Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  “Go!”

  Marcus exploded, feinting and slashing. Watchful for his opening, yet wary of overcommitting, Taras gave ground reluctantly, ratcheting his back foot sideways toward the end of the fourteen-meter strip. He heard clearly now Marcus’ every gasping breath, every scrape and clash of edged steel and ringing of guard. These things seemed louder, Taras realized, because he and Marcus were suddenly cocooned in silence and cordoned with people. Activities all round them had been broken off, as the participants drifted over, one by one and then in groups, to try and follow the slithering, darting blades that fought like dueling snakes.

  But the enveloping hush was suddenly shattered. Across the hall a commotion broke out, excited shouts that caromed high off the girdered ceiling. Somebody close by yelled for silence—“Tisha, pozhalusta!”

  Taras and Marcus fought on, but the shouting continued. More than once Taras thought he caught the two syllables of “voy-na!” —war!

  Another door burst open, more running footsteps, voices yelling. Taras battled the distraction, trying to occlude the world and limit his focus to the teasing sword-point before him...

  Marcus lunged, Taras barely blocked, avoiding defeat by the tiniest of margins. He dared wait no longer. It was time to make his move. He foot-feinted, hopped into a balestra, lunged forward—but Marcus had simply stepped off the strip... and was walking away!

  Taras yanked off his helmet. There was swarming chaos in the sport hall, people running in and out, clustering, shouting. Taras caught up to Marcus, who was talking to another man, grabbed his shoulder, spun him around.

  “What happened? Where are you going?”

  “Taras, can’t you hear? It’s war!”

  “War? Yob tvoyu mat! With America?” The ultimate nightmare of nuclear holocaust mushroomed in Taras’ mind.

  “Fuck, no! With Afghanistan. The Chinese have been massing to attack through the Wakhan Corridor, but we just beat ’em to the punch. Word just came through. Two Antonovs full of Spetsnaz commandos have landed in Kabul, disguised as Afghan Army units. Goddamn it, Cossack!” Marcus punched Taras hard in the biceps. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for—time to kick ass!”

  Marcus was heading for a large group by the door, and stripping off his tunic and the plastron underneath as though their bout had never happened.

  “Are you going, Marcus?”

  “Fuck your mother I’m going, Cossack! Aren’t you?”

  “I... I guess so. I don’t know.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Dokuchayev, coming suddenly alongside, supplied the answer: “No, Taras, you won’t be going. It doesn’t affect you. You will continue with your training.”

  “How can it not affect me?” Taras said. “With a war on, I’m supposed to be playing games?”

  Marcus horse-laughed. “Not just any games—Olympic Games. Mustn’t have our future gold medalists facing live fire, right, Colonel? Sorry, Cossack. Damn good contest, though. Maybe we’ll finish it one day.”

  Taras felt Dokuchayev’s restraining grip on his arm as Marcus hurried off to join a tide of young men flowing out the doors of the sport hall and into the night, as though eager to reach Afghanistan before the fighting was all over.

  Fifteen

  Taras and the other ZSKA club fencers flew back to Moscow the next morning, expecting to find the capital bursting with news about events in Afghanistan. There was certainly no shortage of war rumors making the rounds of the Central Army Sports Club—the main concern being the scale of the deployment and its imminent impact on each of them. But the government news organs—such as Pravda, Izvestia and the nightly Vremya TV news—seemed more preoccupied with the ramifications of a caviar scandal in the Ministry of Fisheries. Pravda, Taras discovered, had several days before denied the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, calling rumors to the contrary “pure fabrications” disseminated by the American news media. And Pravda reiterated the Soviet Union’s long-standing policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of neighboring countries.

  Shortly thereafter, however—just a few days into 1980—Pravda was acknowledging that a limited Soviet military contingent had indeed been dispatched to Kabul—at the impassioned request of the new socialist leader, Babrak Karmal. The soldiers were there, the story said, to render “fraternal assistance”—specifically to restore order and to combat an undeclared war being waged by mercenaries from Pakistan, China and the United States—and would be withdrawn as soon as possible. Izvestia followed with a report that CIA agents were training counter-revolutionary terrorist elements near the Afghan-Pakistani border. And it was said—at least by one GRU officer of Taras’ acquaintance—that operatives of the Israeli Mossad were also involved in fomenting the conspiracy against the Kabul regime.

