by Stuart Woods
Helder woke as the aircraft slammed into the runway. Bloody green pilot, he thought. He went immediately back to sleep and refused to wake up again until a blast of even colder air hit him and a voice shouted his name, none too respectfully. A KGB sergeant was beckoning him from the plane’s doorway, his voice suddenly too loud as the engines died. Helder climbed stiffly down the steel ladder and followed the soldier toward a huge building. It was dark and raining lightly. Helder looked at his watch; just past midnight. They entered a door and climbed some stairs, and Helder found himself in Leningrad’s civilian airport. They walked briskly through the determinedly modern, nearly empty building. Only a group of Western-looking tourists, smiling weakly under the dour gaze of young KGB immigration officers in their neat uniforms and green epaulets, shared the huge terminal with Helder and the sergeant. Helder’s eyes briefly met those of a pretty young girl. English? American? He wished he had time to find out. Where he was going he would be lucky to find women at all, let alone pretty Western ones.
Another truck. Helder dozed, undisturbed by the silent sergeant, as they entered the city. He woke again as they passed the old Admiralty, now a naval college. Helder had taken an electronics course there in his training days. They passed into the large square before the Winter Palace, now part of the Hermitage Museum, and rattled over the wet and shiny cobblestones toward the triumphal archway that was the entrance to General Staff Headquarters. The truck passed through the archway, turned right, passed the main entrance, turned another corner and stopped before a door manned by a single guard. Helder tore open the envelope he had been given in Murmansk and fished out his pass. The guard inspected it carefully, then nodded, saluted and motioned him through the doors, turning up his nose slightly at Helder’s filthy clothes. Helder had the feeling that if he hadn’t been wearing his officer’s cap, he wouldn’t have made it past the man. Inside, he was met by a young woman in an ensign’s uniform. “Captain Helder, please follow me,” she said curtly, and started down the long hallway, which was lit only by every third chandelier at this time of night.
At least he was “captain” again. Her mistake, probably. He followed her like a puppy, her leather heels clicking on the czarist marble, the rubber soles of his canvas deck shoes squeaking on the hard surface. They walked at least a kilometer, he reckoned, past shut office doors with departmental designations. They saw no one. The ensign turned down a wider hallway and passed through a door marked “Chief Administrative Officer.” Another woman sitting at a desk nodded at her, and she continued through the anteroom without stopping and knocked on the inner door. A voice bade her enter. She opened the door, waited for Helder to enter, followed him into the room, and closed the door gently. A short, fat contra-admiral was sitting behind a large desk, reading a document. The charges, probably.
Helder came to attention and saluted. “Comrade Admiral, Senior Lieutenant Helder reporting as ordered.”
The admiral looked at him and winced. “You look like shit,” he said.
“I am very sorry, Comrade Admiral, there was no time …”
“Of course, of course.” The admiral fished an envelope from a desk drawer and handed it to Helder. “You are to report to the commanding officer of”—he hesitated—”a special brigade in Liepaja at once,” he said, then seemed to think better of it. “Well, perhaps not at once. An hour or so won’t matter.” He reached into a drawer, and removed a printed pad and signed it. He ripped off the page and held it out for the woman, who stepped forward to receive it. “Take him to the headquarters depot, wake the sergeant, and get him a decent uniform. Find him a bath and a shave, too.” The admiral reached back into the drawer and produced a bottle of vodka and a glass. He poured a stiff drink and offered it to Helder. “Here, you look as though you need this.”
Helder knocked back the drink and set the glass down on the desk. “Thank you very much, Comrade Admiral. I wonder if I may ask …”
“You may not,” the Admiral replied. “Get out of here.”
Apparently, there would be no court martial, and there had been no mention of a reduction in rank. Still, Liepaja. What the hell did they want with him in Latvia? There were no submarines there. The Baltic Fleet was based in Leningrad and in Baltiisk, in Lithuania, down near the Polish border. Dock officer in Liepaja. Not as bad as Vladivostok, anyway. At least he would be almost at home, which was very unusual. Officers from the republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were invariably assigned to duty in other parts of the Soviet Union. The Politburo distrusted the independent attitudes of these peoples. They were not Russian enough, and their young men who served in the forces were stationed in places where their Russification could proceed, unimpeded by nationalist sentiment.
Helder saluted the admiral and followed the woman again. An hour and a half later, he was on another plane, shaved, bathed, and newly uniformed. This time there was heating and seats. He grabbed an hour’s sleep before they landed in Liepaja, where a car was waiting, another improvement. It was ten in the morning, now, and there was time only to ascertain that they were headed toward the sea before he fell asleep again.
He woke as the car lurched to a stop at a heavily fortified gate. His pass and face and that of the driver were carefully examined before they were permitted inside. They drove down a smoothly paved street which descended a hillside overlooking the Baltic ahead of them to their left was a sort of tidal lake, joined to the sea by only a narrow passage. They passed buildings which looked newly completed and others still under construction. As they continued down the hill, Helder suddenly realized that what he had thought was the water’s edge was really a huge, flattopped building along the waterfront. What had fooled him was that the entire shelter had raised edges and the roof held a foot or two of water. Bloody clever, Helder thought. In a satellite photograph, the building would appear to be part of the bay. Make a lovely skating rink in winter, too.
