by Robert Moss
They started with a parachute drop into the forest, bailing out at only two hundred meters up. It would have been a sure way to crack your spine except for the containers of carbon dioxide each man carried to puff up his parachute right away. They fell in tight clusters, with their side arms and some heavier equipment — radios, Mon-200 directional mines, Stelas, and antitank rockets. They had a couple of small vehicles, six-wheeled mobile platforms. But when they’d buried their parachutes and scattered liquid chemicals around to baffle the tracker dogs, Zaytsev told his team, ‘We’re not fucking tourists. We’re going in on foot. The objective is thirty kilometers away, and we’ve got two hours to reach it.’
As far as Zaytsev was concerned, the weather was perfect. There was a driving rain, punctuated by lightning flashes. As Sasha jogged between the trees, his boots started to squelch; they were soon as heavy as a convict’s fetters. When the rain eased off, the forest moaned and creaked and the sky seemed darker than before. They came to a lake, and had to line their ponchos with bracken and grass, cram in their equipment, tie the ends together, and stuff their weapons on top, under the knot, before starting to wade across. The pace was unrelenting, but Zaytsev was breathing smoothly and evenly, through his nose, after nearly two hours. He was surprised to see that Sasha was keeping up better than the others, even though he was lugging a heavy grenade launcher as well as his assault rifle.
They had only approximate map coordinates for their target. Their nominal job was to locate the secret headquarters and call up an air strike by firing the flares Zaytsev had clipped to his belt, along with half a dozen grenades. Zaytsev spotted caterpillar tracks over to the left, and gestured for his team to get down on their bellies. They smelled the cigarette smoke before they saw the sentry, lolling against a tree. He was wearing American uniform. Before he had even reached for his weapon, Sasha was on him and had his arm around the man’s throat.
One of the rules of these games was that prisoners talked, on the entirely rational presumption that, in real life, nobody could hold out for long against the combination of drugs and more primitive methods that Spetsnaz was schooled to employ. Zaytsev brandished a heavy file, just to remind the prisoner about this. Filing away the caps of a man’s teeth, in his experience, was a surefire way to loosen tongues. They soon had a detailed description of where to find the hidden command post and how it was defended.
The captured guard was almost as tall as Sasha. Zaytsev glanced from one to the other and said to Sasha, ‘Put on his uniform.’
He sent Sasha in by the front door, along the trail of the caterpillar tracks, while the others fanned out through the forest. Sasha soon found a small army concealed in the forest, with tanks and armored cars, and a strong defensive perimeter. An officer in British uniform called out to him, ‘Anything?’
‘Not yet,’ he called back.
A sentry in American fatigues, his collar pulled up to shield his neck from the rain, strolled over and started bitching about the weather. ‘It’s all right for the bosses. They’re nice and dry while we have to wait around getting pissed on.’
Sasha glanced around, but could see no sign of a shelter.
A field officer in a jeep came bumping along, yelling at the men to redeploy for an ambush. They had learned from a radio intercept that the attackers were moving in on the camp.
‘The dumb bitches swallowed it,’ the sentry remarked. ‘We’ve got them in the sack. You wouldn’t have a smoke, would you?’
Sasha fished around in the pockets of his borrowed jacket and found a pack of cigarettes, soaked through by the rain.
‘Keep it,’ he told the guard, who looked at him curiously.
He started running after the colonel’s jeep. There were shouts behind him, but he ignored them. The vehicle was moving slowly, over the ruts, and he took a running jump and swung himself over the back.
The colonel turned round and started swearing.
‘Shut your face,’ Sasha rasped at him, leveling his rifle. ‘You’re prisoners.’
The colonel started complaining that he was from the control team, that Sasha was breaking the rules. Sasha ignored this, and made them drive crosscountry until Zaytsev came darting out from behind a tree.
‘Get your men out!’ Sasha called to him. ‘It’s a trap!’
