by Matthew Dunn
THE RUSSIAN DOLL
A Ben Sign Mystery
By
Matthew Dunn
© 2018 Matthew Dunn The right of Matthew Dunn to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
Matthew Dunn. THE RUSSIAN DOLL (Kindle Locations 11-13). Kindle Edition.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” – Mark Twain
PROLOGUE
Moscow. Fifty years ago
In exactly twelve minutes and thirty three seconds time, female twins would be born. They’d never see each other again. One of them would be named Jayne; the other Susan. Jayne would return to England with her English parents. Susan would vanish.
Backtrack fourteen minutes. The pregnant mother was gripping her husband’s hand in a grimy Russian medical centre. The pregnant woman was Elizabeth Archer. She was a professor of Russian Studies & Culture at Oxford University. Her husband, Michael, was also a professor at the same university. They were gifted and contrarian types who’d travelled to Russia despite Elizabeth’s advanced stage of pregnancy. Before planning the trip, she’d had her last scan at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. The hospital had advised her not to travel. Elizabeth and Michael never did what anyone in authority told them to do. They ignored the advice, didn’t tell the airline booking agent that Elizabeth was heavily pregnant, and boarded a nine AM Aeroflot flight to Moscow. They wanted the offspring to enter the world in unusual circumstances. They thought it would be cool if the delivery took place in Russia.
That decision was a dubious one. Elizabeth had gone into labour three weeks ahead of schedule. And she’d done so while undergoing a routine health check in the medical centre. There was no time to get her to hospital. The delivery had to take place in the underequipped and staffed centre. The Soviet Union medical centre was underfunded and overstretched. Paint was peeling off dank walls. The place was crowded with patients who were elderly, or young, malnourished, drunk, injured, or suffering internal symptoms they couldn’t explain to the staff but were nevertheless agonizing. The noise in the small complex was deafening. Patients were shouting; trollies with metal containers were rushed back and forward, a loudspeaker system blurted out instructions every few seconds, doctors were barking orders at stressed nurses, fights periodically broke out, a receptionist was screaming at a man in crutches to wait his turn in the queue, and all the time tinny music was played at full volume from the centre’s speakers in each corner of every room. The music was designed to calm the occupants of the building. It had the opposite effect.
It was a miracle that Elizabeth was given a private room to give birth. As well as her husband, a midwife, two other nurses, and a doctor were in the room. She was very lucky to get this amount of attention. Still, the whole situation was horrific. Elizabeth was in agony while lying on a bed that smelled of urine. One nurse dabbed a cold flannel against Elizabeth’s brow. It didn’t help. The midwife stood at the business end of the birth, callipers in her hand in case her baby twisted in the womb and needed to be wrenched out. The callipers looked like a medieval torture instrument. The doctor was leaning against the wall, a clipboard in his hand. For the most part he looked bored and exhausted, though now and again he’d mutter an instruction to the nurses, who in turn would look at him over their shoulders and exclaim obscenities at the useless man.
Michael was sweating nearly as much as Elizabeth. His hand felt like it had been squeezed of all blood, due to the strength of his wife’s grip. Now, more than ever, he wondered whether the trip to Russia had been a good idea. But, it was too late for regrets. He stayed by his wife, telling her that everything would be alright, when in truth it seemed like the opposite was the case; saying anything that came into his head and, like all fathers in this situation, fundamentally failing to say anything meaningful. There’s nothing meaningful to say to a woman who feels like her body is being torn apart.
Elizabeth – normally an elegantly dressed woman, with platinum blonde hair, high cheek bones, blue eyes, and a curvaceous yet trim figure, now looked a mess. Her hair was matted, some of it clinging to the soiled sheets underneath her. The radiant shine she’d obtained towards the latter stages of pregnancy was now replaced with an oily paste of moisture that made her skin look like the seal fat lather applied by long distance cold sea swimmers to their bodies. Her eyes were red. And her lips were bloody from her teeth clenching in to them.
She didn’t care what she looked like. Nor did she care that her legs had been forced into the most un-ladylike position. She just wanted this to be over. Fast. What she did care about was the room. It stank. Not from her, but from previous patients. She had no medical training, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that the room was totally unhygienic. The nurses weren’t wearing gloves; bloody swabs were tossed into a metal bowl that already contained other crimson swabs that were not from her; the room smelled of cheese, decay, iron, body odour, shit, and piss. This wasn’t a place to bring a child into the world. Still, she wasn’t going anywhere now until the job was done.
She stared at the midwife. The woman placed her hands between Elizabeth’s legs and helped her guide the baby out. The baby’s umbilical cord was cut; the baby was washed, wrapped in sheets, and placed into a cot.
After that, everything changed.
Crimea. Four years ago.
