Red traitor, p.15
Red Traitor, page 15
Arkhipov peered through the wet glass onto a dark, restless sea. Though he knew he’d probably see nothing more, Arkhipov nonetheless wanted to get out into the fresh air—at least for a few moments. A small hatch in the roof of the bridge led to a tiny, two-man lookout post at the very top of the conning tower. Arkhipov climbed up the water-slick ladder, pushing through a rubber flap that was supposed to keep out the seawater that sloshed around the tiny steel cockpit. At last, for the first time in two days, he was alone.
Up here, six meters above the level of the sea, the rolling of the boat was at its most violent. Arkhipov had to cling hard to the steel rails that surrounded the cockpit to steady himself as the boat plowed through the North Sea chop at a furious fifteen knots. The only thing visible was the whitecaps of a strong following sea. Somewhere about him, Arkhipov knew from his sonar, were the three other boats of his flotilla. And up ahead in the night, plowing through the same swell, was a fleet of fishing trawlers that would mask the submarine’s passage down the British coast. With a click and an oily hiss, the long-range antenna soared into the air from its housing inside the submarine’s conning tower directly in front of him, ready for the evening’s comms with Moscow and the other boats. Arkhipov remained in the cockpit as the rainy night thickened around him, riding his ship through the choppy sea like a plunging whale.
* * *
—
Arkhipov was halfway through dinner when the senior radioman brought him a transcript of the latest fleet orders. It was in code, a meaningless sea of four-letter groups, the only intelligible part being the heading: urgent: eyes only flotilla commander. There was a brief silence as the other eight officers around the mess table looked up from their macaroni with corned beef and eyed the piece of paper in Arkhipov’s hand. Only Captain Savitsky studiously ignored it, spooning the food into his mouth with studied nonchalance.
“Excuse me, Comrades. Fleet HQ will be waiting for an answer.”
Arkhipov walked the few steps forward to his cabin, fished out a set of keys from the chain that hung around his neck, and retrieved his personal codebook from a safe set in the bulkhead. His decryption skills were rusty, and it took him half an hour with codebook and pencil to turn the number groups into letters.
TO: FLOTILLA COMMANDER CFC VA ARKHIPOV.
EYES ONLY—FLASH
FURTHER TO REPORTS OF HEIGHTENED US NAVY ACTIVITY IN CARIBBEAN CONFIRMING OPERATIONAL ORDERS FOR DEPLOYMENT OF SPECIAL WEAPONS BY FLOTILLA SF4492/61.
CARIBBEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS DESIGNATED HOSTILE/WAR FOOTING UNDER TERMS OF STANDING ORDER 117/16. INDEPENDENT COMBAT USE OF SPECIAL WEAPON AUTHORIZED AT DISCRETION OF SENIOR OFFICER AND POLITICAL OFFICER OF EACH SUBMARINE IF VESSEL DIRECTLY THREATENED BY ENEMY ACTION. FURTHER TACTICAL FIRE AUTHORIZATION NOT RPT NOT REQUIRED FROM FLEET HQ OR FLOTILLA COMMANDER UNTIL ORDER RESCINDED OR FLOTILLA LEAVES CARIBBEAN THEATER.
CONFIRM MESSAGE RECEIVED AND SECURELY COMMUNICATED TO ALL SUBMARINE COMMANDERS BY ENCRYPTED VHF COMMS.
BY ORDER COMMANDER IN CHIEF SOVIET NAVY SG GORSHKOV.
Arkhipov looked up and saw Captain Savitsky leaning on the doorframe. Wordlessly, Arkhipov passed his decrypted notes to B-59’s skipper. Savitsky grunted as he read.
“Authorization to shoot. Every man for himself. Could pot ourselves a Yankee aircraft carrier if we’re lucky.”
Arkhipov’s face creased at the skipper’s grimly belligerent tone.
“Is that what you dream of doing, Comrade Captain? Blowing an enemy ship out of the water with a nuclear warhead?”
Savitsky waited insolently long before answering.
“I was under the impression that was exactly what we all dreamed of doing, Comrade. It’s what this warship was built for.”
