Heartland (15 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Heartland
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Within moments the gunfire from the river area intensified. He patiently counted to sixty, then gave the order to move forward.
It was too bad about Eugenio, he thought as he ran.
He fired, then ducked behind another marble statue. Run, fire, cover. But they had all understood the risk. Eugenio had taken two hits, one in his chest and one in his face, either of them certainly fatal. But their instructions had been precise: If a comrade goes down, he will be left mercifully dead for the protection of all of us. If he is not dead by enemy gunfire, the unit commander will make sure he is dead. He was glad it had not been necessary to finish the job with Eugenio.
Within three minutes the firing from the river ceased, and as Juan Carlos, his remaining three soldiers, and Teva reached the veranda, the river cell was coming up the path on the run.
“Keep the alternate path open,” Juan Carlos radioed on B. “We're going in.”
“Roger,” the hand-held radio blared.
They scrambled over the balustrade, crossed the veranda where four of Vance-Ehrhardt's bodyguards lay dead, and crashed through the French doors.
Two men on the stairs leading to the second floor opened fire; Juan Carlos and Teva returned it. The two men slammed up against the banister, one of them going over it and hitting the parquet floor with a dull thud, the other slumping down, then tumbling down the stairs.
One of Juan Carlos' men had gone down, and without hesitation he turned and fired a short burst into his head.
“Teva and I will go up for Vance-Ehrhardt,” he said to his remaining two soldiers. “Keep this exit open, no matter what!”
Teva started up the stairs. Vance-Ehrhardt appeared in the upper corridor, and he raised his automatic and fired two shots. The first went wide, but the second hit
her in the right shoulder, just below her collarbone.
She let out a small cry and fell back against the banister. Juan Carlos, halfway up the stairs, raised his submachine gun to fire. But he hesitated as Vance-Ehrhardt stepped back, seemingly having trouble with his gun.
Juan Carlos leaped the rest of the way up the stairs and was on the older man before he could fire his automatic, knocking the gun from his hand.
“Jorge?” a woman's voice called from farther down the corridor.
There was gunfire from below.
“Run, Margarita,” Vance-Ehrhardt shouted, but Juan Carlos shoved him aside.
“Out here, woman, or this man dies!”
“Jorge,” the woman screamed.
“Move it! Now!” Juan Carlos shouted, and Vance-Ehrhardt's wife, in her nightdress, no slippers on her feet, came out into the corridor and into her husband's arms.
“Downstairs! Now!” Juan Carlos snapped. He was sweating and his heart was hammering out of his chest. He was riding high.
As they started down the steps, Teva was getting to her feet and raising her weapon.
“Are you all right?” Juan Carlos asked.
“I'll live,” she said weakly.
“Kill her!” one of the men below shouted.
Teva swiveled around and fired two short bursts from her hip, slamming both men backward out the remains of the French doors.
“Bastards,” she spat.
Juan Carlos laughed out loud as they herded Vance-Ehrhardt
and his wife the rest of the way downstairs. At the door he stopped and brought out his radio.
“We have our objective. Can we come?”
“We have the path,” the radio blared.
Juan Carlos shoved Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife outside and helped Teva as they went across the veranda, down the steps, and around to the path that led to the airstrip. They were met fifty yards from the house by four men from the other cell, who without a word grabbed Vance-Ehrhardt and his wife, and the eight of them hurried down the path as their helicopter, running without lights, touched down.
They had done it! They had actually done it, despite the heavy resistance. They were home free!
It was late, nearly four in the afternoon, when William Bormett left the podium and went back to his seat at the speakers' table. His audience in the big hall, mostly young agriculture students, was standing and applauding him. Each of the four previous days had seen the same conclusion. The same beginning, for that matter. In the morning he was introduced, and immediately he launched into the story of the Bormett farms, beginning with his grandfather's immigration to Iowa. By late afternoon he had brought his audience up to date, including his plans to increase his land to corn to twenty thousand acres.
Dr. Nikolai Lubiako, dean of the School of Agricultural Engineering here at the University of Moscow, had gotten up from his seat. As Bormett sat down, he raised his arms for the applause to end.
“An amazing achievement,” his unamplified voice thundered throughout the great hall. “A tribute to the ongoing dedication of a family to agriculture.”
Catherine was seated in the front row, off to one side, and Bormett winked at her. She winked back, although it was obvious that she was very tired.
This trip had been hard on her. The food had not agreed with her system, and their room at the Metropole Hotel downtown, although nice by Soviet standards, was not up to hers when it came to cleanliness, so she really had not been able to relax.