Petrov Asina was a twenty seven year old Russian man who’d joined the army age eighteen to escape the humdrum of his impoverished upbringing and resultant boredom of having to survive every day in an apartment in the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The flat was in a tower block that was thirty stories high. There were twelve other apartment blocks nearby, each looking, he often reasoned, like an old person’s decaying tooth. The buildings were grey, except when the rain came – then the exteriors turned black. He grew up in a one bedroom home that housed his parents, Petrov, and his sister Natalia. His parents were smart but poor. Father was a teacher; mother a poet who wrote all day but barely made more than a few roubles for her work. They were tired and had long ago run out of puff. There was no chance they’d get a second wind to carve a new life. But, they adored their children and wanted them to have a better life. The problem was they were conflicted. Petrov and Natalia excelled at school. However, their parents only had enough money to pay for one of them to go to university. And even that was a stretch. His father had to take a night job as a security guard, getting only a few hours’ sleep here and there to accommodate his day job as a teacher. His mother gave up poetry and got a job as a shipping clerk. Still, they had to choose which child they would financially support and which child they would condemn to a life comparable to theirs. Petrov had lost track of the number of times he’d heard his parents arguing about this subject in the kitchen while he and his sister tried to sleep on their blow-up air beds on the floor. The siblings knew their parents were significantly stressed. And they knew how much they loved their children. They should never have been placed in this situation.
Petrov had the academic rigour to go to university. So did Natalia. Sometimes in life choices have to be made by others, because those mostly affected by the choices presented to them simply cannot decide on the right course of action.
Petrov did what he thought was the honourable thing to do. He took the choice away from his parents. On his eighteenth birthday he entered an army recruitment office in St. Petersburg. He had no idea about the army; had never expressed an interest in any matters pertaining to the military. But he had a clear vision. In the army he’d get fed, clothed, and would be able to sleep f
or free in barracks. He’d be paid but wouldn’t need much of his monthly salary. The cash could help pay for a cottage, on the coast, a few miles west of the city. His parents and sister could live there. This was their only way out of the hellish existence they’d endured for so long. The army recruitment sergeant eyed him with a look of disdain. He told Petrov that his hair was too long and that his physique was scrawny. Petrov had replied that hair could be cut and muscles could be expanded. He looked at posters on the wall – sailors smiling on the decks on battle cruisers; marines storming beaches; pilots disembarking from fighter planes, weirdly, a big breasted blonde on his arm as they walked across the runway. It was all bullshit. But, one poster caught his eye. It looked more serious; more real. It was a photo of a man jumping out of a plane, high above the ground, his arms and legs outstretched, equipment and guns strapped to his back, no parachute deployed. The man looked like a diving bird of prey. More importantly, he looked free. Petrov pointed at the poster and said he wanted to be that man. The sergeant laughed, saying that to be that man Petrov would have to serve in one of the parachute regiments before surviving selection into Spetsnaz, Russia’s Special Forces unit. Petrov was undeterred. He liked the idea of freefalling through air, no matter what it took to get that qualification. And when the sergeant told him that elite forces get a higher pay than regular units, he was rifle-shot focused on joining the paras. The sergeant wasn’t convinced that Petrov would make it past day one of training. But, he had a job to do and that included meeting quotas of military applicants, regardless as to whether they were suitable for the job in hand. He signed Petrov up for a pre-selection assessment with the 106th Guards Airborne Division, headquartered south of Moscow.
A week later, Petrov attended the assessment course and passed. Two weeks later he began his training in earnest. It was brutal, exhausting, and lasted six months. He earned his parachute wings and was top of his intake. He was officially a paratrooper. And by now he was physically bigger and the fittest he’d ever been. He was a man. Life in the Airborne Division was relentless – constant training exercises, deployments to various parts of Russia, sniper schools, HALO and HAHO qualifications, unarmed combat drills, and excruciating physical training that involved running, mountain climbs, swimming in freezing waters, gym PT, and twenty mile marches with one hundred pounds on his back. He couldn’t say it was boring. But – elite or not – back then, Russian military units never saw combat. And though Petrov wasn’t a bloodthirsty type, he’d increasingly wanted to test his skills in war. It made no sense to do all this training and not put it to good use. Also, he was changing. Maybe it was because his testosterone levels had increased; possibly it was because he’d been carved into a warrior who had no fight to fight. For three years, that was okay. He carried on doing what he was doing and each month saved up his money for the coastal cottage he wanted to buy his parents. But, boredom is a killer, even if it’s crammed with twenty hour days of non-stop activity. Petrov wanted more.
He was twenty two when he applied to Spetsnaz. In Russia, for the most part the concept of Special Forces is very different compared to SF in, for example, the UK and US. In fact, Spetsnaz doesn’t translate to the western term Special Forces. More accurately it translates to special soldier. And there are tens of thousands of Spetsnaz soldiers spread across Russia. Most of them are embedded in regular units. They are not Special Forces. Instead they are soldiers who are tasked with doing things that the rest of their unit haven’t been trained to do – parachute insertions at night, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, and other things. They are highly trained but Petrov was aware that they were not as good as the elite British Royal Marine Commandos or Parachute Regiment soldiers. They were certainly nowhere near as good as SAS, SBS, SEALs, and Delta. Petrov wanted to better himself, rather than move into a unit that thought it was special but wouldn’t survive contact with a superior Western unit. He did his research and discovered there were three Spetsnaz units that were completely autonomous from the regular military units. Instead, they worked for the SVR, GRU, and FSB, the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. These units were small, spent years honing their skills, and only allowed the very best operators to apply to be in their ranks. The units were Directorate "A" (Spetsgruppa Alpha), Directorate "V" (Spetsgruppa Vympel), and Directorate "S" (Spetsgruppa Smerch). Alpha was a counterterrorism and assassination unit. Vympel was a counterterrorism and counter-sabotage unit. Unlike Alpha, it primarily operated on Russian soil. Smerch was a capture or kill unit that operated primarily in the North Caucasus, tracking down bandits, though they also operated elsewhere in Russia. Alpha, he’d heard, was the unit most comparable to Western SF, given it could work anywhere in the world.
