Stroika

by Mark Blair

  Yuri could almost hear the soldier’s mind whirring, calculating how much trouble he would be in for disobeying him or Alyabyev.

  ‘Lieutenant Orlov,’ said Yuri, exasperated, ‘do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yes, sir, of course’

  ‘Well I intend to be around for a very long time, Lieutenant.’ There was a pause. Everything depended on Lieutenant Orlov, Yuri thought – maybe the whole weight of the Soviet Union.

  ‘I am putting you through now, General.’

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’

  A few moments later, Yuri heard Alyabyev’s disgruntled voice. Yuri imagined Alyabyev’s face, the sardonic, slightly bored look he had seen so many times over the negotiating table that he had long since ceased to recognise as lack of interest.

  ‘Yes, General, what can I do for you?’ Alyabyev sounded tired. ‘Aren’t you under arrest, Marov?’

  ‘Technically, yes, sir.’

  ‘You’re taking a big risk, Marov, walking into GSHQ and contacting me. Volkov will have you rearrested if he finds out.’

  ‘He won’t have to look very far, General. He left for a meeting at the Defence Ministry twenty minutes ago, and I plan to join him there after I finish this call with you. General, I need your help.’ Yuri knew he didn’t have much time. ‘You know there is nothing wrong with the general secretary and that he is under house arrest in Peredelkino?’

  ‘Marov, you probably know a lot more than me… we’ve all been kept busy with this mobilisation.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you, General, and my guess is that if he doesn’t step down voluntarily, that will not prevent the Emergency Committee engineering it. You know what that will mean for him and for the Soviet Union.’

  ‘You are talking about half the Politburo. Let’s assume, General, you are correct for a minute. What do you propose to do about it?’

  ‘General, you had a commando battalion the last time I looked at your dispositions, five kilometres east of Peredelkino. I have a squad of men on their way to his dacha.’ Yuri looked at the wall clock. ‘ETA ten minutes.’

  ‘And you want to fight your way in?’

  ‘No, General. I want you to deploy the battalion around Peredelkino. I’m not expecting your men to fight, General. But I do want you to block anyone coming in or out.’

  ‘Volkov will consider this a mutiny.’

  ‘He’s going to be in meeting for the next two hours. Call it a military exercise, General. I just want them there until 8 p.m. You can retire them to barracks after that; three hours, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘Give me a minute, Marov.’ The line went dead.

  The sergeant looked from the lieutenant to Yuri, waiting for further orders. Yuri glanced at his wristwatch. What was Alyabyev doing now? Putting a call through to Volkov? Calling the military police? Maybe he had read the district general wrong all along, and Alyabyev wasn’t a neutral and he had thrown his lot in with the conspirators. A minute passed and then another. Yuri expected the steel door to open at any second and for him to be led away.

  There was a click on the line. Yuri looked over at the sergeant, who signalled Alyabyev was back on line.

  ‘Yes, General?’

  ‘General Marov, you have until 8 p.m. I hope I don’t live to regret this.’

  Chapter 70

  Peredelkino

  The freighter took a right off Borovskoye and north onto Chobotovskaya and the wooded outskirts of Peredelkino. Less than a kilometre now, Viktoriya thought. She wondered if Yuri had any success with Alyabyev. If he hadn’t, they were all walking into a trap.

  The vehicle lurched to a halt. She heard someone run round to the rear and the creak of the rear doors as before.

  ‘Okay, everyone out!’ shouted Gaidar.

  Viktoriya read the road sign opposite: Lukinskaya. To their right and left, dense woodland stretched in either direction. Around her, soldiers flexed limbs and checked kit as the truck completed a U-turn and headed back in the direction from which they had come. She stared at its retreating vermillion lights, momentarily mesmerised, as it faded into the rapidly descending darkness.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she heard Gaidar say.

  They headed left over a low wire fence and across an open field where a flurry of early winter snow had thawed the earth to soft mud. They stopped at the forest edge – one last check. Gaidar gave the thumbs-up and they melted into the wood.

  Fending off branches with her hands, Viktoriya tucked in close behind Terentev. Underfoot she felt the springy softness of pine needles and young saplings. Only the swishing and snapping of branches marked the phantom-like progress of their small column.

