The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  The sky had just started to lighten as the half dozen cars drew up in front of the hunting lodge. Set on a hill which sloped gently away over open parkland down a long valley towards the forest, its tall chimneys and decorated gables caught the first thin rays of the sun while the men beneath stamped their feet about in the half-light of the forecourt. In the folds of the valley itself, below them to the west, there were still pools of complete darkness, broken here and there with haloes of mist, the tops of a few trees just visible, sticking up through these ponds of milk. The weather was grey, indeterminate and the temperature well below freezing. But the message in this early dawn was clear: quite soon the sharpness would catch fire and the sun would explode all over the short day.

  In the long hall of the lodge the men gathered round a huge mahogany table where breakfast had been prepared: there was vodka and two silver samovars of burbling tea. The service was solicitous, the fare more than ample. The house and all its period furnishings had been preserved meticulously. There was an air of old bounty and tradition everywhere. Indeed apart from the electric grill for the cutlets and other burning meats there was nothing in the hall, and no human activity at that moment, which might not have passed there at a hunting breakfast a hundred years before.

  The men, numbed after their drive, spoke little at first. But soon, with plates in their hands, tentatively fingering the hot meat, gathering round the two log stoves at either side of the hall, they began to take on the lineaments of a mild humanity. And later they were further encouraged by small, quick draughts of vodka and burning tea. The smell of woodsmoke, warm leather, gun-oil, the effects of raw spirit and simmering tea, drew about and stirred within the men a mood of expectant euphoria they could not resist.

  The atmosphere in the hall, which had at first gradually relaxed, now quickly tightened. And by the time cigarette smoke drifted upwards past the boars’ heads and other trophies which ringed the walls, there was a clear sense of impending, irresistible release over the whole party.

  The big hall doors were opened. A wall of air moved in over the company, crisp and cold as broken ice. The stoves roared quickly in the sudden draught; the waiters shivered; the men moved out into the forecourt – putting on their greatcoats, fur helmets, and gathering up their guns – with happy fortitude. And the sun, for that moment, perched in the mists of the eastern horizon, an orange bird held briefly in a cage of hills and trees before flight.

  They set off westwards in a group down across the open parkland towards the forest. Here, at the lowest part of the valley, where the line of trees began sloping upwards for miles ahead of them, they were briefed by the head gamekeeper. The hunting block they were taking for the wild boar, he explained, would follow the oldest part of the plantation in the shape of a huge inverted L: a four-kilometre long first leg, bordered on the left by the road and guard fence of the estate, and then a shorter leg, starting with a clearing of rough underbrush turning northwards. For the first part of the hunt they would spread out along the kilometre width of the block, in line abreast, each of the dozen or so hunters accompanied by a gamekeeper. Shortly after they started, beaters would gradually move towards them from the northern extremity of the block so that, ideally, in this pincer movement, their quarry would be pushed towards the junction of the two arms by both parties and trapped in the clearing of the woods four miles ahead of them.

  Outside a gamekeeper’s hut at the edge of the trees, they drew lots for position in the line. The head keeper checked the slips of paper. Yuri Andropov found himself at the extreme right-hand end of the line; the Czech Colonel was in the middle, with Alexei Flitlianov and Vassily Chechulian at two points in between them. The group broke up and moved along the line of trees towards numbered posts which had been set up several hundred yards apart as starting markers.

  It was just after eight o’clock when a whistle pierced the woods and the men left the trampled snow at the bottom of the valley and began to move upwards through the light clean white carpets that lay between the long avenues of fir.

  Two grouse suddenly exploded just in front of Alexei Flitlianov before he’d gone many steps into the forest, their wings beating sharply in alarm, squawking as they skimmed along beneath the branches further into the woods. He stopped, shaken for a moment. His keeper joined him, a small, wizened-faced man in an old fur cap with earflaps, his hands rather dirty, oily. He looked more like a garage mechanic than a sportsman.