  But Taras wondered if there were not other, more compelling reasons for the intervention. The Afghan rebellion, after all, had been simmering for years between Kabul and the countryside. But the recent fall of the Shah of Iran on Afghanistan’s western border must certainly have alarmed the Kremlin to the dangers of the Ayatollah’s Holy War spreading to the neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan.

  Whatever the real reasons, Taras was desperate to be involved, like Marcus, in whatever was going on—and, despite Pravda’s protestations, there was a great deal. The “limited military contingent” was obviously not in process of early withdrawal, judging by the saber-rattling Taras heard increasingly all about him. Motorized divisions—the 357th, the 360th, the 201st and others—were fanning out across the countryside, a retired tank officer told him, and Kabul was already in the hands of the 103rd and 104th Airborne Divisions and the 105th Guards Airborne Division.

  If further evidence were needed, every day now Taras’ fellow ZSKA members were receiving transfer orders. One was sent to the 103rd Airborne’s home base in Vitebsk in Byelorussia; several others were going east, either to Kirovabad in the Azerbaijan SSR, home of the 104th, or to Ashkhabad, capital of the Turkmen Republic. And more than a dozen were headed direct for Tashkent, just four hundred kilometers north of the Afghan border and headquarters of Marshal Sokolov’s 40th Army, which had crossed the Amu-Darya on pontoon bridges to spearhead the drive into Afghanistan. All of these troop movements, Taras was assured, were preceded by Spetsnaz elements, whose job was to secure airfields, communication centers and other key points.

  Yet through it all, Taras and the other Olympic hopefuls remained untouchables. Among the ranks of full-time Spetsnaz sportsmen of his acquaintance, not a single transfer order was received, and no slightest alteration was made in their training regimen. They stretched, they ran, they bouted; they continued to be coached and cosseted like prize livestock. Taras grew desperate.

  Marcus had promised Taras to speak with some Spetsnaz commanders on his behalf, but weeks passed with no word from the Cowboy, and no change in Taras’ status. By then, assuming Marcus to be already out of reach in Afghanistan, Taras redoubled his own petitions to Dokuchayev—to no avail.

  “Which would you rather have?” the lieutenant colonel demanded with biting sarcasm. “An Olympic medal around your neck, or an Order of the Red Star on your casket?”

  “I choose real life, Ossip, over a game.”

  “The Motherland might endorse your choice, but our sports federation won’t. Not this year, Tarushka. This year you’ll do just as you’re told. Now, go practice your rémise.”

  Taras obeyed, but only disengaging—in the parlance of fencing—to reconsider his tactics. Obviously Dokuchayev and his superiors would do nothing to alter the status of a promising fencer on the runup to the Summer Games. But what if Taras himself did something dramatic to change their opinions?

  *

  Several days later Dokuchayev drew him angrily aside.

  “It won’t work, Tarushka,” he said.

  “What won’t work?”

  “Your clever little scheme. You’re dogging it. Deliberately losing matches.”

  “B
ut you’re joking. I’ve only lost two or three times in the last dozen bouts. And they were very close.”

  “Because you made them close. A point here and there. You’re cutting it very fine, Taras, off—what?—a hundredth of a second in your splendid reflexes? Two of those matches you should have won easily. And I fully expected you to win the third.”

  “I tried.”

  Dokuchayev’s fist hit the table. “You tried to lose—and you damn well succeeded! Do you take me for an utter fool? I see every move my students make out there. You showed more expertise in being defeating by such a tiny margin than if you had won convincingly.”

  Arensky smiled fractionally and reached for his glass of tea. “I suppose I should be flattered—”

  Dokuchayev backhanded the glass off the table, smashing it against the cement wall of his small office. “You should be court-martialed, you little shit! You’re throwing away a chance of a lifetime, something that will never come your way again. Can’t you see that? No, it’s worse than that. By going to Afghanistan, you’ll be throwing away your life! And if you ever quote me on that, Tarushka, I’ll cut off your fucking balls and send you to the ladies’ foil team.”

