by Glenn Meade
OPERATION SNOW WOLF.
SECURITY, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, SOVIET DIVISION.
VITAL: ALL COPY FILES AND NOTE DETAILS RELATING TO THIS OPERATION TO BE DESTROYED AFTER USE.
REPEAT, DESTROYED.
UTMOST SECRECY. REPEAT, UTMOST SECRECY.
Her face showed no reaction as she looked back at me.
“So when you read this and the other pages and learned your father had not committed suicide or died on the date you were told, you realized there was perhaps more to his death and went looking for answers?”
“That’s when I was offered a deal. If I agreed to hand over the original pages I’d hear some answers, and I’d be present when my father was given a proper burial service. But I was told that the matter was still highly secret and that I had to sign a declaration promising to uphold that secrecy.”
Anna Khorev crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and said lightly, “Yes, I know all about your friends in Langley, Mr. Massey.”
“Then you’ll also know I was told that it was all up to you, whether you’d tell me what I wanted to know.”
“Which is?”
“The truth about my father’s death. The truth, pure and simple, about Snow Wolf and how my father ended up in a grave in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.”
She didn’t answer but stood and crossed to the veranda.
I sat forward in my chair. “The way I see it, my father was involved in something highly covert, something that people are still reluctant to talk about. I’m not just talking about a secret. I’m talking about something totally extraordinary.”
“Why extraordinary?”
“Because the people from Langley I spoke with still wanted to hide the truth after all these years. Because when my father was involved in the operation, it was a time when the Russians and the Americans were out to annihilate one another. And you’re the only person alive who might know what happened to my father.” I looked at her. “Am I right?”
She didn’t speak, and I continued to look at her.
“Can I tell you something? I lost my father decades ago. A whole lifetime of not having a father to talk to and to be loved by. It was like having a hole inside me for a long time, until finally he just slowly became a wistful memory. I had to live with the lie that he took his own life. And you—you know how and why he really died. And what’s more, I think you owe me an explanation.”
She didn’t reply, just looked at me thoughtfully.
I said, “And I have a question. Why did you want to meet me in Moscow and not someplace else? I was told you escaped from this country. Why come back?”
Anna Khorev thought for a moment. “I suppose the simple truth of it is I would very much have liked to have gone to your father’s ceremony, Mr. Massey, but I considered it your own private affair. Perhaps my just coming here was the next-best thing.” She hesitated. “Besides, I’ve never seen his grave. And it was something I wanted to do.”
“The second grave, the one beside my father’s—it had the same unmarked headstone. Whom does the grave belong to?”
Something passed across her face then, a look like sadness, and she said, “Someone very brave. Someone quite remarkable indeed.”
“Who?”
She looked out at the view of the city, toward the red walls of the Kremlin, as if she was trying to make up her mind, and then she finally turned back to look at me. She seemed to soften suddenly, and she looked down briefly at the flowers on the table. “You know you look very much like your father? He was a good man, a very good man. And everything you’ve said is true.” She paused. “You’re right. All that pain and silence deserve an explanation. And that’s why I’m here. Tell me, what do you know about Joseph Stalin, Mr. Massey?”
The unexpectedness of her question threw me, and I looked at her for several moments. I shrugged. “No more than most. He was a god to some, I guess. The devil to others. Depends on which side of the fence you sat on. But certainly one of the great despots of the century. They say he was responsible for as many deaths as, if not more than, Hitler. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage eight years after the war.”
Anna Khorev shook her head fiercely. “Twenty-three million deaths. Not including those who died in the last war because of his stupidity. Twenty-three million of his own people whom he murdered. Men, women, children. Slaughtered. Shot or sent to die in camps worse than the Nazis ever imagined, by one of the cruelest men this world has ever known.”
I sat back, surprised by the sudden ferocity in her voice. “I don’t understand. What has this got to do with what we’re discussing?”
“It has everything to do with it. Stalin died, certainly, but not in the way the history books record.”
I sat there stunned for several moments. Anna Khorev’s face looked deadly serious. Finally she said, “I guess the story I’m going to tell you goes back a long time, to when it first began in Switzerland.”
She smiled suddenly. “And do you know something? You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about it in over fifty years.”
THE PAST
* * *
PART ONE
* * *
1952
2
* * *
LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND
DECEMBER 11
All over Europe that year the news seemed to have been nothing but bad.
In Germany, the past was to resurface at Nuremberg, where a tribunal began its hearing into the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. Four thousand bodies had been unearthed outside a small Polish town, all bound and shot with small-caliber pistols, the grisly remains of what had once been the cream of the Polish Army.
It was the year that also saw the French face an all-out offensive by the Viet Minh, a bloody war was raging in Korea, and in Europe the Iron Curtain was lowered between West Berlin and the surrounding Soviet Zone, the ultimate gesture by the Kremlin indicating a postwar peace was not to be.
Otherwise, wartime rationing was still in force in Britain; Eva Perón died; Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, in the US presidential election; and in Hollywood, one of the few bright moments in a dull year was the debut appearance of a stunning blond starlet named Marilyn Monroe.
