Vladimirs diary, p.13
Vladimir's Diary, page 13
*
I woke when the plane thumped the ground. It thumped the ground so hard that the passengers let out a chorused scream followed by applause for a safe landing after the bouncing around finished. I knew no different and did likewise. This earned me a black look from Olga. She hiss-whispered that I needed to pull myself together soon as we would be going through airport security and needed to blend in. I had no idea what she was talking about and nor did I care.
I saw through the now open curtains separating the compartments that the passengers from second class were disembarking. After they had all gone the attendant stood to one side and let us through. Standing by the exit were four NKVD Soldiers carrying matt black machine pistols. As I got next to them they pushed me to one side, raised their firearms and shouted for my three companions to lie on the floor. The other passengers panicked but were calmed by the cabin attendant shrieking at them to remain calm. I was shoved out of the plane’s door along with the other passengers and told to go to a waiting bus. Walking down the stairs I turned to look back. The NKVD Soldiers were putting Olga and the others in handcuffs. They were not interested in me. I stepped onto the bus and the doors closed with a pneumatic hiss. All the passengers were looking back at the plane, all except me that is, I knew what was going on. It was obvious that we had been betrayed, they were waiting for us, we were expected. But why had they let us come this far? they could have taken us in Moscow. Panic set in. What should I do next? Where shall I go? I decided to follow the other passengers, do what they do, and once out of the airport make my way to… to where? I needed to return to Moscow.
*
Olga, Sergei and Vitaly were dragged down the steps leading from the plane by their hair and thrown into the back of an Armoured Personnel Carrier surrounded by eight black Merkovs with blacked out windows. Inside the APC they were pinned to the floor by eight pairs of boots. All through the forty minute journey they were punched, kicked and beaten with batons on their bodies, arms, legs and genitals but not the head.
The beatings stopped when the APC came to a halt. Olga and the others were dragged out by their hair. After face planting the ground they were kicked to their feet. They crashed through doors as they made their way along corridors. Then everything went silent. To the three the silence seemed worse than the beating. They tensed their bodies awaiting an onslaught of baton blows but nonesuch came. Lines of fluorescent lights flashed on as their hoods were removed. The sight that greeted them terrified them. They were in a tiled room as big as a warehouse. There were cages around the perimeter and metal hoops fixed into the walls… chains… pulleys… metal hawsers. In the middle of the room were stainless steel tables, about forty of them. Next to each table were stainless steel glass fronted cabinets, some housing scalpels, saws, knives, cavity spreaders, secateurs, electric saws, electric drills and hammers of various sizes and head shapes, some were ice-picks. In the smaller cabinets was a selection of syringes and glass bottles, most containing clear liquids but some were coloured. Hoods were forced back over the heads of Olga’s compatriots. She noticed movement behind a dark green curtain.
“Where is the fourth member of the cell?” The question was followed by the sound of metal baton on bone. A groan came from behind Olga. She recognised the voice and tried to call out through her gag.
“Remove her gag,” ordered the KGB Colonel. Olga twisted round to see Dmitri. He was in bad shape. He had obviously been through what she and her compatriots were about to go through.
“Dmitri,” Olga whispered tearfully, “what have they done to you my Angel?… why have they done this?”
“You know why. Do not play games comrade,” said an Officer calmly.
“Why would you do this to…” Olga choked on her words.
“To who?”
“To good Russian people… people fighting for freedom… everybody’s freedom, including yours.”
“Oh, I see. So, you are a freedom fighter?” said the Officer sarcastically. “I thought you were a member of a banned political group calling itself Narodnaya Volya?”
“I have nothing more to say.”
“We shall see about that. You do know that NV has been allowed to exist to concentrate all the traitors in one place so we can destroy them? Do you think that you were so clever as to fool us when your headquarters is right next to the Ministry of Travel? You expect us not to know what goes on there and in the underground auditorium at the university? We have been listening in ever since you began… Narodnaya Volya; The People’s Will. Ha!” Mock-laughed the KGB Colonel to taunt Olga. He was letting her and the others know how much he already knew in the hope that they would break more quickly. Time was of the essence. “The People’s Will indeed. Could you not think up an original name? Naming yourselves after a long dead movement. Pathetic.”
“I do not believe you. You are just trying to get us to open up.” Olga was not fooled by the KGB Colonel’s tactics.
“Where is the fourth member of your cell? Did he travel with you? Where is he? Was he on the same flight as you? How did we miss him? Is it a he? Or a she?” Olga shook her head. “Ah, it is a she. Did she travel with you? Or did she travel on ahead? Is she yet to arrive? Who is she? Name her! Who is the fourth member of your cell?”
“I do not know her identity. You know the protocol, we do not know what we do not need to know…”
“She is lying Comrade Colonel,” said an Officer stood behind Vitaly.
“Of course she is lying,” screamed the KGB Colonel, exasperated at the ineptitude of his subordinate. “Tell me where she is otherwise you and your… take their hoods off.” The remaining hoods were removed. “Ah, Sergei… Vitaly. May I still call you Serge, Sergei?” Sergei mumbled a reply through his gag. “Leave it on for now, I can guess his reply. Now comrade, as I was saying, tell me where she is otherwise you and your comrades will go to the tables.” Said the KGB Colonel pointing at the stainless steel tables and their companion cabinets. Olga’s throat dried at the thought of being strapped to a table and interrogated.
