Mazurka (59 page)

Marcus continued to walk. Up ahead was the building that housed the Estonian Radio and Television studios. He lit another cigarette, glanced at his companions, noticed how they bantered among themselves like working-men going home at the end of a long day, men who perhaps had stopped at a café for vodka or beer. Marcus put a hand inside the pocket of his overcoat. The gun felt very good to him. He was aware of crowds jostling him, the smells of colognes, bread from a bakery, gasoline fumes, so many scents. Was it like this when you knew your life was almost over? Were you suddenly sharper, keener, more receptive to the world you were leaving?

He put his hand around his gun. He looked back at the men following him. He smiled, a tense little movement of his lips. Now, he thought. It was almost time.

The Soviet Union

Andres Kiss flew low over marshy countryside, noticing here and there small rounded hills and the occasional river, now and then a farmhouse. He avoided towns and villages. He was still flying at a speed of six miles a minute. He set the radar on ‘range only', which permitted him to look approximately eighty miles ahead and thirty thousand feet above, then he placed the master arm in the ON position, so that he was armed and ready in the event of an attack – if there had been a visual sighting of his F-16, and he prayed that there hadn't. He continued to fly between the low hills and through shallow valleys, keeping to the shadows where the sun didn't penetrate. If he hugged the landscape this way, the chance of any high-altitude craft spotting him was severely limited. He saw nothing above him in his radar, and ahead the landscape was dreary. His luck, so far, had held. But luck, he knew, was a fickle bitch, and could change her mind at any time.

Not today, Andres Kiss thought. He had a feeling that fortune was with him.

He was heading due east now. He was approximately 180 miles – thirty minutes' flying time – from Moscow. And the Kremlin.

He studied the landscape around him, seeing it flash past at the kind of speed he loved. Blurs, brown-greens, a landscape that suggested spilled paint. Cattle whizzed past, and grain silos, and houses, and the stacks of the occasional factory. Reservoirs, dams, electricity pylons. It was crazed speed and impressions came at him faster than his senses could truly register them.

This, Andres thought, was power.

Tallinn, Estonia

The first casualty was the uniformed guard who stepped from behind his desk to question Marcus.

“You need a pass, comrade,” the guard said. “And an appointment.”

Marcus said,
“Ya ne panimayu parooski,”
which meant he didn't speak Russian, which was a lie. He asked the guard to speak in Estonian. The guard, a surly young man from Minsk who loathed the Baltic, and who was homesick for his native city, said he didn't speak Estonian. He did, but only to a small degree. Today, though, he didn't feel like wrapping his tongue round those strange sounds, and he didn't like the look of this fellow who'd just strutted inside the building. The young man put his hand on his holster.

Marcus shot him then. The guard fell backwards and a girl began to scream at the end of the hallway. Marcus turned, saw his companions enter the building with their guns drawn. He hadn't expected to kill the young man, but this was too important for scruples now, too important for hesitation. He hurried along the corridor, seeing doors open on either side, the troubled faces of men and women, employees of the State Radio and Television Company which regularly flooded the air with Soviet-approved trash and which took its editorial direction from the Ministry of Communications in Moscow. The girl who'd been screaming before was silent now, covering her face with her hands and kneeling on the floor.

“You're not going to be hurt,” Marcus said. “Direct me to the broadcasting studio.”

The girl pointed towards a staircase. “Up there. Studio Two is radio. Studios One and Three TV.”

Marcus moved toward the stairs, leaving five of his men posted in the hallway. He took the stairs quickly, followed by two men who were brothers from the district of Tallinn called Mustamae, a place of monstrous Soviet apartment houses. He checked his watch again as he moved.

Ahead, a second guard stepped out of an office into the corridor. He had a pistol in one hand and he fired it directly at Marcus. The shot struck one of the brothers, who fell silently. The guard didn't get the chance to fire again before Marcus had shot him in the forehead. And then he was hurrying along the hallway, looking for the door of the studio he wanted. He didn't want TV, he preferred radio because he believed more people listened to music on the radio in the afternoons than watched the tedious graveyard that was Tallinn television.

