by Robert Moss
The phone shrilled. The flashing light indicated that the call had come through on his direct outside line. He let it ring a second time before lifting the receiver.
‘Sasha?’ The voice at the other end was a full, rich baritone, the voice of a man who is always ready to burst into song and probably does not sing too badly.
‘Yes, Feliks.’
‘Sasha, it’s time. Bangladesh!’ The caller sounded positively elated, possibly a little drunk.
‘What?’
‘Yes, there’s more trouble in Bangladesh,’ the caller amplified. He added: Not only that, but it’s nearly four o’clock and you haven’t bought me a drink yet. The sooner we get out of our offices, the better.’
‘You’re right,’ Preobrazhensky replied, adopting the same bantering tone. ‘I’ll try to think up a new alibi for Lydochka.’
‘Ty chto mumu yebyosh?’ the caller goaded him. ‘Why are you fucking a cow?’ This was his favorite invitation to proceed with the drinking. ‘Let’s get to it.’
‘All right,’ Sasha laughed. ‘Nalivay!’
Preobrazhensky hung up, took a deep drag on the last of his cigarette, and mashed the butt into the plain glass ashtray beside the phone. His face was empty of expression.
He did not call his friend Kolya over at the Aquarium — military intelligence headquarters — to ask for an update on Bangladesh. He was indifferent to whether one strongman had ousted another in that corner of South Asia. The message he had just received had nothing to do with that Bangladesh.
He did call his wife, to tell her not to expect him for dinner. No, he could not say when he would be home; he would probably have to spend the night at the office because of something that had blown up. Lydia went through the motions of complaining. She always did. But he knew she would think nothing of it; it had happened often enough before. Certainly, the dialogue would sound natural enough to anyone from the Committee — the office euphemism for the KGB — who happened to be listening in.
Sasha did not use the black telephone for his next call. Instead, he opened his safe. Inside was a special device that he had had installed only three days before by a military technician. It connected him to the residence of the commander of the special forces brigade at Kavrov, a smoky industrial city on the railroad east of Moscow. When Sasha lifted the handset, Olga — General Zaytsev’s wife — answered at once. There was a slight quaver in her voice, but Sasha knew the woman. She was doggedly loyal, a peasant at heart, like her husband. She would play her role.
‘I’ve been trying to reach Fedya,’ Preobrazhensky lied to her. ‘If you happen to talk to him before I do, please tell him Sasha called. Tell him the meeting we arranged cannot take place because our friend must leave immediately for Bangladesh.’ He stressed the last word, the unfamiliar one, to make sure she got it right.
She did not ask him to repeat anything. As soon as he was finished, she hung up, without formalities.
Sasha’s third call, on the black phone, was to the special forces base at Kavrov. All messages in and out of the base — by phone, telex, or cable — were monitored by the KGB.
It took several minutes before Zaytsev was brought to the phone. He was breathing heavily, as if he had been putting himself through punishing physical exercise. Sasha could picture the man, bullnecked, broad-chested, sweating his way around the brutal obstacle course that ran through the pine forests, his arms swinging evenly, like pistons, reminding his recruits that he asked nothing of them he was not prepared to do himself.
When he spoke to Zaytsev, Sasha was clipped and formal. His tone was that of higher authority dealing with a subordinate. Both men held the rank of major-general, but Sasha was the right arm of the Chief of Staff, and Zaytsev was just a brigade commander, a position held by colonels in most branches of the army. Listening in on the conversation, you would not have suspected that these men were friends.
‘The Chief of Staff wishes to know how the preparations for the exercises are coming along,’ Sasha began.
‘Comrade General,’ Zaytsev responded equally stiffly, in his low, gravelly voice, ‘everything is proceeding in accordance with standing orders. You can inform Comrade Marshal that he will be able to attend the exercise at the appointed time, one week from today.’
‘Good. I am sure you understand that the Marshal is extremely concerned that the maneuvers are executed without a hitch, one week from today.’ Sasha repeated Zaytsev’s phrase to be sure that the KGB monitors did not fail to grasp it. They were sometimes a little slow on the uptake.
