by Robert Moss
Children came skipping across the steps of the National Guard Arsenal, and he thought of Petya. And then, for an instant, he was engulfed in a wave of nostalgia. Images of Russia washed over him, images of the limitless sky over forests and steppes and great rolling rivers. He saw the snow falling from the branches of the firs and rising again in a fine powder dust as the report of his shotgun echoed through the silence of the Silver Forest. He smelled the rose gardens of Livadia, the savor of Crimean vineyards and apricot orchards under the harvest sun.
And he thought of Topchy, his father’s murderer, and of the tasks he had set for himself. He was not his own master. He was the servant of a purpose that was dimly shaping itself, something that reached beyond personal revenge. All his life so far had been merely an apprenticeship for that. He had learned things in New York that would help him, not least from George Afigbo, the African exponent of the coup d’état. Better still, he had made a friend in an unexpected quarter, a friend in the KGB. But he had also bent his own rule that no personal attachment should be allowed to interfere with his mission. That had to be set right.
The same evening, he lay cradling Elaine’s head in his lap and talked about his childhood, his history professor, and the father he had never known.
‘It’s a strange thing to live in my country,’ he told her. ‘Ninety percent of what you are told is a lie, but the lies are more familiar than the truth, so it is the truth that seems unbelievable. There’s a permanent contradiction between what you see and what you hear. People get along by rejecting the evidence of their own eyes. But the people are suffocating. It’s only the ones on top who can breathe.’
‘So why are you going back?’ she asked softly.
He looked at her sharply. ‘How did you know?’
She was on the point of telling him about the FBI, but stopped herself. She was afraid that if he knew, he would break off their relationship for good. If he left her now without knowing, there would at least be the hope that she could find him again.
She felt guilty at the deception as she said, ‘I can sense it from the way you’re talking. It sounds like a farewell speech.’
He seemed to accept this, because he went on. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell you before.’ Now they were sitting side by side, and he took both her hands in his, enveloping them. ‘You mean as much to me as my life. But there are things that are more important than my life, things that are waiting for me in Russia.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Suppose you were living under an occupation,’ he said. ‘Suppose it had claimed the lives of the people closest to you, and you had watched your own generation being turned into cynical drunks. Wouldn’t you fight that?’
‘I couldn’t live with it,’ she conceded. ‘But I could go somewhere else.’
‘I’m a Russian,’ he said fiercely. ‘My only future is there. I hope you can understand.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said, fighting back the tears. ‘Sasha, there will be another time for us, won’t there?’
‘I can’t promise anything. It’s best if you try to forget me.’
‘Is that what you’re going to do — forget me?’
‘No,’ he said simply.
‘Then don’t ask more of me than you ask of yourself.’
When he left, she came down and stood on the steps. He didn’t look back.
Chapter Five – Living with Wolves
‘If you live with wolves, howl like them.’
Russian Proverb
Marshal Zotov discharged one barrel, then the second, at the flight of wild geese winging south, and one of the birds plummeted out of the sky and was lost among the reeds. He let their Bulgarian escorts go fishing for it. One of them, an unpleasant-looking character with a permanent sheen about his face and clothes, waded over and started complimenting the Marshal on his marksmanship.
They were on the shores of Lake Varna, on an estate that belonged to the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense. For the First Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff, the entire Warsaw Pact was a private hunting reserve.
After dinner, when they were alone together by a great open fire in the lodge the Bulgarians had provided, the Marshal said to Sasha: ‘So you want the smell of gunpowder. Is that it?’
Sasha had told his father-in-law that he wanted to return to one of the fighting arms of the Soviet defense forces.
‘The reports about you that Luzhin sent back from New York were excellent,’ Zotov told him. ‘Luzhin says you have a brilliant career ahead of you in the GRU, or at headquarters. Are you sure you’re not just trying to get away from Lydia?’
Of course he was trying to escape from Lydia, and from the memory of Elaine. But he wasn’t going to explain that to the Marshal. He made a phony little speech about duty and tradition, and Zotov let it pass.
