Patriots

by Kevin Doherty

  PATRIOTS

  KEVIN DOHERTY

  © Kevin Doherty 1988

  Kevin Doherty has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 as A Long Day’s Dying by Sidgwick & Jackson Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Roz, with love and thanks

  Table of Contents

  PATRIOTS

  KEVIN DOHERTY

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART TWO

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  PART THREE

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  AFTERWORD

  Cast of Characters

  Soviet Union

  Nikolai Vasiliyevich Serov, general in the KGB and head of its First Chief Directorate

  Gramin, Serov’s bodyguard and official driver

  Sergei, Serov’s secretary in the First Chief Directorate

  Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

  Abel Aganbegyan, economist

  Galina, sculptress and painter

  Katarina, Galina’s mother

  Georgi Fedorovich Zavarov, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Supreme Commander of All Armed Forces; member of the Politburo

  Olga, Zavarov’s wife; mathematician and academic

  Ratushny, Zavarov’s valet and major-domo

  Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev, senior Politburo member and head of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; member of the Politburo

  Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, head of the KGB; member of the Politburo

  Vladimir Chernavin, inspector in the Department for Struggle Against Embezzlement of Socialist Property and Speculation

  Eduard Borisovich Gulyaev, director of Food Shop Number One, also known as Yeliseyev’s

  Glassov, police superintendent

  Genrikh Kunaev, retired KGB major

  Lysenko, drug addict

  Mukhin, officer in Moscow CID

  Stepun, officer in Moscow CID

  Mikhail Tikhrus, Aeroflot clerk

  Sinsky, manager of Serov’s Byelorussian estate

  Valyukev, KGB major-general responsible for rezidentura operations in Western Europe

  Ogarkin, professor of the Serbskiy Institute of Forensic Psychiatry

  Smolny, director of the Foreign Trade Bank, Moscow

  England

  Edmund Knight, director of counter-espionage, MI5

  Eva, Knight’s colleague

  Sir Marcus Cunningham, outgoing Director General of MI5

  Horace Gaunt, new Director General of MI5

  Joss Franklyn, head of operational surveillance, MI5

  Dick Sumner, head of the Soviet section of counter-espionage, MI5

  Martin Kellaway, head of political penetration and monitoring, MI5

  Marie-Thérèse, Roman Catholic nun and schoolteacher

  William Clarke, Home Secretary

  Marion, Clarke’s wife

  George, Clarke’s driver

  Fielding, Clarke’s Special Branch bodyguard

  Viktor Genrikovich Kunaev, senior cipher clerk, London rezidentura

  Anna Kunaev, Viktor’s wife

  Andrei Kunaev, Viktor and Anna’s son

  Aleksandr Lyulkin, KGB colonel; chief of the London rezidentura

  Matt Parrish, specialist MI5 interrogator

  Ibraham Abukhder, student pilot

  Doug Riley, journalist

  Billy Bowman, young man in Knight’s village

  Middle East

  Saleem Ibn Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi prince and half-brother of King Fahd

  King Fahd, ruler of Saudi Arabia

  Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Oil Minister

  Muammar Al-Gadaffi, Libyan leader

  PART ONE

  1

  Moscow, the first week of November

  The church was no more than a stone shell, cleared of its pews. At intervals around the walls tidemarks recorded where the Stations of the Cross had hung. Electric cables had erupted from their perished sleeves and dangled uselessly from the vaulted ceiling.

  As first light began to seep through the grimy windows of the east chancel, Nikolai Vasiliyevich Serov withdrew deeper into the shadows of the upper gallery. Of the people gathered in the nave below him, only the man called Gramin knew that he was there.

  The place was as cold as a tomb. Serov ran his gloved hand over the wall beside him, where an uneven film of ice, a couple of centimetres thick in places, reflected the glow of his thin cigar. Icicles hung overhead where rain and sleet had penetrated the stripped roof.

  A shout, Gramin’s hoarse bark and not the first that morning, rang out from the nave.

  ‘Liar! I saw you talking to the Jew in the Lyublino street market. I heard you haggling with him. I saw what you sold him. Why don’t you just own up?’

  Serov shifted position slightly to bring Gramin into view. With his flat nose and broad body, he looked like the boxer he had been in his army days. The man he was interrogating, if that was what it could be called, was an elderly glass worker called Yezhov. He knelt on the stone floor at Gramin’s feet, his wrists tied behind his back. He was weeping, his shoulders heaving irregularly. Unless he was very stupid indeed, he would know what was coming. Everyone else did.

  There were about thirty people watching the two men, ranged in an untidy semicircle near them. Coarse clothes, gaunt faces, the dregs of the city. Serov knew most of the faces but few of their names. That was Gramin’s job, to know names.

  ‘Yezhov! Look at me! What would happen if everyone helped themselves like you did?’

  Gramin smashed his fist backhanded across Yezhov’s mouth. If he hadn’t been holding him upright with his other hand, the blow would have sent him flying. Yezhov groaned. His head slumped forward, blood pouring from his swollen lips.

