Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  ‘They’re chernozhopi, same as the Afghans,’ Zaytsev pointed out.

  Sasha, who had followed the Marshal’s advice and sought out a copy of General Annenkov’s account of the Central Asian campaigns of the last century, remembered the Tsarist commander’s injunction not to rely on native soldiers. Britain’s reliance on the sepoys, Annenkov warned, was a source of weakness; witness the Indian Mutiny.

  Sasha felt largely indifferent to the plight of the Afghans, friend or foe. Like Zaytsev, like the Marshal, he viewed the invasion that was being prepared as a straightforward military operation to defend his country’s frontiers: a job of work. He expected that he and his comrades would be judged as soldiers, not on the basis of family or Party connections, and he welcomed that. He was looking forward to proving himself in the first real war that Russian troops had fought since Hitler’s defeat. Promotion came fast on the battlefield, and that might assist his secret purpose. But what counted for most was that it was in the field that a man discovered who could be trusted not to cut and run. He needed allies of his own kind. He thought he had found one already in Fyodor Zaytsev. In Afghanistan, he would discover more.

  The Spetsnaz group was given a special mission: to support the KGB team that would be flown to Kabul to seize the presidential palace and neutralize Hafizollah Amin. Before Sasha’s plane took off, the Central Asian divisions had already received the order to push south, into Afghanistan.

  *

  The heavy Antonov transport plane bellied down onto the runway of Kabul’s international airport, the cargo bays were opened, and Sasha’s team drove down the ramp in their jeeps and armored cars. There had been no protest from the control tower at this unscheduled landing. It had already been secured by Spetsnaz troops in civilian clothes who had flown in on a regular Aeroflot flight.

  A fair-haired man in Afghan army uniform came running across the tarmac.

  ‘Preobrazhensky?’

  Sasha, in the front seat of his jeep, gave a brief salute. He recognized Colonel Bayerenov, who until a few weeks before had been the director of the KGB’s paramilitary training school.

  ‘Deploy half your men to secure the airport perimeter,’ the KGB colonel ordered. ‘Follow me with the rest. I’ll go in with the first wave. You know your job. Stay back and cover us in case the Afghans counterattack.’

  ‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’

  It was a strange force that Bayerenov had assembled. Some of them looked over the hill — men in their fifties, or at least their late forties, with sagging guts they hadn’t managed to work off in time for this operation. There was a fair sprinkling of dark-skinned Central Asians, who looked a damn sight less conspicuous in their Afghan army gear than the colonel, and who might be presumed to speak Dari, or at any rate Farsi. Well, Bayerenov and his superiors presumably knew what they were doing. The KGB were supposed to be specialists in mokrie dela, ‘wet affairs,’ weren’t they? It’s a dirty job, Sasha thought. Let them have it.

  Bayerenov had assembled a few tanks and a dozen or more army trucks, no doubt purloined from the equipment that the Soviets had been supplying to Afghanistan in pursuit of their internationalist duty.

  The tanks led the way into the city, slowing the pace of the column behind. An Afghan officer at the checkpoint outside the airport stood yelling at them after the tanks crashed through the barrier. A young lieutenant in a following jeep shot him through the forehead, as coolly as if the Afghan were a target on a firing range.

  The city was eerily peaceful, the great Shah Nou bazaar closed and shuttered, the streets deserted until the column neared the palace and soldiers from a loyal Afghan regiment tried to block the road. Bayerenov’s men pulled up the flaps on the back of their trucks and opened fire with their DSK heavy machine guns. Within minutes, the Afghans broke and fled.

  These weren’t the Afghan fighters Sasha had heard about.

  The Soviet force fanned out to cover all three entrances to the palace compound. These were protected by heavy iron gates, and Bayerenov used the tanks to ram them. As the tanks rumbled forward, they came under heavy automatic fire from the palace guards. From where Sasha was waiting the noise was oddly muted, like a series of wooden matches being struck. Now the real resistance would begin, he thought. They had been told that Amin’s guards had been specially selected from his own tribe, and they were sworn to defend their leader to the death. But they didn’t seem to have anything heavier than a machine gun. With a clash of metal, two of Bayerenov’s tanks broke through. The third was stuck in the twisted bars of one of the gates, apparently stalled. The driver was desperately trying to work the ignition, but the engine just groaned and expired.

