He re-tightened the tourniquet and lay down beside her, gently sliding his arm around her shoulders and drawing her close.
“Who would think that a career in ornithology could end so terribly,” she whispered. “You said it would be dangerous there, not here.”
“Hush.” Why had this happened?
Talia and Ezdovo arrived minutes later with an armed Spetsnaz escort; Gnedin followed and looked first at Dudek, then at Orlava. Her pupils were dilated, her skin clammy. “She’ll probably lose the leg,” he declared without looking up. “There’s not much I can do.”
“I know,” Bailov said.
Talia and Ezdovo searched the clothing of the dead assailant by the wall, but he carried no identification. They found a hundred rubles in one pocket and a condom and forty kopeks in the other. There were three extra ammunition clips in his jacket pocket. His weapon was several feet away; it was Soviet military issue, an officer’s sidearm with a homemade silencer. “Don’t touch it,” Talia told her husband. “Fingerprints. Yakut,” she added, looking at the dead man’s face.
“Tungu,” Ezdovo said, quickly correcting her. Then, “Evenk.” Tungu was the name used by the old Cossacks. “Evenk,” he repeated, as much for himself as for her. Talia’s sudden prominence in the group was affecting his mind. “Evenk,” he said again, “not Yakut.”
“I heard you the first time,” she snapped. Why was he angry with her? She needed his help, not resistance. Couldn’t he understand that?
The soldiers helped carry Dudek and Orlava down to an ambulance. A small crowd had gathered, but when Bailov emerged in his blood-spattered uniform the crowd dispersed and melted into the night. Four men scrambled out of an unmarked truck, one of them stepping into Bailov’s path immediately. He wore a black raincoat, a dark tie with a huge knot, and a cigarette hung from his bottom lip slightly left of center. He showed Bailov his militia credentials. “What’s going on here?”
Bailov held up his Red Badge, then shoved the man so hard that he tripped against one of his henchmen, causing them both to fall unceremoniously. Then he got into the ambulance with Raya and Gnedin and pulled the doors closed as the ambulance raced away without lights or siren.
Ezdovo picked up the Evenk’s pistol by catching the trigger guard with the blade of his pocketknife and carried it downstairs. He was amazed to see that the serial number had not been filed off.
“Taras Ivanovich looked shaken,” Talia said.
Ezdovo grunted. “He’s afraid of losing his woman.” It was a familiar feeling.
130TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1961, 1:00 A.M.Moscow
In his sixteen-year career Colonel Anton Gaponov had grown accustomed to being obeyed. In the beginning he marveled at the way enlisted men jumped at his words; now he expected such compliance and was no longer impressed by his own authority. He had also become accustomed to telephone calls in the middle of the night. During a trip to Helsinki he had bought a telephone that chimed softly when it rang, and now the chimes were singing their muted song. When he rolled over to answer, his wife, Yelena, draped a muscular leg over his hip and hooked him with a wrestling hold that was the first signal of the stirring of her on-again, off-again libido. Yelena was a former two-time European shotput champion, and though she had a naturally compact build, she had added to her strength through a combination of hormone injections and weight lifting. Her years of rigorous training had altered her menstrual cycle, her libido, and worst of all, her timing. Most of the month she had no interest in sex, but when she was within a few days of her period she came alive. Gaponov worked his way loose and slid off the bed. “Your biology is showing,” he scolded her.
She made her way across the mattress and balanced on the edge like a massive, hairless cat. Why was Anton blushing? She pawed at him, but he pushed her arm away as he talked into the telephone.
“Say that again,” he said, his voice wavering.
She raised an eyebrow. “Who is it?” she demanded.
“Why would he do that?” Gaponov asked, his voice rising. He grimaced at the answer. “You saw the body?” He bit his lip. “Shit.”
“Who is it?” Yelena insisted. “Your latest sweetie?” Her altered libido also included the worst sort of jealous streak. For several days of the month she raged at his imagined infidelities; the rest of the time she acted as if she couldn’t care less whether he was dead or alive. Her jealousy was unfounded; Gaponov’s sole mistress was his career, and because of it he now felt stabbing pains in his chest.
