The Devil's Alternative (11 page)

“I would point out that if they did,” said Rudin, “we could not stop them. Our high-energy- particle laser beams from space satellites are not fully functional yet. One day we will no doubt be able to vaporize incoming rockets in inner space before they can reach us. But not yet The latest assessments of our experts—our experts, Comrade Vishnayev, not our optimists—suggest a full- blown Anglo-American thermonuclear strike would take out one hundred million of our citizens—mostly Great Russians—and devastate sixty percent of the Soviet Union from Poland to the Urals. But to continue. Comrade Ivanenko, you have experience of the West. What do you say?”

“Unlike Comrades Vishnayev and Kerensky,” observed Ivanenko, “I control hundreds of agents throughout the capitalist West. Their reports are constant I, too, have no doubt at all that the Americans would respond.”

“Then let me put it in a nutshell,” said Rudin brusquely. The time for sparring was over. “If we negotiate with the Americans for wheat we may have to accede to demands that could set us back by five years. If we tolerate the famine, we will probably be set back by ten years. If we launch a European war, we could be wiped out, certainly set back by twenty to forty years.

“I am not the theoretician that Comrade Vishnayev undoubtedly is. But I seem to recall the teachings of Marx and Lenin are very firm on one point: that while the pursuit of the world rule of Marxism-Leninism must be pursued at every stage by every means, its progress should not be endangered by the incurring of foolish risks. I estimate this plan as being based on a foolish risk. Therefore I propose that we—”

“I propose a vote,” said Vishnayev softly.

So that was it. Not a vote of no confidence in him, thought Rudin. That would come later if he lost this round. The faction fight was out in the open now. He had not had the feeling so clearly in years that he was fighting for his life. If he lost, there would be no graceful retirement, no retaining the villas and the privileges as Mikoyan had done. It would be ruin, exile, perhaps the bullet in the nape of the neck. But he kept his composure. He put his own motion first. One by one, the hands went up.

Rykov, Ivanenko, Petrov—all voted for him and the negotiation policy. There was hesitancy

down the table. Who had Vishnayev got to? What had he promised them?

Stepanov and Shushkin raised their hands. Last, slowly, came Chavadze the Georgian. Rudin put the countermotion, for war in the spring. Vishnayev and Kerensky, of course, were for it. Komarov of Agriculture joined them. Bastard, thought Rudin, it was your bloody ministry that got us into this mess. Vishnayev must have persuaded the man that Rudin was going to ruin him in any case, so he thought he had nothing to lose. You’re wrong, my friend, thought Rudin, face impassive, I’m going to have your entrails for this. Petryanov raised his hand. He’s been promised the prime ministership, thought Rudin. Vitautas the Balt and Mukhamed the Tajik also went with Vishnayev for war. The Tajik would know that if nuclear war came, the Orientals would rule over the ruins. The Lithuanian had been bought.

“Six for each proposal,” he said quietly. “And my own vote for the negotiations.” Too close, he thought. Much too close.

It was sundown when the meeting dissolved. But the faction fight, all knew, would now go on until it was resolved; no one could back away now, no one could stay neutral anymore.

It was not until the fifth day of the tour that the party arrived in Lvov and stayed at the Intourist Hotel. Up to this point, Drake had gone with all the guided tours on the itinerary, but this time he made an excuse that he had a headache and wished to stay in his room. As soon as the party left by motor coach for St. Nicholas Church, he changed into more casual clothes and slipped out of the hotel.

Kaminsky had told him the sort of clothes that would pass without attracting attention: socks with sandals over them, light trousers, not too smart, and an open-necked shirt of the cheaper variety. With a street map he set off on foot for the seedy, poor, working-class suburb of Levandivka. He had not the slightest doubt that the two men he sought would treat him with the profoundest suspicion, once he found them. And this was hardly surprising when one considered the family backgrounds and circumstances that had forged them. He recalled what Miroslav Kaminsky, lying in his Turkish hospital bed, had told him.

