The Soviet Comeback

by Jamie Smith

  Nikita remained impassive. “That almost sounds like capitalism.”

  Kemran shrugged again. “Even our beloved communism cannot deny human nature, my friend. But come, we are not here to discuss theology and politics. I wish no ill upon you or the girl, although I know you do not need me to tell you that you can never see her again, yes?”

  Only a barely noticeable slump of the shoulders gave away any indication of his true feelings, but Nikita’s voice was strong and emotionless. “I know. She is just a girl, of no consequence to me.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Kemran said nothing more. “I have your orders,” he said, leaning back and interlocking his fingers.

  “Yes?”

  “You are a changed man.”

  “My orders, Kemran.”

  The older man pushed his mane of salt and pepper hair back and from the inside pocket of his jacket produced a manila envelope, which he tossed onto the coffee table. “Very well. These were sent through from Brishnov this morning. You, comrade, are going to America. Your tickets are inside.”

  “Agent Brishnov? Is that normal?”

  Kemran shrugged. “I don’t question where the orders come from. You will be surprised to hear that most people outrank the Soviets’ Greek attaché. I presume he was merely an intermediary.”

  Nikita chewed on the information. He leant forward to pick it up, but made no move to open it. “There is one more thing. An enemy remains on the island.”

  Kemran sat up straight, eyes alert. “Go on.”

  “Zurga knew I was coming.”

  In an instant they both had drawn their weapons and the revolvers were focused directly at each other, hovering just inches apart.

  “Tell me,” said Nikita, “have you always sold your soul to the highest bidder, or is it just since you were posted to Greece? Perhaps you feel more aligned with nearby Turkey than with Mother Russia?”

  “I have sold my soul to no one. Are your accusations based on nothing other than the colour of my skin?”

  “Come now, think who you are talking to. Do you think I did not notice the man in the straw hat in the bar? Your knowledge of the girl incriminated you if nothing else.”

  Kemran laughed and lowered his gun. “My boy, on an island the size of Skyros, everyone knows about your little fling. It is the best gossip the people here have had in months. The local girl and the black man? It will be the talk here for some time. What benefit would there be to me in betraying you to Zurga?”

  Doubt began to creep into Nikita’s thoughts. The old man held his gaze solidly and unflinchingly.

  “And who is this man in a straw hat? Hardly a strong point of identification on a Greek island,” Kemran continued.

  “We’ll come to that. Giorgos was your source?” He lowered the gun slightly.

  “Of course. The man was a mine of local information, and I would have appreciated it if you had not used him as bait.”

  Nikita raised the gun again. “His death was not my intention.”

  “But an inevitable consequence of your plan nonetheless.”

  Nikita lowered the gun and pinched his tired eyes. “Probably.”

  “A rather sick twist in the tale of your love affair with the girl, wouldn’t you say?”

  “She will never know.”

  “Let’s pray you’re right. You will make sure Georgios’s family is well renumerated for his service?”

  “I will,” Kemran replied with sincerity. “Now enough of this nonsense; tell me of this straw-hatted man and please tell me you have more for me to go on than that.”

  Sitting back down, Nikita said, “He was an older man. His hat was wide-brimmed which cast much of his face into shadow. He dressed to fit in, but it looked as if he had tried too hard. His shirt and trousers were the right style but were brand new.”

  “I need more than an old man in clean clothes, comrade.”

  “There was one more thing. On his neck was a tattoo. Much of it was obscured, but it almost looked like it could be a swastika. But unlike one I’ve seen before.”

  “Now that I can work with. Was it three-pronged?”

  “I think so, but I could not be sure. Why?”

  “That is the Russian neo-Nazi symbol; they are proliferating back home. But why would Russian Nazis be in Skyros? Zurga was a traitorous son of a bitch, but he only operated with people who would be to his advantage. I do not see how the Nazis would fit into that.”

  “He is the one who alerted Zurga. But if he is not your man, whose is he?”

  “This is impossible to hide for long on Skyros. But do not let this concern you; you have done the job you came here for and must focus on your next assignment.”

  “I will expect to hear an update on the Nazi, Kemran.”

  “You think to give me orders, you little shit?”

  Nikita smirked. “You know how we need to operate. No loose ends. The Kremlin does not forgive.”

  Kemran stood. “You do not need to tell me that, Agent Allochka. Go with God.”

  “Or whoever pays the bills,” replied Nikita. Kemran winked and left the apartment, leaving Nikita alone with a tsunami of thoughts and the manila envelope on the tray table in front of him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Elysia sat behind the counter of the shop, legs crossed and eyes focused on a carving. The shop was empty; it always was. So many hours spent perfecting pieces from Greek woods, only for them to be dismissed as tourist tat and overlooked by islanders and visitors alike. Not by everyone though, she mused.

