College Days: Candid Appraisal
"We need to talk," Kim whispered as she hugged her grandmother.
Morgan "Nana" Possible smiled lightly. Her family had come down to her retirement community for Mother's Day, and she was looking forward to hearing her oldest granddaughter tell about her first year of college.
Though it seemed that Kimberley Anne had another conversation track in mind.
"I take it you spoke with Brad?" she whispered back. Captain Brad Whitaker was the commandant of the NROTC cadets at BAU, and was also one of Nana's old mates from BUD/S and the SEALs.
"Sure did. He told me the whole story about when you went through BUD/S."
"Oh dear," Nana exclaimed with a chuckle. "What angle did he take on it?"
"The phrase 'chauvinist pig' came up a lot."
"I'm not surprised. What else did he tell you?"
"Eh, not a whole lot, since the word 'Classified' tended to come up as well. Though he did mention Yamanouchi..."
Kim's tone indicated that he had done far more than just mention the secret ninja school. Nana just nodded and thought for a moment.
"Wait 'till after supper, dear. Then we'll talk about that."
They walked along the beach for nearly a half-hour, until Morgan was satisfied that there was no one around. After a moment's trained study, she signaled for Kim to set down the two lawn chairs she'd brought out. The two ladies sat in the chairs, silent and watching the sunset, for several minutes more.
"How much did Brad say about what happened at Yamanouchi?" Morgan said at last.
"Not a lot," Kim began slowly. "Just that you'd spent a year there, and that the reason you two were there was Classified."
Morgan snorted.
"Kimberley Anne, that reason goes beyond Classified. If it weren't for the then-Sensei of Yamanouchi providing us with shelter... well, it could have been bad."
"Nana, if you can't tell me-"
Morgan waved a hand.
"What's the point of being a grandparent if I can't regale my oldest grandchild with old war stories?" she said with a grin.
Kim grinned back.
"Your father knows that I was away for a year, from '76 to '77; he was sixteen at the time, so it was kind of hard for him to miss it, but he doesn't know what happened. Brad knew, of course, and I told Henry, your grandfather... since he was, in a way, responsible for it all..."
She trailed off as her eyes glazed over in affectionate remembrance of her late husband, but then she shook her head and willed herself back to the present.
"Kimberley, you have to promise me that you won't repeat what I'm about to tell you to anyone but Ron, okay?"
"Sure, Nana... but why anyone but Ron?"
"A good commander only gives orders that she knows will be followed," Nana replied slyly. "You'd tell him anyway..."
"I would not!"
"I told Hen."
Kim just stared.
"I had to tell him. Just like you'd have to tell Ron."
Kim flushed.
"I guess you're right... so. What happened?"
It had all started with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Henry "Hen" Possible was a high-ranking NASA engineer, had been appointed as part of the liaison team between the American and Soviet engineers. So it was, as he spent portions of 1974 and 1975 in Moscow, that he met Lieutenant Sergei Vladimirovich Beregovoy.
Sergei was a brilliant aerospace engineer, and a skilled officer, but it was only by a political fluke that he was put on the Soviet liaison team. Essentially he had become dissatisfied by the Soviet political system, and in a rather obvious manner. Not enough for him to turn traitor, or to be thought politically unreliable, but it was clear that he didn't exactly believe Marxism to be 'all that.'
Which led his immediate zampolit, who was himself a True Believer in the People's Revolution, to recommend him for the liaison post, so he could be exposed to the True Face of American Decadence and Capitalistic Decay, and thusly return to the True Salvation of Communism.
That backfired like nothing else. The mission itself was barely over when Sergei contacted his new friend Henry, and stated his intention to defect to the United States.
Somehow or another the State Department, and CIA, decided that enabling his defection would be a Good Idea. No one was really sure iwhy/i this was decided, since the victory in the Race to the Moon had lessened the strategic value of any information he might bring, but someone decided that that Sergei was worth saving.
In late 1976, the CIA deployed Navy SEALs Lieutenant Commander Brad Whitaker and Lieutenant Command Morgan Possible to Moscow, to extract Sergei, his wife and son, and facilitate their arrival at the American Embassy.
