Chapter 11.

04/23/1992

 Blankenberg turned his head, slowed down, then stopped altogether, took out a cigarette and lit it. Opposite him was a broken display case, behind which he could see a shop floor, shrouded in semi-darkness and in complete disarray. Above the window hung peeling metal letters, riddled with numerous holes, making up the inscription "Promtovary"//Household Goods//. The round holes, as it was easy to guess, were intended for neon tubes. These tubes did not disappear from here now, they disappeared a long time ago. Maybe a year ago, maybe even before perestroika. In the Soviet Union of recent years, such simplifications, judging by the descriptions of everyday life by more and more new arrivals, were commonplace. Now a real Harlem has opened up here with bonfires in barrels and ransacked shops, atypical for Russia. However, for a country that had already collapsed, which had as many as six hot spots by the summer of 1991, everything that was happening here was not something mind-blowingly depressing.

 At the same time, all these hot spots had not gone away. For example, right now, somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains, troops of independent Georgia were shelling the Escher military laboratory, where biohazardous materials were stored. Double separatists, so to speak, had established themselves there, wanting to gain independence from Georgia itself.

 Blankenberg took a drag, exhaled, and walked on, towards the square. Most of the foreigners in the groups, if they moved around the city like this, on foot, were certainly not alone, and they always took a local with them as an escort. Blankenberg felt much more relaxed. After all, he had once been an officer in the Soviet army. It was good that in those years there were no such perfect databases as there are now. Despite the scrupulousness of the Soviets, who knew a thing or two about sabotage and, accordingly, feared for their own safety, their databases of that time were cumbersome and practically incapable of promptly processing not only a stream of requests, but even a single request.

 Thanks to this, Blankenberg, who formally and actually betrayed his state and military oath in 1971, calmly crossed the border in the opposite direction in 1991. And even more so, he could afford to walk along the streets of a Soviet-post-Soviet city. In addition, he now had a pistol with him - as events developed, there was no need to be shy both in terms of carrying a weapon and in terms of using special means of communication. If at first, in the first days, it was necessary to limit himself to an Atari minicomputer and a hidden transmitter from a purely spy arsenal, now in Blankenberg's room there was a field command military satellite radio station, which provided communication both via an encrypted audio channel and the transfer of any files. Bringing something like that in those old "pre-April" days was a very dubious undertaking even in the conditions of modern Russia. And now in his room there was such a "phone", delivered by one of the arriving business jets. The locals, occupying this and other streets, lived their own lives. Some gathered in groups around the radio or TV. They also drank there. The tents pitched right in the middle of the roadway were supplemented by improvised houses made of plywood and boards stolen from God knows where. The weather, getting warmer with each new spring day, was definitely favorable to the development of this street life. Music was playing, mostly obscene late Soviet. There was also Russian-language rock. Every now and then, sellers of simple food, mostly porridge and cabbage pies, scurried among the tents from God knows where. Ahead of them appeared a square with a couple of American flags hanging on long poles, about fifteen meters long. And in the spontaneous slums that choked the street, stars and stripes flashed every now and then.

 In addition to this grotesqueness, I was not a little amused by the story that in the fifties and even sixties, when Blankenberg-Moskvin went to school and learned poems about the young Ilyich, here in this city, right on the territory of the current square, there were almost the same houses as those erected now. Only those of that time were insulated, but the sizes of some of the especially beggarly ones were comparable. Blankenberg looked at those photographs with some interest. A tram also ran right here and it turned around approximately where Lenin now stood like an idol. Seriously, back then, in the post-war years, the locals built a real favela, only not in a hot tropical climate but here in Siberia, when on some winter days you could get frostbite on your face just by going outside. In the sixties, pompous stone giants of theaters and apartment buildings intended for the party elite began to rise amidst this chaos. The slums, of course, were torn down, and people moved into simpler Khrushchev-era buildings than the party members' dwellings.

 Then they built the "White House", the one in the center, and later the one with the command post. Yes, there were two "White Houses" here. The strike headquarters was located in the central "White House", where the locals were now spending their time in style.

 Blankenberg went out to the square and headed towards his "white house", which towered on the right side. It looked more modest, but unlike the central one, it had a helipad.

 - If you idiots knew what they were preparing for you, you would probably run to the Arctic Ocean, just like this General Grachev promised you. Only what will roll over you like a bloody steamroller is not what he is preparing at all. - Blankenberg sadly looked around the square filled with revived Siberian favelas and headed into the courtyard.

 Entering the small conference room, he discovered that no one was there. The central table was covered with boxes, judging by the labels with army rations. The TV was not turned off, but this did not mean that someone who was here had left for a short time and gone out five minutes ago - no one seemed to have ever turned this TV off. Landskricht's voice, quite recognizable with its accent, was speaking Russian. Blankenberg glanced towards the TV and made sure that it was her on the screen. Blankenberg had no information whether it was on her own initiative or in accordance with some directive that she had taken on hosting this show of hers. And not just hosting, but also organizing it. The idea, however, was not something stunning in its originality. Landskricht was simply answering questions sent in by the townspeople. The first issue, which took place about ten days ago, was built on questions that did not need to be sent anywhere - they screamed about themselves: garbage removal, protection of already looted stores from homeless people and just drunks, who had a habit of behaving like homeless people, falling asleep wherever they could, in particular. People were also very concerned about issues with food and the heating that had started to turn off early. Some things were actually fixed - garbage removal in particular. In one of the warehouses of the eastern industrial district, a "homeless center" was set up, literally nicknamed that. Patrols who did not really understand it brought quite "domesticated" drunks there. And there, with some bias, and Blankenberg had it, one could see something more frightening than, for example, the construction of a new spontaneous dump in an inappropriate place.