  ‘Or if you’d been traced back here?’

  The fist connected again. A dark stain was spreading down Yezhov’s trousers. A puddle of urine began to form around his knees; it mingled with the blood and flowed between the slabs, flooding the cracks in their broken surface.

  ‘You’d have us in Lefortovo, all of us.’

  Gramin’s arm swept around to encompass the silent audience. The performance was really for their benefit, Yezhov being by now as good as unconscious. Anyway, he wasn’t going to be around to profit from their exchange.

  ‘You know what’s going to happen now, Yezhov. You know the rules. Like we all do.’

  They watched impassively as he forced a bundle of rags into Yezhov’s mouth and tied it in position as a gag, then pulled him to his feet and manhandled him past the altar with its shattered slab and up the steps to the pulpit. At the top, he grabbed the noose that swung from a crossbeam and slipped it over Ye
zhov’s scrawny neck.

  ‘Here we go, citizens!’

  At the touch of the rope, Yezhov came to and made a feeble attempt to struggle. Gramin rammed a knee into his groin.

  ‘Here’s today’s lesson.’ He draped an arm over the pulpit and parodied the sign of the cross. ‘Remember it well, all of you. The same could be coming your way.’

  He let go of Yezhov’s arms and pushed him hard in the buttocks. What would have been a scream was choked by the gag to a whine, cut short as Yezhov’s body fell away from the pulpit and down, and the noose snapped tight about his neck. There was a soft crack as his neck broke. His head was jerked to one side by the sudden pressure of the knot and his body jackknifed. He swung irregularly to the end of the rope’s arc, seemed to hover for an instant, and then began to swing back over the broken altar. Blood welled afresh from his smashed lips.

  Serov checked his watch in the cigar’s glow. Yezhov was already weakened by the interrogation; he would die quickly. That was no problem; it left longer for his companions to absorb Gramin’s lesson.

  Outside it was growing lighter. Sunlight reflecting off the snow, undimmed where it found broken window panes, slanted across the nave. Tiny strands of hemp, rubbed loose by the friction of the noose, floated through the bars of light. There was silence but for the drip of Yezhov’s blood on the altar slab.

  Serov waited while the minutes ticked away.

  *

  The sound of the approaching lorry began as a faint buzz in the distance. The revving grew louder and deeper as the vehicle ascended the icy hill to the Church of the Saviour, gears hitching as it wound through the streets of derelict houses. By the time the vehicle arrived outside, the noise was a throbbing growl, felt as much as heard. More revving and the high-pitched note of a warning bleeper indicated that the lorry was reversing towards the church door.

  The explosive hiss of its airbrakes was the signal for action.

  ‘All right, let’s move!’ called Gramin.

  At once the people in the nave snapped into action, fanning out across the width of the church. Gramin clattered down the pulpit steps to stand by the arched doors, stopping there to survey the scene.

  Serov followed his gaze.

  The thirty workers were dispersing themselves into a chain that led across the nave from the main doors and through a smaller door by the north transept. The chain continued down a flight of stone steps to a crypt that ran the width and length of the church. Serov knew that the sides of the crypt were divided into vaults a metre square and almost two metres deep, each closed by a stone slab with a draw handle of iron in its centre. He knew this because he had watched Gramin break open the vaults months before, clearing out onto the floor their muddle of brown bones, skulls, rags and dust.

  Now it was Gramin who raised the thick iron strip that barred the church doors and dragged them wide open.

  The brightness of the snowy morning flooded in, making Serov blink. He made out the silhouette of the lorry driver, already in position with the first box.

  It was by now a well-practised routine. Gramin stepped smartly aside as the driver thrust the box at the first man in the chain. It passed along the line and down into the crypt. Seconds behind it the second box followed.

  On the sixth or seventh box, and into the rhythm of his work, the driver allowed himself to glance up and into the church. Yezhov’s body had stopped revolving and hung motionless from the crossbeam over the altar.

  ‘God in heaven save us!’ The driver’s voice carried clearly in the sub-zero air. His gauntleted hands fell to his sides. Behind him his mate on the lorry’s loading ramp hefted another box towards where his outstretched arms should have been, cursing when he found nothing but empty air. He dumped the fifteen-kilogram carton on the tailgate and jumped down to see what had taken the driver’s attention.

  ‘He stole some of our stock,’ Gramin was explaining. ‘Sold it independently.’

  The ribbon of workers stood waiting.

  ‘You hanged him for that?’ This from the mate; the driver, a wiser man, was saying nothing.

  ‘No choice.’ Frozen billows of condensation blew from Gramin’s lips. ‘Rules, you see. Can’t have people going into business for themselves. Can we, citizens?’ He leered at the two men, then laughed softly. ‘You wouldn’t think of doing such a thing, would you?’

  The laugh grew more boisterous and he slapped the driver’s shoulder, then walked off along the line. He took hold of Yezhov’s foot as he passed and sent the corpse spinning again. He was still laughing as he went down the steps to the crypt.

