The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  “But you believed him about Stepan?” asked Tarasov.

  The frail man finished coughing. He nodded. “The thing is, the general bunked just over me, and he used to talk a lot, I mean, he did before he got so sick and we could all see he wasn’t going to last. Then he kept to himself. But before that, he used to talk to me. And he talked a lot about the ‘imposter.’ That’s what he called Stepan. He said the village Stepan claimed to be from didn’t exist. Neither did his collective farm. And he swore Stepan didn’t know a word of Estonian.”

  “What did Bragin say to that?”

  “He didn’t say nothing. What was there to say?”

  Tarasov asked a few more questions, but there was nothing else the men could tell him.

  “Let them go back to work,” Tarasov said.

  Gents dismissed them. As the frail man passed by, Tarasov slipped something into the prisoner’s jacket. The man noticed it, and their eyes met. He walked on.

  Gents said thoughtfully, “The only way a man could survive that long in the camps was if he got special assignment work. And Stepanalways got special assignment work. Cook’s assistant, bookkeeping, housekeeping. He was even medical assistant in the infirmary with me for a while.”

  “Why the special treatment?”

  “Never could figure it out,” said Gents. “It came down from the commandant. I always figured he was getting greased.”

  “Where’s the commandant now?”

  “Dead. Fifteen years.”

  “Seems everything to do with Stepan Bragin is either dead or burned.”

  Gents shrugged.

  “We’re finished,” said Tarasov.

  They started back to their snowmobiles. Tarasov was anxious to get out of the cold.

  “Three fires,” he said shaking his head.

  “That’s not surprising,” said Yegor. “These camps are all firetraps.”

  Tarasov sighed. Three fires. Stepan had three chances to alter his identity. Stepan Bragin could be anyone.

  Tarasov climbed aboard his snowmobile. His feet were numb and his fingers burned from the cold. He thought eagerly of Oimyakon village, an hour’s flight away. He would have a hot meal and a bath and maybe take a nap before he called Leo.

  Tarasov looked back toward the clearing. Gents had lined up the four inmates Tarasov had interviewed. The men were undressing.

  “What’s going on?” Tarasov asked Yegor.

  Yegor shrugged. “Strip search.”

  “It’s fifty below!”

  “Regulations. They came in contact with you. They may have taken something.”

  Tarasov watched from the seat of his snowmobile as the four men stripped off layer upon layer of clothing. When at last they were naked, Gents circled them. They held their hands over their genitals. Gents began to search the clothes. In the coat of the frail man Gents raised something up for inspection. It was the rabbit Yegor had shot.

  Yegor whipped around to face Tarasov accusingly. “Son of a bitch.” His snow-mobile roared to life, and he sped off. Kagan followed.

  Tarasov held back. He was stricken with a familiar sickness, a darkness that lay over his heart and paralyzed him. Beneath his clothes he began to sweat. He found it hard to breathe. He had nearly forgotten about these panic attacks, but now it all came flooding back . . .

  Berlin, 1981. Tarasov was deputy intelligence chief for European operations and had been assigned to gather intelligence on the American Pershing missiles that President Ronald Reagan was deploying in Germany. The Kremlin was in a panic over the missiles, which represented a whole new kind of military threat. The American ICBMs were half a world away, while the MIRVs of the American submarine fleet were mostly invisible. But the Germany-based Pershings, so close, were like guns in their faces. KGB chief Yuri Andropov wanted intelligence on their deployment, and he wanted it fast. Tarasov arranged for the wife of an American officer to be caught in bed with one of his German agents, a former hockey star. After six brutal hours in a Berlin basement, Tarasov convinced the terrified woman that the only way to save her husband’s career, and her marriage, was to cooperate with the Russians. Her recruitment was a real coup for Tarasov. It was unusual to turn a woman in this way — money was the usual inducement — and the CIA wouldn’t suspect her. She had access to large areas of the base, attended many official receptions and made occasional visits to the embassy. Her husband’s tour of duty was scheduled to last another three years, so she had great potential. Leo Yakunin was stationed in Berlin at the time, and he was assigned to run her.

