by Alex Dryden
‘So. Who’s this Pablo?’ the man asked, and I translated for Finn. ‘How does he know of me?’
‘I don’t know how he knows you. He’s a cheat and a liar,’ Finn said. ‘That’s why the British employ him,’ he added.
‘The British?’
‘And others,’ Finn said. ‘Anyone who’ll pay him enough, in fact.’
‘How does he know about this place?’
‘I don’t know. He makes it his business to collect valuable information, that’s all I know.’
‘Maybe my father spoke to him once,’ the man said vaguely.
He pushed the briefcase to the centre of the table, as if he hadn’t yet decided whether to take the money or not, but Finn didn’t react. He just said, ‘I’ve told Pablo that if any accident happens to you, he’ll be dead in days.’
I looked at Finn in astonishment and saw that he was serious. It made me scared. But the man also saw he was serious and made the decision that Finn wanted.
‘I’ll show you something, then,’ he said.
He got up and walked through the door where he’d gone to get the beers. He was gone a long time, as if what he was bringing was buried very deep somewhere. Outside the sunset was now turning into a dull glow. I saw stars through the open door and a chill air was creeping into the house.
When he returned he was carrying an old leather knapsack of the kind one of his ancestors might have worn while sitting out on the mountain, guarding his flocks against wolves. He sat down and undid the one buckle that still worked and withdrew a waterproof plastic folder; from inside that he took out a buff A4 reinforced envelope for photographs.
He put five photographs on to the table, looked at them keenly, then pushed them across the table to Finn. He got up and fetched a bottle of some home-made mountain liqueur with what looked like a sprig of rosemary inside the bottle. It was dark now and he shut the door. He lit a fire already laid in a rough brick fireplace in the corner of the room.
Finn looked at the pictures. Three were faded and were older than the other two, which looked very recent; different paper, sharp and with a glossy look to them as if they’d recently been developed.
The farmer poured three shots of the liqueur and raised his glass.
‘To what are we drinking?’ he said.
Finn and I raised our glasses.
‘Let’s drink to your father,’ Finn said.
The farmer levelled his eyes at Finn.
‘It’s a good toast,’ he said finally, and we drank. Then the man began to speak.
‘In the spring of 1989,’ he began, ‘my father was working this farm. I wasn’t here back then. I was working in Switzerland. An intermediary, who my father later discovered was acting for one of the men in the pictures, came to him and requested that he rent this house for a weekend in that June. In return for the rent of the farmhouse here, he offered my father a hundred thousand dollars and also a week in the Canary Islands for him and his wife, which they were to take over the period of the weekend when the farmhouse was rented. My own mother died many years ago and this was his second wife,’ the man explained.
‘My father accepted the deal and the money was paid into an account set up for him in Vaduz. The two of them were given air tickets and a room was booked at the most expensive hotel on an island called Hierra. Very remote, even by the standards there. But my father didn’t go. Instead, he called me. I was working at the time on a dairy farm belonging to a distant relative over the border in Switzerland. I hadn’t been up here for many years at the time. I didn’t like his wife.
‘I met my father in Vaduz and he asked me to go with his wife on this holiday instead of him. We had the same first names and it would be easy for me to simply substitute myself for him. I didn’t want to. The idea of spending a week with his woman was repugnant to me. He offered to buy me a new car and I accepted. I was broke. So I went to Hierra and had a horrible time, drinking too much and trying to get away from her. We had to share a room to make it look right on the bill that the intermediary was paying. It wasn’t an enjoyable week.
‘And my father stayed behind in Liechtenstein. He told nobody but me and his wife. He kept it a secret. He hid out in an old shepherd’s hut a few miles over the mountain from here. He came up here in the early evenings of the weekend these men rented the place and stayed in the cover of the trees over there.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of the door. ‘There was a lot of security, he told me later, and that was as close as he could get. And he brought a camera with him. These are the pictures he took.’