  It was very hard for Taras to do what he did next, to look his friend and teacher straight in the eye and say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ossip.”

  “Then get out of here. I’ve nothing more to say.”

  A week later, after Taras had been eliminated in an early round of an important tournament with Dinamo, there was another meeting in Dokuchayev’s office. In the interim there had been no rapprochement between the two men, rather a day-by-day entrenchment of hostile positions. Now, as Taras stood, mask under crook of arm, dripping perspiration from a hundred practice lunges, the lieutenant colonel idly turned pages, ignoring his student’s presence.

  But finally Dokuchayev glanced up. “Well, Sergeant Arensky, it seems you’re getting your wish. You’re out of the program as of today. ‘Does not meet norms for Olympic sportsmen,’ it says here. ‘Reassign to officer training.’”

  “Training? I don’t want to go back to school, I want to fight.”

  “Oh? Do you actually imagine the GRU gives a shit what you want? You’re lucky they don’t ship you out to Afghanistan in a penal battalion and use you as a human mine detector.”

  When Taras made no response, Dokuchayev continued:

  “And let me give you one last piece of advice. Wherever they send you, stick the course for a change. Your washout here makes my judgment look piss-poor.” He tossed a packet of papers across the desk. “There’s an address listed on top there. You’re to report to that office tomorrow morning.” Dokuchayev leaned back in his chair, looking straight at Taras, yet focusing well beyond, as though the younger man were quite invisible.

  “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “Yes. Clean out your stuff here this afternoon. As far as your apartment, the club would like you out by the end of the week. You won’t be needing it where you’re going, and I’ve got a real saberman I want to get in there.”

  Arensky stood up, saluted smartly. “Good-bye, sir.”

  Dokuchayev ignored the salute, waved him out.

  At the door Arensky paused. “I’m sorry, Ossip.”

  “So am I, Tarushka. So the hell am I.”

  *

  The reporting address was the GRU building on Peoples’ Militia Street, and the officer in charge none other than the bullet-domed Major Kornelyuk. If anything, the interview was even more perfunctory than the previous one had been, with the wooden-faced officer betraying no recognition of the young man whose papers he was perusing a second time. Five minutes, a few rudimentary exchanges and rubber stampings later, Arensky about-faced and exited, having been assigned to the Ryazan Higher Airborne Academy to complete his interrupted officers training.

  Two days later, after a four-and-a-half-hour southeasterly train ride from Moscow’s Paveletsky Station, he was tossing his gear onto his bunk in the Ryazan barracks, still with no real idea of what he was getting into.

  Was he really going to spend the next year and a half out on the prairie, sitting in classrooms and slogging through the Oka River marshes, while a war was going on? From all indications, that was exactly what he would be doing—merging into Ryazan’s regular four-year curriculum, which was designed to graduate five hundred airborne officers a year with degrees in military engineering, just as Taras’ former school, the Supreme Soviet Military Academy, turned out lieutenants of motorized infantry.

  He conveyed his impatience to the first officer who would listen, a perpetually grinning, leather-faced Tatar captain of the Special Faculty. This was a school within a school, whose function was to continuously monitor the progress of all students, looking for those few who met the supreme standards for Spetsnaz officers. All the rest would be posted on graduation to regular units of the airborne forces—the VDV, Vozdushno Desantnaye Voyska. The truth was, Taras told the fellow, he was not so anxious to earn his lieutenant’s shoulder-straps as he was to get into combat, even if that meant going to Afghanistan as a noncom.

  The captain slapped both his fat thighs and bared his bad teeth. “What’s your hurry, duckling? We’ve been fighting those bandits for a hundred and fifty years. Believe me, there’ll be plenty of bullets waiting out there for you.”

  Taras was told to forget all his crazy notions—along with his sportsman’s “sergeant” ranking—and to conduct himself like any other Ryazan kursanti, or airborne officer cadet.