“I do not know who she is. She was to make contact with us. You know how it works, we cannot tell you what we do not know.”
“What is your mission here in Tula?”
“Mission? If by mission you mean the conference we were to attend for the furthering of…”
“Where is the message you are carrying?”
“Message? There is no message, we were to be…”
“Liar!” The KGB Colonel nodded to an NKVD Soldier. He punched Olga in the stomach so hard that she vomited.
“Bring their luggage to me.”
“Comrade Colonel, they did not have any luggage with them. It must still be at the airport.”
“Have you searched them?”
“Yes Comrade Colonel, they only had these few possessions on them.” A KGB Lieutenant tipped a motley collection of items onto an interrogation table.
“The messages must still be in their luggage. Unless we locate the fourth person we will never decode the message. She must be found.” The KGB Colonel ordered a dozen KGB and NKVD Officers to accompany him to the airport to search for the prisoners’ luggage. “Bring Dmitri in case he can identify the missing target. In the meantime take Olga and her friends to the tables. Get the cypher out of their heads.”
Olga, Sergei and Vitaly were picked up and slammed onto stainless steel tables. They were strapped down using heavy-duty, brass-bound, leather straps and injected with a psychotropic cocktail specially designed to enhance the horrors they were about to experience. Behind them they heard the high pitched whine of a bone saw coming closer.
“Comrade Colonel, did the prisoner tell you the identity of the female we are looking for?” Asked an NKVD Officer.
“Female? Olga gave that away far too readily. We are probably looking for a male and he was most likely travelling with the other three. Somehow your men missed him on the plane. Check the tapes as soon as we arrive at the airport. With any luck our missing NV operative will have been met at the airport. We might bag more rats than we thought we would. Come on, drive faster! We have no time to lose.”
*
It felt as though everybody in the airport was watching me. Every time I looked up my eyes seemed to meet other eyes which quickly darted away. Following along behind the other passengers I scanned all around the baggage hall to see if anybody was paying attention to what I was doing. Not properly looking where I was going I bumped into an old man, “That hurt. Look where you are going!” I apologised and helped the old man with his baggage. We walked through security control together and then I left him to the care of his family.
I went to a café bar on the upper gallery and watched as people made their way to I knew not where. I felt truly alone. Panic gripped me. What should I do? Give myself up to the authorities and tell them some sad tale about… abduction? I could not think of a story that would not lead to me being arrested and then what? Tortured? Executed? I regretted ever getting involved in this foolish adventure. As I looked across to the other side of the arrivals hall I noticed two men and a woman. Were they looking at me? They were looking at me! I looked away. The next time I looked they were gone. Before I could stand to leave the café bar the female I had seen came and sat at my table.
“Do not cause a fuss. We do not want to attract attention, do we?” I shook my head. The two men I had spied sauntered over to the table and mumbled to the female.
“As far as we can tell he was not being watched.”
“That is lucky for you. We have to get you out of here.”
“I just thought the same thing.”
“Vladimir,” the woman knew my name! “you need to tell us what happened to the others in your cell… but not here. Keep thinking while we make our getaway.” I was highly suspicious of the woman and her two companions. What if they were KGB? At that thought the woman made a sign for NV.
“How do you know anything happened?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
“A couple of the other passengers are NV. They told us about Olga and the others being taken. I wonder why you were not? Until I am satisfied that you are clean you will be treated as a traitor. In case you are thinking of making a break for it there are more of us concealed around the airport, you will not make it.”
*
I was driven away from the airport in the back of a van. I heard one of the men say to the female that I looked a bit like Dmitri and he wondered if I was a relative of his. The female asked me if I was one of Dmitri’s relatives. I said I was not but Lev had asked the same thing. At the mention of Lev’s name everybody turned and stared at me. The female asked if I had really met Lev and I told her that it was Lev himself who gave me this mission. She gave me a look as if to say, ‘tell me another one’. I told them about the events from when Hyram mistook me for Dmitri in the line outside the Ministry of Travel to meeting Diana, “Dmitri’s sister?” the female butted in. “Yes, the very same,” I replied and continued my tale, telling how I had been given this mission by Lev and the discussion with Olga in Moscow airport and… the female said that was enough and removed my handcuffs.
“Hand it over.”
“Hand what over?”
“This is not the time to play games Mister Vakhnenko,” said the female in American. “You obviously still have it so hand it over.”
I removed a small plastic bag taped to my armpit, wiped it down and handed it to the female. She took it from me with the very-most extended tips of her fingers and shook the sheet of paper from the plastic bag. I asked her what her name was. She said, “Alice” then warned me against trying to retrieve the sheet of paper, saying it was covered in a neurotoxin solution and I would die an agonising death if I ate it. Olga had not mentioned ‘agonising’ in her little speech about eating the document.
