Navalny pressed the PLAY key.
“Listen carefully and follow orders. We have your wife and sons. . . .”
~ ~ ~
A real man does what he needs to do and not what he wants to do.
Ivan Navalny understood that the Moscow City Police and the Russian government would later denounce him. Relatives and in-laws and so-called friends would disown him and curse his name. For sure he would be stripped of his rank as a Police Lieutenant Colonel. His 20-year career would end in disgrace at the GUVD-Moscow. He also knew that a long prison sentence waited for him if paid or unpaid killers didn’t catch him first.
So what?
A real man does what he needs to do . . . not what he wants to do . . . not what he feels like doing.
The same goes for a real woman.
Navalny remembered what his grandfather and father often told him:
“A real man does what he needs to do because no one else will ever do as good a job as you yourself can and will do. Ivan . . . you and your family will never really thrive or be independent if you’re waiting on someone else’s handout or some government agency’s magical program to solve your problems.
“Let someone else do what you need to do and they will fail you. They will disappoint you. And if you’re lucky . . . very lucky . . . they won’t turn on you or otherwise harm you or try to control you.”
A real man does what he needs to do. That’s why Ivan Navalny ankle-holstered his father’s 8-round Makarov semi-automatic pistol while he gazed lovingly at a recent picture of his wife and sons. He preferred his father’s reliable army-issued Makarov from 1978 to the modern 17-round MP-443 Grach that the Moscow police had issued him. The Grach went into his shoulder holster.
He picked up a silver-framed picture that he had taken of his family on last year’s vacation in the Black Sea. Navalny fondly remembered the visit to his aging parents in Krasnodar. He had splurged and taken his parents along for a two-week stay at a beach-side resort in Sochi. He had always taken care of his family and that reminded him of one thing.
The difference between a man and a boy is that a real man does what needs to be done and not what he feels like doing. Ditto for a real woman.
At that very minute he had one feeling: the compelling urge to grab his trusty AK-47M assault rifle from his Army days and then barge into the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Interior Affairs—the dreaded MVD—at 16 Zhitnaya Street through one of the many secret entrances that he knew about. He would easily find Col. Timur Samirovich Valiulin and his boss and the boss of that boss. The last one being the MVD Lieutenant General who masterminded the ugly and bloody mess that he now needed to clean up. Navalny made plans—down to the last detail—on how he will empty out the Kalashnikov on all those fine gentlemen and anyone who might try to stop him.
Of course he will have no problem entering the Ministry and dispatching those men. He can and will walk into their offices any time. After all he is the Chief of the Fourth Division of the Moscow City Police Operational Search Department. Or he will find them at home. He can and he will find them. He is the top man in charge of surveillance at the Moscow City Police.
Ivan Navalny ignored his immediate feelings and he delayed his murderous gratification. He first had to do what needed to be done. Before Lt. Col. Navalny left on his mission he played the voice message one more time:
“Listen carefully and follow orders. We have your wife and sons. You won’t see them alive if you don’t do exactly as I say. . . .”
He took one final look around his apartment and knew with absolute certainty that this would be the last time that he would ever set foot in his home. Ivan Navalny embarked on his mission on the remote chance that his family was still alive.
I will never have a normal life after I’m done with this mess.
He grabbed the envelope that contained his life insurance and he walked out of his home for the last time.
Chapter 8/Åtte
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA: WEDNESDAY
JULY 13, OR THREE MONTHS AND 1 DAY
AFTER THE DAY
The canals and architectural jewels of St. Petersburg entitle the city to claim that it’s the Venice of Russia. But the grandeur of the city was a distant rumor in the abandoned and rusting 1950s tractor factory that Stalin had once hailed as “a socialist marvel for the centuries”. The pervasive smell of urine and feces almost overcame the acrid stench of a versicolor brew of toxic chemical spills that covered the floor.
The stomach-churning aroma reminded the ever-so-cynical Ivan Navalny that he would make a fortune if he came up with a women’s perfume and a men’s cologne called New Russia. He would sell out if he could somehow capture and bottle the stench that permeated the factory and Russia. He wondered if Saks Fifth Avenue and a couple of other elegant stores in New York and London and Paris and Monaco would carry the New Russia fragrance that apparently got lost whenever corrupt Russian tycoons bought super-luxury homes outside of Russia at prices that ranged from $ 30 to $ 300 million U.S. dollars.
Could $ 30 million be the benchmark when ill-gotten gains from rotten sources start smelling like roses and Chanel No. 5?
“You are late,” said Pyotr Petrovich Zubkov. The hulking man’s tiny blue eyes almost sank into oblivion under his bulging Neanderthal brow.
“I’m late?” said Navalny. “I didn’t know I was punching a time clock . . . or in charge of my train’s schedule.”
The dour colonel with the FSB looked at his watch one more time to drive home the point. “You’re very late.”
