Duel of Assassins (12 page)

“Bolvan!
”

Blockhead!
That was how Taras’ father had erupted when he heard of his son’s desire to
apply for immediate transfer to the
Spetsialnoye Naznacheniye
—
Spetsnaz,
or Special Designation forces. Among other things, Oleg Arensky knew, if Taras’
application was accepted, it would mean the abandonment of his studies at the
Supreme Soviet Military Academy, where the young man was finishing his second
year with honors.

“Listen very carefully to me, Tarushka,” the older Arensky
said after the initial explosion had subsided and he was able to sit down and
shakily fill two small tulip-shaped glasses with
pertsovka
, pepper
vodka. “You know we have planned this for years, Uncle Dima and I. Getting you
into Suvorov Academy was no easy matter, believe me. We are not big shots. And
then into the Supreme Soviet Military Academy—every bit as good as
Frunze—where, in two more years, you will come out a lieutenant of motorized
infantry. Think, in ten years, if you continue your fine record, you will be a
regimental commander. In
Spetsnaz
you may be dead from parachute jumping
in a month. Is this what you want?”

“More than anything.”

“Why? Because of that arrogant American bastard, Marcus? Why
do you ape him, a traitor to his homeland? Where are your brains, Tarushka?
What are you guys, pansies?”

“Marcus is my friend, Papa. Call me any names you like, but
not him. I won’t permit it.”

“Won’t permit it? You think you are running my life now,
telling me what I can say and cannot say? Be damn careful, Tarushka. I can
still lick you.”

“I don’t think so, Papa.”

“Oh, no? You watch out then, boy, and be ready for me. Maybe
you can beat me when it’s all over, but I promise you, those first two minutes
will be hell on earth!”

“Calm down, Papa. You know I’m not going to fight you. And I
don’t want to run your life. I just want to run my own. And this is my
decision, not Marcus’. I’m only asking you to respect it.”

“Respect a crazy thing like that? When my son says he wants
to join a band of assassins?”

“Papa,
Spetsnaz
fighters are heroes, they perform
special missions—intelligence, reconnaissance, operating behind enemy lines—”

“Like in Prague in ’sixty-eight? Sure, I know. Big heroes!
Nazi stormtroopers! Bullshit, Tarushka! Just be a good soldier, like I was, and
your Uncle Dima. Not a killing machine.”

They faced each other across the kitchen table far into the
night, polishing off a liter of vodka between them. In the end it was old Oleg
whose slumping head hit the oilcloth first, and who had to be wrestled to his
bed by his dark-eyed son.

“You’re a stubborn bastard, Tarushka, just like your crazy,
beautiful Georgian mother” was the last volley the old man managed to fire off
before collapsing unconscious onto his mattress. It was an admission of defeat,
if not consent.

But Oleg’s trump card, which he had been content not to play
in the debate, was a surety that his consent mattered little in the final
issue. Taras needed his permission, he thought, about as much as a cunt needs
an alarm clock. His obdurate, moody son would do exactly as he wished—
but it
would not matter
.

The Soviet system was not geared for change, for
career-switching. It was always and everywhere a one-way maze of choices
leading to mostly dead-ends. The great socialist engine of the State funneled
its citizens irresistibly through that maze, providing the ever-onward
peristaltic impetus—through man-dated levels of education, housing and
employment, with diminishing downstream choices—but there was no system for
backtracking to a main branch, or even lateral switching from one tributary to
another.

And Taras’ course through that maze had been pretty well
ordained since the age of fourteen, when Oleg and Dima had proudly enrolled him
in the DOSAFF, a civilian support group for future military recruits. If the
local draft board, the
voyenkomat
, had certified the young Arensky as a
superior physical specimen—suitable for the elite KGB Kremlin guard or security
forces, or the GRU Special Forces—then he would already have been directed
there.

But this had
not
occurred. At age fifteen Taras,
perhaps slightly tardy in reaching his full physical growth, had gone
instead—with his uncle’s considerable connivance—into Moscow’s Suvorov Military
Academy, a direct career path for future commanders. Two years later, as one of
the top cadets in his class, he had moved on to his present four-year officers’
training academy in a forest outside Moscow.

