Duel of Assassins

by Dan Pollock

  Riddle: Who or what am I?

  I am Marchenko’s weapon, fired into the night by a dying man. I am his samurai, his kamikaze.

  Marcus recalled his last encounter with the old general. It had been three winters before in Moscow at the Yaroslav Station, Platform Two. Marchenko was departing for virtual exile as commandant of some shithole camp outside of Novosibirsk, thirty-three hundred kilometers to the east. Instead of the four-hour flight on Aeroflot, the old man had opted for the Trans-Siberian Railway and a marathon journey of three days.

  “What’s the fucking hurry?” he said to Marcus as they loitered alongside a bright-red carriage bearing the plaque MOSCOW-VLADIVOSTOK. “The tsars used to make poor bastards like me walk all the way to Siberia.”

  The old man waved the porter ahead with his baggage, then reached into his greatcoat, producing a half-liter of Ukrainian pepper vodka and his triumphant, steely smile.

  “In the words of the great Shakespeare,” Marchenko said, offering the first slug to Marcus, “‘Let a soldier drink!’”

  They took turns infusing themselves with warmth against the bleak afternoon and a bleaker future. There wasn’t much left to say between them in those last moments. Marcus had his two sets of orders—his official reassignment to Novosibirsk as aide-de-camp for Marchenko, and the old man’s contradictory ultimatum for Marcus to get the hell out of the country and permanently after his identity.

  “Do your old trick, lad. You’ve got the documents. Fold your wings, crawl into a cocoon somewhere and turn back into a little caterpillar. At least for a while.”

  But how, in such case, was Marcus to contact the general again?

  “Well, you can’t,” he had been told. “Anyway, I forbid it, so don’t even try.” Marchenko had left only one tenuous linkage—verbal instructdions on how Marcus might check for messages along a secret Spetznaz network the general was in process of setting up. “But if you ask my real advice, you’ll forget about me. And if you’re ever summoned, you won’t respond.”

  “Rodion Igorovich,” Marcus had shot back, “don’t give me this bullshit! If you don’t want me to respond, make sure you never call me!”

  “I am just warning you, Marcus. Have it your way. If you wish always to be a glorious, suicidal idiot… well, then, I will take this under advisement.”

  The two men stood close together on the frozen platform, sharing a last bottle as grim-faced travelers flowed past—Tatars, Kazakhs, Buryats, even here and there a Russian. And it suddenly occurred to Marcus that he was looking—for the last time—at the only person on earth who really knew him and who, amazingly enough, accepted him whole. Thought just what he was to this magnificent old dinosaur had never been quite clear in Marcus’ mind. A formidable weapon, often enough, and a protégé certainly. But was he a friend as well, or perhaps something even more? Marchenko had no sons, Marcus knew, only a daughter, long estranged and married to some apparatchik.

  The general put out his big bony hand. “Good-bye, Marcus. Do what I tell you now and get the fuck out of here. Fool the damn bastards on the Stavka and the KGB and find your sunshine again. And sometimes, when you are fucking some darling little cunt—Italian I hear is the best—you give her a good one just for me, okay? You do it right, and all the way to Siberia I will hear her scr aeming.”

  Marcus laughed and promised dutifully. Then Colonel General Rodion Marchenko turned and walked purposefully away, lifting his hand in a last wave before disappearing into the shiny red car. With a sudden hollowness in his chest and thickness in his throat, Marcus let himself be carried along with the crowd, down the platform and into the vast echoing gloom of the station.

  The old man was gone. But his deadly legacy was far from over.

  Marcus had never been to Istanbul, and, during the twenty-minute taxi ride, through the Topkapi Gate in the old Byzantine Walls and along Millet Caddesi into the Old City, he gawked at the passing picture-postcard views like any tourist—or like the world wanderer he had been in his carefree youth. But his was not a pleasure trip, and his current itinerary was extremely tight, with no margin for distractions or detours. Already Stamboul’s fabled light was fading, its domes and minarets veiling for evening as the muezzins’ tape-recorded calls went forth for sundown prayers; on the Asian shore across the Bosphorus a scattered mosaic mirror of westward windows flashed the fires of sunset. Marcus had a great deal of deadly work to do in the hours of this coming darkness, and had managed to snatch less than an hour of sleep during the three-hour forty-minute flight from Munich.

