The fax traffic, preferred by many MVD offices over the regular military channels, was informing Novosibirsk HQ that at this very moment, at 10:03 a.m. Thursday morning — that is, 11:03 a.m. Wednesday on little Diomede, only two and a half miles across the date/boundary line between the U.S. and USSR — with a half hour to go before the Bering Strait passed out of utter darkness into civil twilight, an Allied airborne attack was underway against Ratmanov Island.
Another fax, classified as tayna— “secret”— but momentarily considered less important to Novosibirsk HQ than the American general’s attack on Ratmanov, came through with the information that the submarine that had attacked the two supertankers off America’s northwest coast had reported that one of the torpedoes it had fired had not exploded, a common-enough complaint from the Far Eastern TVD HQ at Khabarovsk. Normally this would merely have been entered as a nerazorvavshiysya snaryad— “dud”— but it was seen by an alert intelligence officer at Novosibirsk who realized that it was opening up an old sore for Khabarovsk TVD HQ — the suspected sabotage of munitions by Jews living in one of the YAOs, or Jewish autonomous regions — in this case a lamb chop-shaped Jewish enclave, 120 miles at its widest, around Birobidzhan. A hundred and fifteen miles west of Khabarovsk, the Jewish region was near the Manchurian border.
In Khabarovsk, KGB chief Colonel Nefski had just returned from the Bear Restaurant having downed an enormous plate of pig’s feet, fresh bread, and wine served by an elderly waiter whose atrocious French lent an air of sophistication whenever Nefski and other senior officers patronized the restaurant. But if Nefski could be fooled by pretensions of French cuisine, there wasn’t much anyone could tell him about the best way to deal with suspected saboteurs. Gorbachev, of course, had vsyo is-portil—”ballsed everything up”—so that even after he had gone and things started to return to something like normal around Khabarovsk there were still idiosyncratic pockets of bureaucracy so that, for example, before he could have “absolute” authority to deal with the Jews it was necessary to get Novosibirsk’s approval. No one would have questioned him had he gone ahead with his own plan, but Nefski knew how pieces of paper not obtained could be used later against one by unscrupulous political opponents. Gorbachev and that other fool, Yeltsin — God rot them — had actually encouraged the Jews for a time to believe they had the same rights as any other Soviet citizen.
As Nefski waited impatiently by the window of his third-floor office for confirmation that his fax had gotten through to Novosibirsk, he took another Sobraine from his cigarette tin and lit it, pouring the acrid, bluish-gray smoke against the frosted windows through which he could faintly see the red-and-yellow tram cars making their way in the blizzard along Khabarovsk’s wide avenues. One’s position, he ruminated to his subaltern, was all a matter of distance from the capital. First, Moscow. Now, Novosibirsk. Like the Americans who lived in Alaska and the American Northwest who were never understood by Washington’s bureaucrats, Nefski had ample evidence that Novosibirsk never understood the tyranny of distance, never fully appreciated the enormous implications of the fact that the lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed barely fifty miles from the Chinese border out here.
Should the Americans, now that they held Korea, decide to cross the Yalu River that separated China’s Manchurian provinces from Korea then wheel westward onto the Great Northern Plain of China, the Jews would seize their chance and cut the rail line, thus effectively cutting off Khabarovsk and Vladivostok farther south on the coast. Disaster would follow. Khabarovsk and Vladivostok were the linchpins of the entire Siberian offensive against the Americans on the eastern flank.
This was true not only for the entire Far Eastern TVD in the war against the Americans but for any air war against Japan, should the Japanese, less than two hundred miles east of the coast, decide to attack as a military down payment on the oil they would have to get from the American North Slope if their industry was not to grind to a halt.
Personally, Nefski confided to his subaltern, a KGB lieutenant, he doubted the Americans would risk incurring the wrath of the Chinese by striking through North Korea, but with Korea in their possession, it was a temptation: a left hook from Najin in North Korea northeastward, less than two hundred miles around the coast on the Sea of Japan to attack Vladivostok. The military consequences of Vladivostok being cut off were too horrendous to contemplate, but it was precisely that that Nefski had to think about. Losing the ice-free port would mean the entire Soviet Pacific fleet would be cast adrift — with no home base, no supplies.