  Bayerenov’s squads were racing through the other two gates, ducking and firing. They were all in Afghan uniforms. The only way to tell them apart from Amin’s men in the darkness and confusion was that their colonel had told them to put on armbands, which had been hastily fashioned from rags of white cloth. Bayerenov’s instructions were precise, and they had been confirmed at the level of the Politburo, which alone had the authority to decide on a high-level assassination. Nobody inside the palace was to be permitted to escape, under any circumstances. The Politburo did not want any witnesses to tell the world how President Amin had died. Bayerenov’s men were going in prepared for a slaughterhouse. They were loaded up with spare magazines for their kalashnikovs. Sasha noted that some enthusiasts had taped two magazines together so they could be fed in faster.

  ‘All right, let’s move!’ Sasha signaled to his men. He led them through the center gate, stepping over bodies that were thrown clumsily about like sacks of grain. Some of Amin’s men were still holding out in a sandbagged machine gun post over to the left of the courtyard.

  ‘Cover me!’ Sasha yelled to the sergeant who was with him. He was something from a nightmare, that fellow, a hulking Estonian with a face that had been ripped and restitched countless times and was not improved by a black moustache set like a permanent scowl. To top it off, he had his head shaved completely bald. But there was nobody better to have at your back in a brawl. While Sasha zig-zagged along the wall toward the Afghan’s post, the Estonian dashed out, threw himself down behind a dead man’s body and opened up, drawing their fire.

  Sasha snapped a magnesium grenade off his belt and hurled it as soon as he got close enough to the bunker. Blinded by the flash, the Afghans screamed and pressed their hands over their eyes. One of them rolled out of the bunker, his uniform ablaze. It was the work of a moment to finish them off.

  The shock of the first wave had already rolled over the remaining Afghan defenders outside the palace.

  A KGB major was yelling in Farsi at the handful of survivals, telling them to drop their weapons and crawl — ‘On your bellies!’ — toward the Soviet vehicles. Three or four men staggered out from behind their shelters with their hands raised. One of them was bleeding profusely from a head wound that seemed to have claimed his right eye.

  The KGB major stepped forward as if to receive the surrendering guards, then hunched himself down, legs wide apart, and opened fire. He was using hollow-nosed bullets that tore the Afghans apart.

  He spun round and saw Sasha watching him.

  ‘Orders,’ he said. Then he added, as if he needed to explain something to himself, ‘Do you think these black-asses would treat us any better?’

  Sasha didn’t say anything, but he studied the major’s sweaty face and wondered whether his father’s killer had looked like this butcher.

  A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the main doors of the palace. Inside, the fighting was still fierce. Amin’s bodyguards were fighting for every inch of the stairs leading up to the presidential suite. Sasha heard the boom of grenades going off in quick succession.

  A man in Afghan uniform came lurching out of the smoke, waving his rifle and screaming something. The words were indistinguishable in the din of battle. The man’s face was smudged and blackened beyond recognition, but Sasha knew him from his height and build.r />
  He was conscious of several Russians swinging their submachine guns toward the man who was waving at them. Hot from the killing, their reflexes were so accelerated they didn’t allow time for a second look.

  Sasha shouted, ‘Hold your fire! It’s the colonel!’ But before the first syllable had passed his lips, Colonel Bayerenov’s chest was crosshatched with machine-gun bullets coming from both sides of him. It was impossible to identify any single killer. Bayerenov’s corpse was thrown back against the palace steps, his head lolling at an impossible angle, his jaws still opened wide in his desperate plea for reinforcements.

  Nobody stopped for the colonel. Sasha roared, ‘Follow me!’ and led the second wave into the palace.

  By the time he fought his way up to President Amin’s suite on the top floor, Bayerenov’s picked killers had already located their quarry.