It now occurred to him that all the buildings he was passing looked civilian and oddly Western. There was a clutch of shops, not just the usual naval store with its tobacco and vodka, and there was a petrol station. Although there was more traffic than would normally appear on the streets of a similar-sized Soviet town, he saw no military vehicles, only civilian cars and trucks, and yet he saw no school, no children, no housewives with prams doing the daily shopping. The place seemed to be neither a military base nor an ordinary town. One last thing intrigued him before he reached his destination. His car drove past a sports center that would have been at home in a much larger city. There was a huge building which, no doubt, housed a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and he counted thirty-six tennis courts down near the water. Past these was a small forest of masts, which meant a marina of some size. As the car stopped before what looked like a small office building, it occurred to him that he must be on one of the most privileged installations in the Soviet Union. So was its commander privileged, he saw as he got out of the car. In the reserved parking space closest to the building’s door was parked a silver Mercedes 500 SE, brand new, from the look of it. He had seen one in Moscow, once.
He was met at the door by a small, very pretty blonde army sergeant and conducted into the building. On entering, he felt as if he had arrived in a foreign country. Nothing he saw seemed of Soviet origin. Even the carpeting underfoot, the hardware on the bronzed glass doors, and the standard of construction of the building were markedly different from the shabby Soviet building efforts of recent years. The place had what he imagined was a Scandinavian air about it. They passed through another set of the glass doors and into an open area with a dozen or fifteen desks. The typewriters bore the letters IBM, and he saw half a dozen computer terminals of futuristic design. But what impressed him more than anything was the appearance of the young women, wearing uniforms of various Soviet services, who sat at the desks and moved around the room. They were nearly all blonde, all of trim, athletic figure, and there was not a dog in the bunch. Women in the Soviet military were pretty rough looking sort
s, as a rule. Never in the Soviet Union had Helder been in a room which contained so many attractive young women. A surge of randiness involuntarily swelled inside him. A sight like this after five weeks on a submarine was almost too much.
They passed into a small reception area, and Helder hoped he might be asked to wait there a few minutes, so that he might look at the girls some more, but it was not to be. They barely slowed down as they moved into a large, square, sunlit room. A glass-topped desk lay dead ahead of him, and the wall behind it was mostly covered by two very large, backlit maps. He recognized at a glance that one was a nautical chart of the Baltic, and the other, a map of Sweden.
There was no one at the desk, but his attention was directed to his right, to a group of leather furniture. A naval officer wearing the insignia of Admiral of the Fleet sat in one of the chairs. Helder snapped to and saluted. “Senior Lieutenant Helder reporting as ordered, Comrade Admiral.”
The admiral leaned forward and snuffed out a cigarette in a large ashtray. “Report to the colonel,” he said. Helder looked further to his right where, in another chair, sat a man wearing the uniform of a colonel in the marine infantry.
Helder was not surprised by this deference from the admiral. In the Soviet military any appointment has assigned to it a maximum, not a minimum rank, as in Western services, and an officer’s importance is judged not by his rank, but by the appointment he holds. During World War II, Helder knew, it had not been unheard of for a senior lieutenant to command an army division, while the regimental commanders beneath him might be majors or colonels. He saluted again. “Lieutenant Helder reporting, Comrade Colonel.”
The admiral rose. “Well, I will leave you to it, Viktor,” he said to the colonel, and made his exit.
The colonel waved a hand, but did not rise as the admiral left. When the admiral had gone, the colonel rose and walked toward Helder. The lieutenant chose the moment to steal a look at him. He looked to be in his early forties, quite tall, trim, fit-looking. He had a high forehead and a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair cut considerably better than was usual in the Soviet military. Helder thought he looked like a prosperous Western businessman in a Soviet uniform. The colonel stuck out his hand.
“My name is Majorov; I am very pleased to meet you, Helder,” he said in perfectly accented British English.
Helder was a little jarred. He had never before been greeted by a new commanding officer in this fashion, let alone in English. Rather cautiously, he shook the colonel’s hand.
“Please sit down,” the colonel said, waving him to a chair.
Everything instilled in Helder by thirteen years of Soviet military training and service resisted this suggestion, and he must have showed it, for the colonel chuckled.
“Please,” he said, “You must begin to get used to our informal ways here.” He waved Helder toward the chair again.
Helder sat down, but he could not immediately bring himself to lean against the back of the chair.
“Would you like a drink?” the colonel asked. “A gin and tonic, perhaps? Please do have a drink.”
“Thank you, Comrade Colonel.” The colonel went to a rosewood cabinet, mixed the drink, and handed it to him. Helder sipped the drink tentatively. His opinion of the colonel climbed as he noticed that it contained a wedge of bright, green lime. Who was this colonel that he could obtain a lime in Latvia?
The colonel mixed himself a drink and sat down opposite Helder. “Now,” he said, smiling slightly, “tell me a little about yourself—your background and upbringing. Please continue to speak English.”
