Chapter 2, continued

Alexei Kuznetsov was a worried man.

From simple peasant stock in the Urals, he had turned his back on further education to pursue a career in the Army. With no great exertion he had become an officer in Paratroops, and had begun his twenty-five-year service with an optimism which had not survived his first year of service.

All around him, troops were suffering at the hands of inept alcoholics whose barbaric behavior debased the uniform he wore. If I don’t get out soon, he thought in despair, I’ll end up an alcoholic, too.

So, when he’d been approached by the KGB to act as an informer within the Army, he had gathered up his courage and asked to join the KGB outright. After a character investigation that was almost as bad as psychoanalysis, he’d been brought into the KGB with his military rank intact—on condition that he stay in the Army.

That had been a setback. After all, he’d joined the KGB in hopes of being rid of the Army. But, the new pay scale was better, the benefits unbeatable, and the hope of being able to modify the misery around him to some extent was still alive. Besides, it wasn’t healthy to argue with the KGB, as his present predicament proved.

He’d been planning to defect from his post in Czechoslovakia when unexpected orders had shipped him to Afghanistan. He would never know if his plans for defecting had been discovered, or if his assignment had been an unlucky coincidence, but here he was, and his only hope of getting out of this insane, demoralizing system was through the Khyber Pass.

Or had been, until a couple of weeks ago, when these two peach-fuzz little sneaker-squad types had shown up from Moscow. They had KGB written all over them. When you couldn’t even visit the latrine without tripping over them... Where, he wondered in despair, could he have left a loose end? How had he given himself away?

“Sir, Captain Kuznetsov is definitely up to something suspicious,” reported Sasha that evening. His bright-eyed, eager face nauseated Sergei.

“What makes you think so?” he forced himself to reply civilly.

“He had a map of Afghanistan and was studying it.”

“Oh, good grief. He was probably asked to set a safe route through some of these mud huts on the outskirts.”

Actually, Sasha had a point. Kuznetsov worked in Ciphers. What would he be doing with a map, under any circumstances? But Sergei wanted badly to deflate the self-important little guttersnipe—

Sweet Cyril, what was happening to him? Sasha wasn’t a bad sort. He was actually rather a pleasant kid. Despite their nickname of the Terrible Two, he and Dima were doing a thorough and conscientious job of reporting the poor bastard’s movements. And they got on well with the other troops, too, so well that they had become an accepted part of the various convoys that shuttled incessantly between the Embassy and the airfield. Which, from Sergei’s own point of view, was perfect, because it gave them a chance to sniff out any other suspicious behavior in this baffling and underhand business.

He had asked himself what was wrong with him, what could have changed his personality so drastically in so short a time. He knew the answer to that question. He knew it very well, too well. He simply preferred not to think about it.

He was worried sick about Yuri. The kid had picked up enough information not only to confirm that the arms cache was indeed somewhere within the city limits of Kabul, but also to implicate most of the Embassy staff in shady deals of one sort or another. And their friendship was already being noticed.

“What on earth do you find so interesting about little Yukie?” Tamara had asked him one evening over Turkish coffee. Sergei had frowned.

“Don’t call him that, Tamara. His name’s Yuri.”

“Yuri the Yukie,” she’d smirked. “That’s what everyone calls him. That ghastly Ukrainian accent of his sticks out even farther than his ears. He sounds like Khrushchev, for pity’s sake.”

“Aside from the fact that my mother comes from the Ukraine,” Sergei had said pointedly, and had had the satisfaction of seeing a dusky blush cover her face, “‘Little Yukie,’ as you call him, is a genius, pure and simple.”

“What! Little Yukie, I mean, Yuri? I know I said he held this entire place together, but that’s only because everyone else is so stoned on either vodka or hashish. ‘Genius’ is the last word I’d use to describe Yu...ri. What do you two talk about, anyway?”

“Machinery. Weaponry. Anything mechanical. He knows every detail of the Kremlin chimes without ever having been to Moscow, did you know that?”

“Does he indeed.” She had set her cup down carefully and begun unbuttoning his shirt. “Let me tell you something that little Yukie knows nothing about.”

Even as his body betrayed his reaction to her, he’d fought to keep his voice cool and professional. “My apologies, Tamara, I’m a married man.”

“What a pity.” Her hand had slipped between his legs, and she kissed him again. With open lips. Again. When it was over, he lay beneath her, spent and numb. I never knew it could be like that, was all he was capable of thinking.

That had been a week ago, and they had met every evening since then, mostly at her quarters. She taught him things about his body that he would never have suspected. Why didn’t Annushka do these things, he’d found himself thinking one night, forgetting her innocence, forgetting her virginity, forgetting the circumstances of their courtship and her vulnerability and the place he held in her life, and when he had returned to the hotel he had removed her picture from his wallet and tucked it among the letters which came sporadically in bundles of fifteen and twenty, giving him little time to do more than scan them cursorily.

“Sir?”

Sergei shook himself. “Sorry, Arkasha, I was somewhere else. What were you saying?”

“I said, there’s a personnel file missing. Zagorka’s.”

“What? What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

“I mean, I asked the file clerk to give me access to the case files and personnel files, and Zagorka’s is missing. We can’t find it anywhere.”

“ ‘We’? You found yourself a little outside help, Arkasha?”

Arkady had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I got Volodya and Vanya to help.”

“Volodya and Vanya have their own duties in this affair,” said Sergei coldly. “I asked you to cover the Embassy because I know that you are an ambitious man, and you have the brains that don’t usually go with ambition. I expect you to use your head for more than a hat-rack, and not to go picking other people’s brains at the expense of their duties.”

The look of hatred burned on Arkady’s face confirmed what Sergei already knew. When we get back, he thought abstractedly, I’ll have to get him some kind of promotion that will give him enough rope to hang himself.

If we get back, he amended as an explosion rocked the building.

“What the hell was that!” said Dima, wide-eyed.

“Don’t know, get down!” roared Sergei, and they threw themselves flat and covered their heads with their arms. It sounded as if Kabul itself were being demolished.

For half an hour, hell billowed around them. At one point, Sasha stood and ran towards the door.

“Get back here!” snapped Sergei.

“We gotta fight!” shot back the young soldier. Sergei remembered that he had been trained in the elite Spetsnaz, the KGB Special Forces, as part of a hit-and-run tactics group.

“This is the Inspectorate now,” he barked. “And I’m ordering you to stay put. We can’t help, and we don’t have the logistics to support heroics.”

Sasha resumed his former position, but Sergei could hear little growls of discontent issuing from him. This godforsaken dump was getting on everyone’s nerves.

At last the fighting stopped. After several minutes they got to their feet cautiously. Sergei looked at his uniform, made a moue of distaste and brushed at it, which helped nothing. He turned and surveyed Sasha, Dima and Arkasha.

“Let’s go see what that was all about,” he said, and at that moment the door flew open and a terror-stricken Yuri tumbled inside.

“Oh, Sir, thank God, thank God you’re all right, Sir,” he stuttered.

“What’s going on out there?”

“Oh, Sir, it’s terrible, there’s blood everywhere...”

A cold feeling of dread took hold of Sergei as his three men rushed outside.

“Yuri, what in the name of heaven happened out there?”

But the boy was incoherent, and it was not until evening that the most general details were known.

Afghan troops had rebelled and joined the mujahidin in preparing an ambush of the regular Embassy convoys. An entire column of soldiers had been wiped out. The Soviet Army had retaliated from the air with MiGs and armored helicopters.

By evening of the next day, the dead numbered in the hundreds. Among them were Volodya and Vanya.

* * * * *

I regret to inform you that your son, Ivan Pavlovich Karmansky, was killed in action on 23. May 1981.

It may be of some comfort to you to know that he died gloriously, in the service of the Motherland. He was a man of pure honesty and enormous personal courage, implacable in the struggle against enemies, stern in the name of duty and prepared to sacrifice himself for the Motherland.

I consider myself to have been privileged to call him ‘Comrade,’ and his death is almost as great a loss to me, his commanding officer, as I know it is to you. Please accept my most heartfelt condolences.

Sergei rubbed his brow in a vain attempt to clear the tight band of pain across it as he read over his letter to Vanya’s parents. He hoped it would console them better than it did him. He had lifted the description of Vanya’s “honesty and courage” straight from Andropov’s description of a typical KGB officer. Hell, what else was he supposed to say?

