Mazurka

by Campbell Armstrong

  Uvarov reached the beach and ran towards the stone jetty, looking for the launch. There was no sign of the vessel. Panicked, he raced to the end of the jetty and scanned the water. There was a faint haze rising off the sea. He thought he could still hear the roar of the F-16 as it raced – barely above sea-level – towards the coast, but he couldn’t tell since the plane was out of sight.

  Where was the damned launch? Uvarov anxiously scanned the water. Nothing. No sight of anything. What if he’d been tricked? What if there was no such vessel? What if Aleksis had been lying all along? Uvarov, so panicked he could barely breathe, peered out into the haze, his eyes stinging from salt spray. He looked back the length of the jetty, seeing the barbed-wire strung around the control centre and the radar dishes that turned ceaselessly, probing the sea and the sky. Where was the fucking launch?

  And then he heard it. He heard it! It appeared through the haze, a small vessel that churned up an enormous wake as it speeded towards the jetty. Uvarov raised his hand, waved impatiently. Hurry, he thought. Dear God, hurry. He glanced back at the control centre once more. There was another sound now, and one he couldn’t altogether identify because he was concentrating on the launch, which had cut its engine and was drifting towards the quay. Hurry, hurry. Uvarov started down the steps, seeing two figures on board the small green craft. One of them was preparing to toss a rope towards Uvarov, uncoiling it. And then Uvarov felt it, the turbulent passage of air, the breeze that swept his face and ruffled his hair, and he looked upwards, drawn to the great turning blades of the helicopter. The rope came towards him and he clutched it hastily as the launch drifted nearer to him – ten feet, seven, five – dear Christ, he’d have to leap. He braced himself, jumped, clutched the side of the launch and was hauled on board even as the helicopter descended like some predatory creature and the man who appeared in the open doorway of the chopper started firing at the launch with a machine-gun. On and on and on, blitzing the deck of the small craft, a crazy kind of firing that seemed to have no end to it. Uvarov fell, conscious of a wound in his side – a distant awareness, beyond any immediate pain. What he felt more than anything was sadness and regret.

  He shut his eyes and even though he didn’t see them he experienced the heat of the flames that had begun to billow out of the launch’s fuel system, which had caught fire during the machine-gun assault. The launch smoked and smouldered before it finally exploded, sending debris up and up into the salt air.

  Tallinn, Estonia

  In the middle of the afternoon, the man known as Marcus met three other men, each of them carrying a concealed weapon, outside the Hotel Viru. At the same time another three men assembled near the Tallinn Department Store on Lomonossovi Street. The Viru Hotel, a modern twenty-two storey construction on Viru Square, could be seen from the department store. Marcus and his companions crossed Estonia Boulevard where the afternoon traffic was dense and the pedestrians, swollen by hundreds of tourists, created a slow-moving crowd that made progress along the pavement difficult. Marcus looked once at his watch as he reached the corner of Lomonossovi Street. Thirty minutes.

  The three men who had gathered outside the department store were following some yards behind. Marcus had the thought that they all looked suspicious, that anyone observing them would notice that they all carried hidden weapons, but this was the result of his own tension and fear. In fact they looked just like anyone else strolling through the afternoon sunshine under a blue Tallinn sky.

  Marcus paused, lit a cigarette, caught the eye of a pretty girl moving past. Her ash-coloured hair, tugged by an ocean breeze, blew playfully up around her cheeks and she pushed it aside in a gesture Marcus found unbearably sweet. In thirty minutes he’d probably be dead. In thirty minutes, simple things, beautiful things like the girl’s hand caressing her own hair, would be beyond his experience.