They arrived at the flat to find a very distraught Katia Beregovoy and Aleksandr Sergeievich Beregovoy (the aforementioned wife and son, respectively). Sergei, it seemed, had told off the wrong person, and had gotten himself shipped off to the gulag. Far Eastern Siberia, to be precise.
Morgan and Brad didn't exactly panic at this, but they were none too thrilled. Of course, the first thing they did was to bring Katia and Aleksandr, as surreptitiously as possible, to the Embassy, where they would be given new identities and moved to the States.
Then they sat down with the CIA Station Chief and planned a rescue mission.
A week later, after a brief ride on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and a rather nerve-wracking hike across tundra, they stood, in 'borrowed' Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) winter uniforms, outside of a gulag camp.
"What do you think, Brad?" Morgan asked as they lay down on a hill and observed the camp. It was motley collection of barracks and factories, along with a decently sized airfield. Intelligence suggested that this was one of the camps where the Politburo sent political dissidents who could actually build things, as they figured they might as well get some work out of the idiots who needed 're-education'.
Which meant, out in the boondocks of Siberia, that the factories needed some way to get their wares out to the Greater Soviet World.
But they didn't need fences, or gates, apparently. Of course, given the climate and the terrain, that was quite understandable.
"Well, I dunno about the approach," Brad said as he set the binoculars back on the ground, "but I think I found our exit plan."
He pointed to the Il-76 (NATO codename "Candid") aircraft that was sitting on the airfield. It was a huge plane, with four engines and a 165-foot wingspan.
Which made it kind of funny-looking, as it's wingspan was greater than it's length.
"Grab Sergei and fly out of here?"
"We can probably reach the Aleutians with that. I know you're used to fighters, Morgan, but think you can fly it?"
She snorted.
"As Hen likes to say... anything is possible, for a Possible. Just... gimme those binoculars," she said, as she made snatching motions with her hand.
Brad handed them to her, as he rolled his eyes at the stars of the clear Siberian night. Morgan herself studied the Candid for several long minutes, and then she brought the glasses away from her eyes and nodded slowly.
"Yeah, okay... it looks like they're prepping the Candid for takeoff, so if we want to do this, we need to be quick about it."
"What? Just waltz in like we own the place?"
Morgan grinned and pointed at the insignia on their winter jackets.
"We're KGB, Brad. We do own the place."
"Then after you, madam," he replied with a flourished gesture.
She snorted and adjusted her face mask (she kept her face covered, as Soviet intelligence likely knew her from Henry's involvement with Apollo-Soyuz; of course, that was why she was there, as Sergei would also know her from Henry's involvement with Apollo-Soyuz), checked the straightness of her uniform and the safety on her AK-47, and then she and Brad made their way down from the hill and into the camp. It was a moonless night, so they were able to easily evade what few towered watchmen there were. Then they strolled into the camp as if they owned the place.
No one challenged them, not when they projected an air of authority, and certainly not when that air of authority was coupled with the insignia of the KGB. A few of the guards around the inmate barracks looked askance at Morgan's face mask, but a sharp glare from Brad (and an implied sharp glare from Morgan, as it the full effect of a glare was hard for her, given the mask) convinced most of them that they didn't really want to look too closely.
After a few minutes of searching, they came to the 'building' (a charitable term, since it was really the next thing down from a Quonset hut) that Sergei was 'staying' in. Two guards, a praporshchik (a Master Sergeant analog) and a Corporal, stood outside the door. They did a valiant job of covering up their shivering.
"Good evening, Comrade Sergeant," Brad growled in Russian. The sergeant, barely into his twenties, saw both the officer's and KGB insignia on Brad's uniform, and quickly snapped to attention.
"Good evening, Comrade Lieutenant!" the praporshchik replied.
"Cold night, Sergeant."
"Ah, yes sir," the praporshchik replied uneasily, as he wasn't exactly used to making idle conversation with a KGB officer. "Is there something I can do for you, sir?"
"Yes. You can return to your barracks and warm up, comrade. Our new recruit here has requested the honor of standing guard over the enemies of our revolution, so he and I will be covering the remainder of your shift."