Now, with a little more than two years remaining till he
received his commission, was Cadet Arensky, on an afternoon’s whim, ready to
scrap the whole business and tell the Soviet military apparatus that he should
be reclassified forthwith? Well, such an anarchic thing could not happen! A son
might well defy his father’s wishes, but Oleg imagined Tarushka would have
rather a more difficult time with the academy commandant, Lieutenant General
Gennadiy Buslakov!

Beyond that, even were permission given for Taras to
volunteer, Oleg knew that the
Spetsnaz
, like all Soviet elite forces,
ran incredibly tough selection courses. Few made the grade. And Oleg had heard
the rumors that most who did were either Olympic-caliber athletes, genetic
supermen, or total criminal degenerates, prized for their ruthlessness. But
certainly not good souls, like his boy.

At least these were the consoling thoughts that had enabled
Oleg Arensky to smile at his bullheaded son—who so foolishly imagined he had
bested his old man!—and let himself succumb, with some sense of decorum, to
alcoholic stupor.

Oleg knew ultimately he would be proven right.

And that was precisely what Taras discovered. To a man, his
faculty advisers told him to forget the entire matter. All he would get for his
trouble, one said, were unfavorable notations on his record. Another professor,
a myopic martinet who still taught Prussian cavalry tactics and quoted
Frederick the Great, even denied the existence of any peacetime commando force.
Was Cadet Arensky perhaps thinking of the sappers and partisans who had
operated so effectively behind German lines in the Great Patriotic War?

The only positive suggestion came, surprisingly, from one of
the school’s ideological instructors, who suggested Taras ask the secretary of
his Komsomol cell to submit a letter of recommendation to the GRU, the Chief
Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff, which was responsible for
special operations forces. Taras thanked him politely.

But most of those he consulted were factually pessimistic,
very much as Oleg had predicted. It was useless to make such an application
now. Taras should have been earmarked for special forces
before
conscription. Oh, occasionally members of regular military units were creamed
off during basic training, he was told, but never plucked from officer training
academies. He should buckle down to his studies and forget all this
Spetsnaz
nonsense.

Instead, Taras came up with the idea of locating a
Spetsnaz
officer and approaching him directly. But his only link was       Marcus, who
had gone off to Odessa without leaving his new military address. So Taras
turned to the academy library, but his researches yielded no published roster of
officers. He did find the official biography of Rodion Igorovich Marchenko, the
major general who had invited Marcus into
Spetsnaz,
but among the many
illustrious citations there were no mentions of special forces or a present
command. The GRU obviously had no desire to publicize the strength, deployment,
organization or very existence of their special forces.

Spetsnaz
brigades were contained within each military
district, Taras had heard, but usually concealed among airborne or air-assault
troops, adopting the uniforms and designations of those units. They also
assumed special names depending on the regions in which they operated. For
instance,
Spetsnaz
in the Siberian Military District might go by the
name of
okhotniki
, hunters, yet call themselves
reydoviki
,
raiders, in the GFSG, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany.

Finally Taras turned to Uncle Dima. And as in the case of
his nephew’s impassioned pleadings the previous year for special leave to visit
his fiancee in Siberia, the Defense Ministry
apparatchik
eventually gave
in. A gruff “I’ll see what I can do” was all Taras got, but from Dima that was
usually enough, and so it proved. A week later his uncle phoned him to report
the following Saturday morning at eight sharp to the GRU officers training building
on Peoples’ Militia Street near the Mnevniki Bend of the Moscow River. Taras
was to be in uniform and ask for Major Kornelyuk.

Recalling Marcus’ interview with Marchenko, Taras worked an
extra hour perfecting his military appearance and went to the appointment with
soaring expectations. Alas, these were brought crashing down in five deadly
minutes with a bullet-domed, inhospitable officer who sat with clasped hands
and tight lips under twin portraits—of Lenin, of course, and a smaller one of a
Marshal Viktor Kondratevich Kharchenko, who, Taras had heard, was considered
the father of modern
Spetsnaz.
The major asked only two or three
perfunctory questions, waited out each of Taras’ answers without giving a
flicker of acknowledgment, then announced there were no openings.