More people were filing out of their offices. Marcus didn't know how long he had. Sooner or later somebody was going to pick up a telephone and call the militiamen and then the building would be invaded by cops. The five men posted in the hallway below could hold them off for quite some time, although Marcus wasn't sure how long that might be. He took the prepared message from his pocket as he rushed along the corridor. Studio One. Three. What had the hysterical girl said? Studio Two? Marcus noticed a red light above the door of Studio Two. He pushed the door open, stepped inside the soundproofed room.

Two women were seated round a microphone discussing how best to pickle herring. In a glass booth beyond the women sat three technicians. The women stared at Marcus as he entered, then – utterly perplexed by this unscripted occurrence, this intrusion into their domestic programme – looked at the technicians for guidance. Marcus waved his gun and made his way to the control booth, shoving the door open.

“I want to read a statement,” he said.

The technicians didn't know how to behave. One, muscular and bearded, asked, “On whose behalf?”

“The Movement for Baltic Independence.”

The bearded man smiled. “Be my guest,” and he gestured towards the microphones where the two silent women sat.

The Soviet Union

Fifty-four miles from Moscow. His predetermined initial point. Nine minutes of flying time. And so far it was working, everything, working like a goddam charm. Even the landscape seemed welcoming to him, a carpet laid out for him to fly over. Magic, Andres thought. Pure magic.

And then he was tense. Flying low over a flat landscape was one thing. Flying between stunted hills, that was a piece of cake. But Moscow was looming up, and Moscow was going to be something else.

He punched the on-board clock, starting from zero and counting up to eight and a half minutes. He pushed a small white button which armed the station where the three Mark 82s were located. Weapons live. Bombs live.

Now, he thought. The last lap. The big city.

Counting up. Still counting up. Five minutes. Six. Seven. But then time was becoming meaningless to Andres now, because he felt he was beyond such measurements. He was in a place without clocks. He was airborne and free and time was a ball and chain you tossed down through the clouds.

When eight minutes had elapsed, he began to climb rapidly, creating an angle of eventual descent. Three hundred feet. Five hundred. One thousand. Fifteen hundred.

Andres's face sweated in his helmet. He could see Moscow –
Matushka Moskva
– spread before him in the afternoon light. He could see towers and apartment buildings and spires and a gleaming stretch of the Moskva River and the movement of traffic on the streets. As he climbed, he said in a soft voice the Estonian version of the Lord's Prayer, which he'd learned from Mikhail Kiss in childhood.
Mei isa, kes sa oled taevas
…

Tallinn, Estonia

Marcus looked at his watch. It was time to read his statement. He sat nervously at the microphone and spread the sheet of paper out on the table before him. For a second he couldn't quite make out the words. He rubbed his eyes, cleared his throat, stared at the technicians in the glass booth. Two were expressionless, but the bearded man looked encouraging.

“Any time you like.” The bearded man's voice was loud inside Marcus's earphones.

Marcus took a sip from a glass of water and began to read. His statement, carefully composed by Romanenko many months ago, concerned the travesty of international justice that was the Soviet occupation. It concerned the rights of nations to self-determination. It concerned old non-invasion treaties, compacts made between the Russians and the Baltic countries, that had been cynically disregarded by the Kremlin. It concerned the revolutionary movements in Latvia and Lithuania that even now were broadcasting to their own people in Riga and Vilnius. And finally it concerned the daring flight of a young pilot into Moscow and how that single act of unselfish bravery was the standard against which all patriotic acts had to be judged, the spearhead of a new movement towards freedom, the call to liberty, the ultimate symbol.

Marcus stopped reading. He didn't realise that his speech hadn't been broadcast, that the transmitter had been rendered inoperative by technicians after he'd read the opening three sentences, and that the five men left to guard the downstairs hallway had been shot and killed by an invasion of militiamen. He had no way of knowing that the young man from Mustamae, who had been standing guard outside the door to Studio Two, lay dead in the corridor, shot by militiamen. Nor could he know that the group that had seized the Post Office at number 20 Suur-Karja had been killed in a thirty-minute gun battle with the KGB.

