by Lee Child
‘What three men?’
‘I don’t know who they were. Apparently they wouldn’t say.’
‘Why talk to me about it?’
‘Because they were asking about you too. Please come and see us.’
I asked, ‘You’re not upset about Leonid?’
She said, ‘Under the circumstances, no. I think that was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Please come.’
I didn’t answer.
She said, ‘I would very much appreciate your help.’ She spoke politely, appealingly, a little submissively, even diffidently, like a supplicant. But notwithstanding all of that something extra in her voice made me fully aware that she was so beautiful that the last time any guy had said no to her was probably a decade in the past. She sounded vaguely commanding, like everything was already a done deal, like to ask was to get. Just let it go, Springfield had said, and of course I should have listened to him. But instead I told Lila Hoth, ‘I’ll meet you in your hotel lobby, fifteen minutes from now.’ I thought that avoiding her suite would be enough of a safeguard, against whatever complications might ensue. Then I closed the phone and headed straight for the Sheraton’s taxi line.
* * *
The Four Seasons’ lobby was divided into a number of separate areas on two separate levels. I found Lila Hoth and her mother at a corner table in a dim panelled space that seemed to be a tea room during the day and might have been a bar by night. They were alone. Leonid wasn’t there. I checked carefully all around and saw no one else worth worrying about. No unexplained men in mid-priced suits, nobody lingering over the morning newspaper. No apparent surveillance at all. So I slid into a seat, next to Lila, across from her mother. Lila was wearing a black skirt and a white shirt. Like a cocktail waitress, except that the fabrics and the cut and the fit were like nothing a cocktail waitress could afford. Her eyes were twin points of light in the gloom, as blue as a tropical sea. Svetlana was in another shapeless house dress, this time muddy maroon. Her eyes were dull. She nodded uncomprehendingly as I sat down. Lila extended her hand and shook mine quite formally. The contrast between the two women was enormous, in every way. In terms of age and looks, obviously, but also in terms of energy, vivacity, manners, and disposition.
I settled in and Lila got straight to the point. She asked, ‘Did you bring the memory stick?’
I said, ‘No,’ although I had. It was in my pocket, with my toothbrush and Leonid’s phone.
‘Where is it?’
‘Somewhere else.’
‘Somewhere safe?’
‘Completely.’
She asked, ‘Why did those men come here?’
I said, ‘Because you’re poking around in something that’s still a secret.’
‘But the press officer at the Human Resources Command was enthusiastic about it.’
‘That’s because you lied to him.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You told him it was about Berlin. But it wasn’t. Berlin in 1983 was no kind of fun, but it was stable. It was a Cold War tableau, frozen in time. Maybe there was a little back and forth between the CIA and the KGB and the Brits and the Stasi, but there was no real U.S. Army involvement. For our guys it was just a tourist destination. Take the train, see the Wall. Great bars, and great hookers. Probably ten thousand guys called John passed through, and they didn’t do anything except spend money and catch the clap. Certainly they didn’t fight and they didn’t win medals. So tracking one of them down would be next to impossible. Maybe HRC was prepared to waste a little time, just in case something good came of it. But from the beginning it was a ridiculous task. So you can’t have gotten a positive outcome from Susan Mark. She can’t have told you anything about Berlin that made it worth coming over here. Just not possible.’
‘So why did we come?’
‘Because during those first few phone calls you softened her up and you made her your friend and then when you judged the time was right you told her what you really wanted. And exactly how to find it. For her ears only. Not Berlin. Something else entirely.’
An unguarded person with nothing to hide would have responded instantly and openly. Probably with outrage, possibly with hurt feelings. An amateur bluffer would have faked it, with bluster and noise. Lila Hoth just sat quiet for a beat. Her eyes showed the same kind of fast response as John Sansom’s had, back in his room in the O. Henry hotel. Rethink, redeploy, reorganize, all in a brief couple of seconds.
She said, ‘It’s very complicated.’
I didn’t answer.
She said, ‘But it’s entirely innocent.’
I said, ‘Tell that to Susan Mark.’
She inclined her head. The same gesture I had seen before. Courteous, delicate, and a little contrite. She said, ‘I asked Susan for help. She agreed, quite willingly. Clearly her actions created difficulties for her with other parties. So yes, I suppose I was the indirect cause of her troubles. But not the direct cause. And I regret what happened, very, very much. Please believe me, if I had known beforehand, I would have said no to my mother.’
Svetlana Hoth nodded and smiled.
I said, ‘What other parties?’
Lila Hoth said, ‘Her own government, I think. Your government.’
‘Why? What did your mother really want?’
Lila said she needed to explain the background first.
THIRTY-SIX
Lila Hoth had been just seven years old when the Soviet Union had fallen apart, so she spoke with a kind of historical detachment. She had the same kind of distance from former realities that I had from the Jim Crow years in America. She told me that the Red Army had deployed political commissars very widely. Every infantry company had one. She said that command and discipline were shared uneasily between the commissar and a field officer. She said that rivalry was common and bitter, not necessarily between the two as individuals, but between tactical common sense and ideological purity. She made sure I understood the general background, and then she moved on to specifics.