"He has, Comrade Lieutenant?"
"Of course, Comrade Sergeant," Brad continued, as he gave Morgan a comradely and enthusiastic smack on the back. "Don't be fooled by his extra clothing and smaller size; this is the son of a senior party official from Cuba, who specifically requested our training.
"Feel free to return to your barracks, comrade; I believe they have some hot soup cooking."
Whatever further questions the praporshchik had died a quick death, as the promise of hot food and a sooner-than-expected rest overcame any remaining protest.
"Yes, Comrade Lieutenant! Thank you, sir!" the guard said as he snapped to attention once more, and then he and the corporal hurried back towards their barracks.
"Did you have to hit that hard?" Morgan whispered when they were out of earshot.
Brad turned and shot her a wolfish grin.
"Whatsamatter?" he teased. "Little girl can't take it?"
"One of these days, Brad, I swear..."
"Ooooh, threats... we've got about thirty minutes, Morgan, before those two figure out that somethings up."
She nodded and started for the door.
"Just keep an eye out, and whistle if any real KGB types come by. And don't worry about the threats, Brad."
She opened the door and turned back to him.
"I'll just have Hen sneak you onto a Mars probe or something."
Then she stepped into the prisoner barracks and shut the door behind her. Brad raised an eyebrow in thought, and then he grunted and turned to keep watch.
"Couldn't be any colder," he grumbled.
The barracks weren't exactly freezing, but they weren't exactly warm either. Nor was it the cleanest place she'd ever been in, as she felt her booted foot shove aside something that sounded vaguely furry. But not in a puppy-dog kind of way.
The beds were simple wooden bunks, stacked two high, with spartan mattresses and blankets. Rows of the beds lined both side walls, and there was only a narrow lane that ran between the rows, from door to back. She stealthily made her way down that lane, each move as silent, graceful, and measured, as that of a cat hunting a canary.
Fifteen bunks down she found that one that contained Sergei. He was fast asleep, it seemed, his typically Slavic features relaxed, and his piercing gray-green eyes closed in rest.
Morgan crept over to the side of his bed, lifted her mask, and gently shook him.
"Rise and shine, Sergei Vladimirovich," she whispered in Russian. "You've got a bit of a trip ahead of you."
The bed creaked as Sergei grumbled and stirred, and then his eyes fluttered open and he looked up at Morgan sleepily. Then he grinned, and sat upright.
The bed creaked again... and then it creaked a third time as his bunk-mate stirred and awoke.
"Beregovoy," he grumbled, causing Sergei to look up in surprise, "what are you shaking the bed for?"
Sergei looked back at Morgan... but she had vanished. He grinned again, knowing that she had a habit of doing that, and as his bunkmate leaned over the side to look at him, he crossed his arms behind his head and lay back down on his pillow.
"I was having a most wonderful dream, Vanya," he said smugly, "one which you have rudely interrupted. Would you care for me to describe it to you?"
"I don't want to hear about your dreams," Vanya replied with a disgusted grunt, and then he hauled himself back up into his own bed. "Just go back to sleep and stop writhing, you nekulturny barbarian."
The last bit came out somewhat slurred, for Vanya was already falling asleep even as he delivered the insult. Sergei smiled again and waited a few moments.
"You can come out now, Morgan Chadovna," he whispered quietly. "He is quite asleep."
Morgan removed herself from underneath Sergei's bed and stood next to it again.
"You sure?"
"Of course. Sleep in the same room with a man, even one as self-important as Vanya, and you will soon learn his sounds. The low-pitched rumble you hear is his 'I will only awake to lick the boots of a Politburo member' snore."
Morgan stifled a laugh, and then got her head back in the game.
"Good. You have winter clothes?"
"Yes."
"Get changed."
Surprisingly enough, they made their way to the Candid with no fuss and bother whatsoever. Whether a Russian and a Cuban escorting a political prisoner to the airfield was a common sight or not didn't seem to matter, as the risk of offending an officer of the KGB was just to much for anyone to take, and so they weren't questioned.
The ease of their transit sealed Morgan's understanding of why Sergei wished to defect.