 Even before the Directorate had dumped brief dossiers on key and some secondary members of the groups, it had become obvious to Blankenberg that this Haldoris was not entirely Norwegian in origin. She certainly did not live through those years, but the Nazis were quite successful in passing on their beliefs to their children and even grandchildren. Years and decades passed, and now these new generations could feel more at ease. During the army years, Blankenberg's past life, no one in the FRG or even more so in the GDR would have thought of wearing the same trinkets with runes, although what was in those people's heads was a big question. These same people, her parents and others like them, managed to "jump away" to a European, but still different country. And so the years passed and this Dorris, or Dora, found herself in Siberia, in the Soviet Union in distress, which was supposedly former, but had not sunk into the past completely, without a trace.

 She looks at the stone buildings built by prisonered Germans, which no one even thought of making a secret of. She sees a newsstand with a newspaper with a headline stylized as an ornament, but still a swastika - they had one in Russia. And she, this Dorris, also ostentatiously demonstrates her commitment to all this tinsel with runes and every now and then expresses joy at the fall of the tyranny of the hammer and sickle, as she has called it more than once. Will she like the catastrophe that is being prepared here? Yes, she will like it! To avenge the Reich, for the defeated ancestors, who, among other things, were condemned to build these houses here that are already peeling to an indecent appearance. Blankenberg would not start an argument if someone said that they considered him an unprincipled ass - after all, betrayal of the oath and all that, but this! This is serious. If we're talking about it, this is not at all in the interests of America, the future America if you like. Of course, it wasn't America that started this mess, but the Rockwell Foundation knows how to pick its people! In a few days, if not the next day, the program turned from routine, albeit detailed, answers to questions into a one-man talk show. Everyone got it. The Soviet government got it for appearing and existing, for ineptly collapsing, and for not collapsing earlier. Yeltsin got it for being a communist and for ceasing to be one, and for not being a real communist, for literally pushing a still functionally viable country toward fragmentation, and also for failing to move towards the West as needed. And these were not some statements spaced out in time, when such a chatterbox, a chatterbox, can easily be shown what he said earlier and which contradicts what he is currently asserting. No, everything here was connected by a single logic.

 Blankenberg clicked the button on the coffee machine and headed to his desk, in the cabinet under which lay a black sports bag. Blankenberg had already had the joking thought more than once that for clarity it would be worth writing "strike" on the bag. Indeed, there were several such bags and this one contained simple notes concerning the organization of economic sabotage. Sometimes he also carried in it an impressive amount of cash by today's standards, which perfectly gave the local organizers a new impetus. In the third week, there was no need to adjust to the previous urban reality, which, among other things, threatened a meeting with skinhead amateur gangsters, capable of not at all amateurish atrocities for the sake of a wad of dollars. Now, when going out on the streets with any interesting carry-on baggage, Blankenberg simply took with him a bodyguard assigned to him – a very typical Croatian fighter, carrying a French FAMAS F1. Life in the region was being transformed.

 - They are asking me again about the radiating cones, - came from the TV. - We already talked about this two days ago, but listen again. They are not as simple as they wanted to present it to us from Moscow through their television and radio, but there is no need to go to extremes. How many of these legends do we have already? The first example is this very "cherry", which the "alpha" group is armed with. Each of you has a friend or relative who seriously believes that at the hour of the invasion, the "alpha" will arrive, which will put a glass ball with red liquid into each high-rise building and everyone will fall asleep, and someone will die. I wanted to find a glass ball, show it to you as if it were a "cherry" and then expose it. You would see for yourself how easy it is to believe. Unfortunately, as I see, unfortunately, I forgot about this idea, but I should have. And what do we have in reality? There is bird-cherry gas. That's all. You know. Tear gas. We don't call it that, but you do. Maybe yours is a little different. In general, they say that it really does smell like bird cherry, I don't know. What does that change?

 Blankenberg chuckled to himself and finally turned his head towards the TV.

 - The next thing is red mercury. Using a computer and a reference system, well, you know, we have one, we contacted specialists. We spent some time, but found out that it's slang, that is... Well, it's a nickname for molten metal. I'll even tell you what kind, it doesn't change anything. That's what nuclear scientists call some of their nuclear plutonium materials, which can't even be pulled out of the reactor because they would immediately stop being what they were there. That's all. And some idiot newspaperman heard that there was a nuclear material called mercury and told another one like him.

 Now about these cones. We have people with an engineering background and they examined them. You've already heard this. More than half of these cones are inoperable. They were broken a long time ago, birds managed to build nests there. By the way, a question for you, did they improve the weather? We asked, and they said that they hardly did. They dispersed the fog, but very weakly.