They pried out of their prisoner the information that their real objective was six or seven kilometers west of the decoy target. One of Zaytsev’s men took the wheel, but they kept the colonel to make sure they didn’t get lost. A quarter of an hour later, they had breezed through the checkpoints — thanks to the colonel, sitting up front — and piled out behind a mobile command post, consisting of four butterfly trucks parked in a square, their flaps lowered to make a big platform protected from the elements by a canvas roof.
They burst in to find a group of senior officers hunched around a camp table. Zaytsev opened up with his machine gun, firing blanks above their heads. The commander of Moscow District slumped in his seat, his mouth open, his belly hanging out.
‘That’s it,’ his chief of intelligence said cheerfully. ‘We’re all dead.’
‘They bent the rules a bit,’ the control team ruled afterward, ‘but you never blame the winners.’ Zaytsev got a commendation, and he made a gesture that was unusual for him: he invited Preobrazhensky to his quarters.
*
Zaytsev lived in a modest two-room apartment. There were few personal touches, and no concessions to luxury, but you could tell from the freshness and neatness of the place that Zaytsev wasn’t a bachelor. His wife was round and pink, with soft cornflower blue eyes. She served them the kind of meal Sasha’s grandmother used to prepare: a salad doused in sour cream and seasoned with dill, then borshch, and stewed veal with potatoes. They drank vodka with everything.
At the end of the meal, Zaytsev raised his glass to Sasha and said, ‘I didn’t like you to begin with, I admit it. But I’ve been watching you. Nu, ty muzhik! You’re a real man!’ It was spoken only the way a peasant could say it. The words sounded rich and loamy. It was the highest compliment Fyodor Zaytsev could pay.
‘What made you choose the army?’ Sasha asked him.
‘You wouldn’t ask if you’d grown up on a farm,’ Zaytsev said. ‘I went back to my village a year ago, to see my people. Everything had changed. It took me a while to put a finger on it. Then it came to me. The young ones had gone. It was a place of old people waiting to die, and hurrying the process by drinking themselves senseless every day. Agriculture in Russia is dying, and nobody even wants to attend the wake. My father would leave too, but he’s an old man, and it’s all he knows. To think that once we were able to sell grain to the world!’
It was the first time Sasha had heard Zaytsev string so many words together.
‘What went wrong?’ he probed further. ‘Didn’t the kids start fleeing the land when Nikita started all those big new projects in Siberia and the Far East?’
‘Nikita, fuck your mother! I thought they taught you history at the university. The ruin of our villages started a long time before Nikita. It started in 1917.’
He paused, as if he had gone too far.
‘Tell me about it,’ Sasha pursued.
It’s an old story. But you won’t read it anywhere. What I know is what my father and my father’s father told me. Lenin decreed that the land belonged to the tillers, am I right? Then, the very next year, he imposed a new law, saying the land belonged to the state. They said there was an emergency, so the peasants would have to turn over their crops for free. The peasants obeyed, up to a point, but the authorities weren’t satisfied, so they sent out their own bandits — Provision Units they called them — to grab whatever was left. These people weren’t Russians, anything but. They were chinks, black-asses, Balts, even Czechs and Hungarians. They didn’t give a shit if Russian families starved. They stole the seed corn, shot peasants who tried to save a litle bit for their children. Our peasants tried to defend themselves, and the Red Army was sent out to s
laughter them.’
He paused to refuel, tossing off some vodka from the neck of the bottle.
‘There was a breathing space for a couple of years, after the country groaned so loudly that they had to bring in the New Economic Policy. Then the bosses panicked because they saw that independent farmers were beginning to recover and they were no great friends of the Party. So they brought in the collective farms as part of a plan to destroy the successful peasants as a class. Great Stalin called it social prophylaxis. Farmers who knew their jobs were denounced as kulaks. Fifteen million of them were shipped off to plow tundra in Siberia. Most of them died. Stalin deliberately starved millions of peasants in the Ukraine. And who survived and prospered? Loafers and petty functionaries who knew how to crawl to the authorities. That’s how it began, Sasha. And you wonder that we can’t grow enough to feed ourselves! What is a peasant most attached to? His land! How can you expect farmers to produce when they’re reduced to wage slaves? We’d all go hungry if someone hadn’t woken up and decide to let the kolkhozniks have a little scrap of land of their own to work in their spare time. Those private plots are maybe three per cent of the farmland in Russia, and they produce a third of our meat and milk and two-thirds of our potatoes!’