On September 29, 1966, near Kiev, at the gorge of Babi Yar, where over fifty thousand Jews had been slaughtered by the SS in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941-42, the Ukraine’s foremost contemporary poet, Ivan Dzyuba, gave an address that was remarkable inasmuch as a Ukrainian Catholic was speaking out powerfully against anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism has always flourished in the Ukraine, and successive rulers—tsars, Stalinists, Nazis, Stalinists again, and their successors—have vigorously encouraged it to flourish.

Dzyuba’s long speech began as a seeming plea for remembrance of the slaughtered Jews of Babi Yar, a straight condemnation of Nazism and fascism. But as it developed, his theme began to encompass all those despotisms which, despite their technological triumphs, brutalize the human spirit and seek to persuade even the brutalized that this is normal.

“We should therefore judge each society,” he said, “not by its external technical achievements but by the position and meaning it gives to man, by the value it puts on human dignity and human conscience.”

By the time he reached this point, the Chekisti who had infiltrated the silent crowd had realized the poet was not talking about Hitler’s Germany at all; he was talking about the Politburo’s Soviet Union. Shortly after the speech, he was arrested.

In the cellars of the local KGB barracks, the chief interrogator, the man who had at his beck and call the two hulks in the corners of the room, the ones gripping the heavy, three-foot-long rubber hoses, was a fast-rising young colonel of the Second Chief Directorate, sent in from Moscow. His name was Yuri Ivanenko.

But at the address at Babi Yar there had been, in the front row, standing next to their fathers, two small boys, age ten. They did not know each other then, and would meet and become firm friends only six years later on a building site. One was Lev Mishkin; the other was David Lazareff.

The presence of both the fathers of Mishkin and Lazareff at the meeting had also been noted, and when, years later, they applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, both were accused of anti- Soviet activities and drew long sentences in labor camps.

Their families lost their apartments, the sons any hope of attending a university. Though highly intelligent, they were destined for pick-and-shovel work. Now both twenty-six, these were the young men Drake sought among the hot and dusty byways of Levandivka.

It was at the second address that he found David Lazareff, who, after Drake had introduced himself, treated him with extreme suspicion. But he agreed to bring his friend Lev Mishkin to a rendezvous since Drake knew both their names, anyway.

That evening Drake met Mishkin, and the pair regarded him with something close to hostility. He told them the whole story of the escape and rescue of Miroslav Kaminsky, and his own background. The only proof he could produce was the photograph of himself and Kaminsky together, taken in the hospital room at Trabzon with a Polaroid camera by a nursing orderly. Held up in front of them was that day’s edition of the local Turkish newspaper. Drake had brought the same newspaper as suitcase lining and showed it to them as proof of his story.

“Look,” he said finally, “if Miroslav had been washed up in Soviet territory and been taken by the KGB, if he had talked and revealed your names, and if I were from the KGB, I’d hardly be asking for your help.”

The two Jewish workers agreed to consider his request overnight. Unknown to Drake, both Mishkin and Lazareff had long shared an ideal close to his own—that of striking one single, powerful blow of revenge against the Kremlin hierarchy in their midst. But they were near to giving up, weighed down by the hopelessness of trying to do anything without outside help.

Impelled by their desire for an ally beyond the borders of the USSR, the two shook hands in the small hours of the morning and agreed to take the Anglo-Ukrainian into their confidence. The second meeting was that afternoon, Drake having skipped another guided tour. For safety they strolled through wide, unpaved lanes near the outskirts of the city, talking quietly in Ukrainian. They told Drake of their desire also to strike at Moscow in a single, deadly act.

“The question is—what?” said Drake. Lazareff, who was the more silent and more dominant of the pair, spoke.

“Ivanenko,” he said. “The most hated man in the Ukraine.” “What about him?” asked Drake.

“Kill him.”

Drake stopped in his tracks and stared at the dark-haired, intense young man. “You’d never get near him,” he said finally.

“Last year,” said Lazareff, “I was working on a job here in Lvov. I’m a house painter, right? We were redecorating the apartment of a Party bigwig. There was a little old woman staying with them. From Kiev. After she’d gone, the Party man’s wife mentioned who she was. Later I saw a letter postmarked Kiev in the letter box. I took it, and it was from the old woman. It had her address on it.”

“So who was she?” asked Drake. “His mother.”

Drake considered the information. “You wouldn’t think people like that had mothers,” he said. “But you’d have to watch her flat for a long time before he might come to visit her.”