They were attempting to convince the guards at the Candid that it was of vital State Importance that they take control of the aircraft immediately, and that they be permitted to fly it on their own. The flight crew was understandably reticent at the idea of staying in Siberia until another plane could arrive, but Brad looked to be succeeding in talking them into it.
The success of his negotiations would forever remain a mystery, as the air became filled with the sounds of blaring klaxons and cries of alarm. Morgan took a quick look around, and saw the guards running helter-skelter-
Wait.
Not helter-skelter. They had a direction.
Straight towards the barracks that Sergei was supposed to be in.
'Snap,' she thought... and then she spun and drove her right heel into the temple of an unsuspecting guard. She felled another one with a stiff-fingered blow to a nerve cluster, and then she turned just in time to see Brad clobber two others with the butt-stock of his AK-47.
"Where's the crew?" she called out.
"Ran into the plane," he answered. "You deal with them, I'll buy you some time out here."
Morgan nodded and ran up the cargo ramp into the massive transport aircraft. It took a moment for her to find her way around, but the interior was analogous to that of a C-141, and so she quickly found her way into the cockpit and dealt with the flight crew, who had already begun the pre-flight checklist.
She return the smoking automatic to its holster, shoved the bodies out of the way. Her spoken Russian was flawless, but her ability to read Cyrillic was just a bit rusty, so the start-up procedure was slower than what she would have liked. However, after she discarded most of the pre-flight safety checks and careful startup procedures, she was able to get the Candid online and its engines roaring.
Just in time, too, as she'd started to hear the chatter of AK-47 fire. That ended when Bard and Sergei jump into the cargo hold and raised the door, and their attackers had to hide to avoid the backwash from the engines. Morgan pushed the throttle to fifty percent and swung the plane around to line up with the runway.
She heard loud cursing floating up from the cargo bay, as her maneuvers flung her male comrades around the hold.
Then she jammed the throttle to full and took off down the runway like a lame elephant on speed. Somehow, and she had always wondered just exactly how the big movers stayed above stall speed, the Candid lifted off the ground and pulled, slowly but surely, up and away from the frozen bleakness of the gulag.
When she at last felt herself clear, Morgan angled east, and set a course for the Aleutians and home.
"Well, snap," she exclaimed again.
"You trust this... this SKR device, Morgan Chadovna?" Sergei said dubiously, as he stared at the arcane device she and Brad had wired into the ship's communications and radar systems.
"They said Jarek Lipsky came up with it," Brad replied with a shrug. "Apparently he's some Company wunderkind, and most of his devices, while not quite up to promise, tend to work very well."
"Which means that, yes, we do have a squadron of MiG-21s flying maneuvers between here and international waters," Morgan said, cutting off whatever Sergei was about to say. "I don't think they've spotted us yet, but I don't want to go up against fighters, even older ones, in this thing."
Everyone agreed to that.
Morgan thought for a moment and then she turned the aircraft and started heading south.
"Whatcha thinking, Morgan," Brad asked from the copilot's seat.
"I'm going to try for Okinawa."
"We're gonna have to jump," Morgan said out of nowhere.
"I beg your pardon?" Brad replied.
"Somebody on Sakhalin Island saw us," Morgan continued as she jerked the plane westward again, so that she was now flying towards Honshu, instead of parallel to its western shore.
"You sure?"
"Positive enough. Sergei, those crates in the back... do you know what's in them?"
"I am not certain," he replied slowly, "however, we had been working a new supply of motors and warheads for surface-to-air missiles. Quota was reached just yesterday, so I would assume..."
"Great," Morgan replied, all business like. "Brad, take Sergei to the back and see if the two of you can rig up something that can go boom, on a timer. I'll try and fiddle something out of the autopilot."
"But Morgan Chadovna, I do not-"
"C'mon, Sergei," Brad said jovially, as he eased the other man back towards the cargo hold. "She's got a hunch about something, and you know she won't let it go until we do exactly what she asks..."
Morgan smiled for a moment, and then she turned serious as she set to reprogramming the autopilot. They needed to get off the plane, she was sure of that. She'd had a bad feeling ever since they'd flown over the Sea of Okhtosk, and their close flyby of Sakhelin Island had only intensified that feeling. She didn't know if it was a GRU trawler, or a spotter team on the island itself that had seen them, all that she knew was that they had been seen.