He signed his name, and beneath it, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. No rank. It would be an insult to receive such a letter from a “commanding officer” who ranked one step above their son. Then he reached for a second sheet of paper and wrote the same thing to Volodya’s parents. He altered it somewhat for Volodya’s young wife.

Then he went to Tamara’s quarters, drank a whole bottle of her Bulgarian wine and spent the night with her.

Chapter 2: Kabul, March 1981

They were met in Kabul by an armored personnel carrier. Sergei exchanged meaningful looks with the members of his team; his own military experience was limited to the paramilitary organization of the KGB, and the rest of his team, all even younger than he, had come into the KGB after only eighteen months or so of military experience. Evidently the gaps in their respective educations were about to be filled in.

As they rumbled through the streets of the Afghan capital, "What's that sound?" asked Volodya, just twenty-one and fresh from Novosibirsk.

The driver of the armored personnel carrier didn't even turn around. "Rocks," he said.

That was succinct, thought Sergei, and repeated the word.

"These people are so happy to see us," explained the driver, "that they greet us with a shower of rocks. Sort of their version of rose petals at a wedding. You know, the marriage of Afghanistan and the Motherland?" He smiled happily, pleased with his feeble joke.

"Pull this thing over," said Sergei icily.

"Can't, Sir. The people would swarm all over us and tear us limb from limb."

In a flash, Sergei had his identification in his hand and was at the driver's side, thrusting the red card under his nose.

"Listen, you half-wit," he growled, "keep your big ears open and your bigger mouth shut. And you can thank whatever luckless patron saint of soldiers watches over you, that I'm not a bloody colonel carrying this thing, because any colonel in his right mind would ship you out to Siberia so fast your feet would still be here!"

"Look, Comrade Senior Lieutenant," said the driver quietly, "I don't mean any disrespect to you or your rank or the KGB, but I've been here since before Brezhnev ordered this 'police action'. There are ten left from my regiment. The lucky ones got a metal overcoat, and if their wives and parents had seen the remains they'd have taken up permanent residence in the Serbsky Clinic. Not because they were dissidents but because they would truly have gone right out of their minds

"And those were the lucky ones. There were the rest, missing legs and arms, even brains..." He swallowed. "It's pretty gruesome, Sir," he ended, almost apologetically.

Throughout this recital, his voice had not risen one half tone in pitch, his facial muscles had not lost their air of befuddled indifference, he had not once taken his eyes from the road before him. Nor had the steady thunk of rock against metal ceased.

"What's your name?"

"Kavalenko, Yuri Alexandrovich. Corporal, Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Serial Number 52538818."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen, Sir."

Sergei nodded. There seemed nothing else to say.

After what seemed like an eternity, the thunking stopped. "Now we're in the Embassy compound," said Kavalenko. "Okay, end of the line on the Simpleton Orient Express, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Sofia, Bucharest, Odessa, Rostov, Tehran, Tbilisi, Kabul, allll out!"

As his men stumbled and scrambled towards sanity, Sergei asked, "What'd you used to do for a living?"

Kavalenko grinned. "Can't you guess, Sir? Streetcar conductor in Kiev. Boy, that was the life. I grew up on a collective about twenty miles outside of the city. Left home as soon as I finished school. Ever been to Kiev?"

"My mother is from Kiev."

"Lucky lady. You, Sir? Kiev, as well?"

"You mean my accent didn't give me away?" Sergei had to smile. "Moscow."

He had at last succeeded in impressing the unflappable Kavalenko, who now stared at him round-eyed.

"Moscow! 'Everything flows downhill to Moscow,'" he quoted the proverb.

"Good," said Sergei dryly. "Maybe if enough of us Muscovites show up, we can all flow downhill a little faster and get out of this godforsaken climate."

Kavalenko's snort told him what his chances of that were.

The interior of the Soviet Embassy looked, on the surface, like an extension of any Soviet government office. Clacking typewriters, harried secretaries and smoke-wreathed bureaucrats were everywhere. It was only when you tried to look at their eyes that you realized this was a fortress under siege. After that, you were alert for the other tell-tale signs: the way people jumped when a telephone rang; the way they stabbed out half-smoked cigarettes and instantly lit another with trembling fingers; the way the entire office staff ground to a screeching halt, wide-eyed with apprehension, whenever a door opened, until they saw it was just another Soviet officer, not very senior in rank, with a contingent of soldiers behind him.

"I'm looking for," Sergei pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his fatigues, "Tamara Borisovna Zagorka. She here?"

Now that she had determined that he was neither an Afghan mujahid nor a general, the secretary was disinclined to exert herself. "Never heard of her," she snapped and riffled papers impatiently. Sergei raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, sighed and produced the magic red card.

"Are you sure of that?" he asked gently.

The effect was extraordinary. The girl dropped her papers, turned as white as her blouse, then as red as the card. My God, the KGB, was written on every line that had suddenly appeared in her face. She raised frightened blue eyes to Sergei.

"I-I-I'm sorry, Sir, I-I'm n-n-new here," she managed to stammer out. Sergei knew that she had been in her posting for over a year, and he let her know that he knew with a raised eyebrow.

"I'd like to see Comrade Zagorka, please," he requested in that same gentle tone.

The secretary licked her lips. "Wh-who shall I say..."

"Makarov, Sergei Ilyich, Senior Lieutenant, Committee for State Security."

"Yes, Sir."

It was almost pathetic, the way she walked from her desk towards the rear of the room by supporting herself on the desks of the other secretaries in the pool. What a shame it took that little red piece of plastic to get any worthwhile work accomplished. How will we ever build True Socialism like that? he asked himself.

She beckoned to him from the far side of the room, apparently not trusting herself to re-negotiate the maze of desks on legs as steady as noodles. When he reached her side, "Comrade Zagorka," she croaked into the room behind her, "a Senior Lieutenant Makarov to see you, and—and—his men. From—KGB," she added, and fled.

Tamara Borisovna Zagorka got to her feet.

Sweet Cyril, thought Sergei.

Warm brown eyes set in a narrow olive face, above a thin nose that swept in a perfect slash from her eyes to flare into nostrils that looked too delicate for anything so functional as breathing, above a dusky rosebud of a mouth that looked permanently berry-stained. Hair as black as a Mediterranean olive, as crisp and curling as the heads of imported lettuce he had left behind at the KGB Stores on Dzerzhinsky Square. As tall as he, far leaner, far browner, and when she smiled, her teeth flashed as brightly as the summer sun on the Moskva.

"My goodness," she said, "what did you do to my poor little Natasha?"

Her official title was Secretary to the Ambassador to Afghanistan from the Soviet Union.

Her other official title was known only to certain people at the Lubyanka. She was the KGB Rezident at the Embassy. Not the same Rezident who was recognized as such by most KGB personnel. That individual was a man with the rank of KGB colonel, who directed security and kept an eye out for possible defectors, who received and acted upon all messages relayed to the chief cipher clerk from the Center, who amassed information on the movements of the mujahidin and coordinated KGB operations in Kabul and environs. No, Zagorka's job, as a captain in the Inspectorate, was to keep an eye on the official Rezident, to make sure he performed his tasks diligently and as assigned to him. She had also been assigned the job of recording the number and kind of weapons, foreign and Russian, that were taken from captured or dead Afghans. It was she who had confirmed the report from Military Intelligence concerning the alarming increase in the number of Kalashnikovs, Makarovs and Graz-Buryas to reach enemy hands, she who held the ultimate responsibility for Soviet state security in the Kabul district. Above and beyond that political appointee who spent his time throwing his weight around.

Sergei shook his head.

"How do you handle this job and run the Ambassador's office, too?" he said.

She smiled. As from a great distance, he heard her reply.

"There's nothing at all to it. They're essentially the same job. Watch, listen, act only when necessary. It's no different from herding sheep in the mountains outside Sofia." Her tone suggested that the Ambassador and his staff were also no different from sheep.

Gone, suddenly, were the memories of the lonely flight from Moscow, the hair-raising ride into Kabul, the sobering conversation with Yuri Kavalenko that had ended in unexpected banter. For Sergei, the world consisted suddenly of citron and olives, clear water splashing over sun-baked stones and throwing droplets of pure light caught in a prism from the rays of the hot Thracian sun, and warmth, warmth to dry the drenching Moscow spring, warmth to uncoil fragile flower petals and tense muscles.

"What's the situation?" someone asked. A second later, he realized that the question had been posed in his own voice. The situation, my friend, he said to himself, is critical, on tenterhooks, ready to snap.

"It's like this—Comrade Senior Lieutenant?"

There was a long pause.

