Duel of Assassins (15 page)

The month of June, 1980, saw the graduation of Ryazan’s
officer class; but Taras and a select group of his third-year mates, instead of
being sent home for a month’s holiday, were kept in barracks. Rumors sprang up
and spread everywhere, like flames across the summer grasslands—and every one
involved Afghanistan. They would be shipping out at once, or within a week at
most; they were headed for the southern deserts, to organize and arm Baluchi
tribesmen and encourage them to secede from Pakistan; they would be air-dropped
into rebel strongholds high in the Hindu Kush; survivors would be rotated back
every few weeks to Ryazan to complete their coursework; others were convinced that
the battlefield was to be their classroom for the final year, and that
commissions would be awarded in the field, based on combat performance. But
whatever the ramifications, that they were for Afghanistan, none doubted.

The need seemed plain enough. After the initial successes of
the Karmal coup and the shock invasion of Kabul, matters had not gone well.
Unlike Hungary in ’56 or Czechoslovakia in ’68, the operation was not turning
out to be a swift surgical strike. The Red Army was rapidly becoming enmeshed
in full-scale guerrilla war, with its “limited military contingent” already
upwards of a hundred thousand men and still growing—the largest Soviet combat
commitment since the defeat of the
Wehrmacht.

Some of this had been necessitated by wholesale defections
on the part of the new Afghan Army. Taras and his fellow cadets heard tales of
whole battalions going over to the guerrillas—and taking their rockets and
mortars and machine guns with them. Karmal’s army was now estimated to have
lost at least half its initial strength of eighty thousand.

Even more alarming were stories of desertions and defections
among Soviet Muslim troops—Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Turkmens—who constituted
several reserve divisions of Sokolov’s 40th Army. The high command was apparently
replacing these unreliable Central Asians as rapidly as possible with
Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians—or Balts.

Taras, with the dark hair and southern complexion from his
Georgian mother, had even come in for some good-natured kidding on this score
from fellow
kursanti
.

One barracks prankster went so far as to present him with a
gift-wrapped, dog-eared Koran. Inside, on the flyleaf, had been scrawled some
Arabic letters and a single line of Russian: “This Most Holy Book Property of
Taraz al-Arenskeem.”

Taras laughed heartily, then manhandled the humorist into
the adjoining latrine, where he was dangled upside-down and head first into a
roaring, flushing toilet—and held there until Taras judged the screams of
contrition convincingly sincere and any would-be imitators sufficiently
deterred.

In late June, after two weeks of rampant speculation, their
orders finally came through—and left them dumbfounded.

Taras and his eager mates would not be heading east to hunt
bandits under the scorching sun of Afghanistan. Their desti-nation was farther,
and even more remote. They were going all the way up to the Arctic Ocean off
the northeastern coast of Siberia for two weeks of simulated combat on icebound
Wrangel Island.

In the midst of his keen frustration, Taras was just able to
appreciate a certain bleak irony in the matter. Whatever epithets Dokuchayev
had heaped on him, Taras concluded, had all been abundantly justified by
events. After turning his back on the chance of being in the Summer Olympics, here
he was—on the eve of that glorious event, which all the world would be
watching—getting ready to play winter war games, for an Arctic audience of
ferrets and foxes.

Had he, perhaps, chosen unwisely?

Yet Taras was to enjoy those two weeks scrambling over
barren granite and frozen tundra with his ghostly mates in their white
camouflage. They had the godforsaken place to themselves—unless you counted a
few Arctic mammals and seabirds, a surprising number of ducks and geese, and
somewhere on the eighteen-hundred square miles of desolation a tiny colony of
Chukchi tribesmen, deposited there by the Soviet government to establish
ownership.

The
Spetsnaz
cadets were broken into teams, sent
against one another on raids and ambushes; timed in marathon land-navigation
exercises whose coordinates took them up and down over the island’s mountainous
interior—and deliberately beyond the limits of physical exhaustion.

Especially did Taras exult in the wild freedom of the
long-range survival courses, which afforded total escape from the constraints
of barracks life. On his own, with only map, compass and survival gear, he felt
the emergence of a more instinctive self from deep within, a self-reliant being
who never came forth under officer scrutiny or coercion. It was, Taras thought,
the same primitive persona who often possessed him in saber duels, a creature
violently and voraciously alive, with atavistic impulses that Taras feared ever
to fully unleash. But he enjoyed running and hunting with this other man, stride
for stride and hour after hour.

