Darpa Alpha

grayish blue smoke leaking from nose and mouth. “Nothing,” he told them, jabbing the cigarette in the air. “You are humiliated. That’s what you get.”

“In Moscow,” added Little, looking at each general in turn, “old soldiers are now packing grocery bags to make ends meet.”

“At least,” said Abramov, the lean, sharp-featured tank commander, “they have jobs. We haven’t been paid for two months.”

“And,” put in army General Viktor Beria, the short, stocky infantry commander, “at least they have some food to put in the bags. The battalion I now command, instead of the regiment it once was, is owed five months’ pay. Five months! It’s a wonder there isn’t mutiny.”

The two officials glanced at each other. “Tell them,” Big invited his colleague who, leaning forward on the cracked Formica table, lowered his voice. “Then you haven’t heard, Comrades, elements of the Northern Fleet have already done so.”

“That damned Gorbachev,” said Air Defense’s Cherkashin, the oldest of the three, his dull gray hair, as he leaned forward, in striking contrast to the brightness of his bemedaled chest. “Gorbachev started it all. We were once a proud nation until he and his Glasnost fairies ruined everything. They took down the anti-Fascist barricade in Berlin, and now look at what we are. My air defense unit has been scattered to hell and gone. I had six hundred men. Now, since Putin, I’m down to a third of that, and everyone wants to leave for a job with the Arabs.”

Neither official interrupted; they couldn’t have hoped for a better response as a precursor to their coming offer. Years before, any officer of infantry, air defense, or tank corps, no matter how senior he was, would have immediately been arrested and sent to one of the Siberian gulags for the kind of criticism of the political leadership Cherkashin was making. But now such talk was common amongst officers and other ranks who had seen their careers and livelihoods ruined by what they called the razval—the breakup — of the once great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Now Russia was surrounded by independent countries, breakaway republics, from the Baltic in the northwest to former Soviet satellite states such as Poland to the south, and flanked by a clutch of Muslim-dominated central Asian republics where the usual resentments between the center and periphery of any country manifested themselves in Siberia’s growing challenge to the kind of authority from Moscow that had once decreed that all trains to and from Vladivostok, eleven time zones away, must run on Moscow time.

“Have you been to Leningrad?” Little asked disgustedly.

None of the three generals bothered to remind him that the politically correct name for the great naval base and artistic center was St. Petersburg — as it had been called before the Revolution. “We’re going backward instead of forward,” he continued.

“Yes,” concurred the infantry’s Beria, whose beady eyes seemed almost to close as he paused, pouring himself a shot of vodka, his hairy hands and wrestler’s build giving him a primitive appearance. He tapped the label of the new Kalashnikov vodka. “You think,” he asked grumpily, “Kalashnikov gets royalties for this?” He peered through the cigarette haze at Air Chief Cherkashin and the tank corps’ renowned Abramov.

Abramov shrugged.

“Kalashnikov,” continued Beria. “He never took a kopeck for the weapon that bears his name. He could have been a billionaire if he’d been a capitalist.” Beria now looked hard at the two officials. “You ask if we know what it’s like in politically correct St. Petersburg. I know, and I ask, what was our Revolution for? Our warships are wasting away. Submarines, battle cruisers, scores of destroyers, all are turning to rust.” Beria downed another vodka. “And in Moscow, gangsters are in control. It’s like the Americans’ Chicago in the thirties, yes?”

Cherkashin, together with the two officials, nodded his agreement. Abramov, the tank commander who, at fifty-five, was the youngest of the three generals, was looking restive, however, an exasperated expression on his face. Big turned to him. “And you, General Abramov. You agree?”

“With what?” asked the steel blue — eyed Abramov, his lean face tight with impatience. “I assume you didn’t invite us here to complain about the situation, Comrade. We all know how bad the situation is, how we’ve been stabbed in the back by Communist billionaires and other democratic politicians in their lakeside dachas. The point is, what can we do about it? How can you help us?”

