by Alex Dryden
She’d cropped her hair short, an inch long, perhaps, and dyed it black, so that he could see the shape of her sinuous neck whitish against the black night. She wore a thick sheepskin waistcoat over mountaineering gear. A well-worn brown leather coat was draped over the alpine pack. Alongside the pack, on the seat between them, there were also coils of strong cordage and carabiners, an alpine harness, ice axe and ice screws and webbing. In the pack itself were the bare essentials; a sleeping bag, food and water, and the Thompson Contender handgun she always used. Its eighteen-inch barrel was perfectly sighted and she could drop a man at up to two hundred yards.
Larry turned back to the road. He knew sometimes that he watched her in ways that were not in the strictly defined limits of his job. After two years together on missions in areas of Russian influence, he would have died for her. But this time she was going into Russia itself for the first time since her defection and he was worried.
‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing ahead, ‘between those two peaks.’
But she didn’t turn towards him or the mountains.
Two greyish-white peaks that denoted the mountain border loomed ahead of them against the clerical purple of the sky, like a ghostly and unforgiving priesthood.
‘The gorge is just to the right of where we’re heading,’ Larry persisted. ‘Between the peaks. There’s a narrow entrance to it, invisible until you’re on it. You’ll see it when you get close.’
‘I know, Larry,’ she said, but she addressed it to the window where her head was still angled upwards. They’d been over the route on maps back at Cougar’s headquarters in the United States a hundred times already.
Cool to the point of unfriendly, Larry thought, but he guessed she was already in her own world, somewhere up ahead of them – after they’d dropped her off – and that in her mind she was making the crossing over the border.
‘This was the least-guarded stretch of border when the tensions were high between Russia and China,’ Larry was saying in his usual attempt to cover her still silence with reassuring facts. ‘Both sides relied on the mountains. You can’t get a vehicle through those. Not on this stretch. It was to the east where the stand-off was most dangerous.’
But Anna knew the borderlands well, even though she’d never been on this, the Mongolian side. When there were two million men on either side of the border, she’d been a teenager, but later, when she’d joined the SVR, the new KGB’s foreign intelligence service, studying the potential of a Chinese attack against Russia had been mandatory. And when she’d become a colonel in Russian foreign intelligence – the youngest female colonel in its history – she’d visited the border east of here where it went up directly against China itself.
Larry now fell silent. If she didn’t want to talk, so be it. That was her way.
But tonight, for once, it wasn’t what she had to do that Anna was thinking about. She wasn’t mentally following the route ahead that she would have to take later that night, nor analysing her mission that lay beyond that, a mission that was intended to bring her up ever northwards into the heart of Arctic Siberia. Her mind was occupied in a way that was neither appropriate nor usual for her just before a mission. It was distracted and the distraction was caused by news she had received five days before. She had received this news in the curious combination of both a body blow and a cause for celebration.
Her father was dead. That was what had been picked up out of Moscow. The old devil had suddenly fallen ill and was dead three days later at the age of seventy-three. It went unreported, due to the disgrace his daughter’s defection had brought upon him. So the news had been filtered out of the country by her mother who had been estranged from him for nearly ten years now. But Anna had hated him for a lot longer than that.
Once, back in her childhood, her father had been the KGB Head of Station in Damascus, a hero of the Soviet Union. He’d been a tyrant to his subordinates, as well as to her mother, and a cold and finally sinister figure to her. And all the time, during the years of her childhood, he was a true, unreconstructed Stalinist who, after Stalin’s death, had concealed his real leanings and consequently had made his way steadily up the ladder of promotion during the gentler years of Khrushchev’s thaw and afterwards. Her father had always been a secret apologist for the Gulag camps of Siberia where millions had died in slavery.
