The commander had attacked this position as being as serviceable for a czar, or for any other feudal leader, as for the Communist party. He asked why Denia had joined the party.
"Because our family was given three potatoes by a party member."
"For three potatoes you committed your life?" Stalin had asked.
"We were hungry, comrade chairman."
No one else in the room had noticed Stalin's eyes narrow ever so slightly, nor had they perceived that ever so slight nod. Gregory had been dismissed immediately by his superior. When he showed up the next morning at temporary headquarters in the remodeled Baptist Church, he found himself alone and wondered if headquarters had been moved. It hadn't. He was now commander, while still in his twenties. He never saw the others again, nor did he ask about them.
He had seen Stalin only once more, and that was during the early days of the great war, when Nazi troops roamed freely over western lands.
There had been a hundred officers of his rank about to return to the field. He was organizing partisans behind the lines. Each officer had passed by Stalin and been introduced.
When it was Denia's turn, Stalin had smiled.
"Three potatoes," he had said.
"Three," had answered the then Colonel Denia.
A staff general had leaned over to explain some of Denia's recent heroic deeds. Stalin interrupted him with a brief wave of the hand.
"I know, I know," he had said. "The fiercest man on earth is a Russian with three potatoes in his belly."
It was a dirty war beyond anything seen since the barbaric hordes had slaughtered whole populations. To see what the Germans had done was beyond the hardness of even the NKVD. And then, of course, came the touchy stalking war with the west. Denia knew it would be a long one.
Three potatoes, he thought, as the Zil limousine moved quietly to the underground garage of the building on the square. He took a small elevator, one man only, to the codes room, and there he met a colonel in charge of one thing, a general in charge of another thing, and a halfdozen captains in charge of something else. There were maps and charts, and there were serious faces and people saluting all over the place and giving low toned ominous warnings about this and that.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, I've got to pee," he said. "Go on with your briefing." He left the door open so he could hear everything they said. Some men turned their eyes away. Babies, he thought. Little ladies. The big bad KGB had turned into a bunch of little ladies.
He went back to the table.
"All right. Now I have heard about twenty reasons each of you is important to the survival of the state. But I have not been given any hard information. Let me give you two bits of hard information, five minutes apiece to think, and then we will do this all over again. One. My Treska unit is on the attack, mopping up against a defeated enemy. Therefore things do not go according to every little dot on every little piece of paper. You don't hear from people for weeks. That's all right. Secondly, what does Vassilivich say? He is the only worrier I respect."
No one waited five minutes. Vassilivich had not made his checks for three days. Auxiliary units had discovered the following men dead, they told him.
Denia listened to the long list. He took a red pencil from one of the officers standing over a map. He asked for the approximate times of the deaths, then he wrote in the times next to towns Naples, Farfa, Athens, Rome.
"You said Ivan Mikhailov?"
"Yes, Major Mikhailov is dead."
"How?"
"Blunt instrument of some sort. Tremendous pressure."
"Of course. It would have to be," said Denia, remembering the incredible strength of the young giant. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. There was an autopsy. Major Mikhailov had enough rat poison in his veins to fell a battalion, but apparently it did not kill him."
"And no word from Vassilivich?"
"None."
Denia did not wish to express his suspicions at this moment, because things once said could never be brought back to safe silence and who knew what any of these heel clicking, saluting ladyniks would do.
"You're all jabbering about some great sudden assault by massive units, but I'll tell you something none of you has even mentioned yet. Look at my markings on the map. Look at the times. Look."
There was much talking about CIA backup teams, a rolling assault by multiple units, each going into action when the other had completed its mission.
One officer with an acne-ravaged face and sunken cheeks and thinning gray hair combed starkly to each side talked of a multinational chain reaction on isolated units. A conspiracy against Russia, possibly emanating from the Vatican.
Denia belched. He hadn't heard that sort of nonsense since a brief stop-over in London, where British journalists had offered to sell any sort of story about anyone for a price.
An aide asked what the journalists meant.
"Would you like to read about America poisoning the Atlantic? The Israelis committing secret acts of war? The Danish government murdering children for cannibalism? The Dutch being secret racists? British journalism is the most lively money can buy. You name it and we'll write it. Books, of course, cost more than articles. But I guarantee, m'lord, there's nothing some of us can't write for a price. Want to read about the Pope's love affairs? His illegitimate children?"
"What love affairs? What illegitimate children?" the aide had asked.
"You pay for 'em and we'll write about 'em."
And this was all right for British journalism, but for serious men who dealt with life-and-death realities, it was appalling. So Denia belched, and he noticed an officer wince.
"Have any of you ever heard of an automobile?" asked Denia.
All the officers in the room without windows nodded that they had. A few cleared their throats. They avoided revealing glances at each other. Of course, they had heard of automobiles. What was the old man talking about?
"Can you all read wristwatches?" Denia asked.
Again the nods.
"Can you count?"
Yes, they could count. Would the most honored Marshal be more specific?
Denia put the red crayon on Rome.
