Duel of Assassins (14 page)

The play continued, phrases and patterns becoming more
intricate, with more deception, composite attacks and secondary intentions. But
Taras’ superior footwork began to tell, frustrating Marcus again and again as
the Cossack floated just out of blade reach. Then, while maintaining long
range, Taras scored with a narrow parry and riposte to top cuff.

Two-one.

A moment later Taras, indulging a slight didacticism
perhaps, was maneuvering to score in exactly the same way, when Marcus totally
surprised him and, by sheer strength, simply overrode Taras’
tierce
parry to score an outside cut to the shoulder.

Taras couldn’t recall that ever having happened to him,
certainly not since early days. It was suddenly two-all, and Taras felt a
twinge of panic. There was no way Marcus Jolly should be fencing even with him.
But dammit, he was!

Taras resumed furiously, pressing the attack and letting his
own temperament take control; when Marcus feinted the same outside attack,
Taras went for it—and lost another quick point to an inside chest cut.

He was down two-three.

The referee gave the warning for the final minute. Taras
imagined he could see Marcus grinning through the mesh mask.

Got to give the bastard credit
, Taras thought. It was
no longer a question of not doing Marcus any “fucking favors”; Taras was
fencing as well as he knew, and was on the verge of losing. And Marcus wasted
no time, crouching unusually low and attacking with what Taras thought must be
samurai-style bladework. This Taras easily parried. Then, as Marcus advanced,
Taras, instead of retreating, lunged forward and scored a head touch.

Three-all.

Seconds after resuming, time ran out. By convention, a point
was added to each side to bring the score to four-all. The two opponents
grabbed a moment’s respite. Perspiration now stung their eyes behind the heavy
masks, soaked their gantleted hands and darkened their padded tunics. But it
was time to go on. They crouched once more, touched sabers. They were entering
unlimited “sudden death” overtime. Whoever scored next would win.

“Go!”

Marcus exploded, feinting and slashing. Watchful for his
opening, yet wary of overcommitting, Taras gave ground reluctantly, ratcheting
his back foot sideways toward the end of the fourteen-meter strip. He heard
clearly now Marcus’ every gasping breath, every scrape and clash of edged steel
and ringing of guard. These things seemed louder, Taras realized, because he
and Marcus were suddenly cocooned in silence and cordoned with people.
Activities all round them had been broken off, as the participants drifted
over, one by one and then in groups, to try and follow the slithering, darting
blades that fought like dueling snakes.

But the enveloping hush was suddenly shattered. Across the
hall a commotion broke out, excited shouts that caromed high off the girdered
ceiling. Somebody close by yelled for silence
—“Tisha, pozhalusta!”

Taras and Marcus fought on, but the shouting continued. More
than once Taras thought he caught the two syllables of
“voy-na!”
—war!

Another door burst open, more running footsteps, voices
yelling. Taras battled the distraction, trying to occlude the world and limit
his focus to the teasing sword-point before him...

Marcus lunged, Taras barely blocked, avoiding defeat by the
tiniest of margins. He dared wait no longer. It was time to make his move. He
foot-feinted, hopped into a
balestra
, lunged forward—but Marcus had
simply stepped off the strip... and was walking away!

Taras yanked off his helmet. There was swarming chaos in the
sport hall, people running in and out, clustering, shouting. Taras caught up to
Marcus, who was talking to another man, grabbed his shoulder, spun him around.

“What happened? Where are you going?”

“Taras, can’t you hear? It’s war!”

“War?
Yob tvoyu mat!
With America?” The ultimate
nightmare of nuclear holocaust mushroomed in Taras’ mind.

“Fuck, no! With Afghanistan. The Chinese have been massing
to attack through the Wakhan Corridor, but we just beat ’em to the punch. Word
just came through. Two Antonovs full of
Spetsnaz
commandos have landed
in Kabul, disguised as Afghan Army units. Goddamn it, Cossack!” Marcus punched
Taras hard in the biceps. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for—time to kick ass!”

Marcus was heading for a large group by the door, and
stripping off his tunic and the plastron underneath as though their bout had
never happened.

“Are you going, Marcus?”

“Fuck your mother I’m going, Cossack! Aren’t you?”

“I... I guess so. I don’t know.”

Lieutenant Colonel Dokuchayev, coming suddenly alongside,
supplied the answer: “No, Taras, you
won’t
be going. It doesn’t affect
you. You will continue with your training.”