That was knowledge she couldn't explain. It was just a hunch... but those hunches had kept her and her teammates alive in the past, and she was just stubborn enough, a trait learned from her ship-captain father (and one reinforced by the even more formidable stubbornness of the women from the Possible Clan), to act on her hunches and not suffer dissent.
They were already over Honshu by the time she'd finished reprogramming the autopilot. She recovered the SKR, turned over control the computer, and then she left the cockpit for the cargo hold.
Sergei had been quite correct in his description of their cargo, and between the two of them he and Brad had improvised a bomb that would blow the plane in half. Morgan set the timer, and then all three of them strapped on the parachutes.
"I've got the plane set to turn back to the Sea of Japan, and then head south on our original course," Morgan explained. "With any luck, that'll throw anyone who's tracking us off the scent."
They nodded, and Morgan opened the side hatch.
"We're passing over a mountain range," she yelled over the rushing air. "I think, if we can stick the landing, we can drop in there and make our way back to civilization. Ready?"
"Good to go!" Brad yelled. Sergei looked nervous, but he gamely shot her a thumbs-up.
"Spankin'!" Morgan said with a grin, and then she jumped out the door. Brad had to drag Sergei out with him, but the engineer managed to open his parachute in time.
Of course, what Morgan thought was a mountain range wasn't exactly an ordinary mountain range.
Most, even in Japan, don't play host to secret ninja schools.
So it was, that by fate or by blind luck, Morgan Possible came to a landing in the courtyard of the Yamanouchi School.
She looked up from where she'd landed (the surprise of finding habitation there had been enough to drop her on her backside) and saw a short, somewhat aged Japanese man, who gazed at her in bemused amazement. He wore a black gi, one which had markings on it that identified him as an instructor at the school.
Despite his size, she had the feeling that he was more than her match... in the martial arts, at least.
Morgan grinned up at him, and he raised an eyebrow in return.
"Konichiwa," they said in unison.
She'd trailed off at that, and Kim looked on in moderate surprise as her grandmother stared into the fading sun. Her mouth was cracked in an amused smile, and Kim sensed that the story was over.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"That can't be it! You just got there!"
Morgan laughed.
"It's not funny, Nana!" Kim grumped. "I mean, you wind up at Yamanouchi, and... and I want to know what happened! Why were you there for a year? Did you meet Sensei? What happened while you were there?"
"Slow down, dear," Morgan replied with amusement. "To your first question... the then-Sensei agreed to allow us to contact the government and inform them of the success of the mission. Several of the State Department brains came up with the idea that we might just want to lay low for a while, at least until the KGB stopped looking.
"I agreed with that idea, so long as they informed our families of where we were and what was going on. The three of us were then graciously allowed to stay a year at Yamanouchi... as for what we did, well, we learned... ninja things. Nothing as interesting as Ronald's experience."
"How do you know what happened with Ron?"
"Oh, he told me all about it when we made lemon squares at Christmas," Morgan said with a wave of her hand. "Some of your story from Drakken's tower reminded me of what the then-Sensei told us about the Mystical Monkey Power, and I was curious."
"The then-Sensei?"
"Now, Kimberley Anne, how do you think leadership of the Yamanouchi school passed down throughout the centuries? The man who met the three of us that day is the man you know as Sensei. He wasn't Sensei then, just an instructor... but we were there when he was elevated to the position of successor."
Kim nodded as she turned that bit of information over in her mind.
"So, what happened to Sergei?" she asked after a moment's contemplation.
"Sergei?" Morgan said with a laugh. "Oh, he reunited with Katia here in the States, and they settled down in Florida once he started work with NASA. He has solemnly vowed never to look upon snow again."
Kim giggled, and then shot her Nana a sly look.
"You're not going to tell me what happened in Yamanouchi, are you?"
"No, I'm not," Morgan said with a sly look of her own.
"And why not?"
"Because, Kimberley Anne, it's late and I'm tired. That story will just have to wait for another time."
THE END