The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  The Domino Conspiracy

  Also by Joseph Heywood

  FICTION

  Taxi Dancer

  The Berkut

  The Snowfty

  Grady Service (Woods Cop) Mysteries

  Ice Hunter

  Blue Wolf in Green Fire

  Chasing a Blond Moon

  Running Dark

  Strike Dog

  Death Roe

  Shadow of the Wolf Tree

  Force of Blood

  Killing a Cold One

  Lute Bapcat Mysteries

  Red Jacket

  Mountains of the Misbegotten

  Short Stories

  Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories

  Harder Ground: More Woods Cop Stories

  NONFICTION

  Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

  CARTOONS

  The ABCs of Snowmobiling

  JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  TheDominoConspiracy

  Guilford, Connecticut

  To Sandy

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 1992 by Joseph Heywood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heywood, Joseph.

  The domino conspiracy / Joseph Heywood.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0905-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971—Fiction. 2. International relations—Fiction. 3. World politics—Fiction. 4. Soviet Union—Fiction. 5. Political fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E92W65 2015

  813'.54—dc23

  2014043273

  eISBN 978-1-4930-1681-5 (ebook)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Comrade Khrushchev is well aware that the borders of Albania are inviolable and sacred, and that anyone who touches them is an aggressor. The Albanian people will fight to the last drop of blood if anyone touches their borders. . . .

  They spend millions to recruit agents and spies, millions of dollars to organize acts of espionage, diversion, and of murder in our countries. U.S. imperialism has given and is giving thousands of millions of dollars to its loyal agents. . . .

  No, the time has gone forever when the territory of Albania could be treated as a token to be bartered. . . .

  —Excerpts from a speech given by Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Albanian Workers Party in Moscow on November 16, 1960.

  Contents

  I Hibernation

  II Awakenings

  III Alert

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TYPE

  I

  Hibernation

  1 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1960, 5:10 P.M.The Vuoksi River Region, Near the Soviet-Finnish Border

  The two soldiers squatted in icy ankle-deep marsh water scanning the horizon. It had been hours since they had left the river and made their way through a thick coniferous forest to the flat marshes. Both men carried double-barreled, rifled shotguns that had been custom-made in Belgium. The bullets were Czech-made, with exploding tips pushed by three hundred grains of flashless gunpowder—not very sporting, but there was nothing sportive about chasing a wounded elk. The idea was to kill a seven-hundred-kilo beast in its tracks, and damage to the meat be damned.

  Marshals Rodion Y. Malinovsky and Tikhon Serduyakov had been hunting since early morning and both were tired, but they neither complained nor hinted at their discomfort. Each had suffered much worse, and at their ages they welcomed the pains of physical labor as a reminder of the life still in them. Too many former comrades were long dead.

  They had seen the animal minutes after entering the swamp, a huge bull elk with a wide, flat sweep of antlers two meters across, a sagging black bell of hair swinging from side to side under its chin and a swollen brisket, an excellent specimen in the rut and more than they had hoped to find so close to the border. The Finns tended to keep the elk population thinned out and brutes like this seldom escaped to Soviet territory, but there was no doubting their eyes. This was a worthy prize. They had stalked him all day, but the bull was wary and moved steadily to keep nearly a kilometer ahead of them.

  It was now well past the time when they should have summoned the helicopter, and at least an hour since they had last seen the magnificent animal. Since then Malinovsky had aimed them 45 degrees west of their quarry’s course, and now the sun was lower and at their backs as they reached a low island of granite boulders and climbed out of the water.

  Serduyakov, commander of the Siberian Military District, immediately slipped off his insulated boots and two pairs of wool socks and rubbed his feet. An old infantryman looked out for his feet first. The defense minister of the Soviet Union moved a few meters higher, propped himself on his immense belly and scanned a line of low firs with his binoculars. Serduyakov took a flask of brandy out of his kit bag, uncapped it and tapped Malinovsky’s foot. “Fuel for the weary,” he said.

  Malinovsky accepted the bottle, took a long pull, swished it around in his mouth, swallowed with an audible gulp, smacked his lips and passed it back. “It’s begun,” he said.

  “The elk?” Serduyakov asked, craning his neck.

  “Operation Aurora,” the defense minister said. He had the raspy voice of a smoker, though he had never acquired the habit; and unlike too many of his Red Army colleagues, he drank sparingly. He liked the symbolism of Aurora, the name of the Soviet ship that had fired the historic shots in Leningrad as the Revolution got under way.

  Serduyakov did not respond immediately. At the age of sixty he had served forty-two years as a soldier in one army or another, and he had ascended the ranks by his prudence as much as by his skills. To Serduyakov words were like precious gems: it took only a few to have great value. “Projections?” he asked after a suitable pause.

  “Too soon to tell,” Malinovsky said, his attention still riveted on the tree line. “But Khrushchev will fall,” he added. “If not now, then later.”

