The Bearpit

6

Protocol within the KGB is more strictly regimented and observed than it ever was in the court of the Tsars and the Kabul controller considered himself in an impossible position having the son of someone now a First Deputy dumped upon him. More so because there had been no instruction – not even discreet guidance – from Moscow how to treat the man, which there should have been. It left him exposed. Forced into creating his own guidelines, Georgi Solov had so far proceeded with caution, even supported by the courage imbued by vodka. A native of Askhabad, just across the border in Turkmeniya – where his parents had actually been practising Muslems – the narrow-faced, burnt-skinned Solov was fluent in three local dialects as well as Farsi, looked more Afghan than southern Russian and rightly considered himself a natural choice to head the rezidentura. Assigning this man, with his fair-haired, open-faced Western complexion, collar-and-tie-and-suit appearance (which he made no effort to modify) and complete lack of any language qualifications, made as much sense as delegating him to the moon. Probably less; on the moon he could have mingled more easily with the American astronauts. Without question it was an appointment about which to be suspicious. And careful. But at the same time not allowing the slightest indication of subservience, which might equally be an error. With that in mind, Solov actually thought of refusing the demand for an unscheduled meeting, insisting the man return for a later appointment. But there was the high-priority retribution business, so Solov decided a delay was an unnecessary reminder of his seniority. But with some regret.

Solov didn’t offer a chair and tried to open forcefully, intending the younger man to be intimidated by his appearing irritated. He said: ‘I certainly hope this is something of the utmost urgency and importance!’

‘I have just returned from the airport,’ announced Yuri, unimpressed. ‘Seen barrels and containers of gas and poison being unloaded from transporters.’ Two things were important: frightening the pompous fool and hinting he knew everything, which he almost did.

Impressions – uncertainties – swirled through Solov’s mind like sand in a storm. It was strictly forbidden for a junior KGB officer to go in or out of the rezidentura without stating his destination and reason in the logbook. Which Yuri Malik well knew. Yet the man was standing there almost proudly declaring a breach of regulations. Unworried by any thought of being disciplined then: an important consideration. At once there came to Solov another and maybe more important awareness. The Eyes-Only Moscow traffic had been strictly limited to himself and maybe five other people, although he supposed wider gossip was inevitable once the shipments started to arrive by air. But had the man known in advance, through some other channel? Could the damned man’s posting – the retribution proposal itself – be some sort of test, of loyalty or ability? Proceed cautiously, Solov thought; very cautiously. Trying for the protective barrier of the operating procedure within the intelligence section of the embassy, Solov said: ‘You made no entry of your movements this morning.’

‘If this operation goes ahead – if people are poisoned and gassed – you will end up in a gulag serving a sentence that will make the GRU imprisonment seem like a holiday,’ said Yuri. The outrage at the insubordination would come now if it were going to come at all.

Solov’s mental sandstorm raged on. Contemptuously dismissive of regulations now, not even bothering to respond. So the man was completely unworried. Not just unworried: sure enough of himself to threaten a superior officer with imprisonment. Unthinkable. Solov said: ‘How did you come into possession of classified information?’ The stilted formality weakened the demand and he recognized it.

So did Yuri, who thought the ploy of keeping him standing was juvenile. Further psychologically to pressure the other man, he pulled an available chair close to Solov’s desk and sat on it, leaning forward in an attitude of urgency. He said: ‘The GRU catastrophe was not the mujahideen ambush, the number of men and the amount of equipment we lost. It was the fact that the disaster – the apparent stupidity – was witnessed and broadcast in the West. The mujahideen know the value of such exposure. It will be impossible to disguise or hide the extent of the slaughter being planned: hundreds, thousands, will die. And they’ll smuggle cameras in again to record it and the Soviet Union will be pilloried again. But worse this time. Not just shown losing a battle. Shown like some sort of barbaric savages, killing women and children…’

Solov was visibly sweating, subservient though he’d determined not to be. He said: ‘They are the orders, from Moscow.’

‘From whom?’

‘Comrade Director Agayans.’

It was not a name Yuri knew but there was no reason why he should. Confident he controlled the meeting now, he said: ‘Initiated by Moscow?’

Solov isolated the danger in the question. ‘Oh yes,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Definitely from Moscow.’

