by Dan Pollock
“If you say so,” Marcus replied. He was more interested in a decidedly non-apparitional plate of salted mackerel now proffered by the bearded man.
Evgeny Chapayev was master of the “survey ship” Nikolai Medtner, whose two short masts and small aftercastle were bristling with electronics, indicative of its principal use as an AGI, an intelligence-gathering auxiliary. Chapayev explained he had scant previous connection with Spetsnaz operations. He was merely obliging his old friend Ivannenko on Marcus’ behalf. Marcus took this to mean that, like Ivannenko, the captain was a reluctant participant, but, unlike Ivannenko, chose not to belabor the point.
Chapayev took another deep pull from a quarterliter of starka, and began to speak of operational details. An hour’s steaming would bring them twenty kilometers off Yalta, he said. It would be perfectly natural for the Medtner to be in those waters, as they were currently helping the Soviet marine science ship, Keldish, search for the wreck of the Sanspareil, which, despite its French name, was an English warship sunk hereabouts in 1854 during the Crimean War. The Keldish, with its forty-million-dollar, high-tech minisubmarine, was working the deeper waters farther out, while the Medtner remained closer inshore with its smaller, more modestly endowed midget sub.However, Chapayev emphasized, this little submersible would be quite adequate for conveying Marcus unseen and undetected to the base of the Oreanda cliffs.
Marcus interrupted. “May I suggest then, Captain, that I might better use the next hour in becoming familiar with its various systems—navigation, ballasting, sonar, and so forth?”
“Why? These are not your concern.”
“They’d better be. I’m driving it!”
“Who told you this? Surely not Ivannenko? Warrant Officer Prilepko will be driving the Flea.”
“Excuse me, Captain. But I have a problem with that. You see, I don’t really know how long this operation will take. If I find a good place to conceal myself, it could be two days before I get a good shot.”
“Ha! I grant you this may be a problem. But it is not my problem. I told Ivannenko I would take you there, no more! In any case, my dear apparition, you will not need a way back from Oreanda. You will most certainly be killed.”
Marcus exploded in laughter. “My God, you’re serious!”
“Killed or captured. Ivannenko assures me you will not hesitate to use your cyanide capsule, when appropriate. This is most essential. We understand each other?”
And finally they did. Marcus, after all, was in no position to argue. And the captain was absolutely correct, if one looked at things from his perspective. It was a suicidal mission, and would be so for any discovered accomplices as well as its perpetrator. Marcus could hardly expect anyone else to share his own maniacal self-confidence.
So, having agreed to everything, an hour later he followed Captain Chapayev up on deck. The wind had freshened, the night had cooled and a silvered quarter-moon now drifted through scudding cloud overhead. Marcus was introduced to Michman (Warrant Officer) Yuri Prilepko, a small, long-armed sailor with a shaved head and a Popeye squint. The Michman was in the process of stripping the tarp off a bulky cylindrical shape amidships—the midget sub.
Fully exposed, it was about five meters of aqua-blue fiberglass, teardrop-shaped, with a searchlight in the blunt bow, a tiny, canopy-enclosed cabin, tapering in the stern to a fin and hydroplanes with a single propeller. Marcus had never seen anything quite like it, although at Spetsnaz “finishing school” on Wrangel Island, he’d ridden several times in an SDV, or swimmer delivery vehicle, and once in a self-contained DSRV, or deep submergence rescue vehicle. The fiberglass hull, he knew, would minimize the acoustic and magnetic signature, and Chapayev had already explained that its battery-powered electric propulsion allowed it to run silently.
It was the Blokha, the Flea—the Cyrillic letters and a stylized cartoon both appeared on its bow. At burst speed of fifteen knots, Captain Chapayev had said, it could cover the twenty kilometers to the Yalta coast in an hour and twenty minutes.
Michman Prilepko climbed down into the forward tandem seat, Marcus slipped in behind, and the laminated-glass canopy was lowered and locked. It was a tight squeeze, and Marcus’ seat wasn’t very comfortable, but, according to the instruction panel, when the cushion was peeled off, the seat doubled as a hand-pumped water closet. He grinned. It just might come to that, he thought.
Under a “dry” diving suit he was wearing light body armor. Beside him was a waterproof “warbag” that had been stowed in the inflatable. In it were various items generously provided by Ivannenko: climbing gear, dismantled sniper rifle, AKR sub-machine gun and Makarov pistol, with ammunition and silencers for all three.
