“Over a dozen. They move so fast that it’s hard to even keep track of them. We pick them up and they disappear again. We’ve eliminated atmospheric conditions, meteors, fireballs, weather balloons, and any kind of flying machine known to man. I was going to scramble some planes, but these objects – whatever they are –are flying so damned high that we’d never be able to get near them.”
General Shipley walked over to one of the radar screens. “Is anything coming in on your screens now?”
“No, sir. They’re gone.” He hesitated a moment. “But, General, I have a terrible feeling they’ll be coming back.”
Ottawa, 0500 Hours
When Janus finished reading General Shipley’s report aloud, the Italian stood up and said, excitedly, “They are getting ready to invade us!”
“They have already invaded us.” The Frenchman.
“We are too late. It is a catastrophe.” The Russian. “There is no way …”
Janus interrupted. “Gentlemen, it is a catastrophe we can prevent.”
“How? You know their demands.” The Englishman.
“Their demands are out of the question.” The Brazilian. “It’s no business of theirs what we do with our trees. The so-called greenhouse effect is scientific garbage, totally unproven.”
“And what about us?” The German. “If they force us to clean up the air over our cities, we would have to shut down our factories. We would have no industries left.”
“And we would have to stop manufacturing cars,” the Japanese said. “And then where would the civilized world be?”
“We are all in the same position.” The Russian. “If we have to stop all pollution, as they insist, it would destroy the world’s economies. We must buy more time until Star Wars is ready to take them on.”
Janus said crisply, “We are agreed on that. Our immediate problem is to keep our people calm, and avoid the spread of panic.”
“How is Commander Bellamy progressing?” The Canadian.
“He’s making excellent progress. He should be finished in the next day or two.”
Kiev, The Soviet Union
Like most of her countrywomen, Olga Romanchanko had become disenchanted with perestroika. In the beginning, all the promised changes that were going to happen in Mother Russia sounded so exciting. The winds of freedom were blowing through the streets, and the air was filled with hope. There were promises of fresh meat and vegetables in the shops, pretty dresses and real leather shoes and a hundred other wonderful things. But now, six years after it had all begun, bitter disillusion had set in. Goods were scarcer than ever. It was impossible to survive without the black market. There was a shortage of virtually everything, and prices had soared. The main streets were still filled with rytvina – huge potholes. There were protest marches in the streets, and crime was on the increase. Restrictions were more severe than ever. Perestroika and glasnost had begun to seem as empty as the promises of the politicians who promoted them.
Olga had worked at the library in Lenkomsomol Square, in the centre of Kiev, for seven years. She was thirty-two years old, and had never been outside the Soviet Union. Olga was reasonably attractive, a bit overweight, but in Russia that was not considered a disadvantage. She had been engaged twice to men who had moved away and deserted her; Dmitri, who had left for Leningrad, and Ivan, who had moved to Moscow. Olga had tried to move to Moscow to be with Ivan, but without a propiska, a Moscow residence permit, it was not possible.
As her thirty-third birthday approached, Olga was determined that she was going to see something of the world before the Iron Curtain closed around her once again. She went to the head librarian, who happened to be her aunt.
“I would like to take my vacation, now,” Olga said.
“When do you want to leave?”
“Next week.”
“Enjoy yourself.”
It was as simple as that. In the days before perestroika, taking a vacation would have meant going to the Black Sea or Samarkand or Tbilisi, or any one of a dozen other places inside the Soviet Union. But now, if she were quick about it, the whole world was open to her. Olga took an atlas from the library shelf and pored over it. There was such a big world out there! There was Africa and Asia, and North and South America … she was afraid to venture that far. Olga turned to the map of Europe. Switzerland, she thought. That’s where I’ll go.
She would never have admitted it to anyone in the world, but the main reason Switzerland appealed to her was because she had once tasted Swiss chocolate, and she had never forgotten it. She loved sweets. The candy in Russia – when one could get it – was sugarless and tasted terrible.
Her taste for chocolate was to cost Olga her life.
