by Jamie Smith
The two bodyguards stood waiting, looking tense. “At ease, gentlemen,” Klitchkov ordered. “There will be no trouble here.”
“What a beautiful day,” he then said to no one in particular as he gazed off across the grey landscape and exhaled a cloud of smoke through pursed lips, a smirk curling one corner of his mouth.
Minutes later, Nikita walked out of the shack, pulling the door closed, muffling the sound of his mother’s anguished cries.
He walked forwards without looking back and joined Colonel Klitchkov with a look of quiet anger and determination on his face.
“What is the organisation I am joining, Colonel?” he asked.
Klitchkov smiled. “Why, the KGB of course.”
CHAPTER 2
GENERAL SECRETARY MISHO PETRENKO’S OFFICE, THE KREMLIN, 1986.
General Secretary Petrenko was known for his humour, but today he was in a foul mood. Sitting at his ornate wooden desk, alone in his office, he pored over a report. It was titled ‘The Budapest Problem’.
“It certainly is a problem,” he muttered to himself. “They are all a problem.” He balled the report and then threw it at the bin, missing horribly, and the ball landed amidst the others he had already angrily tossed.
He rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. He felt tired. Beyond tired.
The speaker on his desk buzzed. He smoothed the hair around his bald pate and sighed heavily before bracing himself. He pressed the button on the intercom.
“Da?”
The tinny sound of his receptionist’s voice crackled through. “General secretary, Comrade Yerin, the chairman of the KGB, is here to see you.”
“Yes, I know who Yerin is, thank you, Anna!” he snapped. “Let him in.”
Outside, Anna raised her eyebrows, giving the granite-faced visitor, all the information he needed on the general secretary’s current mood.
The door to the office opened and Viktor Yerin strode in purposefully, without hesitation, brushing snow from his heavy coat. He had thick wire-rimmed glasses and a tightly drawn, humourless face with squashed cheeks. Heaving his bulk out of his chair, Petrenko walked round to the front of his desk, extending his hand.
“Viktor! Thank you for coming. You are well?”
Taking the general secretary’s hand, Yerin, who towered over the rotund figure in front of him, said, “Surviving general secretary, surviving.”
“That is no mean feat in these dark times, Viktor,” the general secretary responded, signalling to a seat as he walked back behind his desk where he sat, opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of vodka. Yerin observed that it was a fluid motion, and one with which the general secretary was clearly familiar. Opening another drawer, he extracted two glasses and filled them both, pushing one to Viktor.
“Indeed, sir,” Viktor responded.
The general secretary raised his glass and they both threw back the clear liquid with practiced ease, neither gasping at the burning alcohol.
“You are always so formal, Viktor! But then I suppose that is to be expected from a man of your position.”
“With respect, sir, it is not a position I ever asked for.”
“Ah yes, but a masterstroke of my predecessor Brezhnev’s to put you in the position nonetheless. About the only masterstroke he ever had actually. Thanks to you, the CIA operatives infiltrating our country are being well weeded out. But now I think it is time for the hunted to become the hunter. I need a man in America.”
“We already have many men in America, sir; this is how we have taken care of the CIA operatives on Soviet soil.”
“But we need something more; I feel that we are getting only scraps,” said Petrenko, then looked pointedly at the KGB head. “Unless of course you are keeping things from me, Viktor? Are you still Brezhnev’s man?”
Viktor looked coldly at the general secretary, visibly bristling at the accusation. “I have never withheld information from you. I serve the Soviet Union dutifully and faithfully, as I always have done.”
“Calm down, Viktor, I meant no offence” said the general secretary, holding a weary hand up. “As you are well aware, there is growing discontent throughout our great nation. The economy is dying; the Baltic satellite nations are pulling ever away; I have been forced to withdraw from the arms race with the US as our nation grows weaker by the day. And to make things worse, there are these goddam neo-Nazis running around Moscow, flaunting their swastika tattoos and killing anyone with the slightest tan. The iron curtain is a little rusty at present! My own are turning against me. I have to be careful in whom I put my trust. As Winston Churchill once said, ‘Behind me are my enemies, opposite me is my opposition’.”