“Comrade Major, may I inquire if my answers were
unsatisfactory, and if so, in what way?”

“Your answers were perfectly fine. I can only repeat, we are
not accepting applications.” To emphasize the point, the major closed the
folder before him—presumably Taras’—and placed it in his out basket. “Now, I’m
afraid I have a rather busy schedule this morning.”

Taras, hat under arm, paused before turning to go. “Sir, may
I also ask why you agreed to see me?”

“I was ordered to do so. I’m sorry. Your ambition is
laudable, but in the future I suggest you keep it in strict harness to the
curriculum of your fine academy. Good day, Cadet Arensky.”

Taras left, deciding that if Major Kornelyuk was a
typical   
Spetsnaz
officer, he wanted no part of that organization. In
any case, the young man was finally ready to abandon pursuit of the dream.

The dream, however, had not quite finished pursuing him.

For the following year it came true by accident—or, more
accurately, because of a perfectly executed
balestra
, a fencing
maneuver. Taras had taken up the sport at the Suvorov Academy at fifteen, doing
well enough with foil and épée, but finding the saber, with its more athletic
cut-and-thrust techniques, considerably more to his liking. By the time he had
moved on to the Supreme Soviet Military Academy two years later, his skill with
this highly flexible, edged weapon was such that he was given permission to
practice in Moscow on weekends and during leave at the Central Army Sports Club
(ZSKA) complex on Leningrad Prospekt.

One afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a group of fencers from
the rival KGB club,
Dinamo
, dropped by the competition hall for some
extramural competition. Taras won several bouts, and rather easily. He was
approached afterward by one of ZSKA’s senior sabermen, a very tall fellow with
a long face and elegant, Leninesque mustache and goatee, who asked if he would
mind one more duel.

Taras agreed, and found himself pressed very hard by the
much more experienced swordsman. Still, by sheer speed of reflexes, Arensky
hung on, only a touch behind; then, on a stop cut that could have been judged
either way, he drew even at four all. With the shout to resume play, Taras
sprang into the
balestra
—a forward hop followed by an immediate
lunge—and scored again. He was now a point ahead. His older opponent attacked
furiously during the final minute, pushing Taras back to the end line, but was
unable to score a hit.

When Taras was declared the winner at five-four, the other
man unhelmeted and, with the sweat pouring off his face, drew Taras aside to
the Pepsi machine. “Damn good fencing,” he said, grinning as if genuinely
delighted by the outcome.

“Thanks. I was pretty lucky.”

“Perhaps a little. Do you know who I am?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t get here very often.”

“My name is Dokuchayev.”

“Taras Arensky. I’m still sorry. I should know but—”

“Ossip
Dokuchayev.”

A bell rang, faintly. The Olympics? Had Dokuchayev perhaps
been a member of the Soviet fencing team at Montreal? Taras inquired.

“Yes, I was. But what is much more to the point, I am also a
candidate for next summer’s Moscow Games. Only you, my little student, just
might keep me off our team.”

Taras shook his head and smiled. “I’m not that good.”

“You damn well better be—if you beat me!” Dokuchayev knew
talent when he saw it. He had, he explained, these past few weeks been scouring
the city’s sporting clubs—ZSKA, Trud (
Trudoviye reservy
),
Spartak
,
Burevestnik
, even
Dinamo
—for promising fencers, specifically
sabermen.

“In fact, I was pretty enthusiastic about a couple of those
Dinamo
guys, until you cleaned their clocks.”

“I guess we Army lads have to stick together. Who wants a
KGB champion?
Spetsnaz,
sure, but not Committeemen.”

“Why do you mention
Spetsnaz?”

“Well, it happens I know someone who just joined, or got
selected. A good friend. And everyone has heard that some of the best ZSKA
athletes are actually special forces officers. But you never know which ones.”

“The
best
ones are,” Dokuchayev said. “And you could
be one of them. Why are you laughing?”