There was no time for marriage, the decencies. He was always busy – working on behalf of Department 3 in Northern Ireland, for example, feeding the Irish conflict with arms for the IRA. There were useful contacts there, especially in the Drumore area of County Louth, where the local IRA commander, a particularly hard article named Dermot Kelly, became more than useful to him over the years.
And then, in 1988, at the age of forty-five, and a major, he met Ruth.
She was twenty years younger than he and the very opposite in nature: deeply religious, as befit her biblical name, a schoolteacher and social worker concerned only with the good of others. Belov, the hard man, the soldier who had killed when necessary, adored her for her sweetness, her simplicity, her kindness.
When she had found she was pregnant, he had been over the moon, and then it had happened. She had attended a school meeting for parents one night. He’d arranged to pick her up, but then something serious had come up, KGB business, and that came first.
She’d started for home on foot in the driving rain and sleet, and somewhere on the way had been abducted, her half-naked body found in an alley close to Red Square the following morning. Standing in the mortuary looking down at her bruised and beaten face, Belov knew a horror and an anger that would never go away. It froze the soul in him, took away all humanity.
He used no police, no militia. He pulled in all the terrible power of the KGB, found the two men responsible and had them brought before him, looked on their drunken, drug-ravaged faces and knew what he must do.
They could have been charged with several offences including her murder, could have been sent to the Lubianka, but that would have meant trials, paperwork, courts. Instead, he sent for a young lieutenant who had been allocated to him after severe wounds in Afghanistan.
Yuri Ashimov had been born in Siberia. Like Belov, conscription had been the making of him and he’d followed a similar route, which had, in the same way, taken him to Afghanistan, a terrible war, but one in which a man like Ashimov could make his mark. He couldn’t believe his luck when he was allocated to Belov at Department 3, for Belov’s exploits in Kabul had made him a legend.
Standing before Belov’s desk, he could feel the pain, felt it as personally as if this man were a brother.
“Major, what would you like me to do?”
“I will sign an order, releasing these two animals from the Lubianka. There will be no guards, just handcuffs. Then I will wait for them at an appropriate place by the river. I will kill them personally, Yuri. What happens afterward doesn’t matter to me. If I have to meet the consequences, I will.”
“Well, it bothers me, Major. With due respect, I’ve no intention of seeing anything bad happen to one of our greatest heroes. Leave it to me, I’ll get them released and your name won’t be on it.”
“How will you do that?”
“I have contacts, Major. And then, you said by the river? I’ll bring them to the Gorsky Bridge, take the cuffs off and you can finish them.”
“You would do that for me?”
“Of course, Major. It would be an honor.”
And so it became a relationship that grew and flourished over the years, and when the government forces collapsed in Afghanistan in 1992, Belov, by then a colonel, and Ashimov, a captain, were among the last to leave, accompanied by another KGB colonel named Putin.
It all seemed to blur around that time, the Chechen Republic declaring independence, the carnage of the civil war, Gorbachev, the USSR ceasing to exist, the wall down in Berlin and then the mad boom years of the Russian Federation and Yeltsin, years that for the strangest of reasons were the making of Josef Belov into one of the greatest oil barons in the world and the creator of Belov International.
As the man responsible for subversive activities in the Western world, for the creation of chaos and uncertainty and fear, the events of 1991 and the first Gulf War had provided Belov with a whole new field of enterprise.
Belov had been active in Northern Ireland for some years, supplying the Provisional IRA with weaponry, linking various dissident elements with Muslim terrorist groups in the Middle East, and so on. An interesting thing about the IRA was that as the momentum of its own struggle had died down, it had left seething discontent among many of its members who, as had been the habit of the Irish over the centuries, then sought service as mercenaries overseas where their skills could be put to good use, money on the counter – and where better than the Middle East, particularly Iraq after the war. So Belov’s contacts on both sides grew and flourished.
Then, after the roller-coaster years of Boris Yeltsin, everything changed. Privatization of a great deal of the Russian economy became the order of the day, and Belov didn’t like it. He preferred order, discipline, a strong hand. Perhaps all the books he’d read about Oliver Cromwell had affected him more than he’d realized. So he pulled strings and moved to Baghdad, taking Ashimov with him.
It was a turbulent time, Saddam gassing the Kurds and putting down the Shiite rebellion with an iron hand. The country, of course, was suffering economically and not only from the oil embargo, and Belov could see the results. In fact, it got him interested in oil in a way he had never been before.
Sitting on the terrace at the Russian Embassy by the River Tigris having a vodka one evening, he said to Ashimov, now a major, “Yuri, have you any concept of the wealth of the oil business in western Siberia? Of the natural gas and coal and some of the richest mineral deposits in the world? Yet little of it is being developed right. Too much government interference. It’s a waste, just like what’s happening here in Iraq.”
“I don’t know about Siberia, but there’s little you can do about it here, I’m afraid. If Saddam lives up to form, he’s going to end up goading the Yanks and the Brits into another invasion.”
“You really think he could be that insane?”
“Absolutely.”
Ashimov stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date. Dinner and possibly dancing at Al Bustan.”
“Ah, the new GRU girl, the lieutenant?”
“Greta Novikova. Quite special. Why not join us?”
The telephone on the desk rang and Belov answered, then switched into Arabic. He paused, listening, then put the phone down, frowning.
“Now, what in the hell does that mean?”
“Well, I can’t comment unless you tell me.”
“That was the man himself, Saddam. He wants to see me at the presidential palace.”
“Which one?” Ashimov asked dryly.
Belov ignored him. “You can forget dinner. Better phone this Greta and cancel. I’ll need you with me.”
Ashimov was all attention now. “Of course, Colonel, at your orders,” and he reached for the phone.
They drove through the city in a Range Rover, found a small crowd of people at the presidential palace and a few cars. They paused at the gates, where Belov presented his identity card and they were passed through with an efficiency that indicated they were expected. They stopped at the bottom of the huge steps leading up to the palace.
Belov said to Ashimov, “You’re carrying?”
He took a Walther from the shoulder holster under his left arm and Ashimov produced a Beretta. “Of course.”
Belov opened the glove compartment and put the Walther in. “And you. If we take the hardware inside, we’ll set every alarm bell in the palace ringing.”
They went up the steps to the entrance and found an army colonel waiting impatiently. “Colonel Belov, he keeps asking for you. This way. I’m Colonel Farouk.”
The lighting was subdued, the statues in the marbled corridors only half visible in the dusk. They halted at a beaten copper doorway, a sentry on each side. The colonel went in. A moment later, he came out.
“He’ll see you now, gentlemen,” he said, and leaned forward and murmured in Belov’s ear, “For the sake of all of us, take care, Colonel. He’s in one of his manic phases. Anything is possible.”