“How can it not affect me?” Taras said. “With a war on, I’m
supposed to be playing games?”

Marcus horse-laughed. “Not just
any
games—
Olympic
Games. Mustn’t have our future gold medalists facing live fire, right, Colonel?
Sorry, Cossack. Damn good contest, though. Maybe we’ll finish it one day.”

Taras felt Dokuchayev’s restraining grip on his arm as
Marcus hurried off to join a tide of young men flowing out the doors of the
sport hall and into the night, as though eager to reach Afghanistan before the
fighting was all over.

Taras and the other ZSKA club fencers flew back to Moscow
the next morning, expecting to find the capital bursting with news about events
in Afghanistan. There was certainly no shortage of war rumors making the rounds
of the Central Army Sports Club—the main concern being the scale of the
deployment and its imminent impact on each of them. But the government news
organs—such as
Pravda, Izvestia
and the nightly
Vremya
TV
news—seemed more preoccupied with the ramifications of a caviar scandal in the
Ministry of Fisheries.
Pravda
, Taras discovered, had several days before
denied the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, calling rumors to the
contrary “pure fabrications” disseminated by the American news media. And
Pravda
reiterated the Soviet Union’s long-standing policy of noninterference in the
internal affairs of neighboring countries.

Shortly thereafter, however—just a few days into 1980—
Pravda
was acknowledging that a limited Soviet military contingent had indeed been
dispatched to Kabul—at the impassioned request of the new socialist leader,
Babrak Karmal. The soldiers were there, the story said, to render “fraternal
assistance”—specifically to restore order and to combat an undeclared war being
waged by mercenaries from Pakistan, China and the United States—and would be
withdrawn as soon as possible.
Izvestia
followed with a report that CIA
agents were training counter-revolutionary terrorist elements near the
Afghan-Pakistani border. And it was said—at least by one GRU officer of Taras’
acquaintance—that operatives of the Israeli Mossad were also involved in
fomenting the conspiracy against the Kabul regime.

But Taras wondered if there were not other, more compelling
reasons for the intervention. The Afghan rebellion, after all, had been
simmering for years between Kabul and the countryside. But the recent fall of
the Shah of Iran on Afghanistan’s western border must certainly have alarmed
the Kremlin to the dangers of the Ayatollah’s Holy War spreading to the
neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and
Tadjikistan.

Whatever the real reasons, Taras was desperate to be
involved, like Marcus, in whatever was going on—and, despite
Pravda’s
protestations, there was a great deal. The “limited military contingent” was
obviously not in process of early withdrawal, judging by the saber-rattling
Taras heard increasingly all about him. Motorized divisions—the 357th, the
360th, the 201st and others—were fanning out across the countryside, a retired
tank officer told him, and Kabul was already in the hands of the 103rd and
104th Airborne Divisions and the 105th Guards Airborne Division.

If further evidence were needed, every day now Taras’ fellow
ZSKA members were receiving transfer orders. One was sent to the 103rd
Airborne’s home base in Vitebsk in Byelorussia; several others were going east,
either to Kirovabad in the Azerbaijan SSR, home of the 104th, or to Ashkhabad,
capital of the Turkmen Republic. And more than a dozen were headed direct for
Tashkent, just four hundred kilometers north of the Afghan border and
headquarters of Marshal Sokolov’s 40th Army, which had crossed the Amu-Darya on
pontoon bridges to spearhead the drive into Afghanistan. All of these troop
movements, Taras was assured, were preceded by
Spetsnaz
elements, whose
job was to secure airfields, communication centers and other key points.

Yet through it all, Taras and the other Olympic hopefuls
remained untouchables. Among the ranks of full-time
Spetsnaz
sportsmen
of his acquaintance, not a single transfer order was received, and no slightest
alteration was made in their training regimen. They stretched, they ran, they
bouted; they continued to be coached and cosseted like prize livestock. Taras
grew desperate.

Marcus had promised Taras to speak with some
Spetsnaz
commanders on his behalf, but weeks passed with no word from the Cowboy, and no
change in Taras’ status. By then, assuming Marcus to be already out of reach in
Afghanistan, Taras redoubled his own petitions to Dokuchayev—to no avail.

