With the package secured under his coat he walked away from his car and towards the block where senior officers without families were housed. If his heart pumped and his legs were weak, and if the package held tight under his coat seemed to be a lead weight gouging into his belly, he did not show it. He walked with a good stride. He was 1.85 metres tall, with fine blond hair that blew to a tangle in the wind off the sea, blue-grey eyes, and his nose was prominent. His cheekbones were strong, and his chin stronger. His skin was pale, as if he was used to spending his days in closed rooms and behind desks, not exposed to the Baltic weather. The impression his features gave was of a Germanic origin, something far from the ethnic Russian background listed on his file — his parents, on the file, were Pyotr and Irina Archenko. Only he and his friends, far away, knew the secret of the nationality of his grandmother and the story of his heritage. He was an impressive man, one who in a crowd would be immediately noticed, and there seemed an authority and decisiveness about him. Among the conscripts at the gate, and the fellow officers on the admiral's staff, it would be hard to believe of him that he lived a lie. A captain, third rank, who organized fleet exercises, was in the doorway he approached and laughed a greeting to him, then held out his hand for shaking, but Viktor could not reciprocate because the hand he would have used held the evidence of his betrayal. He smiled and hurried past.
When he went into his room, the warnings that had been given him by his friends at the meetings — when they had snatched the minutes for talk about his security — governed his movements. If he were under surveillance he must also assume that his room had been entered, that microphones and cameras had been installed. All of the previous week, since he had turned back from the journey to Malbork Castle, he had made the point of laying single hairs across the tops of the drawers in his desk, which fronted on to the window, and had always done it when he lifted from the drawers a clean shirt, underwear or socks. If his room had been searched, if they had gone through the room of a favoured officer on the admiral's staff, he would know they were confident of proving his guilt. When he took a handkerchief from the middle drawer he saw the hair that fell to his carpet. From that one hair, not more than two centimetres in length, he knew that his arrest was not imminent.
Was that a comfort?
His father had said, when the leukaemia rotted him, after there was no hope, it was better to finish life quickly and rush towards death. He had been dead a week later, had not fought the inevitable.
For Viktor Archenko, it would be long, slow, because the investigation would be thorough and patient. He stripped off and went into the small bathroom annexe, taking the package in its waterproof bag with him. He ran the shower and closed the opaque curtain round him. He removed a tile at the level of his ankles and laid the package in the cavity behind it, then replaced the tile, which was fastened at the corners with gum. It was the best place he knew of in his quarters.
When he dressed again it was in his formal uniform — what he wore in the outer office at his desk that faced the door to the admiral's suite. He felt calm now, but he knew that was a fraud. It would be bad in the night — it had been bad in the night for a week. He thought of his handlers and that helped to calm him, but when night came he would be tossed into the company of the men in the cars and the van, and he would see a pistol, hear it cocked, and feel the cold of the barrel against the skin of his neck.
Outside his block, a platoon of conscripts from Naval Infantry doubled towards him. In the second rank was the spindly wan-cheeked youth with the cavern chest and the concave belly from which his camouflage trousers sagged; wisps of almost silver hair curled from under his askew beret. He was bent under the weight of an NSV heavy machine-gun and was swathed in belts of ammunition that seemed to drag him further down. The conscript, burdened with the weapon, could not salute as the others did and their NCO, but grinned at him and Viktor nodded to him with friendship and correctness. In a few hours his handlers would know and that would be the test of their promises. There was a spit of rain in the air, and the wind carrying it was from the west and came off the sea. He smelt the tang of oil, debris and, seaweed, and headed for the dock area where he could walk undisturbed, where he could think how to save himself, because he did not know if the promises were true.
Behind him, the NCO shouted for the platoon of conscripts to hold their formation. The machine-gun was the dearest thing in Igor Vasiliev's life. Until he had been given the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun, nothing in his life had been kind to him.
His father, in Volgograd, had been a skilled sheet-metal worker in the steel factory, but it was now closed, and he drove a taxi. His mother had worked in the secretariat of the factory, and now sold flowers on the street. As old Russia, familiar and safe, crumbled, the family's fortunes had plummeted. They did not have the resources to be a part of the new Russia that the leaders said was vibrant and exciting. Poverty now stalked the family, and with it came a sense of shame and diffidence that was passed down to their son. He had been conscripted into the Naval Infantry. His thin body, girlish hair, long, delicate fingers and shyness had made him a regular target for the bullies — other conscripts and non-commissioned officers. He was a victim of the cult of dedovshchina. He did not know that the practice of brutality by conscripts and their fellows, by noncommissioned officers on their juniors, was encouraged by some senior officers: it was an escape valve, those officers considered, for the privations of the men, the irregular payment of their wages, their hunger through lack of food, their cold in winter because the military could not afford heating oil. He had not been hospitalized and he had not been subject to homosexual rape. But because his appearance was thought effeminate his kit had been trashed, he had been beaten and kicked, the skin on his back and below his stark ribcage had been burned with cigarettes.
At the time when the last spring had come hesitantly to Kaliningrad, and the ice on the lagoon had melted, his life had changed.
The base is built on the peninsula of sand that runs southwest from the mainland. Entry to the naval docks from the Baltic Sea is by a canal, 200 metres wide and regularly dredged to allow merchant shipping access to the port section of Kaliningrad city, via the Pregel river. West of the canal the sand spit runs on to the Polish border fifteen kilometres away. Those fifteen kilometres are the regular training ground for the naval infantry who share the 1000-metre wide spit with the artillery and the missile units. There was once a Luftwaffe field there, but the buildings are now used for close-quarters infantry combat firing and the land beyond is a scrubby waste cratered by shells and mortar bombs. Rising above the yellowed moonscape are the gaunt batteries of the air defence and ground-to ground tactical missiles, and beyond are the pine forests, the fence with the watchtowers, and Poland. Past the old airfield and the ground used by the artillery and for the missile launchings is a firing range for infantry weapons. The furthest point on the range between the target butts and the firing ditches is 2000 metres — the maximum distance at which the 12.7mm heavy machine-gun is effective. 43
On an April day of that year, the platoon had been on the range. The bullies had fired first, and Igor Vasiliev had huddled down in the depths of the trench with his hands over his ears. He had not been able to see the two-metre-high targets and had not known that each of the bullies had failed to register a hit. An officer had appeared and stood tall, erect, with his hands authoritatively clasped behind his back. He had watched for a few minutes as the messages came back from those below the targets that the firing was high, wide or short. Igor Vasiliev, the target of the bullies, had not been ordered forward by the senior NCO in charge of the platoon. Then the officer had asked if each man in the platoon had fired, whether they were all equally as incompetent as those he had seen shoot. The NCO, who was under the withering gaze of the captain, second rank, had called forward the twenty-one-year-old. Has he been instructed on the use of the weapon? the captain, second rank, had asked. And the NCO had stammered that this particular conscript had not yet fired the heavy machine-gun but would have heard the instructions given to others. The NCO had pushed the conscript into position, on his haunches with his knees raised, behind the weapon, and had gabbled through the theory of wind deflection and bullet drop. From the officer's dominating stature, it had been clear to every youth in the platoon, and to the NCOs, that if Igor Vasiliev failed all of them would shoot until their shoulders were bruised and until their uniforms stank from the cordite emissions.