‘If I were your age,’ Zotov said, ‘I’d start learning Farsi, or Dari. There’s going to be a major blow-up in Afghanistan. We’ll be fighting before the end of the year.’
‘You mean we’re going to be directly involved?’
‘It’s inevitable. We’ve already received orders to prepare a plan of operations. How much do you know about Afghanistan?’
‘Not much,’ Sasha admitted. In fact, he knew a great deal more than most Soviets, including those who were about to be sent there, because he had been reading western newspapers for the past few years, in addition to picking up occasional rumors from Nikolsky and from people in his own service. ‘It seems we’ve been having as much trouble finding a reliable man to run things in Kabul as the Americans had in Vietnam after they got rid of Diem.’
‘Don’t talk cunt! It’s got nothing to do with Vietnam.’
‘I didn’t mean —’
‘Hold on. I will concede there may be one element of truth in what you said. It’s an asshole of a country, Afghanistan. Right on our border, under a fraternal socialist regime, and yet we still can’t find a leader to hold things together. Now the Chinese and the Americans are crawling around like lice. If we don’t do something fast, those black-asses are going to turn around and kick us out. We had a special meeting of the Defense Council —’ A Bulgarian orderly picked that moment to enter the room. The Marshal shooed him away.
‘We’ve always had a problem on our southern flank, God knows,’ Zotov resumed. ‘The problem of constructing a scientific frontier. Go back to your history books. Read General Annenkov. Read General Sobelev.’ These were famous Tsarist commanders who had fought to subdue the martial tribes of what were now the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan. ‘None of those fucking Turks have any love for Russia. And the Afghans were always the hardest to deal with. Look at what they did to the British.
‘Well, you remember the trouble we had with Daoud.’
‘Very clearly.’ Mohammed Daoud had been viewed as a reliable friend of the Soviets until he decided to lock up the leaders of the Afghan Communist Party, early in 1978. The Politburo had often been ready to turn a blind eye to the repression of local Communists in order to maintain good relations with a ‘progressive’ regime, and this was particularly true in its dealings with the Islamic world — witness the cases of Syria under Assad and of Egypt before Sadat threw his Soviet advisers out. In the case of Afghanistan, however, there was alarm that Daoud, lured by the prospect of lavish cash handouts from Iran and the West, was getting ready to break off his close relations with Moscow, and that the arrest of the Communists was only a first step.
The edict was handed down from the Politburo: get rid of Daoud. From inside their cells, with the complicity of their jailers, the Afghan Communist leaders issued precise instructions for a coup. It was executed with the help of sympathizers in the armed forces, especially the air force, for many years a bastion of Party influence. After President Daoud was toppled and killed, the Afghan Party leaders were borne in triumph in a military convoy, horns blaring, headlights on, from the prisons to the palace.
The Soviets still had to pick a replacement fo
r Daoud. The complication was that the Afghan Communist Party was split into two factions, and the relationship between them was more of a vendetta than a dialogue. There was the Khalq, or ‘Masses’, faction, and then there was the other lot, who took the name Parcham, which means ‘Flag’. The Khalq was the more orthodox organization, ready to follow every shift and eddy in Moscow’s line. By contrast, the Parcham faction was suspected of harboring Maoists and Trotskyites — which was why the KGB was allowed to recruit agents inside it.
One of these agents within the Parcham faction, a man regarded by the KGB as one hundred percent reliable, was a politician named Babrak Karmal. This was the man the KGB recommended, after the overthrow of Daoud, as the new President of Afghanistan.
‘I have to admit that our friends in the Committee may have been right for once,’ Marshal Zotov commented after describing this series of events. ‘But, of course, the Central Committee couldn’t accept this Babrak Karmal. Suslov and the ideologues said he belonged to the wrong faction. You couldn’t trust the Parcham people, they said. Any one of them could turn out to be a Mao-lover in disguise.’
‘So they installed Taraki,’ Sasha observed.
‘Exactly. Nur Mohammed Taraki. The little cockroach’ — the word ‘tarakan’ was also a play on the Afghan President’s name — ‘could spout Marx better even than Suslov. His problem was that he believed every word of it.’
