Libra - Don Delillo [89]
Aleksei Kirilenko was present for the second round of questions. A package of Laika filters sat on the table in front of him. There were ten men in the room. The questions rolled forth. The prisoner, called Francis Gary Powers, was sincerely telling the truth about half the time, just as sincerely lying the other half. So Alek estimated.
No, he had not flown over Soviet territory before.
No, the CIA had not given him a list of underground agents he could contact here.
No, he had never been stationed at Atsugi in Japan.
What about the plane?
Yes, the plane had once been based in Atsugi.
They’d given the prisoner a peasant haircut. It suited him well, Alek thought. He had a large square head, strong features, the worried look of a rustic crossing streets in the capital.
No, it did not occur to the prisoner that by violating Soviet frontiers he was endangering the upcoming summit conference.
The thinking in the Center was that Khrushchev would not reveal that Francis Gary Powers was alive and in custody until the American cover story was released in all its hopeful and pathetic variations. (An unarmed weather plane is missing somewhere near Lake Van in Turkey after the civilian pilot reported trouble with the oxygen system.) They would add or subtract details as need dictated. But they were counting on a dead man either way.
Then the Premier would mount the rostrum in the Great Hall, wearing a modest cluster of medals on the breast pocket of his business suit, and announce the interesting news, with photographs, with fitting gestures, his voice carrying in bursts over the delegates, Presidium members, diplomatic corps and international press.
Comrades, he would begin, I must let you in on a secret. The broad smile, the choppy gesturing hand. We have the pilot of the innocent weather plane you have all been hearing about. We have the wreckage of the plane. Shot down by our missiles two thousand kilometers inside Soviet territory. The shadow in the sky. Sent to photograph military and industrial sites. We have the camera and rolls of film. Waving the spy photos, making jokes about the air samples the plane had allegedly been sent to gather. Yes, yes, Francis Gary Powers is alive and kicking, safe and sound, despite the plane’s destructor unit, despite the poison meant to end his life, and the pistol with silencer, and the long knife. Pausing to drink some water. Seven thousand rubles in Soviet currency. Did they send him all this way to exchange old rubles for new ones?
Laughter, applause.
Alek looked forward to the theater that Khrushchev would make of the U-2 affair. The summit was scheduled for Paris in two weeks. Eisenhower’s moral leadership turns to shit.
But as the questions continued for hours, then days, he began to feel uneasy. The men in uniform, the GRU, kept coming back to the question of altitude. Didn’t they know how high the plane was flying when they hit it? Had it been an accidental hit with a haywire missile? Had he taken the plane down to reignite the engine after a flameout? Is that how they hit it? There were rumors they hadn’t hit it at all. Had the plane been sabotaged by the CIA to wreck the summit?
Francis Gary Powers repeatedly claimed he was at maximum altitude when he felt the impact and saw the flash. Sixty-eight thousand feet. It seemed the GRU thought he was lying. They believed U-2s went much higher and they knew Soviet missiles could not reach these altitudes.
Why would they believe the plane flew higher than the pilot contended?
Because Oswald told them? Surely they would have strong corroboration from other sources. In any case this affair tended to strengthen the boy’s claim to authority. He’d evidently been right about the extreme altitude the plane could reach. He was also the one person in the USSR who had inside working knowledge of the U-2, who was American like Powers, who could measure his coun tryman’s responses and telltale inflections, who could evaluate what he said about ground personnel, base security and so on.
Lee H. Oswald