  Two hundred metres in, they found the railway track they were looking for. They paused to get their bearings. Viktoriya pictured the map they had all memorised back at the yard. Michurinets and Peredelkino stations top and tailed the tiny dacha village. Terentev had made it plain they didn’t want to land up at either. Both would be crawling with KGB troops. Across the open railway track, Viktoriya made out the lane that marked the outer perimeter of old Peredelkino; along its length, fruit trees shed the last of their cinnamon-tinted leaves.

  They froze as headlights raced from the right. An army jeep carrying heavily armed KGB soldiers sped by, closely followed by a second. She imagined them turning right into Serafimovicha and left into Pavlenko, and the general secretary’s dacha set back in the woods a hundred metres from Pasternak’s.

  Gaidar walked back towards her and Terentev.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked.

  ‘Serafimovicha is swarming with KGB; one of the men has been reconnoitring ahead,’ said Gaidar.

  ‘How about we stick to the west of the village, make our way up through the wood by the river and work our way above Pavlenko before dropping down onto it?’ she said.

  ‘I should have remembered that logistics is your speciality… yes, that’s exactly what I was going to suggest. We backtrack a hundred metres and cross here.’ Gaidar pointed at the intersection of the railway track stretching east and stream running north. ‘Five hundred metres up, we exit the wood onto this lane and walk up.’ His finger skirted the lane until it intersected with another that led east. Three hundred metres along, it crossed Pavlenko.

  A third jeep appeared, headlights on full beam, and disappeared towards Serafimovicha.

  Viktoriya wondered whether the general secretary’s captors were becoming twitchy. It was only an hour or so before the Emergency Committee was supposed to go on the air waves.

  ‘We haven’t got long,’ she said, almost unnecessarily.

  Spread out in twos and threes, they moved east as fast as they could until they hit the small stream that ran under the rail track and followed it north into the woodland beyond. A branch plucked Viktoriya’s beanie off her head. A soldier behind her reached up and retrieved it.

  ‘Let’s stick close together now,’ Gaidar whispered. ‘Night visors, those of you who have them.’ The undergrowth had become dense and impenetrable in places.

  A soldier in front waved them forward. She stuck close to Terentev, eager to avoid twisting her ankle in some foxhole or having her eye poked out by a low-hanging branch. Squinting into the darkness, doing her best to shield her eyes, she swam forward, arms flailing.

  Relief marked getting to the edge of the wood as the forest canopy evaporated. Viktoriya took a lungful of cool fresh air as she walked down off a low bank onto the narrow lane she remembered from the map. Subdued street lighting illuminated a roughly made track. Opposite, ink-black windows of unoccupied dachas gazed bleakly towards them. Viktoriya shivered. A man grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back out of the light. A jeep crossed the lane two hundred metres below and disappeared. Nobody moved. They stood, silent, straining to hear the whine of an approaching engine or the murmur of distant voices. Viktoriya felt the warm breath of the man s
tanding next to her and wondered if he could hear her pulse pounding in her neck.

  A silhouette stepped back into the road. It was Gaidar. He signalled everyone to form a line behind him and murmured something to his sergeant. Viktoriya looked for Terentev and found him towards the end of the file standing next to the dehumanised form of a soldier wearing a monocular night-vision visor. She wondered if he could make anything out behind the blank windows: a resident’s finger on the light switch, arrested by a band of heavily armed men emerging ghostlike from the black wood, or a guard calling the alarm.

  Chapter 71

  Moscow

  Volkov looked at the assembled. Karzhov had walked into the room five minutes before and was deep in conversation with Dubnikov in the corner of the room; the others had dotted themselves around the long mahogany table with papers spread out in front of them. Opposite, the head of the Peasants’ Union worked his way through a long list of names. Volkov watched him studiously placing ticks and crosses against them, settling old scores, removing opposition. He passed the list to the interior minister, who edited it here and there before bagging it in his portfolio case and zipping it firmly shut.

  ‘Everything in order, General?’ he asked.