There was a curt exchange about transport arrangements, and then Preobrazhensky hung up abruptly. Another light on his phone had flashed on.
He punched the button and said, ‘Yes, Comrade Marshal.’
‘Get in here immediately,’ Marshal Zotov growled. ‘We have a visitor. A friend from the Committee.’
As Sasha marched along a corridor the width of a railway car, spotlessly clean under unremitting fluorescent lights, he tried to think of a reason why the KGB had called on the Chief of Staff — any reason except the one he feared most. He had not found a satisfactory answer by the time he reached the door to the Marshal’s office. The door was massive, like the man sitting behind it, oak covered with padded black leather designed to shut out eavesdroppers. The leather was deceptively soft to the touch, like the seat of an old studded chesterfield.
The Marshal’s adjutant threw open the door, and Sasha’s whole body tensed as if he had just walked into an ambush. Marshal Zotov sat at his desk, his huge arms folded across his chest. His expression suggested he was trying to prevent himself from committing an act of violence with them.
Lolling in an armchair on the far side of the room, his face turned toward the window, was a man of medium height with the blue tabs of the KGB on his uniform and a colonel’s badges of rank. He affected not to have noticed the new arrival.
Sasha had seen this man only once before, in the bar of the Bega restaurant at the Moscow Hippodrome, where successful gamblers drank to their wins and others to obliterate their losses. But the colonel’s face was etched on his memory, the lines traced in acid.
It was an unremarkable face, undistinguished by any signs of more than average intelligence. The eyes were small and bright and hard, like a jackdaw’s. The features did not seem big enough for the pendulous head; they might have been molded from moist putty. The ears were large, but fitted tightly against the cranium, as if the man had spent most of his life pressed up against keyholes. It was an ageless kind of face, but Sasha knew the man was over sixty. It was not a face to inspire fear, under normal circumstances, just a mildly unpleasant reaction. It was a face that, in a different society, might have belonged to the night clerk at the kind of flophouse where they rent rooms by the hour.
But for Sasha, this ordinary-looking man was the human symbol of tragedies that had misshapen his youth, deprived him of the possibility of a normal life, and set him on a course that, in the space of twenty-four hours, would end in something almost beyond imagining, an event that would convulse all of Russia — or in the squalor of his own arrest and execution. As he watched Colonel Topchy, Preobrazhensky was certain that, at that moment, the man was a lethal weapon pointed at him. Knotted inside, his adrenaline pumping, the young general still betrayed no outward emotion.
Marshal Zotov made the introductions.
‘Oh yes, General Preobrazhensky. Assigned to the General Staff for Special Missions.’ As Topchy recited Sasha’s official title, he made no effort to conceal the edge of sarcasm in his voice. ‘You have developed quite a reputation in the Third Directorate.’ The Third Directorate of the KGB — Topchy’s section — was charged with spying on the armed forces. It was Topchy’s men who listened in on Sasha’s phone calls. Their power was such that there was nothing incongruous about Topchy, nominally a colonel, dropping in on the Chief of Staff.
‘Colonel Topchy is here on some very delicate business,’ the Marshal explained.
Sasha
scanned the Marshal’s face for guidance. Had there been a leak? Had the operation he had set in motion with his phone call to Zaytsev’s house already been betrayed?
The Marshal looked confident enough behind his desk, a commanding physical presence, magnificently ugly.
‘Our friends from the Committee’ — Zotov’s sideways glance at Topchy was less than friendly — ‘have nominated a new chief for the special unit at Kavrov. A careful and sober man, we are told.’
Topchy’s department had ‘special units,’ or otdeli, attached to military commands throughout the Soviet Bloc. Zaytsev’s command, the Spetsnaz brigade at Kavrov, rated its own KGB section. A curious incident had taken place at Kavrov a couple of weeks before. The head of the KGB unit responsible for keeping tabs on Zaytsev’s men had broken his neck, apparently in a fall from the tower that was used for parachute training. The circumstances looked fishy; the KGB man was no kind of athlete. At the same time, he had earned a considerable reputation as a zakhleba, a guzzler. And the autopsy showed he had consumed more than a liter of vodka before the accident. The provisional verdict was accidental death while under the influence of alcohol. Topchy’s presence in the Marshal’s office suggested that the Third Directorate was not satisfied with this conclusion. The appointment of a new chief for the KGB section of Kavrov was, after all, a routine business. It did not require a meeting with the Chief of Staff, or even his assistant.
