StaSec’s investigation into Yozhik had begun to center around Agent Nikolai Andreivich South (file attached). South had joined StaSec twenty-nine years previously and is believed to have become radicalized against the party in 2184 as a result of the execution of his sister-in-law, Zahara Fareed Kader (file attached), a member of an illegal political party. It was believed that South was in possession of some dozen Sontang chips containing the consciousnesses of many hundreds of defectors from CR, but that StaSec’s efforts had closed off his means of smuggling them out of CR.
These two matters, South’s activities as Yozhik and the impending arrival of Lily Xirau, became interlinked when South volunteered for the task of escorting Mrs. Xirau during her time in CR. It was obvious that South intended to use Mrs. Xirau as an unwilling courier to transport the Sontang chips to the Machine world.
StaSec now faced a dilemma: Whether to pass up our surest opportunity to catch Yozhik red-handed, or to allow South access to Mrs. Xirau despite the possible risk to her safety and the potential for diplomatic fallout. On my own recognizance, I made the decision to appoint South to the Xirau detail, but placed Mrs. Xirau under the protection of my own personal Directorate Security Division to ensure that no harm would come to her from South. Unfortunately, I did not count on the reckless and illegal actions of PSSA Chernov.
A large contingent of ParSec agents, personally led by PSSA Chernov, illegally entered StaSec HQ in an attempt to arrest South, whom they rightly suspected to be Yozhik, and to execute Mrs. Xirau, whom they wrongly believed to be voluntarily working with him. In the course of this illegal operation, several StaSec agents were injured and PSSA Chernov murdered Agent Paul Berger, the oldest serving member of StaSec whose long and honorable career was brutally cut short as he attempted to prevent PSSA Chernov’s illegal activities. Chernov’s actions triggered a melee in the lobby of StaSec HQ which allowed Agent South to escape with Mrs. Xirau as his hostage, stealing an agency car and driving to Ellulgrad Airport.
Chernov, realizing that his quarry had escaped, pursued South and Xirau to the airport and proceeded to shoot both of them before Mrs. Xirau could board the drone due to take her back to Tehran International Airport.
Mrs. Xirau was killed outright. Agent South remains in critical condition but is currently stable.
What repercussions there should be for PSSA Chernov for his actions is not for me to decide.
That is a matter for the party.
As for South, I believe a trial would be deeply problematic. South, to put it bluntly, has seen all our dirty laundry. Members of some of the most respected families in CR have made use of his services. There is already a perception in many sections of society that our contran laws are applied unequally, and a trial would only exacerbate these tensions and risk the stability of the nation. Additionally, South’s career as a longtime agent of StaSec provided him with access to many state secrets which he would doubtless use the platform provided by a trial to expose.
Therefore, I am formally requesting that Article 52 of the constitution be invoked and that Nikolai Andreivich South be placed in the indefinite custody of the military, without option of appeal.
Your brother in the party,
p.p. Augusta Niemann,
Samuel Papalazarou Junior, Director of the State Security Agency of the Caspian Republic
GRANTED J.P. 27/10/10
35
“Orders received from Ganja. Confirm training exercises for all five commands to commence tomorrow morning as previously advised.”
“Verification code?”
“Yozhik.”
“Understood. What’s the weather like in Ellulgrad?”
“From what I hear, Brother, it’s about to get very hot.”
—Transcript of transmission to Caspian Army Base Gabala-Charbonneau, 27 May 2244
And so, despite all my good intentions, I find myself writing history.
It is the great historical irony of the Caspian Republic that, while its leaders presented the Triumvirate to their citizens as an implacable three-headed Satan that dedicated its every unsleeping moment to their doom, it was frequently only the Triumvirate that stood between Caspian and its complete destruction. Countless times, the governments of the world would be outraged by some new atrocity or crime committed by the murderous Ellulgrad cabal. Another contran activist executed. A new report on the widespread use of torture in the military-controlled prison system. Or mounting evidence of Caspian Army involvement in a bombing or support for some new terrorist group. Each time, the Triumvirate would be consulted on the viability of military action against the Caspian Republic, and each time the advice would be, whether from George, Athena or Confucius, to turn the other cheek and do nothing.
If pressed to explain their reasoning, each triune would give a different response.
Athena patiently explained that planting a flag in Ellulgrad would result in Caspian splitting into at least a dozen military dictatorships, which would destabilize the region and drastically increase human suffering in the South Caucasus for little appreciable gain.
George, in his typically abrupt manner, simply stated that he had been asked a question, he had given an answer and that if the inquirer didn’t like it they could eat shit.
As for Confucius, who had developed his namesake’s fondness for aphorisms, he mused that “One does not waste a bullet on a dying man.”
But as the decades wore on, the putative leaders of the world’s governments began to wonder if perhaps, just this once, the Triumvirate had been mistaken. For Caspian persisted, as closed off and brutal and bloody as it had ever been, refusing to die as only the truly hateful things in this life can. They could not see, as the Triumvirate could, the tiny cracks spreading through the edifice.