  Nearly six months passed before Tarasov saw the woman again. In that time, she had lived up to her promise, turning over hundreds of pieces of data from which the Soviet military had been able to build a picture of the Pershing’s deployment. When Tarasov next saw the woman, he was horrified. She was a wreck — trembling, glassy-eyed and suicidal. After much questioning, Tarasov learned that Leo had unleashed a campaign of terror on the woman. He would call her at all hours of the day and night and insist that she meet him. Sometimes he would demand information she couldn’t possibly get and then threaten to expose her infidelity; at other times he would force her to have sex with him. On one occasion, he forced her to have sex with three of his colleagues. Tarasov confronted Leo with her story, but he defended his actions as the best way to guarantee her continued cooperation. Tarasov went straight to Shatalin in Moscow, but the Foreign Intelligence chief refused to act. “The woman’s delivering the goods. Andropov’s happy. Why rock the boat?”

  Tarasov had tried to forget about it, but he couldn’t. As a KGB operative he had personally taken part in assassinations; he had ruined careers and destroyed lives. It was all part of the job. The Cold War was, after all, a war, even if there weren’t men in uniform diving into bunkers. So why did he have scruples now? Perhaps he had been abroad too long and had begun to see his own country through more critical eyes. Or perhaps hearing his adolescent son recite idiotic communist propaganda as though it were fact had caused Tarasov to question his country’s monopoly on truth. Whatever the reason, the image of the woman’s frightened eyes haunted him. Suddenly, he felt like a man covered in blood. He had to get clean, to build a life for his wife and son on something solid. He decided to take a step that would be tantamount to professional suicide: He would go over Shatalin’s head to KGB chief Yuri Andropov.

  Andropov had raised his eyebrows at Tarasov’s story of the American spy. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” Andropov had asked. “It would be a shame to ruin such a promising career over the fate of one American housewife, Major.”

  “I’m sure, comrade director.”

  Andropov acted swiftly. He recalled Leo from Berlin and gave Shatalin an official reprimand. Shatalin knew Tarasov was behind it.

  Tarasov’s career in the KGB was over.

  Now he was back — and to his shame he was enjoying himself. When Shatalin had first insisted he work exclusively through Leo Yakunin, it had been a gut-wrenching turn of events. Tarasov was shackled to a monster, and no doubt this was part of Shatalin’s revenge. But if one stares at the devil’s face long enough, it starts to look like just another face. This was the genius of the KGB, and already, Tarasov was coming to respect Leo anew for his talents. Tarasov was reminded what a calm, calculating ruthlessness the KGB had devised. By involving tens of thousands in its reign of terror and then scrupulously documenting every torture, every forced confession, every summary execution, they made their unthinkable work seem as ordinary as accounting. Only, instead of ledgers, they used poison-tipped umbrellas, prison camps, psychiatric hospitals . . .

  And rape.

  Once again, black was becoming white. Evil was beginning to lookreasonable.

  His mind turned to Marina. He flushed when he thought of her marrying Titovo. Could he really blame her? The country had made whores of its people. As a Foreign Ministry attaché, Titovo had the pull to get Sasha a good military assignment when his draft came up next year. The son of
agaishnik got sent to Afghanistan: human fodder for desert snipers. Perhaps Marina was right — he had been selfish to leave the KGB. How could he allow his sweet bride to prostitute herself just because he awoke one day to find blood on his hands?

  There on the Siberian tundra, Tarasov hardened his heart to the sickness he felt. He turned over the engine of his snowmobile and sped after Kagan and Yegor.

  He’s not Estonian,” said Leo. “I can tell you that.”

  Tarasov was in Oimyakon village at the house of the local farm manager, where he, Kagan and Vadim would be spending the night. They had arrived at noon following an uneventful flight from Leslog-11. There had been no conversation. Each man was absorbed in his own thoughts. Within an hour of their arrival, they had eaten and bathed. Tarasov tried to put Leslog-11 out of his mind. He passed the afternoon going over what he had learned about Stepan Bragin, jotting notes and mulling over the theory that was taking shape in his mind. He waited impatiently for morning to arrive in Moscow, seven hours behind him.