5
Pioneers’ Ponds, Moscow
4 October 1962
How had Vasin’s life turned into an unremitting series of defeats, a daily procession of failure? Autumn had settled over the city like a smothering gray blanket, squeezing the light from the days and pelting Vasin with rain and buffeting wind. In the corridors of the Lubyanka, Orlov barely acknowledged him. Vasin’s team of watchers slouched at their posts, demoralized. A dead-end posting; a loser beat. The multiplying contagions of failure seemed to gather around everything Vasin did.
Day after day, Morozov would emerge from his apartment and embark on his daily routine. Walk, metro, office, lunch, office, metro, apartment. Occasionally dinner with friends and colleagues. As if taunting his watchers, the Colonel was looking more sprightly by the day. In summer, Morozov had taken to swimming after work at the Chaika pool near the Park Kultury metro station, often followed by a sauna. After every session he emerged looking infuriatingly fresh and ruddy with health. A rotation of watchers was quickly organized to follow him into the sports club. But instead of becoming a welcome relief from their daily routine, Vasin’s beleaguered team ended up bickering over whose turn it was to spend some time in the pool.
Even the grave Schultz had abandoned them. Since his triumph in catching Morozov making his wrong-number call back in June, Schultz had departed on an extended vacation at a kontora sanatorium in Karelia. Vasin understood that he would return. But he had not returned. Vasin’s Morozov team had become the cursed unit, staffed now only by those without the clout to bail out.
Sofia, too, seemed changed. In the days after Vasin had ordered her to hand over the Raúl Castro memos back in August, the whole team had been in a state of high, nervous alert. Vasin had seen Sofia as often as he dared—and ordered her to keep in close touch with Morozov. Yet with each passing day that Morozov was not caught red-handed, Sofia’s suspicion of Vasin and his wild stories of espionage seemed to melt a little, like an ice sculpture in the sunshine. After a fortnight, with autumn setting in and still no breakthrough, Sofia’s tone during her meetings with Vasin had become almost peremptory.
They continued to meet at least once a week. Sofia dutifully passed Vasin a summary of the Anadyr documents that crossed her desk—the documents that her intelligent eye had selected as being of interest to Morozov. A day or so later, once she had Vasin’s approval, Sofia would pass them on to Morozov—usually over a coffee at the Shokoladnitsa or dinner at a Bulgarian greasy spoon café near Belorusskaya that he favored. The flow of information from Anadyr, via Sofia, to Morozov had become steady and constant. And still no slip. No observable contact between Morozov and the Americans.
Every morning at the tail end of summer, Vasin had woken with the same question racing through his brain: How the devil is Morozov doing it? By the time a rainy September slid into freezing, gray October, the question had become more of a dull ache in the center of Vasin’s skull. Morozov was either the best spy in the business. Or…he wasn’t a spy at all. Except that avenue of reason was not open to Vasin. Orlov has designated him an American spy. And Orlov made his own reality.
The morning after Vasin’s dinner with Kuznetsov at Aragvi barely dawned at all—just a faint lightening of the sky beyond the curtains that accompanied the usual clatter and clamor of Vera and Nikita’s breakfast routine. Vasin felt himself almost paralyzed with an overwhelming desire to remain in bed, to pull the sheets over his head and resign from the world. He covered his face in a pillow and groaned at the memory of the previous night. After a tsunami of food and drink at the Georgian place, Kuznetsov had dragged him to the bar at the National. And then to catch a stomping, noisy, and raucous gypsy show at the Hotel Moskva. And then to some dive bar near Kursky Station that Vasin remembered from his cop days, the haunt of black-market traders and low-rent Caucasian racketeers. Had Vasin actually been sick into the bushes as they staggered toward the taxi stand? A bilious sourness in the back of his mouth had seemed to confirm it.
The hands of the bedside clock that stood on the coffee table in front of Vasin’s sofa bed crawled toward ten. Damn. He was due to give Sofia the all clear to pass the latest batch of documents. His fractious surveillance team would be expecting instructions on their precious rotations. He struggled out of bed, kicking the tangled sheets off his legs.
After that one night of drunken, convivial conversation with Kuznetsov, Vasin felt his waking loneliness sharpen. It had been good to talk to someone. Swaying slightly in front of the kitchen telephone, he dialed Sofia’s work number. Usually, he would tell her that her dentist’s appointment had been postponed until the following week—their signal to go ahead. But today Vasin felt a sudden and profound impatience with the whole charade. When Sofia came to the phone, he spoke without any code.