“Then, sir, how can I prove my loyalty… again?” Yerin asked, his face unreadable.
Leaning back in his chair, the general secretary looked Viktor directly in the eye.
“I need a man in the US.” He held up his hand. “I know, I know, you have your man who gave us the American spies. But now I need someone to help us go on the offensive on American soil, not on our own. Not some low-level CIA mole. I need a man of action, a man to get me the information I need. A man who can blend, a man who can do what is necessary. I want to know what the smug son of a bitch President Callahan, is thinking before he thinks it. I want him to fear us once more. If we are to go down, then we shall go down fighting.”
Viktor smiled broadly, the cracks in his face betraying his face’s unfamiliarity with the expression.
“It seems I may have misjudged you, sir. I believe Colonel Klitchkov has been training just the man for your problem.”
“A novice?” the general secretary exclaimed. “You can do better than that, comrade.”
“Ah but, sir, this is no ordinary novice. They call this one the Black Russian.”
Petrenko’s eyes widened in surprise, and he swallowed heavily. “The rumours are true then? It’s an impressive name, but he’ll need more than that for the mission to be successful.”
Nodding, Viktor replied, “He has been in training for five years solid. At Leningrad and Kiev.”
The general secretary exhaled deeply, his eyes widening slightly. “Jesus. Five years with Denisov, and at that Leningrad hellhole to boot? He must be tough.”
“Denisov says he’s the best he has ever seen, and quite lethal. As I understand it, he has already endured more than most of our men do in their entire careers, and he is still little more than a boy.”
“How do we know that he can be trusted?”
“Well, sir, I believe that Klitchkov has taken certain… ah… measures, regarding the young man’s family.”
“That wily old fox Klitchkov. A lunatic bastard, but a cunning one.”
“Indeed, sir. I understand he is field ready.”
“I would hope so after five years of our finest training. Very good. See it done.”
He poured himself another vodka and threw it down. “Who’d have thought, old friend. Blacks, fighting for the motherland. Stalin would turn in his grave.”
Viktor’s face was impassive. “Just as long as he stays there.”
Petrenko laughed and filled their glasses once again.
CHAPTER 3
KGB MILITARY SCHOOL, NEAR KIEV, UKRAINE, USSR.
Nikita opened his eyes. It was still dark outside but he had learned to wake before anyone else; it avoided any unpleasant surprises. Despite being instantly alert, he struggled to throw off the dark thoughts of his dreams. Memories of the past five years blended into one another: the underwater knife fights, the firearms training in the northern forest, the naked ice-water swimming, hunting bears in Kamchatka. Hunting western sympathisers in Leningrad. A nightmare for some, adolescence for Nikita Allochka.
He shook his head to clear it of thoughts of the past. He filled the chipped enamel basin in his room with ice-cold water and then plunged his head in. His senses screamed, and the adrenaline emptied his mind of memories.
He began an intense routine of press-ups, lunges and pull-ups
— four sets of twenty reps without pause. He was stripped totally naked and his finely-honed muscles visibly strained, accentuating the scars across his body. The knife wounds on his arms, a coarse bullet wound on his thigh — reminders of the brutal world he had chosen to enter five years ago, and the brutal colleagues he must now call brothers. Tovarishches. Comrades. With every press-up, sit-up, pull-up or lunge, he recited American accents and phrasing. Sit-ups saw him speaking a monologue in a southern drawl, pull-ups practising verb tenses while getting his mouth around the relaxed Californian SoCal accent, while the more neutral American tones of Virginia with a slight southern bent came while doing core planks. Barely uttering a gasp from his exertions, he moved seamlessly from one accent to the next, as he had trained himself to be able to do through his gruelling years with the KGB - after repeatedly failing the language tests early in his time as a trainee. He intended to survive, and that meant perfecting every area demanded of him and more.