  At four o’clock, he was at last talking to Leo.

  “Let me guess,” said Tarasov. “He’s a foreigner from a non-Soviet republic.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Never mind howI knew. How didyou know?”

  “The tape. The analysis boys say the grammatical mistakes do not indicate a native Estonian speaker. Plus his ‘Os’ are all wrong.”

  “So where’s he from?”

  “They can’t say,” said Leo. “He’s been in Russia too long.”

  “They must have a guess?”

  “Those guys would rather chew glass than guess,” said Leo. “You think he was a spy, don’t you?”

  “That’s one possibility,” said Tarasov.

  “You have another?”

  “I do. It’s possible he has been in Yakutia since the 1940s.”

  Leo was quiet a moment. “A POW?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why wouldn’t he just tell the truth? He would have been amnestied.”

  “There is only one explanation: If it had come out who he really was, our mystery man would have killed him.”

  “Mystery man?”

  “The man who’s behind this whole thing. The one who put Stepan Bragin in the gulag in the first place nearly forty years ago. The man who gave him up for dead. The same man who, nine months ago, learned that this ghost from his past had risen from the dead only to be found trying to flee to Norway.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Okay,” said Tarasov. “It’s like this: A foreign POW in World War II gets thrown into a German POW camp along with our own boys. He knows something damaging about our mystery man. So the mystery man sends the foreigner to the gulag along with the rest of our POWs, fifty-eighters, carrying his secret with him — presumably to the grave, because he is supposed to die there. But he’s tough, and he stays alive. He lives every day fearing that he will be discovered, and the executioner’s axe will fall. Then the camp burns. The fire kills the warden and many of the people who know about him. He helps build a new camp, and then it burns too. Records are lost with each fire. Time passes and the guards who knew the truth about Bragin’s identity die or move on. Time is his ally. It is erasing his past. Our man sees his chance. He assumes a new identity: The Estonian, Stepan Bragin. But records still linger that could link him to the past. And then a third camp burns. Now all trace of his past is gone, and new records are constructed by men like Fyodor Kagan. He is furloughed to Oimyakon. He builds a house. He gets married. He begins to live. Then his wife dies and some madness overtakes him, and he decides to escape to the West, to go home. But he is shot, gunned down in the forbidden zone, just a quarter-mile from freedom. The border guards match his description with a fugitive reported missing from Oimyakon, a man with no nose, Stepan Bragin. They investigate and suddenly, after forty years, the truth comes to light.”

  “From the files that were removed from Leningrad,” said Leo.

  “The files Belov removed right after he realized what had fallen into his lap.”

  “I understand how Belov got involved,” said Leo. “But what does this have to do with the Iron Perova and her son?”

  “I don’t know. But let’s leave that out for the moment. Now Belov and Perova move quickly to rebury the past. They kill the captain who did the Bragin interrogation, remove the files, and put Anton Perov in a psychiatric hospital.”

  “It fits. But what did the man with the stub nose know?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “If you’re right about all this, then Bragin’s secret died with him,” said Leo. “The coverup has worked.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Tarasov. “The men from Leningrad were here last month. They were looking for something.”

  Leo was quiet a moment. “You don’t think he wrote it all down?”

  “I do.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as terribly convenient,” said Leo.

  “No,” said Tarasov. “Think about it. If you were Stepan Bragin and had been sent to die in the gulag, wouldn’t you want the world to know about it? Wouldn’t you write it down? You bet you would. Especially if you knew you were leaving on a journey you probably would not survive.”

  “Maybe,” said Leo. “So where are you going to find this last testament?”

  “When I know how Stepan Bragin escaped from Oimyakon, I will have that answer. And then we’ll be ready — ” Tarasov stopped.

  “Ready for what?” asked Leo.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow when I get back.”

  “Back! Where are you going now?”

  “Bragin’s cabin. Stay near the phone, Leo. I want to wrap this thing up quickly and get the hell out of here.”