At the outset, Taraki did the things expected of him. He invited the Soviets in to supervise the key ministries in Kabul and to run the secret police. He scythed his way through the ranks of the rival faction. Lucky members of the Parcham leadership, like Babrak Karmal, were sent abroad as ambassadors. Many of the others were jailed or shot.
Then Taraki outdid even Suslov’s expectation. As a Marxist-Leninist who went strictly by the book, Taraki believed that socialism required the root-and-branch destruction of religion. So he led an assault on the mosques and recruited Party zealots to slaughter the mullahs. Taraki had also learned that socialism requires the abolition of private property. So he grabbed the land from the tillers and announced the creation of collective farms.
‘He set out to copy our brilliant Soviet kolkhoz,’ the Marshal observed. ‘Suslov, sitting in Moscow, may have thought Taraki was a hero, a model of fidelity. Our advisers down there weren’t quite so impressed. The Afghans don’t take kindly to anyone fucking around with their land or their religion. I started getting reports warning about a civil war. Moslem bandits were talking about Jihad, a holy war. Taraki was losing control of the countryside. Our people started telling him to slow down. He spouted more Marx and Lenin at them. In other words, he told them to piss off.
‘Finally the Politburo had to sit up and pay attention. Enter our new friend, Hafizollah Amin. He reminds me a bit of your pal Askyerov. A real greaser. He appeared from nowhere and was suddenly Taraki’s indispensable lieutenant. Taraki brought him to Moscow and he charmed all of them, from Leonid Ilych down. But we knew even less about Amin than about Babrak Karmal. The KGB had nothing on him. After all, his Party credentials were beyond reproach.’
‘You mean nobody made anything out of the fact that Amin had been in the United States as a student?’ Sasha asked, amazed by this lapse. In New York, Nikolsky had mentioned that the Residency had received a request to check up on Amin’s stay in America.
‘Nobody thought about him at that time. Amin had the Party’s stamp of approval, remember.
‘Well, it was becoming plain to everyone, even Suslov, that President Taraki was off his head. He insisted on dealing directly with Leonid Ilych. He refused to talk to our Ambassador for days at a time. The Politburo finally made up its mind there had been a small mistake. So Taraki was told to move his ass to Moscow in a hurry. They received him with the usual pomp and circumstance, but when he got back to Kabul, he found he was out of a job. Hafizollah Amin had taken over, with our blessing. Taraki just vanished off the face of the earth.’
Sasha had seen a report in a western paper that Taraki’s body had been hacked into little pieces after Amin had him shot.
‘Which leaves us with Amin,’ Sasha jogged the Marshal along.
‘They picked Amin because they thought he’d be flexible. They thought he’d be able to divide the resistance. But Amin turned out to be more flexible than we had reckoned on. He arranged meetings on his own with some of the tribal chiefs, offering deals he didn’t tell us about. Now last week — this is the sensitive part, Sasha, I know you can keep your mouth shut — our friends in the Committee came up with a report that caused a near panic.’
Zotov summarized the contents of the KGB report, which had been discussed at the meeting of the Defense Council he had recently attended. The KGB Resident in Kabul had sent an urgent message to the Center stating that President Amin had offered the rebels a power-sharing arrangement. ‘He is preparing to make an alliance with the most reactionary elements. Then he will turn to the United States and Pakistan for military assistance. There is a high probability that Amin is working in league with the CIA. He has attended secret meetings with identified CIA operatives.’
‘So there’s a possibility that Amin was a CIA agent all along, recruited when he was in the United States,’ Sasha chipped in.
‘That is the KGB’s opinion, and the Politburo has accepted it. One way or another, we have to get rid of Amin. You can guess who our candidate to replace him must be.’
‘Babrak Karmal.’
The Marshal nodded. ‘Third time lucky for Andropov’s boys.’
‘Of course, that won’t end the civil war,’ Sasha said.