This was something else Helder had never been asked to do before by a commanding officer. It surprised him even more, because there was a thick file on the coffee table between them which he knew must contain every detail of his life since birth. He realized that the colonel probably wanted to hear him speak English. “Comrade colonel, my full name is Jan Helder, no middle name; I was born in Tallinn, on the Estonian coast; I am thirty-one years old. I attended, uh, primary and uh, secondary schools in Tallinn, then university in Moscow, where I studied both English and physics. I also speak Swedish, which is commonly spoken on the coast where I grew up. After graduation I requested and was assigned to the Naval College at Leningrad. Upon graduation I was assigned to the Northern Fleet at Murmansk. After two years of general duties I was accepted for submarine training and upon finishing was assigned to a series of Whiskey and Juliet class boats. I had one year at the Command Academy in Moscow, then returned to the fleet. I served as navigation and executive officer in Juliets, and for the past twenty months I have commanded Whiskey 184, conducting training exercises and reporting on NATO shipping movements in the North Atlantic.”
The colonel nodded. “Very good, Helder, your American accent is excellent, though a bit stilted. But that will improve as we go along.” The colonel shifted in his seat and sipped his drink. “Of course, I know all you have just told me, and a great deal more. I know that your parents were both physicians, and that your father was decorated for his resistance against the Nazis, that your mother was also a talented painter. I know that you had a place on the 1976 Olympic sailing team in singlehanded Finn dinghies but that you suffered a compound fracture of your left thigh when struck by a taxi in Leningrad and were unable to compete. In fact, as you must have surmised, I know just about everything about you, or you would not be here now.”
“Thank you for your trust, Comrade Colonel,” Helder replied.
The colonel’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, you have not yet won my trust, Helder, merely my interest.” He smiled. “Still, it is a serious interest, and having read your record, I have little doubt that you will do well here.”
“Thank you, Comrade Colonel.”
“Now, Helder, perhaps you would like to know a little about this place and what you will be doing here.” The colonel rose and began to walk idly about the room as he talked. “I command here and … elsewhere. This is a SPETSNAZ installation, but perhaps you had already realized that.”
Helder had not realized it, although there had been clues aplenty, and a dual twinge of excitement and fear jolted him. SPETSNAZ, the naval special forces, was a closely guarded secret, even within the Soviet navy. All Helder knew about it was that it was an elite force, drawn from the finest examples of Soviet youth, scholastically and athletically, both men and women. Rumor had it that they were trained to do all sorts of dirty work, and that, although the service was, in theory, an arm of the navy, control of it was exercised, at least in part, by the KGB.
Majorov went on. “Each of the four fleets, Northern, Pacific, Baltic, and Black Sea, of course, has its own diversionary SPETSNAZ subunits, but here, in Liepaja, we are a special brigade, made up of personnel drawn from subunits in all the fleets.” Majorov leaned forward. “What we are here, one might say, is the crème de la crème de la crème of all the SPETSNAZ subunits.”
Helder was impressed and tried to look it.
“Your transfer here does not mean that you are now SPETSNAZ,” Majorov continued. “You are still carried on the rolls of the northern submarine fleet, although for some hours, now, you have been carried as a captain, third grade. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Comrade Colonel.” Helder was nearly overwhelmed. The position of submarine commander carried a maximum rank of captain first grade, and he had already been too long in grade as a senior lieutenant. Now he had skipped a rank; captain third grade was the equivalent of full commander in western navies. He had caught up and surpassed nearly all of his classmates in a single promotion. Not only that, but he had been given the promotion at the beginning of his assignment, which was unheard of.
“You are also listed as a division commander,” Majorov said.
Helder’s heart went wild. A division meant nuclear subs. Diesels were grouped in brigades.
“But we will not use rank here, nor will we address each other as ‘comrade,’” Majorov said. “You may continue to address me as ‘colonel’ and as ‘si
r,’ but all others you will address by surname. When you get to know your fellow officers well enough to address them by their first names, you will not employ the patronymic. I hope that is clear; it is very important.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“About two thirds of your colleagues here speak Swedish and English, as you do; the remainder speak only English and, perhaps, another european language. You will conduct all your training and personal conversations in English, except in those few cases where our instructors speak only Russian. It is most important that you continue to refine the American character of your English. With that end in mind, you will find a television receiver in your quarters which broadcasts American programs.” Majorov smiled wryly. “I know that your training and resolve as a Soviet citizen will prevent you from becoming corrupted by this unaccustomed and entirely decadent influence.”
Helder smiled back. “Of course, sir.”
“You will be issued naval, army, and marine infantry uniforms. Please alternate your dress among these. This is mostly for the benefit of the locals in Liepaja, who have been told that this is an inter service sports training facility. You will also be issued civilian clothing of Western manufacture. Please wear this when you are off duty. You need to become used to it, and it needs to become worn.”
Majorov raised a cautionary finger. “You will not leave this installation under any circumstances during your training. If you wish to sail, you will not leave the salt-water lake adjacent to the base nor land anywhere except at the base marina. You will have no contact whatever with the outside. If you should die, you will be buried here. This is your home until your assignment is completed.”