For the first couple of days she had faithfully attended his morning and afternoon lectures, but then, since each day's talks would be the same, she had gone sightseeing and shopping with their Intourist guide in the mornings. Now, at the end of the fifth day, with several more days stretching ahead of them, it looked as if she wanted to do nothing more than go back to their room, take a nice hot bath (if the water pressure was up tonight), and crawl into bed.
Bormett couldn't have agreed more. Although his reception here had surprised—and in some ways exhilarated—him, he too was tired.
“This afternoon we have a special surprise for you,” Dr. Lubiako was saying, and Bormett looked up as a tall, blond young man left the audience and joined the dean at the podium.
“Here with us today we have Arkadi Fedorovich Kedrov, a distinguished man whom many of you know as the special agriculture correspondent for
Izvestia
. Some of you, perhaps, do not know that he is a graduate of our school and has traveled extensively through the American farmbelt states of Iowa, Kansas,
Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.”
The applause was thunderous, and Bormett was confused. He hadn't been expecting this. At this point Dr. Lubiako usually made a number of nice remarks about him, and then dismissed the session. Afterward, there was half an hour or so of individual questions from students who had remained behind, and then he and Katy returned to their hotel for dinner or attended a reception the university arranged for them.
Two students brought in another podium, which they set up a few feet from the one in front of Dr. Lubiako and Kedrov. Lubiako gestured for Bormett to come up.
Bewildered, he got to his feet amidst more applause, and approached them.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov said, smiling.
“I am sorry, Mr. Bormett, for this last-minute surprise, but Arkadi Fedorovich was kind enough to break away from his very busy day to join us,” Dr. Lubiako said.
“We will keep it very short,” Kedrov said. “No longer than a half-hour. You must be very tired.”
“I am,” Bormett mumbled, still mystified at exactly what was going on. “But we're keeping what to a half-hour?”
“Oh, please forgive me,” Dr. Lubiako said. “I am sorry. Arkadi Fedorovich here has agreed to an informal debate with you on the hybrid issue.”
“What?” Bormett asked, stepping back.
Kedrov reached out and drew him back. “Dr. Lubiako is a very old friend, but like many academicians he tends to make everything seem more formal than it is. I had hoped that you and I could speak to the
young people here about hybrids. Corn, if you'd like. I'm sure that you could say much about the subject.”
“I'm very tired,” Bormett said. There was no way he wanted to get into any kind of debate with these people.
“I understand, sir,” Kedrov said smoothingly. His breath smelled of cloves. “And I promise you I will hold it to no more than thirty minutes.”
“I still don't see what you want from me.”
Kedrov glanced at Dr. Lubiako. “I'll just ask you a few questions, and we can discuss the answers.”
“What kind of questions?” Bormett asked.
The audience had sat perfectly quiet throughout all of this, and Bormett felt ill at ease standing here like this.
“Well, I, for one, am worried about hybrids. I think we should move away from them.”
“Impossible,” Bormett said. He was on very familiar territory now. “Without hybrids—at least in corn—our output would drop by seventy percent, and the chance for corn blight and other diseases would be raised dramatically. All modern farming would come to an end.”
Kedrov laughed and slapped Bormett on the shoulder as he turned to face the audience. Dr. Lubiako backed off and took his seat.
“Mr. Bormett has kindly consented to discuss the question of hybrids with us this afternoon,” Kedrov said, and there was more applause. “When I told him I thought we should move away from the trend toward hybrid planting, he disagreed wholeheartedly.”
There was a smattering of applause, and Kedrov turned back to Bormett. “Won't you share your views with us?”
For just a moment Bormett felt very uncomfortable.
But then he looked down at Catherine, who was smiling, and she nodded for him to go ahead. It
was
a subject that he was familiar with.
“Without hybrid seeds,” he began, “farming would be pushed back fifty years.”
“Could you be more specific, Mr. Bormett?” Kedrov asked.
“As I told you just a moment ago, without hybrids the output of my farm would drop by as much as seventy percent. And unless the weather remained nearly perfect for the entire growing season, which it never does in Iowa, then there would be a very good chance for disaster.”
“But aren't we inviting disaster by the very use of hybrids?” Kedrov asked.
“I don't understand.”
“The genetic base of our major food crops the world over is narrowing, Mr. Bormett. Narrowing at a frightening rate. Most Western agriculture—and I'm talking now about the major crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans —is based on less than thirty species.”
“If that is the correct number, those hybrids have been engineered for exactly the soil and climate in which they will be grown. Hybridization is why, in the United States, we will produce four hundred million tons of corn this year.”
“If all goes well, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov rejoined. “If all goes well. Diversity is the first line of defense, however, against diseases and pests. Look at the outbreak of wheat stem rust in 1954, or the southern leaf blight in 1970 in which tens of thousands of acres of corn were destroyed. All because the acres were planted with a single hybrid that happened to be susceptible.”