‘In the opinion of the General Staff — which the Politburo now accepts — there is no way to sustain our position in Afghanistan without using Soviet troops, at least four or five divisions. So you see, you’ve come back at an interesting time, Sasha. You’re looking for a challenge? You’ve got one. Afghanistan. Go there and be my eyes and ears.’
‘I don’t just want to sit around at headquarters. If we’re going into a war, I want to run my share of the risks.’
‘You are hungry for the smell of cordite, aren’t you? Well, that’s all right. Go back to your friends in Spetsnaz. They’ll give you some action.’
‘How long do you think the Afghan operation will take?’
‘Who knows? It depends whether we’re allowed to take our gloves off. The Committee assessment is very negative. But I can see a great opportunity here, Sasha. Think about it. Afghanistan is our approach route to the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It brings us a step closer to controlling the flow of oil from the Middle East. It’s a perfect platform for an armored push into Iran. We’ll need to go in there some day and sort out those fucking mullahs. We can scare the shit out of the Pakistanis, stop them from sending mercenaries to prop up our enemies in the Arab world. General Annenkov was right. This is our historic line of advance.’
He paused before asking, ‘What do you think the Americans are going to do?’
Sasha said, ‘I told you before. The democracies have short memories.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Marshal Zotov stretched out comfortably and allowed himself a small glass of brandy. ‘I nearly forgot to tell you the best thing. The Wakhan corridor.’
Sasha pictured it on the map: a narrow strip of land jutting out from Afghanistan’s northeast corner all the way to China.
‘The finest hunting terrain in the world,’ the Marshal enthused. ‘I want the horns of a Marco Polo sheep for my dacha. Have you ever seen one of those beasts? Magnificent. Great curled horns. They can stand five feet at the shoulder. I heard that one of the Rothschilds used to go hunting in the Wakhan. Next year, it will be our turn, eh? What do you say?’
‘Nalivay!’ said Sasha, filling his own glass to the brim.
*
Back in Moscow, Lydia packed Sasha’s bags for him, and she packed like the soldier’s daughter she was: everything with razor-sharp creases, squared away with the fanatical neatness Sasha had had to master to pass inspecti
on during his officer training.
‘Both of us married the army,’ she said accusingly, watching him fasten the shoulder belt over his field uniform. ‘But my share of army life is waiting.’
‘It’s not so bad, Lidochka. You shouldn’t exaggerate. You’ll have Moscow, and your friends, and all of this’ — he gestured at the splendid apartment — ‘while I sit in a tent.’
‘Then why did you volunteer?’
‘It’s what your father would have done, at my age. Our borders are threatened. It’s my duty to serve.’
That was the most maddening thing about him, Lydia thought. Whenever she had a legitimate complaint — usually that he had virtually abandoned his family — he came up with an unassailable reason why it would have to wait. I’m sorry, but officers of the GRU are on duty twenty-four hours a day. Excuse me, but there’s a war in Afghanistan.
‘Write to me, Sasha. So Petya will know, when he’s older, what it was like.’
Sasha thought of his own father’s letters from the front, and the terrible line, ‘We have become our own enemy,’ and felt suddenly uneasy about the rationale he had constructed for going to Afghanistan.
He said merely, ‘I’ll write.’
*
After two weeks of grueling physical training to work off the residue from the New York restaurants, and another fortnight of briefings that included a crash course in colloquial Dari, Sasha joined the Spetsnaz group that had been assembled in Tashkent. His old friend Fyodor Zaytsev, now a lieutenant-colonel, was there too. Zaytsev was the operational commander; Sasha had been made a chief of staff, a post that was usually reserved for the GRU’s designee. He found Tashkent an ugly, sprawling modern city. Most of its oriental splendors had been destroyed in the terrible earthquake of 1966. They paid a visit to the Djuma mosque and the Kukeltash madrassah, but there was only one afternoon available for sightseeing.
At bases just north of the Afghan border, two Soviet divisions, composed of Central Asian soldiers, were waiting for instructions to move. They had been fitted out with Afghan army uniforms. Zaytsev was skeptical about their fighting ability. These conscript divisions were usually employed in construction work and the menial chores of the Soviet army.