Marcus raised the water glass to his lips and looked at the bearded man, who winked at him through the glass. Marcus ran a hand over his face. He set down his glass just as the studio door opened. He reached at once for his gun as two militiamen, armed with automatic rifles, entered the room with their weapons already firing.

Marcus slumped across the table, spilling his water glass. A stream of water slithered across the paper on which his speech had been written, causing the ink to run in indecipherable lines, as if a bird with dark blue claws had alighted on the paper.

Moscow

At two thousand five hundred feet Andres could see Red Square, and the Kremlin – and there was the Palace of Congresses, where the Communist Party conferences were held.

Andres Kiss's target. Mikhail Kiss's target. The target of the Brotherhood. The place where destinies were decided, the malignant heart of the system the Brotherhood had despised. Andres Kiss could see the great columns that surrounded the building and he thought of how, within its vast auditorium and spacious offices, men decreed the fates of people within all the Soviet Republics, how decisions taken here filtered down into everyday life in the countries of the Baltic, and affected the way people lived. Here the party bigshots planned to bury the Baltic nations. Here they planned to turn Baits into third-class citizens in their own countries. Here the party engine functioned, pumping out poisons that had to be swallowed by people who had absolutely no desire to feed on Russian lies or to embrace a system that was alien to them, one that killed the spirit and demolished the soul.

It was Andres's intention to drop the first bomb at one end of the building, the second in the middle, the third at the other end, and then turn the aircraft in the direction of Leningrad and the Gulf of Finland, which was his one chance of getting out of the Soviet Union before he was attacked.

That was his intention.

He was about three miles from the Kremlin when he nosed the F-16 downwards, conscious now of the way the city tilted through his cockpit, as if the buildings all listed impossibly to one side. Down and down now. Fifteen hundred feet above ground level, twelve hundred. That was when he saw three MIG-29s in the eastern sky, perhaps no more than two miles from him. That was when he realised, with a start that made his heart shudder, that something had gone wrong with the plan.

Without thinking, operating entirely on old instincts and training, he manoeuvred the F-16 into firing position and released one of the forward quarter heat-seeking Side Winders. It exploded on contact with the MIG-29 nearest to him: a flash, a violent plume of smoke, and the Soviet aircraft was gone. Andres fired the second missile and made a direct hit on another of the MIGs, destroying the plane with startling immediacy. The afternoon, so placid before, was filled with trails of smoke and turbulence and destruction.

The third Russian plane zoomed above him and attacked him with cannon. The F-16 trembled and vibrated in the storm of fire but didn't receive a hit.

Andres, still believing in luck, still believing that the angels were on his side, rolled back into his dive on the Palace of Congresses as the remaining MIG-29, the Fulcrum, fired down on him from above. Let him catch me, Andres thought. Let the fucker do his worst. He'd already brought two of them down and he wasn't about to be stopped by some goddam Ivanovich shooting at him. He was about two miles from his target now and he had his hand poised over the bomb button, and when the bombs fell upon the Palace they'd explode after a fifteen-second delay.

At one thousand feet two SA-11 missiles, fired from a site three miles beyond Moscow, came screaming towards him, disintegrating the fuselage of the F-16 and turning the aircraft into a mass of fiery debris that splintered in the sky and fell, like the tail of the most glorious firework that had ever lit the air above Moscow. Andres Kiss, harnessed to his seat, helmeted, still saying the closing lines of the Lord's Prayer, his hand reaching for the bomb button, felt nothing save a very brief moment of burning discomfort before he was falling and falling, along with the flaming remains of his aeroplane, into an empty soccer stadium a mere two miles from the Palace of Congresses.

Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

It was almost midnight when Dimitri Volovich arrived at Greshko's cottage in Zavidovo. The Yakut nurse opened the door for him. Without waiting for any response from her, he stepped inside. “I'll need a glass of water,” he said.