"Imagine this red mark is a car. Puttputtputt goes the car. Rrrrrr goes the engine. Down this road, it goes whoooossh," said Denia. The pencil went from Rome to Naples. "Now we are in sunny Napoli. It is noon. Last night we were in Rome. Ah, here we go, we're heading north to Farfa. Puttputtputt. Whoooosh. Vroom. We are not even driving especially quickly. Now we go back to Rome and get on an airplane. It is a pretty airplane. It flies to Athens. Wheeee. Vroooom. Whooosh. Now it lands at Athens. What a pretty flight."
"Oh," said one officer who suddenly realized what Denia was talking about. Of course. They had all been so involved in gigantic plots and multiple killer teams that no one had noticed one simple fact. The old warhorse had seen it at once.
"It's not a massive counterattack at all," said the young officer.
"Welcome to reality," said Marshal Denia.
"It's only one team. They went from one unit to another, of course. And undoubtedly that executive officer is helping them because he is the only one who is connected to the various teams. He has defected and is leading that killer team to each of our units," the young officer said.
"Wrong," said Denia loudly. "Absolutely wrong."
"Why?" said the young officer. Denia thought quickly. Something like this could get out of hand. And he had worked too long with Vassilivich to surrender the man to some Kremlin suspicion, where people slept cozily and safely and did not know what it was like to have someone put the barrel of a pistol to your belly and threaten to spread your insides into the nearest gutter.
"Because," said Denia.
"Because why, comrade marshal?" asked the officer.
"Because this is the way it was," he said, thinking clearly. "The Sunflower, our counterpart in the CIA, was becoming outmoded, obsolete. Why was it becoming obsolete? Because America had a much more effective kill
er team. What to do? What best way to take advantage of this new technique? Let our Treska expose itself by getting rid of what America would have to retire anyway. How to do this? Take away their weapons under the pretext of not wanting another international incident. Why else would Americans leave themselves defenseless? Is anyone here so stupid as to believe America would expose itself defenseless to this world?"
One officer thought America could be that stupid. He listed events of American foreign policy.
Denia said if the officer wanted to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he should do so. This was KGB.
"What Vassilivich has done, what this great and brilliant and courageous and loyal officer has done, is simply to save the party and the people of Russia. While ladyniks in the safety of the Dzerzhinsky Square building spin out fairy tales like Englishmen."
A liaison officer from the Red Navy took umbrage at being called English. Even being a marshal in the KGB did not give him the right to call another human being an Englishman.
"I am sorry your feelings are hurt. I only used English as a reference point. I did not even mean Englishman but English journalism as an example of silliness. I have great respect for the Red Navy and, it might surprise you, for the British Navy, and, it might surprise you even more, for most British. Now is everyone happy?"
The Naval officer accepted the apology.
"Good," said Denia and slapped the officer hard across the face. "Now, remember who I am. Marshal Denia who knows how to use his brains in combat, and yes, I do mean to insult every one of you for not realizing that just as the Sunflower was obsolete for the Americans, so was the Treska unit for us. Because, you dummies, the Treska and the Sunflower were all but identical."
Stunned heads nodded. Even the officer whose right cheek was a red welt nodded. There was a reason why Denia was a leader of men, and now he was showing it.
"General Vassilivich is directing their new weapon against our Treska units, not to destroy us, but to offer up the lives of his comrades so we will be able to see what their new weapon is and counteract it. What he is doing is, granted, ruthless, but brilliant. We are taking one step backward to be able to take two forward. Gentlemen, America may have started this, but I tell you now, we will finish it."
He slammed his fist on the table.
"You have my life on it," he said with finality. "Keep your heads, ladyniks, and welcome to the world of the cold war."
He knew he did not have to add that his life depended on it. Of course it did. But it made a great dramatic impression just to say it. He was not as bold as the other officers might think. Massive failure of his units would probably mean death anyway, or something akin to it, like prison. And, calculating probabilities, Denia had decided that Vassilivich was either dead or doing exactly what Denia had said he was doing. All life was the edge of the sword.
Without those three potatoes, he might have starved to death anyway.
By 4:55 a.m. Moscow Time, Vassilivich, beautiful, intellectual Vassilivich, started justifying his commander's faith. A lower-rank consul in Athens had picked up a note thrown from a rented car. It was three words. Put together, they showed Vassilivich was alive and a captive.
By late afternoon of the next day, a Swedish unit had gotten a long note left outside a small chalet where the crushed bodies of the Gamma unit were found, their guns unfired, their knives still sheathed. Vassilivich was undoubtedly desperate. The note was handwritten on the back of five empty cigarette pack linings. It was not in code. It read:
D. New U.S. weapon. One man. Unusual abilities. What is Sinanju? Special methods. Giant trap. Treska units useless. One male, six feet tall, brown eyes, high cheekbones, thin, thick wrists, called Remo. Travels with Oriental who may be friend, teacher, poet? Called Chiun. Old. Sinanju the key. Long live sword and shield. V.
