His journey, from his office to Braniewo, would cover 121 kilometres. Between him and the street-market under the cathedral's spire was the border post, and at the border post, on his side, were fences, dogs, guns and suspicion.
He had seen the tower from his office window, and had made his apologies to the fleet commander, Admiral Falkovsky, whose man he was, and said what time he would be returning, and had been reminded to bring tobacco. He had driven out from the base and had started the detour demanded by the lagoon. It was a long drive on a rutted road from the base to Kaliningrad, then south-east on the secondary route with the lagoon to the west of him. The city behind him, the Pregel river crossed, he drove his small Lada through the fishing village of Usakovo and the camping resort of Laduskin, then the road was clear ahead to Pjatidoroznoe and on to Mamonovo where life was suckled by the border. It was flat ground, leading on his right side to the reed banks of the lagoon; on his left were the wet, harvested, lifeless fields. A kilometre short of the village of Pjatidoroznoe, where there was a school, a shop and a church built a century before by the Germans that was now used as a community centre.
He slowed to confirm what he knew, what he had seen a week earlier.
A Polish lorry hooted at him, then swung out to overtake. His mirrors were clear and showed the view back down the poplar lined road. A hundred metres behind him was a red saloon, behind that was a dirty silver one, and behind that a black van. He had fine eyesight, and he had cleaned the mirrors before leaving the base. The black van had a smoked dark windscreen. The red saloon, the silver one and the black van had slowed. He eased his weight on to the brake pedal and lightly turned the wheel. His nearside wheels slid off the tarmac and onto the soft mud of the verge. It was what he had done a week earlier. The red saloon had stopped. The silver vehicle seemed about to ram the bumper in front of it, then also stopped, but the black van powered past the cars, covered the empty road at speed and came alongside him. The passenger window, too, was darkened. He saw the dull flicker of a lit cigarette, but could not make out the faces hidden in the interior cab.
He was not an innocent. He had a working knowledge of surveillance. His friends, in the three face-to-face meetings, had told him what to look for but that had been hurried and there had been so much else to talk of—no more than an hour's tuition to save his life. His safety, the talk of it, always came at the end of the meetings, when he'd been leached dry of tactical and technical detail. But they had talked of it, and sheets of hotel notepaper had been used to scrawl the evasion procedures he should utilize…And in the last four years since he had walked into the skipper's cabin of a trawler tied up to the quay at Murmansk, he had never lost an opportunity to make conversation with the security men at the Northern Fleet headquarters and now at the Baltic Fleet headquarters. Gently and carefully, he had pumped, probed and joked, over vodka and beer, at picnics and receptions, with those men so that he might learn how they worked. Alone in his quarters, in his chair with the radio playing, in his bed in the darkness, the images of the surveillance teams and what he knew of them had played in his mind. They never left him.
A week ago it had only been a suspicion, but that suspicion had been sufficient for him to turn back. A bead of sweat ran down his neck and into the small of his back. A week ago, when he had known the first rise of the sweat through his pores, and the trembling in his hands, he had not been certain. His handlers had told him that it was always better to use the quiet road beside the lagoon than the main highway that was away to the east of his route. It was a rarely used road, with little traffic on it, which gave him a better chance to identify surveillance. His mind raced. He had the radio on in the Lada, but he seemed not to hear the shrieking announcer and the American music on the speakers. The black van had now stopped a hundred or so metres ahead of him. A tractor coming from behind him filled his interior and wing mirrors. Mud flew from its wheels and exhaust fumes from its stack.
A week before it had seemed sensible to turn back, although the risk was not confirmed. The tractor pulled a trailer of high-heaped beet past him and spattered the side windows and the body of the Lada, and a man waved to him. He did not wave back because his attention was now on the red and silver cars stationary 150 metres behind him. Gold autumn leaves wafted down on them. There was no doubt of it. He could not wriggle away from it, as he had last week, and tell himself that this was only a sensible precaution to take. The message from what he saw beat hammer blows in his skull. If they stopped ahead and behind him, they did not care whether or not he was aware of them. Perhaps they wanted him to run, drive at speed towards Mamonovo, and then the border post, wanted to shepherd him towards the fences, the dogs and the guns. There they would spill him out of the car, the handcuffs would go on his wrists and they would smile broadly because his running had confirmed the guilt. Or they would radio ahead, and there would be men waiting for him, men of the Federalnaya Pogranichnaya Sluzhba, with guns and dogs to track and hunt him down long before he reached the fence. He was trapped.
