Yvonne Bornstein - Eleven Days of Hell

Two more calls had ensued over the following week. The money would be forthcoming, Ian promised, if he was just given time.

And time, it turned out, not only kept the Weinstocks alive; unbeknownst to Yvonne or Danny—and the kidnappers—an astonishing and unprecedented operation was now in motion, joining two countries whose entire existence for nearly half a century was based on stockpiling more nuclear weapons than the other. For the first time, they now worked together toward one goal: saving the lives of two Australian citizens being held captive in Moscow.

The roadblocks to any potential rescue mission had been many. The Weinstocks were not American citizens, and there was no hard proof they had really been kidnapped or were in mortal danger. The FBI had no connections to law enforcement authorities in Russia and no legal standing to direct any sort of rescue operation. The Russian police were known to be corrupt and infested with underworld influences. And hanging over the case was the air of mutual distrust between America and Russia; never before had they worked hand in hand in a criminal investigation, and mutual, arched eyebrows and age-old suspicions still abounded.

To crack the case and save the couple, historical conventions and a tangled tapestry of international jurisdictions had to be bypassed, precedents shattered. Yet for too long, that was a faint hope; though a small circle of diplomatic and law enforcement officials—led by a hard-bitten FBI man and an ambitious and vainglorious Russian police colonel who both worked tirelessly to end the crisis, a logjam of bureaucratic inertia which ate up critical hours of the clock.

The missing link fell into place when a precocious and egocentric twenty-three-year-old Russian lawyer living temporarily in Philadelphia became immersed in the case, upstaging the bureaucrats by accomplishing what they could not or would not do. That is when the rescue operation moved off square one, in turn bringing belated vows of cooperation between American and Russian intelligence agencies.

By now, fibres of a noose had been woven, and the noose was closing around the kidnappers. But would it close fast enough?

At the billiard hall, Danny again pleaded to be allowed just one more call to Ian Rayman.

‘Nyet,’ he was told, ‘no more phone calls.’

And then he heard words that sounded more sinister than any other words he had ever heard in his life.

‘Tomorrow, we will take you to Vladivostok.’

His body coiled. If he were to be taken to Vladivostok—thousands of miles away on Russia’s southeast edge, cheek by jowl with Siberia, that most infamous Russian wasteland—he knew he would never see Yvonne again. He would die there, without a trace.

Morning would be breaking soon in Moscow. By then, he knew, it would be too late.

In strict terms, I went to Russia on a business trip. If truth be told, however, I never would have made that perilous journey simply because there was money to be made. Certainly, dying wasn’t supposed to be in the script, but the seeds of such a journey were laid long before I had the faintest idea what business meant. When I look back into my past, for as far as I can see, I was always taking risks. I must have been born with a gene that made my pulse quicken when there was an element of danger involved in something, in anything, I did.

I’m just as sure that that gene must have been handed down to me, since the limbs of my family tree are ripe with an adventurous spirit. My grandparents, on both sides, were swept up in the great immigration wave of the early 1900s, but instead of getting on the well-travelled boat routes to America, they cast their fate south to Australia. My father’s ancestors lived in a Russian hamlet called Vitepsk, my mother’s in Palestine, in a tiny town called Rosh Pina, in what is now Israel. Many Jews did, in fact, immigrate to Australia, but most waited to get off at the second port of call, the cosmopolitan treasure trove of Melbourne. The more adventurous jumped off at the first port, Perth, the more prosaic and challenging capital of Western Australia. My grandparents were among the latter. Knowing what I do of them, they probably got tired of being penned up.

Though I cannot quite remember, I’m sure I strained to get out of the womb decades later, ready to come out kicking, impatient to get my feet on the ground. On October 20, 1955, at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, they couldn’t hold me back any longer. I became the third daughter of Billie and Wally Shilkin.

They say the best revenge is living well, and we did. We lived in a beach town in Perth called Floreat Park, where there were few Jews and a rumbling of anti-Semitism. When my sister Erica and I went to the Floreat Park Primary School—the only two Jewish kids in the place—they had a religion class, which really meant ‘Christian class’ because that’s the religion that was taught. We didn’t want to go into that classroom, so we would sit in the hallway while the other kids pelted us with insults, calling us ‘Jewfish,’ among other things.

My grandmother had helped build our house years before, and it was one of the first homes put up in Floreat Park. We were quite comfortable living the middle-to-upper-class lifestyle. My father worked for forty-five years for the same company as manager of an electrical supply store. In the summertime, every other school vacation, and almost every weekend, my parents would allow me to go to a farm inland in Western Australia. Why they did this I never knew, since we lived near the beach and it was actually hotter and more stifling on the farm, which was owned by a friend’s dad named Mr Collard. The farm was in a country town called Gin Gin and offered precious few attractions for overactive kids. Mr Collard had a daughter about my age named Marilyn. We were close school friends, and we would become so bored and so desperately in need of a swim that we’d ride our bikes to a filthy creek to take a dip.

Even that was a risk, since the pond was full of hungry leeches. We didn’t care. We’d flick them off of us and keep swimming. We’d also do things like send Marilyn’s puppy, an Australian Blue Heeler named Digit, into the scrub, or bush, to encourage the big red kangaroos to come out and chase us. This isn’t as innocuous as it sounds. Some of those big reds grew to nine feet tall, one swoosh of their tails could kill you instantly. Marilyn and I would have competitions to see who could run the fastest away from them!

We played ‘Survivor’ before the concept became a TV show, pretending to be Aborigines digging for food. A prize find was a witchity grub. The insides of these big white caterpillars consisted of live, wriggling maggots. For us, that was bon apetit. Other times, Marilyn’s rotten little brother, Ross, would be my foil. He liked to throw rocks at my head for fun, and one time, knocked me unconscious. When I came to, I told Mr Collard. He looked at me for a second, then said, ‘Why isn’t dinner on the table?’

With that kind of empathy, Mr Collard readily agreed to let me take the wheel of his big Land Rover one day when I was twelve. I did pretty well, maneuvering on a dusty country road like I owned it. Then he said, ‘I’ll take it now.’ I didn’t know how to work the clutch or how hard to hit the brake, and the Rover crashed into a ditch. Miraculously, we weren’t hurt, though I crawled out from the wreckage shaking like a leaf. But I was aglow, too, because I’d driven a car!

Like me, my mother could hardly sit still. When she was eighteen, she walked into ABC radio studios in Perth, told the station manager she wanted an acting job and demanded an audition on the spot. That won her a job in a radio play for five pounds. Soon after, she was given her own show—an exercise program for pregnant women—and later performed on the stage.