Except when he was ill, and the doctors had summoned the courage to issue an order to him, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky never took a day away from his work. All of his career, and more particularly now that he commanded a fleet of warships, he had been obsessed with the levels of control of the navy his adult life had given him. He had no holidays and he took no leave. His wife enjoyed vacations alone or with her female friends. If they took a week in a Black Sea resort, his wife was abandoned while he spent his days visiting other commands, and in the evenings they went to service dinners. But he accepted, with wry amusement, that his chief of staff should be allowed, under humorous and grudging sufferance, an occasional away-day to visit and study Malbork Castle, over the border in Poland. Why a naval officer of seniority should embark on a love affair with a medieval castle, and become an expert in its history and construction, get to the point of obsession, was to Admiral Falkovsky—as Viktor knew—strange to the limit of eccentricity. Viktor talked of the castle to him, lectured him on its magnificence till his eyes turned away and he feigned boredom. He would cry to be spared. Yet the dockets Viktor needed to cross the frontier and visit Malbork were always signed with a gruff snort but they were signed.
'So you have not brought back my cigarettes—how may I survive without my cigarettes?' The admiral struck Viktor's arm. The blow hurt. 'I will die without my cigarettes.'
The admiral smoked up to two packets of Camel, no filter, a day. Each time Viktor travelled to Malbork he brought back ten cartons or more, a minimum of two thousand Camel cigarettes. There was always tension in the admiral's office when supplies were dwindling and the next visit to Malbork was more than a week away. In Kaliningrad, at a price, it was always possible to buy Marlboro, Lucky Strike or Winston off the street stalls, but packets of Camel were hard to find.
'As soon as I can "escape", Admiral, I will go and work for a day with the archaeological team, scrape old stones, excavate decaying bones, and buy your cigarettes.'
'If I am not dead…' Falkovsky's voice softened. In the front of the car that flew the fleet banner on the bonnet was the driver and the admiral's personal uniformed bodyguard. He murmured, 'Tonight there will be present all of the airforce people. Are they going to get the new aircraft, MFI, or are they not? Are they, the pigs, ahead of us at the trough? I would hate to think so. I need to know. Also present tonight is that buffoon, Gorin, from Missile Defence, and I hear they spend every day and half of every night lobbying for money, money, money, and what they get is not available to me. I don't want you talking to them about fucking castles.'
They grinned together, like old friends, and then the interior of the car was filled with the admiral's low chuckle.
Admiral Falkovsky and his wife had produced two daughters. One taught small children in Moscow and the other sat at a reception desk in a St Petersburg hospital. They were both, equally, a disappointment to him. Both were frightened of water, turned pale at the sight of a good sea freshening, and each in her own way had made it clear to their father that his adoration of all things nautical made him a sad, remote and distant figure. They had no sympathy for his life, and he none for theirs, and they came to see him at Kaliningrad only once a year. He would have said, to himself but not to his wife, that the absence of a son in his life was negated when he had first cast his hard and experienced eye on the young Viktor Archenko. He was now aged fifty-six, but then he had been forty-two, and the young man who had caught that eye was twenty-two years old. At that time he commanded the destroyer and frigate flotillas sailing out of Severomorsk. His reputation for brutal commitment to the navy had been made thirteen years before their first meeting and came from suppression of mutiny. In 1975, as a part of the celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, the Krivak-class destroyer, the Storozhevoy, was in the Baltic port of Riga, capital city of the satellite state of Latvia, when the political officer and the second officer recognized that the proximity of Swedish territorial waters represented a once-in-a-lifetime chance of escape from the Soviet camp. With most of the crew and the captain locked below decks, the political officer and the second officer, with the bare minimum of the crew who were co-conspirators to help them, sailed from Riga. The flight was not at first noticed, but a member of the crew who either doubted the wisdom of what they attempted or had chickened out, radioed the shore and alerted the command.
Chaos would have reigned, and confusion, when the message came in. The then captain lieutenant, Falkovsky, had pushed aside superiors who dithered and had given the orders. None had dared disobey him. The airforce had bombed and strafed the defenceless vessel and had stopped it in the water a mere forty-eight kilometres from the Swedish sanctuary. Falkovsky had led the boarding party that had brought back the political officer, the second officer and the crewmen. The political officer had been summarily executed. Falkovsky had said, to any who would listen to him, that he was proud of what he had done, and he had further explained that his motive was not to protect the sanctity of the revolution's celebration, but to safeguard the good name of the navy. None had dared doubt his argument. He would show short shrift, no sympathy, for traitors. The message of Riga and the Storozhevoy was known wherever Alexei Falkovsky's name was spoken, and the reasoning behind his actions.
Thirteen years later he had met the junior lieutenant. The day they had first set eyes on each other had sealed their relationship. The Kanin-class guided missile destroyer, Gnevnyy, had been due to sail on a day in early July 1988 from Severomorsk to join a Northern Fleet anti-submarine exercise, and had not left harbour. The crew had been paraded, and Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stamped on board and delivered a peroration of ferocious bile at the inefficiency of the Gnevnyy''s officers, NCOs and able seamen, and of Junior Lieutenant Archenko. They were a 'disgrace', their 'under-preparedness shamed the navy', they were not fit to clean 'the latrines of the fleet's dry docks', and all their shore leave for twelve months was cancelled.
