Back Channel Read online

  Not as many hands went up. Margo hesitated, then kept hers on her desk. Niemeyer looked around. He asked why those who would now refuse to turn over the money had changed their minds. He called on somebody—not Margo, but one of his most fawning acolytes, a silly rich boy named Littlejohn—who announced confidently that he would have to consider the loss to the bank.

  Niemeyer put his small hands on those ample hips. He had been advising the Pentagon on nuclear strategy for a decade, and he rarely bothered to hide his contempt for the rising generation, a group he considered soft on Communism, and stupid into the bargain.

  “That answer is so bad it’s not even wrong,” said the great man. “And rather exculpatorial, I might add. A fellow like you would hand over the money without a second thought, Mr. Littlejohn, and we both know it. Whereas the rest of them”—pudgy hands made an arc—“well, the rest of them wouldn’t. Know why? Because, now that the amount of money involved is so large, they’re not sure they believe the robber’s note any longer. Remember. The more the blackmailer wants, the more time we spend analyzing whether he’s really serious. Every second-grader turns over his Twinkies to the playground bully. But even a schoolboy would hesitate if the bully demanded his clothes instead. We’re past the hour. Go. Dismissed.” Nodding toward the center aisle, where Margo always sat four rows back: “Miss Jensen. A word.”

  She stood, surprised to be addressed by name. It had never occurred to her that the great Lorenz Niemeyer might know who she was. A couple of students sitting nearby had their heads together, whispering speculations.

  The professor beckoned, and Margo hurried forward, wondering whether she was in trouble. Last week, Niemeyer had booted another girl from the class after she turned out not to have done the assigned reading. Close up, the tubby little man looked slightly ridiculous in his wire-framed glasses and expensive suit. One of his hands was bent and twisted; the fingernails were misshapen. He was packing the ancient leather briefcase that had traveled with him to Nuremberg, to Tokyo, to Moscow, depending on which President he had been serving, and in what capacity.

  “Walk with me,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The professor led the way, a trio of teaching assistants falling into line behind as they left the lecture hall together. Margo sensed the envious glances of her fellow students and, determined to project serenity, clutched her books tightly.

  “What are you doing in my class, Miss Jensen?” said Niemeyer as they burst into the dappling Ithaca sunshine. “Planning to negotiate with the Soviets one day? Or just hoping my name on your transcript will impress the law-school admission committee?”

  “I find the subject matter fascinating,” she began.

  He waved her silent. “You won’t do better than a B. You do realize that no woman has ever received an A in my class?”

  Margo swallowed. “I intend to be the first, sir.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. And stop trying to impress me. My ego is far too large to be flattered.” They crossed between the somber statues of the university’s founders, the teaching assistants still trailing their master like obedient pets. “You’re second-generation Cornell, aren’t you? Didn’t I read somewhere that your father was an alumnus?”

  Again he had managed to surprise her. “Yes. Yes, he was. Class of 1941.” Margo chose not to mention that her father had died without ever laying eyes on her—or that her mother had died when she was seven—for she craved not pity but admiration. “He was an engineer.”

  “Yes. That’s right.” Niemeyer had conjured a cigar from somewhere. He shoved it unlit between his teeth. “Following events surrounding Cuba at all?”

  The abrupt change of subject took her aback. “If you mean the Bay of Pigs, I naturally—”

  “Pfah. A year and a half ago. Ancient history, Miss Jensen. I mean now. Current events. Following them or not?”

  “I read about Senator Keating’s speech in the Times,” she said carefully. On an adjoining walkway, a fortyish man wearing one of those silly alumni hats was heading in the same direction, his cadaverous wife holding his arm. They were gawking and taking pictures of everything.

  “Indeed. And your evaluation?”

  “Keating thinks the Soviet Union is sneaking nuclear missiles into Cuba. Kennedy says it isn’t true.”

