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  “I don’t know, he never told me.”

  HE SAW THE Fräulein start as she stepped out of the helicopter, and Farm Boy and Mongol, who were carrying the body, looked in the same direction as they emerged. Vadim stepped out onto the perforated steel planking of the runway behind them, to see an unexpected Antonov AN-72 transport plane. There were two men standing in front of it.

  The younger of the two figures was wearing the heavy winter version of the VDV’s khaki drab. There was no insignia on his uniform, which marked him as a member of the Spetsnaz. He had chiselled features and a square jaw, like a Western comic character, or a figure in a propaganda poster; but his expression was grim.

  As Vadim approached, he recognised the young man as Private Orlov Razin. He had been a razvedchiki, a scout for the VDV airborne forces, when Vadim had noticed him and sent the boy back to Kiev for training.

  More meat for the grinder, he thought grimly.

  “Comrade captain...” Razin started as Vadim reached the two men.

  “Vadim, or ‘boss,’ not ‘captain’; do you understand me?” Vadim demanded. “Where are you from?”

  “Ukraine, si –” Years of indoctrinated military discipline warred within Razin as he tried to bring himself to say Vadim’s first name.

  “Are you a Cossack, like this old fool?” Vadim asked, nodding towards the colonel. Razin actually blanched.

  “Er... I mean... I’m...”

  “Eloquent? It was a simple question, what are you ashamed of?”

  Razin bristled, which pleased Vadim.

  “Yes, I am a Cossack, Vadim.” He pronounced the captain’s name with just a little venom.

  He has a backbone, Vadim thought.

  “You see the big East German woman?” he asked.

  “Yes si –” Razin looked down, shaking his head.

  “You report to her.”

  Vadim watched as Razin, obviously uncomfortable, grabbed his pack and weapon and made his way toward the zastava.

  “Bit hard on him, weren’t you?” Colonel Krychenko asked, and Vadim turned to face his commanding officer. Tall and thin, the colonel had a narrow face that looked as though it had been formed by wind shear. Dark eyes and a goatee, he wore his salt and pepper hair almost down to his shoulders, because nobody could tell him otherwise. He wore a heavy grey greatcoat and a ushanka ‘ear hat’ made of real mink fur, as opposed to the synthetic fur hats that the rest of them wore, for much the same reason. He had an old, holstered Nagant M1895 revolver on one hip and a real Cossack sabre on the other. The colonel was in his mid-sixties, but Vadim couldn’t help but think, as he pulled his winter smock tighter against the cold wind blowing in from the mountains, that his old friend looked in better shape than he did. Of course, the colonel wasn’t jumping out of helicopters and shooting people on a daily basis anymore.

  “We lost the Spaniard today,” Vadim told him.

  The colonel nodded. “I see, I’m sorry. He was the last of the old guard, wasn’t he?”

  Vadim didn’t answer. The colonel reached into his greatcoat and pulled out a long hip flask and offered it. Vadim took a long pull from the flask, feeling the rough vodka hit the back of his throat and start to burn.

  He was nine years old. Back in Stalingrad, standing over the body of a German soldier, his hands red and dripping. That was how a young Dmytro had found him. He had told Vadim that his first kill had earned him his first drink. Even then, Vadim had known that Dmytro had just been trying to help, but had no idea what to do with the boy. The ‘vodka’ – apparently made from potatoes and white spirit – had blinded him for the better part of an hour.

  Vadim handed the flask back.

  “Death to Hitler,” the colonel said, and took a long swallow from the flask himself. “I’m sorry for your friend.” He handed the flask back to Vadim. “He seems like an earnest young man.” He nodded in the direction Razin had gone. Vadim was aware of raised voices. The rest of the squad had presumably started to give the new recruit a hard time.

  The colonel wasn’t praising the boy. The Spetsnaz didn’t need earnest young men and women, it needed ruthless ones.

  “He’s good,” Vadim said and then after a few more moments: “Perhaps I’m trying to make up for past mistakes.”

