By the time their eyes adjusted to Remo's movements, his hands were snapping through bone, making quick, silent kills. He worked the chests that noon in the villa off the Italian coast. It took him longer to collect the passports. Back at the car in Naples proper, he asked Vassilivich to write down the correct names and ranks on each of the passports Alpha Team had used as covers.
"They are all dead?" asked Vassilivich, believing because he had seen what this man had done to the gigantic Ivan, but still horrified at the thought that one man could do so much.
"Sure," said Remo, as if someone had asked if he had put a candy wrapper in a trash can.
Beta Team was on a full alert, as it had been trained to be if contact was severed. The team had a small house in Farfa, a town overlooking the murky Tiber River, an Italian sewer since the days of the Etruscan kings.
"They really let the place go to rot," Chiun confided. "The history of Sinanju tells of lovely temples of Apollo and Venus near here."
"The House of Sinanju is an old institution then?" asked Vassilivich.
"Modestly so," said Chiun. "Aged with reason and tempered with love."
Remo at the wheel turned around sharply. He would have sworn that Chiun had been talking about Sinanju.
The American, Vassilivich realized, had spotted the first Beta outpost before he had. And he knew what to look for.
When the American left the car, Vassilivich asked how Remo had known that the man who appeared to be casually sunning himself on a small cement bench was really a lookout?
"That's where the outlook should be," said Chiun. "But these are matters of work. Would you like to hear a poem I have written?"
Vassilivich said, "By all means." He watched the American sit down next to the lookout who appeared to be sunning himself. The American spoke a few words.
Vassilivich looked on with dread fascination. The lookout was knife-skilled at the highest levels. He saw his man slip a blade from a sleeve on the far side, hidden from the American. Good, he thought. We have a chance. Good for you, soldier of the Treska, sword and shield of the party. The Korean, Chiun, was squeaking away in a language Vassilivich did not recognize. Chiun brought his attention to the back seat of the car with a gentle touch of a long fingernail to his throat.
"Perhaps you do not recognize classic Ung poetry?"
"Sir?" said Vassilivich. He saw his man smile politely. The knife was going to come soon. They were going to get back on the scoreboard against this killer team.
"In Ung poetry, the classic form is to omit every third consonant and every second vowel. That is the English translation of the formula. You know English."
"Yes," said Vassilivich. Any moment now the knife would fly into the American's throat.
"Then you would understand that the great Ung poetry disappeared about 800 b.c. I am not talking about common Ung poetry used until the seventh century. What so fascinates you out there?"
"I was just watching the American."
"Doing what?"
"Talking to that man."
"He is not talking," said Chiun. "He is going to do work. It is mundane. Now there is an especially beautiful passage I am working on… what so fascinates you?"
The knife flashed in the bright Italian sun and the man smiled foolishly as if he had swallowed a balloon and should have known better. Vassilivich could not see the man's knife. The American appeared to be shaking that hand as if saying goodbye. The lookout nodded off to sleep. With a lapful of blood.
"The greatness of this poem is that it bares the essence of the flower petal and the sounds themselves become the petal," said Chiun.
Vassilivich's body was moist with prickly sweat. He smiled as he heard the Korean's high pitched voice go higher as though scratching a blackboard on the ceiling.
He remembered vaguely hearing of this arcane poetry. A British explorer had said it sounded like a hysterectomy performed with blunt spoons.
Ancient Persian emperors were especially fond of it. Vassilivich did not know it had survived past the third century a.d. In some way, this aged Oriental had a close relationship with this amazing American killer.
Vassilivich had to figure out what. Was the old Korean a poetry teacher? A friend? He certainly wasn't a servant, even though he complained he was being treated as one. Sinanju. He had heard that name before. The old man had said assassins came from there, but certainly this frail, parched being could not be a killer. Yet, there was a link here. And one that could be exploited. Must be exploited.
