The squeaky up and down of the Ung ode ceased. Remo, the American, strolled back to the car with twelve passports.
Vassilivich saw the lives of the Beta Team dropped in his lap. This was not a drunken crew gone sloppy. This was a prime unit at peak. They had not even gotten to their guns; he had not heard shots.
He wrote down their true Russians names and ranks. He knew every one of them. Some farm boys, some city boys, one even released from Lubyanka prison in Moscow, a homicidal maniac whom Vassilivich had personally trained to control his killer urges and direct them toward the welfare of the state. He thought of the training of each one as he wrote in the names, crossing off their fake Rumanian and Bulgarian identities. Ten years training, eleven years, eight years, twelve years. When young boys showed extra abilities, extra cunning and strength, the Treska had its pick of them.
It was at the time when the members of the Beta Team were boys that the then Major Vassilivich had insisted that families should be consulted before their sons were brought into the Treska.
At the time this had been heresy, but Vassilivich had been proven correct. If the family was behind the boy, then he went with a lighter heart. If the family received extra rations and extra privileges, then each boy felt he was doing something especially worthy, and every leave home would be a reinforcement of his loyalty to the Treska, not a strain against it.
He had won that battle with General Denia of the old school, who had preferred that families be separated as much as possible.
"We need men, machines, not little boys," had said the then General Denia. "When we fought the White Armies, the Treska-it was called the Chekka then-dragged us from our homes and made us men immediately. You kill or die. That is what it was; that is what it is, and that is what it will always be. Always."
"Sir," Major Vassilivich had said. "We have a 20 per cent defection rate now. That's high. Perhaps the highest of any service."
"It is a hard business we are in. They do not make men like they used to."
"I beg to disagree, sir. You snatch a fifteen year old boy out of school and tell the parents that he has been selected for the Olympic teams, or something else that they know is not true, and they worry; he worries, and sooner or later he is either going to defect in the West or desert back here."
"And we hang the little bastard."
"May I pose a question, and I place my life on the answer. When things get a bit untidy in the West and we lose an occasional man to the American Sunflower, what happens?"
General Denia had shrugged, showing he did not know what his shrewd aide was driving at.
"At headquarters I make a little mark in our records," Vassilivich had said.
"Yes, so?" Denia had been impatient.
"Have you ever looked at the file drawer where those records are kept?"
"No. I am not much for paperwork," General Denia had answered.
"Both defections and those killed in action are in the same cabinets. Defections are eighteen times thicker than those who died at American hands. We do almost twenty times as much damage to ourselves as the capitalists do to us."
"Hmmmm," Denia had said suspiciously.
"What I am asking is that we, at least, make the capitalist bastards destroy us instead of doing it to ourselves."
"As you say, your life," Denia had agreed.
Within the first year, desertions dropped and defections became unknown. Vassilivich had created an atmosphere where the teams knew that no other government and no other place offered them such honor and wealth. What the rest of the system did by force and propaganda, the Treska accomplished better by services and rewards.
It became a joke at the Dzerzhinsky Square Building in Moscow that the next thing the Treska would do would be to declare stock dividends and give out colored television sets.
But the jokes stopped when a small Treska unit, isolated from the bufferings of flanking units, and outnumbered forty to one, fought to the last man in the hills of Greece, despite lavish offerings from the Sunflower units to defect.
Vassilivich, back at training headquarters, made a big ceremony honoring the fallen men. If there had been a cross at the altar instead of a picture of Lenin, one could have called the ceremony a mass.
It was also Vassilivich who created the light coexistence with Sunflower, an almost friendly relationship as the teams watched each other and circled each other across Western Europe. It was also Vassilivich who, on the very day American CIA headquarters ordered their Sunflower units to surrender their weapons, led the fast, vicious sweep of the continent.
As mangled American bodies were shipped home for closed coffin burials, including the very unfortunate Walter Forbier, KGB had intercepted a strange message:
'Could have been worse. We might have been caught doing dirty tricks.'
It was a message to Washington from a high ranking State Department official, and Vassilivich, reading it, had thought: "We may be matched against lunatics."
But Treska had not been. And it occurred to Vassilivich, sitting in the back seat of the car with the Korean poet named Chiun, that perhaps this all had been a gigantic trap. What a brilliant trap. He had never figured Americans for that sort of cunning. To sacrifice an entire strata of units so that your enemy would relax in time for your first team to mop them up.
That was what the American had said in the sports shop. "Welcome to the first team." It was a ruthless maneuver, but brilliant.
Yet Vassilivich, ever the analyst, was still bothered. True. It was a brilliant and cunning move. But Americans never thought like that.
They had always been geniuses with gadgets and morons at maneuver. Vassilivich felt a tickle at his throat. The Korean informed him that the best part of the poem was yet to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was a grand reunion. It was a glorious occasion. Vodka bottles stretched thirty meters along a linen tablecloth, each bottle with a gloved servant behind it. Accordions played. Glasses cracked against the inlaid wood walls. Shiny boots clicked on the polished marble. Blue uniforms with red piping, medaled as though jewelers had run amok, shone on proud chests.
Someone yelled out in the thick eastern accent of Vladivostok: "He's coming! He's coming!"
Silence came, marred only by the last few crashes of glasses from officers who had not realized what was happening. And then only the footsteps of a single man. A man at a podium set high at the far end of the hall called out:
"Officers, members of the committee, sword and shield of the party, we now greet with admiration, a hero of the Soviet Socialist Republic, Field Marshal Gregory Denia. A bravo for Denia."
"Bravo, Bravo," yelled the crowd.
Denia, medaled across his fat chest, his round face gleaming joy, his pudgy hands raised above him in his own triumph, marched into the great hall of the people's Committee for State Security.
"Denia. Denia. Denia," came the chant.
And he waved furiously, smiling at old friends, survivors of the great war where two nations battled in a line from sea to sea, with the losers facing annihiliation. They were tough men, these officers, survivors of the purges, the favorites of Stalin, then Beria, then Krushchev, and finally the current chairman. Chairmen came and went. The KGB stayed forever. Denia signaled for silence.
And then he spoke.
"I am not at liberty to tell all of you the specifics of our victory. I am not at liberty to tell you just how we achieved more than prominence in Western Europe. But I can tell you this, comrades. Today, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dominates her continent as no nation ever has. Europe is ours. Tomorrow Asia and then the world. Tomorrow the world. Tomorrow the world."