Agent 6 ld-3

by Tom Rob Smith

Raisa’s body had been returned to Moscow. L had demanded a second autopsy. To his surprise this had been agreed to, perhaps in the hope that it would allow him to grieve and drop his incessant requests. The Soviet doctors confirmed the American verdict that she’d been shot from a distance of about ten metres: killed by a single bullet from a powerful handgun, a wound to her torso, entering just underneath her rib. Reading the report, he insisted that he be allowed to see her body. His wife had been laid out on a steel table covered with a thin white sheet. He’d taken hold of the sheet, pulling it back to her waist – a reunion of the most awful kind. Her skin, always pale, was now watery white with trace-lines of blue. He ignored instructions not to touch her, opened her eyes. They’d been so full of intelligence, shrewd and playful at the same time, careful and mischievous, yet there was nothing in these eyes staring at the ceiling. He was so startled by the change that he’d momentarily wondered if this could even be the same woman, as if her life and intelligence were forces too powerful to ever be fully extinguished and some residual vestige would surely remain.

  He’d recovered his composure, begun a dispassionate examination as a police officer. He’d taken out a small notebook. He’d picked up a pen. When he looked down at first page of the notebook he saw a scribbled line, involuntarily formed as his hand had trembled across the page. He’d steadied himself, ripping the front page off and noting down several observations, checking them with the doctor beside him. She’d died from loss of blood. A former soldier, he knew vividly from the sight of the wound that such a death would not have been instantaneous but painful and slow. He asked the doctor for an estimate of the time it would have taken from the bullet entering her body to her death. She’d been in Manhattan when the shooting occurred, only minutes from some of the best hospitals in the world. The doctor had been unable to fix a time, saying it varied enormously from person to person and there was no formula. Pressed by Leo, he guessed between twenty and thirty minutes – which surely meant the official version of events was a fiction. Raisa could have been saved. With this fact, his desire hardened – he had to reach New York with or without the State’s permission.

  Blind as he was to other matters, it was Zoya who forced him to confront the repercussions of his obsessive investigative efforts. In the months after their return Elena’s academic work had suffered greatly, she’d lost weight – she’d become reclusive, fearful of making friends and suspicious of friends she’d known for years. She felt it her duty not to leave Leo alone in his tormented state and yet his anguish was painful to witness. Zoya pointed out that this way of living was not living at all. They had to move on as a family. Her determination and intelligence reminded him of Raisa. Though he did not abandon his investigation, he realized that the chances of an imminent breakthrough were slim and he agreed to refocus his energies, pushing the matter of New York into the background, keeping his preoccupation invisible. In this manner of compromise they lived together for seven years. During these years there were many times when Leo was happy, only for that happiness to melt away suddenly when his thoughts returned to Raisa, as they always did. He learned to mask his emotions from his daughters better. He learned to lie, to pretend. Elena recovered. She finished her studies. Zoya became a doctor. They both found love. Elena married first, at twenty-one, throwing herself into a romance, love once again the answer. Zoya waited a little longer before marrying. With both daughters living in their own apartments, Leo considered his promise fulfilled. He was alone and his mind returned to the task he’d never abandoned.

  For years he’d considered the case and yet it baffled him. He did not know what lay beneath the plan to murder Jesse Austin. He’d decided that his first objective must be to track down the propaganda officer Mikael Ivanov, the man who’d tricked his daughter. His search stemmed not out of a desire for revenge but because Ivanov would have important information regarding the events of that night. It was logical to find him before attempting to reach New York.

  Ivanov was no longer living in Moscow and it took a great deal of effort and bribery to find out that he’d been relocated to the city of Perm, in the central region of Russia. Arriving in Perm, travelling without authorization, Leo discovered that Ivanov had been sent there after returning from New York, working in local government, with a fondness for drink. Several winters ago he’d become drunk and walked out into the centre of a lake, falling through the ice and dying of pneumonia. Some believed it was an accident: others believed it was suicide. Leo had visited the cemetery. The seven-year delay had made it far harder to unearth the truth. Evidence, memories and witnesses faded like the ink in the newspaper articles he’d collected.