The farmer separated the three older pictures and turned them round to face Finn.
‘The man on the far right you know. Most of the newspaper-reading public knows him.’
Finn and I bent over the first picture and looked at a tall, grey-haired figure. I recognised him immediately: a very senior, long-serving German politician from the political elite. Then I looked at the third figure from the right and recognised a KGB general, the SVR’s central Asian boss, who liaises with the Uzbeks and their drug cartels. In between these two was a man I didn’t know. Nor did I recognise the others. But Finn seemed to know everyone in the picture.
‘Quite an interesting weekend,’ Finn said.
‘These three pictures were taken in 1989,’ the farmer repeated. ‘And these I took earlier this year, when there was a second meeting here, between the same men.’
The two recent photographs were indeed the same group, shiny in the newness of the pictures.
‘They rented the farm up here for another weekend, fifteen years after they first took it. Maybe they’ve had other meetings, I’m sure they have, elsewhere. But this is what I have.’
He poured another shot of liqueur for each of us and raised his glass.
‘These are the kind of people who run our countries,’ he said. ‘To freedom from such men.’ Finn and I echoed the toast.
‘I don’t know why my father took the original pictures,’ the man mused quietly. ‘It was completely out of character. But I knew I had to do the same this year when they came back after all this time and, if only in memory of my father, I did.’
We left the farmer with the case of money and drove back down the track until we reached the road. Then Finn turned left, towards Germany, and we drove in silence for a while. I had the pictures on my lap, inside the stiff photograph envelope, inside the waterproof bag.
‘I wonder what he’ll do with all that money,’ Finn said, breaking the silence briefly. I guessed at how much of it there was from watching the farmer count the bundles and I was stunned by the cost.
‘He’ll probably hoard it up somewhere like all the mountain men,’ he continued. ‘The Troll, for example. I bet he turns out to be a multimillionaire when he dies.’
Once we were over the border and in Germany, Finn began to talk quietly about the men in the pictures.
‘There’s the German politician. He’s someone who might even become chancellor of Germany. And of course you know the KGB general, Anna. Then there’s a citizen of the former East Germany, a man called Dietz, who’s now a billionaire from his supermarket chains. And next to him to the left is a Swede called Bengsten. He’s an arms manufacturer. The old guy on the far right is an ex-Nazi, former SS. His name’s Reiter. He’s in his early eighties now and still running his business with the same efficiency as he ran his SS unit in 1945. He owns, lock, stock and barrel, the third-largest trucking company in Europe. But Reiter isn’t his real name, of course. He’s one of the brothers of Otto Roth. And finally, the last figure in the picture is Otto Roth himself.’
34
FINN AND I FLEW to Bucharest one early morning in July. He seemed to have very detailed instructions about how to enter Transdnestr undetected. I asked him if it was a route he’d ever used himself, but all he said was that this was one of Willy’s entry points into the Ukraine, through Transdnestr, from many years before when the Wall was still in place. And just a few days before we arrived, Willy had been back to chec
k his old route still worked.
We stayed the night in Bucharest and watched a film and ate at a café in the vast Stalinist square that Ceausescu had built to glorify his empty rule; empire architecture without an empire. On the following day we took another plane, this time to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
The whole operation Finn had planned depended on the arrival and departure times of Reiter’s trucks. If our, or Dieter’s, information was correct, we knew the date of the next shipment that a truck of Reiter’s would be taking out of Transdnestr. What we needed to find out was where it would cross the border into the European Union.
I was accustomed to Finn’s disappearances and he left the hotel in Bucharest at nine o’clock that evening because he’d ‘run out of cigarettes’. The trip to buy them eventually took him over an hour. ‘They didn’t have my brand anywhere,’ he complained when he returned.
Maybe he had met Mikhail there, in Bucharest that night, or perhaps there was a drop arranged between them somewhere in the city.
