The Red Eagles (3 page)

Nadezhda was still sleeping, her long black hair falling across her face. As he lay down beside her, determined to get an hour or so’s sleep, she snored gently and placed her arm protectively around his chest. He smiled and stroked her hair.

When he was her age he’d been playing hookey from school in Minnesota, bad-mouthing his parents, feeling up Betty Jane Webber in the hay loft, ignoring stupid questions like “What are you going to do when you grow up, Jack?” He had known nothing, experienced nothing, done nothing.

This sixteen-year-old lying beside him had seen her parents and brothers hanged, had killed at least three Germans, and had had at least one lover before him. It was only in sleep that she still looked a child. In sleep she almost had enough innocence for both of them.

He was wakened by Ovchinnikova less than an hour later. “We’ve got a visitor,” she said.

It was a young girl, seven or eight years old, from a nearby village. She was sitting with Yakovenko eating a chocolate bar. “They’ve got an informer,” Yakovenko explained. “They were going to string him up right away, but Mikhailova – remember her? – insisted that they follow all the proper procedures and have a trial. So Liliya here was awarded the fifteen-mile walk to fetch you.”

Kuznetsky groaned.

“Breakfast?” asked Yakovenko, holding out a chocolate bar.

It was a beautiful spring morning, a bright sun warming the air and flooding the eyes with fresh colours. Swiveling his head around, Kuznetsky couldn’t find a single wisp of cloud in the sky.

He was sitting on a piece of rubble waiting for the trial to begin. He’d given Morisov half an hour to put together the evidence, and it seemed like longer. He opened his pocket watch and was caught as usual by the beauty of the face that stared out of the photograph inside the lid. Anna, he called her, but he had no idea what her real name was. The only thing he knew about her was that the man who’d carried her picture had died in a ditch outside Lepel, with both hands vainly trying to stop the hole where his throat had been.

It was almost eleven. “Grigory,” he shouted.

“Ready,” Morisov shouted back. “Bring out the accused,” he said to Mikhailova, who stood holding a pitchfork.

The man was brought out. He was about thirty, with a broad face that seemed ill at ease with his emaciated body. His face was covered in red welts; obviously not everyone had been prepared to wait for the proper authorities. He was clearly terrified.

The same old scene, Kuznetsky thought. The same circle of cottages, the same ring of onlookers, eyes bright with fear and lack of food. The crimes had changed, and the names of the criminals. Counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs, kulak profiteers, Nazi informers. His duty was the same. Liquidation. He listened to Morisov.

“… the accused was seen entering and leaving the Fascist administrative headquarters in Polotsk. That afternoon a Nazi punishment detail arrived here, where they immediately discovered a clearing sown and cultivated against their orders by Comrade Poznyakov. After piling the clearing
with loose branches and setting fire to it, they hanged Comrade Poznyakov, his wife, and two children. The accused returned later that day, feigning ignorance …”

Why had he come back? Kuznetsky asked himself. What stupidity.

The accused sat on the ground, his head bowed, his right arm twitching. Kuznetsky wondered which of the stock explanations it would be.

Morisov had finished and was now joking with one of the village women. The other partisans looked bored; they’d seen this play too many times before. “Do you still deny collaboration?” Kuznetsky asked.

The man spoke without raising his head, a torrent of words. “I had to do it. They have my daughter in the brothel at Polotsk. She’s only eleven and they promised to let her go. I only informed on Poznyakov, no one else …”

The rush abated.

“I find the accused guilty as charged,” Kuznetsky said. “Have the straws been drawn?” he asked Morisov.

“Yes.”

Young Maslov walked forward, pulled the accused to his feet, and half dragged him off between two cottages. Why, Kuznetsky wondered, do we still have this need to execute in private? Who was the privacy for – the victim or the executioner?

The shot echoed through the village, silencing the birds for a few seconds. Kuznetsky walked over to the group of villagers.

“You’ll be better off in Vaselivichi,” he told them, but they knew better.

“Poznyakov wasn’t the only one who sowed a clearing,” they told him.

“Stenkin wasn’t a bad man,” one muttered. “He was right; he could have turned in the lot of us.”

