Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  In Pushkin’s battle with his conscience, loyalty to his commander had won. He’d stifled his concerns about the legitimacy of the spares order and pressed on with preparing the goods for delivery. A telephone call purportedly from the 166th had asked him to provide transport because their own trucks were unserviceable. The drone components had filled a Ural eight-tonner. At an arranged hour an officer and two soldiers from the receiving regiment had arrived in a jeep to escort the load to its destination near the Moldavian border, one hundred kilometres away.

  That had been Friday, exactly a week ago. It should have been an end to the matter, but hadn’t been. Later that afternoon the empty truck had returned much earlier than Pushkin would have expected after a two-hundred-kilometre round trip. His curiosity aroused, he’d telephoned the quartermaster of the Rocket Regiment to check the delivery had been made correctly.

  The brief, uncomfortable conversation which had followed had shaken him to the core. The 166th Rocket Regiment, he was told in no uncertain terms, had not placed any order whatsoever for spare parts for their VR-6 reconnaissance drones.

  ‘Goodbye papa. I love you.’

  Nadya kissed him on the cheek, her coat on and her schoolbag in her hand.

  ‘Goodbye my darling. Be good to your teachers.’

  He always said that. Some subconscious hope that the child being well-behaved would mean that a box or two of surplus fruit from Lena’s parents’ dacha would satisfy the teachers at exam time rather than the money he didn’t have.

  Lena saw her daughter off to the bus which took the officers’ children to the village school, then came back into the kitchen and sat down opposite her husband. Pushkin saw from her eyes what she wanted to talk about, but he couldn’t. Not this morning. Not when he was secretly on his way to see the General and his insides were burning up with fear of what the outcome might be.

  Last night, after Nadya had gone to sleep, Lena had talked to him at length. Starting with her familiar moan about how hard it was to survive on his army pay, she’d insisted that he let her get a job. She had one already, part-time at the nursery school – a highly suitable role for the wife of an officer who still nurtured hopes of making the rank of colonel – but the wages were pitiful. The job she’d talked about was in an office in Odessa.

  She’d told him of her visit to Odessa earlier that same day. She’d taken the twenty-minute ride south on the electric train in order to shop in the huge farmers’ food market where competition made the prices keen. But before plunging into the maze of stalls she’d been unable to resist a stroll through Odessa’s tree-lined streets to peer into the handful of glittery boutiques where biznismen bought their women skimpy dresses for more money than an army major earned in a year.

  ‘You want that, woman?’ Pushkin had asked her angrily. ‘You want to throw money away like those criminals and their whores?’

  ‘No. Not like them. We’d think of better things to spend it on. But Misha, is this it?’ There’d been a crack in her voice. Her small hand had swept round the room and its meagre contents. ‘Are you saying this is all there is for us?’

  Two single beds used as sofas during the day. An old rug from her mother’s house spread on the wall to cover the cracks in the plaster. The twenty-year-old sewing machine with which she stitched her daughter’s clothes. A cassette player and a small TV on a shiny veneered wall unit. A few books.

  ‘Is this the best we can ever have, Misha?’ There’d been tears in her eyes. ‘Tell me!’

  He hadn’t replied. Hadn’t dared to, because the answer was ‘yes’. He saw no hope of being able to provide them with more.

  Seizing on his silence, she’d pressed home her bid to make their lives better, telling him of the small word-processed note she’d spotted in Odessa, stuck to the door of a fine nineteenth-century mansion now used as offices.

  ‘Good wages for a woman ready for any sort of work, it said.’

  He knew what that meant. Bez Kompleksov was what they wrote in the ads. Women sought ‘without complexes’.

  ‘I went inside.’

  He’d felt shocked that she should even have considered it, and afraid.

  ‘It was import-export. Beautiful office. Computers. Italian chairs.’

  ‘New Russians,’ he’d retorted disparagingly.

  ‘So what? They pay good money. We’d eat meat more often, Misha. And Nadya could have clothes which hadn’t been made by the clumsy fingers of her mother.’

