Chapter Six

May 4

With the victory celebrations complete, Phase Two of the Russian invasion of New York City was scheduled to begin. But, in fact, its changes were already being seen.

During the first month of the Okupatsi, the military had deployed its units in urban combat alignments. Heavily armed patrols, manning lots of weapons positions and guard posts, rain or shine, sleeping outdoors and eating meals on the curbstone.

Now more permanent installations were being established around the city. Unit command centers, security checkpoints, guardhouses, outposts on the periphery of nearly every structure with a roof over its head. Large apartment buildings all over New York were being transformed into barracks; smaller ones were being turned into mess halls.

The job of the Russian forces now was to become entrenched in Russkiy-NYC and get ready for the next phase when ordered to do so by Moscow.

Because Phase Two was more hands-on, the Sostva’s staff had instituted daily morning briefings in the joint ops suite at the top of the old Simon & Schuster Building. The meetings would be run by Colonel Gagarin, the one-eyed man who knew it all.

The first one commenced at 0800 hours, three days after May Day. The Sostva commanders walked in, right on time, Alexei, Kartunov, and Marshal MOP, along with their security details. The three officers looked hung-over and sleep-deprived, hardly a surprise. They’d celebrated May Day as vigorously as their troops and were still paying the price.

The commanders took their seats and listened impassively as Colonel Gagarin first explained why these morning briefings were necessary. Then he rattled off eight pages of numbers Moscow deemed important for Phase Two. Total kilowatts cranked out by the restarted Astoria Power Station so far. How many supply ships were expected to arrive from Russia in the next twenty-four hours. How many meals would be served to the troops in the field over the same time period. On and on. All the numbers were positive; every one of them proof that the Okupatsi continued moving along smoothly.

But the three commanders were only interested in one number: the latest payout from the rackets. Now that the Red Hand godfathers were out of the way, that number should represent an enormous increase in profits for Moscow. And this would be good for the Sostva, because in the eyes of the Kremlin, the higher number, the better the job they were doing here in New York.

As it turned out, Gagarin had saved the best for last.

As of that morning, he revealed, the magic number had reached the equivalent of a million dollars a day in pure profit flowing into Russian coffers.

Awake now and feeling a lot better, the Sostva commanders gave themselves a round of applause, so pleased by what they’d heard. The staff officers joined in. Meeting over, the commanders got up to leave.

But after a stern nod from Gagarin, the navy’s chief staff officer, who was in charge of the city’s air defenses, timidly raised his hand and told the high commanders that, a couple of hundred people reported seeing a tiny aircraft flying around the MMZ the night before. Nothing serious, just something that looked like it was from a circus. The Yaks had been scrambled but the little plane had flown away before they arrived.

The still-jovial Sostva officers just laughed. They hadn’t been aware of this incident or the earlier MOP sighting. Nor had they heard the Yaks roaring overhead around midnight. A vodka sleep was a deep sleep.

“A circus plane?” Alexei finally asked, the three commanders sitting back down. “Are you sure?”

“Many people reported it as such,” the navy officer said.

“The army HQ’s security chief among them,” Gagarin added, slightly adjusting his eye patch. “This craft was universally described as being the size of a compact car but able to fly very fast. It was definitely not a military airplane. It was painted in carnival colors, had enormous front wheels and a very noisy engine. It flew around our three military HQ buildings for a few minutes and then just vanished—like a ghost, many said.”

The high commanders were more puzzled than concerned. But it was paramount to them that Moscow not hear of anything that might blemish their success—not even a tale of some weird little samolyot-nevidimka, or ghost plane, flying within the supposedly secure airspace above their conquered city. The Gagarin story of the ghost plane had be discredited and quashed.

But how?

A few days into the invasion, MOP had revived one of the city’s old AM radio stations.

Red Radio, which now ran twenty-four hours a day, played endless propaganda pieces in both Russian and English, bragging about how well the Okupatsi was going. Every three or four hours, an announcer would break in and read the list of rules and regulations for both soldiers and New York’s civilians, followed by some innocuous around-the-town stories. Then it would go back to the propaganda.

With this in mind, Colonel Gagarin suggested a broadcast be made on Red Radio retelling the beagle-flying-a-doghouse holiday balloon story that had been floating around, adding that the wayward inflatable had been tracked down, recovered, and destroyed. End of the ghost plane.

The Sostva commanders liked the plan.

They ordered Gagarin to put it into action.

* * *

But at the stroke of midnight, the ghost plane appeared again.

More than a thousand people saw the toy-like aircraft arrive over Rockefeller Plaza this time. Thanks to the Red Radio broadcast earlier, the ghost plane had been the talk of the MMZ all day, making many soldiers curious. But there were hundreds of civilians, too, who’d either listened to Red Radio or had gotten the word from others. They’d climbed up to the roofs of a number of skyscrapers just outside the MMZ with the hope that the little craft would return.

As before, the tiny plane circled the three main MMZ military buildings one at a time, three trips around each before starting back again. It was noisy but could move very fast. Despite its cartoonish landing gear, it was capable of amazing maneuvers, frequently coming within inches of smashing into a building’s sharp corner on wings-up turns. The trail of exhaust left in its wake created gigantic smoke rings around the skyscrapers, three on each so far. This was a big hit with those watching below.

About two minutes into the display, the plane’s engine let out a terrific screech. Suddenly, it went up on its tail, and stopped in midair outside the Navy Building’s penthouse window. At that moment, a MOP electrical crew working on the roof next door turned on one of their searchlights. It captured the colorful little plane in its beam for a few seconds, and illuminated a small crowd of people looking out at it from inside the navy penthouse.

Then, just as quickly, the plane’s nose came down, and with a great burst of flame and power, it vanished back into the night.