In plainclothes the beefy agent looked as dangerous as he did in uniform. Upon seeing him for the first or second time most people did not know whether to stare at the former boxer’s cauliflower ears or at the poorly stitched harelip left over from a horrific childhood in a hellish orphanage. Very few people had the nerve to stare at the bulbous mass of livid tissue than hung between the colonel’s eyes. The repulsive area had formerly been a nose that had been broken too many times. With those visual choices most people preferred to stare at Zubkov’s massive yellow-gold Rolex Submariner watch—an Oyster Perpetual Special Edition worth at least $ 10,000 U.S. dollars.
“Colonel Zubkov . . . if I had a nice watch like the one on your wrist then maybe I would’ve been on time. But then again I couldn’t afford such a watch. . . . Tell me . . . how did you pay for it?”
“Shut your insolent face up.”
Ivan Navalny grinned but he knew better than to keep goading the ugly gangster who had started out in the KGB beating up political dissidents. At the KGB’s successor agency—the FSB—Zubkov was now known as a fixer for the robber barons who were looting billions of dollars every year from Russia thanks to Yeltsin and then Putin. The two leaders of the New Russia had “privatized” the gold mines and oil fields and banks and other assets that the old communist government had once owned.
“Get in the back door.”
Navalny glanced at the two menacing black SUVs that looked more like funeral hearses thanks to their black-tinted windows. “Which one?”
“Front one,” muttered Zubkov. “Get moving.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Navalny walked closer to the two cars. He recognized the front one as a top-of-the-line Mercedes G-Glass vehicle and the other as a GM Yukon—both vehicles the favorites of tycoons and organized crime bigwigs and the security services. Navalny calculated that the giant American SUV held a full complement of seven passengers because the vehicle’s load weighed it down rather close to the ground.
Once Navalny got inside the luxury Mercedes SUV he failed to recognize the driver or the passenger up front. The two men looked ex-KGB or current FSB. So did the other gorilla who sat on the back seat by the window. Navalny took the middle seat and Zubkov climbed in behind him.
Col. Zubkov’s stainless steel teeth glimmered when he spoke inside the car’s dark interior. “Did you bring the blank arrest warra
nts and the extradition papers?”
“Yes.”
“If you didn’t then we won’t be able to cross the border.”
Zubkov’s unusual set of instructions started making sense. The E-18 Highway would take them northeast into the border with Finland. From St. Petersburg they had a 190-mile drive to the Finnish capital of Helsinki.
As soon as the convoy went east—in the opposite direction of Helsinki—an alarmed Navalny tried to sound as calm as possible. “I thought we were going to Finland.”
“Shut up,” said Zubkov while he filled out the arrest warrants and extradition papers. “Shut up before I do something that you are going to regret.”
The convoy’s route became less of a mystery as soon as the two vehicles got on the M-18 Highway and headed north. “Let me guess . . . north to the Port of Kandalaksha . . . then west to Kovdor . . . then across Finland into Norway?”
“I told you to shut up. I’m not going to repeat myself a third time.”
Navalny smirked. “You can count that high?”
“Shut up before I do something you are going to regret.”
Zubkov’s threat meant little. Navalny had greater worries. The 800-mile northern route into remote and mostly uninhabited wilderness meant that he was in far bigger danger than expected.
Only desperate criminal operatives and extremely sensitive intelligence operations used the old Cold War smuggling route which went through the most desolate regions of the beautiful lake-and-forest taiga of north Europe. If this business went bad then his body would never be found in the endless ocean of pine and spruce and larch.
Chapter 9/Ni
RINGVASSØY ISLAND, NORWAY:
SUNDAY JULY 17, OR THREE MONTHS
AND 5 DAYS AFTER THE DAY
Ervin Vikøren sailed around Ringvassøy Island which is also known as Ringvassøya. He pretended that he was fishing. Pretending was easy to do and quite believable because he fished for himself and he leased out his 100-foot boat as a deep-sea charter for fishermen. Vikøren held a commercial fishing license for cod and haddock and halibut and salmon. But he also caught anything and everything that he could whether it was legal or illegal. Endangered species weren’t off limits.
“Hey there . . . is that you Ervin?” said Henrik Holstrøm over the radio from a boat that was a quarter-mile away and heading to Iceland for cod. Holstrøm was an old boyhood friend. “Ervin Vikøren . . . is it you? . . . Or is someone else on The Asgard?”
“It’s me. I’m still on Cloud Nine,” said Ervin Vikøren in a clever play on words over his ship being named for the highest world in Norse mythology—Asgard—the homeland of a mighty race of warrior gods.
“Really? . . . I thought Ida got The Asgard and kicked you out of the home of the warrior gods.”
“Never,” said Ervin Vikøren as he tensed up at the sound of his ex-wife’s name. “Life’s been very good without Ida.”
Ida Hjort had demolished his heart and bank accounts four years ago.
“That’s not what I heard.”
“What did you hear?”
“That you lost your trawler to her father after he proved that he loaned you all of the money to buy the boat.”
“Not true.”
“Really? . . . I heard that her father’s legal maneuvers forced you to get into debt to buy your new boat.”
“Not true.” Ervin Vikøren closed his eyes as if by closing them he could cool down the roaring fire inside him. He certainly wasn’t going to let Ida have the final word. No. He would do very well without her. “Life’s been very good without Ida.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Life’s been very good without Ida.
