Icon

“No. Russian future. Have a look. That page and the next.”

General Nikolayev grunted and took the proffered file. He read quickly the two marked pages. His face mottled.

“Bloody rubbish,” he shouted. “Who wrote this crap?”

“Have you heard of Igor Komarov?”

“Don’t be a fool. Of course. Going to be president in January.”

“Good or bad?”

“How should I know? They’re all as bent as cork-screws.”

“So he’s no better or worse than the rest of them?”

“That’s about it.”

Monk described the events of the previous July 15, covering the ground as fast as he could, fearful of losing the old man’s attention or, worse, his patience.

“Don’t believe it,” the general snapped. “You come here with some fancy story …”

“If it’s a fancy story, then three men did not die in attempts to recover it. But they did. Are you going anywhere this evening?”

“Eh, no. Why?”

“Then why not put down Pavel Grachev’s memoirs and read Igor Komarov’s intentions? Some parts you will like. The re-empowerment of the army. But it’s not to defend the Motherland. There’s no external threat to the Motherland. It is to create an army that will carry out genocide. You may not like Jews, Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, but they were in those tanks too, remember. They were at Kursk and Bagration, Berlin and Kabul. They fought beside you. Why not spare a few minutes to see what Mr. Komarov has in store for them?”

General Nikolayev stared at the American a quarter of a century his junior, then grunted.

“Do Americans drink vodka?”

“They do on freezing nights in the middle of Russia.”

“There’s a bottle over there. Help yourself.”

While the old man read, Monk treated himself to a slug of Moskovskaya and thought of the briefing he had had in Castle Forbes.

“He’s probably the last of the Russian generals with an old-fashioned sense of honor. He’s no fool and he’s got no fear. There are ten million veterans who will still listen to Uncle Kolya,” the Russian tutor Oleg had told him.

After the fall of Berlin and a year in occupation, the young Major Nikolayev was sent back to Moscow, to Armored Officer School. In the summer of 1950 he was appointed to command one of the seven regiments of heavy tanks on the Yalu River in the Far East.

The Korean War was at its height, with the Americans rolling back the North Koreans. Stalin was seriously thinking of saving the Koreans’ bacon by throwing in his own new tanks against the

Americans. Two things prevailed to prevent him: wiser counsels and his own paranoia. The IS-4s were so ultra-secret that details of them were never revealed, and Stalin feared to lose one intact. In 1951 Nikolayev returned to a lieutenant-colonelcy and a posting to Potsdam. He was still only twenty-five.

At thirty he commanded a Special Ops tank regiment in the Hungarian uprising. That was where he first upset Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, who went on to become chairman of the KGB for fifteen years and General Secretary of the USSR. Colonel Nikolayev refused to use his tanks’ machine guns to rake the crowds of protesting Hungarian civilians on the streets of Budapest.

“They’re seventy percent women and children,” he told the ambassador and architect of the crushing of the revolt. “They’re throwing rocks. Stones don’t hurt tanks.”

“They must be taught a lesson!” shouted Andropov. “Use your machine guns.”

Nikolayev had seen what heavy machine guns can do to massed civilians in a confined space. At Smolensk in 1941. His parents had been among them.

“You want it, you do it,” he told Andropov. A senior . general calmed things down but Nikolayev’s career hung by a thread. Andropov was not a forgiving man.

In the early and mid-sixties he got the outposts, years along the banks of the Amur and Ussuri rivers facing China across the flowing water while Khrushchev debated whether to try to teach Mao Tse-tung a lesson in tank warfare.

Khrushchev fell, Brezhnev succeeded him, the crisis calmed down, and Nikolayev gladly forsook the frozen barren wastes of the Manchurian border to return to Moscow.