  He thought of the girl Erma and the old man Bruno, who were part of a second group forming on Suur-Karja Street, some distance from the old Town Hall. This unit, consisting of twenty people, would enter the Central Post Office and order the clerks to close the doors for the rest of the day. In Latvia and Lithuania similar insurrections were taking place simultaneously. In Riga, groups were scheduled to seize the Post Office on Lenin Street, the Latvian State radio offices, and the TV tower located on one of the islands on the Daugava River. In Vilnius, the targets were the Central Post Office on Lenin Prospekt, the State Television studio, and the railway station. From the post offices in all three cities, telegrams would be sent to a variety of cities in the West – including Stockholm, Paris, London and New York. These messages would be the same in every case – a declaration of Baltic independence, evidenced by this robust resistance, no longer passive, no longer a matter of mere flag-waving, to Soviet occupation – and by the daring flight of a patriot into the heart of Russia itself. A message was being delivered to the world, and it was one of freedom.

  Marcus stopped on Lomonossovi Street. He checked his watch again. Synchronisation was important. He would deliver his own message at precisely the same time as the aeroplane launched its attack. There was impressive power in such orchestration. Chaos would convince nobody. Who would respond to a disorganised rabble? If there was to be a general revolt throughout the Baltic countries, those who decided to participate in it had to be convinced that the leaders were proficient as well as patriotic. They had to have confidence in the organisation. Everything had to be done the way Aleksis had planned it, with attention to detail, to timing. Aleksis had once said that revolutions often failed because they weren’t punctual, a statement Marcus had thought amusing at the time. Not now …

  Marcus continued to walk. Up ahead was the building that housed the Estonian Radio and Television studios. He lit another cigarette, glanced at his companions, noticed how they bantered among themselves like working-men going home at the end of a long day, men who perhaps had stopped at a café for vodka or beer. Marcus put a hand inside the pocket of his overcoat. The gun felt very good to him. He was aware of crowds jostling him, the smells of colognes, bread from a bakery, gasoline fumes, so many scents. Was it like this when you knew your life was almost over? Were you suddenly sharper, keener, more receptive to the world you were leaving?

  He put his hand around his gun. He looked back at the men following him. He smiled, a tense little movement of his lips. Now, he thought. It was almost time.

  The Soviet Union

  Andres Kiss flew low over marshy countryside, noticing here and there small rounded hills and the occasional river, now and then a farmhouse. He avoided towns and villages. He was still flying at a speed of six miles a minute. He set the radar on ‘range only’, which permitted him to look approximately eighty miles ahead and thirty thousand feet above, then he placed the master arm in the ON position, so that he was armed and ready in the event of an attack – if there had been a visual sighting of his F-16, and he prayed that there hadn’t. He continued to fly between the low hills and through shallow valleys, keeping to the shadows where the sun didn’t penetrate. If he hugged the landscape this way, the chance of any high-altitude craft spotting him was severely limited. He saw nothing above him in his radar, and ahead the landscape was dreary. His luck, so far, had held. But luck, he knew, was a fickle bitch, and could change her mind at any time.

  Not today, Andres Kiss thought. He had a feeling that fortune was with him.

  He was heading due east now. He was approximately 180 miles – thirty minutes’ flying time – from Moscow. And the Kremlin.

  He studied the landscape around him, seeing it flash past at the kind of speed he loved. Blurs, brown-greens, a landscape that suggested spilled paint. Cattle whizzed past, and grain silos, and houses, and the stacks of the occasional factory. Reservoirs, dams, electricity pylons. It was crazed speed and impressions came at him faster than his senses could truly register them.

  This, Andres thought, was power.

  Tallinn, Estonia

  The first casualty was the uniformed g
uard who stepped from behind his desk to question Marcus.

  “You need a pass, comrade,” the guard said. “And an appointment.”

  Marcus said, “Ya ne panimayu parooski,” which meant he didn’t speak Russian, which was a lie. He asked the guard to speak in Estonian. The guard, a surly young man from Minsk who loathed the Baltic, and who was homesick for his native city, said he didn’t speak Estonian. He did, but only to a small degree. Today, though, he didn’t feel like wrapping his tongue round those strange sounds, and he didn’t like the look of this fellow who’d just strutted inside the building. The young man put his hand on his holster.

