Bombshell by Max Collins (pdf ebook reader TXT) 📕

meeting his daughter’s colored boyfriend, “where our city motto is that the impossible always happens.”

Well, Harrigan thought, that was easily the dumbest goddamn city motto he’d ever heard.

Everyone waited for the mayor to continue—some minor speech seemed appropriate, some small recognition of this important personage in their presence. But only an embarrassing silence followed.

Khrushchev’s smile dropped, his eyes narrowed. Holding a four-page speech in his hands, the premier—who obviously knew damned well he’d been insulted—growled only one line from it, before stuffing it angrily back in his pocket. Oleg Troyanovsky didn’t bother to translate.

Harrigan clenched his teeth and cursed the mayor under his breath; it was clear Poulson had intentionally snubbed Khrushchev, who was now moving briskly, angrily, past the small crowd of stunned well-wishers.

One of the crowd—a dark young man in a short-sleeved white shirt and denim tie—called out in Russian to Khrushchev, stopping the premier in his tracks. The young man appeared to be of European stock, with just a tinge of Asian in the eyes— or was that Harrigan’s imagination running wild, in light of the Formosa threat?

The agent tensed as he moved quickly between the two, prepared for anything, his coat unbuttoned to give easy access to his shoulder-holstered .38. But Khrushchev only smiled back at the young man, providing a wordless non-response to whatever it was the youth had said.

Harrigan would have to ask the translator later. Right now, however, the urgency of the moment was to get the premier and his entourage safely into those waiting, bulletproof limousines.

As the caravan of cars slowly drew away, Harrigan—in the limo directly behind Khrushchev—looked back at the hangar, where the press and the small crowd were drifting in this direction or that one, dispersing …

… except for the young man in the white shirt, who intently watched them go, eyes unblinking, smile frozen.

Harrigan filed the face in his mental cabinet and settled back in the seat, hoping to Christ that Mayor Norris Poulson was wrong about Los Angeles.

That it wasn’t the city where the impossible happened.

The goddamn possible was bad enough.

3 Poetic Justice

The notion to kill Khrushchev hadn’t come slowly; it arrived to him in one swift instant—not a thought, but an impulse, a need, a duty…

In America he was called Jonas Veres—Veres Jonas in his native land (Hungarians used their last names first)—though he was not yet accustomed to it, slow at assimilating, a reluctant exile. It was difficult to realize he had been in the United States for almost three years already, coming here following the revolution in Hungary in 1956.

Before the bloodbath, Jonas had been a student at the university in Budapest, where he would often pass time at the Writer’s Union, and dabble in poetry… But his major passion was history.

Through history he learned the tortured but fascinating facts about his country’s convoluted past—a past riddled with foreign invasion and suppression, first by the Asian warlord Attila the Hun, then the Romans, Turks, Austrians, Germans, and now … the latest in a seemingly endless chain of invaders … the Russians. A joke that circulated the campus among the students was: What time is it … and who’s ruling us now?

Perhaps it was inherent in the temperament of the Hungarian people—peaceful and happy—that they seemed so susceptible to conquest. Or maybe it was their willingness to make the best of a bad situation, a positive attitude that had a negative result by keeping them from attaining the freedom they so longed for.

Those days were over. The “gentle” people had had enough of rape and pillage. And of course invaders always seemed to forget that when they rape the women of a victim nation, they sow their warrior’s seed into the blood of the conquered people.

Jonas had been only eight years of age when Hitler was defeated by the Russian Army in the spring of 1945; with this victory, there was great hope among the people of Hungary— hope that they would regain their land, so brutally taken in the war, and at long last be able to govern themselves.

But Stalin crushed that hope—along with any resistance to the new communist regime he had installed—and the Russians ruled with a force that made the Hungarians practically long for the vanquished Germans. The irony was not lost on a college-age student of history like Jonas: the liberators of the Hungarian people had suddenly become their captors.

Almost overnight, street signs came down and old accepted names changed to new strange Russian ones; and, too, Soviet emblems quickly replaced Hungarian ones, shattering any sense of place, shredding national pride, even as schools began teaching the Russian language, twisting the Hungarian tongue in yet another unmerciful torture. Farmers lost their land, merchants their shops, and the workers any rights, as Russia moved like a hungry beast over the picturesque land, devouring everything in sight, a greedy monster spouting (between bites) nonsense about the “good of the people,” destroying a nation’s heritage in the name of collectivization and Soviet domination.

Bad led to worse: next came the witch-hunts and executions by the Russian Secret Police—the dreaded NKVD—of any “criminal” (real or imagined) who dared to criticize the new Russian government. Was it any wonder the people all but prayed for World War III to break out? If only the Americans would defeat the Russians, perhaps Hungary could again rise from the ashes …

Then two things happened to bring back a glimmer of hope: Stalin died, and neighboring Poland revolted.

Jonas, like all Hungarians, watched in awe as the crisis between the Polish citizens and Moscow—with Nikita Khrushchev now at the helm—boiled to a head. The result was astonishing: Khrushchev agreed that Russia’s satellite country could “choose its own path toward socialism,” and did not send in his troops!

A bolstered Hungary took this cue, and on October 23, 1956, staged its own revolt, in the belief—the hope—that they too might win such concessions.

The riot had ignited like spontaneous combustion, thanks to impassioned students like Jonas, and what had started on campus quickly