The squeaky up and down of the Ung ode ceased. Remo, the American, strolled back to the car with twelve passports.
Vassilivich saw the lives of the Beta Team dropped in his lap. This was not a drunken crew gone sloppy. This was a prime unit at peak. They had not even gotten to their guns; he had not heard shots.
He wrote down their true Russians names and ranks. He knew every one of them. Some farm boys, some city boys, one even released from Lubyanka prison in Moscow, a homicidal maniac whom Vassilivich had personally trained to control his killer urges and direct them toward the welfare of the state. He thought of the training of each one as he wrote in the names, crossing off their fake Rumanian and Bulgarian identities. Ten years training, eleven years, eight years, twelve years. When young boys showed extra abilities, extra cunning and strength, the Treska had its pick of them.
It was at the time when the members of the Beta Team were boys that the then Major Vassilivich had insisted that families should be consulted before their sons were brought into the Treska.
At the time this had been heresy, but Vassilivich had been proven correct. If the family was behind the boy, then he went with a lighter heart. If the family received extra rations and extra privileges, then each boy felt he was doing something especially worthy, and every leave home would be a reinforcement of his loyalty to the Treska, not a strain against it.
He had won that battle with General Denia of the old school, who had preferred that families be separated as much as possible.
"We need men, machines, not little boys," had said the then General Denia. "When we fought the White Armies, the Treska-it was called the Chekka then-dragged us from our homes and made us men immediately. You kill or die. That is what it was; that is what it is, and that is what it will always be. Always."
"Sir," Major Vassilivich had said. "We have a 20 per cent defection rate now. That's high. Perhaps the highest of any service."
"It is a hard business we are in. They do not make men like they used to."
"I beg to disagree, sir. You snatch a fifteen year old boy out of school and tell the parents that he has been selected for the Olympic teams, or something else that they know is not true, and they worry; he worries, and sooner or later he is either going to defect in the West or desert back here."
"And we hang the little bastard."
"May I pose a question, and I place my life on the answer. When things get a bit untidy in the West and we lose an occasional man to the American Sunflower, what happens?"
General Denia had shrugged, showing he did not know what his shrewd aide was driving at.
"At headquarters I make a little mark in our records," Vassilivich had said.
"Yes, so?" Denia had been impatient.
"Have you ever looked at the file drawer where those records are kept?"
"No. I am not much for paperwork," General Denia had answered.
"Both defections and those killed in action are in the same cabinets. Defections are eighteen times thicker than those who died at American hands. We do almost twenty times as much damage to ourselves as the capitalists do to us."
"Hmmmm," Denia had said suspiciously.
"What I am asking is that we, at least, make the capitalist bastards destroy us instead of doing it to ourselves."
"As you say, your life," Denia had agreed.
Within the first year, desertions dropped and defections became unknown. Vassilivich had created an atmosphere where the teams knew that no other
government and no other place offered them such honor and wealth. What the rest of the system did by force and propaganda, the Treska accomplished better by services and rewards.
It became a joke at the Dzerzhinsky Square Building in Moscow that the next thing the Treska would do would be to declare stock dividends and give out colored television sets.
But the jokes stopped when a small Treska unit, isolated from the bufferings of flanking units, and outnumbered forty to one, fought to the last man in the hills of Greece, despite lavish offerings from the Sunflower units to defect.
Vassilivich, back at training headquarters, made a big ceremony honoring the fallen men. If there had been a cross at the altar instead of a picture of Lenin, one could have called the ceremony a mass.
It was also Vassilivich who created the light coexistence with Sunflower, an almost friendly relationship as the teams watched each other and circled each other across Western Europe. It was also Vassilivich who, on the very day American CIA headquarters ordered their Sunflower units to surrender their weapons, led the fast, vicious sweep of the continent.
As mangled American bodies were shipped home for closed coffin burials, including the very unfortunate Walter Forbier, KGB had intercepted a strange message:
'Could have been worse. We might have been caught doing dirty tricks.'