  “In chess the outcome is apparent after the opening moves.”

  “Only when an amateur challenges a master. In any event, this is no game,” Malinovsky reminded his colleague. The Soviet defense minister harbored little doubt about Khrushchev’s ultimate fate. His plan would ensure that. It was intricate, subtle, complex and dependent on too many factors to recall now, but he had thought it all through, gauged every angle and concluded that he could control the critical parts. Luck would have to do the rest, but that didn’t bother him. Every military operation required luck—always had, always would, and this plan was no different. The idea had come to him while he watched a colleague’s grandchildren playing dominoes; he had immediately imagined a huge expanse of black tiles standing on end, laid out in tight rows, files and sweeping curves. Just one tile could trigger the whole lot, send them all falling, looping and snaking this way and that, but within the graceful patterns there was a single, direct and unrelenting line aimed inexorably at Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, who had been born Khrush the Beetle, a roly-poly, hard-backed little bug who had grown into the insect king. Now it was time to crack his back and squash the pulp from his thorax. Probably he would detect the fall of the first tile, but he would not see that he wa
s the target of it all. It was a subtle plan and nearly invisible, which in Malinovsky’s mind placed it in the category of brilliant—not perfect, but brilliant, which was the most men could hope for. In the end it would come down to mere luck, and either it would swing their way or it wouldn’t. Serduyakov was right that it was like chess, not the game played languidly by old men in Moscow’s parks or the flashy, heady mathematical game of the grandmasters, but chess with flesh-and-blood pieces, each with a precise role. In chess you predicated your attacks on precise knowledge of what your pieces could do. Mask the attack, hide it, disguise it, mislead your foe: these were the rules of engagement. They had let the Nazi hordes advance to the portals of Moscow, then counterattacked with armies that German intelligence didn’t know about. The most effective attack was the one that came from nowhere, the kind he had carefully arranged in this scenario, and it all began with the toppling of a single tile.

  “The army must not be implicated,” Serduyakov said.

  That’s the point, Malinovsky thought: To bring Khrushchev down and preserve the army they had spent their lives creating, an army so powerful that no foe dared challenge it. It had been a long haul, weeding out the cowards and incompetents, fools and weaklings, in learning how to coexist with bureaucrats and party hacks, then manipulating them to acquire what was needed. They had created their own supply infrastructure, their own raw-material sources, their own manufacturing, built their own factories, trained their own work force, created a distribution system that got parts where they belonged when they were needed and made themselves independent of the fools who purported to make goods for peasants. The Defense Ministry had shown the Kremlin how a production system could work if you knew how to manage workers with penalties that were real, severe and inexorable, but despite all this, the civilians in the industrial sector refused to learn and still wasted their time in committees bogged down by inane five-year plans and grand schemes driven by the ghosts of Lenin and Stalin. The Red Army had shed blood and sacrificed a generation of boys out of a common interest; it came first, the old army that had saved the Motherland not once but twice, not an army of missiles and gadgets made by intellectuals and scientists but an army of boys turned into men by hard discipline and sleeping with their bellies in the mud. Khrushchev did not understand, or would not—who was to say what went on in the little bastard’s twisted mind? After all, he had been a political officer, not a true soldier.

  It was clear now that the army meant nothing to Khrushchev. The General Secretary had decided that it cost too much; based on this he had proposed a drastic reduction in troop strength; entire divisions would be mothballed. We must keep the peace with the West, he lectured the Politburo, but he was alone in seeing it this way and he had already started the cutbacks. He claimed he would use the savings to fund a missile force and direct the remainder to boost production of consumer goods. All at the expense of the Red Army, Malinovsky thought, the people’s army, his army. That little Ukrainian prick! He had argued with him about the strategic value of conventional forces, but Khrushchev had only laughed. “You don’t understand modern thinking. You’re an old war horse. You must trust me.” Khrush the Beetle had laughed at him, and in that instant he had realized that the Ukrainian peasant had to be eliminated—not for him, but for the Motherland, for the twenty-five million dead at German hands, for the sake of future generations threatened by American imperialism. It was a matter of honor.

  What Serduyakov referred to, of course, was his own skin because what they viewed as honor others would see as treason, clear and simple. “The essence of honor is sacrifice,” Malinovsky reminded his colleague.

  Serduyakov shuddered and tried to guess the defense minister’s thoughts, but Malinovsky seldom telegraphed his feelings. At Stalingrad there had been bodies as far as the eye could see, corpses frozen into contorted, grotesque death statues, and Malinovsky had walked among them listening to an accounting of ammunition reserves. In Byelorussia the retreating Nazis had impaled peasants on pine trees and Malinovsky had led his staff heedlessly through the forest of corpses while reminding them that spring would soon arrive and that their tanks would need extra treads. In Berlin he had come upon several of his men torturing a captured SS junior officer and had intervened, saving the German and ordering his own men executed for unsoldierly conduct. He was the hardest, coldest man Serduyakov had ever known and the only man he would follow down the path of treason. Nevertheless, if the army was implicated the whole point of the enterprise would be compromised.