The crazy Evenk had been shot while breaking into a woman’s flat. “His orders were explicit,” he hissed into the telephone. “Surveillance only.” Why was he telling this to the cretin on the other end of the line? “Assholes!” he shouted. What to do now? Get the unit out of Moscow; he had planned for this, but had never expected to have to put it into action.
“All right,” he said, “all right. Be calm, comrade. Implement the recall plan.” He listened for a moment, then hissed, “Yes, idiot, I mean now!”
The look on her husband’s face told Yelena that there would be no lovemaking tonight. Something was very wrong. “What is it?” she asked tenderly.
“Work,” he told her, his standard response to most of her questions.
She made a face and rolled her eyes as he began getting dressed. “You’re going out at this hour?” She leaned back to look at the alarm clock on the nightstand. “Why tonight, Anton? Send somebody else.”
Gaponov ignored her as he put on his field clothing and strapped his service revolver to his hip. It felt foreign to him. Though he was a soldier, he had forged his career on his ability to think, not to fight in primitive ways.
“Anton?”
He sat in a chair to slip on his knee-high boots. “If there are any more calls, tell them you haven’t seen me tonight,” he told her. “I went to work yesterday and didn’t come home.”
“But I have and you did.”
He glared at her. “Do as I say.”
She could not hide her fear. “I’m your wife,” she said. “I have a right to know if there’s a problem.”
He left without answering her. The Evenk had fucked up badly, and now he had to set things right. Wolf tickets led by an Evenk; it had been a crazy combination from the start, and not his idea, but what choice had there been? An officer followed orders and did not question motives, especially if the officer was interested in a long career.
An hour had passed since Gaponov left Yelena. The thirty men had arrived at the airport in several groups, including the one who had gone up the stairs behind Okhlopkin in time see the muzzle flashes that followed the Evenk’s unexpected charge into the flat, but he couldn’t explain why it had happened. He simply mumbled “Evenk,” which implied an innate unpredictability and left it at that. Evenks, Yakuts and the others with slant eyes were all Mongols and therefore savage and unreliable, worse than wolf tickets.
The men gathered in a hanger where a three-decade-old twin-engine transport was parked, its pilots in the cockpit waiting for their passengers to climb aboard. Gaponov could see the glow of the red light on their faces as he checked his list one final time. The men waited in a loose formation, sharing cigarettes, their faces tense. “Mount up,” Gaponov ordered.
Unlike regular soldiers, these men dared not question orders, especially now. Their situation was too precarious; they were trying to earn their way back into the system, not to challenge its authority. They boarded in silence.
As Gaponov waited for the last man to get inside he was surprised to see the deputy director of the KGB enter the hangar.
“I wanted to see you before you got away,” Perevertkin said.
“There was no need,” Gaponov said. Why had he come?
“Are all of them accounted for?”
“All but Okhlopkin.”
“Let me worry about him. You followed the recall procedure?”
“To the letter.”
“Your wife?”
“I told her nothing. I i
nstituted the recall, notified you from a public phone and came directly here.”
“Well done,” Perevertkin said. “Don’t worry. Everything has been arranged.”
The two men shook hands, Gaponov disappeared inside and the hatch closed. Perevertkin signaled with his hands for the pilots to wait, ducked under the wing, opened a small panel, reached inside, then closed the door, relatched it, trotted back to the front of the plane, gave the pilot the engine-start sign and headed for the hangar door without looking back.
Gaponov made sure his men were strapped in, climbed into the cockpit and knelt on the jump seat between two sleepy-eyed pilots. The engines had not started. “What’s the delay?”
“Your friend out there saw an unlatched door,” the pilot in the left seat said. “We’re ready to go now.” The man stank of cheap vodka.