  “Timoshenko?” the colonel asked, meaning Gulag. Vadim nodded and took another drink before handing the flask back to the colonel. “Being a killer doesn’t make you a good soldier.”

  “He likes it too much.”

  Gulag had been transferred from his Siberian work camp to a Motor Rifle Penal Battalion. His company had been caught in an ambush, and Vadim and his squad had been first on the scene. The penal company had given a good account of itself, but they had all been killed, bar Gulag. They found him amongst a pile of mujahideen bodies.

  “Perhaps he’s perfectly suited for this war,” the colonel suggested. Vadim had thought the same thing. “You’ll look after my fellow Cossack, though?”

  “This place gets us all in the end,” Vadim said quietly.

  “You know I can have you court-martialled for calling me an old fool?” the colonel asked. Vadim smiled.

  “I think you’ll be at the end of a long queue.”

  “Yes, I noticed the good Lieutenant Ivack didn’t make it back with you.” The colonel’s expression remained carefully neutral.

  “He chose to stay,” Vadim said, and the colonel nodded. “Why’d we get sent there?”

  “Ivack went over my head. I’m sorry.”

  Vadim took a deep breath and looked away from his friend. The sun was up now, the mountains casting long shadows over the plain. The thin air was so fresh it hurt to breathe up here. There was just the slightest taint of oil and aviation fuel in the air.

  “Why is a lieutenant in the KGB giving a colonel in the GRU orders? And why didn’t the border guards do it, or OsnazA?”

  “Because they knew... we knew somebody would get killed.”

  Vadim almost wished he could feel betrayed, but he knew the colonel would have had no choice.

  “Gorbachev has been arrested,” the colonel told him, his voice even. You had to know him as well as Vadim did to see the emotion the old colonel was holding back. Mikhail Gorbachev, with his perestroika and glasnost, had seemed the best chance they had of an end to this grinding war. “He has been charged with treason against the State. For all I know they’ve already taken him into the yard at Dzerzhinsky Square and shot him.”

  Vadim had lived through Stalin’s purges as young man. He didn’t expect to feel such disappointment anymore. It was like a cold knife between the ribs. He was surprised to find he was frightened. He hadn’t realised that he’d had enough hope left to invest any in Gorbachev.

  “I should go in there,” Vadim said, nodding towards the zastava, “and put a bullet in each of their heads. It would be quicker.” He felt the colonel’s hand on his shoulder.

  “I do not think that it is what men like us do,” he said. Vadim broke free of his grip and looked up at the mountains.

  “Who’s in charge now, in the Kremlin?”

  “Varishnikov.” Varishnikov was the hardest of the hard-liners and the head of the KGB. That explained the KGB pushing the GRU – Army intelligence, the parent organisation of Spetsnaz – around. “It was relatively bloodless, at least.”

  “They’re going to kill us,” Vadim said.

  “Yes, both of us. A sad way for two Heroes of the Soviet Union to die, don’t you think?” There was no humour in Vadim’s answering laugh. “We have value to them only as good soldiers; the moment we stop...”

  “We’re bad soldiers, but excellent hunters,” Vadim said. The colonel frowned, but held his peace. There hadn’t been much light at the end of the tunnel, just a glimmer, and now it seemed like that had been snuffed out. Vadim didn’t feel much like going on, but the colonel was right. They’d both lived through Stalingrad. They weren’t the kind of men to put guns in their mouths. When they came for him, they would have a fight
on their hands. He looked up at the Antonov.

  “That’s a big plane for just two people, even an officer of your stature,” Vadim pointed out. The colonel, smiled but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. Vadim wondered if this was it. A flight back to Bagram, and then two in the back of his head in the KGB compound in Kabul.

  “We’re going back west,” the colonel said. “The whole brigade.”

  “Kiev?” Vadim asked, cursing the hope in his voice. He rarely went back to Stalingrad. The beautiful Ukrainian city where he’d done his officer training was the closest he had to a home.

  “I don’t know,” the colonel said. He sounded uneasy.

  “Is the war over? Are they pulling us out?” That didn’t make sense; one of the main issues the hardliners had with Gorbachev was his intention to pull Soviet forces out of Afghanistan.