He eased the Lada into gear and drove forward. The package was wedged under his seat and in his jacket pocket was the unused, unopened strip of chewing-gum. He passed the black van and saw the red saloon and the silver car pull out. Then, in his mirror, he saw the black van pull off the verge and join the little convoy behind him. He thought, on this day and on the day a week before, that they did not have evidence of his treachery but suspicion of it. If he ran, if the package were found, their suspicion would turn to certainty. On his right side was a turning to Veseloe, and he swung into it. But he did not travel down that road to the small fishing village where the men caught trout, carp and pike in the lagoon for sale in Kaliningrad's fish market. He stopped, turned his wheel and reversed, then eased the Lada into the direction of Pjatidoroznoe, Laduskin and Usakovo. A gull might reach Braniewo, but he could not. If the package were found his reward would be a dawn shuffle into a prison yard and death. It would take him a little more than two and a half hours to drive back to the base at Baltiysk and his office. He should not panic. It was panic that they wanted from him. He should not help them. He did not look at the two cars as he went by them. He drove carefully and slowly, and it was only the thought of his friends that enabled him to keep steady hands on the wheel.
For the second week he had aborted his journey to the dead drop. He was a captain, second rank, of the Russian navy, Viktor Alexander Archenko.
The sentries on the main gate saluted him if they only carried sidearms on their webbing belts but came to attention and the present if they had rifles. He received the salutes and the rigid 'present arms' because his photograph was in the guardhouse, and all of the conscript sentries knew that he was a man of influence and power. The barrier was raised for him, then dropped behind his Lada.
Viktor was young for his rank.
Aged thirty-six, his power and influence were guaranteed because he served as chief of staff to Admiral Alexei Falkovsky, commander of the Baltic Fleet. It was said, in the guardhouse, that the admiral did not take a shit unless he had first consulted Viktor Archenko, and did not wipe his backside unless he had first asked Viktor Archenko which hand to use. But for all his authority and his closeness to the admiral's ear, he was well liked by the young men far from home who manned the guardhouse. They said he was fair, and there were few officers of whom that was believed.
He acknowledged the salutes with a brief, shallow wave and drove on.
In his mirrors he noted that his trio of watchers had parked up back from the gate and saw men climb out of the vehicles and light their cigarettes. One of them, from the black van, spoke into the sleeve of his padded coat.
With the package secured under his coat he walked away from his car and towards the block where senior officers without families were housed. If his heart pumped and his legs were weak, and if the package held tight under his coat seemed to be a lead weight gouging into his belly, he did not show it. He walked with a good stride. He was 1.85 metres tal
l, with fine blond hair that blew to a tangle in the wind off the sea, blue-grey eyes, and his nose was prominent. His cheekbones were strong, and his chin stronger. His skin was pale, as if he was used to spending his days in closed rooms and behind desks, not exposed to the Baltic weather. The impression his features gave was of a Germanic origin, something far from the ethnic Russian background listed on his file—his parents, on the file, were Pyotr and Irina Archenko. Only he and his friends, far away, knew the secret of the nationality of his grandmother and the story of his heritage. He was an impressive man, one who in a crowd would be immediately noticed, and there seemed an authority and decisiveness about him. Among the conscripts at the gate, and the fellow officers on the admiral's staff, it would be hard to believe of him that he lived a lie. A captain, third rank, who organized fleet exercises, was in the doorway he approached and laughed a greeting to him, then held out his hand for shaking, but Viktor could not reciprocate because the hand he would have used held the evidence of his betrayal. He smiled and hurried past.
When he went into his room, the warnings that had been given him by his friends at the meetings—when they had snatched the minutes for talk about his security—governed his movements. If he were under surveillance he must also assume that his room had been entered, that microphones and cameras had been installed. All of the previous week, since he had turned back from the journey to Malbork Castle, he had made the point of laying single hairs across the tops of the drawers in his desk, which fronted on to the window, and had always done it when he lifted from the drawers a clean shirt, underwear or socks. If his room had been searched, if they had gone through the room of a favoured officer on the admiral's staff, he would know they were confident of proving his guilt. When he took a handkerchief from the middle drawer he saw the hair that fell to his carpet. From that one hair, not more than two centimetres in length, he knew that his arrest was not imminent.
Was that a comfort?
His father had said, when the leukaemia rotted him, after there was no hope, it was better to finish life quickly and rush towards death. He had been dead a week later, had not fought the inevitable.
For Viktor Archenko, it would be long, slow, because the investigation would be thorough and patient. He stripped off and went into the small bathroom annexe, taking the package in its waterproof bag with him. He ran the shower and closed the opaque curtain round him. He removed a tile at the level of his ankles and laid the package in the cavity behind it, then replaced the tile, which was fastened at the corners with gum. It was the best place he knew of in his quarters.
When he dressed again it was in his formal uniform—what he wore in the outer office at his desk that faced the door to the admiral's suite. He felt calm now, but he knew that was a fraud. It would be bad in the night—it had been bad in the night for a week. He thought of his handlers and that helped to calm him, but when night came he would be tossed into the company of the men in the cars and the van, and he would see a pistol, hear it cocked, and feel the cold of the barrel against the skin of his neck.