In the face of Falkovsky's tirade, the Gnevnyy's captain had hung his head and studied his boots and had known that his navy life was ended. As Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stared at the crew, stabbing at them with the glower of his eyes, Archenko had spoken up. He had been in the fourth rank and there had been—Falkovsky could still remember the detail of it—a forward thrust of his chin, his eyes had stared directly forward, and his voice had been firm and without fear. He spoke when no one else had the courage to do so: 'Sir, the Gnevnyy did not sail because it had no fuel. Although the crew have not been paid for three months, although there was only enough food stored on board for one week's basic meals and the exercise is due to last for nineteen days, those were not the reasons we did not put to sea. The fuel should have been loaded the day before we should have sailed. It was not. It had been sold on the black-market. Our captain was told this by an officer in Administration at Northern Fleet when he went ashore to plead for the diesel. He was told the storage tanks were empty because the last of the fuel had been corruptly sold to mafiya criminals living in Leningrad. When the captain, first rank, provides us with fuel we will be ready to sail and will strive to fulfil our mission.' He had been the only one with the bravery to speak.
In the morning fuel had been found, and rations, and the ship had sailed, and three officers in Administration had gone to the camps, and a mafiya king from Leningrad had died in a road accident. Two years later, when Archenko's duty—closely monitored to see whether he was a barrack lawyer or a duty-driven officer—on the Gnevnyy was completed, Falkovsky had sent him a terse two-line note inviting him on to his personal staff. Two years later, Falkovsky had been posted to the defence ministry in Moscow and had pulled the strings to obtain a place for the young man at the Grechko Academy for Staff Officers in the capital.
In 1997, Falkovsky had achieved admiral's rank and left the ministry to take over command of the entire surface complement of the Northern Fleet, and young Archenko had been posted with him. There was a fondness for Viktor, but also an admirati
on for the workload the man took on his shoulders. Total reliability, the honesty he yearned for from subordinates, and trust were the bricks on which their relationship was built. Viktor was his proxy son. Two years later, May 1999, they had gone to Kaliningrad together: Admiral of the Fleet and chief of staff. In the last twelve months, many young officers had jacked in the navy and retreated into civilian life, so few of those who remained were reliable. This man was a jewel. It was Falkovsky's opinion that he could not have fulfilled his duty without the ever-present and ever-dependable Viktor Archenko. And it was Falkovsky's hope that he would inherit the position of top dog, Admiral of the Fleet of the Russian Federation, when he had finished at Kaliningrad, and that Viktor would be with him, securing his outer office.
They arrived at airforce headquarters. Falkovsky said, 'Don't take any shit from them.'
'Would I ever?' the quiet voice replied.
Again, he punched the younger man's arm. He thought Viktor subdued, distant…and then he was out of his car and marching past a small honour guard and hearing the reassuring bite of Viktor's shoes on the gravel behind him.
It was the sort of evening that Viktor fed from.
His admiral and the generals were at the far end of the room, circling each other for advantage like rutting boars, playing with words and seeking to disguise their mutual jealousies. Viktor was at the bar with those who made up the second echelon of authority, where the food was. Although at the bar and close to the steward, it was his skill that he drank little on such occasions—the visit from Moscow of an airforce general in charge of design and development—while making certain that others around him consumed copiously and dangerously. He was inside the web of a network where total trust existed, where men spoke freely.
The chief of staff to the visiting general told Viktor, 'If we don't have it soon we might as well go home and grow potatoes. Without it we're fucked. At a ratio of two to one we need the lightweight fighter and the heavy bomber, must have them. What we're going to get is different, the compromise—one aircraft, with NTOW of seventeen tonnes—but the range, it's promised us, will exceed four thousand five hundred kilometres, and they'll go for the two engines, the AL-41F turbofan, which is thrust of 175kN. It's not what we want but it's what we're going to get. MFI is what they guarantee us. "What's the manoeuvrability?" we ask. They say it's better than the American next generation, and they tell us the radar will be better, the NOW system that has a +/-130-150 azimuth, with tail radar for the rest, and they say the payload will be all the current air-to-air and air-to-ground payload. But, but, where is it, the prototype? The 1-44 is stuck in a Zhukovsky hangar, undergoing what they call "ground adjustments", which means it's crap—the word is "high degree static instability". They're waiting on the test pilot having the balls to go up in it, poor bastard. It's what we're going to get, and the money's there, from last week, if it ever flies. And, how are things with the navy?'
Viktor talked for a few moments about the condition of the Baltic Fleet, but his concentration was on memorizing what had been said. MFI was the Mikoyan Multifunction Tactical Fighter. NTOW was Normal Take-off Weight…it would be the successor to the SU-27 and MiG-29 fourth-generation fighters, and was designed to confront the Americans' Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. Viktor gestured discreetly at his admiral across the length of the room and muttered that 'the fat man' would appreciate an up-to-date paper on MFI and where the programme was going, for 'his eyes only', and was told such a paper would be sent.