It was a message to Washington from a high ranking State Department official, and Vassilivich, reading it, had thought: "We may be matched against lunatics."
But Treska had not been. And it occurred to Vassilivich, sitting in the back seat of the car with the Korean poet named Chiun, that perhaps this all had been a gigantic trap. What a brilliant trap. He had never figured Americans for that sort of cunning. To sacrifice an entire strata of units so that your enemy would relax in time for your first team to mop them up.
That was what the American had said in the sports shop. "Welcome to the first team." It was a ruthless maneuver, but brilliant.
Yet Vassilivich, ever the analyst, was still bothered. True. It was a brilliant and cunning move. But Americans never thought like that.
They had always been geniuses with gadgets and morons at maneuver. Vassilivich felt a tickle at his throat. The Korean informed him that the best part of the poem was yet to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was a grand reunion. It was a glorious occasion. Vodka bottles stretched thirty meters along a linen tablecloth, each bottle with a gloved servant behind it. Accordions played. Glasses cracked against the inlaid wood walls. Shiny boots clicked on the polished marble. Blue uniforms with red piping, medaled as though jewelers had run amok, shone on proud chests.
Someone yelled out in the thick eastern accent of Vladivostok: "He's coming! He's coming!"
Silence came, marred only by the last few crashes of glasses from officers who had not realized what was happening. And then only the footsteps of a single man. A man at a podium set high at the far end of the hall called out:
"Officers, members of the committee, sword and shield of the party, we now greet with admiration, a hero of the Soviet Socialist Republic, Field Marshal Gregory Denia. A bravo for Denia."
"Bravo, Bravo," yelled the crowd.
Denia, medaled across his fat chest, his round face gleaming joy, his pudgy hands raised above him in his own triumph, marched into the great hall of the people's Committee for State Security.
"Denia. Denia. Denia," came the chant.
And he waved furiously, smiling at old friends, survivors of the great war where two nations battled in a line from sea to sea, with the losers facing annihiliation. They were tough men, these officers, survivors of the purges, the favorites of Stalin, then Beria, then Krushchev, and finally the current chairman. Chairmen came and went. The KGB stayed forever. Denia signaled for silence.
And then he spoke.
"I am not at liberty to tell all of you the specifics of our victory. I am not at liberty to tell you just how we achieved more than prominence in Western Europe. But I can tell you this, comrades. Today, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dominates her continent as no nation ever has. Europe is ours. Tomorrow Asia and then the world. Tomorrow the world. Tomorrow the world."
Many officers who had fought only the cold war against America, in grueling, stalking contests where victories were measured in mere inches, now screamed their praise. For with Field Marshal Denia there had been a recent breakthrough of miles. The West was in full retreat.
Of course, even in such a work oriented group, there was always the one wag. From the back of the room, someone yelled out a toast to Russia's greatest ally.
"Bravo for the United States Congress and its investigating committees."
Faces turned in scorn, but Field Marshal Denia smiled.
"Yes, we have had help. But it was not accidental. Did not Lenin himself say the capitalists would hang themselves if we gave them enough rope? Well, they have the rope, and we tied the knot."
Denia called for a full bottle of vodka, and then, resting on the polished heels of his leather boots, leaned back and downed it completely to a chorus of encouragement. Then he danced out into the center of the marble hall to great clapping. A captain, his face ashen, his hands trembling, worked his way toward the clearing where Denia now spun drunkenly, laughing. The captain, in dull green, made a striking contrast to the array of medals, like a cheap plastic bowl in a jewelry store display window.
Denia brushed aside the captain.
"Comrade marshal, it is of the utmost urgency," said the captain.
He handed Denia a doublesealed envelope, the kind where a small plastic shield has to be broken to open it. He also handed the marshal a pen which he wanted him to use to sign for the letter. Denia took the pen and flipped it into the air.