During their second week Wrangel was invaded by an entire
Spetsnaz
brigade. Taras and his companions watched in fasci-nation as five Il-76
transports took turns coming in low over the drop zone, from its four doors
each extruding a hundred and twenty “little falcons” in its wake, turning the
gray skies white with blossoming airfoil canopies. Within ten minutes all six
hundred men had landed and rolled on the hard permafrost and stood ready as the
final Il-76 came in with their supply drop—BMD air-portable combat vehicles,
assault guns and field howitzers—strapped to a dozen padded cargo pallets
suspended from parachute clusters and cushioned, just before impact, by
retro-rockets. In twenty minutes the drop zone was cleared and the brigade
fully operational.

The next morning Taras was delighted to discover a familiar
face among the new arrivals in camp when Marcus Jolly slapped him on the back
and spun him around. Marcus was a senior sergeant now, with barely enough time
to exchange a greeting. He had a full schedule that day, running his privates
through what he called
Spetsnaz
“finishing school.”

Taras caught up to his old friend the following afternoon.
Marcus was standing on a windscoured ridge of Berry Peak, timing his charges at
the midpoint of a twenty-five-kilometer run—a run made all the more challenging
by the crippling thirty kilos of gear each man carried on his back.

“I thought they needed you in Afghanistan, Cowboy. No wonder
the war isn’t over.”

“Yeah, I thought so, too, Cossack. I got as far as Termez,
right across the fucking river, when the imperial high wizards of the Defense
Ministry changed their collective mind. Sent me and my mates all the way back
to Kirovograd.” The tactical decision, Marcus said, was to phase out special
forces, which had been used so effectively in the coup, and replace them with
conventional troops. While at Termez, Marcus had watched construction begin on
a mammoth bridge over the Amu Darya, to accommodate tanks and motorized infantry.

“So it’s back to playing games,” he summed up.

“Well, at least they’re dangerous games,” Taras said, and
detailed for Marcus some of the mock raids they’d conducted the previous week.

“Nursery school,” Marcus said. He told of going on
nonsimulated training assaults, traversing actual minefields to attack
fortified border installations manned by KGB troops. “They were shooting real
bullets at us, Cossack, and nobody warned them it was all in fun.”

Taras laughed and shook his head. “You win again, Cowboy.

Reminds me of your crazy fencing teacher, what’s his name?”

“Balavadze?”

“That’s the guy, the one who advocates saber practice
without a mask.
Touché!”

A week later, the two friends made their farewells on
the     frozen airstrip. Taras was to return to Ryazan, Marcus to Kirovograd.

“One of these days we’ll get there, Cowboy, you and me,”
Taras said. “We’ll meet somewhere up in the Khyber Pass, wearing turbans and
riding camels.”

“Sounds just like us, doesn’t it? Except if you get your
commission, I’ll have to obey your fucking orders.”

And they laughed, and parted.

Taras was back in time to watch the Olympics on television.
Krovopuskov, who had won the gold medal in individual saber at Montreal,
repeated handily in Moscow; and the Soviet saber team, with three of the four
men who had won at Montreal, did likewise. Taras permitted himself no regrets,
but could not altogether stifle the thought that, had he not sabotaged his
chances, he might have displaced one of the team medalists.

The Games themselves, which of course the Soviets won, were
hailed as a monumental triumph in the national press and on TV. But to Taras
and his fellow cadets the absence of the Americans tarnished the luster
somewhat, especially in such sports as basketball, boxing, swimming and track
and field.

This U.S. boycott over events in Afghanistan had, of course,
no effect on Soviet policy. Throughout the rest of 1981 Taras read report after
official report that the Kabul regime was steadily pacifying the countryside,
and that the counter-revolutionary bandits, lacking all popular support, were
propped up only by Pakistani and Israeli mercenaries—and, naturally, CIA
agents.

The word reaching Ryazan from returning officers and noncoms
was, however, quite different. The Afghan Army was hopeless, Taras was told
again and again, the Soviets would have to do all the fighting themselves;
conventional tactics, with mixed tank-infantry columns moving into the
foothills and high valleys, were proving ineffective—and often
disastrous—against the hit-and-run ambushes of the
mujahideen
guerrillas. Something had to be done, and damn fast.

One decision, long overdue, was a switch from motorized
infantry to more airmobile operations—using armed helicopters and airborne
assault units to patrol for the
mujahideen
and attack their mountain
strongholds. And this meant fewer infantry and mechanized units and more
special forces. The word came to Ryazan that two brigades of
Spetsnaz
were to be sent at once to Afghanistan, based at Jalalabad in the east and
Lashkar Gah in the south. And Marcus was among those brigades, Taras was
delighted to read several weeks later in the Cowboy’s own hand, in a note
hand-carried from Kabul.