The drift of the conversation served to deepen Sasha’s suspicions. Colonel Topchy wasted little time talking about Kavrov. When he turned to Sasha, you could hear him working the gears. His manner, at first cold and sarcastic, became exaggeratedly cordial. He complimented Preobrazhensky on his work and on past assignments, dwelling on the time Sasha had spent in the United States on intelligence missions. He threw out some odd, offhanded questions about Sasha’s opinions about the Americans. Sasha began to feel that the KGB man was less interested in what had happened to his spy in Kavrov than in feeling both of them out. There was a treacherous undertow in his words, most forceful when he was most agreeable on the surface.
Marshal Zotov gave it precisely a quarter of an hour, counting off the minutes on his wall clock. Then he rose from his desk — topped with green baize and bristling with model tanks and planes, trophies from Warsaw Pact armies — as if to dismiss his visitors. With his massive shoulders and heavy jowls, propping himself up on his fists, Zotov looked rather like the old mastiff he kept at his dacha in the Silver Forest.
‘I’m leaving early,’ he told Sasha, as Colonel Topchy handed the young general some standard forms relating to the transfer of the new KGB section chief to Kavrov. ‘I won’t be back until late tomorrow,’ the Marshal added. ‘I have been summoned to attend a special extended meeting of the Politburo. So I rely on you to hold the fort.’
The Marshal avoided looking at Sasha as he said this.
Topchy smiled and nodded, as if to indicate that he, too, was in on the secret of the Politburo meeting.
Sasha knew — because a man had called him with the code word Bangladesh — what was on the agenda for the Politburo session. They had pronounced the General Secretary dead, and were going to pick a new one. He wondered whether the doctors had already shut off the life-support systems in that secluded ward among the white birches, or whether that would come later.
Sasha left the Marshal’s office first. Topchy lingered for a moment. He made sure that Sasha was still within earshot when he remarked to Zotov, ‘You know, of course, that some people criticized you for appointing your son-in-law to such a senior post on the General Staff.’
Zotov scowled, and the KGB man quickly added, ‘Of course, they were wrong. Preobrazhensky is an exceptional officer.’ Again, there was that cutting edge of irony in his voice.
‘Oh, yes, exceptional,’ Marshal Zotov grunted, ignoring the innuendos, impatient to be rid of his KGB guest.
This exchange convinced Sasha that the danger was imminent, and that Topchy’s main motivation for visiting General Staff headquarters that afternoon was to play cat-and-mouse with them before coming in for the kill. Topchy was no stranger to killing. Now Sasha felt certain that Topchy was amusing himself, while awaiting his moment to return to the building with an order to take him to Lefortovo prison.
As he hurried back to his own office, Sasha brooded over the apparently disconnected remarks that the KGB man had thrown out in the Marshal’s office. The questions about New York and the Americans, seeming casual, made him most uneasy. In his own room, he threw open the window, despite the chill in the air and the noise of the traffic on the left side of the building, facing Gogol Boulevard. There was a wide-meshed net tacked to the window frame, as in many of the offices in the building. It was not meant to keep bugs out, but to catch documents that might get caught up and blown away by a sudden breeze. This was a rational precaution; only a handful of generals and marshals rated air conditioning, and in the depth of summer, many of the windows were opened to get relief from the stifling heat. Sasha stared out through the mesh of the net, almost wide enough to stick a hand through, and suddenly he realized the point of the KGB man’s questions about America. For an instant his stomach clenched up inside like a fist.
He went to the safe, unlocked it, and took out his pistol and one of the boxes of ammunition he kept on the same shelf. The pistol was a P-6 with a built-in silencer, like the ones the Spetsnaz commandos used. Methodically, he fitted in the magazine, tested the weight of the gun in his palm for a moment, then slipped it into his pocket and closed the door of the safe.
Whatever the night held for him, it was not going to end Topchy’s way.
To download the book and continue reading click here.
