The Company

by Robert Littell

  The squad members, jamming spare clips into their pockets and grabbing several cartons filled with Molotov cocktails, commandeered three taxis in the basement garage and, after inching through the masses of people in the plaza, headed into the city. The taxis turned off the Arbat onto the Ring Road and sped along it until they reached the barricade. It was half an hour to midnight and most of the defenders had melted away to snatch some sleep. Only a handful of students, half of them girls, remained. The Afghan officer distributed the Molotov cocktails, two to each man, and posted his volunteers on either side of the street up from the barricade.

  At midnight three large tanks with hooded headlights swung into view and crawled toward the barricade, grinding up the pavement under their treads. When they came abreast of the defenders hiding in alleyways off the Ring Road, the Afghan officer blew shrilly on a whistle. From both sides of the road, dark figures grasping wine bottles with burning wicks wedged in the necks darted toward the tanks. The tankers must have been equipped with night-vision goggles because the turrets immediately swiveled to the sides and machine guns raked the street. The first two students were cut down before they got within throwing distance. The other fighters, shooting at the tanks from the alleyways, diverted the attention of the gunners in the turrets. In the confusion two more defenders scurried onto the Ring Road. The first one got close enough to fling a Molotov cocktail at the treads of the lead tank, causing it to veer into a fire hydrant. The gunner in the turret pitched forward and his machine gun, silenced, fell off to one side. At that moment the second fighter, crouching low, lumbered in from the blind side and scrambled onto the back of the tank and pitched his Molotov cocktail directly down through the open hatch. There was a flash of flames, against which the fighter was silhouetted. The Afghan officer screamed from the side, “Run!” The fighter turned to jump off the burning tank—too late. The gunner on the second tank jerked the guncarriage around and opened fire at the silhouetted figure. Impaled on the bullets stabbing into his chest, the fighter was flung back against the burning turret. The ammunition inside the vehicle began to explode as the fighter’s body slid sideways off the tank into the street. A burst of radio static from the second tank filled the night. The drivers of the two remaining vehicles revved their engines and the tanks reversed away from the burning hulk. A roar went up from the barricade and the alleyways.

  The probe had been turned back.

  The volunteers recovered the bodies of their three dead comrades and brought them to the White House, where they were laid out on the makeshift stage. Women, their eyes awash with tears, sponged away the blood as best they could and covered the corpses with flowers. The Afghan veterans, caps in hand, filed past to pay their respects. An Orthodox priest wearing a black pope’s hat and robes placed a small wooden cross on the heart of each dead man.

  Tessa was sound asleep at a desk, her head buried in her arms, when Azalia Isanova shook her awake.

  “Has the attack begun?” Tessa demanded when she saw the tears streaming down Azalia’s cheeks.

  “It is about your father,” Aza said so softly that Tessa wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.

  “My father?”

  “There was an attack on the Ring Road…three tanks…volunteers went out to stop them…destroyed the first and turned back the others…heavy price…three of our defenders were killed. Your father was one of them.”

  Tessa was too numb to cry. “I must see him,” she whispered.

  Aza took her by the hand and led her past the students and Afghan veterans lining the corridors and staircase to the great entrance of the White House, and up onto the makeshift stage outside its doors. The masses of people lost in the darkness of the plaza were perfectly still as Tessa sank to her knees next to the body of her father. At first she was afraid to touch him for fear of hurting him even more. Leo’s chest looked as if it had been crushed by a sledgehammer. The ankle of one foot was turned out at an angle that could only mean the bone had been pulverized. His face, grown ten years older in twenty-four hours, appeared swollen and colorless. His eyes were shut. Dried blood stained one lid. And yet…and yet he looked, to Tessa’s anguished eyes, as if he had finally found a semblance of peace.

  She removed the cross from her father’s broken chest and handed it to the priest. “He wasn’t Christian, you see,” she pointed out. “He wasn’t really Jewish, either. He was—” Her voice faltered. It suddenly seemed important to provide a requiem. “He was an honorable man doing what he thought was right.”

  During a break in the tense late-night sessions at Kryuchkov’s Lubyanka war room, Yevgeny wandered down the corridor to a canteen where sandwiches and beer had been set out and helped himself to a snack. On the way back to the conference hall, he passed the open door of an office in which a KGB captain was monitoring the pirate radio station broadcasting from the White House. Listening from the door, Yevgeny heard a female announcer reading Boris Yeltsin’s latest defiant proclamation. In mid-sentence she interrupted the program with an important bulletin—sources at the White House were reporting that a pitched battle had taken place in the early hours of the morning between forces loyal to the State Committee for the State of Emergency and Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionists. The KGB captain turned up the volume and scrawled notes on a pad. Yevgeny, munching on a sandwich, moved closer.

  “…three tanks sent by the putschists were stopped by freedom fighters when they tried to break through an outer barricade on the Garden Ring Road. The lead tank was destroyed in the action but at great cost. Three of the gallant fighters laid down their lives. All honor to the heroes Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevsky and Leon Kritzky—“

  Yevgeny, dazed, asked, “Did she say Kritzky?”

