Alex Dryden: Death in Siberia

From inside the truck’s cab, the two occupants could make out the darker shapes of the ancient Mongolian burial mounds – the kurgans – that stood out against a purple-black sky which was perfectly printed with a linocut of stars. The grasslands around them could be felt rather than seen, the flowing grass like a living thing swaying for hundreds of miles in every direction. In the daylight they had indeed resembled the movement of waves on the sea. There was a light breeze and, despite the night’s chill, Anna had her window open three inches or so. Her head was turned towards it and up, as if sniffing the air for a trail to follow.

Larry turned the wheel to avoid a large rut and the quiet, brand new engine hauled the beast of the ancient truck up over another hill, then down again into a gully. The truck’s lights were switched off but the eyes of the man and the woman were accustomed by now after four hours of darkness and Larry saw reddish mud banks on either side. Ahead of them, the snow-capped peaks were becoming visibly sharper. The backdrop of the approaching Tuva mountains, where Mongolia gave way to Russia, and the Russian border itself, towered higher and higher from across the empty stage of grassland.

Larry looked across at Anna, over her alpine pack which was wedged between them on the middle seat of the truck. She had her knees drawn up on the seat, arms hugging them, and her long back stretched up in a gentle curve so that she was poised over her haunches – like a greyhound, he thought, waiting to seize the certain moment to spot its prey before leaping from the cab in pursuit.

She’d cropped her hair short, an inch long, perhaps, and dyed it black, so that he could see the shape of her sinuous neck whitish against the black night. She wore a thick sheepskin waistcoat over mountaineering gear. A well-worn brown leather coat was draped over the alpine pack. Alongside the pack, on the seat between them, there were also coils of strong cordage and carabiners, an alpine harness, ice axe and ice screws and webbing. In the pack itself were the bare essentials; a sleeping bag, food and water, and the Thompson Contender handgun she always used. Its eighteen-inch barrel was perfectly sighted and she could drop a man at up to two hundred yards.

Larry turned back to the road. He knew sometimes that he watched her in ways that were not in the strictly defined limits of his job. After two years together on missions in areas of Russian influence, he would have died for her. But this time she was going into Russia itself for the first time since her defection and he was worried.

‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing ahead, ‘between those two peaks.’

But she didn’t turn towards him or the mountains.

Two greyish-white peaks that denoted the mountain border loomed ahead of them against the clerical purple of the sky, like a ghostly and unforgiving priesthood.

‘The gorge is just to the right of where we’re heading,’ Larry persisted. ‘Between the peaks. There’s a narrow entrance to it, invisible until you’re on it. You’ll see it when you get close.’

‘I know, Larry,’ she said, but she addressed it to the window where her head was still angled upwards. They’d been over the route on maps back at Cougar’s headquarters in the United States a hundred times already.

Cool to the point of unfriendly, Larry thought, but he guessed she was already in her own world, somewhere up ahead of them – after they’d dropped her off – and that in her mind she was making the crossing over the border.

‘This was the least-guarded stretch of border when the tensions were high between Russia and China,’ Larry was saying in his usual attempt to cover her still silence with reassuring facts. ‘Both sides relied on the mountains. You can’t get a vehicle through those. Not on this stretch. It was to the east where the stand-off was most dangerous.’

But Anna knew the borderlands well, even though she’d never been on this, the Mongolian side. When there were two million men on either side of the border, she’d been a teenager, but later, when she’d joined the SVR, the new KGB’s foreign intelligence service, studying the potential of a Chinese attack against Russia had been mandatory. And when she’d become a colonel in Russian foreign intelligence – the youngest female colonel in its history – she’d visited the border east of here where it went up directly against China itself.

Larry now fell silent. If she didn’t want to talk, so be it. That was her way.

But tonight, for once, it wasn’t what she had to do that Anna was thinking about. She wasn’t mentally following the route ahead that she would have to take later that night, nor analysing her mission that lay beyond that, a mission that was intended to bring her up ever northwards into the heart of Arctic Siberia. Her mind was occupied in a way that was neither appropriate nor usual for her just before a mission. It was distracted and the distraction was caused by news she had received five days before. She had received this news in the curious combination of both a body blow and a cause for celebration.

Her father was dead. That was what had been picked up out of Moscow. The old devil had suddenly fallen ill and was dead three days later at the age of seventy-three. It went unreported, due to the disgrace his daughter’s defection had brought upon him. So the news had been filtered out of the country by her mother who had been estranged from him for nearly ten years now. But Anna had hated him for a lot longer than that.

Once, back in her childhood, her father had been the KGB Head of Station in Damascus, a hero of the Soviet Union. He’d been a tyrant to his subordinates, as well as to her mother, and a cold and finally sinister figure to her. And all the time, during the years of her childhood, he was a true, unreconstructed Stalinist who, after Stalin’s death, had concealed his real leanings and consequently had made his way steadily up the ladder of promotion during the gentler years of Khrushchev’s thaw and afterwards. Her father had always been a secret apologist for the Gulag camps of Siberia where millions had died in slavery.

But finally, after Putin’s takeover of Russia in 2000, he’d seen those ‘glory years’ reviving. He saw in Putin’s new Petersburg spy elite, who had taken control of the country, a last hope for national resurgence in the years of his own decline. Once more, the KGB – his KGB – was victorious. And it was more powerful, in fact, than it had ever been in its history. The Communist Party that once ruled it no longer existed in power to give it orders. The spies, the spy elite, Russia’s parallel society to which her father had devoted his life, now ruled Russia completely.

Looking into the blackness of the steppe, Anna now recalled that she had spoken to her father for the last time five years before. It was just months before her defection to the West. And it was her father who’d been a window into her reasoning to defect, and her defining excuse to leave this new Russia. A foreign intelligence spy like herself, in his retirement he had been given a hero’s grace and favour apartment near the Kremlin, reserved for upper echelons of the KGB. In the 1990s, he’d taken even more heavily and angrily to drink than he had done in his active service, as he saw democracy make a brief flicker of an appearance in the country. He had raged against her mother, his now estranged wife, for working for the Sakharov Foundation. And finally – to Anna’s ultimate horror of him and of what he represented – he had seen his evil opportunity to help the new KGB in his twilight years. And he had seized it in the vilest way imaginable. In order to snare a Swiss banker who was making a routine visit to Moscow, the new KGB had procured small girls, some as young as ten years old. They were photographed at Anna’s father’s apartment, where the banker had performed on them his disgusting acts of depravity under the remote, watchful eye of Anna’s father. The Russians’ cameras had captured it all and turned it back to use against the banker.