Bormett had to smile at the simplistic view. “Surely, as an agriculture expert, you understand that there is no such thing as a guaranteed crop. Even the best of hybrids can be attacked. But no more so than a natural variety.”
“And your solution to that problem is …?”
“New and more hardy hybrids.”
“Hybrids, which cannot reproduce themselves, cannot be saved for seed? Hybrids that are totally dependent upon fertilizers and pesticides?”
“Chemically aided farming is a fact of life,” Bormett argued, “hand in hand with genetic engineering. Using these advances, the United States has become the breadbasket of the world.”
The audience was utterly silent.
“Your operation, Mr. Bormett, is dependent totally upon Exxon and Standard Oil and other gigantic conglomerates. Your chemicals are petrochemicals. Your farming is based on oil, our dwindling resource. When the oil runs out, and your hybrids can no longer survive, then what will happen to us all, Mr. Bormett?”
The applause was thunderous once again, and for the next twenty minutes Kedrov delivered a diatribe on the foolishness of Western farmers, calling for the Soviet farmer to lead the way back to diverse, organic farming, ending at last with the remark: “Our only salvation against certain worldwide famine is varietal planting.”
Bormett was given his chance for a final statement, but he was able to do little more than repeat what he had already said about output per acre, and the old saw about corn being knee high by the Fourth of July.
The applause came again, and Dr. Lubiako and Kedrov shook his hand and congratulated him as the
students began filing out of the hall.
“You had me nearly speechless when you told us that the United States was the breadbasket of the world, because it's so true, and I really had no defense,” Kedrov gushed.
“Brilliant, Mr. Bormett, simply brilliant,” Lubiako said, beaming. “One of the very reasons our selection committee chose you for this program.”
“There will be a little gathering at my home outside the city this evening,” Kedrov said. “I would be very pleased if you would be able to join us.”
“I don't think so,” Bormett said. Catherine had joined them on the platform, and he looked at her.
“Please do, it would be a great honor for us all,” Lubiako said.
“Go ahead, William,” Catherine said.
“I thought you were tired.”
“I am. I'll stay at the hotel and go to bed early.”
“I'm not going to leave you alone.”
“Nonsense,” she insisted. “I need the rest without you prowling around the room all night.”
“Then it's settled,” Kedrov said smoothly. “I will send a car for you at seven. See you then.” He turned and left the platform.
“A brilliant man,” Dr. Lubiako said. “You'll enjoy his little gathering tonight. Always very interesting people.”
 
Bormett insisted on having dinner with his wife before he left, and when he was ready to leave she had already taken her bath, and had gotten into bed.
“Have a good time, William, but don't be too late.”
“I'll be back as soon as I can get away,” Bormett
said, kissing his wife on the forehead. He took the elevator down to the lobby, where a chauffeur and his Intourist guide were waiting for him.
The evening was warm, and the drive north out of the city pleasant. The Intourist guide pointed out various buildings and institutions, including the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition which Dr. Lubiako had promised to show him over the weekend.
Beyond that, the road changed to a narrow blacktopped highway that ran through birch forests in full bloom now, the moonlight shimmering on the white bark, making it seem like an enchanted tunnel.
“Mr. Kedrov is a very influential man,” the Intourist guide, a young, good-looking woman, said to him. From her briefcase she pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two small glasses. She poured him a drink. “The past few days have been a strain on you, I can tell,” she said gently.
Bormett took his drink as she poured herself one, then raised her glass in a toast. “To friendship,” she said.
They clicked glasses, and drank. “I don't think I can remember your name … I've been so busy.”
“I am Raya, and I'm an agriculture student at the university.”
“You are?”
“Yes,” she said earnestly. “I have listened to each of your talks. It must be fascinating, operating such a huge farm back in Iowa.” She laid a hand on his knee.
Bormett looked a little more closely at her, and she smiled, showing perfectly white teeth.
“Forgive me if I seem a bit forward, but I've always been attracted to big men like you,” she said.
Bormett didn't know what the hell to say or do. And yet he found himself enjoying her attention for now. As long as it didn't get out of hand, he'd go along with her.
He drank the rest of his bourbon and held out his glass for more.
“Now tell me something about yourself,” she said as she poured him another drink.
They drank and chatted for the rest of the hour-long trip out to Kedrov's country home. By the time they arrived, Raya seemed quite tipsy and Bormett felt light-headed himself.
Inside, soft music was playing, there was food and drink laid out on tables, and a dozen men and women were dancing or sitting around talking.
Kedrov and Lubiako met them at the door, introduced Bormett around to the other guests, whose names and positions he would never remember, and within a half an hour he found himself dancing closely with Raya. She reminded him in many ways of what Catherine had been like as a young woman.

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