Lazareff shook his head. “She’s the bait,” he said, and outlined his idea. Drake considered the

magnitude of it.

Before coming to the Ukraine, he had envisaged the great single blow he had dreamed of delivering against the might of the Kremlin in many terms, but never this. To assassinate the head of the KGB would be to strike into the very center of the Politburo, to send hairline cracks running through every corner of the power structure.

“It might work,” he conceded.

If it did, he thought, it would be hushed up at once. But if the news ever got out, the effect on popular opinion, especially in the Ukraine, would be traumatic.

“It could trigger the biggest uprising there has ever been here,” he said.

Lazareff nodded. Alone with his partner Mishkin, far away from outside help, he had evidently given the project a lot of thought.

“True,” he said.

“What equipment would you need?” asked Drake. Lazareff told him. Drake nodded.

“It can all be acquired in the West,” he said. “But how to get it in?”

“Odessa,” cut in Mishkin. “I worked on the docks there for a while. The place is completely corrupt. The black market is thriving. Every Western ship brings seamen who do a vigorous illegal trade in Turkish leather jackets, suede coats, and denim jeans. We would meet you there. It is inside the Ukraine; we would not need internal passports.”

Before they parted, they agreed to the plan. Drake would acquire the equipment and bring it to Odessa by sea. He would alert Mishkin and Lazareff by a letter, posted inside the Soviet Union, well in advance of his own arrival. The wording would be innocent. The rendezvous in Odessa was to be a café that Mishkin knew from his days as a teenage laborer there.

“Two more things,” said Drake. “When it is over, the publicity for it, the worldwide announcement that it has been done, is vital—almost as important as the act itself. And that means that you personally must tell the world. Only you will have the details to convince the world of the truth. But that means you must escape from here to the West.”

“It goes without saying,” murmured Lazareff. “We are both Refuseniks. Like our fathers before us, we have tried to emigrate to Israel and have been refused. This time we will go, with or without permission. When this is over, we have to get to Israel. It is the only place we will ever be safe, ever again. Once there, we will tell the world what we have done and leave those bastards in the Kremlin and the KGB discredited in the eyes of their own people.”

“The other point follows from the first,” said Drake. “When it is done, you must let me know by coded letter or postcard. In case anything goes wrong with the escape. So that I can try to help get the news to the world.”

They agreed that an innocently worded postcard would be sent from Lvov to a poste restante address in London. With the last details memorized, they parted, and Drake rejoined his tour group.

Two days later Drake was back in London. The first thing he did was buy the world’s most comprehensive book on small arms. The second was to send a telegram to a friend in Canada, one of the best of that elite private list he had built up over the years of émigrés who thought as he did of carrying their hatred to the enemy. The third was to begin preparations for a long-dormant plan to raise the needed funds by robbing a bank.

At the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt on the southeastern outskirts of Moscow, a driver pulling to the right off the main boulevard onto the Rublevo Road will come twenty kilometers later to the little village of Uspenskoye, in the heart of the weekend-villa country. In the great pine and birch

forests around Uspenskoye lie such hamlets as Usovo and Zhukovka, where stand the country mansions of the Soviet elite. Just beyond Uspenskoye Bridge over the Moscow River is a beach where in summer the lesser-privileged but nevertheless very well off (they have their own cars) come from Moscow to bathe from the sandy beach.

The Western diplomats come here, too, and it is one of the rare places where a Westerner can be cheek by jowl with ordinary Muscovite families. Even the routine KGB tailing of Western diplomats seems to let up on Sunday afternoons in high summer.

Adam Munro came here with a party of British Embassy staffers that Sunday afternoon, July 11, 1982. Some of them were married couples, some single and younger than he. Shortly before three, the whole party of them left their towels and picnic baskets among the trees, ran down the low bluff toward the sandy beach, and swam. When he came back, Munro picked up his rolled towel and began to dry himself. Something fell out of it.

He stooped to pick it up. It was a small pasteboard card, half the size of a postcard, white on both sides. On one side was typed, in Russian, the words: “Three kilometers north of here is an abandoned chapel in the woods. Meet me there in thirty minutes. Please. It is urgent.”