Falcon Down Read online

  FALCON

  DOWN

  MARK SPAID

  Wasteland Press

  www.wastelandpress.net

  Shelbyville, KY USA

  Falcon Down

  by Mark Spaid

  Copyright © 2019 Mark Spaid

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Printing – August 2019

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68111-322-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019911337

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM, BY PHOTOCOPYING OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE COPYRIGHT OWNER/AUTHOR

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  I wrote this book for James Tomlin. He is my oldest son Jordan’s life companion. He came to us twelve years ago and he has been a pleasant addition. James is warm, friendly, easy to like and we are very happy to have him in our family. He is a hard worker and he and Jordan make a splendid couple. James is intelligent, thoughtful with a marvelous sense of humor and he cares about people. Those are traits in people that I like very much and for those reasons and many more I am proud to dedicate this book in his honor.

  In a nuclear war the survivors will envy the dead

  Nikita Khrushchev

  PREFACE

  Russia began to evolve as a modern nation state in the early Eighteenth Century just as the United States became one later in that century. So, the two future super powers and frequent adversaries came on the world scene at roughly the same time. That, however is where the similarity ends. The United States was bitten with the bug of governing by the consent of the people and individual human rights. The concept of freedom and representative government conducted by elected officials answerable to the people was ingrained in the populace of early American citizens. Individual freedom and the ability to express their concern for governmental acts that challenged that freedom was so endemic to the American psyche that it defined and still defines the fabric of American society.

  Russia was a completely different atmosphere. It is a much older country than the United States. The landings at Jamestown and Plymouth, Massachusetts in the Seventeenth Century were the first white men to populate what became the United States. In Russia, however, there were settlements and thriving civilizations in the third and fourth centuries AD. The Greeks, Turks, Mongols and other cultures settled in Russia. Partially, due to these foreign invasions the long history of Russia is accented by one thing…violence. The Huns, the Mongols and other groups that collectively could be called barbarians, ravaged Russia for hundreds of years. To restore some semblance of order a monarchy was established with the ascension of Ivan the Terrible in 1547. His name is of course suggestive of his behavior as Tsar and though he was perhaps the most sadistic of all of them the Tsars in general were dictators like any hereditary monarchy. Secret police, violence, intimidations, executions were common and without any pretense of laws to govern, such things were the norm. As time passed a feeling developed among Russian society regarding misbehavior by the populace. Whenever things became chaotic the police and army would step in and bash heads, arrest and shoot hundreds or even thousands. It was the way in Russia and the people knew that. There developed a saying that covered these occasional departures from obedience. ‘The Russian people long to feel the whip’. In other words, they wanted the government to step in and punish the law breakers and the revolutionaries. Of course, no one wanted to feel the whip themselves. They wanted others to feel it and behave. Mass arrests under the Tsars and later the Communists was nothing new and not really a major cause for concern as long as it didn’t hit too close to home…like the front door.

  Russia was engulfed in a long series of private wars between the wealthy land owners, called Boyars, during the Sixteenth Century. It was aptly called the Time of Troubles and in 1613 the Boyars had enough killing and decided to place another Tsar on the throne to provide stability. His name was Michael Romanov and his descendants would rule until 1917. During this time the whip was employed many times and order was maintained. Hundreds of thousands were beaten, shot, hanged, banished etc. to keep order. It was a part of the Russian experience to be visited by violence and people were used to it.

  Then in 1917 the last Tsar, Nicholas II was overthrown and he and his family later shot. The Communists took over Russia and the first thing they did was to embark on a program of violent retribution against the former ruling class. So, the cycle of killing went on uninterrupted. Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, became the first Communist leader of Russia. He died in 1924 and after three to four years of struggle a man emerged as the sole leader of Russia. He was born in 1878 in the province of Georgia as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. After becoming a revolutionary, he mercifully for all involved, especially historians and researchers, changed his name to Joseph Stalin. He would certainly qualify as one of the leading psychopaths of the Twentieth Century. A heartless, sadistic butcher who reigned down a period of slaughter for twenty-five years in which somewhere between thirty and sixty million people were executed as the whip continued its sinister work throughout Russia.

  Stalin, though, projecting fear throughout the country, nevertheless had a loyal following and his death saddened many in Russia. After his death, Nikita Khrushchev tried to assure the world that the excesses of Stalin were born of a revolutionary zeal to help the working class and would not be repeated. As time has progressed, most who were alive when Stalin died in 1953 have passed but some old-timers remain and many young people have looked to Stalin as the answer to Russia’s problems with the United States and the world in general. Stalinism is on the rebound and the idea of a Stalinist state has emerged with popularity. There are, in fact, groups of Stalinists who seek to reestablish the old Soviet Union that existed before the collapse of Communism in 1991. They are determined to see their goals achieved and will resort to anything to achieve those ends including, kidnapping, robbery, murder and assassination. It is a new dawn of violence in a country that has known nothing but violence throughout its entire existence. It is a new age of the whip.