  Hafizollah Amin was sitting on a sofa on the far side of a vast reception room hung with silks and finely woven rugs. Behind him was a sight not normally associated with the Moslem conception of paradise: a western-style bar, with a waiter in a white jacket and a gleaming phalanx of bottles. Conscious of the sensitivities of his people, Amin usually favored fruit juice over spiritous liquors. But tonight, he was drinking scotch out of a chunky crystal glass. He was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet of Soviet design over his evening clothes, but he reached for his drink, not the automatic rifle lying across the coffee table, as the KGB hit-men burst in.

  ‘Shurawi Zindabad,’ he greeted them ironically. ‘Long live the Soviets.’

  His calm resignation was not matched by the bartender, who threw himself down behind his counter, or the beautiful courtesan who was sitting with Amin. He was holding her hand, but she pulled free and ran toward the archway that led to the bedrooms.

  Sasha burst into the room in time to see a young KGB officer — the same lieutenant he had noticed at the airport — cut the President of Afghanistan in half with concentrated fire from his kalashnikov. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the ravishing girl who was trying to escape. She reminded him of Maya Askyerova, the one who had fallen for Nikolsky’s pet poodle. The Estonian took care of her. Instead of wasting bullets, he tore after her, seized hold of her, and wrenched her head round like a wheel until he heard the neck crack.

  Now the lieutenant was stalking the bartender, who, realizing he was cornered, was creeping out on all fours. He picked himself up, raised his hands, and started shouting something.

  He looked like an Afghan, all right, but suddenly Sasha realized that his shouts were in Russian.

  ‘Ne strelyaite!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Soviet!’

  The lieutenant, with his helmet down over his ears, didn’t seem to hear, or didn’t want to. He seemed to be crazed with killing, like the men who shot Colonel Bayerenov. Sasha grabbed the man’s arm so that his shots went wide, shattering lines of bottles behind the bar. The lieutenant rounded on Sasha, and his eyes were like pink glass. He could see Sasha’s black Spetsnaz uniform, but he was at the point where he was capable of shooting at anything that breathed. Sasha delivered a quick karate chop; in an instant the lieutenant was on the floor and Sasha had possession of his weapon.

  While they were scuffling, the bartender had seen his chance to run out of the room. He must have hurled himself down the circular stairwell because, during the mopping-up later on, Sasha found him cowering in its shadow on the ground level.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sasha demanded, dragging the man out by the scruff of his neck.

  ‘Talebov. I’m a lieutenant-colonel of KGB.’

  Sasha stared at him in disbelief, fingering the trigger of his Skorpion machine pistol.

  ‘I’m sure the commander knows about me,’ the man stammered. His jacket now looked like a butcher’s apron. ‘I was promised —’

  ‘The commander’s dead,’ Sasha said bluntly.

  Bayerenov’s deputy, one of the men Sasha had thought looked over the hill, came up.

  ‘You know the orders,’ he reminded Sasha. ‘No prisoners.’

  ‘This one isn’t an Afghan,’ Sasha said. ‘He claims he’s one of yours.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Mikhail Talebov was a lucky man, the only member of Amin’s retinue to get out of the palace alive. His story was promptly confirmed by the KGB Residency in Kabul. Talebov was an Illegal, sent to infiltrate Amin’s private quarters. He was an Azerbaijani by origin, with a natural flair for oriental languages. He had been given specific orders to assassinate Amin, and had been provided with a special poison that he mixed in the President’s drinks. But Amin, with a sixth sense for his own preservation, was forever switching glasses or mixing up unpredictable combinations for himself. Nobody had seen fit to inform Talebov that his job had been reasssigned to Bayerenov’s hit teams.

  Meanwhile, the armored convoys were pushing south from the Soviet bases in Uzbekistan, and the troop planes were rumbling in to Kabul airport. The Soviets did not anticipate much opposition from the Afghan armed forces, once a few key Amin sympathizers had been eliminated. There was a hard core of Communists and Soviet agents in the officer corps who could be counted on to carry out instructions without question. Before the night was over, most of Amin’s loyalists would have been removed by KGB-directed squads moving from house to house, barracks to barracks. And the planners had not forgotten the radio.