Sasha was listening very carefully. Those last statistics were unlikely to have come from Zaytsev’s father, who was probably semiliterate at best. The man was not only passionate on the subject of what was wrong with Soviet agriculture, he was well briefed, and surprisingly fluent. Like Sasha, Zaytsev must be a full member of the Party, otherwise he couldn’t be an officer in Spetsnaz. But he certainly didn’t talk like one of the faithful.
‘All right,’ Sasha interjected. ‘So our agriculture is a swamp. You don’t need to tell me. I saw it myself, when I had to go out with the students to help gather potatoes on a kolkhoz. And I’ve stood in a few food lines too. What do we do about it?’
‘It’s easy,’ Zaytsev said. ‘Easy to dream about. You start by breaking up the collectives, and giving the land back to the farmers. But they’ll never do it, of course. They’re scared of the peasants, just like Stalin was. They’d start crapping in their pants at the idea that the peasants might get some money and some power and start standing up to the Party.’ He broke off and looked at Sasha warily. ‘I’ve told you all these things,’ he said, ‘and you’ve said nothing about your own ideas.’
‘There’s time for that,’ Sasha responded. ‘Tell me one thing more. How many people do you talk to like this?’
‘My father. My wife. Now you. Listen, there are no fools in my company.’
Sasha resolved at that moment to follow Fedya Zaytsev’s career closely. A man who fought like a trained killer and felt like a Russian peasant was a man who could be used. In the weeks that followed, Zaytsev coached him in hand-to-hand fighting, until he had learned all the ways to kill with minimum effort. There were other evenings when, once he had got a good belt of vodka inside him — he favored pepper vodka, one of the tastier brews — Zaytsev shared more of his secret opinions. He startled Sasha one night by announcing, ‘There never was a Russian revolution. We’re still waiting for it. What do you say, learned professor?’
Sasha grunted something noncommittal. He was not ready to reveal himself yet, even to Fedya Zaytsev.
‘In the key group of five men that seized Russia,’ Zaytsev went on, ‘there were three Jews — Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev — one cockroach from Georgia, and our famous Lenin, who was half Kalmik and half German Jew.’
Sasha assumed that Zaytsev must have acquired this gem from one of the Slavophile leaflets that were circulating around the barracks.
‘Do you think there’ll ever be a Russian revolution?’ Sasha goaded him gently.
‘There has to be,’ Zaytsev said passionately. ‘And I don’t mean in another century or so. I intend to be present. Do you think I’m crazy?’
Sasha merely raised his glass.
Zaytsev shook his massive head and said, ‘You don’t show yourself, do you, Sasha? Well, that’s all right with me. Russia is full of talkers who can expound the most wonderful plan at four in the morning and then, when the sun comes up, they’ve forgotten all about it and they’re too hung over to get out of bed anyway. You listen and remember. I wish I knew what was going on inside that skull of yours.’
‘I think we understand each other,’ Sasha volunteered. ‘You’re not one of those who forgets the next day, either.’
*
Sasha’s Spetsnaz training was cut short because of the imminent birth of his child. He took the train back to Moscow and rushed over to the hospital, where they kept him waiting for hours, through a protracted delivery. When they finally admitted him to the ward, Lydia was propped up against a pile of pillows. Her face was mottled pink and white, but she seemed to him to be suffused with light. She peered up at Sasha, her eyes bright but barely focused. He hardly dared look at the bundle cradled in her arms. She smiled, and he leaned closer. He thought that what he saw was physical perfection. The baby was long and sturdy, with a tuft of white-gold hair on top of an otherwise bald pate. When he pressed his lips to its cheek, it balled its tiny fists and raised a tremendous howl.
‘We’ll call him Pyotr,’ he said to Lydia, squatting on the edge of the bed beside her.
‘Petrushka,’ she softened the name. ‘Petya.’
