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Chapter 1: Boris Mikheyev.
When night falls a new dawn begins at some distant place on our planet. A faint hue appears on the horizon. The river is calm. A flock of birds can be seen among the rushes. There is an intense immediacy in the air. Everything happens now. Everything is vital. Everything counts. The bird's voices ring clear and shrill. What happens each morning speaks louder than all that has lingered from the day before, orchestrating new perceptions, feelings, struggles, hopes, victories.
But the night is laden with fears; a wilderness haunted by doubts, insanity, and tired emotions that keep the mind slow, rigid, locked onto tradition.
The sound of a siren cuts through the dark of midnight; it cuts into the mind, sharp, harsh, it echoes in thought, but it comes as no surprise to Boris Mikheyev. He raises his head. The practice alert has begun, the one he was awaiting for. He knew it would be called.
To the others at Lenin Base the call of the siren is little more than another disturbance in a long train of impositions that the men have taken for granted as a part of life. To Boris its pulsating sound brings on a feeling of being intensely alive. The timing is perfect! The alert came as though it was written into a script. He is alone in the pit. He is ready. For days, every step of the plan has been rehearsed, timed, and re-timed, and then committed to memory. He puts his lunch on the ground, quickly, and then starts running towards the bulldozer. The eerie whine of the siren stirs an uneasy feeling as he climbs into the cab. The feeling is quickly suppressed; he starts the engine. This is no time for emotions, he tells himself. He knows that he has less than five minutes to prevent the shutdown of the automatic firing sequence that he knows will be initiated during an alert procedure. He moves the bulldozer to where a stone marker lines up with the trunk of a tree. He cuts back to idle and waits.
The plan has been rehearsed until each move became implanted in the deep recesses of consciousness. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong. In forty-five seconds he will know if the alert is true. Fake alerts were not uncommon. He leans out of the cab window, his stopwatch set. He listens. At forty-seven seconds he hears the faint grunting noise of a silo cover being drawn aside. He resets his watch. He is now in synchronism with the launch sequence.
What takes place from this point on is no longer the result of deliberate will. His actions become mindless; mechanical; a series of rehearsed reflexes. The plan is in control. The plan has been in control of his life for the last two weeks. With ever-growing intensity it crowded out his personal feelings. Now it has taken over his life.
He accelerates the bulldozer. While the machine gathers speed he struggles with himself for one last time to take control of his actions. He knows that he can still call it all off, scrap the plan if he wants to, and walk away - nobody is forcing this plan on him!
At the third marker, the last timing checkpoint, he makes a correction in speed. He notes that the plan is still in control. Its sequence proceeds uninterrupted. Eighteen seconds to go, seventeen, sixteen. The speed should be correct now! With the precision of a finely tuned mechanism the plan is acted out step by step. He verifies his speed and position at a forth marker. This is the starting point of the final, full power run. His timing is now correct. He moves perfectly with all the extreme precision that is required. There is a narrow time slot during the pre-launch sequence in which he must sever the power cable to the Launch Control Complex. The task must be accomplished precisely within the narrow window of time when the missile's internal sequence has been started for its system initialization phase, but before the end of it, when the launch control officer verifies the ready status and aborts the launch sequence. This brief window of time is his window of opportunity to change the world. It is less than three seconds wide.
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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