Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“I cannot believe,” Brodsky told his aide, “that in the more than fifty thousand shipyard and dockworkers we have for the Baltic Fleet, there is no one willing to talk.”

“They were ready for us, Comrade Admiral,” his aide explained. “They knew we’d discover the sabotage sooner or later. If I might make a suggestion…”

“Yes?”

“With due respect to our naval intelligence — we should hand this over from GRU to the MPO.” He meant the Morskaya Pogranichnaya Okhrama, the maritime border troops of the KGB.

“What can their frigates and gunboats do that naval intelligence can’t?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that aspect, sir. I had their shore people in mind. Undercover, antiespionage division.”

“Why would they know any more than our GRU?” asked the admiral, turning farther around in his chair.

“In 1949 British military intelligence, Department Six, were running an ‘Operation Jungle’ in the three Baltic states. KGB had it pinned from the very beginning.”

Admiral Brodsky nodded, but it was only a dim memory. He was searching for a name. “That would have been Luki—”

“Lukasevics,” put in his aide. “Yes, sir, his control was Carr. Well, Lukasevics single-handedly invented a partisan Baltic army, which MI6 was desperate to keep alive when the postwar was becoming the Cold War. Washington was just as desperate for information. Moscow center obliged. They had Lukasevics feeding Carr’s MI6 disinformation, and Carr in turn fed the CIA. Carr kept recruiting and sending agents to the Baltic. Six networks in all. And we knew — that is, the KGB knew — who they were the moment they landed.”

The admiral shifted impatiently. “Where are you taking me, Captain?”

“Just this, sir. The KGB has kept a much closer watch on the Baltic than we have. Especially in Latvia and Estonia-most of all in Tallinn.”

“But eventually the British did find out,” replied the admiral. “Their network’s blown.”

“Blown, yes, Admiral, but networks don’t simply close down. Some of those recruited by Lukasevics were genuine partisans. They didn’t know they were being run by KGB. They reformed, waited for another chance — waiting for a Gorbachev — for anything to give them a chance. But Lukasevics waited also. He still had his informers and kept them in place within the new networks. They still believed he was London’s man, you see.”

“You’re telling me,” said Brodsky, grimacing, massaging the swollen joints of his left hand, “we should turn the entire investigation over to KGB’s maritime division?”

“Either that, Admiral, or they could let us have some of their files.”

Brodsky shook his head. He wasn’t that naive about intelligence matters. “No, you were right the first time. If we must do it, Comrade, we will have to relinquish control of the investigation. As it is, they’ll probably be surly that we left it so long. Further delay will only make matters worse. Perhaps I should put it in the form of a request? Let’s see: ‘To assist us in a case of national emergency’?” He turned to the captain. “That should break the ice. It is also true. Though how their MPO troops can identify the source of the sabotage from the same serial numbers we have is beyond me.

Sometimes Admiral Brodsky struck his aide as being bone-thick between the ears. A cautious naval tactician and ploddingly able liaison officer between the Northern and Baltic Fleets, he did not possess the subtlety of mind necessary for intelligence work — nor the necessary toughness. Though a stern disciplinarian, he was nevertheless known to exhibit bourgeois sentimentality when it came to running personnel matters to ground, particularly in cases involving three-year conscripts who went AWOL early in their shipboard assignments. His detractors said he was weak on such matters because as a young conscript in the michman— ”warrant officer”—program, he had fallen in love with one of the women conscripts, who, like most women between nineteen and forty at that time, were being trained as radio officers. She was an Estonian from Tallinn. Brodsky’s parents had objected strongly, and it was said that only the urging of more sensible heads among his comrades had prevented Brodsky from going AWOL from his unit in MV Frunze, the Soviet Union’s Annapolis, where he was in training as a surface vessel line officer.

The would-be marriage never happened, and a young man’s passion became sublimated through the rigorous requirements of the Frunze academy and sea duty as a midshipman in the Baltic Fleet, where he’d learned the cold necessity of subjugating individual desires in duty to the state. In the Western navies, they called it setting your sights on your career, and women were supposed to follow, not impede.

Still, the gruff sixty-seven-year-old had never forgotten Malle Vesiland, the picture of her long, blond hair done up in a severe bun, as per regulations, making her twice as attractive to him, his youthful dreams of seeing it fall free in the flush of passion as fresh in his old man’s heart as it had been a thousand years ago when they were young. Malle’s features had blurred in the memory, and Brodsky had no doubt that she, like most women in the republics, would wear her age badly. But no matter; the unfulfilled dream he’d held as a young midshipman was as new in him now as the day he had first met her in Leningrad.

The closest they had got to the dream was to hold hands during their walks by the Neva until sunset touched the river with gold and to go to one of the small coffee shops by the river, where he would buy her a cup of real chocolate-flavored coffee, which she loved so much and which on occasion mysteriously found its way in from the West.

He regretted not having a picture of her, but in those days even the simplest and cheapest East German camera was beyond his means. Perhaps it was better not to have a photo, he sometimes thought — better to hold the ideal in the mind, where the ravages of time and the vicissitudes of war couldn’t sully the dream.

He became aware of the captain standing beside him, placing the green form on his desk. “The authorization, Admiral.”

As Brodsky unclipped his gold Parker pen, he pushed the smiling, happy image of Malle from his mind. For all he knew, she might be dead. But despite his effort to forget, he found himself remembering momentarily the color of her eyes, ice blue and yet nothing cold about them — rather something eternal — and her joyous smile, even for one of “them,” the Russians, who had invaded and colonized the Baltic states on the heels of the Stalin-Hitler pact. It was one of the things he remembered best about her — that she didn’t care about politics and took each person she met on his or her merits.

Brodsky read over the authorization, understanding that handing over the investigation to the MPO would effectively mean handing over any credit for the investigation to them as well.

Fifteen minutes later, the captain in charge of MPO’s “Border troops Estonia” arrived at Brodsky’s headquarters. Though he was dressed in full naval uniform, the gate guards immediately recognized him as MPO from his green shoulder boards and gave him a snappy salute. The colonel assured the admiral that MPO would get to the bottom of it.

Using the admiral’s phone, without asking, the captain, Vladimir Malkov, a kapitan pervogo ranga— “naval captain first class”—in charge of MPO-Tallinn, in turn called the MPO’s plainclothes section in Tallinn, which was responsible for protecting the borders against penetration by foreign agents and for preventing “unauthorized boat departure” by Soviet citizens.

Within a half hour Captain Malkov had a printout of all known informers and suspected counterrevolutionaries dating as far back as those involved in British intelligence’s “Operation Jungle.” The list of potential troublemakers in the Baltic states was long enough from the years of the Cold War, but after Gorbachev, there had been an exponential leap, the list quadrupling as the zhdavshikh— “wait and sees”—had become more militant and sure of themselves in their demands for autonomy from the Soviet Union. Given the urgency of the task, Malkov knew there was no possible way of working methodically through the list. Almost a thousand Russian sailors had been killed in the sinking of the Yumashev, and who knew how many more would die on other ships because they were firing dud, instead of live, ammunition? It called for drastic measures.