  The captain looked at his notes. “Leon Kritzky. Yes. You know him?”

  “I know someone named Kritzky,” Yevgeny said, thinking fast, “but his first name isn’t Leon. And my Kritzky is against Yeltsin.”

  Yevgeny found his way to the men’s room and threw some cold water on his face. He swayed forward until his forehead was touching the mirror. How could such a thing have happened? How could Leo, who had risked his life for thirty years in the service of the Socialist state, have become a victim of the State Committee for the State of Emergency? All he had to do was lock himself in his Embankment apartment. What on earth had lured him into the streets at a time like this? What the hell was he doing at his age defending a barricade?

  The irony of Leo’s death staggered Yevgeny. Straightening, he stared at his reflection in the mirror and caught a glimpse of a death mask. And he felt a filament of sanity unravel somewhere in his skull.

  He knew what had to be done to avenge Leo’s death.

  Retrieving his car from the basement garage, Yevgeny drove through the deserted streets to the private KGB clinic. As he pushed through the revolving door with the tarnished gold hammer and sickle over it, he realized that he had no memory of how he had gotten there. In the early hours of the morning, only an old, half-blind porter was on duty in the main hall. He touched his cap when he noticed the shadow of a man heading for the staircase.

  “If you please, your name?” he called. “I am required to log visitors in my register.”

  “Ozolin,” Yevgeny said.

  “And how are you spelling Ozolin?”

  “O-Z-O-L-I-N.”

  Moving as if in a dream where the most extraordinary events came across as perfectly unremarkable, Yevgeny made his way down the hallway on the fourth floor to the door with the scrap of paper taped to it that read, “Zhilov, Pavel Semyonovich.” Inside, yellowish light from the street splashed the ceiling. In the undulating darkness, he could detect the purr of a battery-powered pump and the labored breathing of the ghostly figure in the metal hospital bed. Moving closer, Yevgeny’s eyes fell on the clipboard at the foot of the bed. Written in ink across it was the notation, “Chest pains compatible with enlarged heart.” He moved around to the side of the mattress and stared down at the skeletal body c
overed with a urine-stained sheet. Small bubbles of air seemed to burst in Starik’s throat as his medication flowed through the intravenous drip attached to the catheter in his chest.

  So this is what Tolstoy looked like, stretched out on a wooden bench at the Astapovo Station, his straggly beard matted with phlegm and coughed-up blood, his jaw gnashing, the petrified stationmaster Ozolin leaning over him, praying the famous fossil of a man would live long enough to die somewhere else. Starik stirred and a moan escaped his lips. He must have sensed the presence of another human being because his bony fingers reached out and wrapped themselves around Yevgeny’s wrist.

  “Please,” he wheezed, forcing the words out the side of his mouth that wasn’t paralyzed. “Tell me…is the game over?”

  “Despite all your efforts to keep it going, it is ending, Pavel Semyonovich. Your side is going to lose.”

  Starik heaved himself onto an elbow and gaped through crazed eyes at the paint peeling from a wall. “Do you see it?” he cried.

  “See what?”

  “The Red Queen! She is running into the wood where things have no name. Faster! Faster before it catches you!” Spent, Starik collapsed back onto the mattress.

  Yevgeny reached down to the shelf of the night table and groped around until he found the line connecting the small pump to the battery. He gripped it and yanked it out of the socket. The murmur of the pump broke off abruptly.

  With the pump no longer injecting the French drug Flolan into Starik’s body, his lungs would gradually fill with fluid. By the time the nurse on the morning shift came around to check him, he would be long dead. Already his breathing was more labored. When he spoke again, ranting about the Red Queen, there was a shallow metallic rasp between each word as he struggled to suck in air.

  Yevgeny backed away from the bed of the drowning man until he could no longer make out his voice. Turning, he hurried from the clinic. There were still things he had to do before the sweet tide of insanity ebbed.

  Yeltsin hadn’t closed his eyes since the start of the putsch. Physically exhausted, mentally drained, he slumped in a chair, his jaw wedged in a palm, desperately trying to focus on Aza’s mouth and the words coming out of it. “Say again more slowly,” he instructed her. She started from the beginning. Her source in Lubyanka had phoned again to report that KGB Chairman Kryuchkov was pushing for a decisive attack that night. The stratagem, dubbed Operation Thunder by the military planners, was straightforward: before dawn the protesters around the White House would be dispersed by water cannons and tear gas, at which point elite KGB and paratroop units would penetrate the area and blast through the building’s doors with grenade launchers. At precisely the same moment helicopter gunships would deposit troops on the roof. The two forces would spread out and comb the building for Yeltsin, who would be killed resisting arrest. If the operation went according to plan the whole thing would be over in minutes.