  He had the taxi let him off on Kennedy Caddesi at the foot of the Second and Third Hills, by the entrance to the little fishing harbor of Kumkapi. Off to his left, a kilometer eastward along the ramparts facing the Sea of Marmara, was the cluster-domed magnificence of Sultan Ahmet, the Blue Mosque. Nearer to hand along the low seawall, brightly painted caïques and skiffs and smacks began to settle into their own dark liquid reflections, while quayside fishmongers iced their unsold wares and packed up their tables.

  But Marcus’ gaze was directed offshore, into the sunset haze of the Marmara roadstead, where perhaps twenty ships were anchored. They were mostly larger fishing craft and smaller merchant vessels, judging by their hull forms and upperworks. But moored farthest out, right where Marcus was told it would be, was a solitary military ship—a Soviet Polnocny class LST. With binoculars from his shoulder bag, he scanned the elongated tank deck, picked out the white numbers painted on her gray bow—671. She was the Gorodovikov, all right. And he’d cut it damn close—less than a half-hour to spare.

  After his betrayal in Bavaria, Marcus had been left with only two links to Marchenko’s old European network. One was an electronic message drop in Helsinki. Accessing that required only basic hardware—a laptop with built-in modem, easily obtained in Munich—but Marcus had never really trusted email security. The other contact was an emergency phone number in Budapest, again a relay point for coded instructions and information. Marcus had decided to risk it. He’d dialed the number from a pay phone in the Munich Hauptbahnhof, given his request, been called back two hours later with some startling information, directions for this rendezvous—and barely enough time to catch the Lufthansa flight to get here.

  Would this turn out to be a setup, too?

  He didn’t have a long wait to find out. Catching the pungent odor of Turkish tobacco behind him, Marcus turned around. A dozen paces down the quay a compact figure in jeans, windbreaker and deck shoes was smoking and watching him. The man approached, gave him a level, dark-eyed stare and a flat cigarette, then proceeded to light it. They exchanged the correct sequence of trivialities. The man was Andrian Ivannenko, captain of the Gorodovikov. He was also naval Spetsnaz, Marcus knew, and once upon a time had worked closely with Marchenko.

  Ivannenko gestured along the harbor wall. “The launch will be along in a few minutes. Let’s walk. You can leave your bag. Kuzma will watch it.”

  A second man, also out of uniform—young-looking to be an officer, likely a seaman—was approaching. Marcus eased his shoulder bag to the cobblestones, moved off alongside the captain.

  “Marcus, look out there, not far from the Gorodovikov. You know what happened there?”

  “A lot, I’d guess. All kinds of naval battles—Greeks, Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans.”

  “I’m talking more recently. Like a couple of years ago.”

  “You mean that movie ship?”

  “Yeah. Some Kurds jumped an old square-rigger, held about forty people hostage. Burned the ship to the waterline. It washed ashore not far from where we’re standing. I saw it, ugly fucking sight. Here’s my question. What did those poor bastards get for their trouble?”

  “They got dead?”

  “That’s right, Marcus. They got dead, and the Kurds still don’t have a fucking country.”

  “What’s your point, Andrian? Or is this just sort of interesting local color?”

  “I’ll tell you the point, Marcus, as if you didn’
t know. Number one. I’m going to help you, if you insist on it. I owe the Old Man that much. But I’m going to tell you something else. I don’t like it. And the truth of it is, I resent being called on. No matter what happens, you’re endangering me, what’s left of my career, maybe some of my men. And you’re doing it all for nothing.”

  “You’re telling me to call it off, Andrian?”

  “I’m saying think real hard about it, that’s all. Rybkin’s nothing. Just the latest asshole trying to ride the avalanche of history, trying to keep from being buried alive. The world’s changed, Marcus. Marchenko’s world is gone. The Old Russia is gone. Maybe that’s bad, maybe it’s good, but it sure is inevitable. They’re carving us up into pieces, and what’s left will probably end up reporting to Brussels or Berlin, just like the Brits, who lost their whole fucking empire. And you’re not going to stop it all by yourself.” Ivannenko halted and faced him. “So go home, why don’t you, and take it easy?”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  “That could be arranged. That much we could do, before we break up the Old Man’s gang forever.”