The corpulent official took another unfiltered Sobranie cigarette from its tin and lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter, a decidedly upmarket item in striking contrast to his shabbily tailored suit. The biting aroma of Turkish tobacco rose voluminously around the booth’s thick velvet curtains. “We are not here just to help ourselves, we five here. You misunderstand. We’ve come here in order to help the entire officer corps; to form a successful economic nucleus to which other disaffected officers might be drawn.”

“Quite so,” said the smaller official, whose previously impassive face began to crease, his eyes weeping involuntarily under the assault of smoke from the Sobranie.

“Well,” mused the infantry’s Viktor Beria. “This ‘economic nucleus,’ whatever it is, will need money. Lots of it. Trucks full of it, if you hope to put things right.”

Air Defense’s Cherkashin nodded, and Abramov, thoughtfully looking down and flicking away a trace of Sobranie ash that had fallen from the official’s cigarette onto the peak of his tank corpsman’s cap, said, “No damn rubles. They’re worthless.”

The big official gave them an enigmatic smile. “You might have to sup with the devil.”

“We will have to sup with the devil,” Little corrected him. “Stalin had to sup with Roosevelt and Churchill to save Mother Russia. Some things have to be done. In ’42 Churchill had to kill the French at Oran rather than let their Mediterranean ships fall into Hitler’s hands and—”

“Never mind the French,” cut in the steely Abramov. “Who’s our devil this time?”

“Not Muslims, I hope?” proffered Cherkashin. “Those bastards in Chechnya? Killing our people in the Moscow theater in ’02 and all those children in Beslan just two years later.”

“We don’t know,” said the official disingenuously, “whether the Muslims were connected to that.”

Cherkashin was outraged. He stood up. “Muslim fanatics murdered my nephew. I won’t have anything to do with them.”

“The Nazis killed twenty million of us, General!” shot back the Sobranie smoker. “We did business with them when it suited us. We got half of Poland; they got the other half. Sit down!” It was said with such unexpected authority that it transformed the atmosphere in the room, Abramov believing that these two officials from Orsk were in fact military men themselves. “We’ll be selling equipment capability,” the smoker continued, taking another long drag on his cigarette, which was now pointing at the air defense chief. “General Cherkashin, I believe you were a chief negotiator with the Iraqis during the Cold War. How many thousand air defense units did you sell them? And you, Abramov, how many of our T-80 tanks did you sell to the Iraqis?”

Sergei Cherkashin made to say something but sat down instead.

“We’d be selling them tanks?” asked Abramov.

“No,” interjected the other, smaller, official. “Other equipment capability.” He was agitated. “Do you know,” he asked intently, looking first at Abramov and Beria, then at Cherkashin, “what our entire military budget was the year after the anti-Fascist wall came down in Berlin in ’89?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Four billion U.S. dollars. You know what the U.S.A.’s was?”

“I’ll tell them,” said his colleague, who now leaned forward to make the point. “The United States’ defense budget was not four billion, comrades, but two hundred and sixty billion. Sixty-five times that of the Soviet Union!” His tone and that of his colleague made it obvious to the three generals that they were dealing with more than two senior bureaucrats.

Air Defense’s Cherkashin sighed impatiently. “So now we know how much richer the U.S. is than we are, but why, may I ask, did you choose the three of us — a general from Air Defense, Viktor here from Infantry, and our tank commander, Abramov? Perhaps we are so good-looking?”

Big allowed himself a grin, revealing through the fog-like smoke three gold crowns on on his lower teeth and an extraordinarily expensive crown and bridge in his upper jaw before he resumed his serious tone. “Three reasons, Comrades,” he told them, whom he and Little referred to only as A, B, and C. “First,” explained Big, “because your exceptional organizational skills have come to our notice. Whether you liked it or not, you were part of Putin’s transition team before you were reassigned to your separate commands.”