  THE GENESIS OF CRISIS MENTALITY

  The Cold War began right after the end of World War II and some would say even before the end of the war. Russia and the United States were the two super powers that emerged out of the devastation in Europe and they remain the two most powerful countries in the world. Of course, there can only be one bully on a block and when there are two, a conflict is inevitable. Great distance separates these two giants but the tenuous peace in Europe after the war that included Russian occupation of Eastern Europe led to a nose to nose staring match across the war-torn continent. The Americans were in Western Europe faced off against the Soviet Union in the East. Now, it should be noted that the terms Russia and The Soviet Union are two different things. Russia refers to the boundaries of traditional Russia minus the former Tsarist control of Poland and the Baltic countries. In itself a large country but the Soviet Union included the Baltic countries and after World War II they added hegemony over Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. On the surface, Eastern Europe was autonomous with governments in place but they were puppets of Moscow. The Soviet Union ran the show. (See Budapest 1955 and Prague 1968).

  Conflict among countries and regions is as old as the Earth itself and the standoff between the two super powers wouldn’t have been anything new except for the X factor…nuclear weapons. Those men in the desert at
Los Alamos, New Mexico between 1942 and 1945 created something that has forever changed the face of warfare and civilization. They were brilliant physicists, some of the brightest men who ever lived and to their defense they were driven by a pressing desire to beat Adolph Hitler to the ultimate weapon…the atomic bomb. Everyone knew if Hitler had the bomb, he’d use it. So, the race was on and it had to be won to save mankind. Thus, was the talking points and the motivation to develop a nuclear fission bomb? They would reach up and take part of the sun and use it to destroy part or all of the Earth. The moral argument against nuclear weapons is easy to make now but try making it in 1945 when the war was sending home dead American soldiers every day and the invasion of Japan promised as many as a million more. So, the bomb was made and used on Japan; Hiroshima and Nagasaki…it worked and Japan surrendered thus saving lives on both sides.

  The United States had the bomb and no one else did but that wouldn’t last for long. The Soviet Union developed the bomb in 1949. That same year the U.S. made the hydrogen bomb and in 1953 the Soviet Union made theirs. The race was on and still is raging. At this point the U.S. and Russia each have around seven thousand nuclear warheads. Suffice it to say it would only take a few hundred to make the Earth uninhabitable for nearly all carbon-based life. This spinning orb would be left with the most likely survivors, namely; roaches and maybe rabbits.

  Now, since August 9, 1945 no country has used an atomic weapon on another country anywhere in the world. The nuclear club has grown to include The United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (Israel will not confirm or deny having the bomb but satellite surveillance makes it clear they have detonated a test). So, what do we do? That is the million dollar question. What do we do to prevent the end of the world? Any and all answers are welcome.

  The two men charged with building the bomb and ending the war were General Leslie Groves and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Groves was a career army man who had taken over a floundering project and completed it…The Pentagon. Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist who led seminars at Berkeley on bomb design when he was tapped as the leading scientist on the Manhattan Project. It was a military project, thus General Groves, but it would take the world’s best physicists to design and build it. It took three years but they were successful and on July 16, 1945 the bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. At five thirty in the morning in a shack five miles from the bomb an anxious Oppenheimer and dozens of others waited. If it didn’t work then, three years of work and two billion dollars would be down the drain. Not to mention the reputations and careers of all the scientists and engineers involved. In addition, General Groves would be demoted and spend months if not years in front of congressional committees explaining the waste of the taxpayers’ money and the failure to end the war early and save American lives. As the countdown came close to zero there were many things on the line. Oppenheimer and Ken Bainbridge, who was in charge of the test, waited nervously. Then three, two, one and detonation. There was the blinding flash and in a few seconds the rumble could be heard and felt. There was a mushroom cloud that went ten thousand feet in the air. A twelve-hundred-foot diameter crater was created in which everything was gone and the steel tower was evaporated. Not melted but evaporated. Windows were broken miles away; cattle were knocked off their feet and a girl who was blind at birth saw the light from the flash. Yes, the bomb worked. Oppenheimer and his band of egg-heads had breached the divide between physics and the impossible. They had captured the power of the Universe then released it at their will.