"Oh, make it Sergei," he said at last, "takes less time to say."

"Thank you, Sergei. It's like this. In the past six months, the mujahidin we've picked up here in town have had in their possession an alarmingly high percentage of Soviet weapons, and a disturbing variety of weaponry, as well. M-16s we expected, Browning automatics, fine, a few Kalashnikovs, fine—we do lose men out here, Comrade Senior—Sergei. But not in proportion to the number of Kalashnikovs."

"This—what shall we call it, problem?—first was reported by you a week ago. By GRU, three weeks ago, already. Why the discrepancy?"

She shrugged her elegant shoulders. What lovely collarbones she had. Just like Anne's, he thought, glad that Kabul did not exist in his wife's world, but missing her terribly all the same.

"You tell me, Sergei," said Tamara. "I only heard about it from GRU last week." She raised her sable eyebrows. Sergei had to remind himself that she was making a preliminary statement, not seducing him. He nodded.

"You mentioned M-16s and Brownings as well as Kalashnikovs. What percentage of each are you seeing?"

"We expected to see fifteen to thirty percent Kalashnikovs. It's more like fifty percent. Brownings and M-16s, another thirty percent. That leaves twenty percent Other. Such as Graz-Buryas."

Sergei slammed his feet on the marble floor. "Exactly. How, in your opinion, are KGB service revolvers reaching the hands of Afghan rebels?"

Tamara shrugged.

He thought rapidly, and was about to outline a possible conduit and a plan for plugging it when a voice echoed in his ear.

The only person you can trust absolutely is an absolutely dead one.

Popov.

Instead, "Well, that certainly makes it obvious that something hinky is going on," he said. "Do you have any idea where my men and I are billeted?"

She smiled. "As it happens, I made the billeting arrangements." She took a map of the Embassy compound from her desk drawer and sketched a route with her finger. "Straight ahead, then left, count five buildings, another left, then a right. It's a sort of VIP hotel. Loaded with colonels and generals."

"And one Senior Lieutenant with his five troops." He grinned. "Can you picture their reaction to us lowlifes?"

At that she began to giggle uncontrollably. After a moment, he found himself unable to resist that infectious laughter, and within seconds they were wiping their eyes and gasping for breath.

"I don't suppose, Comrade Secretary," he got out at last.

"Call me Tamara. Yes?" She was still grinning from ear to ear.

"Don't do that to me anymore!" He was still chuckling. "Back to business now, Comrade. I don't suppose this highbrow VIP place serves food as well?"

"Do call me Tamara, Sergei. Yes, of course it does. The best Kabul has to offer." The black-olive eyes laughed at him. He returned her look and knew that his own eyes danced.

"Heaven help us," he said dryly.

To his surprise, Yuri Kavalenko was outside the building when he and his men left, ostensibly inspecting his APC for dents from the rocks, but he straightened when they emerged.

"You staying at the Ritz Metropole, Sir?"

"The where?! Oh, you mean the bigwig hotel?"

Yuri's face maintained its air of befuddled indifference as he nodded. Sergei smiled.

"Does it have a real name?"

"I think so, Sir." Yuri's face took on a look of befuddled concentration. "But nobody knows what it is. Take your bags, Sir?" He appeared to brighten at the prospect.

"I don't think so, thanks anyway, Corporal. Don't you have business somewhere else?"

"I'm sorry, Sir?"

Sergei tried a different tack, but kept his voice casual.

"What's your MOS, Corporal?"

"Oh." Yuri patted the APC, then looked over at a low, squat building. "Admin., Sir. Umm...Colonel Bloshchup, Sir. I...sort of keep things going for him, Sir. And the taxi service." He patted the APC again. "And I take care of newcomers, too, Sir. Take your bags, Sir?" he asked again.

Sergei wondered if the boy were all there. If so...yes, Yuri might have some uses. He smiled kindly.

"Sure. You can take this one," he said, and handed Yuri his clothes satchel. "I'll keep the other."

Sergei made sure that all his men were thoroughly settled before he headed back to the Embassy.

"Sure you don't want us to do anything, Sir?" asked the oldest, and the sharpest, of his subordinates. Sergei considered a moment before replying. It was so obvious to him that to Arkady, this whole trip was nothing more than an opportunity to polish his own star by showing up the boss.

"Yes, Arkasha." He grinned. "Yuri showed me where the mess hall is. You and the others take a wander over there, and keep your eyes and open. Don't be obvious. Be new men, taking in the place. And don't show your IDs, under any circumstances. If you're challenged, just leave, and write it down and tell me. And for the love of Lenin, get some food. I doubt any of you had any breakfast."

Four grins answered his. Arkady frowned.

Some minutes later, Sergei re-entered the Embassy. No trace now of superciliousness in that smart-alecky secretary. She nearly fell over herself in her efforts to please him.

"Tamara Borisovna is in the Ambassador's office just now, Comrade Senior Lieutenant, Sir," she stammered. "Would you like some tea? a piece of cake? perhaps some whisky or vodka?"

Whisky, indeed. Every moron in government service knew about the crackdown on government employees' drinking. He smiled and took a seat. "Thanks, I'll just go over some things while I'm waiting. Oh, but please tell Comrade Zagorka that I'm here."

"Yes, Sir. Of course, Sir." The secretary fled. Sergei shook his head as he searched his briefcase for a pen and some notepaper. The power those three little letters "KGB" possessed was unreal. But if that girl thought her obsequiousness would save her from trouble with him, she was mistaken. It might have worked with almost anybody else, but not with him.

Only a minute or so later, he was shown into Tamara's office.

"That was quick," he observed. "I thought you were occupied with the Ambassador."

"I was in dictation," replied Tamara. "But Natasha said you wanted to see me."

"It could have waited. I need at least an hour of your time. You should never have interrupted the dictation session. Not for me."

Her eyes widened. "Who's Rezident here, Sergei?" she said with unmistakable steel in her voice. Sergei refused to be cowed.

"I was thinking," he replied quietly, "of how difficult it is to assemble one's thoughts, and when one has at last done so and is into the spirit of a dictation session, and must then interrupt the flow of thought, it can be extremely difficult to get back on track. When I dictate, I dislike being interrupted," he finished and stared straight at her.

To his surprise, she blushed a dusky rose and lowered her eyes. But she said nothing, and a moment later she looked up and said, "Well, the damage is done. What can I do for you?"

"Kavalenko, Yuri Alex—"

She burst out laughing. "Little Yukie! All right, what about him? No, let me guess, you want to know if he's all there?"

Sergei shrugged. "Is he?"

"Oh-ho, yes he is, my good Comrade Sergei, very much so indeed." She stopped smiling. "Yukie holds this whole godforsaken place together.

"Look, the Ambassador is just that, an ambassador. A public-relations man. He gets the Party line from Moscow and passes it along to that idiot at Party Headquarters in Kabul, whatever his name is—I've lost track by now. General Sokolovsky and his crowd just show up to put the fear of God, so to speak, into the troops. The general staff don't do any real work. Colonel Bloshchup is all right, but he doesn't know his ass from his elbow. His papa was a big noise in GRU, that's how he made it past Captain.

"However, Yukie is Bloshchup's secretary. He knows everything there is to know about how this place is run, and he makes Bloshchup and Sokolovsky look like the Hope for the Future at the Kremlin. I don't know why. He just does."

"What about you? After all, it was my impression that the Rezidenty were being promoted into responsible positions within embassies, not..."

"Second-rate secretarial/administrative positions? 'Gopher' types of jobs?" she said coolly. "I don't happen to think that this is a second-rate job. Especially since I'm not being paid a secretary's wage, and I got to be Rezident at age twenty-nine. And no, the Center didn't rob the cradle," she added. Sergei had the impression that she had explained this whole thing too many times before. "They wanted a Rezident in this job, and the Ambassador has a known weakness for Balkan girls. It was that simple."

"All right. I apologize. But if Yuri Alexandrovich runs this whole place, as you say, why haven't you recruited him for the Cheka?" He made the question sharper than it needed to be, because he had suddenly become aware of her dusky Mediterranean beauty. He could picture her on a grassy mountainside, the sun playing through her hair, leaves dappling her face... This would never do.

"It's not for lack of trying, I can assure you," she responded. "He's such a weird little duckling, I thought sure I'd get him through blackmail. But he never goes into town, he's not homosexual, he doesn't owe money..."

"Hashish?"