  Nearby an old fisherman levered himself up from the cobblestones, started gathering the nets he had been mending. Even in the gloom, the red-dyed netting stood out. Marcus met Ivannenko’s penetrating gaze with an easy smile.

  “I’m sorry, Andrian. You’re lecturing the wrong guy. I’m not a political animal. I’m not even a patriot, like Marchenko. You know why I defected to your country? For the fun of it. And I’m probably attempting this for the same dumb reason. The truth is, I don’t know for sure, because I don’t always think things through. I’m an impulse guy.”

  “This is all bullshit, Marcus. You’re doing it because the Old Man asked you to. At least admit this, or I swear I’ll do nothing for you.”

  “Okay. I owe him, dead or alive, like you do. And also I want to see if I can pull it off, right under the twitching assholes of the KGB. And somewhere down there, in my adopted Russian soul, let’s say, maybe I do think Rybkin’s an evil bastard who’d sell his mother, let alone his Motherland, for whatever he can get on the open market. But don’t worry, Captain. Nobody will know you guys were involved. Just get me out to the Medtner.”

  The Nikolai Medtner was a Soviet Lentra-class converted trawler, or “survey ship,” now patrolling somewhere in the Black Sea. According to the information Budapest had relayed back to Marcus, Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol in the Crimea had been alerted that President Rybkin would be in their area for the next several days. Which meant he had gone to Kichkine, his clifftop estate in the Yalta suburb of Oreanda that had once belonged to Brezhnev. The “plan”—though nobody but Marcus gave it a chance—was to surprise Rybkin there, as Marcus had so often ambushed mujahideen in their strongholds. Getting out to the Medtner was the next critical phase of the operation, and that would require the considerable connivance of Ivannenko.

  The captain stared at him a long moment, then started back toward his aide.

  “Well?” Marcus asked, falling in step.

  “I told you I’d help you, damn you. So let’s do it.”

  Moments later Marcus and Ivannenko were settled in the sternsheets of a little motor launch as Kuzma slalomed out through the anchored shipping toward the shadowy bulk of the Gorodovikov. The Soviet LST, the captain explained, had just returned from landing operations—part of Trans-Caucasus Military District exercises—near Batumi, an Azerbaijan enclave on the Georgian Black Sea coast. They were enjoying a three-day layover in Istanbul, and most of the officers and crew were on liberty.

  As they drew nearer, Marcus was able to resolve the bargelike silhouette of the Polish-built landing craft into its components. The long forward sweep of the low-freeboard tank deck was designed to carry eight BTR-60PB amphibious personnel carriers, which were ramp-launched through bow doors. At both ends of the low-slung, raked superstructure he now discerned the stubby fingers of twin 30mm antiaircraft guns and SA-N-5 Grail launching posts.

  But what directly concerned Marcus was the giant grasshopper shape squatting on the platform just forward of the bridge. This was a Ka-25 Hormone helicopter, its drooping, twin coaxial rotors extending several meters on each side of the deck-wide platform. The Ka-25 was just visiting, Ivannenko said. Its home and hangar were on a larger Rogov-class landing ship, which was now steaming back to Sevastopol. During the landing exercises the Ka-25 had been used mainly for reconnaissance and utility transport, and so had been fitted with external fuel tanks. These gave it an effective range of over six hundred kilometers—enough to fly to the Crimea and back. Tonight’s scheduled flight, however, was one way; they were delivering the chopper back to Sevastopol. With only the slightest deviation in course, they would be able to drop Marcus in the immediate vicinity of the Medtner, which, according to the last position Ivannenko had received, was about sixty kilometers south of the Crimean peninsula.

  An hour later, as a jaundiced quarter moon lifted over the neon-sprinkled Asian hills, the big Ka-25 was thrashing its contra-rotating rotors five hundred meters above the Bosphorus. Only the pilot seat was occupied in the side-by-side cockpit. Senior Lieutenant Krikor Hovhannes had just finished talking to air-traffic control at Yesilköy, which had routinely forwarded his flight plan to the Turkish NATO airbase at Izmir. The young Armenian flight officer had been vouched for by Ivannenko: “Krikor hates all Russians, and wishes you great success tonight.”

