Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  “You have told me more than enough,” said Oksana Volkova. “Enough, I think, to send Khrushchev to his grave. A political grave or a real one. Or both.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He watched her leave, striding purposefully down the trail through the trees, her cassock billowing behind her. He waited until she disappeared into the darkness and he heard the automobile that picked her up pull away. Then, as the sound of the car’s engine faded in the distance, he turned and walked back to the novitiate.

  He had done his job. Oksana would handle the rest. But how many days, he wondered, were left for himself and for the world?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  All day Saturday, he listened to the General Confessions of his novices. They entered his office, one by one, and knelt at the prie-dieu beside his wooden armchair. There was no screen for them to hide behind. Some looked right at him, eyes full of fear or shame, as they tried to confess all the sins committed in their lifetimes.

  It did not take long for them to list their trespasses. Their lives had been short and, to his mind, extremely sheltered. He heard nothing that shocked him, but he was impressed by the sincerity of their contrition. All the more so because the transgressions, temptations, insecurities and fears that they revealed were petty compared to the severity of his own. What they considered gravely sinful was considered commonplace behavior in the world he had known.

  They were damn good lads, he decided. Not perfect, but they were willing to consider giving up everything to become penniless, celibate, obedient servants of God. They touched his heart, these young idealists. And, when they finished making their confessions, he tried his best to give them the comfort and good counsel they might have received from Father John Beck.

  If only he could stay here always, he thought often during that long day, living in a sort of peaceful Limbo with his novices. They were much like the boys he had led into battle, brave and willing to risk everything, even their own lives, to overcome invading Evil. They would make good soldiers, these novices of his, if it ever came to that.

  Such obedience! How quickly they responded to his least suggestion. How willingly they worked to change their lives. He hated that he had to deceive them. That was the worst part of his clandestine life here at Milford. It was not their fault that their Master of Novices was counterfeit.

  The least he could do was to minimize the psychological damage he might be inflicting. He did not believe in the Scriptures or the lessons Ignatius Loyola had drawn from them, but he would try to present the Exercises as effectively as possible. He would continue to play the part of Retreat Master with all the honesty and conviction he would have brought to Hamlet or Lear.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Ah, poor Self, he thought, as he climbed into his bed that night, I doubt that you and I can survive much longer. From student, to actor, to husband and father, to soldier, to officer, to enemy of the state, to prisoner, to mock-prisoner and mock-priest. And, finally, to what?

  To nothing at all, he thought. You are already old and tired, as vague as a wisp of smoke. What he was facing now was inevitable annihilation and he was filled with a dread the like of which he had never experienced in his bloodiest, most hopeless battles.

  It was difficult to escape into sleep that night. He kept wondering what might be happening in Moscow.

  C H A P T E R • 21

  The white birch trees flashed by in Sunday morning sunlight as the black staff car sped farther away from Moscow and deeper into the Russian countryside. Save for his driver, General Michail Andreyevich Kalenko of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army was traveling alone. He carried no weapon, no briefcase, no documents. And yet, he told himself, he was the most dangerous man in the Soviet Union. All he needed for his meeting with the Chief of the General Staff was in his head.

  There were several black Ziv limousines parked along the driveway to Marshal Zakharov’s dacha. Their drivers sprang to attention and saluted as General Kalenko was escorted past them and out across the fields to the Chief of the General Staff’s private target range beyond a stand of timber some distance from the house.

  As he approached, General Kalenko sized up Marshal Zakharov’s guests. There were three Marshals of the Red Army and two civilians, members of the Politburo, both stern, solid men of the old school.

  Marshal Zakharov and his guests gathered around out there beyond the dacha, well beyond the reach of any surveillance devices as General Kalenko gave his report: a summation of what Major Volkova had learned through her agent.

  “Added to our routine military intelligence about troop and equipment movements in the United States,” he concluded, “this latest information confirms the fact that the Americans are preparing for an all-out war. The Americans are convinced that they cannot back down on this issue. They will fight.”

  “So much for Khrushchev’s strategic farsightedness,” said one of the Politburo men. “I, for one, have had enough of his hare-brained schemes.”

  “We will be damned lucky if we survive this one,” said his companion.

  “How certain are you of all this, Kalenko?” asked Marshal Zakharov.

  “I am absolutely certain.”

  “The source?”

  “The highest.”

  “You must tell me.”

  “Of course,” said General Kalenko. “But only you.”

  The Chief of the General Staff laughed out loud. “General Kalenko is an extremely cautious intelligence officer,” he said to the others. “It is said that his mother once asked him for the time of day and Kalenko immediately covered the face of his wristwatch. You will please excuse us for a moment.”

  Marshal Zakharov led General Kalenko away from the group, about fifty yards or so.

  “Very well, Michail Andreyevich. No one can hear us now. Who is your source?”

