RESURRECTION DAY - Book review

Brendan DuBois’s alternate history novel Resurrection Day was published in 1999. The ‘what if?’ scenario is tantalising indeed: What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a full-blown war?

It’s 1972, ten years after the nuclear bombs were dropped. Russia was crushed: ‘... no more large cities, no more government. Just tribes of people, trying to survive in muddy villages that could have existed in the Middle Ages, a decade after an entity called SAC had obliterated their nation from the earth’ (p65). California is virtually destroyed, New York has been depopulated, Washington DC lies beneath a giant crater lake. Europe is unscathed – Nato collapsed. Presidential elections are due at the end of the year. What was left of the United States relied on aid from Great Britain; the USA was shamed and ostracised by the international community because it let the nuclear genie out of the bottle.

Carl Landry, ex-US Army, is now a civilian, a journalist on the Boston Globe newspaper. The paper is heavily edited by an army Captain in accordance with the Martial Law Declaration of 1962 and the National Emergency Declaration of 1963. The Land of the Free no longer has free speech. ‘Why torture yourself, remembering  full supermarket shelves, clean clothes, steady power, and a government that didn’t hunt down draft dodgers and didn’t censor the news and didn’t run labour camps for the dissidents, the protesters, the ones that didn’t belong. That time was gone, was never coming back, not ever’ (p99).

Landry is approached by an aging veteran who has some important papers; they arrange to meet next day, but the vet is murdered, his apartment trashed.

Making enquiries, Landry learns of the deaths of the vet’s neighbours and friends. ‘... when the current national death rates and the results of the 1970 census were both kept secret because of national security, well, if life wasn’t cheap, it certainly wasn’t worth much’ (p51).

He begins to dig – and is warned off more than once: ‘Carl knew he had entered the murky land of late-night arrests, ‘disappearances’, and closed-door trials’ (p162). He was also attacked by an orfie gang – comprising feral orphans of the war.

He befriends Sandy Price, a journalist for the Times of London. She’s beautiful and clever. When they are both co-opted on a fact-finding mission to New York for their papers, they jump at the chance. And then things get weird and hairy, not least because there’s a faction that believes President Kennedy didn’t die in Washington, but still lives; his resurrection could screw the forthcoming elections, indeed.

DuBois has managed to create believable and often sympathetic characters, as well as a post-war situation that seems credible. It was an immersive experience. I zipped through the 580 pages in no time.

An impressive addition to the vast library of ‘what if?’ novels.

Editorial comment:

‘Think, he thought. Just take a deep breath and think’ (p471). Probably would have read better like this: Think, dammit. Just take a deep breath and think. No need for ‘he thought’.

Character names: Jim Rowley and Captain Rowland are quite close; never cause confusion but could easily have been more different.

Writing – research – espionage, defectors

The defecting spy is a staple for many espionage novels and films.  Obviously, at the height of the Cold War, it seemed quite commonplace, and judging by the newspaper reports it appeared that the Soviets were better than the NATO countries at suborning dupes in the West.

But the Soviets didn’t get all their own way, by any means. Briefly, here are two defectors of note.

Penkovsky

GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky first approached the Americans in 1960, but they dallied too long, so he approached the British the following year.

The Penkovsky Papers are reputed to have been written by the CIA, and some disinformation has been bandied about that Penkovsky wasn’t actually shot as a traitor or committed suicide in his cell (1963); the message was that he actually lived in retirement, having fooled the West into believing that the Cuban missiles were important to Kruschev, rather than in effect protecting Castro from US invasion – part of the deal struck at the height of the 1962 crisis. Yet the perceived repercussions in Moscow and within the echelons of the GRU and the KGB suggest that Penkovsky’s information, passed on at risk of his life did indeed damage the Soviet spy machine.

 

 

[Also of interest, see http://www.paperlessarchives.com/penkovsky.html]

Lyalin

In September 1971, the mass expulsion of 105 Russian diplomats and trade officials by Britain caused a storm. While MI6 and the CIA were aware of most of the individuals’ true purpose, the defection of Oleg Adolfovitch Lyalin revealed that their espionage activities were much worse than thought. Lyalin was an officer in the KGB’s Department V, responsible for sabotage and assassination. PM Heath and Foreign Secretary Douglas Home warned Moscow that if any reprisals against Western envoys followed the expulsions, even more Soviets would be sent back to the USSR.

Lyalin had arrived in London in 1969 and enjoyed the life there as a Soviet trade delegate. He was conducting an affair with his secretary, though he was a married man with a family in Russia. He was stopped for a drink driving offence and was persuaded that any subsequent disgrace would ruin him, so he agreed to cooperate with the authorities. He revealed that teams of saboteurs had been prepared to exact maximum damage on British radar stations, communications centres and other important complexes 24 hours before any surprise attack by the Soviet Union. Lyalin’s specific target was to blow up the Fylingdales early warning system in Yorkshire; he had plans and maps to link up with Russian commandos on the coast. Other plans entailed blocking the Clyde estuary, thus trapping the nuclear submarine fleet at Holy Loch, the London Underground system to be flooded, and indeed to employ British traitors to attack air bases using weapons from arms caches. This was some of the background to the expulsion of those 105 Soviets, and shows how serious and sinister the Cold War had become.

Britain lodged a formal protest to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and advised friendly countries about the details of the expulsions. By doing this, they effectively pulled the teeth from the mouths of the Soviet planners. Foreknowledge is power, after all.

 

 

The Prague Papers will be released as an e-book on 26 November by Crooked Cat Publishing. It's set in 1975, and yes, defectors are involved in the story... The first of the chronicles about Tana Standish, psychic spy (in action 1965-1988).