Denia called a special meeting in a room he had set up. More than a hundred officers from various branches of the KGB were present. He outlined the situation. There would be two steps: first, find out what this new unit was; second, destroy it. In those five shiny cigarette wrappers was the key. It was their job to unlock the puzzle, and Denia's job to wreak final revenge. The new unit designed to combat the American weapon would be named the Vassilivich group, in honor of Vassily Vassilivich, who was undoubtedly dead.
On the banks of the beautiful river Seine, Marshal Denia was being proven correct once again.
Vassilivich had himself broken the key of Sinanju. The Korean Chiun was one in a line of Masters of Sinanju that stretched back for untold centuries. If one took all the martial arts and traced their connections to each other and the history of the development of each, one might be able to calculate that perhaps all of them had come from a single source, most powerful at its center. Unlike television sets, martial arts became weaker as they became newer. There "were no improvements in martial arts, only deteriorations, a slow dwindling away of essence, like radioactivity wearing out. The man Chiun was not a poet. It was even conceivable that he was more powerful than Remo.
Several times the comments "sun source" and "breathing" had been passed between the two in English. With breathing, these people were capable of harnessing the normal human body to its full potential. There was nothing miraculous about it at all. Moreover, if scientists ever got into the mysteries of Sinanju, they would probably discover how man had really survived on the ground before he organized into hunting parties and invented weapons. Barehanded man might at one time have been as strong as the sabretooth.
Sinanju, in some way, had harnessed normal human potential, which, interestingly, Vassilivich thought, brought up something from the old Christian religions. Christ had said it: you have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear. Perhaps Christ had not been making a moral statement after all.
"Okay, fella, what are you writing?" asked Remo.
"Nothing," said Vassilivich.
"That's it for you," said Remo, and suddenly Vassilivich's eyes did not see, nor did his ears hear, nor did his body feel the Seine splash over him.
But it did not matter.
In the Dzerzhinsky Square building, Marshal Gregory Denia was getting the answers he wanted, and his tactical solution, he thought, was brilliant. If not biblical.
CHAPTER SIX
Ludmilla Tchernova noticed a blemish. Two inches below and slightly to the left of her left breast bloomed ever so slight a kiss of red on the immaculate, smooth white body. The breasts rose in youthful firmness, capped by mounds so perfectly round they looked as if they had been designed by a draftsman's compass. The waist narrowed in gentle tautness to creamy hips that billowed just enough to establish womanhood, and no more.
The neck was a graceful ivory pedestal for the crowning gem: the face of Ludmilla Tchernova.
She had the kind of exquisite face that made other women want to go back to veils. When she entered a room, wives would kick husbands in the shins just to remind them they were still on earth. Her smile could get a rabid Communist to say mass on his knees. She made the average young Russian woman look like a tractor trailer.
She had violet eyes set in the perfection of a pale symmetry composed of a graceful nose and lips that looked as if they were almost artificial in their delicate pinkness. But that they were real showed when she smiled. Ludmilla Tchernova had fourteen different smiles. Her happiness and gentle acquiescence smiles were her best. Her worst was the smile of sudden joy. She had been working on sudden joy for a month now, watching children when she gave them ice cream cones.
"Hello, dear, this is for you," she would say. And she would watch the child's lips carefully. Sudden joy tended to take two forms. One was a delayed action, which was very hard to get just right, and the other was an explosion of the lips, very wide. She could do the explosion, but, as she had told her uncle, who was a general on the Committee for State Security (KGB), it lacked force, and sometimes, if one looked closely, it could be misinterpreted as cruelty. She certainly did not want to look cruel when she intended
to express sudden joy.
She had a major of the KGB, female, assigned to her. Lately this major had been picking up ice cream cones, cleaning the dirt off them, and handing them back to children. For as soon as Ludmilla had seen the smile she wanted, she tended to discard the cone.
"I'm not here to feed the masses," she had answered when the female major suggested that, with a little more effort, she might continue handing the ice cream cone forward until the child had a firm grasp on it. "I serve the party in a different way. If I wanted to feed children, I would have become a nurse. And it would be a waste of a great natural resource which I have chosen to give to the party and to the people."
"A little kindness cannot hurt," said the major, not especially known for a soft heart but who, in Ludmilla's presence, tended to think of herself as St. Francis of Assisi.
She was a relatively attractive Volga German with blond hair and blue eyes, clean features and an attractive body. Next to Ludmilla, she looked like a light heavyweight boxer at the end of his career. Ludmilla Tcheirnova could make a rainbow look plain.
Now there was a great problem, and as Ludmilla stared at the blemish beneath her left breast, she demanded of Major Natasha Krushenko what she had been fed the night before.
"Strawberries and fresh cream, Madame."
"And something else. There had to be something else." The voice was heavy with anger, but the face was calm. Grimaces could cause wrinkles.
"There was nothing else, Madame."
"There had to be to explain this blemish."
"The human body produces substances that create blemishes. It will disappear."
"Of course it will disappear. It's not your body."
"Madame, I have many blemishes like that."
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