The female scanned the lines of the message and then asked me if I knew what had happened to the other three sheets of paper. I said that they must still be with Olga and the others. She reckoned that they had most likely been taken to a KGB facility on the outskirts of Tula, about a forty minute drive from the airport.
By the time we reached the safe house I had everything crystal clear in my head until Alice began questioning me. She was like a machine gun. Question after question after question. How could she ask so many questions about such a small number of events? A messenger arrived and told Alice that the KGB had returned to the airport with Dmitri in tow. The messenger said he looked in bad shape. Alice deduced that they were probably looking for the sheets of paper. She asked me again about luggage. I confirmed that we had none, “not even hand luggage.” Alice surmised that Olga and the others must still have the documents on them otherwise the KGB would not have gone to the airport. “Having Dmitri with them means they are looking to identify the fourth member of the cell.” That made sense to me.
*
The KGB Colonel was incandescent with rage after no luggage for the prisoners was found at the airport and even more angry when it was confirmed from Moscow airport that they had no luggage with them. Then it hit him. Olga and the others must have either hidden the documents on their bodies, “but Comrade Colonel, we searched them all thoroughly and found nothing,” or they had disposed of them at their moment of capture. He knew they could not have eaten them as they were still alive.
“At least, Comrade Colonel, we know that the fourth member of the cell looks like Dmitri so he should not be hard to spot on the surveillance recordings.” The KGB Colonel was frantic. He knew the price he would pay for failure.
“Where is the plane they arrived on?”
“It is on its way back to Moscow comrade…”
“Get it back here, now! And you, Comrade Sokolov, why did you not tell me that your brother was the fourth member of the cell.” To save his family from arrest, torture and death, Dmitri gave Vladimir away.
“Comrade Colonel, I swear that the man on the recording is not my brother. I have never met him or seen him before in my life. Check the records, that man is not my brother.”
What seem like small, seemingly insignificant, pieces of information have value. Dmitri’s information stopped the KGB Colonel from pursuing a dead-end line of enquiry and set pursuers on Vladimir’s trail. Had Dmitri played along, the KGB would eventually have found out that the fourth member of the cell was not his brother. This would have bought the mission valuable time. But Dmitri had suffered greatly and did not want his family to go through the same thing so he did what he did and would die with that on his conscience.
*
Having established that none of us travelled with luggage, and I had picked my portion of the message out of my armpit, Alice asked the obvious question and I replied that I had no idea where the others had hidden their sheets of paper. She thought for a moment.
“It will not be long before the other sheets are discovered. We must go to the Smirnovsk complex and…”
“And what? What will we do, Alice? Smirnovsk is a fortified torture house full of…”
“A what?” I asked as if I had not heard the words I had clearly heard.
“A torture house! They are all over the place. There are about a hundred in the Tula region alone. They are getting ready for something.”
“I think I know what it is they are getting ready for and I think that is what the message is about… I think.”
“So, Mister Vakhnenko, what is it all about?”
“Terror is about to be unleashed on the people of the Soviet Union. Lev told us that the Central Committee is losing control and they are going to use old style Terror to regain it. They believe Terror is the only way to make the USSR great again.”
“Are they crazy? Or are you crazy?”
“No, he is not crazy, it makes sense and if something makes sense then it is right. We have to retrieve the messages from the others.”
“How?”
“We will mount an assault on the torture house at Smirnovsk to rescue Olga and the others.”
“That is suicide! There are dozens of guards there… they are Spetsnaz. Every one of them is a trained killer.”
“Spetsnaz? Rubbish! You do not know what you are talking about. What would Spetsnaz be doing guarding a KGB operation? You are just trying to spread panic because you are a coward.”
“Shut up both of you. If Olga and her team are still in possession of the documents then we have no choice we have to go. If what Mister Vakhnenko says is true we will be amongst the first to go so we have no choice.”
“May I suggest something?” asked a slightly built female who had been listening from the side-lines.
“Sure, why not.”
“As Mister Vakhnenko supposedly looks like Dmitri we could dress him up like Dmitri and see if that gets us past the guards at the main gate. It is only a small building so there cannot be that many guards inside it. If it does not work we would be close enough to them to overpower them with the element of surprise.”
“Petra, you are not just a pretty face, you are a genius.”
“Genius? It is a crazy idea! They will not fall for it!” barked Mikhail.
“It is not your decision Mikhail, I am the leader of this cell and I say we go.”
“How about we put it to a vote?”
“We are not communards, Mikhail, we are an NV cell and I am its Commander. So what I say goes and we go in five minutes.”
Petra handed me a selection of clothes and recommended which I should wear to most look like Dmitri. I checked myself in a mirror. I was not convinced. The clothes were a terrible fit. They were too big for me. Petra pinched the jacket at the back and put safety pins all down the bunched seam, she pinned me too. She recalled Dmitri was taller than me and suggested I walk on tip toes. While I was practising my ‘walk as tall as possible to look like Dmitri walk’ Petra brought Alice and the others into the room. They creased up laughing at the sight and I realised Petra had played a joke on me. “Very funny, this is serious!” When I returned to the main room everybody was walking around on tip toes and laughing. The laughter lightened my mood and took away the fear of what we were about to do.
