Man on Ice: Russia vs the USA - in Alaska

SIX

Admiral Alexander Vitruk secured his hat, earflaps down, and encased his face in a sealskin and wool scarf. The helicopter door opened, and he jumped to the ground into a strong wind that howled across the small military base on the island of Ratmonova that the Americans called Big Diomede. A rectangle of low-rise buildings dating back to the 1940s stood in a tiny natural harbor protected by high granite cliffs. There was no runway for fixed-wing aircraft, just a concrete helipad ringed by lights which were piercingly visible then darkened by a swirling blizzard that blinded the eyes and turned the air so cold a man could get frostbite in seconds.

He waved thanks to the pilots and clapped the shoulder of the waiting Colonel Ruslan Yumatov. The wind’s roar made conversation impossible. Yumatov pointed through the blizzard towards the main base building whose front double doors were lit by two overhead lamps. There was urgency in the young colonel’s expression. They stepped into the warmth, stamping snow off their boots.

‘It’s a go, sir,’ Yumatov said, shaking his hat and scarf. ‘You asked I didn’t contact you while airborne. We have one medical M-8 on the island.’

‘With paramedics?’

‘And a midwife and a doctor. We had intercepts on their phones and radios. A native girl, aged fifteen. Akna Ondola. Pregnant. Her life is in danger. Two M-8s and four KA-52s are airborne at the border, waiting your orders.’

The KA-52s were Russia’s most advanced attack helicopters and the M-8 a workhorse troop carrier. Three, in relay, would deliver seventy-two men to the island in a few minutes. Vitruk had flown two thousand miles from his headquarters in Khabarovsk to the closest airbase at Egvekinot and from there by helicopter to the island. Its small helicopter base had never been designed for such activity. More than fifty years old, the buildings celebrated Stalinist military pragmatism, weather-beaten concrete blocks, overheated inside, with a smell of polish and disinfectant and ceilings stained dirty brown by decades of cigarette smoke. Flickering fluorescent lighting strained the eyes. Given time, Vitruk could have pulled it all down and rebuilt. Instead, he had imported a military mobile base with quarters for the extra troops, hangars for helicopters, and a field hospital with a sanitized operating theater.

The old mess room to his left was now the command and control center, facing north-west to the Russian mainland and not across the border. To his right was the base’s main reception room, underused, its design unchanged from Soviet times, with a faded portrait of Nikita Khrushchev on the wall. Vitruk stepped in, hung up his coat, and poured coffee from a table urn, one for him and one for his colonel.

‘Well done, Colonel,’ he said, handing Yumatov the cup. ‘Fast and good work.’

There was a moment of quiet between them. Yumatov at six three was a good half-foot taller than his commanding officer, wiry with a thin sharp face and the physique of a long-distance runner. Vitruk was short for a soldier, stumpy with wide shoulders and hard, unsettled features. Yumatov, not yet forty, had been named as among the most talented officers of his generation. His home, wife, and two children were at the other end of Russia in St Petersburg, and he had to be cautious because he was still building the foundations of his career. Vitruk, on the other hand, at fifty-eight, was divorced and his only daughter had died many years ago. Without family, he craved risk and high stakes and he needed a younger, bright officer like Yumatov at his side against whom he could test his ideas.

Even though Vitruk was in command, they knew that if this operation went wrong they would both be finished, while success would make them national heroes and deliver Vitruk to the Kremlin. Vitruk detected a hesitancy as Yumatov turned his gaze away. ‘Are you with me? Say it now, Ruslan, and leave without consequence. Stay and you will be glued to me and follow my every order or I will gun you down with my own pistol. Is that understood?’

The day after the American presidential election, Vitruk had flown to Moscow to meet President Viktor Lagutov. Thoughtful, balanced, fair, uninterested in money, Lagutov was not the decisive and over-reaching figure Vladimir Putin had been. He was a Putin antidote, delivered by the Moscow establishment to give Russia a period of calm. Lagutov knew he wouldn’t last. Nor did he want to. He was Russia’s breathing space until it craved another strongman.

Lagutov was also Vitruk’s patron, and Vitruk his protégé. Lagutov had spotted Vitruk’s talent when he gave an economics lecture at a college in Khabarovsk, the military city in the region Vitruk now commanded. Vitruk was a Siberian peasant from a broken family. His father was riddled with drink, and the military became his lifeblood. Lagutov later told him that he had identified three qualities — high intelligence, determination, and ruthlessness. But that was a quarter-century ago, and there would always be a moment in the protégé—patron relationship when power shifted.