  “The President of the United States.”

  The Chief of Staff of the Red Army took a deep breath. He stood silently for several moments, gazing across the fields.

  “Can that be?”

  “Yes. The information comes directly from the President.”

  “Do you wish to elaborate?”

  “No, sir,” said General Kalenko.

  “But the fact is that one of your agents has penetrated the White House?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “But it is obvious that you have gained some sort of direct access to the President. That seems to be clear.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Will there be more information?”

  “That depends on the President. I believe it is likely, but we must be patient.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Marshal Zakharov rubbed his jaw.

  “How many people know about your operation?”

  “Four. You and I know. Also the person who trained and now controls the agent.”

  “And,” said Marshal Zakharov, “the agent himself.”

  “Himself, herself, or itself,” said General Kalenko. “The agent has only limited knowledge. Only enough to do the job.”

  “What about the KGB? Or your colleagues in the GRU?”

  “Completely in the dark,” said Kalenko.

  Marshal Zakharov clapped the general on the back.

  “You are a cunning old bastard,” he said. “Only five people in the world know anything about your operation and I know the least of all. Well, that is excellent. Keep it that way. The information you have developed must be used with utmost discretion for your operation to continue and be effective.”

  General Kalenko nodded.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  Marshal Zakharov returned to the group.

  “I am satisfied that General Kalenko’s intelligence is accurate,” he said. “I can assure you of that. You can take what he says as absolute fact.”

  “So what do we do with this information?” asked one of the other marshals.

  “We keep it to ourselves,” said Zakharo
v. “The facts, I mean. We must not give any indication that we know anything factual about how the Americans are going to react to what Khrushchev has done. In our conversations with others, we must only speculate. Or, ideally, cause others to speculate.”

  “For our own protection,” said Kalenko, “we must not reveal any of this intelligence to anyone outside this circle. You must be the ones to sow seeds of doubt and uncertainty in the proper places. But you must not indicate that you have access to any actual secret information.”

  “Yes,” said Marshal Zakharov. “That is extremely important. We are just old warhorses who have been considering possibilities. Our concerns are based solely upon our long years of experience and our reading of history. For example, we might observe that moving our military too deeply into America’s sphere of influence would be making the same mistake Napoleon and Hitler made when they invaded Mother Russia. Their supply lines were stretched hundreds of miles too far from home. But Cuba? It is thousands of miles away!”

  “Will anyone pay any attention to us?”

  “Probably not,” replied General Kalenko. “Not at first. But that makes no difference. The Americans will make their intentions clear within the next few days. Then people will remember what you said to them and the questions you raised.”

  “And once the doubts and suspicions we have raised are confirmed,” said Marshal Zakharov, “Khrushchev’s political enemies will turn on him quickly enough. His days in power will be numbered.”

  T H E • E N D

  Red Army Spies

  and

  The Blackrobes

  B O O K • T H R E E

  Death & Discernment

  C H A P T E R • 1

  That Sunday night at Milford, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz prepared to start the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises. It would begin with the meditation titled “The Call of the Temporal King.” At long last, he thought, Ignatius Loyola had given him some rich material to work with: a Sixteenth Century melodrama that he could sink his teeth into.

  Perhaps he had misjudged Ignatius. His First Week’s florid depictions of Hell and damnation had been overwrought and it was hard to swallow his explanation of how Original Sin created the need for Redemption. But in all fairness, Ignatius had been doing his best to instill guilt and fear in those making the Exercises. Judging from the general confessions of the novices, Ignatius had been successful.

  Was Loyola’s relish for the horrendous a Basque trait, he wondered, or a hallmark of the Age of Exploration and Reformation? Maybe the theologically unschooled Loyola was just drawing on what had worked for him in the military. Scare the Devil out of raw recruits until they learned to obey orders without question before facing the rigors of hard combat training.

  But regarding meditation, Ignatius Loyola was a man ahead of his times when he urged using the body’s five senses to enliven what was being contemplated by the mind. Wasn’t that how he himself had been trained as a young actor?

  He felt a surge of excitement that evening as he marched along the corridor to the novices’ chapel to start Week Two. He had to admit that in his “Call of the Temporal King” the soldier-saint damn well knew what he was doing.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  That evening, very few people in the world, least of all the novices in their chapel, had any idea of how close they were to total annihilation. Circling high in the air far from home, long-range B-47s and B-52s, carrying nuclear bombs, were waiting to change course and head toward targets in the Soviet Union.

  The commander of the Tactical Air Command had told President Kennedy that most of the missile bases and nuclear weapons in Cuba might be destroyed in a surprise aerial attack, but not all of them. Those missiles that survived would still be able to destroy several American cities.

  Army troops and Marines, staging on the East Coast for an invasion of Cuba, might suffer as many as 25,000 American casualties.