After giving himself a cold-water shower and dressing in his standard issue uniform, he heard footsteps coming down the corridor. He stood facing the door and readied himself. He was prepared. It opened and the summons arrived.
***
Nikita’s face told the story of one much older than his twenty-one years, and betrayed the pain he had endured. Sitting at a table in the whitewashed box room with leads connected to his temples, a woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit busied herself around him, wiring him up to the lie detector before him. He looked down and noticed that his hands trembled silently. Deep breath, Nikita, you have trained for this, he repeated to himself in the confines of his mind.
Lean and muscular with a shaven head, Nikita sat opposite a man he didn’t recognise. As he stared at him, unblinking, with dead eyes, Nikita’s hands became completely still, like a tightly wound tiger, bunched and ready to pounce.
“I will be your instructor in this exercise. Answer my questions truthfully and briefly,” said the stranger. He had blond hair combed into a fierce side parting, a thin moustache and thick glasses that enlarged already bulbous eyes.
“Is your name Nikita Allochka?”
“Niet,” Nikita replied.
The signals on the lie detector remained absolutely still.
“Then what is your name?”
“Nathan Martins.”
Again, the needle barely flickered on the detector.
“Where are you from, Nathan?”
“Daytona Beach, Florida.”
The signal remained flat.
“And what do you do in your spare time?”
“You mean aside from killing enemies of the state?” Nikita asked with a faintly raised eyebrow.
“This is not a game, Allochka!”
“You mean Martins?” Nikita said, smiling coldly. He sighed. “I like to surf, eat quarter pounders with extra cheese, and have a beer with the guys,” he added in a flawless Floridian accent.
The needle remained still.
Behind the one-way glass, Colonel Klitchkov and other officials watched Nikita’s test. Klitchkov was smiling.
A middle-aged man in a lab coat was almost trembling with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He is totally emotionless,” he spouted.
“He is finally ready,” Klitchkov replied.
“But he is so young, colonel. He will make mistakes if you put him in the field,” replied the man in the lab coat.
“Of course. But that does not mean he is not ready. He is our most magnificent creation,” Klitchkov answered, with a satisfied expression.
The interrogator looked up at Nikita from his notes. “Where is your family?” he asked.
A tiny flicker was visible on the lie detector’s reading as Nikita turned and looked directly at the mirror, directly at Klitchkov. Despite being unable to see him, he fixed him with a piercing stare through the glass.
He paused for a moment. “Somewhere safe,” he answered, with no small amount of accusation.
CHAPTER 4
The valley lay beneath him, with a snow laden hill sloping smoothly down from his vantage point on the road. Nikita’s breath rose before him as he looked out across the crisp, white landscape to a stone izba, nestled in the valley, smoke snaking its way out of a chimney to the dark, cloudless sky. The flickering glow of candlelight in the window screamed of warmth to Nikita, his body temperature ever dropping in the freezing twilight. His dark eyes burned in the moonlight with suppressed rage.
It looked so idyllic, like a postcard sent from the Swiss Alps. But the reality was a far cry from a luxury chalet. This reality was a cold stone cottage nestled in the far northern reaches of Siberia.
He made his way down the road, more closely resembling an icy track, and his eyes fell upon a snowman. Clearly built some time ago, the snow had iced over and the carrot nose lay half buried in the ground.
He bent down and attempted to screw the carrot back into place, but it was now so frozen that the carrot no longer fitted. Bending over, he hitched up a trouser leg, and pulled from his sock a glistening six-inch dagger. His large hands worked deftly as he fashioned a small cleft to slide the carrot into. Eventually satisfied, he smiled gently to himself before moving towards the small homestead.
