Duel of Assassins (9 page)

The other two men were suddenly standing in the doorway.
Taras had felt stunned. He began to stammer. Eva looked at him as though he had
transformed into a monster before her eyes. He got up and stumbled about,
apologizing over and over, to Kostya and Marcus, and endlessly to Eva, till she
finally yelled at him to stop. Then he had wept.

Incredibly, the party had gone on after that. There was more
singing, and at one point Eva even forgave him. But she stayed nearer to
Marcus, Taras saw, and had more to say even to the simpleton Kostya than she
did to Taras. When she began to drink again, so did Taras, seeking swift
oblivion.

The room became a swirling carousel, careening so fast he
could no longer attach names to faces or words to voices. Only at the very
last, as he slipped into insensibility, did a single, fleeting thought take
frightened flight across the fading sky of his mind: By being the first to pass
out, he was leaving his beloved alone with two strange men.

*

Taras awoke in a freezing room with a sledgehammering
headache—pain so blindingly intense it felt like a saber being thrust again and
again through his brain. When he tried to open his eyes, white light seared
into his sockets. He screamed and rolled over. He was aware now that he was
uncovered, freezing to death. Yet he could not bring himself to move again.

But there was something else, something even more terrible
than the pain. A nightmarish after-image, something glimpsed in that hideous,
flashing knifeblade of daylight, something etched retinally inside his mind. He
willed himself to roll over and squint through his eyelashes.

Across the frost-rimed pine floor, protruding from behind a
low wooden chest into a slush-stained rectangle of windowed sun, was a bare
foot. A small, plump foot with a lovely arch. He had held that foot in his lap
and caressed it as they lay tumbled and sandy together on an Odessa beach. Her
skin had shone peaches and cream in that southern sun; now in the cold winter
luminescence it was ghastly bluish-ivory. Taras felt something precious dying
inside his soul as he forced his eyes wide.

Eva’s body—naked, as he had only dreamed of it—lay sprawled
on the floorboards. Taras sprang up, ignoring his exploding headache, bellowing
her beloved name into winter silence. He took three lurching steps toward her
and fell to the floor, just close enough to reach and touch her cold breast.

Taras Arensky smelled the coffee before he opened his eyes.
The crewcut flight steward was standing in the aisle with a well-stocked
plastic tray.

“Breakfast, sir?”

“Thank you.” Taras lowered his tray table, trying to banish
the nightmare images that had surrounded him in half sleep.

Focused instead on scrambled eggs, sausage, croissant, fruit
cup, orange juice. Coffee steaming in a blue plastic cup. He wasn’t
particularly hungry, but knew he should eat something. His watch read
six-twenty, D.C. time. Sunlight streamed out the window.

Where had the night gone? He noticed that flatware, napkins,
placemat and cup bore the Air Force One monogram with presidential signature.
Great souvenirs; unfortunately Taras had no one to give them to.

Across the aisle Clyde Brunton was already attacking his
food; and in the row ahead of him the big Secret Service man, Usher, was
apparently having two breakfasts, on adjoining tray tables.

“Where are we?” Taras asked the steward.

“The southern tip of Greenland is just over the horizon. I
can get you an exact position, if you like. We’ll be serving lunch before we
land at Tempelhof, a snack before Moscow. Cheeseburger okay for lunch?”

“Fine, thanks.” Taras sampled a forkful of eggs, a swallow
of coffee. Outside and below, through the scarred Plexiglas, morning sun shot
through whipped cloudtops to confect a painfully dazzling, gilded fairyland. A
brand-new day, Mr. VIP, Taras told himself. Just relax and enjoy yourself, in
your plush, presidential cocoon twelve thousand meters over the Atlantic.

Eva’s gone. Don’t go wandering back there again, looking for
ghosts in the graveyard of memory.

But the undertow was too strong, the old wound aching anew
in his heart. He couldn’t abandon her again.

He put down the fork. The past was still there, the
nightmare still lurking around a corner of his subconscious. He closed his eyes
and was sucked back to that long ago frozen morning.

