Black wolf, p.1
Black Wolf, page 1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2023 by Kathleen Kent
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover photograph © Georgy Chernyadyev / Trevillion Images
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ISBN: 9780316280419
LCCN: 2022909760
E3-20221122-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Kathleen Kent
For Lowell A. Mintz
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Who can carry the incineration of a universe?
—Ted Hughes
Chapter 1
31 Iyul’ 1990
Tuesday, July 31, 1990
Minsk Oblast, Byelorussia
The man was so happy, he thought his heart would shatter.
This surge of elation brought to mind the poem that every schoolchild grew up reciting:
There, the birch in silence
Slumbers all day long…
But at night. At night, with the warm summer breezes, the birch groves came alive, their topmost branches whipping carelessly in all directions. As did the tall, slender pines that stretched on formidably, lining both sides of the road like restless armies facing each other before a battle. The luminous shale road cut through the forest in an unbroken line—a white scar gouged into the land, shining pale and lustrous beneath a three-quarter moon.
The night air, as balmy, and as dense, as an evening spent on a Georgian holiday beach. The sky, for a few hours a shade blacker than black, punctured by a million pinpricks of light, bathed in the vaporous light of the Milky Way.
The man had rolled down all the windows of his car to let in the breezes, but soon, overcome by his senses, he killed the engine and stepped out of the blue Lada. He stood in ecstasy, the poem inviting back so many memories of his childhood. The savory smell of shashlik roasting on an open fire, the clink of a metal spoon against glass as the small dollop of jam was stirred into his tea, the meaty slap of fish against the surface of the lake as they leapt to catch bottle flies. The lazy, hours-long hunt for mushrooms. Delighted, he shivered and hugged himself and laughed out loud.
He had another ten kilometers to go before he could rest, and so he climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and continued on his northeast journey. As he drove, he listened for any noise from his passenger in the backseat. It had been quiet for the past twenty minutes, but he glanced in his rearview mirror all the same, checking for movement. There was none.
He smiled and began to hum a song he’d heard on the radio. “You Will Come Back to Me” by the Russian star Tamara Miansarova. A bit saccharine, but far better than listening to the Red Army Choir butcher another Western rock melody. He sang along, loudly, extravagantly, appreciating his own warm baritone, which had charmed so many women. So many women…
He was tempted to turn off his headlights and let the reflective glow from the road guide him. It would feel like flying. But it would not do to veer off, to get stuck in a boggy rut or, worse, hit a fox or wolf or the occasional elk that ventured out at night.
Checking the backseat again, he once more admired the ingenuity of his handiwork. The simplicity, the subtlety, of his methods. He had been a student of Western history. In particular, American Colonial history, that all-too-familiar swamp of superstitious dread and cultlike devotion to the ruling magistrates. That culture of opportunistic accusations, as during the Salem witch trials, where the remnants of medieval British law held strong: guilty until proven innocent. But even with debtors’ prisons and oppressive religious rulings, outright torture had been outlawed. However, like good apparatchiks, the black-coated judges and their willing constables found a cunning way around the ban. They devised the Bow.
Economically, it only involved two lengths of rope. A prisoner was laid prone on the ground, belly down. The first length of rope tied his hands behind his back. One end of the second bound his ankles, the knees then bent backward at a sharp angle; the other was formed into a slip noose and secured around his neck. The prisoner was forced to bow his back to keep the noose from tightening. Eventually, no matter how strong, the muscles in his back would give out. His head would drop, the noose would tighten, and, unless he revealed what the magistrates wanted to hear, he would strangle himself.
He would strangle himself.
Technically, by the letter of the law, the jurists would not be responsible. Their consciences could remain clear. Ingenious, really.
The woman lying contorted in the backseat had been a famous gymnast as a teenager. But since, she had become doughy and overweight, continuing to eat as though she were still lithe and active, in training for the Soviet Olympics. She had remained quite strong, though, and had held out longer than any who had come before. Almost four minutes. A record!
She’d also not cried or begged as the others had. Instead, she had spat and raged and sworn at him. A fighter till the very end. It had added immeasurably to the piquancy of their shared experience, accounting, perhaps, for his heightened exhilaration now.