  Marcus shot him then. The guard fell backwards and a girl began to scream at the end of the hallway. Marcus turned, saw his companions enter the building with their guns drawn. He hadn’t expected to kill the young man, but this was too important for scruples now, too important for hesitation. He hurried along the corridor, seeing doors open on either side, the troubled faces of men and women, employees of the State Radio and Television Company which regularly flooded the air with Soviet-approved trash and which took its editorial direction from the Ministry of Communications in Moscow. The girl who’d been screaming before was silent now, covering her face with her hands and kneeling on the floor.

  “You’re not going to be hurt,” Marcus said. “Direct me to the broadcasting studio.”

  The girl pointed towards a staircase. “Up there. Studio Two is radio. Studios One and Three TV.”

  Marcus moved toward the stairs, leaving five of his men posted in the hallway. He took the stairs quickly, followed by two men who were brothers from the district of Tallinn called Mustamae, a place of monstrous Soviet apartment houses. He checked his watch again as he moved.

  Ahead, a second guard stepped out of an office into the corridor. He had a pistol in one hand and he fired it directly at Marcus. The shot struck one of the brothers, who fell silently. The guard didn’t get the chance to fire again before Marcus had shot him in the forehead. And then he was hurrying along the hallway, looking for the door of the studio he wanted. He didn’t want TV, he preferred radio because he believed more people listened to music on the radio in the afternoons than watched the tedious graveyard that was Tallinn television.

  More people were filing out of their offices. Marcus didn’t know how long he had. Sooner or later somebody was going to pick up a telephone and call the militiamen and then the building would be invaded by cops. The five men posted in the hallway below could hold them off for quite some time, although Marcus wasn’t sure how long that might be. He took the prepared message from his pocket as he rushed along the corridor. Studio One. Three. What had the hysterical girl said? Studio Two? Marcus noticed a red light above the door of Studio Two. He pushed the door open, stepped inside the soundproofed room.

  Two women were seated round a microphone discussing how best to pickle herring. In a glass booth beyond the women sat three technicians. The women stared at Marcus as he entered, then – utterly perplexed by this unscripted occurrence, this intrusion into their domestic programme – looked at the technicians for guidance. Marcus waved his gun and made his way to the control booth, shoving the door open.

  “I want to read a statement,” he said.

  The technicians didn’t know how to behave. One, muscular and bearded, asked, “On whose behalf?”

  “The Movement for Baltic Independence.”

  The bearded man smiled. “Be my guest,” and he gestured towards the microphones where the two silent women sat.

  The Soviet Union

  Fifty-four miles from Moscow. His predetermined initial point. Nine minutes of flying time. And so far it was working, everything, working like a goddam charm. Even the landscape seemed welcoming to him, a carpet laid out for him to fly over. Magic, Andres thought. Pure magic.

  And then he was tense. Flying low over a flat landscape was one thing. Flying between stunted hills, that was a piece of cake. But Moscow was looming up, and Moscow was going to be something else.

  He punched the on-board clock, starting from zero and counting up to eight and a half minutes. He pushed a small white button which armed the station where the three Mark 82s were located. Weapons live. Bombs live.

  Now, he thought. The last lap. The big city.

  Counting up. Still counting up. Five minutes. Six. Seven. But then time was becoming meaningless to Andres now, because he felt he was beyond such measurements. He was in a place without clocks. He was airborne and free and time was a ball and chain you tossed down through the clouds.

  When eight minutes had elapsed, he began to climb rapidly, creating an angle of eventual descent. Three hundred feet. Five hundred. One thousand. Fifteen hundred.

  Andres’s face sweated in his helmet. He could see Moscow – Matushka Moskva – spread before him in the afternoon light. He could see towers and apartment buildings and spires and a gleaming stretch of the Moskva River and the movement of traffic on the streets. As he climbed, he said in a soft voice the Estonian version of the Lord’s Prayer, which he’d learned from Mikhail Kiss in childhood. Mei isa, kes sa oled taevas …

  Tallinn, Estonia

  Marcus looked at his watch. It was time to read his statement. He sat nervously at the microphone and spread the sheet of paper out on the table before him. For a second he couldn’t quite make out the words. He rubbed his eyes, cleared his throat, stared at the technicians in the glass booth. Two were expressionless, but the bearded man looked encouraging.

