Red Ice

At once Pyotr understood the staggering impact of Yuri’s words. A naval officer, especially a submariner, would not be allowed to leave the Soviet Union—not with radiation sickness. In essence, Yuri was telling Pyotr to take his family and defect. It was an eventuality Pyotr had only contemplated in a mental whisper. Yuri was inviting disaster because he would not be able to go. He did not have the mobility that accompanied his brother’s naval officer’s internal passport. The relatives that a defector left behind were punished for their unhappy status. Knowing he would be left behind, Yuri was implicitly agreeing to make an extraordinary sacrifice. Yuri was surprised at his own directness.

Using some of Yuri’s samizdat contacts, Pyotr and his family slipped into Finland. Unfortunately, Pyotr’s exposure had been too extensive and he was dead within a month.

Yuri Vyshinsky, professor of theoretical physics at Lomonosov State University, received the usual amenities. A year’s “medical attention” in a psychiatric ward left him in broken health and with a certain slowness of speech. His job and apartment were taken away.

But the brain was still intact… and the spirit. “Krolik” took a job as a sweeper on the underground economy. He slept on a cot in the boiler room of the university’s physics building. His new quarters reminded Yuri of those wintry days as a child in the village when he slept on apech. Occasionally he ghost-wrote technical papers for his former students.

The KGB attempted to visit him periodically but he was difficult to find and completely behind the puppet maker’s curtain now. Guiding the steps of samizdat writers and related dissidents, he was a consultant who specialized in dissidence in the shadows.

There were now no distractions from his struggle with the system. Under a naked light bulb, the boiler room walls echoed, “If they take Shevschenko, get letters to the American Academy of Science…” “That Ukrainian nationalist manuscript must be printed in Austria and smuggled back here….” “The Irkutsk Writers Union is completely infiltrated, I wouldn’t even bother…” “The short Baptist tract can be smuggled in a container like this….” “Have you heard Rimsky got ten years in Magadan for housing the blacklisted Armenians?”

The KGB never caught on to him. But two years after Pyotr’s death, he was thrown into Lefortovo Prison for initial interrogation. The KGB had at last discovered someone dear to Kurganov. Kurganov was a great irritation to them. One whom they could not touch directly. But Kurganov could be made to regret his actions indirectly, through the punishment of others. That was one established way of dealing with men who shouldered a strong sense of obligation and responsibility. Their file labeled “Kurganov” now had a second subheading after “retribution”: it read “Special Prisoner Vyshinsky.”

There was, I knew, a point when after having fought hard and well that a man deserved to be pulled out of the contest. Someone else could pick up the banner. Vyshinsky had earned a rest.

I looked at the picture again and tried to visualize him with a full beard and without glasses. I couldn’t.

The body, the posture, but most of all, the eyes, would have to do it. The peasant puppet maker’s sad and compassionate eyes. Those pallbearer’s eyes.

“Were we able to get information of the size of the garrison or the layout of the camp?”

“No,” Sato said quietly.

“Keep Myshka on it. I don’t want to play a long shot like this by the seat of my pants.”

The coordinates placed the camp in a valley just west of the Dzhugdzhur Range, over eighty miles from the coast. Navigation would be tough. Magnetic compasses would spin aimlessly in that portion of the world. Solar compasses, which gave readings using the angle of the sun’s rays at a specific time of day, were no more help, since we hoped to move at night.

The stars and terrain features offered our primary means of night navigation. Confronted with a heavy overcast or a good snowstorm, we might have to drop crumbs to find our way out—a procedure which the pursuing Soviet army might find amusing.

CHAPTER 12

In the predawn darkness, I put the twenty-five men through an hour of heavy calisthenics, then took them on a 10,000-meter run. Four or five of the Marseilles group wheezed in a full half hour behind the rest.

“It’s too cold for running…. What was all this jock stuff for?… The only muscle that needed conditioning was the one connected to the right index finger…. We’ve already been through basic training once, we don’t need it again.” One, a chain smoker, quit on the spot. He flew home that night.