Svetlana Hoth had been a political commissar assigned to an infantry company. Her company had gone to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion of 1979. Initial combat operations had been satisfactory for the infantry. Then they had turned disastrous. Attritional losses had become heavy and constant. At first there had been denial. Then Moscow had reacted, belatedly. The order of battle had been reorganized. Companies had been merged. Tactical common sense had suggested retrenchment. Ideology had required renewed offensives. Morale had required unity of ethnicity and geographical origin. Companies had been reconstituted to include sniper teams. Expert marksmen were brought in, with their companion spotters. Thus pairs of ragged men used to living off the land had arrived.
Svetlana’s sniper was her husband.
His spotter was Svetlana’s younger brother.
The situation had improved, both in military and in personal terms. Svetlana’s and other family and regional groupings had spent down time together very happily. Companies had dug in and settled down and achieved acceptable safety and security. Offensive requirements were satisfied by regular night-time sniper operations. The results were excellent. Soviet snipers had long been the best in the world. The Afghan mujahideen had no answer to them. Late in 1981 Moscow had reinforced a winning hand by shipping new weapons. A new-model rifle had been issued. It was recently developed and still top secret. It was called the VAL Silent Sniper.
I nodded. Said, ‘I saw one once.’
Lila Roth smiled, briefly, with a hint of shyness. And with a hint of national pride, perhaps, for a country that no longer existed. Probably just a shadow of the pride her mother had felt, way back when. Because the VAL was a great weapon. It was a very accurate silenced semi-automatic rifle. It fired a heavy nine-millimetre bullet at a subsonic velocity, and could defeat all types of contemporary body armour and thin-skinned military vehicles at ranges out to about four hundred yards. It came with a choice of powerful day telescopes or electronic night scopes. It was a
nightmare, from an opponent’s point of view. You could be killed with no warning at all, silently, suddenly and randomly, asleep in bed in a tent, in the latrines, eating, dressing, walking around, in the light, in the dark.
I said, ‘It was a fine piece.’
Lila Roth smiled again. But then the smile faded. The bad news started. The stable situation lasted a year, and then it ended. The Soviet infantry’s inevitable military reward for good performance was to be handed ever more dangerous tasks. The same the world over, the same throughout history. You don’t get a pat on the back and a ride home. You get a map instead. Svetlana’s company was one of many ordered to push north and east up the Korengal Valley. The valley was six miles long. It was the only navigable route out of Pakistan. The Hindu Kush Mountains reared up on the far left, impossibly barren and high, and the Abas Ghar range blocked the right flank. The six-mile trail in between was a major mujahideen supply line out of the North West Frontier, and it had to be cut.
Lila said, ‘The British wrote the book over a hundred years ago, about operations in Afghanistan. Because of their empire. They said, when contemplating an offensive, the very first thing you must plan is your inevitable retreat. And they said, you must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women. The company commanders had read that book. The political commissars had been told not to. They had been told that the British had failed only because of their political unsoundness. Soviet ideology was pure, and therefore success was guaranteed. With that delusion our very own Vietnam began.’
The push up the Korengal Valley had been backed by air and artillery power and had succeeded for the first three miles. A fourth had been won yard by yard against opposition that had seemed ferocious to the grunts but strangely muted to the officers.
The officers were right.
It was a trap.
The mujahideen waited until Soviet supply lines were stretched four miles long and then they dropped the hammer. Helicopter resupply was largely interdicted by a constant barrage of US-supplied shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles. Coordinated attacks pinched off the salient at its origin. Late in 1982 thousands of Red Army troops were essentially abandoned in a long thin chain of inadequate and improvised encampments. The winter weather was awful. Freezing blasts of wind howled constantly along the pass between the mountain ranges. And there were evergreen holly bushes everywhere. Pretty and picturesque in the right context, but not for soldiers forced to work among them. They were gratingly noisy in the wind and they limited mobility and they tore skin and shredded uniforms.
Then harassment raids had started.
Prisoners had been taken, in ones and twos.
Their fate was appalling.
Lila quoted lines that the old British writer Rudyard Kipling had put in a doom-laden poem about failed offensives and groaning abandoned battlefield casualties and cruel Afghan tribeswomen with knives: When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your God like a soldier. Then she said that what had been true even at the zenith of the British Empire’s power was still true, and worse. Soviet infantrymen would go missing and hours later in the dark the winter wind would carry the sound of their screaming, from unseen enemy camps close by. The screaming would start at a desperate pitch and move slowly and surely upward into insane banshee wailing. Sometimes it would last ten or twelve hours. Most corpses were never recovered. But sometimes bodies would be returned, missing hands and feet, or whole limbs, or heads, or ears, or eyes, or noses, or penises.
Or skin.
‘Some were flayed alive,’ Lila said. ‘Their eyelids would be cut away, and their heads forced down in a frame so they would have no choice but to watch their skin being peeled back, first from their faces, and then from their bodies. The cold anaesthetized their wounds to some extent and stopped them dying of shock too soon. Sometimes the process lasted a very long time. Or sometimes they would be roasted alive on fires. Parcels of cooked meat would show up near our emplacements. At first the men thought they were gifts of food, perhaps from sympathetic locals. But then they realized.’