He had his freedom. He could finally do whatever he wanted. He could enjoy any woman whenever he felt the urge. But with his newfound freedom he was having problems making the huge monthly payments on The Asgard by the first day of each month. Unfortunately that was the problem with a high-interest loan from some faceless banker in distant Oslo. Those sharks liked to repossess boats by the fifth if the late payment wasn’t deposited along with usurious penalties by the third. Life was much better and easier when he had a no-interest loan from Ida’s father—whom he rarely paid.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
Ida-free life was good but he rarely got to see his two sons aged 10 and 7. That killed him even worse than the boat payments.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
Life may have been good but he had gotten lonely without his wife and children. The emptiness drove him into sleep-around binges with as many women as he could bed down in and around Tromsø.
The result of his roaming?
He was now shacked up with and tied down to The Bossy Hussy. She was fantastic in the sack but greedy for money and always pushing him to earn more. Ervin Vikøren hated his new life and he knew why he had dug himself into a pit: he had hit the bong pipe one time too many since high school.
The result of his doping?
One dumb decision after another.
Vikøren was trying to cut back on the wacky weed. But it was hard when the psychological addiction was so strong. He knew that he smoked pot because he had always been ashamed about his lack of education and lack of success. After the divorce he had slipped down depression’s ugly little chute to become a slut in the bedroom and business world. Even now—four years after the divorce—the education, good manners, and dignified social standing of Ida and her parents made him feel grossly inferior specially when he thought about his own failures, his coarse manners, and his family of vulgar ignoramuses.
Ervin Vikøren wasn’t stupid. He also knew that he was paying a heavy price for giving in to the hormonal urges that led him to cheat one time too many on Ida—his childhood sweetheart.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
His new woman demanded more and more in bed and the bank account. She was grinding him down literally and figuratively. For extra income he poached by taking far more fish than the maximum catch allowed by law. He also liked to pilfer other fishermen’s catch from their lobster traps or their fish shacks. And for the right price he smuggled people and illicit goods coming in or out of Norway by way of Sweden or Finland or Denmark or Russia. His smuggling enterprises sometimes ventured as far away as United Kingdom and Iceland. The most lucrative run had been a shipload of cocaine a year ago from Columbia via England into Russia.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
One problem with his Ida-free life was the danger of getting caught in foreign waters with a ton or two of cocaine. That risk far exceeded any profits. A stint in any foreign prison—specially a Russian prison—would surely end with his murder or suicide. So he had retired from trans-shipping the white powder after only one boatload. Unfortunately he did not use the fabulous coke profits to pay off the mortgage on The Asgard. Coca profits instead went to buy a new house and new cars and new furniture and new clothes and new appliances to make his new bedmate happy.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
Debt-loaded post-Ida life was so good that he had agreed to pick up a couple of shady characters that his London cocaine contacts wanted imported into the United Kingdom from Norway.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
Ervin Vikøren wasn’t stupid. He knew that only the most dangerous of characters—or the most wanted of criminals—would pay for such an evasive route that snaked deep under the customs and immigration radar of any country.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
He was to retrieve the disreputable and possibly dangerous characters in nearby Furuflaten and take them to Scotland. The pickup site required him to take his boat deep inside the desolate and mountain-ringed fjords of Troms County. He had to pass Reinøya Island and then head east until he rounded Lyngen Peninsula. From there he would go south into the Lyngen fjord until he reached the little bay just north of the small town of Furuflaten which sat on the west
side of the fjord. The proposed enterprise sent off the wrong vibes.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
After picking up his don’t ask-don’t tell clients he had to immediately return to the Norwegian Sea and navigate 14 miles out into international waters to avoid all law enforcement. At that point he would steer south and stay within safe and easy reach of Norway’s coast for the 1,200 mile trip to Stavanger. Then he’d put to open sea and plow through 300 risky miles of rough and unpredictable North Sea waters.
He would only get paid the remaining 50% of his fee if he dropped off his passenger cargo at the isolated sand dunes of Rattray Head—some 30 miles north of Aberdeen Scotland. His clients had been very specific about the secluded location and the exact day and time. They had also advanced him the money to buy a Bombard AX yacht tender with its own engine. The fully equipped Zodiac boat was the best in the industry: inflatable; storable below deck; and very fast and stable for sea-to-shore commutes.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
He needed to be lucky enough to have clients who would not execute him and his crew. After all he and his crew were inconvenient eyewitnesses. It was not beyond the realm of the impossible for his clients to kill him and his crew and then sink their bodies and his ship out at sea to eliminate witnesses to the illegal shipment of human cargo. It would be easy: the killer or killers could use the Zodiac to return to shore after scuttling the unwanted evidence.
Life’s been very good without Ida.
La Vida Loca Without Ida required that he did not have a run-in with Norwegian or Scottish law enforcement. Otherwise his clients, the authorities, and his shrew would demand a lot of explanations or worse. Of course that assumed he would live to do the explaining.
Sohlberg and the White Death Page 9