"No. Not that I've been able to find out. Although he does look permanently shell-shocked." She gasped and sat up. "You don't suppose—"

"That he's our man? That he puts on that space-cadet attitude so that we think he's some kind of imbecile?" Sergei considered. "Only one way to find out. Meanwhile, is there anyone else you suspect?"

"Well...yes. A GRU captain." Before she could elaborate, her buzzer sounded. She clicked her tongue and picked up the telephone. "Zagorka speaking," she snapped, and gazed impatiently at the ceiling.

When she leaned back in her chair, her breasts pointed straight out. Although Sergei was not especially interested in breasts as a focal point of sexuality—like most Russian men, he was most attracted by a shapely, plump bottom—just now, he found himself wondering what a handful of breast felt like. His diminutive, vivacious Anne had very small breasts, only a little more swollen than a child's. Thinking of her, he felt himself stirring, and got up to look for a bathroom. Behind him, the telephone was replaced in its cradle.

"What'd you do to my poor little Natasha?" Tamara repeated her earlier question in the same amused tone.

"Showed her my ID. Look, tell her to get her act together, will you? If the atmosphere around here is so besieged that she can only pull herself together for red cards, then she should go home."

He didn't think it was that at all. "Poor little Natasha" needed to be taught some manners. He could foresee that because Mama and Papa hadn't bothered, it would be up to the KGB to do the teaching. As usual, he thought, and moved restlessly.

"I need to use a toilet," he said. Tamara eyed him.

"It's to your left as you go out the door. Sergei," she stopped him, "there's more to be said, but I'm sure you're tired from your trip. Why don't you get some rest and come back around seven or so? I can get some food together that resembles a civilized meal, and we can speak privately."

Suddenly rest sounded like the best idea since clearing out of this godforsaken place altogether. "Seven," he muttered, and yawned. "Sounds good. See you then, Comrade."

"Tamara," she corrected, as she stood to show him out. "Until seven, Comrade Senior Lieutenant Sergei."

But he did not, after all, get the rest he had promised himself.

He never did figure out where he had made a wrong turn, but in no time at all, it seemed, he found himself wandering among a maze of Quonset huts and other makeshift shelters, and was soon reduced to peeking into windows for some sign of life. Was it significant that when he finally found someone, that someone was Yuri Kavalenko?

"Oh, hi, Sir. Come on in. I found a new one." With a befuddled grin, he held up an M-16 rifle.

"A new—M-16?" hazarded Sergei, as he perched himself on a corner of the briefing room table.

"Yes, Sir. They're not so easy to come by, 'cause Supply and Materiel locks them up as soon as they find them. But this one I found under a mujahid, so I...well, I..." He had the grace to look abashed.

"You appropriated it, instead of turning it in," finished Sergei, and cocked him an exasperated look. "Why, may I ask?"

"'Cause it's the only way I'm ever going to learn about American guns."

"Why not just stick to Russian guns, if you must learn about guns in the first place?"

"Oh, I already know all our guns. See?" Without so much as a downward glance, he picked up a Graz-Burya on the table, field-stripped it and reassembled it in minutes. Sergei could only stare. "And Kalashnikovs and Makarov pistols are even easier," said Yuri as he returned his attention to the gun before him. "It's the foreign weaponry I want to learn next. M-16s. Uzis. Stuff like that."

"Why?" There was no need to pretend curiosity. Guns, to Sergei, were a means to achieve an end, and a poor means at that. A gun would always be his last weapon of choice. "I mean, why bother? It's so...crude. It's so Western."

"Exactly, Sir. If you want to get to know an enemy, get to know his weapons."

Sergei felt a distinct chill down his spine at the ordinary conversational tone of voice this individual used in discussing weapons of destruction. Was it possible that Yuri was the one he was looking for? He was clearly a genius at weaponry. The Graz-Burya wasn't the easiest gun on earth to field-strip. He had exactly the right cold-blooded attitude and love of armature to have conceived of just the kind of gun-running set-up Sergei and his team were investigating.

But did he have the intelligence? And what about motive? Zagorka had ruled out money as a recruitment tool, so presumably, that wouldn't have been his motive in setting up a gun-running operation. On the other hand, there were plenty of other kinds of motives. Did he resent being on support staff? Did he long for the kind of notoriety that this form of piracy might bring him?

Maybe I'm overestimating his intelligence, thought Sergei wearily, and gestured towards the reassembled M-16.

"Will it shoot?"

In answer, Yuri aimed the gun at a tin can full of rubber bands and fired. Rubber bands flew all over the Quonset hut.

"I guess so, Sir."

Sergei nodded absently. He had just thought of a way to find out exactly what Yuri's involvement in this whole matter might be. A long shot, at best. But then, in the past two or so years, he had become rather expert at long shots.

"Yuri, I've got to talk to you."

"Sir?"

Was there a sudden reserve?

"I've got a problem, and I need your help."

"My help? But Sir, I thought all those other men who came in with us were your support staff?"

"They are, yes, but you see, I need someone who's been here longer than we have. There's just one thing..."

"Sir?"

"To use you, to use your knowledge of the way things work around here, I'm going to have to recruit you."

"Into the KGB?"

"Yes."

"Me? A Gebezhnik?"

"It's the only way."

Yuri shook his head. "Sorry, Sir. That I won't do. I don't want to be labelled an informer the rest of my life."

Sergei shrugged. "I understand your feelings about that. I grew up in the shadow of the Cheka—my father's with them, too—and it's not easy, when your associates think you're listening in on all their conversations for the sake of informing on them. But much as I hate to have to be the one to remind you, you are under an oath to serve our country. I can conscript you under that oath. I'd just rather not. I'd rather have your cooperation. If it helps you to feel any better about things, once this operation's over I can talk to people back in Moscow about finding you permanent work among us. You'll have job security, all kinds of benefits you've never even dreamed of, and as for a social life, there'll be plenty of young fellows like yourself. Besides," he added with a grin, "girls love the uniform."

He might as well have saved his breath. None of the usual advantages would work with a person like Yuri, and he ought to have realized that. He could only watch while Yuri's face screwed up in concentration, as he weighed the benefits of a career in the KGB against whatever his peculiar ideas of advantages were. At last he looked up with clouded eyes, and Sergei blinked, startled: What color were they, anyway? He had never in his life seen such nondescript eyes. They weren't grey. They weren't blue. They weren't brown or green. They weren't anything at all.

"Sir? Can I, um, ask a favor?"

"Well... You can ask." Sergei smiled a deprecating little smile that was meant to suggest that he really wasn't in a position to grant favors. That, too, was lost on Yuri.

"I just don't want Captain Zagorka to know that I agreed to work for you."

"Why not? Because she already tried to recruit you?"

"Not just that, Sir. She's..."

Sergei waited.

"She's not like you, Sir."

"You have no idea at all what I'm like."

"Yes I do, Sir." Those odd flat eyes fixed on him without blinking, and Sergei shivered: At this moment, he would have sworn on his KGB oath that Yuri could see into the dimmest recesses of his soul. Probably, he thought, shaken, probably he's just glad because I didn't tease him about his preoccupation with guns.

"All right, Yuri. I promise. I won't say anything to her."

Yuri frowned. "She's not very nice, Sir." While Sergei was still recovering from the idea that anyone in the KGB could be described in terms of niceness, Yuri added suddenly, "Sir, watch out for her, Sir. I don't like her. She's like an apple, Sir, round and red, with a worm in the middle."

Sergei said nothing as he studied the odd little Ukrainian. The trouble with Yuri, he decided, was that he was so eccentric that his contacts with other human beings were too limited to have allowed him to evaluate them with any degree of sophistication. He wondered whether to caution the boy about keeping his mouth shut. I did that once before, he remembered, and he put me in my place fast enough, and properly so. He took a deep breath.

"This is the situation." Rapidly he outlined the problem of the missing weapons and ammunition. "I don't know for sure that the whole operation is based in Kabul. But I need to make sure it isn't before I broaden my investigation. Do you think you can pick up any loose talk?" He held his breath. If Yuri were in any way involved in this affair, now would be the time that he would slip. The same wistful need for companionship that had made him hesitate to join the KGB, would lead him to expand further on Sergei's knowledge, betraying his own role in the arms case.

But nothing happened. Literally, nothing. He watched in dismay as Yuri's face slackened into one of the most vacant expressions he had ever seen. While he was still wondering whether the little Ukrainian was in the grip of some kind of seizure, a slow, sweet smile spread its way across the blank face.