Svetlana Roth stared on into the room, not seeing anything, looking even bleaker than before. Maybe the tone of her daughter’s voice was prompting memories. Certainly it was very compelling. Lila had not lived through or witnessed the events she was describing, but it sounded like she had. It sounded like she had witnessed them yesterday. She had moved on from historical detachment. It struck me that she would make a fine storyteller. She had the gift of narrative.
She said, ‘They liked to capture our snipers best of all. They hated our snipers. I think snipers are always hated, perhaps because of the way they kill. My mother was very worried about my father, obviously. And her baby brother. They went out most nights, into the low hills, with the electronic scope. Not too far. Maybe a thousand yards, to find an angle. Maybe a little more. Far enough to be effective, but close enough to feel safe. But nowhere was really safe. Everywhere was vulnerable. And they had to go. Their orders were to shoot the enemy. Their intention was to shoot the prisoners. They thought it would be a mercy. It was an awful time. And my mother was pregnant by then. With me. I was conceived in a rock trench hacked out of the Korengal floor, under a greatcoat that dated back to the end of World War Two, and on top of two others that were possibly even older. My mother said they had old bullet holes in them, maybe from Stalingrad.’
I said nothing. Svetlana stared on. Lila put her hands on the table and tangled her fingers loosely together. She said, ‘For the first month or so my father and my uncle came back every morning, safe. They were a good team. Perhaps the best.’
Svetlana stared on. Lila took her hands off the table and paused a beat. Then she sat up straight and squared her shoulders.
A change of pace. A change of subject. She said, ‘There were Americans in Afghanistan at that time.’
I said, ‘Were there?’ She nodded.
I said, ‘What Americans?’
‘Soldiers. Not many, but some. Not always, but sometimes.’
‘You think?’
She nodded again. ‘The US Army was definitely there. The Soviet Union was their enemy, and the mujahideen were their allies. It was Cold War by proxy. It suited President Reagan very well to have the Red Army worn down. It was a part of his anticommunist strategy. And he enjoyed the chance to capture some of our new weapons for intelligence purposes. So teams were sent. Special Forces. They were in and out on a regular basis. And one night in March of 1983, one of those teams found my father and my uncle and stole their VAL rifle.’
I said nothing.
Lila said, ‘The loss of the rifle was a defeat, of course. But what was worse was that the Americans gave my father and my uncle to the tribeswomen. There was no need for that. Obviously they had to be silenced, because the American presence was entirely covert and had to be concealed. But the Americans could have killed my father and my uncle themselves, quickly and quietly and easily. They chose not to. My mother heard their screams all the next day and far into the night. Her husband, and her brother. Sixteen, eighteen hours. She said even screaming that badly she could still tell them apart, by the sound of their voices.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
I glanced around the four seasons’ dim tea room and moved in my chair and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.’
Lila Hoth said, ‘I’m telling you the truth.’
I shook my head. ‘I was in the U.S. Army. I was a military cop. Broadly speaking I knew where people went, and where they didn’t. And there were no U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Not back then. Not during that conflict. It was purely a local affair.’
‘But you had a dog in the fight.’
‘Of course we did. Like you did when we were in Vietnam. Was the Red Army in-country there?’
It was a rhetorical question, designed to make a po
int, but Lila Hoth took it seriously. She leaned forward across the table and spoke to her mother, low and fast, in a foreign language that I presumed was Ukrainian. Svetlana’s eyes opened a little and she cocked her head to one side as if she was recalling some small matter of arcane historical detail. She spoke back to her daughter, low and fast, and long, and then Lila paused a second to marshal her translation and said, ‘No, we sent no troops to Vietnam, because we had confidence that our socialist brothers from the People’s Republic could complete their task unaided. Which, my mother says, apparently they did, quite splendidly. Little men in pyjamas defeated the big green machine.’
Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded.
I said, ‘Just like a bunch of goat herders kicked her ass.’
‘Undisputedly. But with a lot of help.’
‘Didn’t happen.’
‘But you admit that material help was provided, surely. To the mujahideen. Money, and weapons. Especially surface-to-air missiles, and things of that nature.’
‘Like in Vietnam, only the other way around.’
‘And Vietnam is an excellent example. Because, to your certain knowledge, whenever did the United States provide military aid anywhere in the world without also sending what they called military advisers?’
I didn’t answer.
She asked, ‘For instance, how many countries have you served in?’
I said nothing.
She asked, ‘When did you join the army?’
‘In 1984,’ I said.
‘Then these events of 1982 and 1983 were all before your time.’
‘Only just,’ I said. ‘And there is such a thing as institutional memory.’
‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Secrets were kept and institutional memories were conveniently erased. There’s a long history of illegal American military involvements all around the world. Especially during Mr Reagan’s presidency.’
‘You learn that in high school?’
‘Yes, I did. And remember, the communists were gone long before I was in high school. Thanks, in part, to Mr Reagan himself.’