Brian Freemantle - The Bearpit

‘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.