  But Tarasov never got to make that call. In fact, months would pass before the two men spoke again, and by then the circumstances would be very different indeed.

  Major Konstantin Tarasov’s C-9 helicopter crashed into a barren expanse of tundra called Upper Sharuleis Flat at 12:14 P.M. on Wednesday, May 2, 1984. Many things about the crash puzzled investigators from the start.

  For one thing, only two bodies were found: Vadim Klimov, the pilot, and Fyodor Kagan, who was the Oimyakon regional Party boss. Tarasov’s body was never recovered. It was possible an animal dragged it away. There were wolves on Upper Sharuleis Flat. And polar bears. In such a case, investigators noted, it would have been best for Major Tarasov if he hadnot survived the crash, as it had taken three days to locate the wreckage.

  Another mystery was the cause of the crash. The engine failure was traced to a clogged fuel line, but how was that possible? Vadim Klimov was one of the best pilots in the north, and he had filed a checklist before takeoff. A fuel line as severely clogged as the C-9’s should have been detected in the preflight check.

  The craft had split into two pieces. The front section, which contained the bodies of Klimov and Kagan, had exploded on impact and incinerated the men. It was unlikely they felt a thing. The rear section was intact. If Konstantin Tarasov had been in the rear at the time of the crash he could have survived.

  The final mystery was what they were doing up there. There was nothing on Upper Sharuleis Flat but ice and Eskimos. Klimov had filed a flight plan in Oimyakon village that would take them to a cabin on Suntar Ridge, near the Upper Tunga River — fifty milessouthof where the C-9 went down. There was evidence that they had indeed visited the cabin, but then had traveled north from there instead of returning to Oimyakon village. Why? If the explanation was navigational error, then one of the Arctic’s best pilots had confused north and south.

  It took the investigators three months to complete their report. When at last it was ready, they presented it to the air safety commission review board in Yakutsk. The board was chaired by Colonel Alexei Novikov, MVD chief for all Yakutia.

  Novikov listened for an hour. Then the big Yakut cleared his throat and said, “We may never know everything that happened that day, but clearly pilot error was involved to
some degree. Regarding the matter of Konstantin Tarasov — we have witnesses to his boarding the aircraft that morning. I am satisfied that he was aboard the helicopter when it went down. As for his missing body, prints of wolves were found in abundance around the wreckage. It seems likely that his body was carried off. That is what the report will reflect, comrades.

  “Any objections?”

  The room was silent.

  Novikov slapped his gavel on the pallet. “This case is closed.”

  That was August 2, 1984.

  The morning of May 2 had begun well for Konstantin Tarasov. He awoke before dawn feeling rested.

  It was quiet in the farm director’s house. Tarasov hurriedly pulled on the same clothes he had worn the previous day and crept outside to have a smoke. The stars were fading in a violet sky. He stood for a half-hour enjoying the crisp air as the fragile dawn broke over Siberia.

  An hour later, Konstantin Tarasov, Fyodor Kagan and Vadim Klimov lifted off from Oimyakon village’s tiny airfield and started east toward the cabin of Stepan Bragin.

  For thirty minutes they flew over monolithic tundra, like a frozen ocean, toward the white mountains of Suntar Ridge. The mountains seemed to stand still on the receding horizon. Then, quite suddenly, they were upon them. Vadim found a frozen river, the Upper Tunga, and followed it up into the folds of the ice-coated mountains.

  The cabin of Stepan Bragin came into view a few minutes later. It rested in a tiny forest clearing where the falling land had leveled out to a narrow step. A frozen stream was etched in the ice beside the cabin. For miles in every direction, there was only rock and tree and ice. Tarasov shook his head in wonder to think that down there in that hovel, the most improbable place on earth, a foreigner had lived out the final years of his life. On lonely nights, with the Siberian winter beating at his window, did Stepan Bragin lament his brutal fate — the chain of events that had propelled him like a seed on strong winds to this bit of soil far, far from his homeland?

  “Take us over it once,” Tarasov told Vadim.