“File a visual flight plan and leave the transponder off,” Gaponov told them as he handed them a chart. “We’ll take care of our own navigation.” He gave them the destination and course. This way air-traffic-control radars would not be able to track them.
“Cherepovets?” The copilot looked puzzled as he lit a cigarette and studied his chart through blue smoke.
Gaponov went back to strap in. Their people in Cherepovets would be waiting. He had been told that there would be a court set up there. The men would be charged as antisocial elements, then shipped to uranium mines in the east. These were sentences of death, but not instantaneous, which was better than the scum deserved. When it was done he would remain in Cherepovets for several days, then return to Moscow. In his absence, others would be conducting damage control, though he had no idea how they would dissociate Okhlopkin from him. All he knew was that it would be done efficiently and thoroughly; secure in this and glad to be close to being shed of his wolf tickets, he told himself to put it out of his mind; he was part of the party’s sword and shield. He would be protected; assurances had been given. The system rewarded loyal service. As the aircraft began to taxi, he finally allowed himself to relax. It would be all right.
131TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1961, 5:30 A.M.Moscow
Raya was under heavy guard at the hospital, in critical but stable condition. Gnedin had been forced to amputate her mangled lower left leg, and had carefully crafted a flap and stump that could later be fitted with a prosthesis; his Soviet colleagues had no access to such technology, but Western devices could be acquired through diplomatic channels. It was ironic, Gnedin thought, that while Khrushchev boasted about his spaceman, most Soviet amputees still hobbled around on homemade wooden stumps, just as they had in czarist days.
For now, however, Orlava’s lost limb was not his primary medical concern. The blood loss had induced shock; the tourniquet had saved her, but her life was still in jeopardy. She had the classic symptoms: low blood pressure, soft, erratic pulse, clammy skin, cold hands and feet, no color, blue splotches on her extremities and hyperventilation. He put her on oxygen, cross-matched her blood and replaced 40 percent of the lost volume with saline, which was all that was available on short notice. He knew there was danger of edema with the salt solution, but there was no alternative. He had started her on two units of whole blood, O positive. No need for corticosteroids; they would only hinder peripheral vascular function, which was important to the health of the stump. He had done all he could; if her heart was strong and there were no clots, she would recover. Bailov wanted to stay with her, but Gnedin forbade it; responding quickly, Talia sent him with Ezdovo to identify the dead assailant.
When Bailov appeared at Yepishev’s quarters, the general simply shook his head and opened the door with a look of resignation on his haggard face. “You again. Will I never be rid of you?”
“We need help.”
“Obviously,” Yepishev said, stepping back.
Wrenches, benches, gauges, shovels, gaskets, boots—all these and more routinely disappeared from government inventories, but the Red Army did not misplace or lose weapons. Ever. Because they had a weapon with a serial number they had a good starting point for tracing Raya’s assailant.
It was easy to see how Yepishev had been promoted. He not only had many contacts, but also an uncanny understanding of military administrative procedures. Within two hours he came up with Okhlopkin’s name, as well as fingerprints that matched those on the weapon and a photograph taken in 1958. Captain Eduard Boryavich Okhlopkin was the bastard son of a Russian mother and Evenk father, a half-breed assigned inexplicably to the Soviet Rocket Force. Administratively he was attached to the political branch under a Colonel Anton Gaponov, but his current duties were unknown. Yepishev told them that until July 1960 Gaponov had been adjutant to Lieutenant General Babadzhanyan, who commanded the Odessa Military District. It made no sense that a nobody like the dead Evenk would be in the Rocket Force’s political section; such assignments were usually reserved for native Russians who were Party members and on upward career tracks. Okhlopkin’s record showed no evidence of a Komsomol background or Party membership. His fitness reports might tell more, but Yepishev said that obtaining these would require time, and might not be available at all.
