14
THE HUSCARL
Boris Stepakov’s aircraft was a spacious variant of the Antonov An-72 with two huge turbofans, seating for fifty-two people and a STOL ability. It was the same kind of plane used by the President and the Chairman of KGB. Now he flew from Stockholm to a secret airfield west of Moscow where a car waited to carry him and the two bodyguards, Nicki and Alex, back to the dacha. There was news of yet another killing by Chushi Pravosudia while he had been in Sweden. A young woman, Nicola Chernysh, aged twenty-six, who held the coveted post of Supervisor to the President’s Secretariat, had left her work in the Kremlin at five that afternoon. She had driven straight back to the apartment building in which she lived with her elderly mother, a block from the Central Concert Hall. Two men had shot her as she left her car. They had pumped eight bullets into her from handguns, then escaped in an unidentified foreign car thought to be of British origin.
Nobody came forward as witness to the actual shooting. The car was seen by six people: ‘Driving away furiously,’ one said. ‘There were two men. They went very fast, nearly knocking down an old babushka who was crossing the road,’ another reported. ‘These men were hoodlums. One had a scar across his right cheek, the other wore a hat like in American gangster films,’ a third reported, but he was very drunk and five blocks away when it happened.
At six thirty, an unidentified male voice spoke to the duty editor at Pravda. He said, ‘Romany. Chushi Pravosudia have executed Nicola Chernysh, an enemy of the true revolution. We ask the authorities to take Josif Vorontsov off our hands and bring him to public trial. One member of the present regime will be executed each day, as promised, until some action has been taken.’ Romany was the code word the Scales of Justice had now established with the Soviet media.
Stepakov spoke for half-an-hour with Stephanie Adoré and Henri Rampart who were still held at the dacha. He then summoned his car and drove into Moscow. The President had arranged to see him at nine.
The interview began on a sour note. If General Stepakov had wanted to see the President urgently, he obviously did not know how urgently the President wanted to see him. For almost an hour, the man with the weight of Russia’s problems on his shoulders, upbraided Stepakov or fired questions at him like a heavy machine gun.
Why had these Chushi Pravosudia not been rounded up? Why had there been no progress? The comrade General had promised, nay, assured, the President that he had the real Josif Vorontsov in Russia and under lock and key. Why then had this situation not been exploited? When would these senseless killings stop? Heaven knew, he had treated poor little Nicola Chernysh – he fondly called her Nicolashenka – like a daughter. It was terrible and it must end. When, comrade General, would it end?
The President was exasperated, at the far stretch of his rope. The country faced grave new economic disasters every day, he did not know how long the army would remain true to the establishment, there were threats and he was being criticised every minute of every hour of every day. He was not a supernatural being. There were fresh problems showing their ugly heads in the Baltic States and in Georgia, not to mention other areas. If this were not enough, he was forced to play mediator between Baghdad and Washington. Thousands of American, British, French, Italian and Saudi troops stood at the borders of Kuwait, and the deadline of January 15th crept ever nearer. Did Stepakov not see that a truly bloody war might yet erupt in the Middle East? The conflict could be the long-promised spark that would set the Middle East ablaze. In the end it might be Arab against Christian and Jew. It could even be Arab against Arab. It was something for which the armed forces of the USSR had trained. Did General Stepakov not realise that the war planners had already spent months building plans and orders of battle for such an event? But the balance of power had changed. The whole sphere of Soviet influence had slid into a new order. Russia was now doing business with the United States. War between all the Western alliances, NATO, and Iraq had long been considered a strategic lever to be used by Russia against the other superpower.
‘Now, we don’t want this,’ the President stormed. ‘If we do the slightest thing which can be interpreted as an anti-American move, we lose the aid I have sweated blood to extract from Washington.’
Stepakov was an old hand in the Kremlin. He had seen powerful men come and go. There had been days, when, as a young man, he had even taken part in one palace revolution – that sorry time when poor old Brezhnev, still titular head of the Soviet Empire, embarrassed all around him as he sank to geriatric senility and had to be rescued by those who worked him like puppet masters.
He had been ranted and raved at before. It was like water off a goose. Stepakov closed his mind to the comrade President’s wrath, isolating only those pieces of information which might just require a coherent answer. Men in power hold forth, but there is always a limit, an end to the one-way street of their sound and fury.
So Boris Stepakov waited out the storm and when it finally abated he spoke, giving the President a clear and concise picture of how he saw Chushi Pravosudia and how the matter should finally be dealt with.
‘Bory, you should have told me straightaway. We could have saved time. Let me put in a call to Kirovograd now . . .’
‘No, sir. No, please. You of all people realise how this must remain a closed book. Better I should have your express orders in writing. I will then present them to General Berzin personally. It is really the most secure way.’
So in the absolute privacy of the President’s office where no electronic devices could ever penetrate, Boris Ivanovich Stepakov dictated the order which the President signed.
It was now late. Stepakov needed sleep. He drove back to the dacha. If they left early enough in the morning, he could hand the orders to the Spetsnaz General Berzin by lunchtime and would expect the operation to move with speed during the following night. Things, he considered, were going very well.
In their handful of days together, Nina Bibikova had become almost a wife to James Bond. They worked side by side on the studio floor during the day, ate in a canteen, which looked like an old monastic refectory, each noon and when work was finished in the evening. More often than not they shared a section of one of the long scrubbed tables with Pete Natkowitz and their guide from the first morning, Natasha, the blonde with legs so long they seemed to reach to her navel.
Natasha did not share her surname with them, but Bond did not have to be blessed with superintelligence to realise she and Pete Natkowitz were becoming ‘an item’. He hoped Natkowitz knew what he was up to, and then immediately dismissed the thought. Any officer of the Mossad, especially with Natkowitz’s kind of experience, knew what he was doing.
The food served to them in the canteen was above average, considering they were locked away in impenetrable forests ringed by snow and ice. The speciality was a particularly good stew made from vegetables and reindeer meat which remained appetising for the first two eatings and from then went rapidly downhill. But the diet was augmented by smoked fish, plenty of black bread and large quantities of Kvas, the popular homebrewed beer of farmers and peasants.