"That's no problem, Sir," he said comfortably. "I hear a lotta things. Like, um—there's this captain works in Ciphers, short, kind of chubby-looking, but boy can he lift weights. He can bench-press a hundred and fifty kilos before breakfast!" Sergei smiled, assuming that this was some kind of exaggeration.

"What about him?"

"His name's Kuznetsov, and the scuttlebutt is that he's with the KGB."

Sergei suddenly knew exactly whom Yuri meant, and, Now how does he know that? he thought in exasperation. The idiot must have done something to blow his cover. "There are a lot of Kuznetsovs in the Cheka," he said carefully. "What makes you think this particular one is—"

"He works late at night after a full day, he's all over the compound and he just doesn't look like the average Embassy attaché. Also, he knows all kinds of codes." As Sergei smiled, prepared to deny any knowledge of the man in question, Yuri's face took on that peculiar wooden look again. "The rest of the scuttlebutt is that he's thinking of defecting to the West."

"What?!"

"Colonel Bloshchup and General Sokolovsky were talking about it a couple of days ago in the office. I had a fire going 'cause it was real wet out, so that they could dry their coats and shoes, and I heard them talking about it when I was stoking up the fire."

Sergei felt that odd frisson that always told him when he had hit pay dirt. Yuri was indeed a genius. Not necessarily the kind of genius who could put together a gun-running operation, but the kind of intelligence operative that men like himself could only dream of becoming. His chief asset was looking like part of the furniture. No matter where he went, or what he did, no one paid any attention to him. It explained so much. The desperate need for human companionship that had led him initially to turn down any involvement in this case. His love affair with guns and, Sergei now realized, thinking back to the tender loving care he had lavished on the APC, all kinds of machinery. His lack of enthusiasm when Sergei had joked about girls falling in love with the uniform: Things didn't reject. Girls did.

Yuri, he realized, was going to be the most valuable player in this high-stakes crap game. He smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.

"That's great," he said, and meant it. "That's exactly what I want you to pick up for me. Good, loose talk. But don't act differently from the way you already do, don't try to get people to talk to you. That's what gets informers into trouble, they're so incredibly obvious about looking for dirt. No, you keep on just as you are doing. Just be around, stoking fires and tuning up engines and cleaning guns, and listen. Listen with everything, not just your ears. Then tell me what you hear."

"Everything I hear, Sir?"

"Everything."

"Okay. Um, Sir?"

"Yes?"

"Should I try to find out who's selling guns to the Afghans?"

"That's my job, Yuri. Naturally, if you pick up anything by accident, tell me. But I want you to concentrate on finding the weapons cache. Once I know where that is, I can arrange a stake-out, and eventually I'll trace the operation to its source."

Yuri nodded, stupidly. Sergei could have kissed him. He looked so much less intelligent than he was.

And keep that in mind, Seryozha, he reminded himself. He has his uses, but he isn't off the list of suspects quite yet.

"Okay," he said, "let's get back to the M-16, and in a few minutes we'll walk out of here, still talking about the M-16. Do you understand me?"

"Oh, sure, Sir."

They grinned at each other in happy conspiracy for a few minutes. Then Yuri said, "Sir, um, you won't tell Captain Zagorka that I'm working for you, will you?"

Sergei raised his eyebrows. "I said I wouldn't. I won't."

He noticed that before they left the room, Yuri looked all around to make sure that they had left nothing of themselves. He was a born intelligence officer. I've got to get this kid into the Cheka, he thought. As soon as this op is over—

If it's ever over, whispered a devilish voice in his ear, as the unmistakable racket of a bombing raid shook the compound.

Chapter 1: December 1979-March 1981

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

—Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War

Mark Mitchell was not a happy man.

On the surface, there was no real reason for his discontent. An assignment to Moscow would have been a plum for anybody, but especially for a Midwestern journalist still in his mid-thirties, this kind of assignment was a vindication of all the years spent chasing fire engines and police sirens, all the years of covering mayoralty races that led up to coverage of contests for House seats, then competitions for Senatorial and gubernatorial positions and just last year, the opportunity to run an in-depth series on the effects on foreign policy of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. Which had led to this pinnacle of his career.

Except for one, really minor, matter: A Russian hospital was no place for an American woman to have a baby.

It wasn't as if they hadn't known that Donna was expecting. And they had been assured that that was all right, that when her time came they could count on being expedited through Customs or Immigration or whatever in blazes got you out of this godforsaken garden spot and back to civilization, or at least to an American GI hospital in Germany or England. Whoever had spun them this fairy tale had obviously never dealt with Customs or Immigration or whatever it was that had refused to let them out of the country without having "their affairs," whatever that meant, settled.

So here he was, an exile among exiles, consigned to a waiting room with all the charm of the Lubyanka and a scenic view of a yellow brick wall opposite. This was Maternity Hospital No. 3, and Donna was somewhere inaccessible, enduring the birth of their second child in a room full of screaming, wailing women, for all he knew, while he alternately sat and paced and wished Russian cigarettes weren't so infernally potent, not with all these sweaty, smelly characters smoking them all at once.

The only other non-smoker in the room was someone he had been told to stay far, far away from: the blue collar tabs and shoulder boards on his olive-drab uniform marked him as a member of the KGB. It was almost amusing to think that anyone in the KGB could have indulged in so prosaic an activity as fathering a child, and he allowed himself a humorous flight of fancy, picturing this young fellow in bed with his wife, who probably looked like a tank, like all these Russian women—

The young man jumped to his feet, knuckles pressed to his mouth, murmured, "Zvinite," as his shoulder board brushed Mark's shoulder, and slouched against the window, staring down at the snow that had begun to dust Moscow. Mark stared at him for a minute, noted the pale face, the gnawing at the knuckles, the surreptitious brushing at tears, and stood.

You idiot, he's KGB, leave him alone!

He's a new father who's worried about his wife.

He placed a hand on the young man's arm.

"She'll be all right," he said with a reassuring smile that froze at the look on the KGB man's face.

"She was—four months with child," he whispered, then, oblivious to the shocked stares in the waiting room, he broke down and sobbed on a sympathetic shoulder.

"Sergei, I lost our baby."

She looked so small, in these clinical surroundings. The white iron bed, the fluffed-up feather pillows and the feather tick seemed to swallow her so that all he saw was her little white face consumed by green, grieving eyes and framed by a disheveled mop of brown curls, her matchstick white arm stretched out to him, already turning black and blue from the prodding of the nurse who had had trouble starting an intravenous. He tried to smile as he took her hand.

"It's all right. You had nothing to do with it, I know."

"Oh, Sergei...I lost our baby...they said it was a girl..."

Anne's Nina, now only a memory. Named for his mother. He held her hand to his lips.

"Time to go, Comrade Senior Lieutenant."

"But Sister, I've only been here five minutes!"

"You shouldn't be here at all. What do you think this is, the KGB Clinic?"

He had already decided to ignore her, and he turned back to Anne, to find her waving her other hand at him.

"It's all right, Serge, you go. I'll be out of here in a few days. Probably even before New Year's—I imagine everyone will want as little work and as much holiday as possible." From heaven knew where she dredged up a wry smile, and he tried to smile back.

"You sure?"

"Comrade Senior Lieutenant—"

"Go now, before you get me into trouble!"

He bent to kiss her, marvelling at a sense of humor that could indulge in raillery even in these grimmest of circumstances; then, throwing the nurse the blackest look he could muster, he departed to his parents' flat on the Mira Prospekt, where he and Anne would be staying until she had recovered, at least physically, from the birth and loss of their first child.

* * * * *

It had been over a year, and he still thought of it every day. Her sudden clutching at her abdomen, the look of unadulterated terror on her face, the frantic call to the ambulance service that had taken her to the nearest maternity hospital and no time for niceties like KGB clinics. He still thought of the awful silence that had pervaded the flat until spring, until the day he had come home in the state of dread he was no longer even aware of feeling, to find all the windows open and freshly polished, a Rachmaninov symphony blaring so loudly that he could hear it on the street below, and his wife, still pale, still far too thin, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and a determined look on her face. Their lovemaking that night had been nothing less than a shout of defiance at the vagaries of Fate, and he had loved her more than he could have thought possible, loved her spirit and her refusal to cave in to this latest in a series of body blows Life had dealt her.

When the second miscarriage had come, in the autumn, in the season they both loved best, he had been told flatly, "No more children. Her system simply can't handle it. If you'd rather be a widower, that's your affair; but for her sake, understand, there can be no more children. When she becomes pregnant, we'll simply set up her appointment for an abortion when she comes in to have her pregnancy confirmed."