  Pushkin, however, was a man stiffened by the codes of honour and loyalty that Russian officers had held dear since the tsars. To him, the new businessmen with their Mercedes and BMW cars, their Ralph Lauren shirts and their mobile phones were thieves and traitors, creatures who smuggled their ill-gotten profits abroad and betrayed the needs of their countrymen. Parasites, as responsible for the decline of his newly independent nation as the corrupt and incompetent politicians who filled the parliament in Kiev.

  ‘They offered me the job,’ Lena had whispered, cutting through his thoughts, her pretty eyes sparkling at the thought of connecting with a life she’d glimpsed so tantalisingly on satellite TV. ‘They said they’d teach me computer with Windows 95 and Microsoft Office.’

  ‘Impossible, Lena. Such places are not for the wife of an officer.’

  Lena had turned away from him to hide her anger.

  ‘You’re a dinosaur, Misha. You live in the past. Think of us,’ she’d pleaded. ‘Think of Nadya and me – not just of your own precious position in society.’

  The last word had cut deep. Society was upside down now. People like him, people who used to be revered – the military, the intellectuals, the artists – all now at the bottom of the heap. Below the poverty line. Society’s new leaders were the nouveaux riches, the get-rich-quick criminals who’d sold their country’s assets to line their pockets. The thieves had taken over the prison.

  ‘This biznisman,’ he’d snarled, ‘he would insist you sleep with him?’

  Both knew it would be expected of her. There were thousands of women in Odessa wanting a job like this. Plenty who’d go the extra distance to get it.

  ‘But anyway, it wouldn’t be such a big thing,’ she’d whispered. ‘You just shut your mind. It’s a small price to pay for a better life.’

  ‘I accepted.’

  At the breakfast table now, her words cut into his thoughts as if reading them.

  ‘Accepted the job,’ she repeated. ‘I start on Monday.’

  Suddenly he noticed her hair was different. Shorter, with a wave in it that hadn’t been there before. When had it changed? Yesterday? A week ago? How would he know when he paid her so little attention?

  He stared at her. Never would he have believed that his wife would defy him. Particularly that she should tell him so this very morning of all mornings.

  ‘We’ll see about that, Lena. We’ll see about it . . .’

  He couldn’t spend time arguing with her now. Couldn’t get involved in family issues when he faced the greatest crisis of principle that an officer could ever face. A crisis which he’d told her nothing about.

  He pushed back the chair. He hadn’t touched the syrniki. Without another word he stood up and put on the uniform jacket hanging in the hall. Lena stood by the front door as she always did to check over his appearance. She brushed an imaginary hair from his lapel, then leaned forward to be kissed. He pecked her cheek and walked out onto the landing to wait for the lift.

  Once on the ground and outside, he strode across the grass to where their faded, rusting car was parked. If Lena was watching from the window above, she would be puzzled, maybe even alarmed, to see him get into the car instead of walking down the road to the administration building as he always did. She would know something unusual was happening and be wondering why he hadn’t confided in her. But he hadn’t been able to for one simple reason. If he’d told her what he was about to do she would have moved hell and high water to stop him.

  The discovery a week ago that the
drone spares request had been a forgery had thrown him into a deep quandary. An attempt to raise the matter again with Colonel Komarov had produced an uncharacteristic rebuff and an order, an order, to forget the whole matter. Yet his conscience wouldn’t let him. Military equipment had been siphoned out of the system, its destination unknown. And worst of all his CO and long-time friend was clearly aware of the crime.

  Such activities weren’t new to the military of course. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent in 1991 vast quantities of weaponry belonging to the new nation’s armed forces had been sold off, both by the government and by individual officers. Huge personal fortunes had been made selling guns to foreign governments, terrorist organisations and criminal gangs. Now, however, it was his own unit and a personal friend of his that had become involved in such criminality. To him it was both shocking and unacceptable.