*

His darling had been strangled by fiendish hands that had
left a livid necklace in her flesh. She had been violated as well—Taras knew
it, though he wrenched his head aside from her blind stare, unable to look more
closely, especially
there
, between her thighs. Instead, he ripped a
woolen blanket off the trapper’s bed and, weeping and apologizing for its
filth, draped it reverently over her. Once more he dropped to the floor,
sobbing. He touched the blanket, then a sheaf of tawny hair that had escaped
the shroud into a shaft of sunlight. Unable to help himself, Taras drew the
long, silken strands through his fingers, then brought them to his lips. The
ripe fragrance seduced him, undiminished by death, whispering earthy promises
never to be fulfilled.

Taras staggered to his feet, but the name he bellowed now
was Kostya’s. The wild-eyed cretin had surely committed this atrocity, then
vanished with all their clothes. Even their winter underwear had been taken;
only Marcus’ black cowboy hat was left behind.

Across the cabin floor Marcus himself lay alternately
snoring and shivering in sleep, like Taras stripped to his shorts. Taras
touched his body; Marcus was alive, but cold.

Taras shook him violently, shouting his name.

It took several minutes to rouse Marcus from frozen stupor.
And when the American was finally able to unglaze his eyes and understand where
he was, and what lay lifeless under the blanket, he erupted in fury, grappling
Taras to the floor. “You bastard!” he screamed, spittle flying. “Why did you do
it?”

An elbow to the jaw stunned Marcus, and a vehement
explanation finally convinced him of Taras’ innocence. Marcus staggered up
again, still freezing, unable to hide his own tears when he lifted a corner of
the blanket. The next instant he was ready to charge naked into the snow and
wreak vengeance on the trapper. Instead, Taras pushed him toward the wall pegs
on which hung some of the murderer’s filthy garments. With near- frozen
fingers, the two fumbled into dirt-glazed corduroy pants, stained quilted coats
and
valenki
, felt boots, all several sizes too large.

Not only had the trapper made off with their clothes. Also
missing, they now discovered, were all their identity papers and Marcus’
moneybelt with nearly five hundred U.S. dollars—a potential fortune on the
Soviet black market.

Once bundled up, they had rushed outside. Eva’s Moskvich was
there, but buried under a mound of snow. It must have snowed steadily since the
trapper had made his escape, for no tracks marred the crystalline white carpet
surrounding the
izba
.

They had rushed about like madmen, seeking clues, their
valenki
postholing through the soft powder. They had slogged down to the banks of the
frozen Ussuri, then up to the main road without finding a trace of Kostya’s
flight. Exhausted, their breath plumes mingling in the air, they had stood,
staring both ways down the empty road. It began to snow again, wet flakes
spinning down out of a mother-of-pearl sky.

Then a bus came grinding through the vaporous clouds. Taras
flagged it down and talked the driver into dropping them off at militia
headquarters. There, still shivering despite the overheated vestibule, Taras
blurted out the grim tale to an already mournful-looking duty sergeant, who
could not seem to comprehend the need for immediate action.

It wasn’t until almost an hour later, when several
detectives returned noisily from a nearby cafeteria, that urgency was
manifested. Taras and Marcus were driven back to the scene of the crime in a
cream-colored van with a red militia stripe. The detective captain apologized
for the strong disinfectant smell; a drunken hooligan had been violently ill in
the back earlier that morning. Riding along in the van beside them was a
tearful Intourist guide, Mariana, Eva’s friend, now pressed into service to translate
for Marcus.

The detectives combed the area all around the
izba
,
flapping about in the snow in their heavy gray greatcoats and communicating by
walkie-talkie. But, like Marcus and Taras, they could discover nothing beyond
Eva’s pitiful corpse, which was photographed extensively, then taken away in a
second van by the militia pathologist. The detective captain was phlegmatic as
they drove back through thick snow flurries to headquarters. The trapper might
have taken to the
taiga
, in which case he was either holed up in a cave
or frozen in a snowdrift. If he didn’t come in to confess when he sobered up,
they’d probably find his body in the spring. Still, he might have escaped on
the train, using Arensky’s military papers and clothing. At the terminal it was
learned that several soldiers had indeed purchased tickets that morning. A
description was flashed along the line—westward to Birobidzhan, Belogorsk and
Skovorodino, and east to Vladivostok and Nakhodka, and to dozens of little
stations in between. Unfortunately, the captain pointed out, Kostya might
easily have dropped off undetected between stops.

