In the Shadow of Mordor

by Michael R Davidson

  Here was Petrov – a worthless little man doing his best to convince her of his value - to serve her. He was obsequious and fished for compliments. She was far above him and his sort – she was an official, a true Chekist, and people like Petrov saw in her the personification of the government they served.

  She smiled condescendingly in unconscious imitation Karpov.

  "You are a true professional," she said. "It's simply remarkable that you've been able to dig all of this up. You've been very helpful. Could you please let me have the address of this old lady? One of my friends is looking for a nanny."

  Petrov gave her a cunning look out of the corners of his eyes. She wasn't fooling him. He knew exactly what she was doing. He wrote the address on a piece of his company stationery and handed it to her. "Here it is. Her name is Nina Valentinovna Guskova. No need to talk politics with her. She's one of us – watches Russian TV, but she doesn't understand the subtleties. That's why she can get along with this corrupt Jew. She's a simple soul and doesn't understand what he's doing. If it were me, I'd punch him."

  Petrov slapped himself on the chest as though he expected someone to pin a medal on him.

  Olga flashed a brilliant smile. "I'm just looking for a nanny."

  She accepted Petrov's silent admiration and left.

  Olga debated whether to pay a visit to the nanny. Karpov might not approve of her getting so close to the target, but she wanted to see where the man lived.

  Guskova lived in a modest house surrounded by shrubbery that undoubtedly would explode in a riot of color in the spring. But gray skies dominated now, and a gentle rain was falling when she knocked on the door.

  She introduced herself and was invited inside by a white-haired but robust appearing woman in her mid-70's – Nina Guskova. The cozy house was filled with the aroma of baking cookies. On one wall of the living room was a small shelf with dried flowers, icons and family photos decorated the walls.

  Olga experienced a brief regret that she was here under false pretenses. But she kept in mind the image of herself as a steel-nerved professional. She was in a war, and she would fight it with every smile and word, every nod of her head, in her smallest gesture, in the firmness of her gaze, in the tension she did not betray. An invisible war.

  Olga recited the story she had concocted as a pretext for the visit. "My friend has a two-year-old daughter. She's very precocious and runs everywhere and talks. The only problem is that she doesn't live near here. You don't drive, and it would be hard for you to get there. It's possible that my friend could bring the child here on her way to work in the morning and pick her up after. You have such a nice garden where the little girl could play. But I do have a question. Are your neighbors OK?"

  "Oh, the neighbors are very quiet." The old woman waved vaguely at a window. "On that side there is a very nice elderly American couple. Their children visit occasionally, and they're very nice. And a nice Russian boy," she gestured to the other side, "lives over there. Well, not a boy, but he's young and quite charming, a handsome Jew," she smiled. "He says clever things that I don't always understand. He lives alone with his dog. I don't know much about dogs, but this is a good-sized one. But he's nice. He always runs to give me a kiss."

  "So this man is smart and handsome, but he's not married?" She wanted to encourage some gossip.

  "Oh, he's always busy, like all the Americans." Guskova shook her head. "He used to study all the time, to be a lawyer, I think. He also worked as a paralegal for one of those lawyers that help with political asylum. I asked him, 'Marik, what is all this about asylum – escaping from one's own country?' And he says, 'Oh, Nina Valentinovna, it's best that you not know.' And what does he know that I don't? I lived my entire life in Russia and saw much that he did not …"

  This was easy. It didn't take much to get the garrulous old lady started. "And what did he do when he finished his studies?"

  "He went to Europe for about three months and asked me to look after his dog. He was with me so long it was hard to give him back. Such a good dog. But then Marik founded some sort of organization and spends most of his time there. He helps all sorts of people, refugees, I think. I tell him, 'Marik, you should have a family instead of helping others all the time.' And he says, 'These people help me, too. Thanks to them I always know what's going on, and know that I'm not working in vain.'"

  As she listened to this naïve old lady praise a traitor, Olga experienced an unwelcome nausea. She breathed in the aroma of fresh cookies and through the window saw the sun break through the clouds outside. Something in her soul could not be reconciled to what was happening, and she could not shake it.

  This work is complicated, and I only now realize it completely. Aloud, Olga asked, "So he hasn't traveled to Europe again. He's still here?"

  Guskova waved a hand in the air. "He's always traveling. He went to Ukraine just a couple of months ago. I said to him, 'What do you do over there, Marik? There's a war and fascists,' but he said, 'No, Nina Valentinovna, there aren't any fascists like they say on television.'"

  Guskov's eyes went wide. "And how is it possible that the television could lie? They have smart people, and they know everything. But Marik just laughed and said, 'I talk with generals, with professional soldiers, and they know more than the television.' But can one believe generals if they aren't our generals?"

  The television does not lie, but Shtayn lies every time he opens his mouth. Olga wanted to say this but did not, and the old lady continued like a water tap that could not be shut off.

  "I saw a girl with him a little while ago, maybe his secretary. They work together, and she's started to come home with him. She's young, but then so is he. She's pretty. I like her looks. I saw her through the window." It was a habit of babushkas to watch what their neighbors were doing.

  "Does he have family in Russia?"

