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“No, don’t hang up. Just give me your name and your location.”
Gennadi did so. The control office quickly checked the place on the map. It was just inside the Moscow City Region—Oblast—in the extreme west but still in Moscow’s jurisdiction.
“Wait at the selsovet. An officer will come out to see you.”
Gennadi waited. It took half an hour. When he came he was a young inspector from the uniformed branch. There were two other militiamen and they came in the usual yellow-and-blue Uzhgorod jeep-type vehicle.
“You the one who found the body?” asked the lieutenant.
“Yes,” said Gennadi.
“All right let’s go. Where is it?”
“In the woods.”
Gennadi felt quite important riding along in a police jeep. They dismounted where Gennadi suggested and set off in single file through the trees. The mushroom picker recognized the birch where he had left his bicycle, and his trail from there on. Soon they smelled the odor.
“He’s in there,” said Gennadi, pointing to the clump. “He doesn’t half stink. Been there awhile.”
The three policemen approached the body and examined it visually.
“See if there’s anything in the trouser pockets,” said the officer to one of his men. To the other, “Check out the greatcoat.”
The one who had drawn the short straw held his nose and ran his spare hand through both trouser pockets. Nothing. With his toecap he turned the body over. There were maggots underneath. He checked the rear trouser pockets and stood back. He shook his head. The other threw down the overcoat and did the same.
“Nothing? No ID at all?” asked the lieutenant.
“Nothing. No coins, handkerchief, keys, papers.”
“Hit and run?” suggested one of the policemen.
They listened to the rumble from the highway.
“How far to the road?” asked the officer.
“About a hundred meters,” said Gennadi.
“Hit-and-run drivers move on fast. They don’t lug the victim a hundred yards. Anyway, ten yards would do in all these trees.” To one of his men the lieutenant said:
“Walk up to the highway. Check the shoulder for a smashed-up bicycle or a wrecked car. He might have been in a pile-up and crawled here. Then stay there and flag down the ambulance.”
The officer used his mobile phone to call for an investigator, photographer, and medical expert. What he saw could not be a natural causes. He also asked for an ambulance but confirmed that life was extinct. One of the policemen set off through the trees for the road. The others waited, moving away from the stench.
The plainclothes trio came first, in a plain buff Uzhgorod. They were waved down on the highway, parked on the shoulder, and walked the rest of the way. The investigator nodded at the lieutenant.
“What have we got?”
“He’s over there. I called you because I can’t see how it could be natural causes. Badly knocked about and a hundred yards from the road.”
“Who found him?”
“The mushroom picker over there.”
The detective walked over to Gennadi.
“Tell me. From the beginning.”
The photographer took pictures, then the doctor pulled on a gauze mask and made a quick examination. He straightened up and pulled off his rubber gloves.
“Ten kopecks to a good bottle of Moskovskaya, it’s a homicide. The lab will tell us more, but someone knocked the shit out of him before he died. Probably not here. Congratulations, Volodya, you just got your first zhmurik of the day.”
He used the Russian police and underworld slang for a “stiff.” Two orderlies from the ambulance came through the wood with a stretcher. The doctor nodded and they zipped the corpse into a body bag before taking it back to the road.
“Are you finished with me?” asked Gennadi.
“No chance,” said the detective. “I need a statement, at the station.”
The policemen took Gennadi back to their precinct house, the headquarters of the Western District three miles down the road toward Moscow. The body went further, into the heart of the city, to the morgue of the Second Medical Institute. There it was put in a cold chest. Forensic pathologists were few and far between and their workload was overwhelming.
Yemen, October 1985
JASON Monk infiltrated South Yemen in mid-October. Though small and poor, the People’s Republic had a first-class airport, formerly the military base of the Royal Air Force. Big jets could and did land there.
Monk’s Spanish passport and supporting United Nations travel documents excited thorough but finally unsuspicious attention at Immigration, and after half an hour, clutching his all-purpose suitcase, he was through.
Rome had indeed informed the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization program that Señor Martinez was coming, but gave him a date which postdated Monk’s actual arrival by a week. The Yemeni officers at the airport did not know that. So there was no car to receive him. He took a taxi and checked in at the new French hotel, the Frontel, on the spit of land joining the rock of Aden to the mainland.
Even though his papers were good and he expected to run into no real Spaniards, he knew the mission was dangerous. It was black, very black.
The great majority of espionage is carried out by officers inside an embassy and technically posing as embassy staff. They thus benefit from diplomatic status if anything goes wrong. Some are “declared,” meaning they make no bones about what they do, and the local counterintelligence people know and accept this, though the real job remains tactfully unmentioned. A big station in hostile territory will always try to maintain a few “undeclared” officers whose cover jobs in the trade, culture, chancery, or press section remain unblown. The reason is simple.
Undeclared officers have a better chance of not being tailed out on the street, and therefore being freer to service dead drops or attend covert meetings than those always being followed.
But a spy working outside diplomatic cover cannot benefit from the Vienna Accords. If a diplomat is exposed he can be declared persona non grata and expelled. His country will then protest its innocence and expel one of the other nation’s diplomats. The tit-for-tat dance having been gone through, the game resumes as before.