Lagutov could have met him in the yellow triangular Senate Building, the Russian President’s everyday office, or, worse, the drab Building Fourteen from where the faction-ridden administration ran its monopoly on power. But no — Vitruk was led to the high-domed Vladimirsky Hall in the Kremlin’s Grand Palace, whose opulence underlined Russia’s sophistication and its sense of destiny. In the late tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir I had unified a weak Russia with Orthodox Christianity and expanded and secured its borders. Vitruk was escorted along the deep maroon carpet of the palatial hall while above him, written into the stucco patterns of the magnificent dome, was the insignia that was fitting to his plan. Benefit. Honor. Glory. Dignified and tasteful, with its unfolding sense of space, its marble, arches, and columns, this hall was the nucleus of the whole of Russia. It was a fitting venue for the meeting.

From behind an elegant wooden desk where dignitaries were received and treaties were signed, his mentor, the President of the Russian Federation, got to his feet to greet him. Huge crow’s claws spread from Lagutov’s sharp blue eyes. His lined face was framed with a head of thick gray hair. He was not a tall man, nor physically strong. But he was confident and casual. His dark suit jacket hung on the back of his chair. He wore a light-blue shirt with no tie, a relaxed leader in a lavish setting.

‘Ah! Admiral!’ Lagutov’s voice bounced around the vast room. ‘Thank you for coming so far. Your idea, this idea you sent me, will it work?’

‘Yes, sir. It will.’ Vitruk spoke softly. The glow of lamps on the huge chandelier of gilded bronze offset the night darkness that was visible through the skylight. Lagutov indicated that Vitruk should take a seat to the side of the desk.

‘I like it. I respect your impatience,’ he said, as they both sat down. ‘But tell me, Alex: After Larisa, have you found anybody. Do you have family?’

‘Russia is my family, sir,’ he said. ‘That has not changed since the day we met.’ But the question took Vitruk by surprise. It was more than twenty years since, tanked up with vodka, he had driven a snowmobile into a tree. He was thrown clear onto soft snow. His eight-year-old daughter, Larisa, was crushed and killed. Katerina, his wife, never uttered another word to him. Vitruk cast himself into Russia’s wars, aimlessly at first, until Lagutov had offered him a lifeline.

‘All those years ago,’ said Lagutov, ‘when I saw you, restless and angry, at that dreadful military college, I knew you were special. Fearless. Intelligent. Nothing to lose. Russia’s greatness has been forged on such qualities and war has tutored you well. I ask you now about Larisa because such a mission needs motivation that cannot be personal, and I know how badly you took the loss.’

‘My motivation is only for the Motherland, sir.’ Coiled inside, Vitruk spoke with assured calm.

‘Then convince me, Alex. I need to see in your eyes planning, not revenge, pragmatism, not hatred.’

‘We have an opportunity that will not arise for eight, possibly twelve or sixteen years. The antagonism between the American President and his successor has created a leadership vacuum of historical proportions.’

‘An opportunity for what exactly? We need America. Even if we could weaken it, what would that achieve? And this island? What is to be gained from taking it?’

‘It will force the Americans to reassess Russia. Under the Tsars we were savagely misruled. Under communism, America contained us. After communism, it exploited us and turned us into a Mafia state. Under Putin, it made us its enemy again. Russia has never been free to grow and live in the world with dignity.’

‘And how will raising our flag on an unknown American island change this?’

‘The Stars and Stripes has flown illegally in so many countries, sir. It is a symbol of oppression and war. Should a hostile foreign flag now fly over America territory, the world will applaud us. It will show American weakness and Russian courage. For too long, we have used the buffer of Europe as an excuse not to confront. This time we will break that hallowed border between America and Russia and begin to write a new world order.’

Lagutov was quiet for a long moment. Aware that many in Moscow wished him ill, Vitruk wondered if he had said too much. His enemies saw him as a Siberian peasant boy who had risen way above his station. But Stalin had done just that, and if he, the Georgian son of a cobbler and a housemaid, could make it to the top, so could Alexander Vitruk, the son of a loyal communist engineer whose roads and bridges had forged Russia’s Far East. That was until his father became too drunk to build them and found solace in the beds of Eskimo women, just as his grandfather had before him. Through the contours of his low forehead and slight cheekbones Vitruk thought he might even be carrying native Eskimo blood.

He was living by a promise made to his late mother when he was ten years old and his father’s vodka-poisoned body was dumped on the snow-covered doorstep of their miserable apartment block in the Chukotka capital of Anadyr. Eskimos had found him as a frozen corpse in the forest. They wrapped his body in a bearskin to allow dignity, and delivered it by dog sled.