Her doctors had reckoned without two things: her determination to give him a son, and her religious faith. He was too aware of her importance in his life to allow her to risk it giving him children. But that religious faith of hers, that was something else.

"Forget it," she had told him. "I don't have abortions."

"Come on, Annochka. Even the Orthodox Church will allow a mother to abort if her life is in danger." And to his astonishment and almost annoyance, she had actually grinned.

"You gotta believe," she had said, maddeningly. "That was the Mets’ motto back in ’69. If the Mets could win the World Series, anything can happen."

"All right," he had tried another tack, "how can your God expect you to put your life in danger by bearing children? I can't believe that any Supreme Being, or whatever you think He is, would have so little regard for your life. For that matter," he had sailed on, ignoring her attempt to answer him, "how can you still believe in your God when He allowed such terrible things to happen to you in the first place? Letting you get shot, depriving you of children, that's no God to worship."

"If He hadn't let me get shot," she had retorted, "I would never have met you. And as for the babies..." Just for an instant, a profound grief had shown on her face. "I refuse to accept that the death of a child is the will of God. There's a reason for it, Serge. There has to be." And that's all there is to it, she might just as well have added.

He thought about his unborn children, both daughters, every day. Nina and Yelena, named for both their mothers. He did so now, looking out the window of his office towards the gleaming modern buildings on Kalinin Prospekt. Just at the moment, death seemed very close.

His intercom buzzed, and he sighed and got to his feet, not even bothering to answer it. He knew what it signalled.

For the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Anne peeked out the curtains into the wet April evening. Still no Sergei.

He had telephoned around 3:30 that afternoon to tell her that he would be "late," and not to keep supper for him. Anne, recalling "latenesses" in her own career, had drawn the immediate inference that he would be occupied in interrogation, and had made her own plans for the evening.

But it was now 10:30, she had returned half an hour ago from her evening out with her mother-in-law, and there was still no Sergei.

Should she worry?

She shook herself and laughed. After all, she told herself, that's law enforcement. Her own unpredictable hours were what had occasioned her move from her parents' home; they had been as uncomfortable with the idea of a twenty-five-year-old woman's being out "until all hours of the night," as they had been with the idea of any young unmarried woman's having her own apartment. There had been some stormy sessions before she had packed up her books and clothes and gone to live in Greenwich Village. Her stepfather's ultimatum—"If you move out, you're not moving back"—still rang in her ears, after all this time.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she hunched her shoulder, imagining herself enveloped in Sergei's strong, loving arms. If she were honest with herself, nothing had ever gone right between herself and her parents. Sergei knew it and helped her to live with the knowledge. There was a family mold to conform to, and you either crammed yourself into it or you lived in a state of exile, surrounded by an alien culture and mockery and scorn—

Then she remembered something, blinked away her tears, and smiled as she turned from the window towards the ornate baroque escritoire that she still associated so strongly with Aunt Zinaïda. She sat down, picked up a letter and scanned through it one more time, marvelling as she did so at the force of her brother's personality that projected itself some ten thousand miles. It almost seemed as though Kevin himself stood in front of her asking his penetrating questions, making his irreverent cracks about the world at large, filling the minuscule flat with his boisterous Irish humor and shouting the house down with an Irish tenor to rival Joe Feeney’s.

At length she opened a drawer, took out sheets of writing paper and her fountain pen, and wrote.

Dear Kevin,

I was surprised, and very pleased, to hear from you. I'm not sure if you know that I haven't heard from anybody at home since at least last May, so you can imagine what a feeling it was to see familiar handwriting, in English, yet! Where you been keeping yourself?!
I seem to recall that you had the same Ethics professor I did at John Jay—Teddy Behr? (of East Overshoe fame!). Remember what he always said: Believe half of what you see, and nothing of what you hear. Which means:

1. I do not share a communal apartment with seven other families;

2. we do have hot and cold running water;

3. we also have indoor "facilities" (no outhouse!);

4. the whole place is most efficiently centrally heated; and

5. I do not need hot coals to pile into my flatiron every time I iron Sergei's shirts!

We are currently living in a three-room apartment not unlike my old place in the Village (Greenwich, not Middle), and our street, which in English is called the Street of the Pastrycooks, bears a strong resemblance to Waverly Place, in atmosphere, at least. It's not exactly a stone's throw from Sergei's office, but it is walkable—if you love hiking!

You asked, in your letter, about “modern conveniences.” I assume you mean things like dishwashers and clothes dryers, which I don't recall our own mother ever owning, who could have put them to a lot better use than I ever could. But we do have a washing machine, which is a godsend no matter where you live. What would go unsaid was the fact that she never used it; Soviet detergent gummed up the works so hopelessly that it was easier to scrub her clothes clean with a scrub brush and a cake of soap.

And we have a television, radio, and stereo, all of which get ample use. We watch soccer and KGB spy shows on TV, listen to March-Around-the-Breakfast-Table music on our morning radio program and play records when we want decent music. Lord, she hoped Kevin would never take it in mind to visit them.

We have a modern kitchen—Modern thirty years ago, but what the hey, it had a gas stove, a sink with water taps (when they worked), and a counter-sized refrigerator.—which is on the small side. With the kitchen table and two chairs added to the available work space, it's downright cramped. But our living room is large enough for me to have dining-room furniture in it—an arrangement which seems to be fairly common, from what I've seen. In KGB circles, anyway. And no one she knew, including themselves, even owned a dining-room suite. The space was usually occupied by a baby grand piano or some equally ostentatious display of wealth, and when they let their hair down, even the elite entertained around their kitchen tables, even if it meant packing people into the room like caviar in a tin. "Kitchens are more honest," explained Sergei.

My parents-in-law gave us a Berber rug for a wedding present, and I have that at the balcony end of my living room, with the sofa, chairs and TV grouped around it. The other end of the room is lined with bookshelves, complete with library (in Russian, of course). All leather-bound and very high-brow. Sergei's Aunt Zinaïda, whom we cared for in her last illness, left us everything we own, and as she inherited all her belongings from her parents, you can imagine that the sofa and chairs are horsehair-stuffed brocade, and some of the books are original editions. How this stuff ever survived both the Revolution and World War II, I'll never know.

Then there's our bedroom, equally Victorian. We have a dresser with a mirror that hangs from the wall from a silk cord, a double bed that's almost as big as a king-sized bed, and a chifferobe that's big enough to hold all our clothes, both Sergei's and mine. I couldn't tell you what kind of wood—I'm assuming oak—but it looks like that stuff Grandma Flaherty used to have in her house, with the ornate carving around the edges and little curved legs, and the doors of the chifferobe have a forest scene carved into them. Takes forever to dust, as you can imagine! but I feel like a princess when I snuggle into that bed at night. All it needs is a canopy, and yes, the posters are tall enough for one!

So in terms of the “special KGB perks” you were asking about in your letter—yes, if you were to visit us, you would think that we had all kinds of special privileges, to judge by our living circumstances. And you would be dead wrong. Everything we own came to us from an inheritance. Otherwise, we live in much the same conditions you and I grew up in, minus, of course, all the kids. What she would never tell Kevin, or anyone else, was that stringent as her childhood had been by American standards, it was prodigally luxurious by the standards of the ordinary Russian worker, who would never even have considered it possible to own his own home, as her parents had done, who worked two jobs and waited ten years to be able to purchase a car with no frills whatever, to whom a summer vacation was a blessing granted by the Party for superior work, not something to be planned for and saved for and relived on snow-bound days while browsing through the photo album. She consoled herself with the thought that thanks to the ethics and morals that had been bred into both her and Sergei, their life-style was actually rather Spartan by KGB standards, and kept on writing.

KGB officers are about as short of money as FBI agents, despite what you've heard all these years. On the other hand, the American taxpayer has always been convinced that civil slaves are making money hand over fist. Don't we wish! I made less than the average car mechanic when I was at the Bureau.

Answer to unspoken question: Not yet, but we're having a lot of fun trying. My mother-in-law has scrounged up an old cradle that matches the style of our furniture – I have no idea where she got it. I haven't the heart to tell my in-laws not to hold their breath, but after that shoot-out in New York, the doctors told me that my chances of having children in the future were extremely slim. And the doctors here concur.

She paused for a moment, unable to go on. She wondered if even Sergei guessed how it grieved her not to have given him a child by now. She couldn't even look at other people's babies in the street without that stabbing pain in her heart, the awareness, not of what might have been, but what ought to have been, what every other couple planned for and looked forward to even before they were married. Sometimes, when she thought of the two daughters she had buried, she thought of her father, too, the father she had never known, and a horrific dread consumed her that Sergei, too, would be taken from her.