  ‘Those are easier shooting,’ he said, trying to establish too immediate a cameraderie, Flitlianov thought. ‘With shotguns. These boar are difficult animals. You were here last year weren’t you, sir? I remember you got a big tusker then.’

  ‘No. That was Comrade Chechulian.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. You’re right. It’s hard sometimes to tell people apart – all in the same kind of hunting clothes.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ The man had put his finger on it at once, Flitlianov thought: everyone in more or less the same kind of clothes, this shooting while moving forward in a line, the chance of a stray boar running back between two positions, a rifle swinging round in a 90 degree arc. An accident in these circumstances could be made to seem the most natural thing in the world. He had realised this from the beginning, of course, two days before at their meeting in the Rossiya Hotel. But he had long before agreed to go on this hunting expedition – he went every year – and could not therefore have avoided the occasion today: in Andropov’s present surprising mood he might fall upon anything as evidence of guilt.

  He had been puzzled by Andropov’s behaviour at the meeting: he’d said there had been no intention of conducting a purge among his deputies but this was exactly what seemed to be happening. Was he trying to raise Chechulian from some cover? Was Vassily, who shared some of his own background, the man he suspected of this conspiracy? He seemed an unlikely candidate. But anything was possible. And it was in this vague cloud of suspicion and invention which Andropov now held over his deputies, that Flitlianov saw the answer to the mystery: Andropov was not sure of anything. He was simply intent on creating a mood of alarm, of psychological unease, by suggesting that he had complete knowledge of the conspiracy – so that the man or men involved would become unnerved, make a mistake, break cover. Andropov was in the middle of an elaborate bluff and this day’s hunting, Flitlianov felt sure, was a potentially dangerous part of it. Anything might happen. And thus he had laid his plans accordingly: he would move himself, long before anything could happen. The garage mechanic was not to be trusted of course. He would have to be the first to go.

  Flitlianov moved forward again into the tunnel of heavy branches, bright sunlight breaking through them here and there on the snow in front of him, speckling the dark arcade with small patches of brilliant tinsel. After ten minutes’ walk he saw a small clearing ahead with a pile of fir trunks stacked in a large pyramid waiting to be taken away.

  *

  Further along the line to the right, Vassily Chechulian checked his rifle. He removed the ammunition, shot the bolt back and forth quickly several times, depressed the magazine spring up and down violently with his huge thumb, and then re-loaded it again carefully with a different supply from an inner pocket. For him this gun was what would get him safely through the day. It was a Mauser .375 barrel mounted on a Winchester sporting stock and he was remarkably well able to use it. He too had been worried by Andropov’s recent behaviour, his untypical flights of fancy over this imaginary Sixth Directorate, and he had come up with no good answer for it. He only knew, with the sure intuition born of many years experience of cover in the field, that he was exposed, at risk. From what quarter he had no idea, no more than he knew when or where the boar would run. And so the nerve of action was sharp in him that morning, all his senses resting on a hair-trigger: if there were to be any untoward accidents in. the coming hours he was determined to be the cause and not the result of them. He lit a cigarette and watched where the breeze would take the smoke: it drifted southwards along the line.
He threw the cigarette away, washed the oil from his hands in a fistful of snow, dried them carefully in a fresh chamois cloth, and then drew a long breath, drinking the keen air several times deeply into his lungs. He waited another minute with his keeper, listening intently all round him, trying to fathom the silences that ran away from him in every direction, peering intently down all the long green tunnels. He saw that there was only a properly clear field of fire directly ahead or behind him, if he stayed in the track between the long straight rows of trees. So he moved forward in a zig-zag pattern, changing the angle of his walk by 90 degrees every forty yards or so, always moving diagonally across the lines of trees and thus, from any distance away, almost completely covered by them.

