by Robert Moss
Feliks winked at the Armenian and asked, ‘Have you got any female company arranged?’
Agopian grinned. ‘Not this Sunday, Feliks. You’ll have to look after yourself. I’m meeting a friend of mine, Colonel Topchy.’
Nikolsky tried not to register surprise. Topchy was the man Sasha had asked him to find out about as a matter of great personal importance.
‘I don’t think I know this Topchy,’ Nikolsky said nonchalantly. ‘He’s Third Directorate.’
Nikolsky made a face. Everyone in his service looked down on the military chekists of the Third Directorate as riff-raff, low-grade thugs.
‘Don’t be so snotty-nosed,’ Agopian reproached him. ‘Topchy is a great fellow.’
‘How did you get to know him?’ There wasn’t much social contact between the two KGB directorates, especially now that Nikolsky’s service had been moved out to the Village.
‘We served in Baku together. Those were the days!’
Before the Armenian could digress into an account of the delights of Baku, Nikolsky said, ‘Who was your chief in those days?’
It was Agopian’s turn to look startled. ‘But I thought you knew! Gussein Askyerov was running our organization in Azerbaijan. Before he became Foreign Secretary.’
‘Ah, that’s right. I’d forgotten,’ Nikolsky lied. ‘How were Topchy’s relations with him?’
The Armenian made an obscene gesture. ‘As tight as that.’
Nikolsky decided to go to the racetrack that weekend.
*
Topchy seemed pleasant enough on first being introduced, although his attention was on other things. He had been having a talk with one of the racetrack managers, and was busy scurrying up and down the stairs to deal with the illegal bookies whose turf was the smelly, shadowy corridors under the grandstand.
They all knew Topchy by sight. He would rattle off his bets, hand over the money from a thick wad of roubles, and the bookie would scribble down the details and his assumed patronym, ‘Vissarionovich,’ on a scrap of paper and squirrel it away in his pocket. There were no betting slips. This was one place where honor among thieves was scrupulously upheld.
Topchy was sure he had the winner picked for the second race, thanks to his source, and jeered at Nikolsky and the Armenian when they put their money on a horse called Burilom instead.
It was a lackluster lineup at the starting gates. The horses looked undernourished. The jockeys were turned out in a ragbag of garments. One sported a builder’s hardhat; another, what looked like an army helmet.
Topchy was pressed up against the railing, yelling his lungs out in between taking a swig or two from the bottle of vodka he had wrapped up in Izvestiya, when the horse he had picked started into the home stretch. All at once, a black stallion came up fast on the outside. It was Burilom. The lead jockey lashed out viciously with his whip, trying to cut Burilom across the face. This was quite routine at the Moscow Hippodrome. The managers took no action as long as everything had been arranged with them ahead of time.
This time, however, something went awry. Burilom’s jockey spurred his horse wide, out of reach of the whip, and streaked ahead to win by more than a length.
Topchy was angry and deflated, complaining loudly that the race had been fixed. He had lost quite a pile. But his spirits revived over the many drinks Nikolsky paid for in the bar of the Bega restaurant, and over the excellent dinner that followed. He thought this Nikolsky was a sympathetic fellow, not like most of those stuck-up people in the First Chief Directorate. Flattered by Nikolsky’s interest, he started telling him all about his intimate friend, Gussein Askyerov.
Somehow, Nikolsky managed to drive Topchy home without running foul of the militia, who liked nothing better than to catch a KGB man drunk at the wheel. They parted like old buddies, agreeing that they had to keep in touch.
I’ll have something interesting for Sasha, Nikolsky thought. If the poor sod ever gets back.
*
Each day that Sasha spent in Afghanistan, he hated the country more. In Kabul, the military headquarters was established in a vast compound near the airport, surrounded by barbed wire and concrete walls and minefields to keep the guerrillas back. The Soviets had their own generators, but most nights, much of the city was blacked out. The capital depended on hydroelectricity from the Kabul gorge, but the rebels knocked out the power lines faster than they could be repaired. The only alternative sources of electricity were a few smelly, broken-down oil generators.