  *

  It took only half an hour to unload the contents of the lorry – East German beef today – into the vaults and slide the closing slabs back into position to protect them from rodents. At this time of year, in this weather, it would keep almost indefinitely.

  Gramin broke open a few of the cartons and distributed packages of the frozen meat to the workforce as payment. They buttoned them under their coats, shivering as the temperature hit them, and hurried off.

  Serov came downstairs to watch Gramin clear up. Only one clue remained of their presence: Yezhov’s body. Gramin cut it down and lugged it by the heels to the crypt, bumping the head on the steps like a sack of coal. He crammed it into one of the vaults and sealed the closing slab with some cement that Yezhov himself had mixed earlier. Next he broke the thin skin of ice that was forming on a bucket of water he had left by the stairs. Dabbing a rag into it he rubbed off the steps here and there where the head had grazed and left faint traces of blood. The remainder of the water he sloshed across the puddle of blood and urine on the altar.

  As his last job he fetched a shovel from the east corner of the crypt and loaded it with dust. He returned upstairs and scattered it over the most obvious traces of footprints on the church floor. He repeated this several times, going patiently up and down the steep stairs to reload. He threw a whole shovelful on top of the already freezing water on the altar.

  All the while Serov stood in the doorway, smoking. He had ungloved his left hand to hold the cigar. His right was deep in the pocket of his black leather greatcoat.

  After fetching his last shovelful Gramin set it down by the crypt door, careful not to spill it, and padlocked the door securely. He backed towards Serov, spreading dust behind him as he went.

  ‘That’s it, comrade General,’ he grunted.

  ‘I’ve told you not to call me that here.’

  ‘Apologies.’

  Serov flipped the cigar butt out through the half-open door. He took a wad of folded banknotes, a mix of roubles and assorted foreign currencies, from his left pocket and handed it over.

  ‘For your additional duties today.’

  Gramin grinned broadly and propped the shovel against the wall. He took the wad of notes and turned to leave, his attention focused on the cash.

  His forehead hit the oak door with a resounding crack as Serov flung him against it. The impact slammed the door shut. The noises, virtually simultaneous, echoed like a thunderclap in the emptiness of the church. Serov’s right hand had emerged from the greatcoat pocket. It held a heavy Makarov 9mm pistol. He twisted Gramin’s arm behind his back and pressed the muzzle into the nape of his thick neck; he let Gramin hear the safety catch click off before he spoke. Banknotes scattered to the floor.

  ‘No more Yezhovs.’ Serov’s voice was quiet, not much above a whisper. ‘That’s what I pay you for. To make sure no one tries, not just to catch up with them afterwards. Next time I’ll do the clearing-up myself. You won’t be able to help. You’ll be one of the messes I’ll be clearing up. Understand?’ He pushed the arm a little higher.

  ‘Yes, comrade. Yes, yes.’

  ‘Look in the streets, Gramin. The city’s crawling with investigators. People are being rounded up everywhere. These are bad days.’ He twisted the arm again. ‘Especially after last month.’

  Gramin whined softly, like a frightened dog. ‘Druzhba Park wasn’t my fault.’ His ch
eek was flattened against the door, his eyeballs bulging.

  Serov pressed the Makarov a little deeper into the fat of his neck. ‘It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. We lost people and a good organisation. And I’m stuck with half a million roubles’ worth of cocaine I can’t market. Think I can afford to have that kind of cash tied up?’

  He gave Gramin’s arm another twist before releasing him. As he drew his gloves on again the litter of banknotes on the dusty floor caught his eye: dollar bills, Deutschmarks, sterling.

  ‘Pick up your money before I change my mind.’

  A final glance around the empty church, a careful look outside, and he was gone. Gramin scrambled to gather the money together, locked up and hurried after him.

  Five minutes later he was gunning Serov’s Chaika into the thin morning traffic on the Mozhayskoye Shosse back to town. Serov sat in the back seat, smoking and staring straight ahead. To any of the ordinary citizens who bothered to look, Serov was just another high-ranking official with his driver. The hill where the Church of the Saviour perched was far behind them.

  They spoke only once on the journey, when Gramin asked their destination.

  ‘To Yasyenevo, comrade?’

  But Serov shook his head. He had other business to attend to first. Personal business.

  *

  In the cold light of that same dawn the Kremlin’s russet walls stood drained of all colour. Within the walls all was still but for the intermittent patrols of the soldiers of the praetorian guard. Snow gathered on their greatcoat shoulders and fur hats, and was kicked up in flurries by the toes of their high-stepping boots.

  In the top-floor room of the Arsenal block that formed the castle’s northern corner, two men had sat all night and now saw the dawn arrive.

  One was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. In his hands lay a bound document marked ‘Most Classified’. He had been through it perhaps a dozen times that night. Now he closed it slowly and turned it over in his hands. The red leatherette cover had a rectangular window cut in it, through which was visible the four-line title typed on the first page. It read:

  USSR Economic and Industrial Strategy