He saw the turnoff to his dacha. For the briefest moment he thought to keep driving the dozen or so kilometers on to Khatyn. Now abandoned, it’d been the town where as a boy he’d dreamed about serving as a policeman. He’d imagined having a new uniform, and a warm woolen coat, with boots of good leather. But the war had started, and German soldiers were soon thick as flies across the countryside. In 1942, not yet twenty, he’d joined the Resistance instead.
There was something delicious about the thought of performing his planting at the official park at Khatyn. To return in the fall to watch scores of respectful visitors laying flowers on the war memorials, and then stooping to harvest the fruits of his labors. But there was no guarantee that he could return when the park was open in September. The fall would be a very busy time for him.
Momentous events were taking place. The Byelorussian Soviet Republic would soon declare its sovereignty, and full independence from the Soviet Union would follow within a year’s time. Of that he was certain.
So he turned and drove around the dacha slowly, skirting the broad sweep of the lawn, thick with fibrous grasses and wildflowers, and pulling into the deeper shadows at the back of the house. He parked, his headlights illuminating a stand of birch trees. They’d been tall even when he was a boy. Opening one of the rear doors, he pulled a pocketknife from his coat and deftly cut the ropes binding the woman, gently pulling them from her stiffening limbs. He dragged her from the backseat and, with some effort, across the dirt, until he felt his shoes sink into the softened, spongy earth under the sheltering trees.
He retrieved a shovel from the trunk of h
“Moya ledyanaya printsessa,” he whispered, laying his body over hers, sinking his teeth into her until he tasted the bright tang of blood. My Ice Princess.
But it wasn’t until, in a building frenzy, he had packed her mouth and the tight recess between her legs with dirt that he could obtain an erection and gain release.
When he had finished, he rested for a bit, and then stood and shoveled the earth back over her form. She would rest beneath the surface, her body providing the necessary nutrients for the mushrooms to grow. He only ever planted the luscious ones. The others—the skinny, harping, bold-faced ones—he threw away like the trash that they were.
Later, he’d sprinkle on barn hay and horse manure for carbon and nitrogen. Then the spores would grow thick and fragrant. In a few weeks he’d return to harvest them, along with the many others growing in the grove behind the well-seasoned dacha—at least twenty-six patches of them. He’d cook them in soups and stews and his personal specialty, made in vast quantities: draniki, mushroom-stuffed potato pancakes. After all, what good was plucking the bounty of the earth if you couldn’t share it with friends and colleagues?
Finally finishing, depleted, he entered his summer home, where he stripped and washed and fell heavily upon the bed that had once been shared by his parents and his grandparents before them.
He smiled in the dark, remembering the Tamara song. “You Will Come Back to Me.”
Yes, you will, he thought. Again. And again. And again.
Chapter 2
Thursday, August 2, 1990
Minsk
The small group of Americans arrived at Minsk-2 airport through a thick blanket of gray clouds and rain. The airport sat within a vast tract of silver birch forests about twenty miles east of the capital city. From a distance, the building had looked impressive, modern. Inside was a different story.
Melvina Donleavy stood at the baggage carousel a few feet apart from her three travel companions, taking in the crumbling masonry and cracked marble, the dangling and exposed wires, and long stretches of dark hallways. It had been pointed out by Dan Hatton, their team leader, that lightbulbs, among many other things, were in short supply.
The passage through immigration had gone relatively smoothly. The guard processing Mel’s paperwork scrutinized her closely, matching her face—pale, with wide-spaced dark eyes and a slightly elfin chin—to her passport photo. She knew that in photographs she often looked startled, like a forest animal caught in the road. She was tall and slender but, despite her appearance of fragility, surprisingly strong, as her physical fitness test instructors, first at Quantico and then at the Farm, had discovered. Her mother, a college drama teacher, would often say that Mel had the outward demeanor of an Ophelia but the stealth, and secretiveness, of a Hamlet. At twenty-six years old, she was the youngest in her party.
The guard’s gaze kept returning to a space above her head. It wasn’t until her passport had been stamped and she had moved away from the window that Mel noticed that large, tilted mirrors had been placed over every cubicle, allowing the guards to scrutinize the backsides of travelers. Perhaps looking for some aging babushka smuggling in a black-market chicken.