Yuri decided it was necessary to frighten the other man further. Knowing the answer already, he said: ‘But there has been some liaison?’

‘Communication, yes,’ agreed Solov reluctantly.

‘So the inquiry will have evidence of your involvement, from your signed messages?’

‘What inquiry?’

‘Don’t you think there’ll be one?’ demanded Yuri, going back to answering a question with a question. ‘Can’t you honestly conceive this being anything but a debacle, resulting in a worse inquiry than last time? And punishment worse than last time?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Solov conceded. He’d abdicated almost completely, just wanting the conversation to continue, to hear what the other man had to say: to learn what the escape could be.

But Yuri was not prepared to abandon the pressure quite so soon. He said: ‘You didn’t query the order?’

Solov blinked at him. ‘One does not query Moscow. Not a Comrade Director.’

‘Never!’

‘Moscow is the authority: that is where the policy is determined and made.’

Yuri sat across the desk, studying the other man curiously as one might look at an exhibit in a laboratory. Was this a typical senior officer of the country’s intelligence organization: a conditioned animal unquestioningly and unprotestingly obeying, like Pavlov’s dogs? He said: ‘This must be protested. Stopped.’

‘How?’

A dullness seemed to settle over Solov. Exactly like a conditioned dog, Yuri thought. One reflection directly followed another, but less critically: there was some explanation for Solov’s apparently docile helplessness. The enshrined regulations, as restrictive as the straps on an experimental animal, strictly dictated a pyramid order of communication: a field office could never exchange messages with an authority higher than the department, division or section director controlling that field office. In this case someone named Agayans. Who had initiated the operation. And was unlikely to accept any challenge to it, at this late stage. Or ever, if Solov’s belief in the infallibility of Moscow orders were correct. Certainly it precluded the use of the normal cable channels because they were automatically routed to the Director’s secretariat, with no allowance whatsoever for variance. He said: ‘The rezidentura ships to Moscow in the diplomatic pouch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every night?’

‘Yes.’

Yuri sighed, hesitating. Precisely the sort of action his father had urged him to avoid, during those final, mutually irritated days – ‘ don’t invoke our relationship… regard it as something to make life more difficult than easier… think politically…’ The last part of the injunction stayed with Yuri. Politically was exactly how he was thinking: politically and beyond his father’s fragile eyrie. Time to shit or get off the pot. He said: ‘I would like to include something in tonight’s shipment.’

‘A personal package?’

Yuri no longer felt contempt for the man. If there were an emotion it was pity. He said: ‘Something addressed to my father…’ He paused again, deciding to offer the man a way out. He added: ‘Will you require it to be left unsealed, to be read?’

‘No!’ said Solov. The rejection burst out in his eagerness to dissociate himself from any more unknown and unimagined dangers. ‘Our part of the pouch has to be completed by five,’ advised Solov, helpfully. He’d debated enough; he wanted the meeting over, to think.

Yuri offered no explanation for what was a memorandum, not a letter. He presented it with absolutely correct formality, at the same time embarrassed that the phrasing were as if the person to whom he was communicating were not his father. Don’t invoke our relationship, he thought. Yuri’s arguments were so well formulated that it did not take him long and he was back at Solov’s office – again avoiding Ilena’s cubicle – with an hour to spare.

Solov accepted the sealed envelope and hurried it into the larger leather package in which other parcels and letters were already secured against unauthorized interception during the journey to Moscow. The interruption had allowed the rezident to recover some of his composure and he was anxious, too, to recover something of what he considered was the proper superior-to-subordinate relationship with the other man. He said: ‘There’d better be the right sort of reaction to this.’

There was.

Because of Vasili Malik’s rank it was delivered within minutes of its arrival in Moscow, ahead of all the other pouch contents, and because of the source – and obvious sender – Malik opened it at once, initially believing in worried irritation that his son was improperly using a diplomatic communication channel. Which, technically, he was. But that was the briefest of Malik’s thoughts, just as quickly dismissed as irrelevant. The assessments and implications of what was apparently being planned in Afghanistan – a country for which he was supposed to be responsible – crowded in upon him, appalling him. There was initial and instinctive fury, which he subdued, not wanting his reasoning clouded by emotion. And there was a lot to reason out, beyond the immediate crisis.