As she felt that dread coming on her now, she took a deep breath, gripped the pen, and continued:

In the meantime, we keep busy. This Sunday we're going to a performance at the Bolshoi Ballet: Sylvia, if I'm not mistaken. The one with the Willies in it, she would have liked to add, but culture to Kevin meant hitting the Irish bars in Far Rockaway on Saturday nights, and anything else was "long-hair" stuff. I grew up with that?! she thought, took a deep breath, and ground on. And Sergei is teaching me to ice-skate. Did you ever think you'd see the day, with my collapsible ankles? But darling Sergei has the patience of—I guess I can't say “a saint,” can I? Not in Soviet Russia, anyway!

I guess that's about everything. Oh, not quite: When's the wedding? And don't say, What wedding. Susan sounds like your other half, and you're crazy if you don't pop The Question. Love to you and all the rest of the Thick Micks, and keep in touch okay? Love, Annie.

She smiled with affection as she wrote out the envelope, tucked the letter into it and left it unsealed on the desk. When Sergei came home, she'd have him read it. He'd probably want to add a couple of lines of his own. He'd be so pleased to know that at last, she'd heard from home. It had puzzled him, she knew, that her family had written only once since their marriage.

She stretched and yawned, and looked at the clock. It was—no, that couldn't be right. Quarter to twelve! And still no Sergei. That was no interrogation. Something big had to be going down. The FBI agent in her itched to know what it was. The KGB wife told her to mind her own business and go to bed.

By one a.m. she gave it up as a lost cause. It was the first time in more than a year that they had been separated at night. She missed him more than she would have believed possible, missed his physical presence, the way he wrapped an arm or a leg around her as they slept, the sweet smell of his body washed with birch soap or fresh from the steam baths, even his warm, moist breath on the back of her neck. This is ridiculous, she groused to herself as she gathered up her pillow and feather comforter and padded out to the living room. I'm a grown woman, slept by myself for two whole years in the middle of downtown Manhattan—

—without Sergei. Life without him was so utterly unimaginable that she had only to think of it to dispel any doubts she might have entertained about her defection. She grinned as she made up an encampment for herself on the sofa, crawled into it and opened up the latest issue of Soviet Woman.

So much for Liberated Female FBI agents.

"You funny little girl."

Anne blinked her eyes open in response to the kiss that accompanied the admonition. Sunlight streamed in through the window, and Sergei sat beside her on the sofa, looking exhausted. At sight of his wife's sleep-heavy eyes and flushed face, he smiled and said, "What had you in mind, to sleep here instead of in bed where you belong?"

She wriggled to a sitting position. "You need to ask? Never mind that. You look like something the cat dragged in."

His eyebrows shot up. "I feel like something the cat dragged back out. For now I need—" He yawned. "—a hot breakfast and a warm bed. With you in it." He got up, rubbed his hand over a chin that was too clean-shaven, and headed for the bedroom, shedding pieces of rumpled uniform as he went. Anne watched him with a sense of foreboding: It was unlike him to be so careless of his clothes. She shook her head, kicked off her feather comforter, and went into the kitchen to start the samovar.

Some thirty minutes later, "Thanks, I needed that," Sergei said as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and held out his tea glass for a refill. Anne obliged.

"I've never seen anyone chug-a-lug tea before," she said. "Can you tell me what's going down?"

He cocked a surprised grin at her use of the law-enforcement slang for a case about to break. Every once in so often, a glimpse of her former profession slipped out, reminded him of the circumstances of their meeting, and the miracle that was their life together enveloped him yet again.

"I love you so much," he whispered, and she laced her fingers through his.

"I love you too," she said softly. "What's going down?"

He let his eyes rove over her face as he searched for the right words. But there were no right words.

"In a week, I must leave for Afghanistan."

Afghanistan.

The Russian Vietnam.

Anne found herself listening from somewhere beyond herself as Sergei told her about the missing caches of arms, the stolen ammunition, the Russians lured into deadly traps by—whom?

"It's been going on ever since we first went into the place," he told her. "GRU—military intelligence—has been doing its best to find out who's responsible. We know it's not the CIA, they've been running M16s and small arms out of Pakistan anyway, and the trouble is that the rebels have too many Kalashnikovs and Makarovs—even some Graz-Buryas—for them to have been taken off captured or dead Soviets. That leaves" —He rubbed a hand across his eyes. He looked so tired. —"either GRU itself or Gebezhniki. Either way, it's an Inspectorate affair. I'm going in with five others." His lips had become thin slits, and his fists were white knuckles, and Anne knew that he had used the derogatory slang term Gebezhniki deliberately, to show what he thought of a KGB officer low enough to betray the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who, after all, were only following the orders of an army they'd been conscripted into. "And we're going to find out who's been killing off Soviet kids!" The sudden outburst was accompanied by the slam of his hand on the table, a slam that set tea glasses and samovar rattling. Anne jumped.

"Oh, dushinka." He bit his lip. "I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "Doesn't matter. Need a shower?"

"No. The intelligence meeting ended around midnight, and I went to the steam bath at the Club. Left there about four this morning, went back to the Center for some breakfast and landed in another briefing." He looked over at her and stretched out his hand. "Dushinka, come with me."

They lay together in the great oak bed, each with his own thoughts. Sergei did not make love to her, nor had she expected it. She allowed him to hold her close, to wrap her in his arms and legs that still smelled of the birch branches he had whisked over his body in the steam bath. Eventually his body covered hers, and his lips and nose blew moist, warm air into the side of her neck. When she was sure he was in a deep sleep, she gently disengaged herself.

Her letter to Kevin had made no mention of the doctor's appointment she had made for today, an appointment she alternately hoped and dreaded would confirm...

A miracle?

* * * * *

Anne toyed nervously with the clasp on her handbag and swung her legs, crossed at the ankles, under the straight-backed chair she was sitting on. The door opened suddenly, and she hopped off the chair to her feet. A tall, dark-haired man in the uniform of a KGB major gestured her through into his office, closed the door behind him and took her hand. "Gospozha Makarova?" he said as he bowed over her hand, an action so completely at odds with his pleasant, square-jawed appearance that Anne wondered if Sergei could have been more accurate than he knew: Could Major Kuryagin be descended from aristocracy? She found herself dropping a small curtsy as she replied, "Yes, Sir."

A smile tugged at his lips. "Viktor Andreyevich Kuryagin," he introduced himself, and gestured for her to take a seat on a sofa against the wall. Seating himself beside her, he continued, "What can I do for you?"

"It's about my husband. Lieutenant Makarov?"

"Yes?"

"He told me, um, he's being posted to Afghanistan."

"That's so."

She bit her lip, and he covered her hand with one of his and steeled himself to refuse the request he was certain was coming. But:

"Something has happened that he ought to know about." At last she looked up at him. "But I know if I tell him, he'll worry about me when he ought to be thinking of his job." Tears welled up in her eyes. "I want him to come back to me."

"Yes of course we all want that," said the major quickly, "he's one of the best officers we have. I don't really understand what the problem is."

She studied the floor again. "I've been told—well, ordered, is more like it—not to have children. I was shot some years ago, and..." Her voice trailed off as, with horror, she felt her cheeks burn. What a thing to be discussing with a man she'd never met until three minutes ago. But she was desperate for advice. "Yesterday I learned that I'm to have a child."

"Are you asking me if you should tell your husband about the child?"

"I thought you would have a better idea of what he's going into. If it's very dangerous, if he needs to give all his attention to the mission, then I don't want him to be distracted worrying about me. Which he would, because of my having been shot, and ordered not to have children, and all."

"Well, surely, that closes the issue, if you've been ordered not to bear children."

"Sir." The look on her face gave him his first clue as to the type of person he was dealing with. "I can't do that. I did my best to prevent it, but now that it's here, I can't destroy it. I couldn't."

Before she knew what he was about, he reached over, slipped his index finger under her collar and caught at the thin gold chain he had glimpsed as she seated herself. The small gold cross dangling from it only confirmed his suspicions.

"Hasn't your husband told you?" he admonished, frowning. "This is illegal."

"It doesn't come off. I've had it since I was christened as a baby. I'd have to break the chain to get it off, and it's all I have," her eyes filled with tears, "of my father or his family."