  It was, apart from the whereabouts of that idiot Marov, but he did not have time to respond. The large double doors at the end of the room flew open and Gerasim Gerashchenko strode purposefully in. The deputy general secretary took his seat at the head of the table and called the meeting to order. Karzhov and Dubnikov hurried to their places, casting a glance in Volkov’s direction. Gerashchenko looked pale, exhausted. Dark circles pooled under his eyes. How long had it been since they had precipitated this venture?’ Volkov thought. Was it only three days?

  When Gerashchenko spoke, he did so with the voice of a man who no doubt felt the weight and future of the Soviet Union upon him.

  ‘Comrade Chairman,’ he said, looking at Karzhov, inviting the KGB chair to speak first.

  Karzhov picked up a typed sheet of paper and cast his eyes down the page.

  ‘Deputy General Secretary, comrades,’ started Karzhov, ‘I can report that, as of this morning, internal opposition to the new government has been neutralised.’ A good word, thought Volkov – neutralised – very KGB. ‘Russians are giving us the benefit of the doubt for the moment, as are the other Soviet republics. Rest assured we will take whatever action is necessary to maintain calm.’

  ‘And East Germany?’ asked the interior minister.

  Gerashchenko interrupted, ‘I spoke with the East German premier an hour ago. He is confident that with our support he can reassert his authority.’

  Our support? thought Volkov. Two hundred thousand Soviet troops would begin retaking the streets tomorrow.

  ‘I know we can rely on General Volkov,’ he added. ‘Once we have re-established order we can replace the premier with a fresh face, not immediately. We do not want to be encouraging more dissent.’

  ‘And the general secretary, do you have his resignation in writing yet? We need to conclude this matter.’

  ‘Within the hour, Secretary,’ Karzhov said confidently; he did not elaborate. Indeed, none of them wanted to know the detail; that was Karzhov’s responsibility. The general secretary would go quietly one way or the other, of that Volkov was sure.

  The soft burring of the phone next to Gerashchenko interrupted proceedings. He picked it up. It must be important to have interrupted the meeting, thought Volkov. The secretary looked in his direction as he listened.

  ‘General, apparently General Marov is in reception, demanding to join the meeting. I thought he was under lock and key?’

  ‘That was the case until this morning. My men have been looking for him but it seems he has found us.’

  ‘My men can rearrest him,’ chipped in Dubnikov, looking at Volkov as though his men were incapable of that feat.

  ‘He has warned me against that.’ Gerashchenko shrugged. ‘Let’s see what he has to say; there can be no harm in that. Maybe we can win him over.’

  Chapter 72

  Gaidar was the first to spot the military checkpoint thrown across the wide lane above Pavlenko. Viktoriya counted five heavily armed soldiers standing behind a makeshift manually operate red-and-white painted boom. To the right, another soldier manned a heavy machine gun behind a neatly constructed wall of sandbags that curved protectively around him.

  The soldier nearest the barrier shouted ‘Halt!’ as Viktoriya observed the man in his sandbag redoubt hunker down behind the gun and trail its barrel towards them. Gaidar’s military uniform clearly confused them. One of the soldiers standing beside the barrier said something to the gunner. Grit and mud zipped around her a split second before she heard the deafening sound of the machine gun weave its deadly path. Viktoriya covered her ears and fought the urge to throw herself on the ground.

  ‘Soldier!’ shouted Gaidar, when seconds later the rapid tuck-tuck of the machine gun stopped. Their presence would no longer be secret. ‘This is Major Gaidar of the Kantemirovskaya Division.’

  When Viktoriya turned to find Terentev, he was no longer there, nor was the soldier with the night visor. She quickly counted the number of heads she could see in the narrow beam of light that flooded towards them from the barrier: twenty men – that left Terentev and four others unaccounted for. She looked up at the two-metre-high bank of scrub and pine needles that followed the lane along its right side towards the temporary barrier and then back down the lane where they had just come and the ink-black forest beyond. Where had they got to? she wondered. She couldn’t believe Terentev had deserted them.

  ‘What are you doing out here, Major? Peredelkino is strictly off limits. You should know that? How did you get here?’ Sound carried perfectly over the fifty metres that separated them. An owl cooed and then another a little further off. In the near distance, Viktoriya could hear the rising rumble of approaching vehicles.

