by Alex Dryden
CHAPTER TEN
19 January
THE TWO UNMARKED gunmetal-grey trucks were displaying no lights as they moved slowly along the track towards the no-man’s land of the border zone. After the deliberately roundabout journey from Kursk which had taken four hours instead of the usual two and a half, the men inside had finally reached their first destination, the jumping-off point, and they pulled up just over three miles from the border. For the next three miles from here towards Ukraine was traditionally accessible only with military or KGB passes. In the brief period of democracy in the 1990s, Russia had handed over border control from the KGB to regular border police. Now, since Putin had been in power, the KGB had been given back that control.
The muffled engines of the trucks went quiet and the men inside sat in silence, three in each truck, while the dusk drew in around them. It wasn’t a long wait. When the darkness had deepened into a cold January night all six men then stepped out, stood near the trucks blowing on their hands and stamping their feet. But all the time they looked towards the border.
The men wore combat fatigues and, like the trucks, they had no insignia to identify them as officers of military counter-intelligence from the Russian 3rd FSB Division. But all the men displayed the word Patriotiy, written in black, across the shoulders of their jackets. It was more of a gang slogan, an embroidered tattoo, than any identification. Each man had sewn on the word himself.
As the last of the sun’s light faded from the distant horizon, the vast flat steppe around them absorbed the night and disappeared.
The older of the men, a veteran colonel in his forties, pulled open the driver’s door of the first truck and took out a back pack. There were no spoken orders. It was evident they all had their tasks and it had been rehearsed meticulously. The colonel stood for a moment and listened. The night was still. There was no sound to disturb the silence, no wind, no water, no human or even animal presence. The moon was four days old, a thin silver sliver in the eastern sky that offered no light even when the clouds briefly parted. The veteran looked into the blackness. Three miles ahead of them and to the west, now lost in the darkness, was the 1200-mile-long border that separated Russia and Ukraine.
He checked that there were no lights that shouldn’t be there, no random border patrol vehicles on either side. They should have all been pulled back to let his mission through, but you never knew. The Forest’s chain of command was obsessed with secrecy, even when it was necessary to be open enough to keep away prying eyes. He was looking with his naked eye for lights first of all. He already knew there was no human habitation along this stretch of the border – that was why it had been chosen – and the only lights he could see were the sparsely placed border posts which displayed a few glimmering yellow arc lamps in the far distance. But the border posts were two miles to the north and south of where the trucks were going – where they should be. The colonel spat on the frozen earth. In any case, it was a border that the six men – and their masters in Moscow – believed shouldn’t be there at all. The patriotiy wanted the border removed, so that Russia and its the historical birthplace of Old Rus were one again. To the colonel and his men, the darkness and the thinly stretched border posts seemed to exist for the sole purpose of tempting men to cross without papers.
Without a word, the men climbed back into the trucks and now in the cover of darkness drove a further two miles down a more derelict cart track this time, and always towards the border.
The mission had been planned in great detail, just like all the others. Four days before this particular night, at Kraznomenniy Street in Moscow, a building secretly owned by Russia’s Interior Ministry, the mission had been laid out before the six men. It was the shortest time line and one that left as little room for error as possible. Three Interior Ministry officials were in attendance. The ministry officials were the formal representatives of the patriotiy, which were a wide, shadowy grouping of KGB officers that reached from the lowest ranks to the senior leaders of the intelligence services. For the purpose of this meeting at Kraznomenniy, the three officials were typical of the leadership type. They were all either in or approaching their sixties, all ranking KGB veterans of the Russian war in Afghanistan launched on Christmas Day 1979, and they all nursed the anger and resentment of Russia’s intelligence services and special forces at the motherland’s humiliating defeat back then. In the intervening period up to the present day they and their colleagues had ascended the ranks of the ministry, thanks to their KGB backgrounds, and now controlled a powerful clique inside the Interior Ministry, one of Moscow’s more powerful centres of authority. The ageing officials were gifted with powers that ranged from control of Russia’s prisons to censorship of the media, and ‘special operations’ on Russian territory.
And for the purpose of this mission – code-named with utmost simplicity ‘Repossession’ – the independent state of Ukraine, a land with its own culture and language and with an application to join the European Union, was considered by all concerned to be part of Russia’s territory.
Inside the higher echelons of the KGB, the interior ministry clique was openly known as the patriotiy. But outside it, they were only the subject of gossip in street cafés, rumour and conspiracy theories. The clique was an unofficial branch of Department S, however, itself a highly secret body within the KGB responsible for aggressive measures on foreign soil. In the usual arrangement of the structure of Russian dolls regularly adopted by the KGB’s special forces, a discreet distance was placed between the actual perpetrators of terrorist attacks on foreign soil and their ultimate controllers. There were the men on the ground – in this case, the six men. Above them were the interior ministry officials. Then came the shadowy figures from Department S, then an irregular KGB committee set up for the purpose that itself answered to the head of the intelligence service, then a Kremlin intelligence liaison, and finally the prime minister himself, Vladimir Putin. If anything went wrong with this mission – a high-risk smuggling operation on to another country’s sovereign territory – the six men would simply be declared independent mafiosi out for their own commercial gain. The men were happy enough with that denial, even though it meant they might take a big fall if they were caught.