To Manfred Kass, stalking through the woods outside the old Swiss city of Lucerne that cold December morning, such things hardly mattered. And although he could not have known it, that day was to mark a beginning, and also an ending.
It was growing light when Kass parked his ancient black Opel on the road in front of the entrance to the woods. He removed the single-barrel shotgun from beneath the blanket on the backseat of the car. It was a Merkel twelve-gauge, getting a little old now, but still reliable. He climbed out and locked the doors before slipping a cartridge into the breech but leaving the gun broken. He shoveled a boxful of cartridges into the pockets of his shooting jacket, then started to walk into the woods.
At thirty-two, Kass was a tall, awkward man. He walked clumsily and with a slight limp. The clumsiness had been with him since childhood, but the limp had been an unwanted memento from the Battle of Kiev eleven years before. Though he was born in Germany, being conscripted into Hitler’s army had not been one of Kass’s ambitions in life. He had intended to emigrate to Lucerne before the war, where his wife’s uncle ran the bakery business, but he had left it too late, the way he had left many things in his life.
“Trust me, Hilda,” he had told his wife when the winds of war had started to whisper and she suggested they beat a hasty retreat to Switzerland and her family. “There won’t be a war, liebchen.”
Two days later Hitler invaded Poland.
Kass had been proven wrong on many other occasions. Such as when he volunteered for the front at the start of the Russian campaign. He reckoned that because the German army was rolling across the steppes of the Ukraine with such ease, and because the Russkis were dirty and stupid peasants, the war against them would be a piece of cake.
He had b
een right about one thing. The Russians he had met were generally dirty, stupid peasants. But they were also fierce fighters. And the fiercest enemy of all had been the Russian winter. So cold that your own piss froze, and you had to snap it off when it turned to solid ice. So razor-sharp were the freezing Baltic and Siberian winds that swept over the steppes that within minutes of defecating, your own waste was freeze-blasted as hard as cement.
Kass had laughed the first time he saw his own frozen turd. But it was nothing to laugh at really. Prodding the phenomenon with his bayonet, he had been hit by a sniper’s bullet. A clear shot from two hundred yards, into the right flank of his bare backside.
Manfred Kass was used to making mistakes.
But the mistake he was about to make that December morning in the woods outside Lucerne was to be the biggest of his life.
He knew the forest reasonably well. Which paths led where, and the locations of the best rabbit grounds. The rabbits made a good tasty stew to accompany the fresh, floury bread he helped to bake six nights a week. And the thought of food made him hungry as he stalked through the forest, snapping the breech of the shotgun closed as he came closer to the clearing in the woods.
The light was getting better. A faint, watery mist lingered on the low ground. Not perfect light, but bright enough for him to get a clear shot.
As Kass stepped carefully toward the clearing, he heard the voices. He halted and rubbed his stubbly jaw. He had never met anyone in the woods that early, and the sound of voices made him curious. It occurred to him that he might have come across a courting couple, still out after a late Friday night dance in Lucerne, who had come to make love in the woods. It sometimes happened, he supposed. But he had not seen any car parked on the road, nor any bicycle tracks in the forest.
As Kass moved through the trees to the edge of the clearing, his eyes snapped open and he halted, riveted to the spot.
A man wearing a dark winter overcoat and hat stood in the center of the forest clearing. He held a pistol in his hand. But what shocked Kass, stunned him, was that it was aimed at a man and a young girl kneeling in the wet grass, their faces deathly white, their hands and feet bound with rope.
As Kass stumbled back, his belly churned, and his body broke out into a cold sweat. The kneeling man was crying in pitiful sobs. He was middle-aged, his face painfully thin and sickly gray, and Kass noticed the dark bruises under his eyes and the cuts on his hands indicating he had been savagely beaten.
The child was crying, too, but there was a white cloth gagging her mouth and tied behind her long dark hair. She was no more than ten, Kass guessed, and when he saw the frightened, pitiful look on her face, her body trembling with fear, it made him want to vomit.
And then suddenly Kass’s anger flared, his veins no longer ice but boiling now, because there was something pitiful and debauched about the man and the young girl kneeling there as if waiting for death.
He looked at the man. His weapon had a long, slim silencer, but from where Kass stood he couldn’t see his face, only his profile. But he noticed a vivid red scar that ran from the man’s left eye to his jaw, the blemish so livid that from a distance it looked as if someone had painted it on.
He was talking to the man kneeling in the grass, and in between his sobs the kneeling man was pleading. Kass couldn’t hear the words, but he could see that the man with the scar was not listening, realized that what he was about to witness was an execution.
And then it happened. So fast Kass hardly had time to react.
The scar-faced man lifted his pistol until it was level with the kneeling man’s forehead. The weapon gave a hoarse cough. A bullet slammed into the man’s skull, and his body jerked and crumpled on the grass.
The child screamed behind her gag, her eyes wild with raw fear.