The Eskimos rang the apartment-block bell and rolled the corpse out of the bearskin, which they took back. His mother saw the body from the window and screamed. She tore a blanket from her bed, grabbed his hand, and they ran down to the street. She covered the body and held her son tight. ‘Don’t die like this, Alex. Please. Don’t be like he was. Ever. Promise me.’ They shivered together in the cold, warming each other.

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘Be a big man, when you grow up, the biggest in the world.’

‘I will. I promise.’

Vitruk had shed no tears, nor did his mother. His father left her with three children and a paltry pension. But Viktor had honored his pledge. He had smashed through ceilings and was now a few steps away from being anointed President of the Russian Federation. He didn’t intend to lose the moment. Fogged in fast cars, yachts, and champagne, the Moscow fools had no concept that the future lay in the Far East, the Pacific and Asia. But Lagutov did and that was why Vitruk was with him now.

‘How will it work, Alex, with this island?’ said Lagutov.

‘The island is vulnerable, sir. For the Americans to have allowed it to remain so was strategic madness. They could have requisitioned it, resettled the native villagers, and set up defenses like we did with Ratmonova. They have been arrogant. Some eighty Eskimos live there. The weather often cuts them off from the mainland. We monitor their radios and cellphones. The health of the islanders is not good. They have problems with narcotics, domestic abuse—’

‘Which we have, too.’

‘My plan is that the next time they make an emergency call for help and their helicopters cannot get to them we go, because we can get there in a matter of minutes.’

Lagutov eyed Vitruk with the skepticism of an academic. ‘I don’t understand. You go on a medical mission and raise our national flag?’

‘Yes. We treat the patient either there or at a field hospital on Ratmonova. We also take the opportunity to offer the islanders health checks. We know from our own Eskimos that their health is not good — bad diet, diabetes, heart and dental disease, that sort of thing. We accuse the Americans of neglecting their own citizens and we take control of the island on humanitarian grounds.’

‘Which they will reject.’

‘President Holland does not come to office for more than two months. After that he will take more months to settle. America will be at its weakest. Holland will have to decide how to handle it. He will bluster. But will he risk war over this unknown island?’

‘And Russia? What do I say when the American President calls me?’

‘You have the finest analytical mind of anyone I know, sir, and you will judge. I will open the door for Russia and you can support me or you can abandon me as a rogue officer. I will follow your command.’

Lagutov took off his spectacles and gave Vitruk a genial look. ‘I am merely a technocrat, an economics professor keeping the seat warm for my protégé. You are my muscle, Alex. You are what our country needs. If you fail, of course, Russia will destroy you, but I will do all within my declining power to help you succeed.’

And it was then, as Vitruk was expressing his thanks, that Lagutov surprised him. Through a doorway to the left came a beast of a political figure whom Vitruk knew only from his compelling appearances on television and whom he detested because of his sycophantic pandering to the West. Sergey Grizlov, the elegantly tall Chairman of the State Duma, wearing an expensive dark pinstriped suit that would have been hand-tailored in London or Rome, walked briskly across carrying a black leather briefcase.

He greeted Lagutov with a huge smile, but without a word, then clasped Vitruk’s hand with both of his. ‘What a privilege to meet you, Admiral. Your reputation dwarfs us all. I have heard some of your plan and am very excited.’

‘We will need our elected representatives with us, Alex,’ said Lagutov with a self-effacing frown. ‘These are not the days of President Putin.’

‘If you can take and hold this island for twenty-four hours, I can deliver the voice of the Russian people,’ said Grizlov. ‘The current border was approved in 1990 by Gorbachev, an arrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union, a country which no longer exists. America forced it through when we were at our weakest. The new Russia has no agreed border with America, and the Duma has never ratified the Soviet one. I also have documents disputing the Alaska Purchase of 1867. Again, Russia was vulnerable and America exploited us.’ Grizlov unlocked the briefcase and spread documents on the table. ‘So, this is what I propose.’

As the three men worked through details, Vitruk understood how Lagutov was playing him. Grizlov’s political plan was as solid as Vitruk’s military one. For either one to win, both had to work together. If Vitruk took the presidency, it would be on the image of raising the Russian flag on American territory, of his rejection of the West and his vision of building a strong Russian friendship with a rising Asia. If Grizlov took it, it would be through his skill in political persuasion and his horse-trading with world leaders. But Russia would again be controlled again by the West, weakened, humiliated, and stripped of self-esteem.

Over the next two months, Vitruk had put measures in place to ensure that didn’t happen. Lagutov, his patron, Grizlov, his enemy, and Yumatov, his protégé, knew barely half of what he had planned. Only the winner could take the presidential throne. Sixty-seven days after that meeting, with a high-risk teenage pregnancy, both men got their chance.