Life in the Shah Nou bazaar seemed bustling and normal, at least in the mornings. Currency traders still squatted there on their rugs, prepared to change any kind of money, quoting exchange rates that were so exact, so up-to-date, that you wondered if they had a direct line to the exchanges in London and New York. But the Soviets visited the bazaar only in large parties under the escort of armed guards. In the first months, the usual escort was two full truckloads of soldiers. As the random snipings and knifings increased, the guard had to be doubled to four truckloads of troops with kalashnikovs.
You couldn’t trust any Afghan, Sasha soon concluded. Every government agency was riddled with spies. The chief of the secret police fled to Pakistan, and his successor narrowly escaped being blown up by a bomb planted in his office by his own lieutenants. Press gangs roamed the streets rounding up young men to serve in Babrak Karmal’s army. And they deserted in droves, whole battalions at a time. Rebel prisoners escaped by the hundreds, with the help of their jailers. Even inside the highest circles of the government, the old feud between the Khalq and the Parcham factions was raging fiercer than ever. The Afghan minister of defense, a Parcham supporter, had to be hospitalized after his own deputy, a member of the other faction, beat him up and broke several of his ribs. Whenever government forces were included in a military operation, the rebels received a tip-off in time to get away. When there was no alternative but to turn to the Afghans for something, they were infuriatingly slow, and it was hard to tell whether this was deliberate sabotage. Nim soat, ‘in half an hour,’ became a maddeningly familiar phrase. It was the standard answer whenever you asked how long it would take to get something done. It could mean anything — a few hours, a few days. It rarely meant what it said.
There was an expression that was even more familiar. You heard it shouted from the back of a crowd, from behind a shuttered window, from children in the street. Russe murdabad! ‘Death to the Russians.’ They didn’t even own the capital. They were just sitting on it, like a sumo wrestler sitting on his opponent.
The hostility of the Afghans was oppressive, but it was less depressing than what the war was doing to the Soviet army. Within a few months, the Central Asian divisions were pulled out and replaced by predominantly Russian units.
‘There. What did I tell you?’ Zaytsev remarked. The Central Asian troops, related to the Afghans by language, blood, and the Moslem religion, had shunned combat. Some had turned themselves over to the Mujahideen. Sasha didn’t doubt that the number who defected would have been many times greater but for the guerrillas’ enthusiasm in killing anyone in Soviet uniform before asking questions.
But the country had a corrosive effect on the Russians as well. The rebels, even when they were armed only with First World War rifles, were the best fighters Sasha had ever seen, and they fought with an absolute faith in themselves and their cause. Apart from the border skirmishes with the Chinese, the Soviet army had not seen battle since 1945; the Party leadership preferred, where possible, to pursue its foreign enterprises through subcontractors like the ever-obliging Cubans. In Afghanistan the Russians were soon hunkering down in static defensive positions, using clumsy air strikes to pursue an enemy who was hard to find through mountain fortresses that were harder to scale.
Living in fear, deprived of women — the only ones they saw were hooded from top to toe — and often of vodka as well, the Soviet troops found consolation in hashish. The defensive reflexes of the Politburo and the geopolitical instincts of the General Staff had led
them into one of the world’s great markets of hashish, a waystation on the hippie trail a decade or so before. Soon Russians from the ranks were trading anything they could steal, including their own weapons, for the fruits of the poppy. Hashish might have fueled the fanaticism of the thirteenth-century Order of Assassins, and of fundamentalist warriors of Jihad since, but Sasha saw no evidence that it was honing the cutting edge of the Soviet army in Afghanistan. On the contrary, soldiers drugged to the eyeballs made easy targets for the rebels.
It wasn’t only the conscripts who stole. A colonel was shot for trying to smuggle emeralds out of the country. The gems came from a Dasht-i-Riwat, in the heart of the rebel stronghold.