He put his arm around her shoulder. In that moment, in the presence of the mystery of birth, he could forget her airs and her bossiness and the cold reasoning that had led him into the marriage. She was magnificent.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured as he kissed her, and added mentally, Thank you for making me more than myself.
*
One of the rooms in the apartment in the Visotny Dom was turned into a nursery, and General Zotov filled it with soft toys, mostly huge cuddly bears, one of them nearly as big as the baby’s grandfather.
Zotov was just as active behind the scenes. Sasha was notified that he would be attending a special course, preparatory to his posting to the Residency in New York. They set him to studying old files, maps, and phone books. He listened to a succession of veterans discourse on the psychology and the weaknesses of the Americans. Even the legendary Colonel Abel was produced for one of these sessions. Abel had once run an Illegals network in New York. Captured by the Americans, he had kept his secrets and was eventually freed in exchange for the downed U-2 pilot, Gary Powers. Abel’s voice was thin and reedy, and Sasha had to strain to catch his words, with the snow thudding against the windows, leaving marks like paw-prints.
Word came at last that they would be leaving for New York in the spring. Kolya Vlassov hosted a farewell party. He got Sasha in a corner and said, ‘I bet they told you all about the FBI, didn’t they? How they’ve got hundreds of radio cars on the prowl, and all the cops and even the firemen report to them?’
‘Not quite.’
‘Well, just you remember, Sasha. The FBI could be on your ass, but it’s our brothers in the Committee who are going to stick it to you.’
Chapter Three – Nikolsky’s Problem
‘Drinking is the joy of the Rus.’
The Grand Duke of Kiev (Eleventh Century)
There were cars double-parked on three sides of the block, protected by the black letters DPL on their license plates, defying Manhattan’s impatient drivers to gouge a strip off their paint. Large policemen with faces that were maps of Ireland and Calabria stood about in their rumpled blue coats. The precinct house, on the north side of East 67th Street, was a sooty, shadowy place with a flag that sagged from its pole like washing hung out to dry. A few doors away was the firehouse, red brick and businesslike, and next to that, the oriental effusion of the Park East synagogue.
The Soviet Mission occupied a converted cement-block apartment building that would have been at home in the newer suburbs of Moscow. You didn’t need to belong to the FBI to guess which floor of the Mission was home for the spies. None of the windows was overclean. But up on the seve
nth floor, the grime had been allowed to thicken until the glass was opaque. The windows on that floor were never washed, and the blinds were never opened, so the KGB officers who worked on the street side of the building did not have to contemplate the synagogue opposite. The KGB and the GRU shared the seventh floor. As senior partner, the KGB had appropriated the front two-thirds for its Residency. The GRU had to make do with the space that was left at the back.
Everyone in the Mission shared the same bank of elevators, which created a protocol problem. Nobody pushed the button for the seventh floor. Even if everyone knew that you weren’t really just a second secretary or a chauffeur or some vague type of attaché, you didn’t announce your true functions by getting off on the floor whose windows were never washed.
So the members of the KGB rode up to the eighth floor and walked down the stairs. Their GRU neighbors got off on the sixth floor and walked up.
At the end of Sasha’s first week in New York, he shared the elevator with two other people. He had seen the girl before, leaving the Mission at the end of the day. She had quite a pretty face, very fair-skinned with a snub, slightly upturned nose. The rest of her was oceanic, under the kind of dress you associate with advanced pregnancy.
The man was a stranger to Sasha. At first glance, Sasha thought he might have been an American — except, of course, that no American was permitted above the first floor of the Mission. He wore a very well cut suit, a muted pinstripe with a lot of buttons on the cuffs. He was quite good-looking: tall, with wavy hair, graying in just the right places, a strong chin, and a wide, sensual mouth. He was a bit puffy around the eyes, as if he had stayed up too late, and the flush in his cheeks was a little too ruddy. His eyes were the most striking feature. Bluer than Sasha’s, vivid, constantly mobile and alert, with a twinkle that suggested both devilment and skepticism. They were eyes that always seemed to be asking the question, Pizdish? Are you talking cunt?