  No more time could be wasted. He began to devise a way to reach New York, saving up his modest salary to buy gold on the black market, necessary once he crossed the border, carefully plotting a route to the United States. These preparations offered the glimmer of a resolution – no matter how difficult it might be to achieve.

  *

  Christmas, 1973, he’d eaten dinner with his family, his daughters and their husbands. He’d given them presents. He’d kissed them goodbye. He’d told them nothing of his plans. The next day he began his journey, making his way towards the Finnish border. He’d come close, only metres away before he was shot and caught. The failure of his attempt and his subsequent capture could have resulted in his execution. Once again Frol Panin intervened. Now frail and ill, the old man warned him: I cannot save you again.

  They were words that Leo had once uttered to his own protege. Interpreting his attempt to cross the border as grief rather than treachery, the State gave Leo an ultimatum – life in prison, or a job so dangerous that no one would ever volunteer for it.

  Greater Province of Kabul City of Kabul Karta-i-Seh District Soviet Embassy Darulaman Boulevard

  Next Day

  Captain Anton Vashchenko woke at five o’clock, getting out of bed at the first sound of the alarm, not allowing himself a moment’s delay, throwing his feet out from under the covers and pressing them against the cold floor. He found satisfaction in such discipline and in the dark found his steel water bottle, containing strong cold coffee brewed last night. He took a long gulp before getting dressed in the dark, putting on running gear, jogging pants, sweatshirt, trainers and a holster, which held his semi-automatic Makarov pistol tight near his shoulder. His route was approximately five kilometres, along Darulaman Boulevard, crossing the Kabul River into the centre of town. It had been suggested that if he wanted ecise he could run at the heavily guarded airport, laps of the runway. He’d dismissed the idea. He would run where he lived, as he had always done. In Stalingrad, where he’d grown up after the Great Patriotic War, he’d run past ruined buildings and unexploded bombs, scampering over rubble – devastation had been the backdrop to his childhood. Here in Kabul, his run took him past slums and bullet-chipped ministries. He refused to live in protected isolation, in the secure military garrisons outside the city. Causing some inconvenience, he’d insisted upon modest temporary accommodation in the embassy despite several protests that it was inappropriate. From his point of view, he’d been tasked with the security of Kabul so living outside the city made little sense. Losing control over these streets would hand their enemy a psychological victory. It was essential that they act and behave like this was their city. Indeed, Kabul was their city now, whether the Afghans liked it or not.

  Captain Vashchenko left the gates of the embassy, jogging in the direction of the city centre. Normally, running in Russia, for the first kilometre his muscles would be heavy with sleep, a sensation he’d shake off as he eased into the rhythm of the run and the caffeine took hold. But in Kabul he was alert from the first step, his heart beating fast not because of the exertion or the speed, but because there was a chance someone might try to kill him.

  Within a couple of hundred metres gunfire sounded. He suppressed his instinct to stop and duck since the noise had come from far away, a distant neighbourhood. Sporadic bursts of machine-
gun fire were a regular feature of city life, along with the pungent smells – cooked food and raw sewage only metres apart. Even as his hand flinched towards his gun, he didn’t long to be somewhere else. The captain flourished in extreme conditions. Life in Russia with his wife and children was of little interest to him. After only days at home he became irritable. He was not a good father and he accepted that – it was a skill he would never master. He needed to be tested every day: that was the only way he felt alive. There was no military duty open to a Soviet soldier more dangerous than Afghanistan and for that reason alone there was nowhere else the captain would rather be.