  He did so, and found himself plunged at once into a carefully coordinated nightmare, flogged by sadistic instructors down a daily gauntlet of pain so unremitting that it erased from his memory the minor tortures Dokuchayev inflicted on his fencing squad. He was given no time to think of Afghanistan—or of anything but surviving the next few hours or minutes; indeed, after Ryazan, Taras was soon convinced, war itself would seem a holiday outing.

  And the demands on Taras were especially fiendish because of the extra efforts required to catch up with the third-year officer’s class—something he was determined to do rather than lose another year.

  For instance, he found himself lagging seriously behind in basic skill-at-arms, and had to spend many extra hours on the firing ranges, training with both Warsaw Pact and NATO weaponry—sidearms, sniper and assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. There were no points awarded here for fencing prowess, nor did the slashing techniques of the saber bear any helpful resemblance to infantry bayonet drill. And he took more than his share of lumps during those early days, from the camp’s gung-ho specialists in rokupashni-boi, close-quarter battle method, and sambo—samooborona bez oruzhiya—unarmed combat, Red Army-style. And these brutal disciplines, he learned, were mere prerequisites to more advanced Spetsnaz techniques of silent killing.

  And each night on his bunk, exhausted—all but comatose—Officer Cadet Taras labored an extra few minutes to make up his huge classroom deficit. He committed to benumbed memory long lists of current American and British slang, Marxist dialectics, electronic schematics, military theory from Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz and Ho Chi Minh—until lights-out brought blessed oblivion. He also devoted to his studies those precious hours each week meted out to cadets for personal or family matters.

  But this was not all. Because of his late transfer, Taras was the only man in his class not qualified in basic airborne operations. To remedy this embarrassing deficiency, while other cadets were enjoying “free Sundays,” Cadet Arensky would report to Ryazan’s jump school—an extensive parachute-training area in the rear of the academy. He learned to pack his own chutes, both drone-assisted D-5s and UT-15 sport chutes. He spent hours maneuvering on the suspended canopy simulators. And finally he earned his wings, exiting an An-12 at a thousand meters and gentling down smack in the center of a landing zone beside the Oka River.

  In two more months he was qualified in HALO (high-altitude, low-opening)—which entailed jumping at ten-thousand meters and
free-falling most of the way before pulling the ripcord—and HAHO techniques. He had landed on top of buildings, in water and on nearly every kind of terrain, including spruce and birch forest. Now, in addition to his parachute insignia, Taras sported the blue beret and blue-and-white telnaishka T-shirt, precisely the jaunty outfit he had admired on Marcus two summers before in Gorky Park. And, like Marcus, Cadet Arensky now tended to walk with a slight swagger.

  The month of June, 1980, saw the graduation of Ryazan’s officer class; but Taras and a select group of his third-year mates, instead of being sent home for a month’s holiday, were kept in barracks. Rumors sprang up and spread everywhere, like flames across the summer grasslands—and every one involved Afghanistan. They would be shipping out at once, or within a week at most; they were headed for the southern deserts, to organize and arm Baluchi tribesmen and encourage them to secede from Pakistan; they would be air-dropped into rebel strongholds high in the Hindu Kush; survivors would be rotated back every few weeks to Ryazan to complete their coursework; others were convinced that the battlefield was to be their classroom for the final year, and that commissions would be awarded in the field, based on combat performance. But whatever the ramifications, that they were for Afghanistan, none doubted.

  The need seemed plain enough. After the initial successes of the Karmal coup and the shock invasion of Kabul, matters had not gone well. Unlike Hungary in ’56 or Czechoslovakia in ’68, the operation was not turning out to be a swift surgical strike. The Red Army was rapidly becoming enmeshed in full-scale guerrilla war, with its “limited military contingent” already upwards of a hundred thousand men and still growing—the largest Soviet combat commitment since the defeat of the Wehrmacht.

  Some of this had been necessitated by wholesale defections on the part of the new Afghan Army. Taras and his fellow cadets heard tales of whole battalions going over to the guerrillas—and taking their rockets and mortars and machine guns with them. Karmal’s army was now estimated to have lost at least half its initial strength of eighty thousand.