As he drew closer, he began to pick up the sound of laughter, a sound unfamiliar to him now, with a sense of humour not high on the list of priorities for Soviet operatives. But then neither are nerves, yet Nikita could not deny a sense of trepidation squirming in his stomach as he approached the black door.
He looked up and noticed that the window frames were also painted black, along with the awnings. So unnecessary and so out of place in the surroundings, he thought to himself. “Perhaps the KGB do have a sense of humour after all,” he muttered wryly.
He raised his hand and knocked on the door. The sounds from within stopped instantly.
After a long pause, he heard the voice of his father shouting through the door in poorly-accented Russian, “Who is it and what do you want?”
“It’s a memory trying to find its way home,” said Nikita, responding in English.
There was a scrabbling at the door as the chain was pulled off and several locks clicked into place. The door was yanked open and Nikita looked up at the huge silhouette of Gabriel Allochka. Even in the shadows, Nikita could see that his hair was now lightly dusted with grey.
Wide-eyed, he appeared almost scared. A silence sat between them that felt like an eternity to Nikita. “Father…” he said tentatively, feeling confused, almost like the boy he thought he’d left behind five years ago.
Gabriel’s eyes crinkled sadly, and he reached out and tentatively stroked Nikita’s cheek. “My boy, is it really you?” he said softly.
“Father it is me, your Niki,” Nikita replied, feeling his eyes stinging, fighting back the tears he had been trained not to show.
Gabriel pulled him into a rough embrace and began to laugh, a deep sound that came all the way from his toes and transported Nikita to a different time and place.
“My son! I feared we had lost you forever. Quick, come in out of this freezing cold.”
Nikita forced the thick wooden door shut quickly and the warmth of the cottage then hit him, giving his hands chilblains.
Before he had time to take in his surroundings, a small figure flew across the room with arms wide open, and shouted “Niki!” before stopping suddenly a few yards from him. His little sister Milena’s eyes were wide and she appeared suddenly cautious. She had grown a great deal and now approached the slight awkwardness of being ten years old.
“Milena,” Nikita said softly and moved towards her, opening his arms. But she stepped back before turning and running back upstairs, fear on her face. “Milena,” he whispered again as his stomach dropped and his heart ached.
“Do not worry about Milena,” Gabriel said from behind him. “You look… different now; it is hard for her to understand.”
Nikita nodded silently.
A voice thick with emotion sudde
nly rolled down the stairs. “I know that voice…” Appearing down the staircase, Sophie Allochka had tears streaming down her face. She almost fell into his arms, and grabbed him so tightly that it hurt. “My baby, come here. I love you, praise be to God!” she gasped, hugging him even tighter as if afraid he might escape again if she let go. She pulled back and held his face in her hands. Again, a flash of something that almost looked like fear crossed her face, but as quickly as it appeared it was gone and she kissed him on the forehead. Over her shoulder, Nikita could see Milena peering from behind the bannister of the stairs, slowly moving down the steps.
“You are years late,” she squeaked to him from the safety of the stairs.
Nikita bowed his head. “I know. I am sorry, little sister. Will you forgive me?” She said nothing.
From his pocket he pulled a small teddy bear and held it out. She didn’t move, fear still on her face. He laid it on the floor between them and then backed away. She moved tentatively out from the stairs and grabbed the teddy bear, but said nothing.
“Milena, it is your brother, say thank you,” said Sophie, despite also looking at Nikita with some concern as he sat down beside the fire.
“Thank you,” she squeaked. Nikita looked unhappily at them all for the first time in five years, feeling a leper among his own family.
***
Later that night, as Nikita sat by the fire, letting the warmth wash over him, his father walked into the room to join him. “They are both sound asleep; it’s been an emotional day for them. For us all,” he added, passing Nikita a whiskey, keeping another for himself. Nodding in agreement, Nikita held the whiskey up to the firelight to inspect it.
“They’ve put you in the arsehole of the world, but I see they are at least keeping you well, Father.” He put his drink down to one side. “But it is not for me just yet.”