Several more times, that day and the next, Taras and Marcus
retold their story, filling out and signing endless carbon forms, contributing
a sense of overwhelming futility to their already full measure of grief.
Through it all, they sat together, these former rivals, now united in tragedy.

On a leaden afternoon—on what should have been the fourth
and final day of Arensky’s idyllic visit to his fiancée—he stood beside Marcus
at Eva’s burial. The gravediggers had set a fire to thaw the frozen ground, and
now an icy wind whipped both snow and ashes among the few mourners. Besides
Taras and Marcus, there were only two militiamen and three of Eva’s Intourist
coworkers. As the pine coffin was lowered into the grave, both young men,
despite their resolve, had wept openly. Then, unable to bear the sight and
sound of earth being shoveled in, they had turned and walked off, hunched over
against the wet wind.

Taras could think of nothing but his great loss, and the
emptiness of his life ahead. He recalled with new understanding the bitter
words of a Lermontov poem he had memorized in school: “And life, when you look
around you with cold attention, such an empty and stupid joke.” The last phrase
especially he repeated to himself as a litany, over and over:
takaya,
pustaya i glupaya shutka!

Yet—how strange!—Marcus, his former, detested rival, was now
almost his only comfort, his one living link to Eva. And when Taras made preparations
for his immediate return to Moscow, he was not displeased when Marcus asked to
come along with him, forgoing stops in Irkutsk and Novosibirsk. In fact, thanks
to partial compensation from Intourist for the stolen funds, the American
insisted they travel together in soft class, and that he pay for Taras’
upgrade.

On that marathon journey the two had forged a friendship.
They gave each other nicknames; Marcus became “Cowboy,” Taras was “Cossack.” By
sheer doggedness they found they could communicate almost anything—by gestures,
by pictographs, and by endless resort to an English-Russian dictionary. And
when these failed, they even found a few common words in French, words Taras
recalled from his older sister Luiza’s school lessons and which Marcus had
picked up in the South Seas.

On the fifth day, as the Rossiya Express wound through the
rocky Urals past Sverdlovsk and the trackside obelisk marking the boundary
between Europe and Asia, they had pledged lifelong friendship over a shared
half-liter of vodka. The second oath was for vengeance—on Eva’s killer.

“But you go away, Cowboy,” Taras had said when the bottle
was empty, reluctantly pointing out the obvious flaw in their plan.

“Nyet!”
Marcus had said, flipping through the
dictionary for the Russian words he wanted. “I stay here. Be soldier like you,
Cossack. In Soviet army. My new adventure.” He grinned, tilting back his cowboy
hat, the only remnant of his old costume.

Incredibly, the young American had followed through on what
had seemed clearly an empty, alcohol-induced boast. In Moscow, with Taras’
help, Marcus had applied for and received political asylum. The decision,
astonishing at the time in light of the American’s enviable free spirit,
continued to perplex Taras for years. Had Marcus some ulterior motive in
fleeing his homeland? Fully fifteen years were to pass before Taras would
receive a satisfying answer to this puzzle.

Neverthless, the two managed to remain fast friends while
going their separate ways—Arensky pursuing his studies at the Supreme Soviet
Military Academy, and Marcus not only entering the Red Army at the somewhat
ripe age of twenty-one, but being selected for special forces, or
Spetsnaz.

And from that time to this, no trace had ever been found of
Eva’s murderer.

Marcus Jolly burst into the small, dimly lit room, pivoting
and firing the 9mm automatic as targets popped up around him, one after
another, at extreme close range. There were eight friend-or-foe
silhouettes—four terrorists, four hostages. The idea was to take out only the
ones with weapons. He reacted instinctively, pointing and shooting, two head
shots for each “bad guy,” until only good guys were left standing in the acrid
aftermath. He had cleared the room in less than four seconds—actually 03.69
according to the digital readout over the door—with seven bullets still in the
clip.