  Navy aircraft were tracking twenty-five Russian merchant ships now steaming toward Cuba carrying God only knew what cargo. More missiles? More warheads?

  The Navy now had more than one hundred warships in the Caribbean in position, waiting for orders.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The President of the United States made his decision.

  John F. Kennedy’s first response to Nikita Khrushchev would be a naval blockade of Cuba. Rather than risk igniting an all-out nuclear war, the United States would confront the Soviet Union at sea.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Charley Coogan sat in the Novice Chapel waiting for his Master of Novices to start speaking. The priest had seemed more energetic than usual when he entered to lead the novices in an opening prayer. But now, he was sure taking his time getting started. He was just standing silently beside his table on the altar platform.

  Charley caught his breath when the priest smacked his hands together, snatched up his small green book and barked: “Attention!”

  Charley snapped upright in his chair. So did the other novices.

  “Pay close attention! The Second Week begins now! Ignatius Loyola wants us to imagine that we are in the presence of ‘a human king, chosen by God, whom all Christian princes and men reverence and obey.’ The setting, judging from what he writes, is the time of the Crusades, those military campaigns by European Christians to reclaim the Holy Land by force. Ignatius asks us to listen to this king.”

  Charley watched the priest throw out his chest and raise his right hand shoulder high.

  “It is my will to conquer all the land of the unbelievers!”

  His voice was deeper now, powerful and commanding.

  “Therefore, whoever would like to come with me is to be content to eat as I eat, to drink as I drink, to dress as I dress. Likewise he is to labor like me in the day and watch in the night, so that afterwards he may have part with me in the victory, as he had it in the toils!”

  Wow, thought Charley.

  But then the king faded away as the Master of Novices relaxed into his conversational posture.

  “Ignatius asks us to consider what a good subject ought to reply to a king like that. So liberal and so kind. If anyone did not accept the appeal of such a king, so says Ignatius Loyola, he would be deserving of being censured by all the world and held for a mean-spirited knight.”

  He lowered the book and placed it over his heart.

  “Obviously, no one here is a 16th Century Basque nobleman. And I am certain that not a single one of you worries about being censured by all the world or regarded as a mean-spirited knight.”

  Charley laughed out loud. He was not alone. When the laughter subsided, the priest continued with a straight face.

  “However, at this point in the Spiritual Exercises, we must try to experience the emotions Ignatius wants to evoke. So something more contemporary may get us to where Ignatius wants us to be.”

  He dropped Loyola’s little green book on the desk and picked up another slender volume.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Something more up-to-date.” He waved this book in the air and grinned. “Shakespeare!” he said.

  Charley chuckled and relaxed. This was going to be fun.

  “We turn to Henry V, Part II which is Shakespeare’s historical play about England’s warrior-king. Henry, at least the way Shakespeare presents him, is the sort of king Ignatius might want us to envision.”

  Charley watched his Master of Novices pace back and forth before the altar, six paces one way and six paces back, holding the book behind his back, looking up at the ceiling and speaking quietly as if he were thinking out loud.

  “When Henry the Fourth dies, young Prince Hal succeeds his father to the throne of England. He knows he must stop being an irresponsible playboy and cast aside his low-life companions.

  “Now, fully aware of his obligations to God and Country, young King Henry leads his nation into war against France to restore what the English believe is rightfully theirs. Young Prince Hal must rally his soldiers! He must prove himself to be the so
rt of king they can follow into battle!”

  The priest stopped pacing. He turned, gathered himself and thrust the book high above his head.

  “On your feet!” he commanded. “Everyone! Pick up your chairs and kneelers and move them to the walls! Clear a space and stand together facing the altar!”

  He kept talking while the novices hustled away their furniture and rushed back to the space they had emptied. Charley edged forward to hear better. The priest had begun speaking, at first softly, then more vigorously. Somehow, as he became more confident, the priest appeared to be growing younger.

  “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage!”

  Swinging the book like a sword and declaiming from memory, the priest bounded down the altar steps into the midst of his startled novices. His eyes flashed as he looked from face to face.

  “Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide! Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit to his full height. On, on, you noblest English!”

  Charley had seen the movie and had thrilled to Laurence Olivier’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead!” But this was different. It was like standing with his team in the locker room sucking up confidence from his coach in those anxious moments before rushing out onto the field.

  “I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start! The game’s afoot! Follow your spirit, and upon this charge, cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The man who played Father Samozvanyetz stopped.

  He took his pause and then slowly relaxed, lowering his book and holding it open with both hands. Only then did he begin to read and talk, talk and read, savoring each word, drawing the novices deeper into his performance, gesturing, catching the rhythm, tuning their ears to the Elizabethan music, more foreign to them, he judged, than to himself.