Mikhail paused. ‘There’s another reason for the design of this room, the open-plan concept with the continuous window. Even when I’m absorbed in writing, I’m not comfortable in a room where I’m not aware of my surroundings. I can’t sleep unless the windows are open. It’s a small legacy of war.’
Jeremy eyed him cautiously. ‘You were in Afghanistan during the Soviet war, weren’t you? Before you defected? Rebecca told me, but I know you don’t like it spread about. Plenty of people here haven’t forgotten the Cold War and still think of the Russians as the enemy.’
Mikhail walked over and opened the top drawer of a small wooden chest beside the sofa. He took out two badges and tossed them on the sheepskin carpet on the floor in front of them. One was a hammer-and-sickle design within a star surrounded by golden sheaves of wheat; the other was a red-enamel pentagonal star containing a white-metal image of a Soviet soldier holding a rifle. He looked at them ruefully. ‘The Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star. They dished those out to everyone who fought in the battle for Hill 3234, to the men who survived and the families of the men who died. I was an intelligence officer attached to the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment. We were ordered to occupy a nameless ridge 3,234 metres high overlooking the road from Gardez to Khost near the Pakistan frontier. It was the night of the seventh of January 1988. A single reduced company of thirty-seven men fought off waves of attacks by hundreds of mujahideen all night long. By the time we were relieved, we’d suffered thirty-four casualties.’
‘And you survived unscathed?’ Jeremy asked.
Mikhail pulled up his left sleeve, revealing an ugly scar under his bicep. ‘You may have noticed that I can’t really use all the fingers of my left hand. The mujahideen who shot me was using an old British service rifle, a Lee-Enfield. Somehow having one of those rifles here and being in control of it helps me to deal with the pain. He came right up to our perimeter and I killed him with a grenade.’
‘That’s one less Taliban today,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘Maybe. But if we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there’d have been no mujahideen and then maybe no Taliban and no al-Qaeda. The only thing I can be sure of is that I fought in the last campaign of the Cold War and that our defeat brought about what I so desperately wanted, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just like Korea and Vietnam and numerous other proxy conflicts between communism and the West, fighting mujahideen on the Afghan frontier served as a pressure-relief valve that kept the prospect of nuclear annihilation at bay. That’s the way I see it as a historian, though as a soldier you only see yourself and your mates. Without the breakdown in the Soviet security system that was precipitated by the Afghan War, Petra and I might never have defected and I wouldn’t be a professor of history in the United States today.’
‘And Rebecca wouldn’t have had such marvellous foster-parents,’ Jack said.
Mikhail walked around and peered out of the window facing the driveway. ‘The difference between here and Hill 3234 is that we held a mountain ridge with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility down into the surrounding valleys. What nearly finished us was the sheer force of mujahideen numbers, as well as the rocky terrain that allowed them easy concealment as they came up the slopes, and the limitations of our weapons and ammunition supply. What mainly concerns me here are the two places where the forest comes within seventy metres of the house. But let’s leave that to Ben and the dogs. I want to show you what I found in the archive, Jack.’
‘Good. The Embraer’s returning to Syracuse for me this afternoon.’
They walked down the steps and sat around the table. Mikhail picked up a large manila envelope from beside the guns and slid out a sheaf of papers that looked like scanned documents. He peered at Jack, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘You asked me for two things. First, to try to get the inside story on the discovery of those crates of Schliemann’s treasures in Moscow in the 1980s, the artefacts from Troy taken by the Russians in 1945 from Berlin. My contact in Moscow is looking into it, and it’s very promising. She says the curator who found the crates also discovered a package of documents with it, German military order books that the Russian soldiers who seized them must have shoved into one of the crates and then forgotten. She thinks they still exist in the museum store, and she’s on the trail.’
‘Hoffman’s diary,’ Jack murmured. ‘Frau Hoffman told us he’d mentioned it to her during their brief final encounter before he embarked on the U-boat, that he’d left it with the crates in the Zoo tower for the Soviet intelligence people to find. He told her it contained everything he knew about the final months of the Third Reich.’
‘That could be explosive,’ Jeremy said.
‘As soon as we’re done here and Rebecca’s safely in your hands, I’m on a plane to Moscow,’ Mikhail said. ‘This kind of thing comes to a historian once in a lifetime.’
‘And the second thing?’ Jack said. ‘The reason why I’m here?’
Mikhail leaned forward. ‘You asked me to look for any reports of U-boat sightings in the Caribbean after the German surrender on the eighth of May 1945, for anything unexplained or odd. At first I was sceptical. The Caribbean was a major area of operations for long-range U-boats in 1942 and 1943, with many merchantmen torpedoed and at least a dozen subs sunk in the area by Allied aircraft and ships. But the last recorded attacks on Allied shipping in the Caribbean were in July 1944, and the last known U-boat patrol there ended the following month. Most reports of sightings after that can be put down to jittery coastguards, seeing dark shapes on the sea at night. But it’s true there has always been a big question mark over the final weeks of the war. There are some who believe that U-boats secretly sailed through the Caribbean on the way to Costa Rica and Brazil and other south American destinations, taking fleeing Nazis and their plunder.’
‘A voyage like that could have extended well beyond the eighth of May,’ Jack said. ‘A U-boat could have set off from the Baltic just before the surrender and then taken a circuitous voyage across the Atlantic to avoid detection.’
‘Right,’ Mikhail replied. ‘Two Type IX U-boats, U-530 and U-977, refused Grand Admiral Donitz’s order and didn’t surrender until the tenth of July and the seventeenth of August respectively, both in Argentina. But as for U-boats in the Caribbean, that’s only ever been speculation. By yesterday afternoon I thought I’d reached a dead end. But then I remembered something from research I did in the US National Archives in Washington almost twenty years ago, soon after my defection. In Moscow I’d been a student of military history and then a defence analyst before being called up for service in Afghanistan. After my debriefing at Langley, I worked for several years as a researcher for the CIA historical division. They allowed me access to classified material in order to bring a Soviet intelligence perspective on periods of Cold War arms build-up that still remained poorly understood. As you know, Jack, my speciality has become the shift of Allied and Soviet strategic planning from the defeat of Nazi Germany to the Cold War stand-off, particularly during those crucial first months after the Nazi defeat. My interest really began when my CIA handlers asked me to file a report on the earliest Soviet plans for tactical nuclear bombing, for the use of atomic bombs as battlefield weapons. They let me look at classified files relating to comparable US plans, and that’s when I came across this account. I still have security clearance and was able to order a scan of the contents and have it couriered to me yesterday evening. The access records show that from the date when the file was boxed away in August 1945, nobody else has ever looked at it. I’d remembered it because it was so unusual, and also because it was the eyewitness report of an experienced combat aviator who would have known what he was looking at.’