A surprisingly schoolboyish-looking Green Beret instructor
hurried in, hit the overhead fluorescents and whistled appreciatively as he
checked the targets.

“Holy shit, sir! You’ve got four kills, right between the
eyes, one-inch groups. If this is your hobby, what the hell do you do for a
living?”

“Sank you,
ja,
it is good sport. I sell hardware,
software, it is,
ja?”
Marcus tapped his golf cap, which bore the logo of
the German electronics giant, Siemens A.G.

“Well, if you ever get bored, the
Bundeswehr
could
use you, maybe even GSG-9.” The reference was to Germany’s famed
counter-terrorist warfare unit,
Grenzschutzgruppe
9, or Border Marksmen
Group 9.

“No, only targets I shoot, not people, ha-ha. “Other three
rooms not open today,
ja?”

“Sorry about that. I’d like to see what you could do in them
myself.”

Marcus smiled and took off the foam-rubber ear flaps as he
exited into the Bavarian sunshine. Besides the Siemens golf cap, he was wearing
trendy, Boris Becker-endorsed tennis shorts, shirt and shoes, and a bushy brown
mustache attached with spirit gum, which matched his recently darkened hair.
Outside, a stout man, whose resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt included steel
spectacles, grizzled mustache and even a toothy grimace, handed Marcus a can of
Coke. The man’s uniform identified him as a captain in the
Bundeswehr
’s
1st Mechanized Infantry Division.

“Marcus, I told you to try and miss a few, not cause a damn
sensation,” the captain said in Bavarian-accented German as they moved off a
little ways.

Marcus answered with a fluency that would have astonished
his erstwhile Austrian girlfriend: “I did try, Walter. I was shooting
weak-handed.” He transferred the Coke to his left hand and the matte-black
Czech CZ75 pistol to his right. “Want to see me do it faster?”

“Wonderful idea, blow both our covers. Let’s get out of
here.”

The two men walked away from the shooting house, which, the
captain had informed Marcus, was modeled after the Delta Force “House of
Horrors” in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Which, in turn, had been inspired by
the SAS “Killing House” in England. This one was located in Bad Tölz,
forty-five kilometers south of Munich just north of the Austrian border,
headquarters of the USAEUR 10th Special Forces Group, 1st Battalion (the
balance of the 10
^th
having relocated in 1968 to Fort Devens,
Massachusetts). The shooting house had been hastily assembled in 1980, the
captain explained, to train a thirteen-man Special Forces unit that had accompanied
Delta to Iran as part of the abortive Eagle Claw hostage-rescue mission.

“The Green Beret kid back there mentioned GSG-9,” Marcus
said. “They’re located around here, aren’t they?”

“Just across the Rhine from Bonn. In St. Augustin. Why?”

“I heard they’ve got a fantastic underground shooting range.
Maybe you could get me in there. How’s your pull with the
Bundesgrenzschutz?”
This was the German Border Police, the parent outfit of GSG-9.

“Marcus, just behave yourself.” They were approaching the
camp’s main gate, where the
Bundeswehr
captain’s Opel Kadett was parked.
“My connections aren’t
that
good. And I’m afraid your German is only
good enough to fool Americans.”

The two men lunched at an outdoor cafe in Bad Tölz’
picturesque Old Town, on the steep and winding Marktstrasse. It was exceedingly
pleasant—weisswurst with sweet mustard, sauerkraut and schooners of beer under
a vine-trellised, overhanging Bavarian roof—until a tiny East German Trabant
601 sidled up to the adjacent curb and began spewing lethal hydrocarbons at
their table. Walter, though now out of uniform, rushed over and screamed in
full military voice, forcing car and driver into flatulent retreat.

“Damn stinkpots,” Walter muttered, resuming his chair.
“Worst thing about reunification and opening the Wall was all those Trabis and
Wartburgs that came farting in from the East with their shitty two-stroke
engines. But we must tolerate them, out of a spirit of freedom and unity—
Freiheit
und Einheit
. I say shit!
Scheissdreck!”

“They’re real trendy, Walter. Museums buy them. Rich
Austrian kids buy them and put Porsche engines in them.”