  "In Russia, yes. He complains about not seeing them for so long, but what can I do. It's his fault. My daughters weren't refugees, and they came home every year to visit me while I lived there." She turned a disapproving eye in the direction of Shtayn's house.

  And that was everything she could wring out of the old lady for her report to Karpov: information on his repeated trips to Europe, his contacts with foreign generals, about his family and his supposed girlfriend. It didn't seem like much to her.

  Chapter 33

  The Shenandoah Valley, Virginia

  This is what the old man knew.

  Age strips us of our vanities and illusions until, like an oak in winter denuded of its autumnal glory, we stand naked against the bleak winter with all our faults exposed. But unlike the oak, there is no promise of quickening sap in the coming spring, no prospect of summer's renewed vigor. Man’s cleverness has mauled the circle of life into a straight line, a mortal continuum with a definite beginning and an inevitable end. What happens in between is largely a matter of chance.

  A hollowness had expanded inside him, like the empty, icy expanse of space, and it led him to decide that he no longer liked nor needed people, either as individuals or, more generally, as a species. There were those he had called friend, and two women he'd truly loved. But they were lost like stones dropped into deep, dark water to sink from sight forever.

  People were best avoided. Perhaps this disdain always had been a part of him but temporarily overcome by youthful enthusiasms. The old man knew too much to retain those deceptions.

  There were ideals worth fighting and dying for. He had met evil and vanquished it time and again, only for it to reappear in some other guise, sometimes springing from the same soil he thought he had salted. The lives of some who defended what had once been called an evil empire were snuffed out by his hand, but these had been only temporary, ephemeral victories. By taking sides, he also accepted a burden of responsibility that in the end was too heavy to bear. Evil would always be with us.

  And so in the end, he abandoned mankind to its foolish devices and stopped caring if it repeated the same ancient mistakes. Hi
s participation was at an end.

  He much preferred the company of dogs, a species he viewed as vastly superior to man in spirit, decency, loyalty, and truth. Dogs do not require a surfeit of conversation, and deception is unknown to them.

  The smoke from a large Cuban cigar, a Partagas Lusitania, in fact, wafted toward the fire in the native stone hearth. A chocolate Labrador Retriever named Sadie rested her head in his lap. The furnishings in the log cabin were spare and solidly masculine. There was a lot of leather and heavy, oak pieces. The walls were adorned with a few oil paintings, identified as seascapes of the Irish coast if one were to examine the small, brass plaques affixed to the frames. A glass-fronted liquor cabinet with a copper top contained a collection of Islay single-malt scotches.

  There were no photographs because reminders of the inhabitants of his former life evoked unfailingly painful memories.

  Book shelves lined one wall. There were so many of the great books still to be read. There was a gun safe concealed in another wall containing a variety of weapons. Beside the door, a coat rack was mounted on the wall. It was currently inhabited by a hooded parka and several hats. A sturdy blackthorn walking stick leaned against the wall below beside a pair of fur-lined boots. If one were to enter the cabin, one would encounter the pleasant aroma of tobacco mixed with furniture polish and pine-scented cleaner, but there were never visitors.

  The cabin was situated on fifty acres of unimproved, forested mountain land on Supin Lick Ridge, a part of the Appalachian range, overlooking Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The old man paid a ridiculously inflated price to a delighted real estate speculator. The place had been abandoned decades earlier and sold at a tax auction before passing through many hands. He found the neglected cabin nearly in ruins and spared no expense in its restoration, which included a powerful generator to guard against frequent power outages, a state of the art perimeter alarm system, and a kitchen that sparkled with the most expensive and modern, stainless steel equipment. He also installed a sturdy gate at the entrance to the only access road. He added a garage on one side to house for the Land Rover.

  There was no television and no computer, only an ancient but powerful, multi-band radio of German manufacture. A phone line was connected, but he kept the phone unplugged. There was no one from whom he wished to hear.

  He was comfortable here, alone but for the dog, and isolated from the world by acres of forested mountainside. The cabin represented a return to beginnings, to self-sufficiency.

  Once a month, the old man would drive with the dog to the nearest city to re-stock his supplies. He discovered Costco, which except for the scotch satisfied most of his needs.

  An early frost already had begun to turn the leaves by mid-October leading Shenandoah Valley residents to predict a long, hard winter. The leaves turned earlier than usual, bringing in carloads of tourist gawkers who bought locally produced apple cider and colorfully decorated hand-carved whirligigs in the shape of roosters or other animals. In another month hunters would begin to move through the forests in search of deer, turkey, and bear. The prizes from these hunts would feed many families throughout the year.

  It was time to top up the 500-gallon underground propane tank, assure a good supply of dry firewood, and stock the larder.

  In the check-out line at Costco the old man noticed a man in a military surplus jacket with a woman in a hijab, not in itself so unusual, even in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The man was young and handsome. He and the woman ferried two loaded trollies piled high with bulk food items toward the check-out counter.

  Shoppers avoided the line like scattering birds to head for other lines that promised a faster pass through. The old man, his own shopping cart heaped with a month's supply of meats, frozen goods, and sundries, fell in behind the two.