A braying laugh from Dan snagged her attention. Dan was ostensibly her boss, but she knew that, of the four Americans, all sent by the Central Intelligence Agency, she had the highest security clearance. So high, in fact, that Dan was completely unaware that she’d been handpicked by the CIA’s deputy director of clandestine operations on direct orders from a select Senate committee back in Washington. What the others did know was that this was her first mission, as she’d only just completed her Agency training. Mel couldn’t—and for purposes of her cover story, wouldn’t—hide it: she was, by turns, nervous and exhilarated. Nervous because there was as yet so much unknown, and exhilarated for the same reason. As was customary in Agency protocol, she’d spent a few weeks stateside prior to their trip getting to know her colleagues. And though they’d been friendly, and reasonably open, the other three already had years of experience as foreign field agents. She knew they’d be watching her, saving their final assessment of her reliability for after their mission was completed.
She’d been warned by her trainers that, at some point, the goals of her mission might conflict with those of the other three, and that she might cause friction within the team. But under no circumstances was she to reveal her true mission to anyone. She would share that only with her American intermediary, who she’d been told would contact her shortly. It was this intermediary who would smuggle any intelligence she gathered out of Byelorussia and back to the States.
Her two other colleagues—Julie Reznik and Ben Franklin (born Benjamin Worthingham Franklin, according to his passport)—smiled indulgently at Dan’s jokes. But she caught Ben throwing her a weary look and the slightest shrug.
He soon broke away and sauntered over, rolling his shoulders to ease the cramps in his back. It had been a long series of flights: DC to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Moscow, Moscow to Minsk, with delays in between. It was now early morning, and there were few travelers at the airport. But the Byelorussians who had gathered to collect their baggage all gawked unabashedly at Ben. They’d probably only ever seen a Black person on TV, when the Communist state–run news propaganda ran images of impoverished, diseased Africans, or riotous African Americans hell-bent on destroying their own cities in the decadent West.
Mel had witnessed how Ben’s immigration guard looked suspiciously from his passport to Ben and back again. But then he’d frowned and asked incredulously, “Like American president?”
Ben had barely suppressed a grin and answered, “Sure.”
The baggage carousel lurched into action for a few seconds and then stopped again.
“More bad jokes?” Mel asked now, chucking her chin at Dan.
Ben adopted a rigid, military posture. “What is difference between Russian pessimist and Russian optimist? Russian pessimist says, ‘Things can’t get any worse.’ And Russian optimist says, ‘Oh, yes they can.’”
Mel snorted. “At least he’s stopped with the Chernobyl jokes.”
The carousel started up again, but as soon as the battered suitcases and boxes began moving, the overhead lights went out, plunging them into darkness. Ever resourceful, Ben dug a flashlight out of his backpack, and soon the four Americans were trudging toward customs, wheeling their bags behind them.
Dan directed the group to the shorter line for those with diplomatic status, which was also populated by a few German and Swiss businessmen with special visas. But it was still a full twenty minutes before two guards took up their post and started slowly and methodically inspecting every piece of luggage.
“God, it stinks in here,” Julie muttered to Mel, who’d been studying the line ahead, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other.
Julie had sharp, Mediterranean features, a full figure—what some people would call Rubenesque—and a dry, stoic demeanor. But she could cut through corrugated iron with one caustic look. Grabbing a handful of her thick, curly black hair, she brought it to her nose, grimaced, and said, “Oh, God.”
In Mel’s experience, every foreign place had a unique smell. Bombay, cumin and stale sweat. Frankfurt, sausage and wet concrete. Rio, sunscreen and motor exhaust. “How do you say ‘fermenting cabbage and disinfectant’ in Russian?” she asked.
“Kvasheniye kapusty i dezinfitsiruyusheye sredstvo.”
Mel shook her head. “I’m not even going to try that one.”
Her three companions all spoke Russian, Julie being the most fluent. Ben and Dan were fairly conversant. Mel could only speak a few phrases. Just enough to find the toilet or hail a taxi. But, with the exception of Julie, they were all to feign ignorance of the language. People were more inclined to speak their minds if they thought they couldn’t be understood.