Kass swallowed, wanted to scream, too, felt icy sweat run down his face. He felt his heart was about to explode with terror. He wanted to turn back, to run, not witness what was about to happen, but for the first time he seemed to realize that he held the shotgun in his hands and that unless he did something the child was going to die.
He saw her struggle helplessly as the executioner pressed the tip of the barrel to her head and prepared to squeeze the trigger.
As Kass fumbled to raise his shotgun, he called out hoarsely, “Halt!”
An angry, hard face turned to look at him. The scar-faced man stared coldly at Kass, his thin lips like slits cut in his face with a razor. His eyes seemed to take in everything at a glance, flicking to the forest left and right, then settling on Kass again, assessing his enemy, but no sign of fear showed in his eyes.
Kass called out shakily, “Stop, do you hear me? Put down your weapon!”
He heard the naked fear in his own voice and barely had time to squeeze the trigger as his adversary swung around and the silenced pistol gave another hoarse cough. The bullet smashed into Kass’s right jaw, shattering bone and teeth, slicing through flesh, flinging him back against a tree, the shotgun flying from his grasp.
As Kass screamed in agony he saw the man fire into the child’s head. Her body jerked and crumpled.
Kass stumbled back into the trees, but the man was already rushing toward him. As Kass crashed through the woods and fled, oblivious to the pain in his shattered jaw, his only thoughts were of survival and making it back to the car.
Fifty yards to go and he could see the Opel through the trees, could hear the man rushing through the forest after him.
Fifty long yards that seemed like a thousand, and Kass ran like a man possessed, a hand on his bloodied face, his whole body on fire with a powerful will to survive, the horrifying image of the young girl’s execution replaying in his mind like a terrible nightmare, spurring him on.
Thirty yards.
Please, Lord.
Twenty.
Ten.
Lord, no.
Please.
A bullet zinged through the trees, splintering wood to his left.
Holy Mother . . .
And then suddenly he was out of the woods.
As he reached the Opel and yanked open the door the man emerged out of the forest behind him.
Kass did not hear the shot that hit him, but he felt the bullet slip between his back ribs like a red-hot dagger. It jerked him forward onto the hood of the Opel.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
The bodies were found in the woods two days later. Another hunter, like Kass, but this one more fortunate because he hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He threw up when he saw the child’s body.
Her pretty face was frozen and white. The flesh around her head wound and behind her neck had been partly chewed away by forest rodents.
Even the hardened policemen of the Lucerne Kriminalamt thought it one of the most brutal murder scenes they had ever witnessed. There was always something pitiful and particularly repugnant about the body of a murdered child.
The subsequent forensic and pathology examinations determined that the girl was aged between ten and twelve. She had not been raped, but there was severe bruising on her legs, arms, chest, and genital area, which suggested she had been badly beaten and tortured some hours before being shot. The same with the man’s corpse lying next to hers. Both bodies were placed in cold storage in the Lucerne police morgue.
The only corpse that could be identified was that of Manfred Kass. In his wallet was a driver’s license and a shotgun permit, and he wore a wristwatch with an inscription, “To Manni, with love, Hilda.”
The police learned that the bakery worker had gone hunting after his Friday night shift and they deduced that he had perhaps stumbled onto the slaughter of the man and the child and paid with his life.
But of the murderer or his identity, there was no trace at all.
A month later there was still no evidence that linked the two unknown corpses to missing persons. Both had no personal identification and had been wearing the sort of clothes that could be bought in any large clothin
g store in Europe. The child’s dress and underwear had been purchased in a Paris department store; the man’s suit had been bought from a very popular chain of men’s outfitters in Germany.
Concerning the bodies, the only clue was a faded, minute tattoo on the man’s right arm. It was of a small white dove, inches above his wrist.
3
* * *
WASHINGTON, D.C.
DECEMBER 12
It was a little after eight in the evening when the DC-6 carrying President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower from Tokyo landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.
Although he was not to take over the reins of power until January, Eisenhower had flown to Seoul a month after his election to assess personally the war situation in the Far East, wanting to see for himself the state of play on the muddy battlefields of Korea.
His meeting with President Harry Truman the next day was unofficial, and after the brief welcome Truman suggested they take a walk in the White House gardens.
The air was crisp and clear, the ground covered in a moist carpet of brown and gold leaves, as Truman led Eisenhower down the path through the lawns where the Secret Service men stood at strategic intervals.
The two men seemed a strange pair: the small, bespectacled president with the bow tie and walking cane who, like a certain predecessor, believed that the way to earn respect was to speak softly and carry a big stick, and the tall, erect military man and former five-star general who had been a professional soldier all his life.
They reached one of the oak benches, and Truman gestured for them to sit. He lit up a Havana cigar, puffed out smoke, and sighed. “You know what I’m going to do the day after I leave office? I’m going to fly down to Florida and bake under a hot sun. Maybe do me some fishing. Seems like I haven’t had time for that in years.” The president hesitated before he looked at Eisenhower’s face and said more seriously, “Tell me, Ike, what’s your opinion of Stalin?”