In one of Sasha’s first reports to Marshal Zotov, sent through his private channel to the General Staff, he insisted that the war would merely swallow up increasing quantities of Soviet manpower and materiel unless they pursued the offensive in the Spetsnaz style. They had to fight the rebels on their own ground, infiltrate their ranks, use agents to play one movement off against another, and send in elite forces to blow them out of their sanctuaries in the mountains and across the borders, in Iran and Afghanistan. Zotov relayed his enthusiastic endorsement.
There were times Sasha felt utterly nauseated, not by what the war was doing to the Afghans, but by what it was doing to the Russian army. He put none of this in the bland letters he sent home to Lydia, which dwelled excessively on the poor quality of the food. It was the courage and the steadiness of some of his comrades that revived his sense of purpose and encouraged him to believe that, for all of them, the experience could be a decisive watershed.
Sasha went with the Spetsnaz teams on a series of raids into rebel territory, and learned a lot about his fellowmen. From their actions under fire, from the talks they would have at night in the mess or beside a campfire, he found himself grading his fellow officers in terms of whom he could count on, not just for courage in the field, but for the intelligence to understand the type of leadership the army and the country required. As the war dragged on, more and more of the younger officers were outspoken among their own kind about the stupidity of the men in Moscow who had sent them into battle under conditions that they believed made any kind of victory impossible. Sasha listened more than spoke during conversations of this type.
The disaffection extended to some of the more senior officers as well. There was a major-general called Leybutin, charged with an offensive against the rebels in the area around Ghazni, who was particularly scathing about their fraternal socialist ally Babrak Karmal and the people who had picked him for the job.
‘It’s the old problem,’ Leybutin insisted. ‘They won’t leave the decisions to the professionals, the men in the field. They can’t agree on their objective, and they won’t give us the means to achieve it.’
‘It’s called democratic centralism,’ a young Spetsnaz officer called Orlov observed sarcastically. Sasha had been watching him. He was a more intellectual version of Zaytsev: a man with the reflexes of a professional killer, but the spirit to question the ends for which his talents were being used.
‘To fight a war like this, you have to clear out the dead wood,’ Zaytsev chipped in.
‘And the grafters,’ Orlov added.
They all knew that the worst of the looters weren’t conscript soldiers trading for hashish, but people with seats on the Central Committee.
‘There’s a death penalty for economic crimes, isn’t there?’ Leybutin said. ‘They ought to enforce it.’ He named one individual with an exalted Party rank who had made a fortune by charging the Afghan government a percentage on contracts for Soviet equipment.
‘You’re dreaming,’ Sasha goaded him on. ‘In our society, a man like that is above suspicion.’
‘Then the time will come when the army will have to clean house,’ Orlov said quietly.
That silenced the discussion. They all knew Orlov had gone too far. But nobody challenged him, and Sasha lay awake for a few hours afterward, reflecting that the war was molding a new kind of army from the men who served in it: leaner, more exacting, allergic to slogans. It was an army its political masters might have reason to fear.
*
In a raid against a guerrilla base, or qarargah, in the north, Sasha traveled a mountain trail by foot with the Spetsnaz squads. They came to a bridge over a jagged gorge, hundreds of feet above the ice-blue river below. It was a typical Afghan bridge: a couple of narrow tree trunks lashed together, tapering in the middle to a thickness barely wider than his two boots pressed together.
A lieutenant in the group, Malenov, whom Sasha had reprimanded for constantly showing off and exposing himself to unnecessary danger, came to the middle of the bridge and stopped. He stood there, swaying gently from side to side, his eyes fixed on the bottom of the gorge.
‘Get a move on!’ Sasha yelled at him, assuming this was another show of bravado.
‘I — can’t,’ Malenov whimpered.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sasha roared. He suddenly realized that the man was about to fall. He walked back across the bridge to Malenov and stretched out his hand. ‘Here. Hold on to me.’
He guided the lieutenant, step by step, to the safety of the cliff.
Malenov started stammering his apologies. ‘It’s something I’ve always suffered from,’ he explained. ‘It’s not so much vertigo, more an odd compulsion to throw myself over a height.’
‘But you’ve made hundreds of parachute drops.’