  ‘Throw down your weapons, Major,’ the soldier ordered. Viktoriya watched the gunner tilt the barrel a fraction higher. They would all be dead in an instant if he squeezed the trigger.

  ‘Drop your weapons, Sergeant.’ It was Terentev’s voice from behind the barrier. She looked up at the bank and saw Terentev and three other soldiers lying flat, their Kalashnikovs extended in front of them; a fourth soldier had his gun pointing directly at the back of the gunner at a distance of no more than ten metres.

  ‘Soldier,’ it was Gaidar’s voice, ‘Let’s all remain calm. It’s your commanding officer I need to speak with.’

  As he finished speaking, a truck ground to a halt behind them and ten soldiers jumped down off the back board. A lot of people were going to die, Viktoriya thought, if someone lost their nerve. An eerie silence descended on the impromptu gathering as they faced off, soldier on soldier. Only the sound of the diesel engine ticking over disturbed the still night air.

  ‘Major, it’s me you need to speak with.’ In the glow of the truck’s headlights, Viktoriya made out the silhouette of the man who had spoken. ‘I think it would be best if we avoided any unpleasantness.’

  Gaidar lowered his gun and walked to the rear of his small column.

  ‘You’re not with Kantemirovskaya Division, are you, Major, if that’s what rank you truly are?’

  ‘Major Gaidar works for me,’ said Viktoriya, before Gaidar had a chance to explain himself. ‘And right now I represent General Marov.’

  ‘General Marov?’ He almost sneered. ‘You are backing the wrong horse, comrade.’

  ‘Viktoriya Nikolaevna—’

  ‘Kayakova of Leningrad… ah yes. Is it the “Gang of Two”?’ The colonel laughed. ‘And what is it you are trying to do here? Recue our ailing general secretary? I’ve fifty men between where you are standing and his dacha. You are not going to get very far.’ He took a step forward. Gaidar raised his Kalashnikov.

  She could see now the
three stars on his epaulette.

  ‘Colonel, we are here simply to protect the general secretary. There is no need to spill Russian blood.’

  He was smiling now as if she were deranged.

  ‘Protect, doesn’t he already have protection?’

  ‘Colonel, I trust that is the case… just look at our presence as an insurance policy.’

  Viktoriya looked at Gaidar, who had his barrel trained directly on the colonel. She had no doubt he would use it if he felt the situation were moving against them.

  ‘Nobody leaves Peredelkino while the general secretary is held here against his wishes,’ she said in a flat tone, ‘you, your soldiers, no one. If anything happens to him, you will be held to account. Do I make myself clear?’

  The smile vanished and his jaw tightened. Viktoriya prayed that Yuri’s powers of persuasion had remained intact.

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’

  ‘I’m surprised you aren’t better informed, Colonel. If I’m right, a spetsnaz battalion is deploying around us as I speak… we are all hostages now.’

  The colonel glared at her, his fists clenched. ‘Corporal!’ he shouted, ‘put me through to Central District command.’ A moment later he stepped into the cab of the truck and slammed the door shut.

  The whop-whop-whop of a rotor blade made her look up as an MTV passed over them and headed in the direction of the dacha. Friend or foe? she thought. It stopped over where she imagined the general secretary to be and hovered in a holding position.

  The door of the cab opened and the colonel climbed out. Ignoring the gun pointed directly at him, he walked up to Viktoriya and stopped. He stood there and looked at her for a moment, his face expressionless, exuding a deadly calm.

  ‘My compliments, Viktoriya Nikolaevna, it seems for the moment you have the temporary advantage…’

  Chapter 73

  Yuri heard footsteps behind him on the marbled hall of the defence building and turned to see Dubnikov accompanied by two soldiers. Was he about to be rearrested? He had brazened it out so far. Soldiers, who he encountered every day at checkpoints around the Arbat, had been reluctant to challenge him so far. He might be at odds with the interim government, but that was it, for now it was only interim and here he was in plain view in uniform, acting as if nothing were amiss. He doubted the defence minister would be so reticent.