one the vehicles moved across the river. The surface was frozen and the drivers had to follow a line of sticks across to keep from becoming trapped in the deep water that lay under the crackling ice. Another five hundred meters.
The base camp was on a small rise. It was surrounded by lowlying bunkers made of sandbags and logs. None were fully manned. The camp was well sited, with wide fields of fire in all directions, but they'd only man their weapons pits fully at night. Only a single company of troops was actually in the post, while the remainder were out patrolling the hills around the camp. Besides, the column was coming in at mealtime. The battalion motor pool was in sight.
The Archer was in the front of the lead truck. He wondered to himself why he trusted the defected Major so fully, but decided that this was not a good time for that particular worry. The battalion commander came out of his bunker, his mouth working on some food as he watched the soldiers jump out of the trucks. He was waiting for the unit commander, and showed some annoyance as the side door on the BMP opened slowly, and a man in an officer's uniform appeared. 'Who the devil are you?'
'Allah akhbar!' the Major screamed. His rifle cut down the questioner. The heavy machine guns on the infantry carriers ripped into the mass of men eating their noon meal while the Archer's men raced to the half- manned bunkers. It took ten minutes before all resistance ceased, but there was never a chance for the defenders, not with nearly a hundred armed men inside the camp. Twenty prisoners were taken. The only Russians in the post-two lieutenants and a communications sergeant-were killed out of hand and the rest were placed under guard as the Major's men ran to the motor pool.
They got two more BTRs there and four trucks. That would have to be enough. The rest they burned. They burned everything they couldn't carry. They took four mortars, half a dozen machine guns, and every spare uniform they could find. The rest of the camp was totally destroyed-especially the radios, which were first smashed with rifle butts, then burned. A small guard force was left behind with the prisoners, who would also be given the chance to join the Mudjaheddin-or die for their loyalty to the infidel.
It was fifty kilometers to Kabul. The new, larger vehicle column ran north. More of the Archer's men linked up with it, hopping aboard the vehicles. His force now numbered two hundred men, dressed and equipped like regular soldiers of the Afghan Army, rolling north in Russian-built army vehicles.
Time was their most dangerous enemy. They reached the outskirts of Kabul ninety minutes later, and encountered the first of several checkpoints.
The Archer's skin crawled to be near so many Russian soldiers. When dusk came, the Russians returned to their laagers and bunkers, he knew, leaving the streets to the Afghans, but even the setting sun did not make him feel secure. The checks were more perfunctory than he expected, and the Major talked his way through all of them, using travel documents and code words from the base camp so recently extinguished. More to the point, their route of travel kept them away from the most secure parts of the city. In less than two hours the city was behind them, and they rolled forward under the friendly darkness.
They went until they began to run out of fuel. At this point the vehicles were rolled off the roads. A Westerner would have been surprised that the Mudjaheddin were happy to leave their vehicles behind, even though it meant carrying weapons on their backs. Well rested, the guerrillas moved at once into the hills, heading north.
The day had held nothing but bad news, Gerasimov noted, as he stared at Colonel Vatutin. 'What do you mean, you cannot break him?'
'Comrade Chairman, our medical people advise me that both the sensory-deprivation procedure, or any form of physical abuse'-torture was no longer a word used at KGB headquarters-'might kill the man. In view of your insistence on a confession, we must use? primitive interrogation methods. The subject is a difficult man. Mentally, he is far tougher than any of us expected,' Vatutin said as evenly as he could. He would have killed for a drink at the moment.
'All because you bungled the arrest!' Gerasimov observed coldly. 'I had high hopes for you, Colonel. I thought you were a man with a future. I thought you were ready for advancement. Was I mistaken, Comrade Colonel?' he inquired.
'My concern with this case is limited to exposing a traitor to the Motherland.' It required all of Vatutin's discipline not to flinch. 'I feel that I have already done this. We know that he has committed treason. We have the evidence-'
'Yazov will not accept it.'
'Counterintelligence is a KGB matter, not one for the Defense Ministry.'
'Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain that to the Party General Secretary,' Gerasimov said, letting his anger out a bit too far. 'Colonel Vatutin, I must have this confession.'
Gerasimov had hoped to score another intelligence coup today, but the FLASH report from America had invalidated it-worse still, Gerasimov had delivered the information a day before he'd learned that it was valueless. Agent Livia was apologetic, the report said, but the computer-program data so recently transmitted through Lieutenant Bisyarina was, unfortunately, obsolete. Something that might have helped to smooth the water between KGB and the Defense Ministry's darling new project was now gone.
He had to have a confession, and it had to be a confession that was not extracted by torture. Everyone knew that torture could yield anything that the questioners wanted, that most subjects would have enough incentive in their pain to say whatever was required of them. He needed something good enough to take to the Politburo itself, and the Politburo members no longer held KGB in so much fear that they would take Gerasimov's words at face value. 'Vatutin, I need it, and I need it soon. When can you deliver?'
'Using the methods to which we are now limited, no more than two weeks. We can deprive him of sleep. That takes time, more so since the elderly need less sleep than the young. He will gradually become disoriented and crack. Given what we have learned of this man, he will fight us with all of his courage-this is a brave man. But he is only a man. Two weeks,' Vatutin said, knowing that ten more days ought to be sufficient. Better to deliver early.
'Very well.' Gerasimov paused. It was time for encouragement. 'Comrade Colonel, objectively speaking you have handled the investigation well, despite the disappointment at the final phase. It is unreasonable to expect perfection in all things, and the political complications are not of your making. If you provide what is required, you will be properly rewarded. Carry on.'
'Thank you, Comrade Chairman.' Gerasimov watched him leave, then called for his car.
The Chairman of the KGB did not travel alone. His personal Zil-a handmade limousine that looked like an oversized American car of thirty years before-was followed by an even uglier Volga, full of bodyguards selected for their combat skills and absolute loyalty to the office of chairman. Gerasimov sat alone in the back, watching the buildings of Moscow flash by as the car was routed down the center lane of the wide avenues. Soon he was out of the city, heading into the forests where the Germans had been stopped in 1941.
Many of those captured-those who had survived typhus and poor food-had built the dachas. As much as the Russians still hated the Germans, the nomenklatura-the ruling class of this classless society-was addicted to German workmanship. Siemens electronics and Blaupunkt appliances were as much a part of their homes as the copies of Pravda and the uncensored 'White TASS' news. The frame dwellings in the pine forests west of Moscow were as well built as anything left behind by the czars. Gerasimov often wondered what had happened to the German soldiers who had labored to make them. Not that it mattered.
The official dacha of Academician Mikhail Petrovich Alexandrov was no different from the rest, two stories, its wood siding painted cream, and a steeply pitched roof that might have been equally at home in the Black Forest. The driveway was a twisty gravel path through the trees. Only one car was parked there. Alexandrov was a widower, and past the age when he might crave young female company. Gerasimov opened his own door, checking briefly to see that his security entourage was dispersing as usual into the trees. They paused only to pull cold- weather gear from the trunk of their car, thickly insulated white anoraks and heavy boots to keep their feet warm in the snow.
'Nikolay Borissovich!' Alexandrov got the door himself. The dacha had a couple who did the cooking and cleaning, but they knew when to stay out of the way. This was such a time. The academician took Gerasimov's coat and draped it on a peg by the door.
'Thank you, Mikhail Petrovich.'
'Tea?' Alexandrov gestured toward the table in the sitting room.
