six men that Ukraine consisted partly of Eastern Europe and was partly a gift from Russia—mistakenly made—in 1991. Now, in the depths of the winter of 2010, it was time to redress this terrible wrong.
Sitting at an oversize and heavily built polished desk under the Russian eagle, he told them: “Your mission is crucial to the future greatness of Russia and a decisive step in atoning for past mistakes.” Words like “justice” and “atonement” were central to the hurt suffered by Russia’s elite spy community and to the mythologising of Russia’s mission. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the birthplace of Russia a thousand years before, the cradle of Russian civilisation.
But the general didn’t mention that this mission, which the six men were to perform, was just one of tens, perhaps hundreds, of similar operations. For the six men, it was as if they, and they alone, stood between Russia’s historical greatness and another humiliation similar to the ones they believed they had already suffered. For them, it was a chance to begin the reversal of a process of retreat that had seared the Russian soul for more than twenty years.
Three of the six men had been released early from prison for the mission, including the colonel commanding the mission. But they had been given the lightest of sentences for conducting illegal killings, massacre, and torture in the Chechen wars. Theirs had been a new type of Russian show trial whose purpose was the opposite of the usual show trials. It was in order to find their innocence—or lack of culpability—not guilt, while at the same time appeasing Western calls for justice in Russia to be free and fair. First, then, their trials were a pretence for Western observers that justice in Russia was working. But in reality they were a clear signal that things were back to how they had been under the Soviet Union. No matter what offences they had committed, the KGB would look after its own, welcome them back into the fold after their derisory short sentences, and then swiftly promote them through the ranks.
The other three men were fully paid-up officers of the Vympel group, the special forces team engaged in “social warfare” based at the Forest.
After the general laid out the broad purpose of the mission and the historical rightness of it, he departed and left his two lieutenants to lay out the details on the ground. It was, in essence, a straightforward smuggling mission across the lightly guarded border between Russia and Ukraine. The porous borderlands between the two countries were regularly travelled by commercial smugglers who transported anything from pork fat—a delicacy beloved by Ukrainians—to nuclear materials. The lieutenants from the ministry brought out maps and grid references; set out times, distances and moon phases; and, finally, the methods of communication with a team of two or perhaps three men on the other side of the border in Ukraine.
Out on the steppe, the advancing night had turned the temperature to well below freezing. The leader of the six men nodded to the driver in the first truck and the vehicle pulled up a second time, now just a mile from the border. The truck behind pulled up in line. The leader stepped out, looked inside the truck, and motioned silently to the two men remaining. In the second truck, a similar silent order was given. The six men descended, opened the muffled rear doors of the trucks, and waited again. Either they would be met tonight on the far side, or they would return on the following night, and then the night after that, until a way was clear.
The leader now withdrew a pair of Baigish night vision binoculars from inside his pack and surveyed the terrain between the trucks and the border. He was no longer looking for anything as obvious as lights. The land between him and the border was a flat expanse of grass steppe that stretched across to the other, Ukrainian side. In both directions he therefore had a wide and long field of view. The lake that straddled the border was to their left. They had no need of maps. Everything was contained inside the colonel’s head. When he was satisfied they were alone, that no unlit human presence lay ahead of them, he signalled without words to the men.
Two ramps were slid out of the rear of the trucks. From each truck a light amphibious vehicle was then wheeled down the ramps. Each vehicle was fully loaded and fitted with electric engines. As the colonel swung the binoculars across the terrain a second time, the other five men checked the batteries on the vehicles for the third or fourth time that evening and gave the strapping that attached the loads a final twist. The leader then let the binoculars hang on its strap, stepped back into the truck, and opened a metal case. He took out a computer, opened it up, and tapped in a code. Then he waited. There was a pause of maybe seven to ten minutes. Finally, he received the coded response they were hoping for. So it would be tonight. He shut down the computer, removed the hard disc, and placed it in a lead-lined box.
The electric engines on the amphibious vehicles were switched on, and the men climbed aboard. In almost total silence they then headed into the blackness, towards the lake and the border.
11
THE ROAD THAT FOLLOWED the borderland on the Ukrainian side of the border was no more than a cart track. The grass where it appeared through the snow was grey and brown and grew down the center of the track, providing a visible line to follow in the failing light and would also do so when darkness fell. Ruts created by farm vehicles in the previous autumn had frozen into deep, hard crevices and the ice in them was thick enough to walk on. The snow lay across what would be deep green meadows when the spring came, and these would-be meadows undulated on either side of the track.
Anna looked up ahead. Through her frozen breath she dimly spotted the large lake, which barely stood out as a colourless grey shape in the winter light against the dark sky that threatened another snowstorm and against the paler snow. She saw that the lake was fringed by thick reed beds that waved from the motion of the water rather than the wind. There was no wind. The lake seemed to wind its way through low-lying, waterlogged islands—darker than the water—so that it seemed more like a river. She stopped on the track and looked behind her. To the north of where she’d stopped, the forest steppe stretched away for three hundred miles while, to the south, steppe grasslands flattened the landscape for another eight hundred miles to the Black Sea. To her left, eastwards, was the border.
Anna set off again and kept to the left-hand, deeper rut of the track and walked southwards at a steady pace. The GPS told her she was six miles north of where Burt believed, from previous satellite pictures, that a rendezvous was to take place, another smuggling operation across from the Russian side.
Three-quarters of a mile out to her left, she occasionally saw glimpses of the border posts on the Ukrainian side and beyond that there were another few hundred yards to the KONTROL signs that marked the territory of Russia. Then there was the no-man’s-land inside Russia, which varied in depth, depending on which part of the huge frontier you were on; some parts were considered more dangerous to Russia than others.
She carried a small pack and wore hiking clothes. She had a tent in a roll at the bottom of the pack, despite the unlikely existence of hikers or campers in the area in January. More important, she also carried the bare minimum of small arms: a Thompson Contender handgun with a twelve-inch barrel and a separate silencer, ammunition, a bowie knife, and two grenades that might provide enough mayhem to distance herself from any trouble if things went wrong.
The sun, when it appeared, gave off a feeble light—it was the semidarkness of a late winter afternoon with a storm-laden sky. But the sun was now sinking to the west and the winter air was turning to a deep chill that would probably, she thought, fall at least ten degrees below freezing after darkness fell. But now, as the sun began to set, the sky was turning a soft pink between breaks in the clouds and the landscape was becoming clearer, more delineated without the flat white winter light, like a photographic negative. She found a hollow on the right-hand side of the track, scraped out the snow, and squatted down out of sight until the sun disappeared altogether and the lights of the scattered border posts were switched on and then glittered across the cold steppe.
Rumours, that was how it had started, Burt had told her. That was how it always started. Or perhaps the antecedents to the rumours were the belligerent statements of the Russian government that had inflamed, cooled, and then inflamed again the tensions between the two countries for twenty years, ever since the Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Ukraine became independent of Russia for the first time in centuries. But though these inflammatory words of Russia’s KGB leaders had kept conflict rumbling just beneath the surface, the initial cause of Anna’s assignment to this remote border area were the rumours. It was only when they had circulated through the border areas and finally reached the corridors of Cougar that Burt had concentrated one of Cougar’s spy satellites on the region.