At a thumbs-up from Prilepko, the Flea was hoisted by a derrick, swung outboard from the Medtner and lowered into the water where—to Marcus’ considerable discomfort and slight dismay—the little torpedo hull began to bounce around almost as violently as Azib’s Peshawar taxi on a rocky road. But the turbulence ceased an instant later as they were released from the ship, and a liquid black void closed around them. Marcus became aware of the steady pulse of the propeller, watched as Prilepko fiddled his joystick to get the proper trim. They were still sliding downward, but at thirty meters, Marcus knew, they would level off and be on their way.
It wasn’t exactly the first oceanic mission Marcus had undertaken with no way out, no escape plan. There was, for instance, the time he had stripped to his shorts and jumped into the Sausalito marina and swum out to solicit his first sailboat ride. At that time, as he recalled, he had no slightest thought of ever paddling back to the dock in defeat. However, he could have. Not so here. He was fully committed, unless he tapped Prilepko on the shoulder sometime in the next hour and called the whole thing off.
Which he would never do. Better a madman than a coward.
Yet oddly, Marcus felt no sense of dread, little foreboding. He was wondering, with lively curiosity, just how he was going to pull the damn thing off. For he knew somehow he would do it. One way or another, he always had.
Twenty-Two
Taras didn’t like chatty seatmates on airplanes. But Pavel Starkov, his KGB chaperone on the two-hour flight from Moscow to the Crimea, not only didn’t speak. The young lieutenant colonel didn’t smile, fidget, visit the toilet or read. In fact, for the first hour he scarcely seemed to blink his blond-lashed eyes. Maybe the ramrod-stiff bastard wasn’t human. Maybe the organs of security and the Academy of Sciences had somehow interwoven their fantasies and synthesized the perfect state-run automaton. But if that were so, Taras thought, why did they have to pattern him so blatantly after old Aryan stereotypes, housing his photo-sensors behind Alpine-blue glass beads, and his cranial circuitry in a crewcut, Gothic skull?
But finally, somewhere over the Ukraine, Starkov spoke, pitching his voice barely above the drone of the Aeroflot Tu-134’s twin turbofans:
“Excuse me, Major.”
Taras turned, saw a tiny cardboard box in Starkov’s square pink palm. “What’s that?”
“It’s for you. From Chairman Biryukov.”
Marcus opened the lid, took out the fire-ring, looked an inquiry.
“Earlier today,” Starkov continued, “we showed this ring to several of our resident psychics. People who are able, or claim they are able, to tune into ‘vibrations’ from crime scenes, murder weapons, and especially what they call ‘familiar objects.’ You know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure,” Taras said. “Spoon-benders, card-readers, ball-gazers. I didn’t know you guys were still giving office space to them.”
“My exact sentiments, Major. Spoon-benders, I will remember this. In regard to this ring, all they came up with was psychological garbage. ‘This man is running from himself.’ ‘He takes long walks and had an unhappy childhood.’ Something of that sort. Not one dared to guess his current whereabouts.”
“And Biryukov thought maybe I could do better?” Taras held the bulky steel ring to his forehead, closed his eyes. “Hello, C
owboy, where are you? Talk to me, old buddy. Are you running from yourself, like they say? Taking long walks? Why is it you never talked to me about your unhappy childhood?... Sorry, Colonel, he’s not coming through. Maybe it’s the altitude, too much cosmic ray interference or something.”
Starkov showed his teeth; Taras took it for a smile. “In any case, you may keep the ring as a souvenir. We have no further use for it. Also these.” From his coat pocket Starkov produced a packet of five gel-flame capsules. “However, I suggest you not load the incendiaries while we’re in the air. We don’t want to violate Ministry of Aviation rules.”
“What about your Makarov?” Taras pointed to the checkered butt of a shoulder-holstered pistol momentarily visible under the flap of Starkov’s suit coat. Taras’ own .45 automatic was packed away in his luggage.
“Most observant, Major.” The KGB officer tugged at his lapels, sealing the offending aperture.
“It’s nothing. Thank your boss for the thoughtful gift. And assure him I’ll use it with discretion.” Taras pocketed the capsules, slid the ring onto his index finger, a tolerable fit. The only clear “vibration” he picked up from it was one of plain ugliness. He could imagine it on Marcus, but on his own hand it seemed a grotesquerie. But then, Taras didn’t take to jewelry. He had once worn a paratrooper ring; he’d given it to a merchant in Peshawar the day he defected. He twisted the fire-ring, smiling at the idea of stodgy, bear-faced Biryukov consulting with psychic “sensitives.”
It was full dark when they touched down at Simferopol, the principal Crimean airport. Rather than take the regular Aeroflot helicopter into Yalta, and then drive three kilometers west to Oreanda, Arensky and Starkov were shuttled with their bags to the military section of the airport, where an Mi-2 light helicopter was waiting to fly them directly to the presidential compound.
They had the eight-place cabin to themselves as the pilot lifted into the night for the twenty-minute flight over the coastal mountains. Presently, peering through the cockpit canopy, they got their first glimpse of the Black Sea—a velvety dark wall dead ahead. Moments later they were looking down on a necklace of sparkling lights—the port of Yalta, sheltered by an amphitheater of forested mountains.
The Mi-2 now swung southwestward along the Crimean shore, skimming over illuminated, geometrical gardens and courtyards that surrounded an Italianate marble edifice, impressive even from the air.
“In case you’re looking for the helipad, Major,” the pilot’s voice came over their headsets, “that’s not where we’re going. The presidential estate is a couple of hills ahead. That’s the Livadia Palace down there, summer residence of Nicholas II and site of the 1945 Yalta Conference. I’d give you more of a spiel, but right now, if you’ll both excuse me, I’d better get our final clearance to land before we get shot out of the sky.”
Taras had toured the area as a Young Pioneer, and was familiar with many of the sanatoria scattered over the dark mountainsides. They were above Oreanda now, site of several more spas terracing the steep slopes, including the sprawling Nizhnaya Oreanda complex. Then, on a thrusting clifftop ahead, he picked out the lights of a small minaret. As they hovered nearer, the needling tower, tipped with a spotlighted Soviet flag, rose slowly above a palisade of dark cypresses to reveal itself situated atop the white gleam of a miniature Moorish palace, complete with minidomes and crenellated battlements. This, Taras knew, was their destination—Kichkine, which in Arabic meant “little one,” though it was environed by several, much smaller guest dachas, also in Moorish style. Taras could see why Rybkin, and Brezhnev before him, had fancied the retreat; though an even more exotic structure lay farther along the rocky coast in Miskhor—the little fantasy castle known as the Swallow’s Nest, Lastochkino Gnezdo, on Cape Ay-Todor.
In a moment they were down and taken in hand by a distinguished looking, gray-haired colonel of the KGB Guards Directorate—the Ninth, the only branch permitted to carry guns in the proximity of Soviet leaders. A signal exception was being made in the case of Arensky and Starkov. “For as long as you’re here,” said the colonel, whose name was Pasholikov, “we have been instructed to regard you as officers of our personal protection squad.”
Pasholikov conducted them on a brief tour of the compound, passing without comment the lovely Moorish guest pavilions, the floodlit gardens and grounds, edged with palms and pines, cypresses and magnolias, leading to lily ponds, a tennis court, a swimming pool. Rather, he directed their attention to the various intrusion-defense features.
Taras was suitably impressed with the perimeter security, at least on the landward side. The compound was massively, yet discreetly fortified, with guard towers hidden among the tall, thick-trunked Crimean pines; tripwires, microwave “fences,” seismic and magnetic sensors; radar, thermal-imaging and multi-camera TV surveillance; and a series of vehicle barriers that Pasholikov boasted would stop anything short of a tank. All of this, he emphasized, was manned and monitored by an elite detachment of Ninth Directorate guards.
When the circuit was completed, Taras paused by the dark, splendid sweep of sea frontage, peered through a copse of junipers down a hundred meters of sheer bluffs to waves creaming in the faint moonlight. He savored the salt tang, the surf murmur. Taras had been eleven when he was chosen for his thirty-day summer “shift” at the Artek Young Pioneer Camp east of Yalta. He had not been back to the area since. But how, he wondered, could he have ever forgotten that caressive, velvet breeze of the Crimea—air so restorative that sanatoria patients were regularly taken outdoors to sleep?
But there was something else in the air besides southern balm. He had an eerie sense of Marcus—as though his old comrade were here tonight, or had been here recently, or would be soon. It was almost a voice, and very like the kind Taras had learned to listen to during their heliops against the mujahideen in Afghanistan. But that had been long years ago. This was probably just self-delusion, stimulated by all the nonsense about picking up “vibrations” from Marcus’ ring. The most likely danger here was of Taras’ turning into a spoon-bender himself. Still, the feeling wouldn’t go away, and it bothered him.
He turned to Pasholikov, gesturing seaward. “Colonel, what about your southern flank, if I may call it that? It looks rather exposed.”
The colonel chuckled, then pointed to a moving silhouette a few meters away. The shape came nearer, became a uniformed KGB guard speaking into a transceiver, his submachine gun unslung and in hand. He saluted Pasholikov as he passed. In addition to the manned observation posts and gateside sentries, armed men roamed throughout the grounds and along the cliffside pathways.
“I mean in addition to your small army,” Taras said. “If you could just summarize.”
“How comprehensive a summary do you wish, Major? For instance, shall I explain the operation of our Voyska PVO network?”
“No, leave out your air defenses. What about from the ocean?”
“You saw the coastal radar and sonar displays in the command post. We track every approaching vessel, every plane. The nearest ship, as I recall, was that Lectra-class trawler, which has been poking along the southern coast for some old sunken English man-of-war for the last couple weeks. But there’s a Grisha-class patrol boat due along any moment. You have to keep your eye on them, because at thirty-two knots they go by pretty quickly. We have three that keep us company: two under naval command, from Sevastopol and Balaklava, and one KGB Grisha II based in Yalta. It seems tranquil, but as you see, Kichkine is a very busy place, especially when the Boss is in residence.”
“Are you satisfied, Major?” This was from Starkov.
“Just one more thing. I’d like to see Rybkin’s quarters, if I may.”
“I’ll show you the outside. We actually walked by it a few moments ago. But we have strict orders never to disturb Alois Maksimovich when he’s in his workshop.”
“Workshop? Is he some kind of hobbyist? I hadn’t heard.”
“Yes. He repairs things.” Colonel Pasholikov smiled discreetly
. “It’s not generally known. But he’s actually quite good. Fixed my mother’s old sewing machine last month. No charge.”
*
Alois Maksimovich Rybkin was indeed fixing something. He had the entrails of a Viennese Biedermeier clock spread all over the big chest-high workbench—gear-wheels, weights, gathering pallets. There were other benches, other intricate surgeries in progress. Across the aisle a just-refinished wing chair was upended, a bolt of muslin propped between its feet. He needed to cut and tack pieces of the fabric to the inside of the frame so he could get on with the real upholstering. Close beside it a mahogany jewelry box lay in the jaws of a wood clamp, its regrooved rabbet joints being glued. A jolly round doll’s head lay in the lap of its sailor-suited trunk, awaiting recapitation. At the far end of the room a recently acquired Spanish bellows organ also waited, well into its second century of silence. Alas, its wounds were too grievous to merit inclusion in this quick triage; it would be, perhaps, next year’s project.
But right now he was completely involved in the clockworks.
He was talking to himself, and lecturing the stubborn escape-wheel tooth he was trying to straighten with the needlenose pliers in his stubby fingers. It was exactly the way his father, old Maksim, would converse with himself in the old converted stable-workshop in Ulyanovsk, while the cats brushed past his legs or attacked the socks that slopped around the ankles of the unlaced shoes, or lightly followed his heavy footsteps as he rummaged angrily and profanely through shifting mounds of debris for a mislaid bolt or bushing.
In fact, this was his father’s old workshop, removed and trucked down from Ulyanovsk, piece by piece—everything but the spiderwebs festooning the corners—and lovingly reassembled like a three-dimensional puzzle, to Rybkin’s best recollection, inside the gutted interior of a little guest dacha. Oh, he had added some new hand tools, spruced things up a little; he could neither recreate nor tolerate the perfect chaos in which old Maksim had flourished. But otherwise, it was uncannily the same, minus the confounded cats. And when Alois worked in daylight, a turn of his head fetched him a shining square of blue ocean, near enough the angle at which his father, squinting round from his workbench, used to watch a windowful of the mighty Volga.