  Four meters behind Hovhannes, clad in black wetsuit, with lifejacket, web belt, facemask and fins, Marcus had the main cabin all to himself—except for the tiny inflatable raft in its carrying case beside him. The other eleven fold-down seats were unused. And so, officially, was his; Hovhannes was supposed to be ferrying an empty Ka-25 back to Sevastopol.

  As they reached the entrance to the Black Sea, the pilot’s voice crackled in Marcus’ headset—the only way to commu-nicate above the deafening racket of the twin turboshafts. With their cruising speed of two hundred kilometers per hour, Hovhannes estimated arrival at the drop zone in two and a half hours.

  “Now, Major, put in your earplugs and try and get some sleep. Captain Ivannenko’s orders. Don’t worry. I’ll wake you in plenty of time.” And incredibly, despite the unholy din, Marcus did find a little sleep—his first in thirty-six hours, except for the brief nap in the Lufthansa 737.

  *

  “Major? Time for your evening swim.”

  The pilot’s voice wrenched Marcus out of the uterine depths of unconsciousness, slamming him back into the cramped, shuddering cacophony of the helicopter.

  “Are you awake, Major?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

  Marcus shook the sleep from his mind. Hovhannes was explaining they were now only a couple of minutes from rendezvous with the Nikolai Medtner.

  Marcus peered out the small, square window to his left, saw moon-flecked waves dimpling a vast blackness, Ursa Major twinkling icily above. He unbuckled, made his final equipment check, removed the spare headset. From now on he’d go by the pilot’s hand signals.

  Then they were dropping quickly, the swells looming larger in the lacquering moonlight. On a signal from Hovhannes, Marcus slid the cabin door aft, sat down in the opening, legs dangling, arms braced against shrieking windblast. They were hovering at only five or six meters, their landing lights bathing a surface being whipped into a maelstrom by the downdraft. Marcus knew it was no easy matter for the pilot to gauge his height in these conditions, and waited for his “go” signal. An instant later it came: Hovhannes motioned violently downward with his palm.

  Marcus tossed out the raft. As it cleared the helicopter, its attached static line disconnected, activating its CO2 inflation cartridge. Looping his left forearm through his fins and mask, Marcus grabbed the diagonal strut of the rear landing gear, slid out and hung suspended a flailing instant. Then he brought his legs together, swung forward and let go, clasping his fins blades-up, falling straight and slicing cleanly into the dark water. By t
he time he rose to the surface, he had his fins and mask on and stroked quickly to the welcome vinyl sheen of the inflatable, still hissing and unfolding to its two-meter length.

  Spotlighted from above, Marcus slithered inboard and activated a tiny battery-powered RDF beacon to help the Medtner locate him. Then, as the Ka-25 lifted and went hammering off to the northwest, he settled himself in the raft, abruptly alone in vast undulant darkness. By his watch it was only twenty minutes to nine. He was making excellent time... if he didn’t spend too long bobbing around in this giant bathtub.

  Five minutes passed. He broke out the raft’s flare kit, swore in disgust. He’d expected a pistol and 26.5mm parachute-flare cartridges, or even 40mm hand-launched rocket flares. Instead he got what looked like a toy—a pouch of nine tiny cylinders about the size of double-AA batteries, and a ballpoint pen-sized launcher. Marcus sighed, fitted one together, fired it off. It went hissing up into the night, burst seconds later into red lumin-escence seventy meters overhead, staining the surrounding sea and sky scarlet.

  Marcus reverted to the American version of a favorite Russian oath: “Motherfucker!”

  In five seconds the flare was extinguished. But Marcus had already picked up the soft throb of diesels. He turned around, squinted, saw navigation lights, a curl of phosphorescent bow wave.

  He reached for another flare. This one blossomed blinding-white, enveloping him in five seconds of stark daylight. Even before it faded, an approaching searchlight began stabbing the darkness around the raft. Marcus semaphored his arms till the beam finally foreshortened and skewered him.

  “Forgive me, but I do not welcome you to my ship,” said the rheumy-eyed, heavily bearded man as he thrust a steaming glass of tea into Marcus’ hands. “The fact is, you know, you are not really here, and therefore I am addressing only an apparition, a product of this bottle of old vodka. This is understood?”