The senior official, a KGB general from the ministry, had convened the meeting on a day in early January when an intense snow flurry that developed into a blizzard had dusted then clogged Moscow’s chilled streets. The sky had then cleared, the sun had appeared and, for a moment, the city seemed to dangle the promise of spring before its inhabitants. Icicles that formed on the eaves began to melt and occasionally fell dangerously from the eaves of high buildings, exacting their usual, fatal, toll on unwary pedestrians. But by the evening of the day of the briefing, winter had exerted its grip once more.
In his introduction to the six men, the general echoed the words of Russia’s Prime Minister Putin almost exactly two years before, in April 2008.
‘Ukraine is not even a nation,’ he stated. In the ornate woodpanelled room in the secret government building on Kraznomenniy Street, the general thus gave the men the righteous cause for their mission – a terrible injustice done against them personally and against the integrity of Russia. Like Putin before him, the general explained to the six men that Ukraine consisted partly of Eastern Europe and was partly a gift from Russia – mistakenly made – in 1991. Now, in the depths of the winter of 2010, it was time to redress this terrible wrong.
Sitting at an over-sized and heavily built polished desk under the Russian eagle, he told them: ‘Your mission is crucial to the future greatness of Russia and a decisive step in atoning for past mistakes.’ Words like ‘justice’ and ‘atonement’ were central to the hurt suffered by Russia’s elite spy community and to the mythologising of Russia’s mission. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the birthplace of Russia a thousand years before, the cradle of Russian civilisation.
But the general didn’t mention that this mission which the six men were to perform was just one
of tens, perhaps hundreds, of similar operations. For the six men, it was as if they, and they alone, stood between Russia’s historical greatness and another humiliation similar to the ones they believed they had already suffered. For them, it was a chance to begin the reversal of a process of retreat that had seared the Russian soul for more than twenty years.
Three of the six men had been released early from prison for the mission, including the colonel commanding the mission. But they had been given the lightest of sentences for conducting illegal killings, massacre and torture in the Chechen wars. Theirs had been a new type of Russian show trial whose purpose was the opposite of the usual show trials. It was in order to find their innocence – or lack of culpability – not guilt, while at the same time appeasing Western calls for justice in Russia to be free and fair. Firstly, then, their trials were a pretence to Western observers that justice in Russia was working. But in reality they were a clear signal that things were back to how they had been under the Soviet Union. No matter what offences they had committed, the KGB would look after its own, welcome them back into the fold after their derisory short sentences, and then swiftly promote them through the ranks.
The other three men were fully paid-up officers of the Vympel Group, the special forces team engaged in ‘social warfare’ based at the Forest.
The general laid out the broad purpose of the mission and the historical rightness of it. Then when he had departed, he left his two lieutenants to lay out the details on the ground. It was, in essence, a straightforward smuggling mission across the lightly guarded border between Russia and Ukraine. The porous borderlands between the two countries were regularly travelled by commercial smugglers who transported anything from pork fat – a delicacy beloved by the Ukrainians – to nuclear materials. The lieutenants from the ministry brought out maps and grid references, set out times, distances and moon phases and, finally, the methods of communication with a team of two or perhaps three men on the other side of the border in Ukraine.
Out on the steppe, the advancing night had turned the temperature to well below freezing. The leader of the six men nodded to the driver in the first truck and the vehicle pulled up a second time, now just a mile from the border. The truck behind pulled up in line. The leader stepped out, looked inside the truck, and motioned silently to the two men remaining. In the second truck, a similar silent order was given. The six men descended, opened the muffled rear doors of the trucks and waited again. Either they would be met tonight on the far side, or they would return on the following night, and then the night after that, until a way was clear.
The leader now withdrew a pair of Baigish night vision binoculars from inside his pack and surveyed the terrain between the trucks and the border. He was no longer looking for anything as obvious as lights. The land between him and the border was a flat expanse of grass steppe which stretched across to the other, Ukrainian side. In both directions he therefore had a wide and long field of view. The lake that straddled the border was to their left. They had no need of maps. Everything was contained inside the colonel’s head. When he was satisfied they were alone, that no unlit human presence lay ahead of them, he signalled to the men without words.
Two ramps were slid out of the rear of the trucks. From each truck a light amphibious vehicle was then wheeled down the ramps. Each vehicle was fully loaded and fitted with electric engines. As the colonel swung the binoculars across the terrain a second time, the other five men checked the batteries on the vehicles for the third or fourth time that evening and gave the strapping that attached the loads a final twist. The leader then let the binoculars hang on their straps, stepped back into the truck and opened a metal case. He took out a computer, opened it up and tapped in a code. Then he waited. There was a pause of maybe seven to ten minutes. Finally, he received the coded response they were hoping for. So it would be tonight. He shut down the computer, removed the hard disc, and placed it in a lead-lined box.