  It was a spur of the moment decision, his interest slightly piqued. It was not so much the fact that the couple aroused his curiosity, but rather the outline of a large caliber pistol traced through the fabric of the man’s jacket when he bent to the trolley to lift items onto the counter.

  Virginia is a concealed carry State, but the combination of a Muslim couple and a large caliber weapon in a store full of shoppers flipped an interior switch which activated reflexes too much a part of his make-up for too many years to ignore. Entirely of its own accord his hand snaked inside his jacket to unsnap the safety strap that secured a Heckler & Koch .45 Tactical in a shoulder rig.

  Nothing untoward happened. The couple paid for their purchases with cash and trundled toward the exit. Except that when the man spoke to the woman the language he used was Russian. This shifted the old man’s speculation geographically northward, toward the Caucasus.

  The old man paid and pushed his own cart to the parking lot where he loaded his purchases into the Land Rover.

  The couple was still loading their purchases into the bed of a beat up F-150 with sun-bleached red paint and a sagging rear bumper. The woman did the heavy lifting while the man stood aside lighting a cigarette. When she was finished, the woman headed back to the main building tugging both empty trolleys behind. After crushing his cigarette beneath his shoe, the man climbed behind the steering wheel and started the engine, which emitted a well-tuned purr that belied the trucks appearance. He waited for the woman to return and clamber into the cab before backing out of the parking space.

  The old man filled the Land Rover’s tank with cheap Costco gas and headed for an ABC store to pick up a couple of bottles of single malt.

  *****

  Some days later he spotted the F-150 again on the narrow gravel road that led up to Supin Lick ridge. It was stopped in front of a gate that guarded a narrow dirt road leading to a former turkey farm. On certain hot summer days when the wind was right, the stench of the old breeding barns drifted up the mountain over his fifty acres that lay just to the west.

  As the Land Rover passed, the man opening the gate stared hard, his eyes following the old man's progress until he was out of sight. In the Land Rover's rear view mirror, the F-150 passed through the gate.

  His didn't like his new neighbors' profile. The location was remote. Given the extent of the old man's property it was possible that the new occupants of the turkey farm didn't know he was even there. But he knew about them now in the way a man knows about a splinter in his flesh that is otherwise invisible; the irritation would fester.

  Chapter 34

  Surveillance of Mark Shtayn was simplified by the fact that the man travelled between his home in Fairfax and his office in Arlington via an unchanging route. He left the house every morning at the same time, caught the same Metro train at the same time, rode it to Clarendon Station and walked the short distance from the station to his office with almost no variation. In the evening, he reversed the route. Those times he would elsewhere were often publicized, and so he could be found speaking at a university one night or attending a symposium at a Washington think tank on another. To make things even easier, his public appearances were punctiliously published on his website.

  It didn't take Olga long to figure this out, and she told Karpov she would not require assistance. Shtayn never once so much as looked over his shoulder. He felt completely invulnerable in America.

  Curiosity drew her to one of Shtayn's appearances at Georgetown University. She didn't seek Karpov's permission because he almost certainly would have denied it. But she wanted to see for herself why this man was such a successful anti-Russian agitator.

  She arrived at the auditorium five minutes before the presentation and found a cozy spot in in the back row. The audience was an eclectic mix of students in jeans and hoodies, not so different from what she recalled of her own time at university in Moscow, well-dressed older men and women, and everything in between.

  By the time the speaker was introduced, the place was about half-full. Shtayn's lecture on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was open to the public. Olga could see him clearly across the expanse of auditorium seats. As he took his place behind the dais the air seem
ed charged with electricity that tingled on her skin and caused her heart to beat faster. This was the enemy, her target, and her goal was to see him disgraced. She feared that her animosity was so great it would be noticed by Shtayn as though assaulted by a physical force.

  Shtayn began, "The Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine was carried out under the control of the Western Group of Forces – one of four strategic formations created in 2008 when the Russian Armed Forces were reorganized. At that time Moscow created the Western Group of Forces to counter NATO. The Eastern Group is to conduct operations against China. And the Southern Group against the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Central Group serves as a strategic reserve."

  Olga sucked in her breath. This is our military. How can he talk like this in enemy territory, and how does he know these things?

  "The Western Group has two headquarters levels and was used in military operations in Ukraine, both in traditional and non-traditional ways. The non-traditional, for example, include airborne divisions and regiments, as well as special operations brigades. It was actually these forces that were used at the beginning of the war to destabilize Eastern Ukraine and gather intelligence on strategic targets in the region. These were the forces known as 'little green men,' and they were involved in the invasion and annexation of the Crimea. As for regular forces, as the incursion got underway they consisted of tank and motorized divisions that supported mechanized and armored brigades. These forces were reinforced by elements from the Central command."

  Images of men in camouflage with darkened faces and without identifying unit patches appeared on a large screen behind Shtayn, as well as tanks and other military equipment that Olga did not recognize. But she knew they were "ours." The strength of Russian arms was being shown at a Washington university – could this be permitted?

  There was a question period after the lecture, and several people raised their hands. One of them leapt up not waiting to be recognized and in a voice shaking with emotion began to speak.