“Degenerates!”

“Now you sound like old man Marchenko, complaining about
Soviet youth and their sickening addiction to Western corruption.”

“Well, he was right.” Walter motioned to a sheet of paper
Marcus had been studying. “So, tell me what you think.”

Marcus shrugged. The paper purported to list all of
President Rybkin’s movements for the next three weeks—up until the Potsdam
Conference. “This is nothing. I read all this shit in the newspapers already.”
Marcus crumpled the paper and dropped it on the table.

“That’s all we have now. If the man’s doing any other
traveling between now and Potsdam, he hasn’t advertised it—even in the
Politburo, believe me, or we’d know about it. In any case, Potsdam is the only
place that makes sense, Marcus.”

“You’re supposed to help me, Walter, not tell me how to do
my job.”

“I’m just saying you’ll never get close to him in Moscow, or
anywhere over there. That’s like trying to attack your opponent’s king when
he’s castled. You have to draw him out.”

“I don’t play chess, Walter. I’m not a real Russki,
remember? And I like to sneak up on people. It gives me a hard-on.”

“Ah, really? Then here’s what you should do, Marcus. Go to
the library—I suggest the
Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek
in Munich. Ask
for detailed floor plans of all the buildings in the Kremlin Palace. Make a big
X on Rybkin’s office, or better his bathroom, and sneak up on him with your
hard-on while he’s on the shitter. I wish you good hunting. Now, what else can
I do for you? Do you like the Czech pistol?”

“It’s okay. I test-fired an Italian clone back in Austria,
made by Fratelli Tanfoglio, you couldn’t tell the difference. You keep it,
Walter. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else locally.”

“So, Marcus, where are you going from here?”

“It doesn’t work that way. Just do your job for the
Bundeswehr
and wait to see if you’re contacted.”

“You are trying to scare me now, Marcus, is that it?” Walter
pointed to the crumpled paper. “Don’t leave that lying around, please. I don’t
care what you think of it.”

Marcus made a fist. The captain tensed, swallowed wurst,
measuring Marcus’ icy squint.

“Relax, Walter, and just watch.” Marcus thumbed a thick
steel ring on his forefinger. From the side mounting of its black onyx stone a
tiny barrel protruded, and a jet of fire shot forth; the paper flamed up, then
shriveled into ash.

“God in heaven! What is that, a laser?”

“Miniature flamethrower. Burns nitric acid and kerosene,
just like Marchenko’s old SS-9 rockets. Five shots, then you throw the damn
thing away. From the KGB toy department. Ugliest hunk of jewelry I ever saw.
They probably use it for lighting ladies’ cigarettes across crowded rooms.”

“Seriously, if you don’t like it, give it to me.”

Marcus eyed the captain a long moment, then slipped the
heavy ring off and tossed it across the table. “You want it, Walter, it’s
yours. It’s got four shots left. Wear it in health. And forgive me for being
such a degenerate asshole. But hey, that’s the way I am.”

As Walter screwed the ring onto his own stubby index finger,
Marcus hoisted his schooner. “A toast, Walter.”

The captain looked up from his new toy in ill-concealed
delight. “Yes, yes?”

“Confusion to the enemy!”

“Confusion to the enemy!” Walter echoed.

“Whoever the fuck he may be,” Marcus added.

*

In return for the gift, the
Bundeswehr
captain had
offered to take Marcus on a discreet tour of some of Munich’s more interesting
nocturnal habitats. There were certain private shows, for instance, which
catered to a variety of esoteric tastes and which were said to rival anything
available on the Continent. Among the specific enticements Walter offered were
leather-clad Aryan goddesses with superb physiques and wonderfully sadistic
temperaments.

Marcus declined.

“But you are not squeamish?”

“Some other time, Walter.”

Instead Marcus went early to bed—or early to camp. He had
parked his Moto Guzzi and pitched his sleeping tent on the outskirts of Bad
Tölz among holiday caravans on the banks of the Isar.