  He’d brooded on the matter for days before deciding what to do. Then, on Tuesday of this week, he’d made an excuse to spend time alone with the driver who’d been assigned to the Ural truck that had driven the drone parts from the base. The lad would surely tell him where he’d taken them. To get the driver to himself, away from prying eyes, he’d decided to make a personal inspection by jeep of the Magerov runway, which was still supposed to be maintained in a usable condition, despite no aircraft having landed there for at least two years.

  Private Reznik, a nineteen-year-old conscript, had steered the UAZ jeep slowly down the faded, rubber-scarred runway centreline while Pushkin scanned its surface for damage and for foreign objects that could be sucked into the engines of a jet. The youth had been stiff-backed with fear, knowing something was up. He was too junior to be assigned to driving senior officers around.

  Thin-faced and shaven-headed, Reznik was grey from the malnutrition that was a conscript’s lot. There would be bruises on his body, Pushkin knew, injuries from the bullying that was endemic in the armies of the former Soviet Union.

  ‘You miss your home?’ Pushkin had asked, knowing he must first break the ice.

  ‘Of course, comrade Major.’ The boy’s tone had become almost dismissive. The question was absurd.

  ‘You write to your mother often?’

  ‘No, because my letters make her cry.’

  Pushkin had looked away. If Lena had given him a son he would go to any lengths to pay the bribes that would secure a bogus medical certificate to spare the boy from military service.

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘A small village. One hour west of Kiev.’

  A peasant family, no doubt. No way for such sons of the soil to escape conscription.

  ‘Any friends from home here with you?’

  ‘No, comrade Major.’

  Lonely then. Lonely and scared as they always were.

  ‘Stop here a minute.’ They’d reached the far end of the runway, the point furthest away from anyone who might see them. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  Reznik had blanched. He’d known what was coming.

  ‘Last Friday you delivered a load in an eight-tonner.’

  The boy had frowned as if trying to remember.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Where I was told to go, comrade Major.’

  ‘But where was that?’

  ‘Don’t know, comrade Major. The officer said to follow their four-six-nine jeep, and I did.’

  ‘But where to?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking, comrade Major,’ he’d mumbled.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Did they tell you not to say anything? Tell you not to say where you’d been?’

  ‘Just said to follow the four-six-nine.’

  ‘To a military base?’

  ‘Don’t kn—’

  ‘Reznik!’

  ‘There were gates, comrade Major. Then a yard. I wasn’t concentrating.’

  ‘In Odessa?’

  ‘I think maybe.’ Reznik had bitten his lip, realising the little he’d said was already too much.

  Pushkin had offered a cigarette and lit it for him with a match.

  ‘A yard, you said? There were soldiers in it?’

  ‘I didn’t see, comrade Major. Just kept my eyes on the four-six-nine like I was told. The officer gave me something to read while I waited for them to unload.’

  ‘Pictures of girls in it?’

  ‘Yes, comrade Major.’ The boy had blushed slightly. ‘Amerikanski.’

  ‘So instead of watching what was happening to the load on your truck you had your eyes full of spread legs!’

  The boy had coloured beetroot.

  Pushkin had known he would get no more from the youth and had ordered him to return him to the administration block. At the moment the jeep had driven up to the entrance, Colonel Komarov had emerged from it. He’d looked startled to see them together.

  Pushkin switched on the ignition of his eight-year-old Zaporizhzhia. After an agony of churning, the rear-mounted engine spluttered into life. A cold drizzle smeared the windscreen, which the well-worn wiper blade did little to clear. He engaged the gear and the machine jerked down the road towards the main gates of the Magerov base. Set on a stone pedestal at the far end of the drive a corroding MiG-15 acted as a gate guardian and a reminder that the Magerov base had once had a more prominent role.

  The railway station would take him just five minutes to reach.

  Pushkin had blamed himself partly for what had happened to Reznik after that gentle interrogation. It had been downright careless to allow Komarov to see him with the youth.