  “Just the 15th Spetsnaz, and we’re being replaced. The 40th Army is being reinforced. At least two more Armies.”

  Vadim suddenly felt cold.

  “Two?”

  “At least.”

  Vadim knew that this could only mean one thing.

  “Pakistan or Iran?” he asked. It made perfect sense, of course. They couldn’t control Afghanistan, so why not invade another country.

  “I don’t know. I suspect Iran, and then try for the rest of the Gulf. They need the oil.”

  Vadim stared at the colonel. He had wondered if it was going to happen in ’79 when he’d flown into Kabul with the ‘Moslem Battalion’.

  “The Americans have to respond to this.”

  The colonel just nodded. It made sense that the 15th Spetsnaz Brigade were being pulled out; they were effective, but they had a reputation for being insubordinate – bordering, at times, on the seditious. The colonel liked to joke that this was down to his leadership. They also did not have a good relationship with the KGB. “They want to fight a war they can’t win.”

  “Just like this one, my friend.”

  “But nobody can win this one,” Vadim said very quietly. The colonel didn’t say anything. Suddenly Vadim remembered how the gaunt, near-starving German soldiers thrown into the ruins of Stalingrad had looked like demons to him. Not for the first time, he wondered who the demons were now.

  “Well, at least we’ll get to put our training to use,” he managed. Much of Spetsnaz training focused on cross-border, deep-penetration raids to destroy strategic resources, particularly nuclear weapons. He nodded towards the zastava where he could still hear the squad’s voices. “What do I tell them?”

  “What do you think?” the colonel asked.

  THE COLONEL HAD returned to the Antonov; there were more members of the 15th to pick up from various airstrips in the north. Then they would return to Bagram before joining the rest of the brigade to fly west en masse. The colonel felt that it should be Vadim himself who told his men.

  He could hear them arguing, good-naturedly. The Fräulein was divvying out the Spaniard’s belongings to the rest of the squad. They would have given Razin any gear that he needed, and the rest would be shared out according to sentimentality and requirement. The Spaniard didn’t have much family. Given his off-duty habits, he almost certainly had bastard children everywhere he’d served, but they’d been unknown to him. Farm Boy had his parents and siblings back in Georgia, Mongol had a large extended family back in Mongolia, and, oddly, Gulag spoke of his father with near holy reverence, but none of them had immediate family. Their life wasn’t really conducive to partners and children.

  As he approached he could hear them calling Razin ‘New Boy’. That’s what he’d be called now until he earned back the nickname he’d been given in basic training, or a new one. He was new in from Kiev, so the rest of the squad would be going through his gear, looking for anything that was difficult to get hold of in Afghanistan – which was just about everything, but particularly sweets, alcohol, pornography and cigarettes. How New Boy took this blatant theft would play a large part in how he was accepted by the squad. You had to strike a balance between generosity and assertiveness. Even so, the rest of the squad would keep their distance until he had proven he wasn’t a fool.

  Their tent was pitched in a hole and surrounded by sand bags; you had to walk through a warren of trenches to reach it. It tended to turn into a boggy swamp when it rained, but in the snow, it was just cold. Gulag was lying across the top of the sandbags, smoking what Vadim assumed was one of New Boy’s cigarettes.

  “He didn’t have any porn. I can only assume he’s a monk. Didn’t Marx have some quite strong things to say about religion?” Gulag took another drag of the cigarette. Vadim wasn’t really in the mood for Gulag’s brand of humour tonight. He started down the crumbling earthen steps into the tent. “Cosy little chat with the colonel: you both being heroes and everything?”

  The Spetsnaz may have been more relaxed than the regular army, but even so, this crossed the line.

  “You weren’t beaten enough during basic training, were you?” Vadim asked. He was wondering if at his age he still had it in him to deliver a beating to a savage like Gulag. He wasn’t sure he would like the answer.

  “Oh, I was beaten,” Gulag told him.

  “I get that, just not enough.”