Sheslakov arrived early at his Frunze Street office and found the NKVD messenger waiting outside his door with file in hand. He signed for it in triplicate, ordered his usual three cups of coffee from his secretary, and settled himself behind his desk. While he waited he studied the photograph that came with the file. Did the man look American or did he think that only because he knew he
was
American? Perhaps it was the half-amused expression on the face, not a common feature in NKVD portraiture. He put it to one side as the coffee arrived; faces were Fyedorova’s speciality, not his.

The man’s real name was Jack Patrick Smith; Yakov Kuznetsky was a literal translation of the first and last names. He’d been born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1900 to second-generation Anglo-Irish immigrants. His father had been a cop and his mother a seamstress. There had been no other children.

Jack had joined the U.S. Army in 1918 – “to see the world” he’d told his first Soviet interrogator – and had been posted to one of the battalions used in the American intervention. In August of that year his battalion was guarding the Suchan mines near Vladivostok, the only source of coal for the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian, a footnote helpfully pointed out. For several weeks the Americans and the local population had gotten on well, but when the Revolution reached the area the Americans sided with the Whites and the mining community with the Reds. The Americans occupied the mines. One day one of their officers was shot, and the Americans went out looking for a culprit. Smith and another man, O’Connell, were sent to search the house of a miner who lived some way from the village.

They didn’t come back.

The Americans assumed they’d been captured by Red partisans and offered to exchange two arrested miners. They didn’t believe it when the Reds told them Smith was not a prisoner, so a meeting was arranged between him and the
American commander on neutral ground. Smith told him that O’Connell had attacked the Russian miner’s daughter and that he’d shot and killed O’Connell. Smith told his commander he’d joined the Revolution and that was all there was to it.

Sheslakov put down the file, took the handbook of Siberian flora off the second cup of coffee, and watched the steam escape like a smoke signal. An apparently ordinary American boy “joining the Revolution,” just like that. It didn’t bode altogether well. The Mongols had always slaughtered deserters on the grounds that they’d shown they could never be trusted. Still, he mused, the current condition of Mongolia didn’t say much for their judgment.

Sheslakov went back to the file.

After the Revolution, Smith – now Kuznetsky – had been thoroughly investigated. He’d come out clean, and since he’d already proved himself with the partisans, commanding his own group in the Chita area for over a year, he’d been snapped up by the Cheka in Irkutsk. Since then it had been all promotions and special assignments: head of the Chita NKVD 1931–34, commissar attached to special anti-kulak forces in the Saratov area, the West Ukraine, and the Crimea, 1934–37, administrative adviser in Spain 1937–39. He’d been sent back to the Far East in 1939 to a post in the Commissariat attached to Zhukov’s General Staff, had still been there when the Far Eastern divisions were redeployed on the Moscow Front in November 1941. Finally, he’d volunteered for partisan duty and been parachuted into Belorussia in May 1942 as a replacement brigade commissar. For the last six months he’d been commanding the brigade, as the previous commander had been killed and not replaced.

Why, Sheslakov wondered, would a man with Kuznetsky’s glittering record volunteer for partisan duty? The noble-gesture theory didn’t fit with the rest of his career. Had he been trying to recreate his idealistic youth? And why,
in twenty years of promotions, had he never gotten himself a position in Moscow? It wouldn’t have been difficult if he’d wanted one. But he hadn’t, and that was unusual.

Sheslakov took the fauna handbook off the third cup and took a sip. In all other respects the man was perfect, and choosing a more difficult life was no indication of disloyalty. The reverse, some would say. He lit his first cigarette of the day, watched the smoke wafting upward, then reached for the telephone.

He was on his third call when Fyedorova arrived. He passed her the photograph without speaking, and she took it across to the window.

Fyedorova was his “administrative assistant,” and had been since the beginning of the war. She was ten years older than Sheslakov, a small, thin woman who had worked for the GRU since its founding. Fyedorova drank to excess, cared nothing for authority, and did next to no work. Her only function, which both she and Sheslakov found self-justifying, was to act as his sounding board. For this she was perfectly equipped. Her intelligence was as purely psychological as his was purely logical; she had a wisdom, an insight into people, which he found as vital as it was irritating.