  Niemeyer frowned. “Incorrect, Miss Jensen. Kennedy’s people say only that they have no evidence to suggest that it’s true. So—let’s be precise, shall we?” Margo colored. He shifted his bag from his good hand to his bad, then waggled a finger in her face. “I understand Professor Bacon had you in Intro last spring. His views are rather antediluvian, to be sure, but he says you’re rather sharp. Are you?”

  Antediluvian, Margo registered. She collected, recreationally, six-syllable words with a stress on the fourth syllable, and Niemeyer used a lot of them. Just this morning, she had noted incomprehensible and exculpatorial, which she was not even sure was a word.

  “I do my best, sir,” she said.

  “Well, let’s see, shall we? Whom did he have you children reading? Dahl? Lipset? Lazarsfeld?”

  “And the classics. Machiavelli and Tocqueville”—pointedly, and correctly, omitting the “de”—“and a few others.”

  “Bernard Crick?”

  “No, sir. I know a little of his theories on American ideology—”

  “If you haven’t read him, you don’t know a thing about his theories. Never mind. Let’s think, shall we, Miss Jensen?” In the classroom, a favorite phrase. “Let’s think hard. Based on what you’ve studied so far, both this year and last year, if you were the Soviets, would you put strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba?”

  Margo met his gaze. This was her moment. This was what she lived for: blowing her professors away. Nana had taught her not only to study harder than the white kids, but to show off to those in authority as much as possible. If you don’t toot your own horn, Nana liked to say, they’ll never hear you in the front. Nana had gone to college more than forty years ago, when maybe two dozen Negroes in the country attended the best white schools, and knew what she was talking about. Nana was always extolling the genius of her son—Margo’s father—and although Margo had never met him, she was determined to prove herself every bit as brilliant.

  “No,” Margo said. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not? We have missiles in Turkey. We have missiles in Italy. We have missiles in England. Our Polaris submarines prowl their waters. Our B-52 bombers circle right off the Aleutians, very near Soviet territory. We have them surrounded, Miss Jensen. If we ever pull the trigger, they might not have time to react. We must have them scared half to death. Cuba’s their only ally in this hemisphere. So why not match our strategy? Surround us, too? Didn’t Bacon teach you the virtues of tit-for-tat?”

  “The first rule of conflict theory is to keep the other side guessing,” Margo said. She knew she might be blundering into a trap, but a wrong answer, Nana always said, is better than none. “They can’t know for sure what’s in your mind, and they have to worry that you might overreact to small provocations. Like the playground bully you mentioned in class. Somebody to stay away from. That’s in Schelling’s book.”

  A flicker in the clever eyes. “You’ve been reading ahead, I see.”

  “Yes, sir. My point is, the Soviets couldn’t be sure how we’d respond. They might think putting missiles in Cuba just equalizes the situation. But we might not see it that way. We might see a threat. We might even go to war to keep missiles out of Cuba. That’s why they wouldn’t do it. Because the stakes are too high. They’d be crazy,” she said, and wondered whether, in her enthusiasm, she’d gone too far: a thing that tended to happen when her mouth ran ahead of her brain in the excitement of the intellectual moment. But this was argument, and argument was what she loved best.

  “That all sounds rather methodological of you, Miss Jensen. Trying to fit people to formulas rather than the other way around. But the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbat
h. There is such a thing as a mad ideology. I seem to recall that we just recently fought a war against one, although I suspect you were busy being born at the time.” Despite the rebuke, Niemeyer’s tone was placid. It was a compliment, everyone said, that he would even bother to correct you. “Tell me something, Miss Jensen. Do you love your country?”

  She looked for a trap, found none. On the adjoining walkway, the alumnus and his wife kept pace. “Of course I do,” she said.