“Visit the exotic east,” Marcus had scrawled on the back of
a crude propaganda cartoon torn from the
Kabul New Times
. It showed a
sinister
mujahid
about to shoot two praying
mullahs
in the back
with a pistol emblazoned with a U.S. dollar sign. “Don’t worry, Cossack. I
promise to go easy on these filthy beggars till you get here.”

Taras thought he would be joining his friend fairly soon.
With four thousand
Spetsnaz
out of a total of only twenty-five thousand
now involved directly in the war, the odds were good of the net dragging him
in—perhaps as soon as he received his commission the following summer.

And in June of 1982 many graduates of Ryazan Higher Airborne
Academy were shipped straight to Afghanistan, especially those who, like Taras,
had been earmarked by the Special Faculty for careers in
Spetsnaz
. But
“freshly baked” Lieutenant Arensky was somehow not among these.

Instead, two weeks later, wearing brand-new Hungarian shoes
and a custom-made suit from a Moscow
atelye
, Taras was standing in the
arrivals lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport, looking for a man with a sign.
Once found, he followed the man outside to a curbside Austin and was driven an
hour through sheeting rain and on the wrong side of the road to the Soviet
Embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens. Here, sharing a smoky basement cubbyhole
with two other GRU officers, he was to spend the next ten months nominally as
an attaché—and actually as a junior intelligence officer.

It didn’t take him long to decide that he preferred his new
posting to Afghanistan, even with the constant drizzle. He was intrigued by his
first assignment—investigating the activities of supposedly retired SAS
officers, several of whom were suspected of working closely with America’s
Delta Force in preparing a commando mission to rescue the U.S. Embassy hostages
held in Tehran.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, Taras liked the West. It
was      a totally different world, one he found vastly stimulating, though
bewildering. Even after several months he experienced daily shock at seeing so
much random activity—so many cars, colors, signs, fashions, choices; so many
things to buy and eat and wear and look at. Not that all these choices were
available to him necessarily; he could merely window-shop the West, not really
partake of it. His own life was carefully sequestered within the walled embassy
compound—and carefully surveilled when he left it. Nevertheless, Taras thought
wryly, he had undoubtedly been infected, at least mildly, by what one Party
dialectician had branded
Veshchism
, or “Thingism”—the virulent fungus of
Western consumerism.

If so, he was certainly not alone. Most of the men and women
of the Soviet mission managed to contrive frequent shopping forays down into
Knightsbridge or along Oxford Street, and some of the minister counselors and
first secretaries boasted hand-tailored suits from Bond Street or Savile Row,
and their wives couture outfits from Harrods or Liberty.

But it wasn’t necessarily glitter and glamor that fascinated
Taras about the city and its people. He enjoyed riding the Tube, noisy and
filthy compared to Moscow’s showpiece Metro and almost as crowded, with
commuters every bit as ethnically colorful and shabbily dressed, but far more
animated. He liked eavesdropping in the midst of this human swarm, and
attempting to decode the babel of dialects—public school, cockney, Caribbean,
Midlands, Home Counties, Scots, Indian, Pakistani and heaven only knew what
else. After a few weeks, having drastically updated his slang, he discovered he
could converse with nearly everybody, after some fashion. He particularly
enjoyed engaging in the prolonged civilities and courtesies that might
accompany the simple purchase of a bar of chocolate or roll of film. “How are
you, dear? Is that all you’ll be wanting, then? That’s right, 50p for you,
dear.” But then, why shouldn’t he enjoy this? His linguistic expertise was English,
after all, not Pushtu or Dari-Persian, the principal languages of Afghanistan.
London was a logical posting.

And when he got an evening free, he liked strolling with the
tourist swarms between Piccadilly and Leicester Square, through the neon gauntlet
of movies and discotheques, video arcades and fast-food emporiums, dining on
takeaway as he walked—
döner
kebab
or
bratwurst
on a bun,
Scotch egg or Cornish pasty.

To maintain his fitness, he jogged every morning through
Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, past the Serpentine, enjoying the equestrians
cantering along the bridal paths and the millrace of black cabs swirling around
Hyde Park Corner and charging up Park Lane. To keep his hand in, he formed a
fencing club and by the end of summer was conducting weekly lessons in foil in
the embassy gymnasium.

In December he was promoted to captain and appeared on the
1983 diplomatic list as an assistant military attaché. He had definitely
adjusted his career sights when, in early April 1983, the KGB deputy
rezident
,
Colonel Oleg Karamzin, called him into his plush fourth-floor corner office and
gave him a generous shot of vodka along with the startling news that his
request for transfer to Kabul had finally been approved. He should be ready to
leave tomorrow.

Karamzin hoisted his glass. “To your health, Captain!”