“Hi. It’s me. Sasha. I need to see you. Lunchtime? At the metro?”
“What’s happened?” Sofia’s voice was immediately taut with alarm.
“Nothing. Just need to talk. One o’clock okay?”
Vasin hung up the receiver and rested his heavy head on his chest.
6
Arbatskaya Station, Moscow
4 October 1962
Waiting outside metro stations. Waiting and watching from apartments. Listening at microphones. Vasin felt that he had become not a man but a species of predatory shadow, forever waiting for silence and tedium to form itself into something concrete. The gloomy morning clouds had at least been blown away by a fresh autumn wind, and a few scraps of blue sky were visible high over the bare trees of the boulevard.
“What’s happened? Tell me.”
Sofia had appeared at Vasin’s side. She, too, had discarded their customary ballet of following each other to one discreet location or another, and simply spoke to him directly. It felt, to Vasin, thrillingly illicit simply to speak to a person in the street, in plain sight.
“Hi, Sofia.”
“Is he okay?”
“Which he? Morozov is okay. Your brother is okay.”
“So what is this?”
“Just wanted to talk.”
“What if someone from my office sees us?”
Nothing that Vasin could have done, it seemed, could unsettle Sofia more than the sudden abandonment of all their carefully rehearsed spycraft. She darted nervous glances from side to side. A stream of lunchtime commuters passed them on the way to the Arbatskaya metro station, many of them in military uniform. Vasin felt strangely light-headed.
“Sofia. I just wanted to say…it’s okay to go ahead with this week’s handover.”
“Fine. And?”
“And…I wanted to ask you another question. About Morozov. A personal question. Not for the kontora. Just for me.”
Sofia looked at him quizzically, as though seeing Vasin properly for the first time. Her strong, beautiful face formed into a knot of concern.
“Are you feeling all right, Colonel?”
“Forgive me. But I want you to answer a question about Morozov. From your heart. Is it truly impossible that he is betraying his country?”
Sofia’s eyes narrowed and searched his face for signs of some complicated double bluff. Vasin resisted the urge to close his own, even as he felt that he was swooning into himself. He was breaking every rule of tradecraft—every technical rule, every personal rule. Rather than wait for her answer, he blundered on.
“I’m tired. And frustrated. And we have nothing, still, after all these weeks and months. And you know him, Sofia. I just need to hear it from you. Are you sure he’s not a traitor, Sofia? Are you sure?”
To his own complete surprise, Vasin felt tears springing to his eyes. His own recklessness was as shocking to him as any line he had ever crossed before. But the adrenaline shock that swept him was as reviving as a gasp of air after an eon spent holding his breath underwater. Sofia stood absolutely still, staring. She opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. Her eyes slid sideways, then down to look at her hands. In her hesitation, Vasin read anguish. And doubt.
“I cannot answer that question.”
Sofia turned abruptly and disappeared in a moment into the crowd. Vasin leaned against the cold granite parapet and tipped his head back to gaze at a drifting patch of blue sky. He felt light-headed, somehow floating out of his own body. She had not said, “I am sure Morozov is innocent.” Yet Vasin had frankly failed. How could he ever tell Orlov that he would never catch the white whale? Vasin could admit defeat to himself. But he would never, ever be able to call off Orlov’s obsessive hunt.
7
Chaika Swimming Pool, Moscow
5 October 1962
Colonel Oleg Morozov squeezed his way onto the crowded B trolleybus, leaning his hefty body against a packed press of humanity until it yielded enough centimeters for the door to clack shut behind him. The streetcar lurched into the traffic, leaving the young watcher Lyubimov among the unlucky crowd left to wait for the next trolley.
A couple of months ago, Lyubimov had been keen. But routine, the daily tedium of a fruitless surveillance routine, had ground the edge off his enthusiasm. He watched the trolleybus with his mark on board pull away almost with relief. He knew exactly where Morozov was heading. The bloody swimming baths.
* * *
—
Morozov disembarked at the junction of Metrostoyevskaya Street and the Garden Ring and set off at a brisk pace toward the Chaika baths. In his raincoat pocket was a packet of breath mints he had purchased at a kiosk by the Mayakovskaya metro. He used his thumbnail to ease the mints out until they all clicked loose in his pocket. The process felt obscurely satisfying.