Viktor moved on.
At that time, across the border, away to the south-west in the Polish city of Warsaw, on the embassy's second floor, behind a steel door, a signal was being enciphered.
Viktor reached his second target of the evening, a colonel in Early Warning Defence, who with his general was on a three-day assessment-of-capability visit to the Kaliningrad base. Viktor had noted that the colonel's glass was empty and brought a double replacement.
'It's hopeless, worse than ever. I've been in EWD for nineteen years. It's like our knickers have dropped to our ankles, the elastic's gone. You don't believe me? You should. The big word is deterioration. We follow the principle of "hair-trigger" reaction to threat, but that is based on comprehensive satellite surveillance of where the launch might come from, and we haven't replaced the satellites. They've passed their useful lifespan. And not only are my knickers down, I'm blindfolded. There should be nine satellites up if we're to follow "hair trigger", but we have only three. Three. We cannot monitor firings from the Tridents out in the Pacific, where they'd launch from. Because it's a high elliptical satellite system there are times when we have no cover for an eight-hour period. Eight. And we've lost ground radar—like the one in Latvia. They could shoot from Alaska and we wouldn't know we were under attack until the air burst. We have no shield, not any more. We scream for more satellites, and they are deaf to us. It's bloody freezing with your knickers at your ankles, I tell you.'
Viktor drifted away. He estimated that his admiral would be bored by now with the occasion. He left behind him two men who had each poured out a cupful of heartache about a new airforce programme and an early-warning shield that was a myth.
An enciphered signal would now be in London.
In the staff car he told the admiral what he had learned and won a steady succession of grunted expletives in return. He had not noticed them on the outward journey, but on the return leg there were vehicle lights behind them that kept pace with the admiral's driver.
By now the signal would have been read. Were his friends true to him? Was there anything his friends could do for him? Did they care?
The signal his friends would read would say: ferret: no show.
... Chapter Three
Q. In which Russian city in 1998 was a state of emergency declared because the majority of the population were in a medical condition of starvation?
A. Kaliningrad.
Every morning when he did not have a breakfast meeting, Viktor Archenko ran on the beach north of the base. He left the harbour, the castle, the barracks blocks and office buildings behind him, and Lenin's statue, which dominated the complex in stature and past authority, and the guarded gates. He had been tense as he had jogged past the sentries…the moment when his freedom would end? Would he be turned back? But the conscripts with their rifles on the barrier had saluted him, and he had made himself acknowledge them. The black van and the silver saloon had been parked outside the gates and when he was a hundred metres beyond them he'd heard, against the drumming of his feet, their engines start up. He hadn't looked back.
In the night he had lain on his narrow bed and he had cursed himself for the mistake he had made on the road to the border and Braniewo. The U-turn into and out of the side road had been a major error of judgement, and it would not be repeated. The run along the beach was his final throw to save himself. He had talked about it with his friends in the late-evening and early-morning sessions in the Excelsior Hotel and it had been stressed to him that he must make a habit of the morning run. At his age it was entirely understandable that he should seek to maintain his athleticism, so he ran on the beach every morning that he was free to do so, and the sentries on the gate were familiar with it, and so was Piatkin, the zampolit, and so would be the men who sat in the black van and the silver saloon. His friends had told him to make the habit familiar to anyone who watched him so that, when and if it mattered, the run did not create suspicion.
He wore heavy trainer running shoes and thick socks so that his feet would not blister, and lightweight shorts and an athletics vest that had the emblem of the Baltic Fleet front and back, and a red bandanna was knotted tight on his forehead so that the sweat did not dribble into his eyes. In the pocket of his shorts was a small piece of white chalk, no bigger than his thumbnail. His friends had told him he must always have the chalk there, however long he had no need of it.
The only approach road to Baltiysk, and the base, was along the spit from the north. At the town of Primorsk, th
e land mass shrank to a narrow finger peninsula, and the road ran beside a railtrack that served the fleet. The canal at Baltiysk cut across the peninsula that stretched south across the firing range and the missile batteries, then the frontier, where high wire and watchtowers guard the approach to Poland.
His trainers stamped on the dry sand above the tideline, and the give in it made for hard running. His target, that dawn and every dawn that he ran on the beach, was a water tower built on the upper point of the peninsula, its foundations some thirty metres above the levels of the sea and the lagoon. Running fast, like an automaton, he was soon clear of the base with nothing ahead of him except the sea, the beach and the tall pine trees that hid the road and the railtrack. His stride kicked up little clouds of sand, and sometimes he crunched on the amber pebbles that were washed on to the beach by the fiercer storms. In his dulled mind, he wondered if his grandmother had walked on this beach, in panic, had tramped on the same brittle sand and had carried the suitcase in which were all of her possessions. If she had she would have gazed out over the sea, far beyond the waves breaking on the sand and the little pieces of amber, and she might have seen the disappearing outlines on the horizon of the low, overloaded Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya, and she might have wept because she was not on one of them.
Gerald Seymour Page 6