  “It’s too complex,” Serduyakov insisted. “Simplicity is the key to a successful military operation. We learned that against the Nazis.”

  Serduyakov’s fears were understandable. He didn’t know all of it; as the plan’s designer, Malinovsky knew fate had supplied a certain man to start the fall of the main line of dominoes, but to share this was to risk it all, so he kept it to himself, just as he had in the war. An American agent had come into their hands. It had been serendipitous to find such a man, unimaginably lucky, but it was he who saw the opportunity the American represented. The man was French-born and of Albanian descent, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The CIA had sent him to Paris, but he was pursuing his own agenda, leading a secret life, and it had been simple enough to use this for their ends. Lumbas, another Albanian, had been the bait. The American dreamed of unseating the Hoxha regime in Albania; his parents had passed on this obsession to him. It had been risky to extract Lumbas from the missile base after the immense risk of putting him there, but it had been done, and while he fed the American missile information he also led him down a parallel path, helping to create a mythical invasion of Albania by the United States as a provocation.

  When Hoxha learned that he had been targeted he would react predictably. Vengeance was the central Albanian value, revenge their theology. Hoxha and Khrushchev loathed each other; Khrushchev had been cozy with the Americans, pursuing the policy he called peaceful coexistence. Hoxha would see that the American intervention could happen only if the Soviets approved it, if not openly, then tacitly, which for him would be the same. Hoxha would strike back at Khrushchev, and even if his attempt failed, the Politburo would see that their General Secretary no longer commanded respect. A mere flea of a nation, a suppurating boil on Communism’s backside, a collection of backward brigands daring to challenge the leader of the Soviet Union? Even if Khrushchev escaped with his life, his peers would see the truth. Could the Soviet Union afford to have such a weakling commanding the Politburo? Not with the Chinese and the Americans pressing in on two sides.

  Of course it would be best if the Albanians succeeded; then they could bury the little prick with honors, erect the customary statues and forget him. But even if the brigands failed, the attempt alone would be enough; this was the beauty of his plan, the ultimate political simplicity that Serduyakov would never understand. The trick was to make certain that nothing interfered with the Albanian retaliation, and this would not be easy. Despite his flawed Russian and penchant for earthy proverbs, Khrushchev had survived this long because he had a long reach and ears everywhere; he had the survival instincts of a cockroach. He had engineered Beria’s death in the wake of Stalin’s passing; the entire country had feared the secret police chief but it had been Khrushchev who had moved against him, then consolidated his power by eliminating his remaining political rivals, not in Stalin’s way with an ounce of lead to the backs of their heads, but through remarkable political maneuvering. He had taken power without shedding blood, and that had to be respected. To fight him head-on was not practical. It had to come from the outside, and from a source so ludicrous that it would shock the Party to its very foundations. The Albanians would be David to the Ukrainian Goliath, and he, Radion Malinovsky, would be the savior of the army.

  “You worry too much,” Malinovsky said. “Whatever happens, we’ll be safe if we keep our wits.” Even if Khrushchev managed to deflect the assault before it happened, there were others to take the blame and stand t
he punishment. It had all been arranged.

  “I still don’t like it,” Serduyakov grumbled.

  Malinovsky knew his colleague was no coward and was committed to the cause, but he was like all subordinates; he allowed himself to doubt. Those in command could not afford such luxuries.

  Suddenly the dark brown elk appeared, its snout submerged in a mass of floating plants. It was less than forty meters away, its mind on food. Malinovsky wrapped the sling of his rifle around his left forearm and braced his weapon against the rocks. “Watch this,” he whispered to his colleague.

  Serduyakov slithered into position beside the defense minister. “Magnificent,” he whispered.

  Malinovsky began to grunt rhythmically, which made the elk lift its head and grunt a reply; water cascaded from its huge snout.

  The sudden explosion beside Serduyakov caught him by surprise. For hours they had been enveloped in a silence broken only by their own whispers and movement. He was surprised that Malinovsky let fly with both barrels simultaneously. The elk’s head and massive antlers exploded and left the headless creature standing momentarily before it toppled sideways into the water with a great splash.

  “When you hunt for survival,” the defense minister said softly, “you do not concern yourself with trophies.”

  2 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1960, 10:00 P.M. Moscow

  Enver Hoxha, Albania’s First Secretary, had said his piece at the gathering of Communist and worker parties with more than his usual flair for incendiary rhetoric, attacking Khrushchev and the Russians directly and vehemently as hundreds of delegates from eighty-one countries looked on. Having spoken, he hurried the Albanian delegation out of the cavernous meeting hall through a gauntlet of derisive whistles and angry shouts from pro-Soviet representatives. Only the Chinese had been silent.