The Beast in the Red Forest

by Sam Eastland

  Kirov squinted at the object, which had landed on the blanket just above his chest. It was a bullet, or what was left of one. Kirov stared at the gnarled mushroom of lead and copper.

  ‘The bullet must have ricocheted,’ explained the doctor, ‘which explains its deformed shape. By the time it hit you, the force was almost spent. We removed it from under your collar bone. If the round had been going any faster, it would have torn away your shoulder blade.’

  A shudder passed through Kirov as he thought of the bullet ripping through his skin.

  Seeing Kirov’s discomfort, the nurse picked up the piece of lead and tucked it into the pocket of his tunic, which was now draped over a chair in the corner of the room. ‘I really don’t know why you hand those things out,’ she told the doctor.

  The doctor smiled. ‘A reminder to be more careful next time.’

  ‘I really should be going,’ said Kirov. ‘You see, I came here from Moscow to find someone.’ As he struggled to sit up, he felt a dull, tearing sensation across his chest and slumped back with a groan.

  ‘Be patient,’ warned the doctor. ‘Even for a commissar, willpower alone is not a cure. You’ll be back on the street soon enough. In the meantime, allow my nurse to make your life miserable for a few days. It’s the least you can do after punching her lights out yesterday.’

  ‘I have already apologised.’

  ‘Knowing her,’ said the doctor, as he replaced the chart, ‘I think it might take more than that to earn forgiveness.’

  When the doctor had gone, the nurse finished tucking in the bed. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ she told Kirov. ‘He likes to stir up trouble.’

  ‘So you won’t be making my life miserable?’

  ‘When the morphine wears off,’ she assured him, ‘your life will be miserable enough without my help.’

  And she was right.

  In the long, sleepless night which followed, blinding flashes of colour exploded behind Kirov’s eyes and pain rose from the fading haze of morphine, shuddering through his body as if some cruel phantom was prising at his joints with screwdrivers. He listened to the Morse-code tap of the branch against the window and the whimpering of soldiers whose amputated limbs still ghosted them with agony. The more Kirov listened, the louder the noises became, until he had to press his hands against his ears or else be deafened by them.

  Kirov had no sense of having slept, or for how long, but in the morning he woke bathed in sweat, to the sound of a creaking wheel as Captain Dombrowsky steered himself into the room. ‘The nurse told you I was crazy, didn’t she?’

  ‘More or less.’ Kirov’s throat was dry. He wished he had something to drink.

  ‘Do you know what those nurses call me behind my back?’ asked Dombrowsky. ‘Their name for me is Samovar, because that’s what I look like with no legs and only one arm. To them, I am nothing more than a glorified teapot. Maybe I’m insane, but I know what I’m talking about.’

  Kirov fixed him with a bloodshot stare. ‘And what are you talking about, Dombrowsky?’

  ‘About the man you saw. He appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost, right when the nurses were changing their shifts. He went straight to your room and as he walked he made no sound. No sound at all!’

  ‘What did he look like, this man?’

  ‘He was tall.’

  ‘That’s all you can tell me?’

  ‘He wore an old-fashioned coat, of a kind I haven’t seen since before the Revolution.’

  Maybe I wasn’t hallucinating after all, thought Kirov.

  The nurse appeared in the doorway. ‘What did I tell you, Captain?’ she scolded. ‘Now leave Major Kirov in peace! And stay away from the stairs! I saw you this morning, and you were much too close to the edge. If you try going down in that wheelchair, you’ll kill yourself.’

  ‘I’m going! I’m going!’ Meekly, Dombrowsky wheeled himself away, but as he passed by Kirov’s bed, he turned his head and winked.

  *

  That night, Rovno was bombed again. This time, it was the outskirts that received the full force of the destruction. Above the burning houses, the sky turned pink as salmon flesh and, at the hospital on the other side of town, shockwaves caused the windows to tremble like ripples in a pond.

  Kirov drifted in and out of sleep. The fever had broken and now his discomfort centred on the livid purple scar beneath his collarbone. He found it difficult to lie in any one position for long and each time he moved, the pain would jolt him awake.