Over supper that evening, Finn told me what little he knew of Transdnestr and I filled in the large gaps in his knowledge.
‘In London, we call it the Cuba of Europe,’ he said. ‘But I bet it’s much worse than that. Hardly anyone’s even heard of the place. It’s far more obscure than Cuba. Transdnestr doesn’t even officially exist. Even your people in Moscow who support it don’t recognise it as a country.’
The Russian puppet regime, which runs Transdnestr, issues its own currency, but it is not recognised anywhere else; it manages its own borders, even though no borders officially exist. It needs our army, which it calls a peacekeeping force, to maintain control.
‘It’s about the only place left that still looks like the Soviet Union did fifty years ago,’ I told Finn. ‘The 13th Army’s there, but we actually use the place as a secret training camp for the spetsnaz. I’ve trained there myself. But its real importance–i its raison d’être is as a marketplace for illegal arms deals, and as our “offshore” money-laundering centre.’
Up in the bedroom after supper, Finn laid out various maps of the region on the bed. Google Earth was of little use and he had an air map and another map of Willy’s from ‘a hundred years ago’, Finn said, which was probably the most useful. They showed a flat plain. To the east was the Ukrainian steppe, with Odessa on the Black Sea a mere seventy miles away: to the west was Moldova, to which Transdnestr actually belongs by international law, even though it is ignored by those who run the enclave and by Russia itself. Hence the Russian ‘peacekeeping’ force.
‘The way we control the place is by giving it free oil, gas and electricity,’ I told him. ‘The army’s there to exercise control and to ensure the necessary muscle is there if needed. Essentially the enclave’s run by our own people: former Russian special forces and KGB officers. Most of them were stationed in the Baltic republics before eighty-nine, before the Wall came down. And most of them are wanted by Interpol for crimes committed before the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’ve all changed their names now, of course.’
‘Another bad fairy tale,’ Finn said. ‘A make-believe state.’
‘Make-believe but real. There’re two thousand square miles of flat steppe and cultivated fields, from which everyone except the nomenklatura chisels a meagre livelihood for forty dollars a month,’ I said. ‘Essentially the SVR runs the economy. There are two main companies and they control everything. They’re both overseen by the self-styled “president” of the enclave. The boss of the first company is a senior commander of the MVD branch of the KGB. The second company makes arms and is controlled directly from Moscow, mainly from the Russian Ministry of Defence, but it also makes arms on the side for illegal export.’
‘And Reiter’s trucks go to one of these two companies?’ Finn asked.
‘They have to. Apart from these two companies there’s nothing else in the place except second-rate vegetables.’
We studied Willy’s map and Finn traced with his finger a small road back westwards from the so-called ‘capital’, Tiraspol, a city with no airport, towards the River Dniester, which separates the enclave from Moldova.
‘The river protects its borders, and Willy says the bridges are well guarded,’ Finn said. ‘But a river’s a river. It’s porous. This is where we cross.’
He pointed to a lonely stretch midway between two bridges.
‘There are patrols along the banks, of course, but Willy has a good record. He’s crossed here half a dozen times in the past when it was more closely guarded. He’s given me an updated study of how their patrols behave, what we can expect.’
Finn and I left Chisinau at midday and took a bus to within six miles of the river on the Moldovan side of the border and began to walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, larks sang, motionless, over the cornfields, and we stopped and ate a picnic we’d bought before we left. Then we set off again in the late afternoon.
When we were little more than a mile away, we sat on a small grassy hill surrounded by fields planted with sunflowers. It was pleasantly warm; the summer temperature lulled us.
A woman working in the fields, or maybe she was a gypsy from a camp nearby, stopped and offered us some kvint, the local brandy. We drank and exchanged nods and smiles. I didn’t want to speak Russian in front of her. We told her we were Ingliski. When she’d gone, we took the precaution of walking in the opposite direction we’d been heading, until nightfall. Then we retraced our steps to the river.