  Yeltsin let the information sink in. He mumbled something about how it was a godsend to have a spy at the heart of the putsch. Then he summoned the Afghan officers and had Aza repeat what she had told him. The group brainstormed for several minutes, after which Yeltsin issued his orders. Buckets of water were to be placed in the plaza around the White House so that demonstrators could wet pieces of cloth and use them as masks to protect themselves from the tear gas. The barricades were to be reinforced, additional Molotov cocktails were to be distributed to stop the water cannons. The roof of the White House was to be immediately strewn with office furniture to make it more difficult for the helicopters to land. Yeltsin himself, along with his senior aides, would retreat to a sub-basement bunker and lock himself behind a fifty-centimeter-thick steel door. “The flame of resistance burns as long as I am alive,” he said tiredly.

  At the Lubyanka, the debate raged on around the oval table. Some of the middle-level field commanders who had been assigned to lead Operation Thunder were having second thoughts. At first the reservations were couched in mundane operational terms:

  “How are we to land helicopters on a roof piled high with furniture?”

  “What if Yeltsin manages to slip away in the confusion?”

  “We have to consider worst-case scenarios. What will happen if we kill several thousand defenders and still don’t capture Yeltsin?”

  “What if Yeltsin escapes to the Urals and goes through with his threat to form a shadow government?”

  “What if our troops refuse to fire on the people manning the barricades? What then?”

  “Worse still, what if our troops attack and are turned back?”

  As the discussion dragged on the criticism became more pointed. Sensing that the balance was slowly tilting against them, the putsch leaders tried desperately to save the day. They argued that the stalemate worked for the counterrevolutionists; as long as the White House held out people would continue to rally to Yeltsin. And if Yeltsin were permitted to prevail, the careers, the lives of all those who had sided with the putsch would be in jeopardy.

  A combat general who had been for the attack when it was first proposed wavered. “I don’t know—if this blows up in our faces, it’s the Army’s reputation that will bear the stain.”

  “The Party leadership walks away when things turn sour—the war in Afghanistan is the most recent example,” complained another war hero.

  The press baron Uritzky pleaded with the field commanders. If Gorbachev and Yeltsin retained power, they would slash military budgets and humiliate the once-proud Soviet army. Gorbachev’s military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, who had rushed back to Moscow from vacation to join the coup, insisted that it was too late to back down; once the putsch had been launched the plotters had no option but to go forward, if only to preserve the Army’s credibility.

  “We have something more important than credibility—we have the respect of the masses,” observed an older officer who had remained silent up to now. “All that goodwill will disappear overnight if we fire on our brothers and sisters in the streets of the capitol.”

  One senior commander headed for the door in disgust. “They want to smear the Army in blood. I for one will not storm the White House.”

  A much-decorated Air Force commander agreed. “I categorically refuse to send my helicopters into the air. You’ll have to get somebody else to issue the order.”

  Under the noses of the ringleaders the putsch began to unravel in a flurry of recriminations. Watching from the sill of a window, Yevgeny concluded that the senior military commanders had lost their nerve. As the mood deteriorated, bottles of liquor appeared on the conference table and the putschists began the serious business of drinking themselves into a stupor. Yevgeny joined two others who were heading for the toilet, then slipped into a small office with a telephone on the desk. He lit the green-shaded desk lamp and dialed a number and listened to the phone ringing in a drawer on the other end. When Aza finally came on the line Yevgeny could barely repress the triumph in his voice.

  “Yeltsin can go to sleep,” he told her. “They have called off the attack…. No, the leaders were willing to take the risk. In the end it was the field commanders who didn’t have the appetite for bloodshed…I think it’s over. Without the army behind them, the putschists have no way of swaying the masses. Yeltsin has won…To tell the truth I can hardly believe it either. In a few hours the sun will rise on a new Russia. Things will never be the same…Let us meet at—” Yevgeny stiffened as his ear caught a faint echo in the phone. “Is someone else on this line?” he asked quietly. “Not to worry. It must be my imagination. We will meet at your flat at the end of the afternoon…Yes. For me, too. We will slow down the time left to us so that each instant lasts an eternity.”

  When he heard Aza hang up, Yevgeny kept the phone pressed to his ear. Twenty seconds went by. Then there was a second soft click on the line that caused him to catch his breath. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows; perhaps it originated with the telephone exchange or the central switchboard operator. Turning off the desk lamp, he walked
into the outer office. He stood for a moment waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Hearing the rustle of fabric, he peered into the shadows and realized that someone was in the doorway.

  A woman’s voice, seething with pent-up fury, hissed, “So it was you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the traitor in our ranks who betrayed us to the counterrevolution.”

  He knew the voice—it belonged to Mathilde, the wife of the press baron Uritzky. An overhead light snapped on and she stepped out of the shadows to confront him. Buried in her fist was a metallic object so small that he thought it could only be a lipstick.

  “It was not lost on us that at every turn the counterrevolutionists seemed to know what we were doing. My husband told Kryuchkov there was a traitor in our midst but he didn’t pay attention. He was so sure Yeltsin would cave in once he realized the hopelessness of his position.”

  “He miscalculated,” Yevgeny remarked.

  “So did you!”