"I need your signature, marshal."
"Anatoli, tell this idiot he doesn't need a signature."
"You don't need Marshal Denia's signature, captain," came a voice from the crowd. It was the commander of the captain's entire unit.
Denia read the message. He was feeling good with the warmth of the vodka, and his blood was running hot and wild from dancing. The message read:
'Apparent high complications Treska units southern flank Europe. Stop. Suggest your immediate return Dzerzhinsky Square Building for consultation. Stop. Immediately.'
Denia crumpled the note and put it back in his pocket.
"Serious, Gregory?" asked a general.
Denia shrugged. "It is always serious. The central committee wants to change the color of the uniforms and so the chairman of a textile factory faces a serious problem. The ministry of propaganda hears about a Solzhenitsyn speech or a new book he has written and they have a serious problem. Every day there is a new serious problem here and there, but all of us are drinking good vodka and living in good homes and yet everyone goes running around crying the sky is falling. The sky, gentlemen, is still above us as it was before we went crying from our mother's wombs into a serious confrontation with air, and it will be there after we are shoveled into ground following a serious confrontation with death. Comrades, I tell all of you now. There is no such thing as a serious thing."
His little speech was greeted with applause, partly because he held the rank of marshal, but also because he was known as a man who held things together during crunches. So this was the marshal's philosophy, and it was respected.
Outside a black Zil limousine was waiting. Traffic at home was always so much easier than in the field, where so many people had cars.
Marshal Denia was not as casual as he had appeared at his celebration. Years in the field had given him that extra sense of when to worry and when not to. It was a time for worrying.
Lubyanka Prison was in the Dzherzhinsky Square building. So many of his comrades had ended up there during Stalin's reign. He was the only one to survive from his unit, a political one under the command of a former university professor who had joined what was then called the Chekka, to be changed to the OGPU, to be changed to
the NKVD, the MVD, and, finally the KGB. All different clothes for the same body.
Stalin had wanted the whole unit, forty two men, to dress in formal attire and attend a dinner with him alone. There was much vodka. Something had told Denia not to indulge too much on that long-ago evening in the early thirties. Perhaps it was the absence of water on the long tables that had given him the clue that Stalin wanted them to drink heavily.
His commander, who ordinarily was a cautious, abstemious man given to tea and crackers, had downed vodka as if he had been born on the back of a Cossack horse. By mid-meal, the commander had been talking loudly of being part of the socialist vanguard. Stalin had smiled. He did not drink, but he had lit that large white pipe and nodded and smiled, and young Denia had thought: "My god, this is a cobra we deal with here this night."
Each young officer had tried to outdo the others in his commitment to the purity of the Communist revolution. Denia had been quiet. Then Stalin himself had pointed to him.
"And what do you think, quiet one?" Stalin had asked.
"I think everything they said is nice," Denia had said.
"Just nice?" Everyone had laughed. "Nice," the august chairman of the party had then said, "is a word for strawberries, not the revolution."
Denia had said nothing.
"Do you wish to change that word?"
"No," Denia had said.
His commander had become immediately uncomfortable, then had launched into a dialectical attack upon uncommitted revolutionaries conducting a bourgeois counterrevolution.
"And what do you think about that, young man?" Stalin had asked.
Young Denia had risen, because he knew he was dealing with his very life and he wanted to do it on his feet. He had also understood what his comrades had not, however. They too were dealing with their lives.
"What my commander says might be very true. I do not know. I am not a great professor, nor am I a great thinker. I know Russia needs a strong hand. Before the revolution, those who ruled ruled for their own privilege. There were hard times. Now there is a chance for a better life. That is good. It will not be easy to achieve. This is a big country. We are still backward. I am Russian. I know there will be much bloody work ahead. I know that for every thing done, there will be a thousand ideas of how to do it better. But I am Russian. I hold faith with the party. What they decide is their business. But in Gregory Denia, the party has a faithful servant."
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