“Which would you rather have?” the lieutenant colonel
demanded with biting sarcasm. “An Olympic medal around your neck, or an Order
of the Red Star on your casket?”

“I choose real life, Ossip, over a game.”

“The Motherland might endorse your choice, but our sports
federation won’t. Not this year, Tarushka. This year you’ll do just as you’re
told. Now, go practice your rémise.”

Taras obeyed, but only disengaging—in the parlance of 
fencing—to reconsider his tactics. Obviously Dokuchayev and his superiors would
do nothing to alter the status of a promising fencer on the runup to the Summer
Games. But what if Taras himself did something dramatic to change their
opinions?

*

Several days later Dokuchayev drew him angrily aside.

“It won’t work, Tarushka,” he said.

“What
won’t work?”

“Your clever little scheme. You’re dogging it. Deliberately
losing matches.”

“But you’re joking. I’ve only lost two or three times in the
last dozen bouts. And they were very close.”

“Because you
made
them close. A point here and there.
You’re cutting it very fine, Taras, off—what?—a hundredth of a second in your
splendid reflexes? Two of those matches you should have won easily. And I fully
expected you to win the third.”

“I tried.”

Dokuchayev’s fist hit the table. “You tried to lose—and you
damn well succeeded! Do you take me for an utter fool? I see every move my
students make out there. You showed more expertise in being defeating by such a
tiny margin than if you had won convincingly.”

Arensky smiled fractionally and reached for his glass of
tea. “I suppose I should be flattered—”

Dokuchayev backhanded the glass off the table, smashing it
against the cement wall of his small office. “You should be court-martialed,
you little shit! You’re throwing away a chance of a lifetime, something that
will never come your way again. Can’t you see that? No, it’s worse than that.
By going to Afghanistan, you’ll be throwing away your life! And if you ever
quote me on that, Tarushka, I’ll cut off your fucking balls and send you to the
ladies’ foil team.”

It was very hard for Taras to do what he did next, to look
his friend and teacher straight in the eye and say, “I don’t know what you’re
talking about, Ossip.”

“Then get out of here. I’ve nothing more to say.”

A week later, after Taras had been eliminated in an early
round of an important tournament with
Dinamo
, there was another meeting
in Dokuchayev’s office. In the interim there had been no rapprochement between
the two men, rather a day-by-day entrenchment of hostile positions. Now, as
Taras stood, mask under crook of arm, dripping perspiration from a hundred
practice lunges, the lieutenant colonel idly turned pages, ignoring his
student’s presence.

But finally Dokuchayev glanced up. “Well, Sergeant Arensky,
it seems you’re getting your wish. You’re out of the program as of today. ‘Does
not meet norms for Olympic sportsmen,’ it says here. ‘Reassign to officer
training.’”

“Training? I don’t want to go back to school, I want to
fight.”

“Oh? Do you actually imagine the GRU gives a shit what you
want? You’re lucky they don’t ship you out to Afghanistan in a penal battalion
and use you as a human mine detector.”

When Taras made no response, Dokuchayev continued:

“And let me give you one last piece of advice. Wherever they
send you, stick the course for a change. Your washout here makes my judgment
look piss-poor.” He tossed a packet of papers across the desk. “There’s an
address listed on top there. You’re to report to that office tomorrow morning.”
Dokuchayev leaned back in his chair, looking straight at Taras, yet focusing
well beyond, as though the younger man were quite invisible.

“Is there anything else, sir?”

“Yes. Clean out your stuff here this afternoon. As far as
your apartment, the club would like you out by the end of the week. You won’t
be needing it where you’re going, and I’ve got a real saberman I want to get in
there.”

Arensky stood up, saluted smartly. “Good-bye, sir.”

Dokuchayev ignored the salute, waved him out.

At the door Arensky paused. “I’m sorry, Ossip.”

“So am I, Tarushka. So the hell am I.”

*

The reporting address was the GRU building on Peoples’
Militia Street, and the officer in charge none other than the bullet-domed
Major Kornelyuk. If anything, the interview was even more perfunctory than the
previous one had been, with the wooden-faced officer betraying no recognition
of the young man whose papers he was perusing a second time. Five minutes, a
few rudimentary exchanges and rubber stampings later, Arensky about-faced and
exited, having been assigned to the Ryazan Higher Airborne Academy to complete
his interrupted officers training.