  “I was beaten growing up, I was beaten in the gulag, and I was beaten in basic training.” He took another drag of his cigarette. He wasn’t wearing his gloves now, despite the cold. Vadim could see the stumps of the two fingers on his left hand. “Made me the man I am today.” Gulag sat up on the sandbags and grinned down at Vadim. “They don’t beat me anymore, though. Now they just try and kill me. Tell me, captain, how many men under your command have made it back to Russia, or whatever disgusting shithole they come from?”

  Vadim stared up at Gulag.

  The criminal smiled back at him. “You’re going to try and kill us all, aren’t you?”

  Not me, he wanted to tell Gulag, except it was his command, they were his people.

  Gulag pushed himself off the sandbags, landing right in front of Vadim. He leaned in close, smelling of sweat, cigarettes and bad breath.

  “Well you’re not going to kill me, do you understand?”

  Then he turned and stalked into the tent.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1117 EST, 14th November 1987

  The Volga, Lenok (India) Class Submarine, Laurentian Fan, Atlantic Ocean, off the East Coast of Canada

  THE SQUAD JOINED Colonel Krychenko in the Antonov, and the short-take-off-and-landing transport aircraft hopped from one airfield to the next, collecting the scattered 15th Spetsnaz Brigade. Vadim assumed that he would know most of the men and women that had joined them on the plane, but the rate of attrition had been such that a lot of the faces where new to him.

  They landed at Bagram Airbase just outside Kabul, the main headquarters of the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan. The 15th Brigade had just about enough personnel left to warrant a heavy-lift Antonov AN-124 Ruslan aircraft. Even with them all in there, the huge cargo aircraft’s interior seemed cavernous. The other men and women all looked like Vadim felt, tired and without hope. There was much speculation, but nobody was telling them anything. He’d used the time to catch up with those members of the brigade that he still knew. They shared the same stories: soldiers’ lives wasted, the villainy of the KGB.

  The plane landed a number of times to refuel and to drop people off. Initially Vadim wasn’t sure where their final destination was, though he suspected East Germany. It was warmer here than it had been in Afghanistan, despite its being November. They were loaded into trucks, and eventually debussed at the Baltic port of Rostock.

  They were led into covered submarine pens to see two docked Lenok Class boats. They looked like most submarines Vadim had seen or operated from, except these had raised structures on their backs, carrying submersibles of a type Vadim didn’t recognise. He could feel the questioning eyes of the rest of the squad, but this wasn’t a good time to discuss anything.

  There had been enough
Spetsnaz in Rostock to form a patchwork company, which was split between the two subs and then broken down into squads. They were then ordered to give up their equipment, causing some heated discussion. No sailor had been permitted to carry a weapon in the Soviet fleet since the Kronstadt Mutiny, but Vadim and a number of other officers, backed by some increasingly angry soldiers, had pointed out that they weren’t sailors. The naval officers had replied that a pressurised environment 700 feet beneath the surface is not a good place for high-velocity weapons and grenades. In all honesty, Vadim could see their point.

  It was cramped on the sub, which smelled of diesel, sweat, military cooking and shit. The sub seemed to be running on a reduced crew to make room for the Spetsnaz commandos. The squads had been separated and isolated. This was standard operating procedure, helping compartmentalise what little information they knew. They had been at sea for more than seven days now. At least they had all managed to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

  Vadim made his way through the narrow corridor from the commander’s state room back towards the cramped bunk area his squad had been assigned. He had no idea how Farm Boy, Mongol and the Fräulein were managing to get around.

  They were all sitting around a wooden crate, except for Gulag who was in his bunk, furtively masturbating.

  “Fuck’s sake, Gulag,” Vadim muttered.

  “I can’t help it, boss, I can see Fräulein.”

  “I will tear it off and choke you with it, little man,” the Fräulein threatened.

  “Promises, promises...”

  “Speaking as your medic, you’re supposed to leave it alone when it starts to bleed,” Mongol pointed out. There was some laughter. Gulag’s mercifully dry hand emerged from beneath the sheets and he tried to wipe it on a protesting Farm Boy.