 Blankenberg glanced out the window towards the opposite building. On the roof of that building stood this "bucket". Judging by the documentation, the most it was capable of was dispersing smog within a radius of two hundred to three hundred meters. Not bad for an airfield, in general, but these figures were on paper, and considering that Western companies, who knew how to find something to make a profit from, did not produce anything like this, the physical principle, from which no one made a secret, did not have the declared effectiveness. This was purely Soviet - all these research institutes perfectly mastered the methods of work in vain.

 - And now some people are wondering what to do with them? - Landskricht continued, - We had to guard these things and you were already told why. This is evidence, and evidence is guarded. Our specialists said that theoretically these sound emissions are capable of influencing people and at the same time people will not hear any sound. There are many among you who know what infrasound is and how dangerous it is, and how it occurs in the oceans. I am explaining in very simple words for those of your loved ones who have not heard this. There are probably such people.

 - For the most stupid, because I, Haldoris Landskricht, think that most of you are stupid, - Blankenberg answered mentally, imagining, as it seemed to him, the level of education of his former compatriots much more reliably than Landskricht. A very decent level, despite the annoying glitches with these damn psychics.

 - We expect that a group of engineers and other specialists from the USA will arrive soon, and they will give a reliable assessment of the danger that these cones represent. These cones can really be connected to a single control network, to a computer, and play such an infrasound game on them... well, like playing instruments. Not single drum beats, but many drums and in time. We do not know what threat this poses, so we are waiting for specialists. But in any case, it does not emit any rays about that can be heard on the streets. Those who talk about this should be ashamed. And the rest should explain to them. But what everyone should understand is that this is evidence. It can be very important. Like a "cherry", if there were one. Do you understand? That is why we protect it. In the USA, they punish very seriously for damaging evidence or hiding it. Anyone else who will climb and try to break what is left will go to the "eastern" center. Someone is already there. Exactly for this. Unfortunately, there is no doubt that there will be more detainees.

 - This is my concentration camp and it is in the eastern part - Blankenberg thought mockingly. - And I also want to build a second one and call it "western". It is still good that the plan is limited in time and you will not have time to develop here to your heart's content.

 - Now let's talk about why America will inevitably advance to this continent, and why this is where it was started...

 Blankenberg took a sip of coffee and looked at the square, over which a couple of flags were fluttering. Now the darkness of night will descend and the place will look like some kind of temple, illuminated by the light of countless fires. It all started as Disneyland with the distribution of Coca-Cola food packages, and now this... And Disneyland was peculiar - it looked like that only in the eyes of the locals. Tents and food distribution are an attribute of a disaster rather than a holiday. Blankenberg looked around his desk, where a couple of fax machines and a whole battery of telephones were piled up, then glanced to the side and something inside him caught him. On Landskricht's desk, attached behind the closet and coat rack, stood her laptop computer in all its glory. The very one she had bragged about. She had bragged about how this thing perfectly replaced all fax machines and even telephones in most cases. She had said more than once that she needed to master e-mail, that it would reduce the number of phone calls. In technical terms, she was right, but in terms of information security... If Blankenberg, as a professional, had separate, dispersed communication channels, including a satellite radio station stored in the hotel, hidden from prying eyes, then here everything was collected in one civilian, albeit expensive, computer. A completely rational solution for business, but not for work within the framework of... within the framework of work.

 Blankenberg, not believing what he saw, pushed off with his feet, moving from his seat in his chair. Then he stood up and went to Landskricht's desk. The computer was not turned off! Blankenberg slapped his pants pocket - the diskette was there. It was a kind of duty diskette, sometimes there were two of them - a habit of saving something important with a copy on the second. Now he had Hewlett-Pakkards that cost fifty dollars, outwardly no different from simple, as they said here, "shirpotreb"//consumer// goods. These were incomparably more reliable. In one of the bags there was a special one with commands recorded on it, but for now Blankenberg decided to use what he knew - this way there was less chance of leaving traces. So-called software or digital traces of interference. Having run through the lines in both the right and left panels of the "Northon", he moved the cursor to the command line and typed the first command. The list of Internet connection addresses was there, but it was encrypted and copy-protected. Copy protection was a joke, maybe good enough for an office. The second command, as expected, allowed the file to be copied to a floppy disk. Blankenberg clicked the drive button, and a second later the previously inserted floppy disk was already in his hands. The deed was done.

 Of course, there was no point in rejoicing prematurely, but there was no point in delaying either. Blankenberg threw on his coat and, pouring coffee into a paper cup taken from a stack, headed for the exit. Landskricht's speech about the Intercontinental States of America was coming from the screen.

 Blankenberg grinned: The idea is beautiful, but it has nothing in common with her obviously Nazi dreams. And in general it is too abstract, one of many similar ones generated by academic circles, so it is also not for you, Madam. And you, Madam, have screwed up very badly.

 With these thoughts, Blankenberg ran down the stairs. Now it was necessary to transfer the file via satellite, and there they would find a master key for any cipher. They would simply take it from the developer of the cipher. That's all.