  A member of the elite Spetsnaz troops, he’d arrived three months ago, the vanguard of an invasion force sent to save the year-old Communist Revolution from falling apart under ineffectual rule. There were Soviet advisers already based in the city, but they were no more than diplomatic guests of an independent Afghan state. The captain was part of the Soviet Union’s first foreign invasion in two decades, a complex logistical operation across a vast terrain. Quick success had rested on the gambit that the Afghan Communist regime would not recognize that they were being invaded by their allies, a bold military premise and one that the captain embraced. On Christmas Eve 1979 he’d flown into Kabul airport at the same time as other Spetsnaz troops were flown into Bagram airbase in the north, pretending to be an extension of the substantial military aid already provided to the regime. The first test occurred at Kabul airport when the captain and his men disembarked from the planes that landed without permission in violation of international law, approaching the Afghan government troops stationed there, troops with no warning of their arrival. Several Afghans had raised their weapons, cocking their Soviet machine guns at their Soviet allies. In this moment the invasion had rested on a knife-edge and the captain had been the first to react, dropping his gun, running forward, arms high in the air as if greeting a much-loved comrade. He’d expected a chest full of bullets. No shots were fired and the invasion continued er the guise of a military aid programme. New ammunition was promised for the Afghan 7th and 8th Divisions, neutering their guns as shells were neatly lined up in the sand waiting for replacements that would never arrive. Afghan tank units were told they’d be receiving new tanks and ordered to drain their fuel to power them. With the fuel in cans, taken away, the heavy armour sat useless as Soviet tanks crossed the border.

  The captain had watched the deception play out with mixed feelings. There was only one interpretation of the events – the Afghan soldiers were inexperienced, the disciplines of a modern army were not natural to them. They were gullible because they’d been organized according to Western military concepts, indoctrinated to being told how to behave. They did not recognize when an order seemed out of place. These were the soldiers he and his comrades would be relying upon to defeat the uprisings, inheriting men who had rolled over in muddled disarray as motorized rifle divisions entered Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, soldiers who hadn’t fired a shot as fifty thousand foreign troops took control of their country. He was not troubled by the Afghan troops’ strength, he was troubled by their weakness. The invasion had been intended to capture the Afghan military machine, funded and built up over the years by lavish subsidies. The purpose of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan was not to fight the war but to direct it using the Afghan military. But even before the desert dust kicked up by the invasion had settled it was apparent that there was no war machine to capture. As a ring of Soviet troops spread around the country taking the major cities, Herat, Farah, Kandahar and Jalalabad – a near-perfect loop of successful tank and troop manoeuvres – the Afghan forces melted away. On New Year’s Day, the Afghan 15th Division revolted in Kandahar. When the Soviet 201st Division entered Jalalabad the 11th Division of the Afghan army simply deserted, a whole division lost in less than a few hours. It was clear to the captain that the real war was only just beginning.

  He had never been one of the more bullish officers who considered the resistance to a Communist state primitive, fragmented and disorganized – a tribal opposition equipped with mismatched rifles, some dating back fifty years, and led by squabbling factions. Such an assessment, though accurate in its material analysis, overlooked one key advantage the enemy possessed. This was their home. Superior weapons did not guarantee victory in this mysterious landscape. Smitten with the mystique of this country, the captain had spent many hours reading about the history of resistance in Afghanistan, the defeat of the British and their pitiful retreat from Kabul. One fact above all else had struck him, that since expelling the British: The Afghans have never lost a war.

  What better opponents to carve a brilliant career from? He entered this war from a position of supreme respect for his adversaries but also supreme confidence that he would become the first soldier that these mighty warriors would be defeated by, or, if they preferred, they could die fighting.

  Coming to the end of his run, there were the first cracks of sunrise in the sky. Some of the shops were open: new fires in back rooms were burning tinders and twigs. The captain stopped dead in his tracks, drawing his gun and spinning around. The barrel of his gun came level with the forehead of a child directly behind him, a boy running in imitation to impress his all audience of friends. Seeing the gun they stopped laughing. The boy’s mouth hung open, terrified. The captain leaned down and gently tapped the barrel of his gun against the boy’s front teeth as though knocking on a door.