Which was why, when the New Humanist Party was overthrown almost thirty-four years after the hanging of Leon Mendelssohn, observers outside the borders of Caspian were almost as surprised as the New Humanists themselves.
When Caspian fell, it fell not at the hands of the enemies it had spent so much of its hatred and energy trying to root out and destroy. It was not the contran smugglers or the Needle Men. Not the CIA, MSS or EUI. Not the Triumvirate. It was at the hands of an enemy who had been there since the very beginning, overlooked, maligned and totally underestimated.
In truth, many in Ellulgrad had been sounding the alarm that the Caspian Army relied too much on Azerbaijani recruitment, and it was widely known that various separatist groups had a substantial presence in the ranks of the enlisted. But Army Command either brushed off the government’s concerns or made only token cosmetic efforts to address the issue.
The fact was, the army was largely based in the western provinces of the republic, often in areas with majority Azerbaijani populations.
As one general irately put it to a Parliamentary committee set up to investigate the issue: “No fucking Ajays, no fucking army, savvy?”
Better historians than I have tried to make sense of the events leading up to the May Revolution of 2244, a process that has been described as like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces.
In the dark.
With certain pieces missing and which will come to light only years from now when someone dies.
The sheer amount of factions is mind-boggling. The level of coordination and cooperation that was achieved between multiple groups of vastly different backgrounds, ideologies and agendas is both awe-inspiring and a testament to just how much the New Humanist regime was detested in its final days.
When trying to make sense of it all, I find it helps to think of it in these terms:
The Caspian Republic was really two countries: the so-called “Ellulgrad Pale,” the eastern part of the country centered on Ellulgrad and its surrounding provinces, which was under the rule of the Parliament who maintained control through the local police, StaSec, ParSec and various other smaller forces.
And then there was “The West,” basically all of historic
Azerbaijan not within the Ellulgrad Pale plus Nakchivan and Syunik. Although the West was nominally under the rule of the government in Ellulgrad, in practice the region was under martial law, with any and all civilian power structures in each province subservient to the local military commander.
The war in the West was essentially a war within the Caspian Army between radicalized pro-Azerbaijani “Green” divisions and those “Blue” divisions loyal to Ellulgrad.*
The war in the Ellulgrad Pale was mostly urban guerrilla warfare between the security forces on the one side and a rogue’s gallery of radical political groups, Azerbaijanis, pro-democracy and pro-AI protestors and frequently ordinary citizens who weren’t particularly political but were quite keen on the chance to throw a rock at a ParSec gulliver’s head.
These two conflicts were fought side by side and fed off each other. In the West, the war was practically decided in its opening hours. The order was given for a massive “training exercise” involving the bulk of Caspian’s military forces, under the pretext of role-playing a hypothetical EU invasion across the Russian border. The Blue divisions were unwittingly funneled into exposed areas where they were easy targets for artillery from the Greens. The carnage that followed proved absolutely decisive. The Blues were decapitated, losing roughly half of their combat strength and forcing them into a fighting retreat that they would never rebound from. With that initial strike, the Ellulgrad government ceased to have the upper hand militarily and the remainder of the war was simply prolonging the inevitable. Not that that made it any less bloody.
Many Blue divisions managed to fight their way through to Ellulgrad, where they found the opposition much more to their liking. This was the bloodiest portion of the war in the Pale, as inexperienced, untrained militias found themselves engaging in street battles with the enraged, blood-crazed remnant of the loyalist Caspian Army. The atrocities they committed, most infamously the Koslova Square massacre, incited even greater resistance in Ellulgrad. This phase of the war would continue until the victorious Greens, having brought the West under their control, made their final push on Ellulgrad.
As news of the war spread to the outside world, many Caspian exiles and foreign fighters began to flock to the Persian border to join the fight. Many of these international and exile brigades fought heroically, particularly in the south of the country. Among these I most emphatically do not include Sebastien Bellov who, according to his own account, arrived in Caspian in early June and proceeded to graciously win the war single-handedly on our behalf. Bellov’s continued veneration in the global media as a hero of the war and a serious authority on the Caspian Republic remains a point of intense irritation to many of his countrymen, myself very much included.
Which is not to say that Bellov contributed nothing. I am sure that the bar in Oski where he spent his days imbibing his own body weight in vodka and writing his drunken military fantasies was very glad of his custom in those uncertain and volatile times.
It is estimated that the death toll of the war was somewhere between ten and twelve thousand combat fatalities, a fairly low figure that testifies not to any lack of brutality but more to the brevity of the conflict. Indeed the total death toll was slightly less than that of the Morrison Crisis fifty-two years previously, which is doubly striking when one considers that the revolution covered the entire nation whereas the Morrison Crisis was mostly restricted to Ellulgrad alone.
As bloody as many of the battles were, anticlimax was often a feature of the war. Nakchivan City and Koslovagrad both were surrendered to the rebels without a shot needing to be fired.
And then there was the quiet end to one of the most storied rivalries in the history of StaSec, which occurred in a leafy, affluent suburb in Ellulgrad when Commandant Nadia Evershan accepted the surrender of former Special Agent Sally Coe.