  The piece was taking shape, but the Cyclades ebony was a very hard wood that took patience to fashion into a figure like the dog he had requested. She wondered how he would feel about her making him a second one to keep the first company. “Why would anyone want a carving of a black dog?” she muttered to herself. Even despite the tears in her eyes that had rarely left since the news of her uncle’s death had reached her, she couldn’t help but smile weakly. There was little about Nathan that made sense. He said so little and was so impassive, but somehow, she felt a deep well of emotion within him, disguised by the mystery and enigma in which he cloaked himself. She wanted to know more; she wanted to see him again. She flushed at the thought of the morning, and how unlike her it was to do anything like that. She found she didn’t regret it at all, which made her flush all the more. She wondered if he would come to the funeral with her; the support would make the thought of facing it somehow less daunting, but perhaps it was too much to ask so soon.

  She put him from her mind and her thoughts drifted again to her uncle Giorgos. It just felt so wrong that he wasn’t around any more. Everyone had known that truck was on the brink of dying, but no one had seriously thought it would take him with it. Of all the things to take him, he who claimed to know every pothole, bump and track better than any other on the island.

  She realised she had drifted to gazing absently out of the window, lost in thought and turned back to the carving of a dog, unaware it bore an eerily close resemblance to a Black Russian Terrier, the type of dog being trained, thousands of miles away to work in a world she was unknowingly teetering on the edge of.

  ***

  Nikita gazed through the shop window, this time careful to avoid being seen. He stood well back in the shadows, with stray tourists ambling past. Leaning against a faded blue wall, he could see directly through the open door to where Elysia was sitting, her bare feet just visible poking out from behind the wooden counter and her hair shielding her face as she worked intently on something in her lap that he couldn’t see.

  A part of him ached to enter the shop, ached to feel that warmth, but already that part of him had been packed away so deep that he was barely aware of the longing.

  He saw now why he’d been sent to Skyros first. Not because of Zurga or the island’s strategic importance between East and West. It was because here mistakes could be made and learnt from without the repercussions being felt far and wide.

  A dark car stopped down the street. The
driver got out, his face obscured by mirrored sunglasses, and beckoned to Nikita. Choosing to overlook the fact that Kemran had clearly known he would return here, he took one last look at Elysia, soaking up every detail of her beautiful golden face, before walking to the car and not looking back.

  Inside the shop, suddenly sensing eyes on her, Elysia’s head snapped up from the carving to the open doorway. Nothing could be seen other than a dusty street, a couple strolling past and a blank faded blue wall. In the distance she heard a car fire up and pull away.

  ***

  As the small propeller jet ferrying him and a smattering of other tourists lurched away from the island, taking them back to Athens on the Greek mainland, he gazed down from the window at Skyros, with its clear blue seas, golden beaches, villages and mountains all packed into just a few short miles. Somehow his fear of heights never bothered him on planes. The island was so small, yet so much had happened in only a few days there. A part of his soul would be forever lost on the island, lying with all the blood that had soaked into the earth at his hand. That, and the murder of Giorgos and the old woman would remain forever on his conscience. His training meant he felt detached, but he nonetheless knew that there was no going back from the point he was at now. He was a killer, and he could no longer convince himself otherwise. Not only was he a killer, but he was good at it.

  But I will never enjoy it, he said to himself. Blood would be paid for with blood, and he knew not if he would get out of it alive and cared even less. But his family, they were different.

  Reminding himself, as he had so many times before, of the reason he was here, and the reason he had become what he had, he sat back, closed his eyes and prepared himself for what lay ahead. Prepared himself for the United States of America.

  On his lap, clenched firmly in his fist was a manila envelope, the contents of which laid out the challenge that, if successful, would alter the history of the entire world.

  CHAPTER 13

  US Secretary of Defense Simon Conlan leant on the wooden post and cracked open a beer as he looked out across his sprawling ranch, basking in the knowledge that everything visible right to the horizon belonged to him.

  The dusts of Texas were being whipped up in the November winds blowing across the arid plains west of Odessa. In his grandaddy’s time the soil had been black with oil but now much of the land lay barren. Some cattle roamed, living off the tough Texan grass that seemed to endure anything.

  The Cherokees who had once roamed freely across these plains had believed the oil seeps to be gifts from the heavens, using it for medicine. His grandaddy, Terry Conlan, had seen it more as a gift to him and had set about creating an empire with a bloody singlemindedness that had made the Conlans one of the wealthiest families in Texas. The Cherokees had lost their land and heritage, but as Terry had always said, “When the dust settles, money and power are the only things that really matter.”

  Simon breathed deeply, soaking up the clean, dry air. This was a rare treat. He could count on his hands how many times he’d got back to the ranch since Callahan appointed him secretary of defense back in ‘81. Away from the whining politicians, high security, and not even any wife and kids this time; they’d had a last-minute call to visit her mother in Arkansas this weekend, and praise God he hadn’t been asked to go. He pulled the sleeves up on his old blue and red chequered shirt, over the arms that had once been strong and muscled, gained through a childhood of working the cattle. They had got him through a hard war in the Pacific too. Now they looked every inch like the pen-pushing, hand-shaking arms of the seventy-year-old he’d become. A formerly handsome man, he still exuded a natural authority, with broad shoulders and a full head of steely grey hair. Broken veins on his nose and the absence of any laughter lines gave away both his indulgences and his lack of humour.