Two days later, after a four-and-a-half-hour southeasterly
train ride from Moscow’s Paveletsky Station, he was tossing his gear onto his
bunk in the Ryazan barracks, still with no real idea of what he was getting
into.

Was he really going to spend the next year and a half out on
the prairie, sitting in classrooms and slogging through the Oka River marshes,
while a war was going on? From all indications, that was exactly what he would
be doing—merging into Ryazan’s regular four-year curriculum, which was designed
to graduate five hundred airborne officers a year with degrees in military
engineering, just as Taras’ former school, the Supreme Soviet Military Academy,
turned out lieutenants of motorized infantry.

He conveyed his impatience to the first officer who would
listen, a perpetually grinning, leather-faced Tatar captain of the Special
Faculty. This was a school within a school, whose function was to continuously
monitor the progress of all students, looking for those few who met the supreme
standards for
Spetsnaz
officers. All the rest would be posted on
graduation to regular units of the airborne forces—the VDV,
Vozdushno
Desantnaye Voyska
. The truth was, Taras told the fellow, he was not so
anxious to earn his lieutenant’s shoulder-straps as he was to get into combat,
even if that meant going to Afghanistan as a noncom.

The captain slapped both his fat thighs and bared his bad
teeth. “What’s your hurry, duckling? We’ve been fighting those bandits for a
hundred and fifty years. Believe me, there’ll be plenty of bullets waiting out
there for you.”

Taras was told to forget all his crazy notions—along with
his sportsman’s “sergeant” ranking—and to conduct himself like any other Ryazan
kursanti
, or airborne officer cadet.

He did so, and found himself plunged at once into a
carefully coordinated nightmare, flogged by sadistic instructors down a daily
gauntlet of pain so unremitting that it erased from his memory the minor
tortures Dokuchayev inflicted on his fencing squad. He was given no time to
think of Afghanistan—or of anything but surviving the next few hours or
minutes; indeed, after Ryazan, Taras was soon convinced, war itself would seem
a holiday outing.

And the demands on Taras were especially fiendish because of
the extra efforts required to catch up with the third-year officer’s
class—something he was determined to do rather than lose another year.

For instance, he found himself lagging seriously behind in
basic skill-at-arms, and had to spend many extra hours on the firing ranges,
training with both Warsaw Pact and NATO weaponry—sidearms, sniper and assault
rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. There were no points awarded here
for fencing prowess, nor did the slashing techniques of the saber bear any
helpful resemblance to infantry bayonet drill. And he took more than his share
of lumps during those early days, from the camp’s gung-ho specialists in
rokupashni-boi
,
close-quarter battle method, and
sambo
—
samooborona bez oruzhiya
—unarmed
combat, Red Army-style. And these brutal disciplines, he learned, were mere
prerequisites to more advanced
Spetsnaz
techniques of silent killing.

And each night on his bunk, exhausted—all but
comatose—Officer Cadet Taras labored an extra few minutes to make up his huge
classroom deficit. He committed to benumbed memory long lists of current
American and British slang, Marxist dialectics, electronic schematics, military
theory from Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz and Ho Chi Minh—until lights-out brought
blessed oblivion. He also devoted to his studies those precious hours each week
meted out to cadets for personal or family matters.

But this was not all. Because of his late transfer, Taras
was the only man in his class not qualified in basic airborne operations. To
remedy this embarrassing deficiency, while other cadets were enjoying “free
Sundays,” Cadet Arensky would report to Ryazan’s jump school—an extensive
parachute-training area in the rear of the academy. He learned to pack his own
chutes, both drone-assisted D-5s and UT-15 sport chutes. He spent hours
maneuvering on the suspended canopy simulators. And finally he earned his
wings, exiting an An-12 at a thousand meters and gentling down smack in the
center of a landing zone beside the Oka River.

In two more months he was qualified in HALO (high-altitude,
low-opening)—which entailed jumping at ten-thousand meters and free-falling
most of the way before pulling the ripcord—and HAHO techniques. He had landed
on top of buildings, in water and on nearly every kind of terrain, including
spruce and birch forest. Now, in addition to his parachute insignia, Taras
sported the blue beret and blue-and-white
telnaishka
T-shirt, precisely
the jaunty outfit he had admired on Marcus two summers before in Gorky Park.
And, like Marcus, Cadet Arensky now tended to walk with a slight swagger.