  As soon as the signal went out that Hafizollah Amin was no longer a factor in Afghan politics, Radio Kabul broadcast a remarkable statement by Babrak Karmal, interspersed with patriotic music. Babrak Karmal, describing himself as the legitimate President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, invited his fraternal Soviet allies to come to the defense of his country’s revolution, which was threatened by imperialist plots and the secret intervention of the CIA.

  The broadcast had been recorded by Karmal at a luxurious rest house in Tashkent. The new leader of the Democratic Republic didn’t show his face in Kabul for a week after the KGB had dispatched his predecessor, just to make sure there weren’t any unpleasant surprises when he showed himself to his people.

  *

  Nikolsky woke up before he wanted to, utterly dehydrated, in the middle of a baffling dream. He was attending a grand reception, in a huge marbled hall with endless staircases, balconies, and running fountains. It seemed as big as a whole town. He passed one beautiful woman after another, all in décolleté gowns, until he was at the back of the ballroom, where it suddenly became plain that the whole edifice was incomplete. Not all the foundations had been laid, and at the back the whole structure seemed to be adrift, floating and swaying like a raft. And back there the windows, two stories high at least, had glass. As Nikolsky tried to steady himself on the heaving floor, a great tide of foul water burst through between the columns, drenching everyone. Or not quite everyone, perhaps, because a cheery round little fellow called Krupchenko came up and made Nikolsky a handsome present: twenty bottles of fizzy red communion wine and a few cases of beer. ‘Be sure to drink the altar wine first,’ he cautioned.

  As Feliks crawled out of bed and thumped his way to the bathroom, he kept puzzling over the donor. He didn’t know anybody called Krupchenko.

  He drove himself out to the Village in his Zhiguli. Armed with his dollars and certificate roubles, he’d had no trouble buying the car. He turned off the Ring Road and drove through dense pine forests, past the sign that said ‘Halt!’ and, below that, ‘Water Conservation District.’ At the guardpost, where men in khaki uniforms with blue flashes checked his ID card, the bronze plaque amended this to ‘Scientific Research Center.’ They let him through to the parking lot, and he walked between neatly cropped lawns to the new headquarters of the First Chief Directorate. They had found some hotshot Finnish architect to design the thing, which was shaped like a three-pointed star, all glass and aluminum. Nikolsky thought it was hideous. But the worst thing about it was that the crowded canteen, where you had to line up for half an hour to get a stale sandwich, didn’t even sell beer. This was part of the
new drive for efficiency at the workplace. There he was, stranded miles from a drink. It made him quite homesick for the old Lubyanka.

  He usually ignored the Soviet press and went straight to the American papers, which were available to his section, although you had to sign each copy out as if it were a state secret. But an item in Pravda on the war in Afghanistan caught his interest. It was about the CIA and Chinese operatives who were supposedly crawling all over the place. That’s what they told the conscripts in their orientation classes too: they were going down there to fight the Americans and the chinks. Nikolsky wondered whether Sasha had run into any foreigners. The Pravda piece cited an article by an American correspondent, D. Frick. Nikolsky swore out loud. So the little shit-eater was still churning it out. He took out his ballpoint and changed the first letter of the transliteration of Frick’s name to a P.

  One of Nikolsky’s colleagues, an Armenian who had spent time in San Francisco, strolled in with a racing form sheet under his arm.

  ‘Well, Agopian,’ Feliks addressed him, ‘have you got any good tips for me?’

  ‘I’ve got a hot one for Sunday. Burilom.’

  ‘It had better be an improvement on that last one you touted.’ Off-track betting, naturally, was illegal. But Agopian was always ready to place a few roubles for a friend.

  ‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’

  Nikolsky considered this proposal. The Moscow Hippodrome wasn’t exactly Belmont. The horses were mangy brutes, and everyone knew the races were fixed by the managers. The entrance to the place looked like the Brandenburg Gate — massive columns and heroic statues of rearing stallions and musclebound men trying to restrain them. But the inside was sleazy and faded. There were always plenty of bums and touts hanging around the stairwells under the two-tiered grandstand, which stank like urinals. Still, you could get a serious drink on the terrace from black-market runners who would slip you a bottle wrapped in a newspaper, and the racetrack restaurant, the Bega, was one of the best in the city.