  “Despite how we treat your people?” Niemeyer made a clucking sound: the question was rhetorical. “Tell me, then, Miss Jensen. When you say you love your country, do you love it, say, as much as an immigrant who becomes a citizen does?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  They had reached the government department. Niemeyer stood close to her on the granite steps, forcing her to lean against the balustrade as his assistants filed past. “Are you aware, Miss Jensen, that the citizenship oath required of naturalized citizens includes the promise to fight for the country if called upon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And does that apply to the ordinary citizen as well? To you, say, Miss Jensen? Would you fight? Would you risk your life? If, say, the country’s survival were at stake?”

  “I would.” She did not understand why he was pressing the point. “It would be my duty.”

  “Oh, that’s a fine answer, I must say. You’ll do excellently well.” He actually patted her shoulder. “See you tomorrow, then,” said the great man, and scurried inside.

  Margo stood alone on the step, unaccountably worried. Niemeyer had been all bonhomie, but she had the peculiar sense that he had just signed her up for something. At last she shrugged, and turned away, just in time to notice the alumnus in the funny hat snapping her picture.

  II

  That was Wednesday. On Saturday afternoon, everybody went to the stadium to watch Cornell play football against Colgate. Clouds scudded across a gray sky. In the frigid wind whipping up from the lake, the ball fluttered all over the field. Margo sat high in the student section with a brace of friends. She wasn’t much of a fan, but went because Tom loved sports. They even shared a blanket, but she kept her hands in position to defend herself against Tom’s occasional efforts to engage in what Nana called taking liberties. Midway through the second quarter, with Cornell already trailing badly, she decided she’d had enough of the game, or maybe of those liberties. She excused herself, citing the need to do research for her paper for Niemeyer’s class.

  “It’s not due for two months,” Tom protested.

  “I don’t like to wait for the last minute,” she answered.

  His eyes were already back on the field. “Pizza later? Usual place?”

  “Usual time,” she promised.

  The stadium was a cavernous structure of cut stone, with wooden benches and shadowed tunnels leading to walkways through the underbelly of reinforced steel struts. Margo never failed to marvel at the complexity of the edifice. She was on the ground floor now, her attention mostly focused on the architectural detail far above her head. As she waded through the crowd thronging the refreshment stand and the restrooms, a prickle on the back of her neck told her she was being watched, but when she turned she saw only a sea of faces, none of them staring. She sidled around a massive cinder-block structure enclosing a fire stair, and noticed, not for the first time, the green gunmetal door on the far side, bearing the black-and-yellow poster signifying a fallout shelter.

  She had been noticing fallout shelters more often since enrolling in Niemeyer’s class, probably because he enjoyed taunting his students with the likelihood that, were the balloon ever to go up, as he put it, there wouldn’t be enough room for all of them, and in any case the first group to arrive at the shelter would bar the doors and refuse to admit the stragglers.

  “Have you ever seen the inside of a fallout shelter?” Niemeyer had asked them. “Believe me, if it’s a choice between taking your chances in the open and spending a month or two in some airless basement, eating foul crackers and smelling the latrine, you’d rather be caught in the open.”

  About to head back toward the crowd, she hesitated. She glanced around, but nobody was looking. In truth, the answer to Niemeyer’s question was no: Margo had never seen the inside of a shelter. It had long been her habit to explore secret and forbidden places. According to Nana, who had often been called upon to punish Margo for various trespasses, the curiosity was inherited from her late father.

  She tried the door.

  It was locked, of course, a protection against looters and squatters and vandals: an illustration of what Niemeyer called the Petits Paradoxes, dilemmas that arose from overlooking the casual details of everyday life. The lock, sensible though it might seem, would make the shelter useless in an actual crisis, unless by some happy chance the man with the key could be found in time. In a perfect world, Niemeyer had pointed out just the other day, you’d be able to run for shelter, as the British had run into the tunnels of the underground during the Blitz. At that point, some bold, foolish soul raised his hand to suggest that in a perfect world there would be no war.

  Niemeyer had snickered.

  “And are we intelligent in your perfect world? We are? Then your answer is not even wrong. As long as there’s intelligence, there will be invention. As long as there is invention, there will be acquisition. As long as there is acquisition, there will be war.”