  *

  Half a mile away, to Chechulian’s right, at the edge of the line, Yuri Andropov walked along between the head gamekeeper and another man. The line of trees ended fifty yards away. There was a loggers’ track along the side of the wood and beyond that 200 metres of open ground rising steeply to the brow of a hill where the forest began again in a younger plantation. Behind him, out of sight in the distance, a forester’s jeep followed them along the rough track. He could just hear the engine on the wind as it climbed the steeper gradients, turning back towards it every so often, as though he was being pursued and not protected by it. His fingers were numb on the weapon; he did not know really how to use it. The spectacles he wore bit into the bridge of his nose painfully. His eyes had begun to water in the sharp air, blurring his sight. He could feel the drops running down his cheek; warm at first, like blood, but icy pellets by the time they reached his chin. He stumbled over some dead branches, making heavy weather in the thicker drifts of snow that had blown in from the edge of the wood. He seemed generally ill at ease.

  *

  Alexei Flitlianov stopped by the large pile of fir trunks, leant his rifle against them and glanced up at the circle of brilliant blue morning sky above the small clearing. He took his gloves off, blew on his hands and rubbed them together vigorously. They had been walking for almost half an hour. His keeper joined him, keeping his rifle in his hand.

  ‘Just the weather, isn’t it?’

  The man nodded. ‘We had such snow this winter. The road out was blocked for weeks.’

  ‘You’re from these parts, are you?’

  ‘No. From Leningrad. I’m stationed at the village. Two weeks duty up here, then four days off.’

  ‘I know. You’re under Rakovsky aren’t you – at Orlyoni? Second Directorate, Leningrad south-east division.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Flitlianov thought then that the man must have been a plant put on to him by Andropov. Hadn’t Rakovsky been moved from that Leningrad area command six months before? But he couldn’t remember precisely.

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Two boys. Twelve and fourteen.’

  ‘Are your family with you here?’

  The man hesitated. ‘No, they’ve not joined me yet. They’re still in Leningrad.’

  ‘Pity. I expect they’d like the hunting.’

  ‘Yes, sir, the younger one, Pytor, is very keen. It’s more the guns than the animals, I’m afraid; he’s very keen on guns. Youngsters are!’ The man laughed quickly, easing the rifle strap on to his shoulder.

  ‘Indeed, I know.’ Flitlianov chuckled – and then belched hugely. ‘God, I ate too well this morning. I must get it out. Will you wait for me.’

  Flitlianov walked round towards the other side of the stack of logs, unbuttoning his coat. But the moment he was out of sight, he climbed quickly up the slope of trunks and found himself a niche between two of them at the top. He squeezed down, lying out full length, and waited. He must have been at least fifteen feet off the ground so that unless the keeper went looking for him up the hill, and then turned round, he could not be seen. Besides, in his fur helmet, brown leather overcoat and tan boots, he knew he must look something like a log.

  Several minutes passed in silence. The sun beat down thawing the frozen drops of moisture on his sleeves. Already it had warmed the resin that seeped from the gashed trunks, so that, with his face buried among the logs, he felt himself beginning to suffocate in the strong smell of rising pine. Then he heard a sound, like a knuckle cracking, a rifle bolt breaking and then the bullet being rammed home. The man had come round to the far side of the logs. Another minute passed.

  ‘Comrade Flitlianov – are you all right?’

  From somewhere away to their left a branch cracked, the sound running clearly down the light wind. Flitlianov raised his head a fraction. The man was just below, his back towards him. He turned his head in the direction of the sound.

  ‘Comrade Flitlianov?’

  The gamekeeper’s voice was thin this time as if he expected no response. The man looked at the confused footprints in the snow and then started to follow them backwards down the hill into the trees. After a hundred yards he turned back and re-traced his steps to the clearing. Then he started to climb the pyramid of logs. At the top he stood up and looked all around him, shading his eyes from the hard sun. There was nothing to see anywhere – nobody, no sound, an empty world.