But a spy going in “on the black” is an illegal. For him, depending on the nature of the place where he has been caught, exposure can mean terrible torture, a long spell in a labor camp, or a lonely death. Even the people who sent him in can rarely help him.
In the democracies there will be a fair trial and a humane jail. In the dictatorships there are no civil rights. Some have never even heard of them. South Yemen was like that, and the United States did not even have an embassy there in 1985.
In October the heat is still fierce and Friday is the day of rest when no work is done. What, thought Monk, will a fit Russian officer do on a blazing hot day off? Have a swim was a reasonable idea.
For security’s sake the original source who had had that dinner in New York with his FBI ex-classmate had not been re-contacted. He might have given a better description of Major Solomin even helped compose a portrait. He could even be back in Yemen, in a position to point the man out. But the assessment had been that he was also a braggart who talked too much.
Finding the Russians was no problem. They were all over the place, and evidently allowed to mix pretty freely with the West European community, something that would have been unheard of back home. Maybe it was the heat or the sheer impossibility of keeping the Soviet military advisory group pinned into their compounds day and night.
Two hotels, the Rock and the new Frontel, had inviting pools. Then there was the great sweep of sand with its foaming breakers, Abyan Beach where the expatriates of all nationalities were wont to swim either after work or on their day off. Finally there was a big Russian PX-style commissary up in the town where non-Russians were allowed to shop—the USSR needed the foreign currency.
It was quickly clear that the Russians on display w
ere almost all officers. Very few Russians speak a word of Arabic, and not many more know English. Those that do would have attended a special school, i.e., be officers or officer material. Private soldiers and NCOs would be unlikely to have either language and therefore could riot communicate with their Yemeni pupils. Thus, noncommissioned ranks would likely be confined to mechanics and cooks. Orderlies would be locally recruited Yemenis. Russian noncoms could not afford the prices of the Aden watering holes. Officers had a hard currency allowance.
Another possibility was that the American from the U.N. had found the Russian drinking alone at the bar of the Rock. Russians like to drink, but they also prefer company, and the ones around the pool at the Frontel were definitely in an impenetrable group. Why did Solomin drink alone? Just a fluke that night? Or was he a solitary who preferred his own company?
There was a possible clue here. The American had said he was tall and muscular with black hair but almond-shaped eyes. Like an Oriental, but without the flat nose. The language experts at Langley put the name somewhere in the Soviet Far East. Monk knew Russians are irretrievably racist, with an open contempt for chorni—blacks—meaning anyone not pure Russian. Perhaps Solomin was tired of jibes about his Asiatic features.
Monk haunted the commissary—the Russian officers were all living as bachelors—the pools, and the bars after dark. It was on the third day, strolling along Abyan Beach in boxer shorts with a towel over his shoulder, that he saw a man come out of the sea.
He was about six feet tall with heavily muscled arms and shoulders; not a youth, but a very fit fortyish. The hair was black as a raven’s wing, but there was no body hair save beneath the armpits when he raised his hands to squeeze the water from his hair. Orientals have very little body hair; black-haired Caucasians usually a lot.
The man strolled up the sand, found his towel, and plonked himself down facing the sea. He pulled on a pair of dark glasses and was soon lost in thought.
Monk slipped off his shirt and walked toward the sea like a bather coming for his first swim. The beach was reasonably crowded. It was natural enough to choose a vacant spot a yard from the Russian. He took his wallet and wrapped his shirt around it. Then his towel. He kicked off his sandals and made a mound of them all. Then he looked around in apprehension. Finally he glanced at the Russian.
“Please,” he said. The Russian glanced at him. “You stay for a few more minutes?” The man nodded.
“The Arabs do not steal my things, okay?”
The Russian nodded again and went back to staring at the ocean. Monk ran down the beach and swam for ten minutes. When he came back, dripping, he smiled at the black-haired man.
“Thanks.” The man nodded for a third time. Monk toweled off and sat down.
“Nice sea. Nice beach. Pity about the people who own it.”
The Russian spoke for the first time in English.
“What people?”
“The Arabs. The Yemenis. I haven’t been here long but already I can’t stand them. Useless people.”
Behind the black glasses the Russian was looking at him but Monk could read no expression through the lenses. After two minutes he resumed.
“I mean, I’m trying to teach them to use basic tools and tractors. To increase their food, to feed themselves. No chance. Everything they break or smash up. I’m just wasting my time and the United Nations’ money.”
Monk was speaking good English but with a Spanish accent.
“You are English?” asked the Russian at last. It was his first contribution.
“No. Spanish. With the Food and Agriculture program, United Nations. And you? Also United Nations?”
The Russian grunted a negative.
“From USSR,” he said.
“Ah, well, it will be hotter here than back home, for you. For me? About the same. And I can’t wait to get back home.”
“Me too,” said the Russian. “I prefer the cold.”
“You been here long?”
“Two years. And one to go.”