But finally, after Putin’s takeover of Russia in 2000, he’d seen those ‘glory years’ reviving. He saw in Putin’s new Petersburg spy elite, who had taken control of the country, a last hope for national resurgence in the years of his own decline. Once more, the KGB – his KGB – was victorious. And it was more powerful, in fact, than it had ever been in its history. The Communist Party that once ruled it no longer existed in power to give it orders. The spies, the spy elite, Russia’s parallel society to which her father had devoted his life, now ruled Russia completely.
Looking into the blackness of the steppe, Anna now recalled that she had spoken to her father for the last time five years before. It was just months before her defection to the West. And it was her father who’d been a window into her reasoning to defect, and her defining excuse to leave this new Russia. A foreign intelligence spy like herself, in his retirement he had been given a hero’s grace and favour apartment near the Kremlin, reserved for upper echelons of the KGB. In the 1990s, he’d taken even more heavily and angrily to drink than he had done in his active service, as he saw democracy make a brief flicker of an appearance in the country. He had raged against her mother, his now estranged wife, for working for the Sakharov Foundation. And finally – to Anna’s ultimate horror of him and of what he represented – he had seen his evil opportunity to help the new KGB in his twilight years. And he had seized it in the vilest way imaginable. In order to snare a Swiss banker who was making a routine visit to Moscow, the new KGB had procured small girls, some as young as ten years old. They were photographed at Anna’s father’s apartment, where the banker had performed on them his disgusting acts of depravity under the remote, watchful eye of Anna’s father. The Russians’ cameras had captured it all and turned it back to use against the banker.
To Anna, that was the kind of man her father was and had always been. But when she’d seen the photographs in a hotel room in Geneva, and recognised his apartment, the well of her hatred for him exploded.
And so his sudden death, as well as being a body blow, was also a cause for her celebration.
But it was actually the body blow that accompanied the news that was more complex. For in a subtle and inverse way, it was her father who had provided the incentive for her to be as good as she became, to be better than any other graduate of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service, and to become its youngest female colonel. As the old Soviet empire collapsed in 1989, she had initially decided to take her revenge on him by being better than he was at the same game, the spy game, to be more senior and successful, a greater operative and hero than he had been. And she’d decided back then that she would do this in a country that was apparently turning to democracy for the first time in its history.
That was to be her revenge on him, simply to be better than him, in a better cause.
But Russia’s democracy soon turned out to be an illusion. She’d watched her father then, gloating once more as Putin’s spies seized the country. And after she’d seen the photographs, she’d done the only thing she could think of to damage him most. Her defection brought him a shame and humiliation in the dying years of his life which could not have been made greater by anything else she might have done. And it was a far greater revenge. At the end of his life, he was disgraced in the eyes of his superiors, shunned by his peers, because of the defection of his daughter. He was destined for no place in history, and an unmarked grave.
As Anna now sat in the truck that bounced them all from side to side on the Mongolian military road, she wondered where that incentive to excel at her work would come from now that he was dead. She no longer had a personalised hatred against whic
h to struggle. Her father was gone – and good riddance – but was she the same person she’d been when he was alive?
She turned away from the window and back to the track ahead, focused again on the present.
They’d left the last proper metalled road at the Mongolian settlement of Dzuungovi and headed north to the lake along the deserted military track. She heard the two pumped-up special forces men talking under the tarpaulin in the back, armed to the teeth in case of trouble. They were talking loudly over the noise of the truck.
Larry and a team of five other men had already been watching her route through the gorge for three weeks now, as deep inside it as they’d dared to go, where they could just about survey the border itself two miles beyond. Unlike other stretches, they’d confirmed this area was relatively clear, the way through deemed by the Russians impossible for any infantry attack and a complete barrier to any vehicle. The locals said that even a horse couldn’t make its way through the gorge. Only the eagles and the agile Siberian big horn sheep could move around in these mountains – or a determined and lucky mountaineer.
Larry didn’t like the prospect of her going over at all, but to cross over here seemed madness. There were fewer border guards for a very good reason.