  A scrawny wild dog scampered into the middle of the street, eyes glowing in the last moments of darkness, before running away. Captain Vashchenko’s day had begun.

  Greater Province of Kabul City of Kabul Karta-i-Seh District Darulaman Boulevard

  Next Day

  Leo woke, peeling his face from the pillow. He shakily got to his feet, looking down at his outline imprinted in the mattress. His muscles ached. The lining of his stomach was tight and dry like old leather. A hacking cough seemed to take over his entire body. His clothes were the ones he’d been wearing yesterday when he’d walked into the lake. They’d dried stiff. He broke up the folds in his shirt, hobbling to the front door and slipping on a pair of dark green flip-flops. He descended the stairs, plastic soles slapping each step. Throwing open the front door, he revealed the street – from the darkness of his apartment to bright sunshine and city commotion, crossing from one world to another. A kharkar, a waste collector, rattled past, whipping a pitiful-looking mule dragging a wagon, wheels squeaking, overloaded with various kinds of city filth. Once the kharkar was out the way, Leo breathed deeply, smelling diesel fumes and spice. He wondered how many hours there were before it was night again. The sun broke through the smog, and squinting at the sky he guessed it was the afternoon. As a rule he didn’t smoke until it was dark.

  Without getting changed, washing, or taking anything to eat, he stepped out, closed the door, leaving it unlocked since there was nothing worth stealing in the apartment. He shuffled down the alley to where his rusty bicycle stood waiting like a devoted mongrel. The bicycle was also unlocked, protected by its worthlessness. He threw a leg over the seat, balancing precariously, and pushed himself off from the wall, wobbling down the alley to the main street, mixing into the traffic of bicycles and mule-drawn wagons. Battered cars honked their horns, exhaust pipes spluttered in reply. And Leo tried not to fall off, rocking from side to side until he managed to find a fragile sense of balance among the chaos.

  It was his seventh year as a Soviet adviser providing counsel to the Afghan Communist regime. His area of expertise was the workings of a secret police force, forced into a job no KGB officer wanted. The dangers were numerous. Several advisers had been savagely murdered, regional offices overrun; there had been public decapitations. He was performing the most hated job in a society where he was hated not only as an agent but also as an occupier. His task both now and before the Soviet military occupation was to create an Afghan political police force capable of protecting the fledgling Communist Party. Communism c
ouldn’t be exported to Afghanistan without also exporting a political police force: the two went hand in hand, the party and the police, the ideology and the arrests. Having abandoned the profession in his homeland, he’d been forced to return to the job that Raisa had so despised. If he left his post, or failed in his duties, if he tried to run, he would be executed. Military discipline applied. Correctly suspecting the threat to his life might not scare him, it had been made clear that the repercussions to his daughters would be serious, their reputations would be tarnished and their prospects damaged, which tethered him to thejob. Locked in servitude to the State, his only choice was to carry out his responsibilities as they’d been outlined – well aware that his superiors did not expect him to survive. Yet he’d clung on, a ragged existence, and he was now the longest-serving Soviet adviser based in Afghanistan.

  The Afghan Communist Party was a young creation, formed only a few years before he touched down in a rickety propeller aeroplane at Kabul airport in 1973. Grandly named the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, it was led by a man called Nur Mohammad Taraki: an agent of the Soviet Union and codenamed NUR. Since the party wasn’t in power there was no way for Leo to establish anything as sophisticated as an official police force and initially his job was merely to keep the party from being destroyed by its enemies both foreign and domestic. It was as if he’d been sent back in time to Lenin’s early years: Communism existing as a minority party under mortal threat from all sides. It had been a wretched struggle to deflect numerous CIA plots and resolve internal rivalries. Few were more surprised than Leo when, in the April coup of 1978, the Communist Party seized power. Agent NUR became President of Afghanistan and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. At that point Leo’s duties transformed. He could now advise on how to set up a secret-police force with uniforms and prisons, a force with one purpose – to maintain and preserve the Communists’ grip on power.