Monk laughed. “Good God, we have to do one year, and I’ll never stay that long. It’s a job with no point. Well, I must be going. Tell me, after two years you must know, is there any good place to have a drink after dinner around here? Any nightclubs?”
The Russian laughed sardonically.
“No. No diskoteki. The bar at the Rock Hotel is quiet.”
“Thanks. Oh, by the way, I am Esteban. Esteban Martinez.”
He held out his hand. The Russian hesitated, then shook.
“Pyotr,” he said. “Or Peter. Peter Solomin.”
It was on the second night that the Russian major returned to the bar of the Rock Hotel. This former colonial hostelry is built literally into and on a rock, with steps up from the street to the small reception area and, on the top floor, a bar with panoramic views of the harbor. Monk had taken a window table and was staring out. He could see Solomin enter by the reflection in the plate glass, but he waited until the man had his drink before turning.
“Ah, Señor Solomin, we meet again. Join me?”
He gestured to the other chair at his table. The Russian hesitated and then sat down. He lifted his beer.
“Za vashe zdorovye.”
Monk did the same.
“Pesetas, faena, y amor.” Solomin frowned. Monk grinned. “Money, work, and love—in any order you like.” The Russian smiled for the first time. It was a good smile.
They talked. About this and that. About the impossibility of working with the Yemenis, of the frustration of seeing their machinery smashed up, of doing a task neither of them had any faith in. And they talked, as men far away will, of home.
Monk told him of his native Andalusia where he could ski in the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and swim in the warm waters off Sotogrande on the same day. Solomin told of the deep forests in the snow where the Siberian tigers still roam, where fox, wolf, and deer are there for the skilled hunter.
They met on four consecutive nights, enjoying each other’s company. On the third day Monk had to present himself to the Dutchman who headed the FAO program and be taken on a tour of inspection. The CIA’s Rome Station had procured a detailed briefing of that program from the FAO in the same city, and Monk had memorized it. His own farming background helped him understand the problems, and he was unstinting in his praise. The Dutchman was quite impressed.
During the evenings and late into the night, he learned about Major Pyotr Vasilyevitch Solomin, and what he heard he liked.
The man had been born in 1945 in that tongue of Soviet land lying between northeastern Manchuria and the sea, with the North Korean border to the south. It is called Primorskiy Krai and the town of his birth was Ussuriysk.
His father had come from the countryside to the city to seek work, but he raised his son to speak the language of their tribe, the Udegey people. He also took the growing boy back to the forests whenever he could, so the lad grew to have a deep affinity with the elements of his land: forest, mountains, water, and animals.
In the nineteenth century, before the final conquest of the Udegey by the Russians, the writer Arsenyev had visited the enclave and written a book still famous in Russia about these people. He called it Far Eastern Tigers.
Unlike the short, flat-featured Asiatics to the west and south, the Udegey were tall and hawk faced. Many centuries before, some of their ancestors had moved north, crossed the Bering Straits into what is Alaska today, and then turned south, spreading through Canada to become the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
Looking at the big Siberian soldier across the table, Monk could envisage the faces of the long dead buffalo hunters of the Platte and Powder Rivers.
For the young Solomin it was the factory or the army. He took the train north and enlisted at Khabarovsk. All youths had to do three years military service anyway and after two the best were picked for sergeant rank. With his skills out on maneuver, he was then chosen for officer school, and after two further years was commissioned as a lieutenant.
The assignment to Yemen in 1983 had been his first foreign posting. He knew most of his colleagues enjoyed it. Despite the harsh conditions of the land, with its heat, blistering rocks, and lack of entertainment, they had roomy quarters, very different from the USSR, in the old British barracks. There was plenty of food, with lamb and fish barbecues on the beach. They could swim and, using catalogues, order clothes, videos, and music tapes from Europe.
All of this, especially the sudden exposure to the new delights of Western consumer culture, Peter Solomin appreciated. But there was something that had made him bitter and disillusioned with the regime he served. Monk could smell it, but feared to push too hard.
It came out on the fifth evening of drinking and talking. The inner anger just came bubbling over.
In 1982, a year before the Yemen posting and with Andropov still in the presidency, Solomin had been assigned to the Administration Department, Ministry of Defense, Moscow.
There he had caught the eye of a deputy defense minister and was assigned to a confidential task. Using money skimmed from the defense budget, the minister was building a sumptuous dacha for himself out along the river by Peredelkino.
Against party rules, Soviet law, and all basic morality the minister assigned over a hundred soldiers to build his luxurious mansion in the woods. Solomin was in charge. He saw the built-in kitchen units that any army wife would have given her right arm for rolling in from Finland, bought with foreign currency. He saw the Japanese hi-fi system installed in every room, the gilt bathroom fittings from Stockholm, and the bar with its aged-in-oak scotch whiskies. The experience turned him against the party and the regime. He was by far not the first loyal Soviet officer to rebel against the sheer, blind corruption of the Soviet dictatorship.
At night he taught himself English, then tuned in to the BBC World Service and the Voice of America. Both also broadcast in Russian, but he wanted to understand them directly. He learned, contrary to what he had always been taught, that the West did not want war with Russia.