About two hours after darkness descended we reached the river and walked along the bank of the Dniester for another four and a half miles southwards, along the Moldovan side. Finn saw the small hut disguised with branches for the purpose of duck shooting that Willy had used in the past. Next to the hut, under a small cover of woven branches, was a skiff that was tucked into the bank and tied to a wooden post. It was just as Willy had described it to Finn. Two oars tied by a new rope were attached on the inside of the skiff.
There was no moon and in nearly complete darkness I slung my small backpack into the skiff and untied it from the post. Finn said the current would take us automatically to the centre of the river. I lay down inside and Finn lay on top of me. He pushed us off from the bank with his foot and we were away.
Willy was right. The current bounced off this side of the river and took whatever floated into the centre of the stream. Once we’d reached the centre of the river, we’d have to propel the boat, and using just one oar, over the stern like a gondola, Finn fought for several minutes to push us beyond the fast-flowing central stream to where the current moved us slowly over towards the far side. After about a mile, with us both lying in the bottom of the boat and Finn struggling with the oar, I sensed we were heading slowly towards the opposite bank to the place where we intended to land.
Here, the river curved away in the opposite direction and the current was in our favour again, taking us towards the bank. We drifted with our heads below the sides of the skiff.
On this bend in the river, there was thick woodland and, according to Willy, no observation post for half a mile on either side. We drifted until the skiff bounced along a high bank and Finn grabbed an overhanging branch. We lay in the boat and waited, listening for dogs or shouting or warning shots, and catching our breath. Slowly, Finn crawled over the side of the skiff and half swam, half pulled himself with the branch to the bank. I threw my backpack to him when he’d climbed up the bank and followed him. We collected stones to put in the skiff and sank it. Finn tied the painter on to a branch that dipped beneath the water; we’d be returning another way, but it was a good precaution if things went wrong.
We waited at the edge of the wood under cover until we could be sure no sentries were close or troop manoeuvres were taking place nearby and then crossed a dust track into some fields of vines. They provided the cover we needed to reach a road on the far side of several fields, where we could wait out of sight for a bus that came sometime after dawn.
It was a short journey by
bus to the border town of Bendery. By mid-morning we had reached the town, with its statues of Lenin still in place, fifteen years after the Soviet Union collapsed. We were two British backpackers, fascinated by this frozen piece of history, on a walking holiday.
The town of Bendery lay further north back upriver from where we’d landed. The capital Tiraspol has some modern buildings paid for with mafia money, and a huge new stadium, but Bendery has very few modern structures. Both cities are museums of Soviet architecture, but thanks to its border position with Moldova, Bendery’s few modern buildings are paid for from legal and illegal cross-border traffic.
The two companies we were interested in, which are effectively Transdnestr’s economy, were both based in Bendery. The first place Finn wanted me to look for Reiter’s trucks was located in the barbed-wire fenced yards of Pribor, Transdnestr’s arms manufacturer, controlled by the shadow state company Salyut in Russia.
We knew we were at the point of no return, illegal entrants into an illegal country, one of us an SVR officer, and the other a British spy. There was nothing we could do now if things went wrong. I’d be escorted to Moscow. And Finn? I didn’t know what they’d do with him, but I doubted he’d choose to be captured alive.
It was in a café, about a mile or so from the Pribor factory, that Finn and I went our different ways. His job was to find a car, mine to enter the factory. A car hire company, if one existed in Transdnestr, was out of the question and he’d have to buy a car with cash.
Both of us were nervous. I saw the rationale behind the practice at the Forest- and I’m sure at MI6- that two people in an intimate relationship were never sent together on an assignment. It was distracting me now. Leaving Finn was uppermost in my mind when I should have been thinking about the job.
‘We could have a coffee, if you like, Rabbit,’ he said. ‘Or we could just go home.’
I put my arms around him and whispered in his ear.
‘I love you, Finn.’