  Remembering now, she wondered whether Niemeyer was right, and war was a necessary consequence of human nature. Unless he was wrong, the nuclear age might be the last age mankind would ever—

  “Hello, Margie.”

  She startled, and spun, but it was only Philip Littlejohn, whom Niemeyer had so badly embarrassed the other day in class. He was a junior, red-haired and swaggering, the creepiest and wealthiest member of her study group.

  “Hello, Phil.”

  “Tired of the game?”

  “I have work to do.”

  “That’s my Margie. Hey, know what’s down there?” Inclining his head. “I saw you looking over at the sign.”

  “It’s a fallout shelter.” She always felt a little stupid in his presence, even though she knew she could run intellectual rings around him, and had the grades to prove it: her grades were the reason she had been invited to join the study group in the first place.

  “Door locked?”

  “Yes.”

  He tried it anyway. He had broad shoulders and powerful hands, was a star of the school’s lacrosse and hockey teams.

  “Mmmm. Too bad, Margie.” He knew she hated that name. “Tell you what. If you really want to see the inside of a shelter, my frat has one in the basement. Did you know that?”

  “No, Phil.”

  He leaned close, towering over her, one strong arm braced against the cinder blocks as if to prevent her escape. He breathed beer into her face.

  “Why don’t we walk over now? I’ll give you the tour.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come on, Margie. It’s interesting. It’s got barrels of water, crackers, that cheese crap, you name it. Also blankets and mattresses. Lots of mattresses. You know, to propagate the race after the next war? I was thinking you and I could inspect the mattresses together. See how comfortable they are.”

  She colored. “I don’t find that amusing.”

  “You think I’m joking?”

  “I hope you are. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Still smiling, he dropped his arm. She headed back toward the crowd. Then she stopped. The same alumnus who had snapped her photograph three days ago was standing on the stairs, camera pointed her way, still wearing his funny hat. He took a couple of quick shots, then backed into the crowd and disappeared.

  TWO

  First Contact

  I

  The freighter Poltava plowed through the squall. Dark, angry waves broke over the bow. As usual, the weather forecasts were wrong. On an ordinary voyage, the crew would have ignored
the reports on the official Soviet channel and used the engineer’s clandestine radio to listen to the capitalist frequency.

  But this was no ordinary voyage.

  In addition to cargo and crew, the ship carried a political officer and a contingent of military police. To be caught using an illegal receiver would likely mean prison. And so the Poltava risked the unpredicted mid-Atlantic storms, rarely varying course or speed, because the mission had been assigned the strictest of time lines. They were required to make port in Mariel, Cuba, by September 15, and be unloaded and ready for the return trip by the second day following.

  No excuses permitted.

  In the high pilothouse, set just past midships, the helmsman struggled to hold course. The storm lashed the windows. Visibility was nil. In every direction was the same grim rain. Gray water sloshed over the decks, where, between the folded heavy cranes, trucks and farm equipment were tightly lashed, along with ranks of containers and crates stenciled REFACCIONES clearly enough for the American spy satellites to read at a distance.

  The helmsman cursed as the freighter rolled. He fought the wheel. He fought the instinct of a lifetime that screamed at him to change heading before they foundered. This was no squall; this was a full-blown tropical storm.

  They rolled back the other way, and a cup of foul coffee slid off the navigation table to the floor.

  He cursed again, and felt a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The officer of the deck sat beside him, watching the instrument panel. Even in the stormy darkness, the bridge gleamed. The Poltava was a new ship, first of a planned series of heavier cargo vessels laid down at the Black Sea Shipyard in Nikolayev. The freighter had been designed to ferry lumber. But earlier this year, it had been returned to drydock and fitted with more powerful cranes and longer deck hatches. The crew had been vetted afresh, and several sent packing. All in preparation for this mission: their small part in the operation known as Anadyr.