  “Any time you like.” The bearded man’s voice was loud inside Marcus’s earphones.

  Marcus took a sip from a glass of water and began to read. His statement, carefully composed by Romanenko many months ago, concerned the travesty of international justice that was the Soviet occupation. It concerned the rights of nations to self-determination. It concerned old non-invasion treaties, compacts made between the Russians and the Baltic countries, that had been cynically disregarded by the Kremlin. It concerned the revolutionary movements in Latvia and Lithuania that even now were broadcasting to their own people in Riga and Vilnius. And finally it concerned the daring flight of a young pilot into Moscow and how that single act of unselfish bravery was the standard against which all patriotic acts had to be judged, the spearhead of a new movement towards freedom, the call to liberty, the ultimate symbol.

  Marcus stopped reading. He didn’t realise that his speech hadn’t been broadcast, that the transmitter had been rendered inoperative by technicians after he’d read the opening three sentences, and that the five men left to guard the downstairs hallway had been shot and killed by an invasion of militiamen. He had no way of knowing that the young man from Mustamae, who had been standing guard outside the door to Studio Two, lay dead in the corridor, shot by militiamen. Nor could he know that the group that had seized the Post Office at number 20 Suur-Karja had been killed in a thirty-minute gun battle with the KGB.

  Marcus raised the water glass to his lips and looked at the bearded man, who winked at him through the glass. Marcus ran a hand over his face. He set down his glass just as the studio door opened. He reached at once for his gun as two militiamen, armed with automatic rifles, entered the room with their weapons already firing.

  Marcus slumped across the table, spilling his water glass. A stream of water slithered across the paper on which his speech had been written, causing the ink to run in indecipherable lines, as if a bird with dark blue claws had alighted on the paper.

  Moscow

  At two thousand five hundred feet Andres could see Red Square, and the Kremlin – and there was the Palace of Congresses, where the Communist Party conferences were held.

  Andres Kiss’s target. Mikhail Kiss’s target. The target of the Brotherhood. The place where destinies were decided, the malignant heart of the system the Brotherhood had despised. Andres Kiss could see the great columns that surrounded the building and he thought of how, within its vast auditorium and spacious offices, men decreed the fates of people within all t
he Soviet Republics, how decisions taken here filtered down into everyday life in the countries of the Baltic, and affected the way people lived. Here the party bigshots planned to bury the Baltic nations. Here they planned to turn Baits into third-class citizens in their own countries. Here the party engine functioned, pumping out poisons that had to be swallowed by people who had absolutely no desire to feed on Russian lies or to embrace a system that was alien to them, one that killed the spirit and demolished the soul.

  It was Andres’s intention to drop the first bomb at one end of the building, the second in the middle, the third at the other end, and then turn the aircraft in the direction of Leningrad and the Gulf of Finland, which was his one chance of getting out of the Soviet Union before he was attacked.

  That was his intention.

  He was about three miles from the Kremlin when he nosed the F-16 downwards, conscious now of the way the city tilted through his cockpit, as if the buildings all listed impossibly to one side. Down and down now. Fifteen hundred feet above ground level, twelve hundred. That was when he saw three MIG-29s in the eastern sky, perhaps no more than two miles from him. That was when he realised, with a start that made his heart shudder, that something had gone wrong with the plan.

  Without thinking, operating entirely on old instincts and training, he manoeuvred the F-16 into firing position and released one of the forward quarter heat-seeking Side Winders. It exploded on contact with the MIG-29 nearest to him: a flash, a violent plume of smoke, and the Soviet aircraft was gone. Andres fired the second missile and made a direct hit on another of the MIGs, destroying the plane with startling immediacy. The afternoon, so placid before, was filled with trails of smoke and turbulence and destruction.