The Rocket Man by Maggie Hamand Page A

lurking.’
    Katie smiled; she could believe this.
    â€˜Of course all the hypocrisy can’t help eating away at you. But I will say this for us, at least when we repeated all this stupid stuff we knew it was all shit. That’s why the Americans are so dangerous, because they believe their own propaganda.’
    Katie turned to look at him. Forgetting what he had said earlier, he reached out for another cigarette. Playfully, she took it away from him. Then she asked, ‘But you didn’t ever work with nuclear weapons?’
    â€˜No, not directly, of course – well, that’s not quite true. I did my military service in the Strategic Rocket Forces. I spent four months one summer in Novaya Zemlya – do you know where that is? It’s the huge island north and east of Archangel where they test the rockets, and nuclear weapons too, actually. We worked in huge concrete silos deep underground. The control post had to be manned around the clock of course, so we used to work eight-hour shifts, day and night.’
    Katie moved closer to him, pressing herself against him; he rolled over, embracing her; she felt her skin melting into his. She saw a momentary playfulness in his eyes, as if he enjoyed shocking her by what he was saying. ‘We worked with the huge Scarp missiles which began to be deployed in 1965,’ he said softly. ‘They stood 34 metres high; the warheads were 25 megaton thermonuclear devices, equivalent to 1,250 Hiroshimas – they used to make obscene jokes about it as they lowered the warheads onto the rockets.’
    Katie could barely imagine such a thing. She wondered what it felt like, to actually stand and look at such a bomb. Were you afraid? Awed? Disgusted? Could the imagination even take it in? She pulled back from him a little, asked, ‘But how could you stand it?’
    â€˜Well of course I was not very happy about being there at first, but in fact it was not really such a terrible experience. A lot of people coped by not thinking about it, just drinking, playing cards, sleeping, going into the nearest small township in search of some distraction. But let me try to explain to you how it was. Imagine: you come out of the missile silo at three in the morning – and of course it’s a polar day, there’s no night – you are in broad daylight, with this wind blowing in your face. You are completely disoriented from working different shifts and the lack of day or night. I cannot describe to you the beauty of this austere landscape. The sea is green, and so clear you can look right into it; there are icebergs floating; the rocks are black and covered with lichen and dark moss; and of course the immense sky. I used to walk for hours by myself, I went without sleep, at times I thought I was hallucinating. It was an almost mystical experience.’
    Dmitry reached out for the bedside table and lit another cigarette; he lay back and exhaled with a long sigh. ‘Let me admit it: there was something seductive about being in the presence of so much power. I used to think about it when I walked by the sea for hour after hour. Like someone looking over the edge of an enormous cliff and feeling the urge to jump, I used to wonder if we might actually fire them, just to see what would happen, or indulge in some perverse urge towards destruction. Now I suppose the main danger is we will use them on ourselves.’
    Katie didn’t know what to say. She was shocked, but at the same time, she found what he was saying thrilling; she was awestruck by the vision of him associated with something so dark and powerful. She could feel her mind doing an about-turn, rethinking her past attitudes. ‘So that means that when I was in the sixth-form at school and signing up with CND and going on disarmament marches, you were there in the missile silo, you were one of those people that I so despised, who could have been told to press the button.’
    Dmitry laughed.