  Okay, so science is unswerving in its drive to explain everything, discover everything, invent everything, etc. There wasn’t a person, scientist or not who wasn’t impressed and in awe of the accomplishments that took place in the desert of New Mexico. But sometimes we do things and then realize that there are consequences for any action no matter how large or small. More importantly, there is responsibility. The machine gun was invented along with poisonous gas, chemical and biological weapons and any number of other things to make killing in war more efficient. And, these things work very well but where is the guilt. Millions of people have or will die in the future from weapons created by scientists and engineers. Do they get a moral pass since they were just doing their jobs? There is no easy answer and on the early morning of July 16, 1945 Oppenheimer and Bainbridge watched as the bomb obliterated the test site. Perhaps Oppenheimer had given thought to what he was doing during the project and what the ramifications might be if and when the bomb worked and other countries had it. Who knows but as he and Bainbridge watched the debris fall back to Earth and as the men who went outside to watch were cheering the success of the last three year’s work something came over Oppenheimer. As he stood staring out the window at the destruction he had created, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.” Ken Bainbridge, was not the learned scholar that Oppenheimer was but he put it in terms that anyone could understand. “Yeah, now, we’re all sons-a-bitches.” They were that to be sure but let’s be fair; their country grabbed them, plopped them down in the desert and said build us the ultimate weapon to end the war. They did and after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to speak to his people. This was the man who was worshipped as a God yet no one had ever heard his voice. Now, they heard him speak and he praised the Japanese people for their great effort during the war but then said it is time to surrender. The bomb did the trick. All those American and Japanese lives were saved as the war ended. And, it was due to the effort of those scientists at Los Alamos so, to turn around and beat them over the head with a moral argument seems disingenuous. The bomb did what it was expected to do and on September 2, 1945 Japan surrendered in Tokyo Bay.

  A happy ending? Not exactly, it’s like buying a tiger to rid your house of rats. The rats are eradicated but how do you control the tiger. He has a voracious appetite and he sees everything and everyone as his prey. You can’t take him back because of the no return policy at the tiger store. You keep him at a distance, you don’t want to use him again if you can avoid it. He is ever vigilant and waiting for his chance to attack and you have to keep him at bay, keep him under control. Your house is free of rats but can you ever be safe again, can you ever feel content and most importantly can you ever relax again without fear of annihilation? No, you can’t and thus is the predicament the world is in now.

  Oppenheimer said after the war that the U.S. should take all of their bombs, all the paper work, the plans, fuel, materials etc. and dump it in the ocean. A fanciful suggestion meant to symbolize the state of the world because of the bomb. Too late Dr. Oppenheimer, the toothpaste is out of the tube, Pandora’s Box is open, the cat is out of the bag and good luck capturing him and putting him back in a second time.

  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists keeps a doomsday clock and at this time it is two minutes to midnight. That’s how close they think we are to the end. Rather pessimistic but the number of weapons out there is suggestive of a powder keg waiting for a match. Any time there is a stand-off between the big nations, fears run high of a nuclear exchange. The U.S. and Russia are ever mindful of the stakes that exist in any conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Petrov incident and other misses showed not just the dangers that existed but the restraint used by both sides. It seems unlikely that the two giants would start a nuclear war but the renegade states like North Korea and Iran when they finally get a nuclear weapon are another story. They would wield weapons of mass destruction without regard for the political or nuclear fallout.

  At the height of the cold war in the sixties the U.S. built an underground facility to monitor Soviet activities and to be ready to launch all those missiles. It was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is built under two-thousand feet of granite in the Rocky Mountains and it can withstand a 30-megaton nuclear explosion. It was in full operation during the Cold War but after the Soviet Union fell it was decommis
sioned in 2006 because it was felt that Russia was no longer a threat (permission to chuckle). Now, guess what? We are moving back into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. The Russians have never retreated from a position of angst regarding nuclear war and keep an ever vigilante eye on the U.S. So, the Cold War is just as cold or just as hot; whatever you choose. Does that signify a coming nuclear exchange? No, but it pays to be prepared. Because you never know what is going to happen on any day that you get up. Tomorrow could be a crisis that has both sides with their fingers on the button. That’s what this story is about.

  FALCON DOWN

  PROLOGUE

  “Comrades, take your seats.” It was a commanding voice and everyone immediately sat down. Two hundred men and women sat in a meeting hall once used as a Communist Party headquarters in Volgograd, Russia. Andrei Kulagin was their leader and he stood grim faced with his trademark large mustache as he stared down at his audience.

  “Thank you, Comrade for holding this meeting,” a man said rising and giving Kulagin a salute.

  “Be seated, Comrade,” and the man complied. “Never forget why we are here and why we must succeed.” There were cheers and words of encouragement and agreement. Kulagin looked at his audience and a faint smile escaped his thin lips. Few people had seen their leader smile and looks were exchanged wondering if he was alright. Perhaps he was drugged or had lost his mind. They were used to a hard, cold, angry and powerful man who instilled fear in people. Fear if they didn’t obey him and fear if they didn’t succeed in carrying out his wishes. Now, they see him actually smile. That was scary to them because this group was very much a cult of the personality…Kulagin’s personality.