Malik personally issued and signed the cabled instructions to the Kabul rezidentura to abandon the gassing and poisoning and insisted that the rezident, Georgi Solov, acknowledge each section of the abandonment instructions to ensure that it was completely understood but more importantly to guarantee that no detail was overlooked. Still determined to be absolutely sure, Malik contacted – personally again – the Ministry of Defence and insisted upon duplicate orders being sent to the army, air force and spetsnaz units and acknowledged in the same manner as he demanded from the KGB personnel in Kabul.

The preliminary planning – air transporting the gas and poison, for instance – made it inevitable that the GRU were already aware of most, if not all of the planning. Malik accepted that their knowledge would become complete by his involving the military in the cancellation plans and that the back-biting gossip would begin within days. Just as he accepted that despite the supposed compartmenting within the KGB, details would spread throughout Dzerzhinsky Square. Which he welcomed, wanting as wide a circulation and awareness as possible that it had been his name upon the abort orders and no one else who made the calls to the Ministry of Defence.

Because even while he worked upon the cancellation, Malik was thinking beyond. This had not been a mistake, an aberration. This had been an attempted entrapment, something intended to destroy him within the first tentatively exploring weeks of his appointment.

The truth had to be investigated by official inquiry.

And such inquiries – certainly the sort of official inquiry Malik envisaged, damning indictments against the perpetrators, resounding praise for himself – needed documentary proof. Which had to be seized before there was any opportunity of it being destroyed or altered.

It was late afternoon before Malik was satisfied everything in Afghanistan was safely closed down. At once he issued a fresh set of instructions, the most urgent to the cipher room that all cable traffic between Moscow and Kabul for the preceding two months be sealed and delivered to him at once. He remembered his own memorandum well enough, of course. He recalled it from records and reread it carefully. Satisfied completely with its propriety, Malik put it to one side of his desk, ready to form part of the file he intended to create when the cables arrived.

What about witnesses? Yuri, he decided: the resounding praise deserved to be spread and nepotism wasn’t a charge here. And Agayans, of course: the most significant cog in the entire machination. Vital not to miscalculate here by one iota. Certainly necessary to avoid any personal interrogation, to appear as if he were interfering or prejudging: it had to be the inquiry which returned a verdict, not him. Wrong, equally, not to make some sort of investigatory move into what could – without Yuri’s intercession – have been an inconceivable catastrophe. Malik smiled to himself, at the ease of the resolve. It was an investigation. And on the prima-facie evidence there was sufficient for Agayans to be put under detention.

Vasili Dmitrevich Malik reached once more for the telephone that had been used so much that day. And made his only – but disastrous – mistake.

The security sections of all KGB directorates are run upon military guidelines – uniforms are invariably worn, for instance – with military requirements. One of those requirements is monthly attendance at a firearms installation to ensure that a necessary standard of marksmanship is maintained. The installation is established at Gofkovskoye Shosse and it was here that Malik located the newly promoted head of his directorate’s internal discipline, Colonel Lev Konstantinovich Panchenko.

In his own office, which was just one hundred yards from that in which Malik had minutes before completed his conversation, Victor Kazin went physically cold, actually shivering, at Panchenko’s immediate warning on the private, untraceable telephone.

‘I’m to arrest Agayans,’ reported the colonel. ‘Something to do with Afghanistan.’

Kazin swallowed against the sensation of paralysis, driving himself to think. ‘Do it,’ he said, hoarse-voiced. ‘But do it the way I’ve already ordered you to do it.’

‘I need more time!’

‘Do it!’

Georgi Solov still did not completely understand – in fact, he understood very little – but he was fairly sure that what could have created some personal difficulties for him had been avoided. He smiled across the desk in the Kabul rezidentura and said: ‘Everything cancelled.’

‘Of course,’ said Yuri curtly. He guessed Solov wanted to make it appear a joint intervention.

‘And you’re to return at once?’ smiled Solov, gesturing to the message that lay between them.

‘That’s what it says,’ agreed Yuri. He didn’t try to keep the impatience from his voice: he couldn’t think now why he’d earlier felt pity for the dance-to-any-tune idiot.

‘Seems as if we were right to intervene,’ attempted Solov, directly.

‘I was, wasn’t I?’ corrected Yuri. If there were to be credit given, Solov literally had to be weak in the head to imagine it would be shared.