He realized, from her scarlet cheeks, that she understood perfectly well the indefensibility of her position. Sergei had doubtless explained it to her many times. She knew that she was defying not only her husband, but also the social mores of an entire Communist nation. He nodded and dropped the chain back inside her blouse.

"I'll have a word with your husband, Anna Andreyevna. We don't leave the families of our officers to fend for themselves, and I can reassure him that while he's gone, the Service will keep an eye on you." He smiled at her.

"About your child," he continued, "why don't you wait to tell him? He's an intelligent young man, perhaps he can wrap up this whole case in a few weeks or months and come back to you before you've progressed too far. Then he won't have been fretting about you while he's supposed to have been working." He paused. "And if he's down there longer than we hope, we'll get word to him.

"But the main thing for you," he patted her hand, "is to take very good care of yourself and our future Chekist. Don't take any risks you oughtn't, and above all," he wagged a finger at her, "above all, don't worry about your husband. He's very good at his job. You of all people should know that."

By this time she had grown somewhat accustomed to the blatant sexism of Russian men in general and KGB officers in particular, and she smiled her prettiest smile with only an inner wince. "Yes, Sir," she said, "I'll try."

"Don't just try. Do it. It isn't wise to disagree with the KGB, you know." At that her head jerked up. But the twinkle in his narrow grey eyes was unmistakable, and she found herself smiling back as she said her goodbyes.

"Come in," called Sergei in answer to the knock on his door, and hastily shuffled papers into a file folder. The door opened, a head appeared. "I came to offer some advice."

"Major Pop—I mean, Comrade Colonel, Sir, come in!" Sergei stood with alacrity to greet his former chief. Popov strolled in, knocked his elbow against the door to close it and helped himself to a seat. "What can I do for you, Sir?" asked Sergei as he resumed his own seat.

Popov raised his eyebrows. "You could," he drawled, "put in for a transfer to my division."

Sergei frowned. "But I was just transferred here." Then he grinned. "Don't tell me my replacement is giving you problems already."

Popov glowered at his crossed arms. "Frankly, he stinks. What in the name of goodness do they graduate from the Academy nowadays? You may have been naïve, but naïveté is curable. And you at least had something remotely resembling brains. However." He sighed. "I won't waste your time, I know you'll be wanting to get home. I, ah, heard about your latest assignment. Came by to offer my good wishes for success."

"Thank you, Sir." Sergei wondered if he would ever be able to gauge Popov with any degree of accuracy.

"Also, as I said, to offer some advice. Namely, don't trust anyone. Including anyone on the team you're taking with you. The only person you can trust absolutely is an absolutely dead one."

Taken aback as he was, it took Sergei a minute to reply. "Do you know something about my team that I should know?"

"No, no." Popov held up a hand and got to his feet. "I know the men you've picked, and they all have excellent records. No, I suppose I've been thinking a whole lot of nonsense about the British and the Khyber Pass and Jezail bullets and Gunga Din. Afghanistan is...well...just watch yourself out there, Makarov, that's all."

"I plan to, Sir."

Popov rubbed his nose. "I'll look in on your wife, if you like."

"I appreciate that, Sir. I'll worry about her a lot less if you do, Sir."

And that, thought Popov, aghast, is because you'd tell the wolf in the forest where your own grandmother lived. Yet, curiously enough, Sergei's misplaced trust in him had conferred upon him a responsibility he knew he would fulfill. To cover his confusion, he flared his nostrils and said, "Still stuck on her?"

"Yes, Sir." Sergei blushed. Popov shook his head.

"I want you to know you never had me fooled for an instant while you and she were playing house in the Arbat." Then he relented. "You're still living in that neighborhood, aren't you?"

"Yes, Sir, Pastrycook Lane. We were living with my old aunt after our marriage, and when she died, we were sitting tenants, so we were allowed to stay on. I think the Government was just as glad not to have to move out all that antique furniture."

Popov burst out laughing. "Likely enough! Well, anyway, good luck. Remember what I've said."

"Thank you, Sir, I shall."

Popov nodded twice, turned on his heel and walked to the door. With his hand on the latch, he turned back. "Just to cover all the bases," he said softly, crossed the room again and put his hands on Sergei's shoulders. Their eyes locked. After a few minutes, Popov squeezed both shoulders hard, nodded abruptly and left. With a tightness in his throat, Sergei recognized the gesture that over sixty years of communism had never yet eradicated: the silent blessing conferred upon one about to embark on a long journey. Some said the blessing of God was being prayed for in that silent time; Sergei couldn't believe that of Popov, confirmed atheist and devout believer in the Office of Crude Bandits that he was.

But like everyone else in the KGB, he was above all else Russian. It was the only explanation for his out-of-character observance of that old custom.

"Sergei?"

After a moment, Anne looked at her husband. "Sergei?" she said again.

Still no answer.

"Ser-gei."

He started. "Dushinka?"

"What's the matter?"

He smiled and shook his head. "Nichevo."

"Come on, Sergei. When you start answering me in Russian, I know something's cooking with you. Now tell me what it is, and don't answer 'nothing'."

Sergei closed his eyes and a long spasm shook him. For the first time, Anne allowed her fears to surface. She crossed the room and knelt at his feet. "Hey," she said softly, and looked up at him.

At that he smiled, quirked his eyebrows up and cupped her chin in his hand. "Dushinka. Tell me something."

"Besides how much I love you?"

He smiled. "Besides how much you love me. Tell me. I know you not only as my wife, but as a woman of great intelligence and a—well, if not a colleague," he smiled wryly, "at least as a fellow professional law-enforcement whose abilities are worthy of the highest respect. But one thing I do not understand. How, with all of your intelligence, can you believe in the existence of a God? There is no rational explanation for the existence of any Supreme Being. You can't prove He exists, any more than I can prove He doesn't. So how is it that you still believe?"

He saw by the look on her face that he had stumped her, and his stomach sank. In his most secret self, he had been hoping with all his soul that she would be able to send him into battle with something more than Lenin, more than Marx, more even than the faith that had sustained his fathers: What was in the past wasn't good enough for the future that awaited him.

Then her face cleared. "How can you believe in the existence of Love?"

"That," he said, and disappointment made his voice sharp, "is a refusal to answer my question."

"No, it isn't," she said calmly. "It's true. There's nothing so unscientific as love. They've been trying to define it for years. You can pin it down in terms of hormones, in terms of chemistry, in terms of neurological pathways or sociological similarities or differences, but when it comes down to brass tacks, how can you actually say what brings two people together? You and me, for instance? The closest I can come to defining what I see in you is that you make Me possible. And I'm blessed if I can figure out what you see in me. But what we're talking about is—soul chemistry. Whatever it is that draws our two souls together. And when you're talking about Soul, something you can't define in any purely material terms, you're talking about God. As I said to you once before," and Sergei caught his breath, knowing what she was about to say, "you can't prove He doesn't exist any more than I can prove He does. But I think I have more proof on my side. Because I have you."

The question still haunted Sergei as, three days later, he turned and stared out of the window of the Aeroflot jet for a last look at his familiar world.

His father was in a high-level briefing, his mother was teaching, Zoya was parading around Moscow like a good Intourist guide, causing who knew what mischief with her part-time spying activities. Popov and Kuryagin were both deep in their respective investigations. He hadn't really expected a send-off committee. Nevertheless, he felt unaccountably lonely. He sighed, and blinked—then blinked again, and stared hard out of the window.

No, he hadn't been mistaken. There she stood, in a white long-sleeved blouse and a navy-blue wool skirt that his mother had just made for her, waving as though no other were on that plane, as though there were no terminal filled with travellers staring at her as they hurried past.

She can't possibly see me, he thought. She shouldn't have come. "Annie, my Annochka," he whispered, unaware that he was grinning from ear to ear. "I promise you, dushinka. I'll be back."

With that, the plane's engines roared as the machine picked up speed. In seconds, he was airborne. He swallowed the fear in his stomach, and concentrated instead on the face whose image he carried in his most secret heart, the face of his wife.

I'll be back, my Annochka, he said to himself. I promise you, I'll be back.

1 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Oh nooooooooo !
More , Meg, please !

You can`t leave me in suspense like this !

Poor Anne and Sergei. First the babies and then Afghanistan ?
Dear Lord.

One of our relatives was in the British armed forces and he served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. We were worried sick about him, so this strikes very close to home. And I have had a miscarriage too, but at least that was between DD1 and Dd2, so I did still have a living child as well as one waiting for me in the afterlife...

March 26, 2007 5:35 AM