  *

  Flitlianov by now was well away from the clearing and running hard up the hill between the thickly arched trees. Then he turned sharply, at right angles, moving northwards across the plantation lines. He would have to be careful; this path would cross that of two or three other hunters, including Chechulian, before he came to Andropov’s beat at the end of the line. He had suspected from the beginning that somehow Andropov might be the real target of the day. Now he needed confirmation of this and of the marksman, if possible.

  He had crossed two sets of tracks and must have been close to Chechulian’s path. But there was no sign of him or of his footprints. Chechulian must have slowed or been delayed in his walk. Flitlianov would have to wait until he passed. He stood quite still for a moment, listening, his eyes probing the dark corridors. There were footsteps somewhere, faint, but coming towards him, rising up the hill to his right. Then, a stone’s throw in the same direction, the undergrowth crackled and a brown shape exploded from it. The boar stood an instant in its tracks, then came for him, head down, moving fast, kicking up a flurry of snow behind it.

  Chechulian raised his rifle to the animal and fired in one movement. Then he fired again at the receding form. The second shot had winged him, he thought, somewhere in the shoulder. The beast’s head had reared violently, it had stumbled, but had then charged away across the line of trees to the right. Chechulian re-loaded and moved after it, running.

  *

  After the first shot the boar had veered away from Flitlianov just as he’d thrown himself to one side, finding cover among some brush at the base of a large fir trunk. The second shot had hit the animal, ripping through the top of his shoulder, and a moment later he saw Chechulian and his man hurrying after it not five yards away from him. Flitlianov waited until the two of them were out of sight before getting up and moving quietly on across the line of trees.

  *

  Yuri Andropov heard the two shots to his left, and thirty seconds later the sound of underbrush and dead branches splintering violently, this new noise approaching him like an arrow. He gripped his rifle, half raising it – an involuntary, useless gesture, he knew, for the ammunition it contained was blank. And then the boar was upon them through the nearest line of trees. The group had no time to scatter. The keepers fired almost simultaneously. But for the first of them it was too late: the animal rammed him viciously about the legs and then started to gore his midriff. The second keeper threw himself forward, trying to kick the beast away, unable to get another shot in.

  A rifle had fallen to the ground. Andropov picked it up and ran. He was fifty yards away from the struggling keepers, zigzagging through the trees before a first shot followed him; then came a ragged volley – the bullets slapping into tree trunks, kicking up little gobbets of snow about his feet. But it was useless. Andropov was running southwards, ag
ainst the grain of the wood, the trees masking him more and more completely at every step. The forester’s jeep drew up at the edge of the trees. Two men got out and, leaving the keeper to tend his wounded colleague, they set off in pursuit.

  *

  Alexei Flitlianov kept his head well down among the bushes while this new shooting raged invisibly in front of him. When it had stopped he raised his head an instant and then ducked again. A man was running wildly towards him – a tall, burly figure, with a light silver fox-fur helmet and rimless spectacles: Yuri Andropov. But as he passed a few yards away from him Flitlianov recognised something else about the man: it was not Yuri Andropov but someone dressed and made up to look very like him.

  *

  Vassily Chechulian had stopped in his pursuit of the wounded animal when he heard the shooting. It could only mean one thing: Andropov, or some other party to his right, had sighted the boar, missed it, and succeeded only in heading it back towards him. It was coming for him now, the undergrowth rattling fifty yards ahead. He raised his rifle but the noise suddenly stopped. Something moved in a patch of dark scrub beneath the trees. He would have to flush the animal out. He fired once, and then a second time, the shots ringing violently in the silence. Then he moved carefully towards the patch of scrub. Halfway there he stopped. Two men were facing him from the other side of the bushes, their rifles covering him. And in the bushes lay the body of a man: Yuri Andropov.

  *

  Flitlianov worked his way across the edge of the forest and paused, crouching down behind the last line of trees. A covered forester’s jeep was parked on a logger’s track, its back towards him. There was no one around. He walked up behind it slowly. The front seats were empty. He put his head in through the driver’s window. Yuri Andropov and Alexander Sakharovsky were sitting quietly in the back seat. They started forward in alarm.