He approached his commanding officer in the Airborne Division. While stood to attention in his CO’s office, he said, “Sir, I wish to apply to Directorate Alpha.”
From behind his desk, the CO looked at him with a cold stare. “That doesn’t surprise me. You’re one of my best men. Why wouldn’t you wish to climb several rungs up the ladder? But, look at it from my perspective. If you succeed in Alpha selection, and that’s a big if, I’d be losing a highly effective paratrooper from my regiment.”
“Are you blocking my request to undergo Alpha selection, sir?”
The colonel drummed his fingers on his desk and looked away, deep in thought. “No.” He looked back at Petrov. “I have a son your age. He’s not in the military. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is how I would respond to him if he approached me and told me that in his heart he wanted to take a huge risk in order to pursue his dreams. What would I say? Would I say he didn’t have my permission? He’d hate me for life, and would ignore my stance.” He clasped his hands. “Sometimes in life we parents must bite the bullet and let our children fly to their zenith or nadir. You have my permission, corporal. I will arrange matters. That will be all. Dismissed.”
Two months later Petrov turned up at Alpha’s training establishment. Out of an intake of forty applicants, only three passed the six month selection process; a process that would make other combat units in the Russian military drop their jaws. It wasn’t like anything that Petrov had experience before. Airborne Division selection and training was a walk in the park compared to Alpha training. He was one of three people who passed. He felt proud. But then he had to receive continuation training by serving Alpha troops. They gave him no quarter. To them, he was a newbie who hadn’t proven himself. In their minds it was simple – when they went into combat they had to have the right man by their side. Petrov had done Alpha selection; but now he was back to square one – he had to show his colleagues that he was up to the task. He was. He served with distinction for three years.
It all changed in 2014.
Russia’s neighbour Ukraine was tearing itself apart. The new Ukrainian president was seen as a Western lackey; half the country liked the shift in politics, the other half yearned for a return to communism; war broke out in the eastern peninsula, particularly the Crimea; Russia couldn’t tolerate the collapse of the Ukraine into Western democracy; more importantly, it needed to secure the Crimea to ensure that Russia had a land channel to its fleet in the Black Sea. Russia decided to take action. It had the support of the Ukrainian rebels, but they were for the most part amateurs. Russia needed to send specialist troops in to the Crimea.
It did so. They were nicknamed ‘Green Men’ due to the fact they wore green army uniforms with no insignia. There were rumours in the Ukraine and the West that they were elite Russian troops; but Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, didn’t admit that until months later. Some of the green men were airborne guards, tasked to protect airports and other installations, others were Spetsnaz tasked with arming and supporting rebels. Alpha was sent in with a very different remit. The political landscape of the Ukraine was on a knife edge. Russia needed popular opinion to side with the pro-Russia rebels. And the best way to do that was to make the Ukrainian government and its forces look like a tra
vesty.
Petrov didn’t know why he and eight other green men were monitoring a village on the Crimean border with Russia. He assumed it was because there was some kind of strategic value to the zone. He was prone on the ground, on a hilltop, watching villagers in the valley below go about their daily business. His rifle was pointing at them, even though he could perceive no threat. The villagers didn’t know the green men were only a quarter of a mile away. The green men were camouflaged, hiding amid bushes and trees.
Petrov wasn’t in charge of the eight-man unit. He was a sergeant and was outranked by the captain leading the platoon. So, he had to follow orders, even though he didn’t know what those orders were. He waited for several hours, maintaining his surveillance of the village.
The captain gave his first and last order. “We move in to the village now and kill any human we see – men, women, kids, old, young, it doesn’t matter. Kill them, and then we extract over the border. This is for Mother Russia, and this is for our ally the Ukraine. When we get back to base I’ll tell you why this needed to be done. Meanwhile, don’t blink. Do your job.”
He led his men down the escarpment above the village. The green men were armed with assault rifles, grenades, and pistols.
Petrov knew this was all wrong. But, it’s very hard to disobey orders when you’ve spent years getting in to the unit you’ve dreamed to be a part of. Alpha was his family. All that sweat and toil to get into the unit couldn’t be wasted. Even though his stomach was in knots, he continued walking, telling himself that he was kidding himself if he thought organisations like Alpha never did black ops. The captain was right, he reasoned. There had to be a purpose behind this. It was part of the bigger picture. He could either follow what he’d been taught in training, or he could follow his conscience. He chose to grip his rifle and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades.