by Dan Pollock
The President of the Soviet Socialist Republics came here in times of duress, increasingly these past few years, abandoning his wife and any guests in the main palace across the reflecting pond to wrestle with far simpler problems than those of state. Crossing the threshold with a nod to his guards, he would shut out the clamoring world and enter the shadowed habitat of childhood. How vividly he could recall those endless hours he would sit by his father—just over there, say, on that backless chair—with a little hardwood block and whittle knife, and watch the old man work. The boy would imbibe the fumes of the workshop —the sweet burn of lathing wood, the dizzy-making vapors of solvents and resins, the smells of the old man himself, his powerful arms socketing from the undershirt under the battle-stained coveralls, as, with explosive breaths, he settled his favorite crosscut blade into a deep sawcut.
Well, little Aloysha had inevitably become his father. He, too, was a fat old man now, though as a child he’d never thought of his father as fat. He was even wearing a similar pair of coveralls, and the exact red tam-o’-shanter, bestowed on his father in 1945 by an officer of the Highland Scots in Berlin, whither Junior Lieutenant Maksim Rybkin had ridden on a T-34 battle tank with Konev’s First Ukrainian Army Group. The ancient tam’s tassel was worn off now, the tartan quite threadbare. No matter. Madame Rybkina had run out of adjectives to describe her husband’s workshop ensemble—nyekulturny, outrageous, farcical, even pathetic. Alois Maksimovich didn’t care.
He looked down at the scattered movement of the clock. And, as too often happened, he found that the world’s insidious problems had followed him inside his refuge. The truth was, of course, that despite the clever trappings of nostalgia, he wasn’t his father. His trade was statecraft, not tinkering, and the badly broken thing that he confronted, and which it was his sworn business to put back together, was not a timepiece but a vast country, fragmented along ancient fault lines from the irresistible tremors of a new age. Its pieces, strewn like these ratchets and springs and pinions across his worktable, were peoples—Slavs, Nordics, Kazakhs, Semites, Tatars, Yakuts, Turks, dozens more, each further fractured into nations, tribes, languages and faiths; and, in the case of the Moslems, threatening to unite again under the banner of Islamic fundamentalism. They had been assembled into the continent-straddling colossus of Russia, God knows how, by the great warrior czars, Orthodox crusaders and Cossack adventurers; then forged and hammered together on the anvil of mythic “Soviet Man” by Lenin and Stalin.
But it couldn’t last indefinitely.
Rybkin fitted a pinion to a plate, checked the meshing of the teeth. At least this heirloom had a blueprint, a schematic for coherence. His country no longer had. The world thought he was only accepting the inevitable and helping to dismantle the colossus, divest himself of the parts that didn’t fit, reorder those that did into a new, streamlined state. But the world was wrong.
Alois Maksimovich had a desperate plan for putting his vast land back together, a great deal of it anyway—exactly as the new Europe was being shaped out of ancient, rivalrous states.
Amazingly enough, he had gotten his plan out of a think tank—IMEMO, the Institute of World Economics and Inter-national Relations—the same one that had first formulated glasnost and perestroika and argued the wisdom of dismantling the Wall and letting Eastern Europe go its own way, long before those astounding events came to pass. In the last months Rybkin had spent considerable time in discussion with academicians from that gray, nineteen-story building at 23 Trade Union Street in Moscow, looking at their equations and economic and geopolitical models. Finally they had persuaded him into a new direction, a direction almost as radical as that which had resulted from their earlier idea that the new revolution—the STR, or scientific-technological revolution—had made Bolshevism a dinosaur.
The U.S.S.R. was engaged in global chess against several opponents at the same time, and faring badly. It was being rapidly encircled by the new European juggernaut and the exploding economies of the Pacific Rim, while experiencing its own energy crisis and customary stagnation, with no real replacement for the trading partners it had lost in the demise of Comecon and the retreat from Eastern Europe. Now the time had come for the Soviets to make their decisive move, just like the Americans were doing—scrambling frantically to link up with Japanese, while maintaining their dwindling ties to Europe.
Ironically, there seemed to be a consensus among Rybkin’s domestic allies and enemies—like old General Marchenko—that their leader was getting ready to dilute Soviet sovereignty, or sell it out altogether, in exchange for inclusion in the new United Europe. What else did the “Common European Home” and “Greater Europe” initiative boil down to? they wondered. Wasn’t Europeanization from the Atlantic to the Urals the real thrust of the upcoming Potsdam Conference? The only difference was that Rybkin’s allies called it pragmatism and his enemies treason.
But the IMEMO academicians had convinced the Soviet President he didn’t need to settle for being the last invitee at the feast of a New Europe, didn’t need to go to Potsdam with his begging bowl in hand, lacking as he did the energy reserves to export for hard currency and consumer goods. If the European leaders weren’t eager to give him absolutely everything he demanded—and he should demand a great deal more than equality, IMEMO said, and surrender nothing—then there was another very large card he could play—or at least show.
He could threaten to turn away from the West—and toward Mecca. By continuing the long mea culpa over the invasion of Afghanistan, and granting limited autonomy to the Central Asian republics, Rybkin could dramatically improve his standing with the fifty-five million Soviet Moslems. And he could go further yet. By expanding his already substantial economic and military aid to the Middle East, and his presence in Syria, Iraq and Libya, he could make the Soviet Union the real champion of the Islamic world. To solidify that position, he could turn next to the Iranian fundamentalists, even help them launch a new jihad to finally destroy Israel and overthrow the Saudi regime.
The West would be outraged, of course. But in the final analysis, the West—and especially energy-dependent Europe —didn’t need Israel, it needed Middle Eastern oil—desperately, just as Russia did, and the Japanese as well. And that oil would be firmly in the control of Rybkin and his new pan-Islamic allies.
Europe would be at his mercy.
Chief Academician Churkin had expressed it more judiciously: “It was Bismarck, if you remember, who counseled Alexander II to turn away form the West, that Russia’s true destiny lay eastward. Of course, Bismarck had his own designs on the West. In any case, it is far from an ideal solution that we propose, Alois Maksimovich. But it may very well be the optimum gambit, for again and again it is the only one that comes up. Without this sort of Middle Eastern strategy, we grow increasingly weak and Europe increasingly strong. With it, and with a little luck, the situation can be reversed.”
How far he should go down this road would depend, to a great extent, on what happened at Potsdam. Ultimately, if Europe and the Islamic states alike spurned his overtures, he would be prepared to attack Iran and Iraq—in overwhelming force, without any pretense of a “limited military contingent” as in Afghanistan, and seize the oil he needed.
One way or another—unless Marchenko’s madman stopped him—he would save this country yet, and restore its lost greatness—ironically the very thing Marchenko had most desired.
He finished assembling the movement, mounted it, closed the cherrywood and ebony case, wound the clock. Listened awhile as it ticked.
And heard a knock at the door.
Twenty-Three
Incredibly to Yuri Prilepko seated at the hydroplane and steering controls of the midget sub Flea, his mysterious passenger slept through much of the hour-and-twenty-minute trip to the Yalta coast. Prilepko wasn’t privy to the assassin’s identity, but Captain Chapayev, sure of his Michman’s sympathies and loyalties, had hinted sufficiently at the objective; in any case, with Oreanda their destination,
it was obvious. Think of it—to be able to sleep before such a business!
Prilepko, on the other hand, had never been so wide awake in his life, even during a four-man midget infiltration into NATO waters in the Baltic years before. He stared ahead into the spectral tunnel the searchlight drilled into liquid night, monitored every ambient sound, tracked every drop of condensation that trickled down the bulkheads, consulted his obstacle-avoidance sonar. Nor were his nerves steadied by the occasional pinging that resonated through his hull—transmissions, he assumed, from one of the Grishas patrolling the coast. It bothered him, even though he knew the Flea was too minuscule to be detected by them, and would also slip unheard through the coastal SOSUS chain—the Seabed Sound Surveillance System. But things could go wrong; systems could easily malfunction. Which reminded him to verify, once again, that his degaussing gear was properly activated to neutralize any magnetic and acoustic coastal defenses.
Then, having reduced speed from fifteen to five knots, Prilepko saw the sea floor shelving up. He gave a quick echo sounding; the bottom was twenty-five meters, then nineteen, rising sharply. He reduced speed to sixty revolutions—three knots—and came up to periscope depth. He allowed himself only a quick look, barely breaking the surface.
Khorosho! An easy swim, dead ahead in a faint wash of moonlight, the cliffs of Oreanda were right where his chart and gyrocompass said they’d be. Swiveling the lens around to port, the Michman picked up the small lighthouse on Cape Ay-Todor. Damn perfect! He’d stuck the Flea right up their impregnable asshole!
He slowed further, scraped bottom in ten meters of water, went slow astern, stopped, settled gently, nearly level. He blew out his breath as he took on more ballast. Then he turned to rouse his passenger.
*
Marcus hadn’t really been asleep, though his body felt the acute need of rest. He had been in reverie, eyes closed, his sense of urgency merely suspended, not forgotten. At some level, if only kinesthetically, he remained aware of their steady movement through the water—and their destination.
At first, he had tried to concentrate on the mind-clearing dicta of the Hagakure, which again and again counseled the samurai serenely to invoke his own death before embarking on mortal combat. But it wouldn’t come. Marcus’ mind kept deflecting from the astringent focal point of ki, into beguiling, somatic images; it sought escape, not confrontation. He transported himself happily to the South Seas instead, flat on his back on the foredeck of the gaff-rigged ketch Tusitala, watching the mainmast scribe endless arcs against a lurid Technicolor sky.
The languorous undulance of the boat next triggered a series of far more explicit images—of an afternoon orgy on a big schooner at anchor in Jokaj Harbor, Ponape. He could no longer recall the name of the vessel—she was a beauteous thing out of Auckland—nor of the two lissome Kiwi girls—their names were fatuous and indistinguishable, something like Dora and Dee-Dee, or Donna and Dodie. Memory dealt them back mostly in tandem flashes—lank, sunbleached hair; nasal, singsong voices; freckled smiles; darting, pale eyes; light bikini stripes on well-tanned hides.
It had started innocently enough topside. Marcus, the luncheon guest from a neighboring boat, hunkered down to spread suntan lotion on their sleek brown backs. It had moved, then, with stunning suddenness below decks to a V-shaped, reflection-bathed cabin in the bows, where Marcus began heaving big sailbags off the bunks to make room for horizontal recreation. But the girls rapidly changed their minds, or couldn’t wait. They had attacked him from behind, stripped him and then themselves, oiled him to rampant hardness. They took turns straddling him as he stood, his back braced against a bulkhead, gritting his teeth, pumping and posting like a carousel steed. Well, why not cooperate? Wasn’t that the classic advice for the rapee? To his everlasting credit, Marcus had managed to endure till each transfixed and well-lubricated Kiwi had collapsed in his arms, before he groaned, shuddered and slumped to the deck beside them.
The satiated sighs, he recalled, changed to giggles as the trio became aware of the stentorian snores that still emanated from the uncle’s cabin amidships. Five minutes later Marcus and the girls had jumped overboard, raced each other twice around the seventy-footer and climbed back up to nap and sun themselves on the fantail.
“How about I rub some more of that oil on your backs?” Marcus had deadpanned, and the girls had shrieked.
And in the midst of that stuporous contentment, there had come to him a small moment of self-awareness. He had thought: This is what it feels like to be having the time of your life.
It was true—there was never to be an afternoon quite like that again—and how odd that he had known it! But now the long corridors of memory were invaded by a sudden sensation of weightlessness. The sub was sinking—or, rather, settling down. He opened his eyes on the enveloping blackness, heard the distorted clinkings of fiberglass hullplates skidding along the bottom. Reluctantly, Marcus Jolly shook off the cloying fantasy of fourteen summers previous. It was twenty-one minutes after eleven; they’d made good time. He collected his gear and scooted ass-backward to the wet-and-dry chamber.
He huddled there in the tiny space, mask on, hugging his knees and adjusting the mini-regulator of his flashlight-sized air canister as Michman Prilepko flicked a switch and the watertight bulkhead doors banged shut. Then, through the tiny window, he got Prilepko’s thumbs-up—the order to flood. Marcus hit the pump lever, and the tiny compartment began to fill with water—his second tepid bath in the Black Sea this night, with the summer ocean temperature at least seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
As the chamber slowly filled, Marcus felt a little like Harry Houdini, preparing for one of his death-defying underwater escapes. But had the great magician ever attempted anything so perilous as that which Marcus was embarked upon this night? Not likely. And just as he imagined Houdini might have done, Marcus began psyching himself for the great task ahead. He gave himself permission to slip out of control, for a more instinctive self to come forth and take possession. Social conditioning sloughed off, his body came alive, his senses more acute, his reflexes cocked and ready to fire. The lukewarm water was inching up his torso, the air venting into the adjoining cabin area, the increased pressure squeezing in on him. As the tide covered his face, he blew out his nostrils to clear his eardrums, bit down on the mouthpiece of the mini-tank’s regulator and began to breathe normally.
Now he opened the vent in the upper hatch to equalize pressure, then opened the hatch itself and clambered out onto the Flea’s fiberglass casing. A minute later, having reclosed the hatch, he was arrowing up through thirty meters of lukewarm ink toward a graying ceiling, trailing his tethered warbag. He barely broke surface, and sank again before he could fill his buoyancy vest. The Black Sea, he knew, might in places equal the Mediterranean in warmth, but never in buoyancy. Its salinity was much lower, owing to the constant freshwater infusions of the Danube, the Dniester, the Dnieper and the Don. With the vest inflated, Marcus switched to snorkel, saw he was a bit farther offshore than he would have liked. He estimated a thirty-meter swim to the foot of the cliffs.
He hoped to hell that was Cape Ay-Todor light over there and that these were the right cliffs, because if they weren’t, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. His underwater taxi would be already on its way home.
Snorkeling in, he picked up a sound like an underwater tom-tom—distant, but growing perceptibly louder. Presently he ventured a surface peek, saw a dazzling white glow behind Cape Ay-Todor, caught a low, turbine-diesel throb. An instant later a blinding searchlight stabbed the night, froze a green-breaking wave, then swept on as the high-raked bows of a patrol boat emerged behind the cape. Marcus recognized the Grisha II, one of the favorite craft, he knew, of the KGB’s Maritime Border Guards Directorate. He hoped Prilepko had the Flea well out to sea, for if detected, the Grisha might give chase and—unless Prilepko convinced them he was prowling the coast in the middle of the night for an old sunken ship—it might lob one of the dozen World War II-type depth
charges carried in its rails. But the patrol boat’s searchlight instead swung round to rake the cliffsides, and Marcus quickly submerged.
He remained under snorkel till the vibrations had died away, and he judged the Grisha had vanished eastward toward Yalta. A couple of things were now clear. One, Marcus was definitely in the right vicinity; and two, Rybkin’s security people weren’t entirely ignoring the possibility of a hostile approach from the sea. Which led to the question: How long would he have before the Grisha returned to light up the cliffs?
He’d better hustle.
Towing the warbag, he paddled toward shore, carried along by a slight tidal surge, then held off by a backwash. Approaching steep cliffs with no shelf or shingle, he was glad he didn’t have real surf to contend with. Fortunately, as he drew nearer, he saw the bulging bluffs weren’t nearly as formidable as he’d been warned, and had prepared for. They were fissured, veined and eroded. And the cliff base afforded a tiny ledge where he was able to strip and stow his skindiving gear, wedging and weighting the bundle with the ropes, climbing harness and carabiners he wouldn’t be needing. Unless he was fatally mistaken, he would be able to scale this rock wall with little trouble. He had done far more difficult free-climbs assaulting mujahideen strongholds, and carrying considerably more than the vastly lightened warbag—down to perhaps a dozen kilos—that he now slung on his back. Without further delay, he began moving swiftly up the cliffs, choosing a route, wherever possible, that traced the deepest shadows.
Twenty minutes later, soaked with perspiration, Marcus was crouched under an overhang just below the top. He could have reached this point in a quarter of the time had he not taken vast care to avoid dislodging even pebbles or clinking his backpack against the rocks. And despite the exertion, he had managed to keep his breathing nearly inaudible to himself. The brow of stone immediately above was cowled with thick shrubbery. Against the moon-grayed sky, the twisted silhouettes looked like holly oaks and juniper. He needed to get up there and hide in their cover. He planned his moves carefully, then froze.