"It doesn't matter that you are not ready," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich. Field Marshal Zemyatin had told him to allow no special requests from his execution team.
Chapter 14
Pytor Furtseva had been primed to kill for so many years that when he was told the target was advancing on him before he was ready, he didn't even mind. He would not have minded if he had to kill the target with his teeth right in the streets of Hanoi. He had practiced with his teeth on cows, and he had made his execution squad do the same.
"Blood faces," they were later called, but rarely to their faces. At one training base in Byelorussia another officer had commented that the chef should throw away his carving knife and let the "blood faces" butcher the cows.
Furtseva killed that officer with his teeth. He killed him in the mess hall where the officer had made that comment and, with the man's throat still in his mouth, he went to every table and stuck his face next to every officer at every place in the hall.
No one peeped. No one left. Furtseva had stood there in that hall waiting to be arrested, to be tried and then hung. He did not care. Eventually one of his fellow officers had the nerve to carefully get up and leave. Then the rest left and he spit out the throat onto the ground. Shortly thereafter armed soldiers filled the hall, surrounding him. He spat blood at them from the dead officer's throat.
As Furtseva was escorted out of the mess hall, his execution squad cheered him. It was the proudest moment of his life. He was ready to die.
The court-martial was held the next day and the execution was scheduled for the following week. The presiding officers were split. Some wanted hanging. The others said he had the right to be shot.
It was unanimous, of course, that he would die.
Pytor Furtseva stood for the verdict. His head was high. He felt a sense of relief, as though nothing mattered anymore. The shame and burden of being trained for something and never used was over. It would all end with a bullet or a rope.
The chief officer at the court-martial read slowly, occasionally adjusting his glasses. The other officers sat with faces passive as sand.
It took twenty minutes before Furtseva realized that he was not being sentenced to death.
"It is the verdict of the defense forces of the Soviet Socialist Republics that you and your entire unit be punished collectively. You will march one hundred miles through the Siberian frost with only knives for protection. You will have minimum clothes. You will have no matches. No food. No water."
"What?" Furtseva said. He could not believe the verdict. The army would never let a recalcitrant officer live. The most important thing in the army was getting along. To bite out the throat of a fellow officer for an insult was perhaps the most extreme example of not getting along.
And then the strange punishment. Why should his unit be punished? He apologized to his men, the only apology he could ever remember making.
They had asked him before he was assigned to the execution squad why he had never apologized to anyone.
"To admit being wrong is to admit weakness. More than anything in the world, I fear weakness."
That answer was scarcely out of his mouth when his Red Army file was stamped:
"This man is never to be allowed near nuclear warheads or to undertake diplomatic missions."
That did not bother Furtseva. He had never met any officer assigned to nuclear weapons he had even mildly respected. They were uniformly phlegmatic, and none of them had ever had even a strange idea, much less a lust for life. Or death.
Still, his actions in the mess hall undoubtedly would get some of his men killed on that hundred-mile starvation trek through the deadly Siberian chill. And it was not his unit's fault. It was his.
So he called them together to explain the punishment. And then came the time for his apology.
"And because it was my fault, I am now saying I am..."
The word "sorry" did not come. He gave his pistol to a sergeant.
"If you wish to shoot me, go ahead."
The sergeant stepped back and saluted. The entire unit snapped to attention and saluted. Then they applauded.
"Better to die with you as blood faces, sir, than to live like clerks in the Red Army," said the sergeant. They all had similar psychological profiles. There was something about them Pytor Furtseva liked. At that moment, the liking had turned to love.
Almost half the men died on the hundred-mile trek. They hunted with knives, they burned whatever they could for warmth, they made clothes from elk hides and from the canvas they found. They even stumbled on a stray police unit that was lost. The unit never turned up again, although somehow they had left their clothes with the blood faces.
When the hundred-mile trek was over, Furtseva's blood faces were the strongest unit man for man in the entire Red Army. Any one of them would have died for him. Every one of them thought they were the best killers in the world and were dying to try out their skills, ready to pick fights with ten times their number.
But also as part of the punishment they were sent to a base far away from all the other Red Army units. The sentence was indefinite. The blood faces took it proudly.
The only hard part of their punishment was that they did not get a chance for combat. Not even during the delicious invasion of Afghanistan. All over the world assassinations had become a tool of governments, and Furtseva's unit remained on their lonely base.
Their leader was told that was part of strategy. Telling him this was one of those smooth-faced officers who probably thought a knife was for opening presents and a gun to hold out in a parade.
The strategy was that the Soviet Union would use its satellites for assassinations. This would leave Mother Russia free of terrorism charges and the leaders of the Communist world free of taint. They would use the Bulgarians and other East Europeans for the dirty work: Who cared what taint stuck to a Bulgarian when Russia could remain a socialist beacon of morality?
His unit would only be used as a last resort. It was then that Furtseva heard the rumor that the man behind that strategy was an old field marshal from revolutionary days. The old man-he'd heard the phrase "Great One" used-had been the one responsible for his strange punishment.
If the commander of the blood faces had been told the Great One's reasoning he would not have understood. He was not supposed to understand. It was all part of a very logical scheme that had brought Furtseva to Hanoi to kill a lone American while a KGB staff officer looked on.
When news of Furtseva's revolting act in the mess hall reached Alexei Zemyatin, he inquired rather casually what the army officers intended to do with the man.
He did not use the word "man." The word he used was Russian for "crazy animal."
"Get rid of him, of course," Zemyatin was told.
"Has any of you thought this through?" Zemyatin had asked.
"You can't keep a crazy animal in the army," Zemyatin was told.
"This man is an executioner, yes? His unit was trained like commandos with all the knives and garrotes and things they use," said Zemyatin. The accent on "things" showed the old man's dictate.
"Yes."
"Then who else would we want for this sort of work but a crazy animal? Who are you going to train for this?"
"We thought someone who would make a better soldier."
"You mean one who would cause no trouble. Who would work well with others."
"Of course. What else would you want of a soldier? He must get along with others, because if he doesn't, you don't have an army. You have a mob."
"Soldiers parade, and soldiers surrender, and soldiers sometimes will not even fire their rifles. I know soldiers. This man Furtseva is a disgusting killer, and sometimes we need just that. So let us not only remove him from the army, but make him an even greater hero to those lunatics in his command."