  With a moan, Kirov rolled on to his back. His eyes flickered open and the darkness took shape around him – the light bulb in the ceiling, the crack in the bottom left pane of the window, through which he saw the sky punctuated by the flash of high explosives in the distance.

  That was when he realised there was someone standing right beside his bed.

  This time, there could be no doubt.

  It was Pekkala.

  For a moment, Kirov was too stunned to speak. Even though he had believed all along that the Inspector could have survived, he had always been guided more by faith than certainty. Now, at last, Kirov’s mind was no longer shackled by doubt. ‘I knew it!’ he shouted. ‘I knew they couldn’t kill the Emerald Eye!’

  Pekkala responded by slapping his hand over Kirov’s mouth. ‘Quiet!’ he hissed. ‘Are you trying to wake the dead as well as the living?’

  Kirov blinked at him in silence until Pekkala finally removed his hand.

  ‘How did you know I was in Rovno?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘The clues I left with Linsky,’ explained Pekkala, speaking so matter-of-factly that it was as if no time at all had passed since the two men parted company. ‘I knew they’d lead you here eventually.’

  ‘So you really were in Moscow!’

  Pekkala patted his new coat. ‘And I did not leave Moscow empty-handed.’

  ‘But why did you wait so long?’

  ‘I came as soon as the German army pulled out of this area,’ explained Pekkala. ‘Before that, it was not possible to travel.’

  ‘But why leave clues for me to follow you out here?’ demanded Kirov. ‘Why didn’t you simply come to the office?’

  ‘You were being watched,’ explained Pekkala.

  ‘Watched?’ Kirov remembered the feeling of uneasiness which had pursued him almost to the point of madness. ‘By whom?’

  ‘From the look of them,’ answered Pekkala, ‘I’d say they were NKVD Special Operations.’

  ‘Our own people?’

  ‘Stalin knew that his best chance of catching me was if I came back to look for you. That’s why he had you followed.’

  Now it all began to make sense. ‘And why every assignment I’ve been given since you disappeared has kept me in Moscow. He wanted to make sure you could find me.’

  ‘But Stalin grew tired of waiting. That’s why he finally allowed you to leave the city, hoping you’d lead him to me.’

  ‘All this time,’ Kirov muttered angrily, ‘I have been nothing more than bait in a trap.’

  ‘There’s a way around every trap,’ said Pekkala, ‘and my way around this one was Linsky. For several days, I had been shadowing the same people who were following you. They had staked out the office, your apartment, even your friend Elizaveta. But they had no one watching Linsky. I knew he would recognise who placed the order, even if I didn’t leave a name. I gambled that, as soon as Linsky realised I was still alive, he’d find a way to get in touch with you, and for you to pay a visit to a tailor would not arouse the suspicions of NKVD. In the meantime, I couldn’t stay in Moscow. It was too risky. So I left behind that tobacco pouch, trusting that the tanner’s mark inside would lead you here to Rovno.’

  ‘There was one other clue, Inspector.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what was that?’

  ‘Your pass book and your gun were found on that body at the site of the ambush, but the emerald eye was missing.’

  A faint smile creased Pekkala’s lips as he turned down the lapel of his coat. By the l
ight of bombs exploding in the distance, the emerald-studded badge winked from the darkness.

  ‘I came here to find you, Inspector, but I should have known you’d track me down instead.’

  ‘As soon as news reached me of a tall, skinny NKVD officer who had just arrived by plane from Moscow, I set out to meet you. Unfortunately, I was too late to prevent what happened. Can you describe the man who opened fire in the bunker?’

  ‘It was dark,’ explained Kirov. ‘There had just been an air raid and the electricity had gone out. But I know who it must have been, even if I didn’t see him pull the trigger. The nurse here told me that they recovered three bodies from the bunker. One was Andrich and the other two were partisans. The only other man in that room was a Red Army officer. With a bandage wrapped around his face, he looked as if he’d just been wounded, but I realise now that it was only a disguise. Andrich said the officer had just arrived from headquarters, so he might have been carrying forged papers as well as a stolen uniform. Inspector, do you have any idea why this happened?’

