Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” Big Rudi said. He had a way of appearing at Arkady’s side when least expected. “War is a meat grinder. Farmers, doctors, teachers? Ground beef. And if Fritz doesn’t shoot you, the commissar will. But I miss the camaraderie. I was smoking at your age,” he told Zhenya, who was approaching tentatively.

“Did you kill anyone?” Zhenya asked.

Arkady stuck a cigarette in Big Rudi’s mouth and lit it. The old man inhaled deeply and coughed up half a lung.

No one stopped the cameraman Grisha from using bones as stepping stones because everyone understood that television ruled. This was the Diggers’ moment in the sun. Better than the sun, the camera’s eye. Wiley was right, Arkady thought, it was a great visual.

Big Rudi said, “The collective used to have a nice field of wheat here. Nice soil, sandy, well-drained.”

“Why didn’t the collective take the trees out?”

Big Rudi shrugged. “They had to apply. Someone said no.”

“Why would anyone in Moscow care whether a collective farm in Tver cut down trees?”

“Who knows? These were the old days. An order from Moscow took into consideration forces and dangers we knew nothing about.”

Arkady watched Grisha’s advance through the trees. The cameraman kept each move smooth and slow, a step away a brown line that led to what looked like a pinecone standing up.

“Can I see what-?” Zhenya started toward the cameraman.

“No.” Arkady pulled him to the ground and shouted, “Grisha, stop! Land mine!”

Grisha tripped, aimed down, and the ground erupted. When the smoke cleared, the cameraman was soaked in blood, on all fours, blinking, experimentally searching his crotch. Isakov helped Grisha to his feet and out of the trees. Grisha could walk, but Isakov tipped the bones out of a wheelbarrow and put Grisha in. Zhenya disappeared. The Diggers called for a pullback, which became a wholesale retreat to the tents.

Arkady stayed. Now that he knew what to look for, he found more unexploded mines. The POMZ land mine was a Russian creation as successful as the AK-47 and even simpler: seventy-five grams of TNT in a cast iron cylinder crosshatched for fragmentation and mounted on a stake. A trip wire ring looped over the igniter, a cigarette-sized rod that capped the mine. A safety pin hole was provided, although the pin had been pulled long ago. He spread-eagled on the ground studying how to remove the igniter and get to the fuse.

He was tentatively wriggling the stake when he noticed a wire running the other direction. He brushed aside rotten needles and discovered another POMZ. He discovered seven mines altogether on the same trip wire circling a tree, a necklace of ancient POMZs with their safety pins pulled and rigged like a string of holiday lights; if one went off, they all would, spitting shrapnel with a lethal range of four meters.

Probably all duds.

Arkady rolled on his back to dig into his pockets, found his keys, and slid them off the key ring. As occasionally happened under stress, a loud, unwelcome tune began in his head. His brain selected Shostakovich’s “Tahiti Trot.” Tea for two and two for tea, me for you…

Although he couldn’t straighten the entire ring he did, at the cost of a bloody finger, manage to bend a tip of wire. He rolled onto his front, held the stake steady with one hand, and with the other inserted the wire into the safety pin hole and pulled out the igniter and fuse. Didn’t even have to unscrew the fuse. The General always said they came out too easily.

Arkady was wet and covered in needles from head to toe, unintentionally camouflaged in case Urman came searching. Arkady could tell how much the detective itched to go into action. That was the exciting thing about Urman, his unpredictability. He could be affable company one moment and help you swallow your tongue the next.

Using his makeshift safety pin Arkady disarmed the next two mines in short order. The safety hole of the fourth was rusted shut and demanded exquisite pressure to force open without tripping the wire.

“Nobody near us, to see us or hear us…”

What Arkady did not understand was why the mines were set on metal stakes rather than wood. It was as if whoever rigged the POMZs had intended them to stand guard during the war, after the war, forever.

“What are you doing?” Zhenya asked.

Arkady was startled enough to make the trip wire tremble: he had not heard the boy coming.

“Rendering these mines a little less dangerous.”

“Huh. You mean, disarming them.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what you should say. ‘I’m disarming these mines.’ That’s simple.” Zhenya shifted the weight of his backpack. Damp ringlets stuck to his brow. “You’re making such a deal out of it. They’re all duds according to Nikolai and Marat. Nikolai and Marat would know better than you.”

“What about the cameraman Grisha?”

“Scratches. The mine didn’t have any real charge left. Marat says Grisha will still be able to scratch his balls.”

“Marat said that to you?”

“Yeah. I’m looking for him.”

Arkady considered the prospect of Zhenya wandering around land mines and skeletons. Or worse, being near if Arkady tripped a wire.

“I think Marat was looking for you around the pathology tent.”

“I was just there,” Zhenya said. “That’s a long walk.”

“Get a lighter backpack.”

“I bet Marat could disarm mines like these in his sleep.”

“You could be right.”

“I’m bored.”

“I’m busy,” Arkady said with a look that matched.

Zhenya’s cheeks went red, the most color Arkady had ever seen in them.

Arkady found a tripwire to follow, but when he crawled forward he felt something scratch his stomach. He rolled away from a mine set as a booby trap deep and on its own. After waiting sixty years, the bomb detonated with the soft pop of a champagne cork.

A dud.

When Arkady looked up, Zhenya was gone, except for his laugh.

A steady drizzle could not dampen the spirits of the camp. Although digging was canceled for the rest of the day, no one was leaving because every crew had brought vodka and beer, sausage and bread, fatback and cheese. Besides, twenty remains had successfully been brought in for examination, enough for the pathologist to, once she was done, declare all the victims Russian.

In the visitors tent Arkady listened to Wiley praise Isakov.

“An officer who carries home his wounded men? This is exactly the image people respond to. That tape is being edited in the studio as we speak. It’s still only four in the afternoon. If the pathologist gets her act together, you’ll make two news cycles as the lead story.”

“What if the bodies aren’t Russian?” Isakov asked.

“They found Russian helmets.”

“What if they aren’t?”

Wiley glanced at Lydia, who was occupied signing autographs for admirers at the front of the tent. The cameraman named Yura was on a cell phone to Grisha’s wife.

“If they’re German?” Wiley dropped his voice. “Admittedly, it won’t be nearly as good, but the rescue of Grisha will still sell you.”

“Is that what I want to be, sold?”

“With all your heart and soul,” Pacheco said. “You crossed that river the day we were hired.”

“Nothing like this was mentioned then.”

“Nikolai, you’re suffering preelection nerves. Relax. This dig is going to put you over the top.”

“They’re right,” Urman said.

“We’re just lucky we brought two cameramen.” Pacheco raised a glass of brandy. “To Grisha.”

“Anyway,” Wiley said, “you needed something like this. Your numbers were starting to flatten out.”