  He sighed. Life had been so much simpler fighting the Japs. See one, shoot one. So straightforward. Now life had become so goddam complicated and consumed by the Russian commies. Sometimes he wondered if politics had been the right career choice.

  “Take the weekend; think it over, Simon, and I know you’ll make the right decision on the INF Treaty. The world needs this to happen,” the president had said.

  Negotiations for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty had dominated his entire term as secretary of defense, and he was starting to grow tired of fighting it. But fight it he would. The only way to beat communism was to destroy it, and he wasn’t about to let more than eight hundred of his nuclear warheads be destroyed because that snake Petrenko said he’d do the same. However, many the Russkis had, Simon wanted more.

  “We do not negotiate with communists,” he’d told Congress again and again, but he was fast being overruled and was ready to play dirty to undermine the agreement. Even making his position clear in the press hadn’t generated the level of public support he’d hoped for.

  He downed the rest of his beer, tossed it to the ground and walked towards the stables. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Is nobody going to pick that up?”

  A young black woman appeared silently from the side of the house and ran quickly to pick up the bottle, her wide eyes avoiding the haughty glare of Secretary Conlan.

  This is why I love politics, he thought to himself. So much power over so many. He made efforts to make the staff black. Politically it helped him look good in the eyes of the northern states. Privately he’d never forgiven the Confederacy for losing to the anti-slave north. For him there was an order to things, and the blacks were firmly rooted at the bottom with the Cherokees.

  He ambled over to the stables as the girl scampered away with the bottle. The massive wooden construction had been redeveloped by his father who was horse mad. Simon had never fully shared the enthusiasm, but horses were in his blood as a family of Irish descent, his great grandfather racing horses back in County Donegal before making the move over to the US in the famine. Jane and the kids got a lot more out of it than he did, but he liked to keep a stable and an eye on it as his father had before him.

  He walked over to a chestnut stallion in its pen and stroked its head as it bowed slightly to him and pawed the ground. There was straw in his mane.

  “Nat! Where the hell are you?” he yelled.

  Appearing from another pen, a young black man appeared. “Here, sir. How can I help, sir?”

  “What the hell are you doing with these horses? This one looks like he’s not been cleaned in weeks!”

  “He was sleeping in the straw. I clean him every day, sir.”

  Nat ducked quickly as an old horse shoe came flying at his head. “You going to tell me I’m wrong, boy? Don’t make me throw you back to the dirt you were born in with the rest of you bootlickers.”

  Nat looked terrified. He was eighteen and yet to fill out his wiry frame, appearing gangly. “Please, sir, sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t let it happen again. I’m docking your pay for a week.”

  “Sir, please! I have to pay for my momma’s medicines.” The boy had tears in his eyes.

  “You should’ve thought of that before you let him get all strawed up. Now get out of my sight.”

  The young man fled, all legs and arms. The stallion whinnied as he saw the stable boy leave, and pawed the ground again. Simon smiled. It was good to be home.

  He left the stables and as he returned to the house, he heard the phone ring. “I suppose it’s asking too much for anyone to answer the goddam phone?” he yelled. He heard footsteps running. “Whatever happened to slaves being neither seen nor heard? No, no, it’s fine, don’t let me interrupt all y’all’s rest.”

  He picked up the phone in the broad living room, its wide French windows thrown open onto the plains beyond, casting light across the pale blue and white room.

  “Secretary Conlan speaking.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr Secretary, sir, I’m patching through Secretary of State Schultz.”

  “Very well. Tell him to hold one moment.”

  “Yes, sir,” repli
ed the secretary. Conlan pushed the phone to his chest to cover the receiver. “Nat! Come here,” he yelled to the house.

  The young man hurried into the room, eyes fixed on the floor.

  “Come here,” Conlan ordered, and Nat duly complied. When he reached the secretary, the old man reached out and rubbed his head.

  “Rubbing a nigger’s head has always brought me luck,” Conlan said matter-of-factly. “Now run along,” he added and lifted the receiver to his ear. “Secretary Conlan speaking.”

  “Simon? Surprised to hear you answering the phone yourself, isn’t that what you pay your army of slaves for?”

  “The key word there is that I pay them. This better be good, Harry, it’s the first weekend off I’ve had in years.”

  “Are you safe to talk?”

  “I’m in my own home.”

  “This is a matter of national security.”

  “It’s fine, Harry, I’m alone; spit it out.”

  “I need to know where you stand on the INF Treaty; things are moving fast and we need you on board.”

  “You know where I stand, Harry, and I made that clear to the president just yesterday.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Simon, Petrenko is giving us exactly what we’ve wanted for the past seven years. Why are you still fighting it?”

  “Exactly what y’all want, Harry. I’ve fought this the whole way. Why would he just suddenly want to give in to your requests? Giving up all the things he said were non-negotiable before? The man’s a crook.”

  “Come on man, you know his new slogan, Glasnost — Russian Government transparency. The world is changing; you need to keep up and keep on board.”

  “Glasnost! That’s horseshit and you know it. Just like their ailing campaign in Afghanistan, none of it means that the Soviets have given up their long-term aggressive designs. Communism can’t be contained or appeased; it needs to be crushed.”