  ‘There are many blood feuds between the partisans,’ answered Pekkala. ‘It may be that you and Andrich were simply caught in the crossfire. Or it may be that Andrich himself was the target.’

  ‘But why would anyone want to murder the colonel? After all, he was negotiating a ceasefire.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ answered Pekkala, ‘because Andrich might have succeeded. He was the only man Moscow trusted who could speak to the partisans. When Andrich’s division was annihilated back in ’41, he took to the forest and joined the partisans, rather than surrender. Two years later, Moscow made contact with his group by dropping leaflets over the forest requesting someone who could act as a representative for the partisans. Andrich volunteered. He knew that somebody would have to speak for the partisan groups still active in this area. The partisans are sick of fighting, whether it’s against the Germans or each other. They just can’t find a way to stop. There is too much hatred among them.’

  ‘Why are they killing each other?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘Some groups originally sided with the Germans,’ explained Pekkala, ‘who used them to hunt down other partisans or to commit atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. When the Germans began to retreat, many of those who had taken up arms against the Ukrainians became victims themselves as old scores were settled. This has been a war within a war, Kirov, more bloody than anything I’ve ever seen before. Andrich knew that the only way the killing would cease was if all sides learned to trust each other. It might have worked, too, if Andrich hadn’t been murdered. And the fact that those two partisan leaders also died will only make the situation worse. Those men were all supposed to be under Soviet protection when the attack occurred. If Andrich was indeed the target, then the killer must have known that murdering him would destroy any hope of peace between the partisans and the Red Army. The faith which Andrich worked to build has now evaporated, just as Stalin knew it might. That’s why he recently ordered a brigade of counter-intelligence troops to be transferred to the Rovno garrison.’

  The Soviet Counter-Intelligence Agency, known as SMERSH, had been formed by Stalin the previous year as a specialised task force with the NKVD and was responsible for crushing any acts of rebellion in the newly reconquered territories of the Soviet Union. Ruthlessly, they sought out enemy agents who had been recruited by Germany’s spy organisation, the Abwehr, under the control of Admiral Canaris, as well as those partisans, civilians and former POWs, who might have collaborated with the Germans during the years of occupation. Within six months of coming into existence, Counter-Intelligence troops had massacred tens of thousands of Russians, for crimes as vague as selling apples to German soldiers, allowing them to drink from a well or for having been captured in one of the vast encircling attacks that wiped out entire Soviet divisions in the first days of Operation Barbarossa.

  The brigade that had been sent to Rovno fell under the Counter-Intelligence Agency’s Anti-Partisan Directorate. This brigade had originally been led by the notorious Commander Danek, whose excesses stunned even the most hardened NKVD members. But Danek had recently been killed under suspicious circumstances. It was rumoured that he had met his end at the hands of one of his own people, although nothing had been proven. The man who took his place, Commander Yakushkin, had been Danek’s right-hand man throughout the war. Since taking control of this SMERSH brigade, Yakushkin’s methods had proved to be even more cold-blooded than those of his former master.

  ‘Stalin said nothing to me about SMERSH,’ remarked Kirov.

  ‘Why would he?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Stalin may be hoping for peace, but he is also preparing for war. Commander Yakushkin had orders to wait and see if the partisans could be persuaded to lay down their arms peacefully. But Yakushkin knows only one thing and that is the art of butchery. Now that Andrich is dead, Yakushkin and his troops will soon begin the process of wiping out every partisan band in the whole region. The partisans may disagree with each other about many things, but even the bitterest foes among them will unite against a common enemy, especially if the alternative is annihilation. SMERSH have now become that enemy. The result will be the deaths of countless soldiers and partisans, along with any civilian who gets caught in their path. The only way to prevent it is to prove to Yakushkin that he is being drawn into a plot designed to pit him against the partisans, which would only end in their mutual destruction. Even a killer like Yakushkin doesn’t want that, but first I must persuade him. To accomplish this, Major Kirov, I am going to need your help.’

  Kirov opened his mouth to reply, but Pekkala cut him off before he could speak.

  ‘Think carefully before you answer. Do not forget that Stalin has a price upon my head. That’s why I came here in the middle of the night, so that you can still return to Moscow if you choose, and pretend this meeting never took place.’

