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.