But Anna, as always, had prevailed with Miller – initially with gaining the assignment in the first place and then with the chosen method to reach the start point. If she made it across tonight it was still two hundred miles by bus from Erzin just across the border to Kyzyl further inside Russia, then another three hundred miles to Abakan and a hundred miles or so after that to Krasnoyarsk. And Krasnoyarsk was just where her mission began.
It was a few minutes after midnight when Larry heaved the truck off the road and into some pasture. Anna saw a corral roughly made with untrimmed branches inside which were several horses. There was a man, too, in the corral, one of Larry’s who had been assigned this part of the mission; he was a former cowboy from Montana, Larry had told her. Larry turned the key to Off, the engine died and the cowboy unhooked the crude gate and approached. Anna was already out of the cab, taking the leather coat and the pack and gear with her. She put on the coat and dropped the rest of her equipment in the grass. In the open air, it was icy cold after the heated cab.
She nodded to the man without a greeting, though whether he saw her nod in the darkness was doubtful. Nervous, the man thought, nevertheless. But in her relentless pursuit of perfection in her work, Anna Resnikov had never yet been afflicted by nerves.
She walked with the man over to the corral as Larry and the others stepped out of the truck.
She saw that the horses were native Mongolian; short legs, big heads, extremely hardy animals that lived through very hot summers and minus forty-degree winters with equanimity.
‘I recommend him.’ The cowboy indicated the horse nearest to the front. ‘Look at him. He’s eager to get going. You can gallop him for twenty miles. He won’t tire. Or when he does, you’ll already be at the mouth of the gorge.’
Anna touched the muzzle of the horse and felt his forelegs. They were immensely strong. ‘Okay,’ she said.
She swung herself into a high saddle and her pack and climbing gear were strapped on to the rear of the saddle by the men.
‘When you get there, release him and give him a tap,’ the cowboy said. ‘He’ll come home by himself.’
Larry came up to her.
‘Remember, Anna. Get rid of everything before you cross,’ he said urgently. ‘Including the gun.’
‘Don’t worry, Larry. I will.’
But she knew Larry would worry anyway. He’d become almost like a personal bodyguard, Burt Miller’s shadow who had followed her for three years now. But here he couldn’t follow. That was what always bothered him.
The horse was good. She reached the entrance to the gorge in under two hours at a gallop. Should she go through now? Or wait for another night? She got down and unstrapped the pack and gear and tapped the horse on the rump. It didn’t like to leave her. She smiled up at it. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s finished.’ She tapped it again and the horse turned, began to trot and then broke into a canter into the dark plains.
Before it was lost in the darkness she heard it whinny once.
Anna slung the pack over her shoulders and looped the cordage around her neck. The rest of the equipment she hung from various belts and over the top of the pack. Then she began to walk.
There was a way along the bank of the river at first. The water was icy clear, tinkling and rushing over black and red rocks. It caught the moon until the walls of the gorge rose up high around it and shut out the thin fingernail of light. Soon she was winding around overhangs, sometimes walking into the edge of the water to clear the towering rock. The route became harder. She was climbing so far without the gear. Then there was a high, flat rectangle of pasture that she climbed towards, and she had an easy way for a while. All the time the unmarked route rose upwards, sometimes gradually, sometimes sharply, towards the gap between the snow peaks.
Once, as she was crossing up high above the river, she caught sight of the moon again and then she dipped down a scree slope and it disappeared behind the crags once more. Where the gorge was at its most forbidding, she stopped finally to rest before the final assault.
Her mission filled her mind in those moments of quiet, the noise of the river too far below now for her to hear it.