  ‘There’s no need for that, Inspector. The situation has changed. Whatever charges Stalin laid against you have been dismissed. You are forgiven. Stalin told me so himself. He needs you back, Inspector!’

  Pekkala was not convinced. ‘One thing I have learned about Stalin is that the man does not forgive. All he does is to postpone his vengeance, but hopefully it will be long enough for me to track down this assassin.’

  ‘And of course I will help you to do it, Inspector, just as soon as I can get out of here!’

  ‘Is now soon enough?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Now?’ echoed Kirov. ‘Well, I suppose I . . .’

  ‘Good!’ Pekkala walked over to the doorway and peered down the hall. He listened carefully. Satisfied that no one was coming, he beckoned to Kirov. ‘Hurry! There is much to be done.’

  ‘But can’t this wait until morning? Why do we have to leave now?’

  ‘It’s quite simple, Kirov. When the shooting started in the bunker, you were only an innocent bystander, but as soon as this assassin learns that you are intent on hunting him down, he will come back to finish what he started.’

  ‘I’ll just put some clothes on!’ whispered Kirov, as he lowering his feet uncertainly to the floor. He wasn’t even sure if he could walk, but a few minutes later, dressed in his still-muddy uniform and with the canvas bag slung over his shoulder, Kirov slipped past the night duty orderly, who had fallen asleep at his desk. Making their way through the deserted kitchen, which reeked sourly of cabbage and boiled fish, the two men made their way out into an alley behind the hospital and set off towards Rovno, where fires from the air raid still painted the low-hanging clouds.

  ‘You might need this,’ said Kirov, handing over a new Soviet identity book. ‘NKVD made you a replacement, since your last one was burned to a crisp. Fortunately, your picture was still on file. It’s the only one known to exist!’

  The pass book was the size of a man’s outstretched hand, dull red in colour, with an outer cover made from fabric-covered cardboard in the manner of an old school text book. The Soviet State seal, cradled in its two bound sheaves of wheat, was emblazoned o
n the front. Inside, in the top left-hand corner, a photograph of Pekkala had been attached with a heat seal, cracking the emulsion of the photograph. Beneath that, in pale bluish-green ink, were the letters NKVD and a second stamp indicating that Pekkala was on Special Assignment for the government. The particulars of his birth, his blood group and his state identification number filled up the right-hand page.

  Most government pass books contained only those two pages, but in Pekkala’s, a third page had been inserted. Printed on canary yellow paper with a red border around the edge, were the following words:

  THE PERSON IDENTIFIED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS ACTING UNDER THE DIRECT ORDERS OF COMRADE STALIN.

  DO NOT QUESTION OR DETAIN HIM.

  HE IS AUTHORISED TO WEAR CIVILIAN CLOTHES, TO CARRY WEAPONS, TO TRANSPORT PROHIBITED ITEMS, INCLUDING POISON, EXPLOSIVES AND FOREIGN CURRENCY. HE MAY PASS INTO RESTRICTED AREAS AND MAY REQUISITION EQUIPMENT OF ALL TYPES, INCLUDING WEAPONS AND VEHICLES.

  IF HE IS KILLED OR INJURED, IMMEDIATELY NOTIFY THE BUREAU OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS.

  Although this special insert was known officially as a Classified Operations Permit, it was more commonly referred to as a Shadow Pass. With it, a man could appear and disappear at will within the wilderness of regulations that controlled the state. Fewer than a dozen of these Shadow Passes had ever been issued. Even within the ranks of the NKVD, most people had never seen one.

  ‘I never thought I’d need another one of these,’ said Pekkala, as he slipped the pass book into the inside pocket of his coat.

  ‘I have brought you something else as well,’ said Kirov, handing the bag to Pekkala.

  ‘I didn’t realise that we would be exchanging gifts,’ remarked Pekkala, as he undid the wooden toggle on the flap and reached into the bag. Feeling the familiar coolness of the Webley’s brass grip against his palm, a look of confusion spread across his face. He withdrew the weapon from the bag and stared at it, as if he did not quite believe what he was seeing. ‘Wasn’t this destroyed in the fire?’