The electric engines on the amphibious vehicles were switched on, and the men climbed aboard. In almost total silence they then headed into the blackness towards the lake and the border.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ROAD THAT followed the borderland on the Ukrainian side of the border was no more than a cart track. The grass where it appeared through the snow was grey and brown and grew down the centre of the track, providing a visible line to follow in the failing light and would also do so when darkness fell. Ruts created by farm vehicles in the previous autumn had frozen into deep, hard crevices and the ice in them was thick enough to walk on. The snow lay across what would be deep green meadows when the spring came, and these would-be meadows undulated on either side of the track.
Anna looked up ahead. Through her frozen breath she dimly spotted the large lake, which barely stood out in a colourless grey shape in the winter light against the dark sky that threatened another snow storm and against the paler snow. She saw that the lake was fringed by thick reed beds that waved from the motion of the water rather than the wind. There was no wind. The lake seemed to wind its way through low-lying, waterlogged islands – darker than the water – so that it seemed more like a river. She stopped on the track and looked behind her. To the north of where she’d stopped, the forest steppe stretched away for three hundred miles while, to the south, steppe grasslands flattened the landscape for another eight hundred miles to the Black Sea. To her left, eastwards, was the border.
Anna set off again and kept to the left-hand, deeper rut of the track and walked southwards at a steady pace. The GPS told her she was six miles north of where Burt believed, from previous satellite pictures, that a rendezvous was to take place; another smuggling operation across from the Russian side.
Three-quarters of a mile out to her left, she occasionally saw glimpses of the border posts on the Ukrainian side and beyond that there were another few hundred yards to the Kontrol signs that marked the territory of Russia. Then there was the no-man’s-land inside Russia, which varied in depth, depending on which part of the huge frontier you were on; some parts were considered more dangerous to Russia than others and had a deeper Russian no-man’s-land.
When she crossed the border illegally, she carried a small pack and wore hiking clothes. She had a tent in a roll at the bottom of the pack, despite the unlikely existence of hikers or campers in the area in January. More importantly, she also carried the bare minimum of small arms: a Thompson Contender handgun with a 12 inch barrel and a separate silencer, ammunition, a bowie knife, and two grenades that might provide enough mayhem to distance herself from any trouble if things went wrong.
The sun, when it appeared, gave off a feeble light – it was the semi-darkness of a late winter afternoon with a storm-laden sky. But the sun was now anyway sinking to the west and the winter air was turning to a deep chill that would probably, she thought, fall at least ten degrees below freezing after darkness fell. But now, as the sun began to set, the sky was turning a soft pink between breaks in the clouds and the landscape was becoming clearer, more delineated without the flat white winter light, like a photographic negative. She found a hollow on the right-hand side of the track, scraped out the snow, and squatted down out of sight until the sun disappeared altogether and the lights of the scattered border posts were switched on and then glittered across the cold steppe.
Rumours; that was how it had started, Burt had told her. That was how it always started. Or perhaps the antecedent to the rumours were the belligerent statements of the Russian government that had inflamed, cooled, and then inflamed again the tensions between the two countries for twenty years, ever since the Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent of Russia for the first time in centuries. But though these inflammatory words of Russia’s KGB leaders had kept conflict rumbling just beneath the surface, the initial cause of Anna’s assignment to this remote border area were the rumours. It was only when they had circulated through the border areas and finally reached the corridors of Cougar that Burt had concen
trated one of Cougar’s spy satellites on the region.
While Vladimir Putin had declared that Ukraine was not a real state, Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, had said it was time that Russia seized the Ukrainian Crimea, way to the south of where she was now. But recently the rumours and stories had hardened into inescapable facts, thanks to Anna’s and Cougar’s own sources on the Russian side. The rumours were now beginning to flesh out the Kremlin’s aggressive words and the pictures Anna had studied on Burt’s yacht began to bring out the rumours into solid facts. First, the Russians were said to be distributing Russian passports to the Ukrainian population in the east of the country that bordered Russia. The purpose of this, if true, was to provide an excuse for Russia to defend its own in case of crisis. And Burt had said it was undoubtedly true.
It was the same tactic the Kremlin had used as a casus belli to invade the Republic of Georgia two years before.
Then came stories of weapons caches in the border areas, and an infiltration of Russian spetsnaz troops, disguised as farm workers. After that, it was said that the Russian workers at the Malyshev Tank Factory in Kharkov on the Ukrainian side were to stage an uprising, initially disguised as a labour dispute, but then developing into full-scale violence.
But the rumour that drew Anna to the borders on this particular evening in January at Burt’s behest was that a consignment of unidentified materials was to be smuggled across the border in one of the long stretches of land where the border posts were stretched to the limit. It was the fourth or fifth such consignment that Cougar knew of. American satellites, including Cougar’s, had detected unusual movements on the Russian side for months, but Burt Miller never put his trust in technology. The ubiquitous eyes in the sky were supposedly all-seeing, but even the giant American Worldview satellite which could pick out a car numberplate from space, was, in Burt’s opinion, highly flawed and relied upon to an insane degree by the CIA. How many remote control Predator missiles did it take to kill one suspected terrorist in Afghanistan? Up to half a dozen – and this because the all-seeing eyes didn’t see all.