  The following morning he’d arrived at his usual time at the headquarters building, the Ukrainian flag flying from the staff on the roof. Top half azure, bottom half golden yellow, symbolising fields of corn under a blue sky. A salute from the guard, then upstairs to his office.

  ‘The report on the accident, comrade Major.’ One of his lieutenant clerks had met him at the top of the stairs. ‘It’s on top of the pile, Major. On your desk.’

  Accident?

  In his gloomy room with its smell of stale tobacco, he’d picked up the topmost sheet from his desk. A report from the Militsia traffic department. There’d been an explosion in a jeep last night, while the vehicle was being driven outside the base.

  One occupant only. The driver – Private Ivan T. Reznik. Killed.

  Deeply shocked, he’d sat staring at the poorly typed, misspelled report, simply not believing it. That it could not have been an accident was the one thing he was certain of. Jeeps did not explode of their own accord. No accident either that the victim was Reznik.

  The boy had been murdered. A miserable young life cut short before any chance of happiness. A young man silenced because of what he could tell about the destination of the drone spares. Could tell, but hadn’t in any significant way. And remembering Colonel Komarov’s shock at seeing Reznik with him the previous afternoon, Pushkin had thought the unthinkable. That his commanding officer and close friend had had a hand in Reznik’s death.

  And yet he knew in his heart that Oleg Komarov was not a criminal. And most certainly not a murderer. If his daughter’s godfather was involved in these criminal acts it was because forces beyond his control had compelled him to be.

  Only at that point had Pushkin understood. The forces concerned would be Mafiya. Suddenly he’d become deeply afraid.

  The Lieutenant from his outer office had knocked and entered, a fair-haired twenty-five-year-old with cool blue eyes.

  ‘Bad about Reznik, comrade Major.’

  ‘Yes. Very bad.’

  ‘A fault with the jeep? Fuel leak perhaps?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Should I question Vehicle Maintenance?’

  ‘Yes. You’d better.’

  ‘Odd though. You’d have thought he would have smelled something.’

  ‘Yes. Yes you would.’

  The Lieutenant had hovered over him. There was one more matter to be dealt with.

  ‘It’s the telegram, comrade Major
. For the family. You usually put your name to them.’

  For the Lieutenant the death or serious injury of conscripts was a routine matter that he dealt with repeatedly.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Wondered if you wanted to say something special, since Reznik drove you only hours before the accident?’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps I should.’

  ‘It’s the mothers, Major. Makes them feel their sons were treated like human beings here instead of dogs.’ He’d spoken without irony.

  Pushkin had sat for another hour at his desk, smoking cigarette after cigarette and pondering, stubbing out the butts in the shell-case ashtray his father had given him when he graduated. He was dealing with something of an unfathomable size and shape. It had puzzled him at first why Mafiya gangsters should want a drone. Their wars were fought at street level with Skorpions and Kalashnikovs, not on a battlefield where aerial reconnaissance had its use.

  Then it had dawned on him.

  All along his thinking had been confined within the tight parameters of his own military environment. He’d imagined that the spares misappropriation must be some internal army scandal – that the drone would be used for the purpose it had been designed for. But a machine built for one purpose could be easily adapted for another. Replace its camera sensor with a bomb of equivalent weight and the device became a guided missile. A fearsome weapon for some Mafiya gang – or a group of crazy foreigners bent on terrorism.

  The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d realised that the consequences of what had happened here at Magerov might soon reverberate around the world. Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives might be lost as a result of the misuse of property belonging to the army of Ukraine. And apart from lives, honour was at stake here too. The honour of the Ukrainian armed forces.

  The army was in his blood, as it had been in that of his ancestors. The son of one of the few Ukrainian heroes of the Great Patriotic War to survive the conflict, Mikhail Pushkin was a man to whom honour and duty mattered more than anything else. His duty, he’d realised, was to pursue the matter further. And first he would need to raise his concerns again with his commanding officer. Only if that action produced no satisfaction could he take it to a higher level.