They grinned together, like old friends, and then the interior of the car was filled with the admiral's low chuckle.
Admiral Falkovsky and his wife had produced two daughters. One taught small children in Moscow and the other sat at a reception desk in a St Petersburg hospital. They were both, equally, a disappointment to him. Both were frightened of water, turned pale at the sight of a good sea freshening, and each in her own way had made it clear to their father that his adoration of all things nautical made him a sad, remote and distant figure. They had no sympathy for his life, and he none for theirs, and they came to see him at Kaliningrad only once a year. He would have said, to himself but not to his wife, that the absence of a son in his life was negated when he had first cast his hard and experienced eye on the young Viktor Archenko. He was now aged fifty-six, but then he had been forty-two, and the young man who had caught that eye was twenty-two years old. At that time he commanded the destroyer and frigate flotillas sailing out of Severomorsk. His reputation for brutal commitment to the navy had been made thirteen years before their first meeting and came from suppression of mutiny. In 1975, as a part of the celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, the Krivak-class destroyer, the Storozhevoy, was in the Baltic port of Riga, capital city of the satellite state of Latvia, when the political officer and the second officer recognized that the proximity of Swedish territorial waters represented a once-in-a-lifetime chance of escape from the Soviet camp. With most of the crew and the captain locked below decks, the political officer and the second officer, with the bare minimum of the crew who were co-conspirators to help them, sailed from Riga. The flight was not at first noticed, but a member of the crew who either doubted the wisdom of what they attempted or had chickened out, radioed the shore and alerted the command.
Chaos would have reigned, and confusion, when the message came in. The then captain lieutenant, Falkovsky, had pushed aside superiors who dithered and had given the orders. None had dared disobey him. The airforce had bombed and strafed the defenceless vessel and had stopped it in the water a mere forty-eight kilometres from the Swedish sanctuary. Falkovsky had led the boarding party that had brought back the political officer, the second officer and the crewmen. The political officer had been summarily executed. Falkovsky had said, to any who would listen to him, that he was proud of what he had done, and he had further explained that his motive was not to protect the sanctity of the revolution's celebration, but to safeguard the good name of the navy. None had dared doubt his argument. He would show short shrift, no sympathy, for traitors. The message of Riga and the Storozhevoy was known wherever Alexei Falkovsky's name was spoken, and the reasoning behind his actions.
Thirteen years later he had met the junior lieutenant. The day they had first set eyes on each other had sealed their relationship. The Kanin-class guided missile destroyer, Gnevnyy, had been due to sail on a day in early July 1988 from Severomorsk to join a Northern Fleet anti-submarine exercise, and had not left harbour. The crew had been paraded, and Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stamped on board and delivered a peroration of ferocious bile at the inefficiency of the Gnevnyy''s officers, NCOs and able seamen, and of Junior Lieutenant Archenko. They were a 'disgrace', their 'under-preparedness shamed the navy', they were not fit to clean 'the latrines of the fleet's dry docks', and all their shore leave for twelve months was cancelled.
In the face of Falkovsky's tirade, the Gnevnyy's captain had hung his head and studied his boots and had known that his navy life was ended. As Captain, first rank, Falkovsky had stared at the crew, stabbing at them with the glower of his eyes, Archenko had spoken up. He had been in the fourth rank and there had been — Falkovsky could still remember the detail of it — a forward thrust of his chin, his eyes had stared directly forward, and his voice had been firm and without fear. He spoke when no one else had the courage to do so: 'Sir, the Gnevnyy did not sail because it had no fuel. Although the crew have not been paid for three months, although there was only enough food stored on board for one week's basic meals and the exercise is due to last for nineteen days, those were not the reasons we did not put to sea. The fuel should have been loaded the day before we should have sailed. It was not. It had been sold on the black-market. Our captain was told this by an officer in Administration at Northern Fleet when he went ashore to plead for the diesel. He was told the storage tanks were empty because the last of the fuel had been corruptly sold to mafiya criminals living in Leningrad. When the captain, first rank, provides us with fuel we will be ready to sail and will strive to fulfil our mission.' He had been the only one with the bravery to speak.
In the morning fuel had been found, and rations, and the ship had sailed, and three officers in Administration had gone to the camps, and a mafiya king from Leningrad had died in a road accident. Two years later, when Archenko's duty — closely monitored to see whether he was a barrack lawyer or a duty-driven officer — on the Gnevnyy was completed, Falkovsky had sent him a terse two-line note inviting him on to his personal staff. Two years later, Falkovsky had been posted to the defence ministry in Moscow and had pulled the strings to obtain a place for the young man at the Grechko Academy for Staff Officers in the capital.
In 1997, Falkovsky had achieved admiral's rank and left the ministry to take over command of the entire surface complement of the Northern Fleet, and young Archenko had been posted with him. There was a fondness for Viktor, but also an admiration for the workload the man took on his shoulders. Total reliability, the honesty he yearned for from subordinates, and trust were the bricks on which their relationship was built. Viktor was his proxy son. Two years later, May 1999, they had gone to Kaliningrad together: Admiral of the Fleet and chief of staff. In the last twelve months, many young officers had jacked in the navy and retreated into civilian life, so few of those who remained were reliable. This man was a jewel. It was Falkovsky's opinion that he could not have fulfilled his duty without the ever-present and ever-dependable Viktor Archenko. And it was Falkovsky's hope that he would inherit the position of top dog, Admiral of the Fleet of the Russian Federation, when he had finished at Kaliningrad, and that Viktor would be with him, securing his outer office.
They arrived at airforce headquarters. Falkovsky said, 'Don't take any shit from them.'
'Would I ever?' the quiet voice replied.
Again, he punched the younger man's arm. He thought Viktor subdued, distant…and then he was out of his car and marching past a small honour guard and hearing the reassuring bite of Viktor's shoes on the gravel behind him.
It was the sort of evening that Viktor fed from.
His admiral and the generals were at the far end of the room, circling each other for advantage like rutting boars, playing with words and seeking to disguise their mutual jealousies. Viktor was at the bar with those who made up the second echelon of authority, where the food was. Although at the bar and close to the steward, it was his skill that he drank little on such occasions — the visit from Moscow of an airforce general in charge of design and development — while making certain that others around him consumed copiously and dangerously. He was inside the web of a network where total trust existed, where men spoke freely.
The chief of staff to the visiting general told Viktor, 'If we don't have it soon we might as well go home and grow potatoes. Without it we're fucked. At a ratio of two to one we need the lightweight fighter and the heavy bomber, must have them. What we're going to get is different, the compromise — one aircraft, with NTOW of seventeen tonnes — but the range, it's promised us, will exceed four thousand five hundred kilometres, and they'll go for the two engines, the AL-41F turbofan, which is thrust of 175kN. It's not what we want but it's what we're going to get. MFI is what they guarantee us. "What's the manoeuvrability?" we ask. They say it's better than the American next generation, and they tell us the radar will be better, the NOW system that has a +/-130-150 azimuth, with tail radar for the rest, and they say the payload will be all the current air-to-air and air-to-ground payload. But, but, where is it, the prototype? The 1-44 is stuck in a Zhukovsky hangar, undergoing what they call "ground adjustments", which means it's crap — the word is "high degree static instability". They're waiting on the test pilot having the balls to go up in it, poor bastard. It's what we're going to get, and the money's there, from last week, if it ever flies. And, how are things with the navy?'