After several weeks of the considerable pleasures of Silvie,
Marcus wasn’t in need of sex, and certainly not any voyeuristic excursions into
Teutonic kink. What he did need was to think clearly about his next step. And
to do that, he had first to subdue his swirling thoughts and find his spiritual
center, his source of power—his
ki
, to use the martial arts term—and
unleash its transforming energy.

He unrolled his down bag inside the little tent, knelt
Japanese-fashion on his pillow and, positioning his flashlight, opened his
Hagakure
at random. He read:
“Instead of victory, concentrate on dying.”

Having found his samurai text, Marcus closed the slim book
and meditated, shutting out the pulsing sound of the latest Euro-rock from a
nearby caravan. His grandparents’ death had indeed sent him forth as a young
man, and death had intersected his adventurous wanderings again and again. The
death of Eva Sorokina had forged his friendship with Taras Arensky, and
countless deaths in Afghanistan had severed that friendship—as it drew Marcus
deeper into his Russian destiny.

He could not desire death in the samurai way; he had
inflicted and witnessed its careless handiwork too often. But neither did he
fear or flee it, for death and danger had long been his intimate companions.
The only life he craved was life lived on the flirtatious edge of death.

Perhaps constant courting of danger was his way of seeking
death, as the samurai code instructed. But Marcus now contemplated a further
step. Marchenko—his samurai “lord,” his
daimyo
—had been slain. Marcus
was charged with avenging that murder—killing Rybkin—the
shogun
—as the
Forty-Seven Ronin (whose sacred graves Marcus had visited in the Sengaku-ji
Temple outside Tokyo) had avenged their Lord Asano. According to
Hagakure
,
Marcus’ own death must result from the successful completion of that task.

Marcus shook his head, imagining what the old rocketry
general would have made of this Eastern nonsense—equating Marchenko’s network
of loyal
Spetsnaz
fighters with homeless samurai after their leader’s
death. But how else could Marcus anchor his life against the hurricane winds of
change shrieking once more across Russia? What was a defector to do when his
adopted homeland betrayed
him?
When its leader was busily dismantling
its borders and defenses, exiling or assassinating its greatest patriots, and
only smiled enigmatically as civil protest boiled over into armed insurrection
all across the Eurasian land mass? Marchenko’s simple solution—kill
Rybkin!—seemed more and more the only way out of bloody chaos.

But today’s meeting had posed a further problem. Walter had
faithfully passed along Marchenko’s final command; beyond that, Marcus remained
skeptical of the captain’s
gemütlich
manner. Marcus chuckled as he
recalled how avidly the German had swallowed the preposterous story about the
KGB flamethrower ring having five shots and being rocket-fueled. The truth was,
its one-shot chamber had to be reloaded after each firing with a new gel-flame
capsule. Since Marcus had no more of these, the ring was now useless—which
Walter would discover if he ever tried to fire it.

The man was not to be trusted, Marcus decided. Hereafter
Marcus must seek help only from the inner core of old
Spetsnaz
comrades,
and even there be wary.

“Instead of victory, concentrate on dying.”

The task ahead of Marcus was indeed formidable. Only by
embracing his own death,
Hagakure
counseled, could Marcus achieve that
impossible victory—Rybkin’s death.

So be it.

Marcus switched off the flashlight, but was denied darkness.
Faint light from a neighboring caravan seeped through the red nylon tent
fabric. That was all right. Marcus did not intend to sleep yet. He was
energized, ready to conjure his own death—a daily
samurai
exercise. He
began to visualize it—and imagine its mental, emotional and visceral impact—in
different forms. Being torn apart by explosives. Dying by his own hand—slashing
his own jugular; disemboweling himself samurai-style, with a sword-wielding
second standing by. Being riddled with bullets. Having a hang-glider capsize in
sudden, violent air, plummeting earthward with no chute. Drowning at sea. Being
crushed in an earthquake, trapped in a burning building. All sudden, violent
ends. Marcus did not bother imagining a slow, debilitating death.

The exercise worked, separating his upwelling
ki
from
his motionless body. He became for a second a nameless being, a hovering force
field with eyes. Yet the old familiar Marcus remained below, kneeling on his
pillow, occupied by pangs of hunger and incessant trivial thoughts, tethering
him like a kite’s tail to the earth.