“First reaction?” he asked as he put down the phone.

“A wild card,” she replied, pinning the photograph to the wall opposite her chair.

“Try this one,” he said, passing across a picture of a young, dark-haired woman.

Fyedorova stared at it for some time. “This one tells me nothing,” she said finally, “and that’s unusual.”

“A good start,” Sheslakov murmured. “Put it up with the other one and I’ll tell you who they are and what I have in mind for them.”

He went through his plan, clarifying his own appreciation of it in the process.

“Ingenious,” she said when he’d finished. “But you know that.”

She looked up again at the two faces, both with the half-smile, as if they were looking at the same thing. “Even the best play …”

“Depends on good acting,” he completed drily.

“And one of our two leading actors has been forced on us by circumstance. Her file is about as useful as the people who wrote it.”

“I’ve got Nikolai trying to trace the man who recommended her recruitment. Luerhsen, Josef. According to her file, he’s in Moscow, but his file’s disappeared.”

She was still staring at the photographs. “Neither of them is Russian,” she said. “Zhdanov won’t like that.”

“Zhdanov will like the alternative even less. Let’s get the script right first, then worry about the actors.”

He picked up the phone again and, after some playful banter with the switchboard girl, whose name he kept forgetting, was put through to Sergei Yanovsky, an old friend and the head of the GRU’s German section.

“I need to talk to you, Sergei Ivanovich.”

“I can’t make it today or tomor—”

“First Priority. How about twenty minutes?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I must remember that for the bread queue,” Fyedorova said. “I assume you want me here.”

“Yes, we have a long day ahead. Yanovsky is only the first.” He picked up the phone again and made three more appointments, two in his office and one at a research institute outside the city. He’d barely put the phone down when Yanovsky arrived. The two men embraced.

“Right,” Sheslakov said, sitting down and twirling his jade letter opener. “All you know of the German atomic program.”

Yanovsky looked surprised for a moment. “There’s none
to speak of now, though there could have been. Their technical knowledge in 1939 was the equal of anyone’s.” He lit the cigarette offered by Sheslakov. “Tea?” he asked.

“When you’ve earned it.”

“Okay. In 1939 the Nazis set up a Uranium Society, the Uranverein, and all the prominent scientists they had left after the emigrations were given particular tasks to do in solving the basic problem of how to make the bomb. Uranium exports from Czechoslovakia were stopped, a heavy-water production program was started. By 1941 the scientists reported that they could build a reactor that would make the U-235 they needed for a bomb. The problem – ours, too, as I understand it – was the deadline. Hitler wasn’t interested in anything that would take several months, let alone something that would need a few years, so the program wasn’t given any priority. Our information is that the German scientists, most of them at any rate, were quite relieved about this and were quite happy to work on the theory knowing full well that their consciences would never be troubled by the practice.

“In the last year things have changed, though not that much. The Nazis are getting desperate, and all sorts of desperate solutions are being looked at. Atomic bombs are still seen as too long-term for practical use, but German atomic espionage in America has been stepped up. Fortunately most of their information comes from our Rosa, and she’s been busy confirming their pessimism. That’s about it. They have an atomic development program that might give them a bomb in ten years. Since they’ll all have been hanged within two, it’s completely irrelevant.”

Sheslakov looked pleased. “But they have the scientific knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“If they had the U-235, they could make a bomb?”

“Heisenberg actually told Speer as much. ‘Give us the
U-235 and we’ll make you a bomb,’ he said. You’re not planning to give them any?”

“When did that conversation take place?”

“1942. June, I think. I can look it up.”

“No need.” Sheslakov stood up. “Thank you, Sergei Ivanovich. You’ve been most helpful. But,” he added, seeing the other’s expression, “I can say no more. And” – he looked at his watch – “I’m afraid there’s no time for tea. Yelena is well?”

“Fine. Apart from worrying about our son Mikhail.” He smiled ruefully. “You and Vera must come over. I’ll telephone you.”