Evershan had been part of the Golden Year of 2211, so-called because so many of the new recruits accepted into StaSec that year went on to have extremely impressive careers. Evershan was very much among that number. She rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the youngest Senior Special Agent in StaSec by the age of thirty-two.
Lauded as a brilliant investigator and considered to be unimpeachably loyal to the party, the canniest observers in StaSec looked at her and saw a future department head. Possibly (if she could get the right connections and lose the last traces of the Old Baku accent) a future head of StaSec.
But it was not to be.
In the midst of a massive uptick in contrannings in the capital, Evershan began to suspect that the Yozhik case was not as dead as StaSec believed and that Nikolai South (He Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken Without Spitting on the Ground Afterward) might not in fact have been the brilliant, diabolical mastermind he had been painted as.
Evershan’s investigations led her to a most unlikely target: Senior Special Agent Sally Coe, head of the Directorate Security Division.
What followed would become the stuff of StaSec legend.
On the fifth of September 2222, the Caspian Republic awoke to the shocking, unprecedented news that a ninety-three-year-old man had died in his sleep. Samuel Papalazarou Junior was dead and the nation mourned the passing of the great hero of the Second Founding, the pillar of the republic, the worthy successor to his father’s legacy etc., etc. repeat ad nauseam. The masses were told that the great man had finally been released from his suffering and had slipped away silently with a smile on his face.
Evershan’s sources in the DSD, however, told a slightly different account: that the bedridden Samuel Papalazarou Junior had been beaten to death with one of his own golf clubs.
At first, Evershan had dismissed the account as an obvious and overly lurid attempt at feeding her false information. A few days later, however, Augusta Niemann was finally promoted to Director of State Security after effectively running the agency for two decades. That much had been expected.
What had not been expected (or at least had not been taken as a given) was that Niemann would be retaining her place in the cabinet, which until now she had held only as Papalazarou’s proxy. The head of StaSec having a cabinet position had always had staunch opposition in many sectors of the government. Even Dascalu had never enjoyed that privilege, and many assumed that when Papalazarou died, he would take his seat on the cabinet with him to the hereafter.
What clinched it for Evershan was when she learned that Niemann had been given a guarantee by the prime minister that she would retain her position in the cabinet in the event of Papalazarou’s passing and that this same guarantee had been obtained the day before Papalazarou’s death.
It seems that, for once, an eagerness to tie up loose ends overcame Sally Coe’s prudence.
* * *
* Armenian militias also played a role in this theater, but almost exclusively in Syunik with little connection or collaboration with other factions in the conflict.
36
“Did you order Sally Coe to beat Papalazarou to death with a golf club?”
“No. I told her to ‘take care of it.’ I don’t like to micromanage.”
—BBC News interview with Augusta Niemann, 16 April 2245
Throughout the twenties Evershan pursued Sally Coe, painstakingly building a cage for Coe only for Sally to escape time and time again. Evershan has stated that she came within a hairsbreadth of personally killing Coe no fewer than three times during those years. The first was during a gunfight in a pitch-black alleyway in Old Baku, dark enough for either woman to plausibly claim she couldn’t see who she was firing at if she hit her mark.
The second time was in StaSec HQ itself when Evershan, shell-shocked and paranoid, almost knifed Coe in the lady’s bathroom with a letter opener. And the third time, of course, was when Evershan openly named Sally Coe as a contranner in a parliamentary hearing. That could very easily have ended Sally Coe’s life, had a pivotal witness not turned on Evershan and accused her of being psychotically obsessed with bringing down Coe.
Coe, for her part, claims t
hat she almost killed Evershan eight times, but she’s never gone into detail and it’s my personal belief that she’s simply engaging in one-upmanship.
Their feud cost both women greatly. Evershan lost her fiancé, the playwright Magnus Serafitz, to an assassin’s bullet, which Evershan claims was a revenge hit from Coe (Coe flatly denies this).
But Coe also suffered. While Evershan was not able to make her case against Coe stick, she had uncovered enough that Coe was now deeply distrusted and considered soiled goods.
She was demoted to Senior Agent and shipped up north to StaSec’s Sumgait field office, exiled from Ellulgrad and her beloved Gussie.
Demoting and reassigning Sally Coe was Augusta Niemann’s last act as head of StaSec.
She then resigned, and returned to her dacha to live alone while Parliament chose her successor.
That had been the deal.
But the story did not end there. Instead, it simply changed direction.
In 2229, Nadia Evershan left Ellulgrad.
Feeling at risk from Niemann and Coe loyalists in StaSec, she accepted a secondment to Army Intelligence as part of one of the military’s sporadic attempts to cleanse itself of infiltration by Azerbaijani separatists. Out in the West of the country, Nadia Evershan finally saw the true depths of the regime’s depravity and became radicalized. Forming connections with several members of the Azerbaijani resistance, she worked to assist them from within. After two years in the West, she returned to Ellulgrad in 2231, a bona fide double agent for the Azerbaijani Liberation League. Her shift in loyalties to the ALL’s cause went unnoticed in Army HQ in Ganja, and back in Ellulgrad. But it did not go unnoticed in Sumgait.
When the Sparrow Falls Page 25