Outside his block, a platoon of conscripts from Naval Infantry doubled towards him. In the second rank was the spindly wan-cheeked youth with the cavern chest and the concave belly from which his camouflage trousers sagged; wisps of almost silver hair curled from under his askew beret. He was bent under the weight of an NSV heavy machine-gun and was swathed in belts of ammunition that seemed to drag him further down. The conscript, burdened with the weapon, could not salute as the others did and their NCO, but grinned at him and Viktor nodded to him with friendship and correctness. In a few hours his handlers would know and that would be the test of their promises. There was a spit of rain in the air, and the wind carrying it was from the west and came off the sea. He smelt the tang of oil, debris and, seaweed, and headed for the dock area where he could walk undisturbed, where he could think how to save himself, because he did not know if the promises were true.
Behind him, the NCO shouted for the platoon of conscripts to hold their formation. The machine-gun was the dearest thing in Igor Vasiliev's life. Until he had been given the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun, nothing in his life had been kind to him.
His father, in Volgograd, had been a skilled sheet-metal worker in the steel factory, but it was now closed, and he drove a taxi. His mother had worked in the secretariat of the factory, and now sold flowers on the street. As old Russia, familiar and safe, crumbled, the family's fortunes had plummeted. They did not have the resources to be a part of the new Russia that the leaders said was vibrant and exciting. Poverty now stalked the family, and with it came a sense of shame and diffidence that was passed down to their son. He had been conscripted into the Naval Infantry. His thin body, girlish hair, long, delicate fingers and shyness had made him a regular target for the bullies—other conscripts and non-commissioned officers. He was a victim of the cult of dedovshchina. He did not know that the practice of brutality by conscripts and their fellows, by noncommissioned officers on their juniors, was encouraged by some senior officers: it was an escape valve, those officers considered, for the privations of the men, the irregular payment of their wages, their hunger through lack of food, their cold in winter because the military could not afford heating oil. He had not been hospitalized and he had not been subject to homosexual rape. But because his appearance was thought effeminate his kit had been trashed, he had been beaten and kicked, the skin on his back and below his stark ribcage had been burned with cigarettes.
At the time when the last spring had come hesitantly to Kaliningrad, and the ice on the lagoon had melted, his life had changed.
The base is built on the peninsula of sand that runs southwest from the mainland. Entry to the naval docks from the Baltic Sea is by a canal, 200 metres wide and regularly dredged to allow merchant shipping access to the port section of Kaliningrad city, via the Pregel river. West of the canal the sand spit runs on to the Polish border fifteen kilometres away. Those fifteen kilometres are the regular training ground for the naval infantry who share the 1000-metre wide spit with the artillery and the missile units. There was once a Luftwaffe field there, but the buildings are now used for close-quarters infantry combat firing and the land beyond is a scrubby waste cratered by shells and mortar bombs. Rising above the yellowed moonscape are the gaunt batteries of the air defence and ground-to ground tactical missiles, and beyond are the pine forests, the fence with the watchtowers, and Poland. Past the old airfield and the ground used by the artillery and for the missile launchings is a firing range for infantry weapons. The furthest point on the range between the target butts and the firing ditches is 2000 metres—the maximum distance at which the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun is effective. 43
On an April day of that year, the platoon had been on the range. The bullies had fired first, and Igor Vasiliev had huddled down in the depths of the trench with his hands over his ears. He had not been able to see the two-metre-high targets and had not known that each of the bullies had failed to register a hit. An officer had appeared and stood tall, erect, with his hands authoritatively clasped behind his back. He had watched for a few minutes as the messages came back from those below the targets that the firing was high, wide or short. Igor Vasiliev, the target of the bullies, had not been ordered forward by the senior NCO in charge of the platoon. Then the officer had asked if each man in the platoon had fired, whether they were all equally as incompetent as those he had seen shoot. The NCO, who was under the withering gaze of the captain, second rank, had called forward the twenty-one-year-old. Has he been instructed on the use of the weapon? the captain, second rank, had asked. And the NCO had stammered that this particular conscript had not yet fired the heavy machine-gun but would have heard the instructions given to others. The NCO had pushed the conscript into position, on his haunches with his knees raised, behind the weapon, and had gabbled through the theory of wind deflection and bullet drop. From the officer's dominating stature, it had been clear to every youth in the platoon, and to the NCOs, that if
Igor Vasiliev failed all of them would shoot until their shoulders were bruised and until their uniforms stank from the cordite emissions.
He had settled behind the heavy machine-gun, ground his haunches into the wet and cold of the sandy ground. A corporal lay on his stomach beside him to feed the belt, and the senior NCO had reached forward to check the sight and see it had not been moved. Let him do it, the captain, second rank, had said, let him make any adjustments that are necessary. It was late morning in spring, and the wind came from the east and flew the cone at full stretch from the mast. The wind strength would have been at a minimum of thirty kilometres. The conscript had looked at the cone, at the wave of the grasses, at a distant plastic rubbish bag that careered across the range…and he had fired.
Thunder blasted in his unprotected ears. He had to use his full strength to hold the machine-gun steady on its low tripod. Ten rounds in three bursts, then quiet had rested over the trench. They had all waited for the screech of the radio from the distant target butts. Five hits in a target that was two metres high and 1.5 metres wide.
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