Comrades

“Be Proud You Opened the Road to Stars from Earth.” Tested, Whalerock Industries, 3 Apr. 2012, d2rormqr1qwzpz.cloudfront.net/photos/2012/04/02/56-37220-soviet-man-be-proud-you-opened-the-road-to-stars-from-eart.jpg.

     

     It’s been 17 hours since I last left this room; 36 since I left the building. Being a Security Hacker for the U.S. government often requires ultra-marathon hacking sessions, but this was the longest yet. Operation Pegasus, as the big guys called it, could change the tide of the war by getting into the Moscow’s secret launch facilities’ computers. If we could just find one weakness, one small slip-up, the war would be ours.

     18 hour mark. We’re so close. The Commies accidentally let a government propaganda site login be cracked with simple SQL injection, so we’re practically touching the launch codes. As I look through the chat messages of high-level Russian officials, I see a meeting place and time, right here in Las Vegas. It reads:

The Leone Cafe, an hour from now. Code word to know you’re one of us: молния. Open to all double agents and spies to celebrate their recent success in Vietnam. 

     It looks like this is the first time they are meeting one another, so it seems like I could masquerade as one of them. What an opportunity -  to see the enemy face to face, to see how they lived, how they act, and to see the horrible things that the US government tells us they do in real life. I walk up to my commanding officer.

“Sir, it’s been almost 20 hours without a break. I need a beer and to see my wife and kids.”

He looks at me questioningly. “You don’t have a wife or kids.”

I smile. “Just the beer, then.”

     Laughing, he waves me away. I close my monitor and take a cab to the Leone Cafe. A nice place, not littered with Red Bull and filled with the stench of human. I see two men dressed in the same attire: blue jeans, a jacket, and a black shirt. I whisper the code word: “молния.” Lightning in Russian. I see one of the men look up, smile, and say, “вспышка! Welcome.” Surprised by their kindness, I sit down. The guys, Anton and Bazhenov, don’t seem like the devils the daily briefings led me to believe. We ordered a couple of beers (“Vodka would be too obvious,”  Anton says with a smile) and have a wonderful time. After spending years blindly fighting the Russians, these great people are who they turn out to be? Bazhenov suggests that we meet up again; perhaps next week? We all agree.

     It’s been 2 weeks since Operation Pegasus started. Although we no longer do 20 hour shifts, it is still a major undertaking. Until today, that is. After repeatedly pinging the Tor servers with different sized data, the firewall finally broke. We got in. Everyone was allowed to go home for 3 weeks as a reward. Finally, some quality time to spend with my Russian pals.

     Five days after everyone went home, everyone was urgently called to the bunker. The Russians had fired a missile at us! As I live in Las Vegas, I was the first responder. Luckily, it had been from the Moscow base, and we knew exactly how to control the rocket. What I didn’t expect were my orders from my commanding officer:

“Fire it back at them.”

     Unbelievable. To fire directly at the homeland of my best friends? I tried reasoning with him. “It’s the perfect plan, directly from the President himself. Not only would it severely damage their rocket supply, but it would destroy the morale of the Russians: their own rocket flying at themselves! Ingenious. And if I didn’t know better, it sounded like you were defending them,” he said suspiciously. How could this man be so indifferent to the lives of thousands of men, women, and children, who were some of the best people in the world, to be obliterated in an instant?
“Soldier, there’s 20 minutes on the clock! Redirect the missile now!”

   No. I couldn’t be involved in this. I could not deliberately kill the family of my Russian comrades. There was no way to explain it. Instead of wasting my time, I took out my Sig Sauer P320, turned around, and fired at my commanding officer. A clean shot through the head.

    Ten minutes left. After finding the maximum distance the rocket could travel, It seemed like the place that would kill the least people was still this bunker, deep in the Nevada mountains. The Russians certainly knew what they were doing.

     Five minutes. I take out my secret stash of vodka given to me by Bazhenov and take a shot. Mmm. Vodka from a distillery in Siberia. Russians really do make the best Vodka in the world.

     One minute. I look at the television screen simulating a window and see a streak of red and orange on the sky, growing closer by the second. Contrary to the horrible US propaganda, it flies straight and true. Beautiful.

     Five seconds. As the rocket draws near its target, I utter my final words.

Прощай, матушка Россия.

Farewell, Mother Russia.

-Fin