In the old days Petrov had taught them that the art of investigation was sequential. One started at the end of a chain and worked one’s way through the links one at a time. With Okhlopkin dead, Gaponov was the next apparent link. Bailov and Ezdovo did not overlook the fact that the murder of Melko’s ex-girlfriend and her family had also been linked to the Odessa district through the mysterious KGB accounts Annochka’s husband had stumbled onto. They doubted that this was a coincidence.
Yepishev’s contacts produced Gaponov’s office number; a call to his office gave them his home address. Melko was sent to the office while Ezdovo and Bailov went to the colonel’s residence, which was on the second floor of a five-story apartment building. The woman who opened the door was short and mannishly muscular, but not unattractive; Bailov thought he recognized her, but he couldn’t put a name to her face. Her brown hair was trimmed short, she wore a plaid shirt for a nightgown and she was barefoot. Her pink nail polish was a badge of her husband’s rank; such cosmetics were impossible to find in Moscow unless one had access to exclusive state stores or traveled outside the country. “What do you want at this hour?” she challenged. She wore her husband’s rank with confidence.
“Is Colonel Gaponov at home?” Bailov asked politely.
“Who wants to know?” she demanded.
“Where is he?” Ezdovo pressed, his voice hard.
“I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. He left at eight.”
“He works nights?”
“Sometimes.”
They could see that she was nervous, but doing her best to hide it. “Does he call in when he’s going to be out all night?”
She smiled. “I’m his wife, not his commanding officer. May I tell him who called?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Ezdovo said.
“As you wish, but he’s very reliable. I could ask him to call you when he returns.” The appearance of the two men had shaken her. The one with the red hair looked like a soldier, but not the other one, who had intense eyes. Why had Anton gone out so suddenly? Was he in trouble? If so, then she was in trouble.
“Forget we were here,” the wild-eyed man said.
Yelena Gaponov pushed the door closed, listened to them go down the stairs, went to the phone and dialed her husband’s office.
At the office there were three clerks on night duty, two females and a slightly built young male who looked as if he had yet to have his first shave. When the phone rang, he reached for it, but Melko caught his arm. “What’s your name?”
“Nestorev, Junior Lieutenant,” the boy said nervously.
Melko pointed him to a chair, motioned for him to sit and picked up the receiver. “Junior Lieutenant Nestorev,” he announced.
“This is Mrs. Gaponov,” Yelena said. She tried to remember Nestorev’s face. He was young and smooth-skinned; that was all that she could recall. Why d
id his voice seem so much older? “Is my husband there?”
“No,” Melko said. He heard the panic in her voice. “Is the colonel coming in?”
How much should she tell a junior lieutenant? “I think so, but maybe I misunderstood.”
“Shall we have him call you when he arrives?”
“Please. If it’s convenient for him,” she added.
Her voice betrayed her frayed nerves. “When do you think he’ll be here?” Melko asked.
Why didn’t Nestorev just take the message and shut up? Suddenly she wished that she had not called, but the two men at her door had frightened her and she felt she had to do something. “Any moment.”
“May I ask how long it’s been since he left?” Melko tried to sound sympathetic.
What if something had happened to Anton? “A couple of hours ago, perhaps a little longer.” Actually it had been before midnight, which was more than enough time for him to get there. Anton had told her to say nothing, but Nestorev was one of his men.
“Ah,” Melko said. “Perhaps he had other stops to make. You’re certain he said he was coming to the office?”
“Not in so many words.”
Melko looked at the duty board. Several personnel were signed out to various locations, including four who had gone to something listed only as B-4, TTC. He cupped the receiver and pointed at the board. “What’s B-4?” he asked Nestorev.
“Tactical Training Course. Small arms,” the young officer told him, his eyes locked on the Red Badge that Melko had left lying open on the desk.
“How far is it?”
“Just outside the city. Near the airport.”
“Which one?” Melko asked.
“Vnukovo.”
Melko uncovered the phone. “Mrs. Gaponov?”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps he went to TTC. Several of the officers are there for training.”
His field dress! That would explain it. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps I misunderstood. He was dressed for the range.”
The Domino Conspiracy Page 48