Some six hundred miles lay ahead of her before she would reach Krasnoyarsk. Then it depended on her finding a way downriver towards and beyond the Arctic Circle. That was another fifteen hundred miles as the river flowed. Intelligence suggested that the scientist, Professor Vasily Kryuchkov, was in or around Norilsk. But it was possible they’d moved him further east, to the secret nuclear development facilities in the Putorana mountains, where the grim guardians were also hidden – the missiles of Russian’s northernmost ICBM, their Intercontinental Ballistic Missile site. It was from this nuclear research and development facility that reports of Kryuchkov’s discovery had filtered – in hearsay, in dribbles of information sufficiently reliable only in as far as it required her mission to confirm or deny them. But if the talk were true, what Kryuchkov had finally discovered was too momentous to ignore. And there were other pointers that had indicated to Burt Miller that the talk was true. Three recent visits by nuclear scientists from the West had resulted in no meeting with Kryuchkov and the Russian scientist had been forbidden to travel to international nuclear forums in the West for over a year now.
The Russians were apparently keeping Kryuchkov to themselves, guarding him closely, afraid perhaps that what he had supposedly discovered would find a way out of Russia. For Vasily Kryuchkov, Anna thought, his genius – if the rumours were true – meant permanent exile under guard and a denial of any further contact with the West.
Once she was rested sufficiently, she unclipped the pitons from a belt around her midriff and took some cordage in her right hand. Then she looked up at the high wall of rock above her and began to climb.
It was long and slow, but she climbed crabwise up a rock face in the darkness. Sometimes there was a ledge she could cling on to, or take a brief rest on, but mostly the face was smooth and she needed the pegs and carabiners to make the agonisingly slow progress. For an hour she ascended and when she looked up there was still a great chunk of the face still to scale. She was tired, unseeing, knowing her way up only through touch. And then suddenly her hand went over the craggy edge at the top and she hauled herself over it and lay panting face down on the ice and rock, too exhausted to think.
But down the other side of the face was another rock wall she would have to descend in similar fashion. At least here she would make progress more quickly with the aid of a rope, and below that was the river again, leveller ground for a while. She would have to do this by climbing, then abseiling, downwards several times, scaling and descending the near impenetrable vertical rock walls. Clouds had appeared. Sleet began to lance down in sharp-angled darts, sti
nging her face. Then, as she went higher, the sleet turned to snow and the climbing became more treacherous.
Finally, some two hours before dawn, up ahead of where she crouched low on a snowy slab of granite, she saw the black outline she was looking for against the purple sky. It was the old Czarist mud fort Larry and his team had identified from two miles back down the canyon as the border with Russia.
Towards this she now made her way, scrambling over scree slopes and down sharp drops, using the axe sometimes to arrest her accelerating slides, or hammering in more pitons for climbing. Within another hour – almost too late with the dawn beginning to show on the far horizon to the east – she saw that she was close to the fort. Down here in the dark gorge, she had, perhaps, another hour before the light could penetrate.
What she saw as the fort came nearer were its ancient, crumbling mud walls, the beams all rotted and gone long ago, just a roofless frontier post abandoned more than a century before. But it was the place. It was the border and she would get through before dawn came.
She climbed up towards the fort and approached it concealed in the lee of a large rock that towered ten times her height above and around her. When she was almost at the mud walls of the old fort, she rested for the last time behind the rock. She lay on her back behind it and looked up at the sky, where the stars had disappeared behind the low snow clouds which scudded below the higher peaks of the mountains. The clouds would delay the light of the dawn here, just as the high walls of the gorge would. That was good. She sighed with relief from the pain of the climb and with the thought that the first stage was almost done. She lay on her back in the snow and looked with almost total blankness at the snow clouds. One last rest.
It was then that she heard something. To her acute senses, it was an unnatural sound in this emptiest of places.
In the discreet still of the night before the dawn was fully dressed for her appearance, and with the river inaudible three hundred feet below, Anna heard the unmistakable click of an automatic weapon. It was muffled by the steadily falling snow, certainly, but it was a sound she’d heard a thousand times. She sat up, rolled over on her front, her gun drawn at once from its sheath in the back of her coat. The noise seemed to have come from behind her, from where she’d come, from where she’d just made the final ascent towards the fort. But perhaps the sound was reflected off the rocks. She would have to be careful of that. She had no way of perfectly telling where it came from. But the sound was the unmistakable snap of a heavy ammunition clip being shot home.