At the entrance to the Chaika sports complex, Morozov presented his season ticket and picked up a rubber band to which a locker key was attached. He strode up the steps to the locker rooms, opened his locker, and changed into his swimming suit. The sports club had been an excellent idea, Morozov thought as he made his way to the pool. Two months he’d been a member, and now he was swimming two kilometers every visit. Everyone in the office complimented Morozov on his newly trim appearance. Friends ribbed him that he had some new mistress he was trying to impress. This was almost true.
Toweling off after his swim, Morozov could not help but glance about at his fellow health enthusiasts. Some familiar faces would crop up week to week, but that was normal in a sports club. He tugged on his clothes and, finally, his raincoat. But as he pulled it from the locker, he would leave the empty packet of mints crumpled in the back corner. With a tiny steel roll of microfilm nestled inside.
Morozov never knew who observed him at the Chaika—which made it an excellent cutout. Much better than the clumsy wrong-call system he’d used earlier that summer to signal that he was ready to make contact. But he knew, as he left, that someone’e eyes were on him. And on the empty sports locker, yawning open with its piece of insignificant trash left in the back.
8
3rd Frunze Street, Moscow
22 October 1962
The morning was once more a pall of unrelenting gray. The skies were the color of dirty drainpipes, and drizzle fell steadily over the piles of autumn leaves in Vasin’s courtyard. The universe was in agreement: there was no joy to be had anywhere, for anyone.
Vasin opened his green steel mailbox in the hallway. Inside was a single piece of correspondence—a prestamped souvenir envelope with a view of the Cathedral of St. Dmitry in Vladimir. Inside, someone had typed an address: Leningradsky Prospekt 78/2, apartment 181. There was no signature.
The souvenir envelope. It had to be Tokarev.
Vasin crumpled the paper with a stab of guilt. Nearly two months that Tokarev’s wife, Saida, had been in the nuthouse, and Vasin had been powerless to help her. Not that there was much that he could have done. Only Orlov had a chance to get her out—and Tokarev had gravely crossed the General. She was far beyond Vasin’s helping, at least until he landed his big fish and restored his own standing in Orlov’s eyes.
Vasin hurried to his car. It was three hours before he could finish his routine rounds—appointments at the office and checking in on the team at the observation station. By the time he was finally free it was almost lunchtime, and the Friday-afternoon traffic on the northbound lane of the Leningrad highway crawled from traffic light to traffic light with infuriating slowness.
Tokarev’s apartment building was identical to those of his neighbors, one of a sprawl of recently built prefabricated blocks that spread across the new suburbs of northern Moscow. The young trees that had been planted along the sidewalks were spindly and bare, and the courtyard playgrounds were deserted. Vasin found the entranceway, took the elevator to the top floor, and waited, listening, on the landing. Nothing.
Could this be an elaborate trap? The GRU had not reappeared since Vasin’s showdown with Zimin at Kursky Station back in August. Nonetheless, Vasin found the silence ominous. Quietly, Vasin descended two flights to apartment 181. Through the padded door he could hear the low sound of a radio and the small noises of someone moving around inside. Vasin stepped away to the landing window to check the courtyard for unusual traffic or lurking strangers. Then he pressed the bell.
“It’s open!” Tokarev’s voice sounded strangely strangled. Vasin pressed the handle and let himself in.
Tokarev stood at the end of the hallway. He seemed to have aged a decade in just a few weeks. His face was sunken, and his cheeks furred with gray stubble. He wore his uniform breeches over stockinged feet, with a dressing gown hanging loose over his shoulders. Tokarev straightened under Vasin’s appraising gaze, squaring his shoulders.
“Good of you to come, Comrade Colonel.”
Tokarev’s exaggeratedly formal tone immediately put Vasin on his guard. He glanced around the apartment. The place was small and cluttered, two rooms filled with bookshelves and knickknacks. Through the open bedroom door Vasin saw an untidy pile of laundry. The place had obviously not been cleaned since Tokarev’s wife had been taken away. The modest home was not much of a reward for a decorated war hero. But also not a likely place for an ambush—too cramped, nowhere for a snatch team to hide.