It was the man’s way of proving to himself, and to others, that he wasn’t afraid. In the same spirit, when they reached the guerrilla camp, Malenov was the first into action.
On another operation, in Shindand district, near the border with Iran, the Estonian sergeant was in Sasha’s group. One night, he took off by himself, dressed all in black, with his black face mask and his chosen tools of trade: a knife, a pistol, and a stock of magnesium grenades.
Sasha stayed up most of the night with Zaytsev, hammering out the details for a plan he intended to submit to the Marshal. He was still waiting for approval to cross the border and take out some of the rebel sanctuaries inside Iran. But it was clear to both Sasha and Zaytsev that as long as the guerrillas enjoyed safe haven and a guaranteed supply route through Iran and Pakistan, where Afghan refugees had poured in by the million, they couldn’t be decisively defeated. Sasha’s plan called for Spetsnaz units, guided by agents and informers inside the rebel movements, to cross the borders and kill or capture the leaders of the resistance.
When he went outside, it was not quite dawn, and the gray light gave everything the grainy texture of an old daguerrotype. He was surprised to see the Estonian come striding across the compound, lugging a sack. He looked more sinister than ever, with a coarse stubble sprouting over his pate and his cheeks. But he advanced with a bouncing, even jaunty gait. Sasha was immediately suspicious that the man had been out robbing the villagers or trading for hashish.
He ordered him to stop and open up his sack.
‘Take your pick, Colonel,’ the Estonian said insolently, dumping the bag on the ground.
Sasha picked it up and shook out the contents. One glance was enough. The Estonian had been out killing, along an irrigation ditch in a fold of the mountains where he knew that some of the Mujahideen hid during the night. He had brought back his trophies: ears, fingers, and other detachable organs that proved the number of his conquests.
Sasha turned away without speaking to the sergeant. The man was a raging beast, more barbarous than those he was fighting. Yet Sasha felt nothing, just the dull pain above his right eye and the sharper pain in his lower back that went with his utter exhaustion. The war was shaping all of them.
Driving himself to the limit helped him not to think about what he had left behind in New York. There were whole days when he managed not to think of Elaine for a single waking minute. But she returned to him in his dreams.
Finally, in the second year of Sasha’s war, he got formal approval for a s
eries of cross-border operations that were code-named ‘Caravan.’ The Party leadership still wasn’t prepared to send Spetsnaz teams against the densely populated refugee camps in Pakistan. They would go on with the same methods as before — the occasional bombing mission slightly off-course, diplomatic arm-twisting, and the myriad forms of political warfare. But Iran was a different affair. The Ayatollah was supplying arms and sanctuaries to the Moslem fundamentalists among the Afghan guerrillas, and had showed he was no friend of the Soviet Union in other ways as well. Not content with humiliating the Americans, he had let a mob invade the Soviet embassy in Teheran. The Ayatollah deserved to be taught a lesson, and he had nobody’s shoulder to cry on except Allah’s.
*
‘It’s here.’ Sasha jabbed his finger at a point on the huge relief map that covered his work table. Zaytsev bent down to look. The place marked was in the desert north of the marshes of the Hamun-e-Helmand.
‘It’s at least forty miles inside Iran,’ Zaytsev observed.
‘More like fifty.’
Zaytsev looked at him. ‘So you finally got approval. Ochen khorosho. It’s time we showed those fucking mullahs who to pray to. How reliable is this source?’
‘The best. He’s one of our own Illegals.’ Sasha summarized the message he had just received from Moscow, based on the reports received via the Residency in Teheran. Two rival groups of Mujahideen, both supported by the Ayatollah, had agreed to join forces for an all-out assault on Herat. They were now massing in the Iranian desert, at an ancient caravanserai on one of the traditional routes for the smugglers’ camel trains. They had picked a place that tested men’s endurance: a barren region of treacherous quicksands, with white salt-smears on the lifeless soil. In summer, the land gave back the sun’s heat like a metal reflector. From two hundred miles away you could see the mountains with absolute clarity, as if they were within a short ride.