And if this wasn’t enough to fire Nefski’s determination to root out the Jewish saboteurs whom he believed were responsible for the local attacks on the Trans-Siberian Railway link, then his humiliation during the short-lived Minsk Treaty was. He and other KGB officers had been “required” to make public apologies to the Jews for certain “irregularities” during the war. Indeed, Nefski and his aide had been imprisoned for forty-eight hours by the Jewish underground, destined to face charges in what the Jews called “open court.” Open court! Well, everything had changed very suddenly with Novosibirsk’s rejection of Chernko’s cowardly Minsk Treaty. The following day the Jews had fought sporadic actions along the rail line 160 kilometers between Khavarovsk and Birobidzhan, cutting it in several places; but with Siberia’s decision to continue throwing its vast resources and armies against the Allies, and military reinforcements being rushed out from western Siberia, the Jews were on the run again — the hunted, not the hunter.
“Kings for a day, eh?” Nefski remarked to his subaltern, without taking his eyes off the tram cars that had fascinated him ever since he was a child and afforded him the warm, secure feeling of someone safe looking out at a hostile world. Then Nefski, with a full stomach to stoke his confidence, explained to his subaltern that even if Ratmanov fell, which he doubted, an attack by aircraft from American carrier-based fleets that might steam toward the Sea of Japan from the Americans’ Aleutian bases was highly unlikely. First there would be the blizzard facing them as well as the zhelezny zjanaves—”iron curtain”— of antiaircraft missiles and gunfire that would be thrown up at them by the formidable defense network of the Kuril Island screen, four hundred miles off the coast. And even if they got past the Kuril Islands, the Americans would then be met by swarms of Soviet fighters rising to meet them north of Japan from bases dotted along the six-hundred-mile-long shield of Sakhalin Island just off the Soviet coast. And this quite apart from the koltsa— “rings”—of AA missile and gun emplacements around Vladivostok and inland around Khabarovsk itself.
Nefski glanced at his watch, frowned, and pushed the button for “cells.” “What are they doing down there?” he asked sharply, the sour stench of his kumiss, the fermented mare’s milk so beloved by the Yakuts, filling the overheated, stuffy KGB office. His subaltern tried to hold his breath as Nefski spoke, surmising that the colonel’s breath was so foul that if they could pipe it down the narrow, winding, stone staircase to the cells four stories below, the Jews would agree instantly to tell Nefski whatever he wanted to know about who was who in the Jewish resistance.
“They had some trouble with the woman,” the subaltern explained, pulling a file. “After we brought her and those three brothers of hers in.” He was reminding Nefski of the time they had pretended to shoot the youngest to get her to talk. “She apparently went bonkers when we picked her up again after Novosibirsk rejected the Minsk treaty.” He laughed. “They all thought they were about to be liberated when Chernko signed at Minsk. ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ “
“If she’s crazy,” said Nefski, “she’s no use to us. This time we won’t be generous — to her or her gangster brothers. No more blanks to frighten them. This time we’ll use—”
“No, sir,” interjected the subaltern, “I don’t mean crazy mad, sir. I mean violent.”
“Then for God’s sake give her an injection.”
“That’s what they’re doing, sir,” answered the subaltern, trying to hide his anxiety. He prayed nothing had gone wrong downstairs. If he helped Nefski break the Jews, it would mean a promotion from lieutenant to captain.
Nefski lit another Sobraine off the first, the lieutenant grateful for the infusion of the thick tobacco smoke to counter the foul smell of sour cheese. Nefski had completely misunderstood his subaltern’s anxiety about the woman, mistakenly interpreting it as concern. “If you’re going to be an old woman about this, Ilya, I don’t want you here. These vermin pose as great a threat to our supply line as did the Czechs.”
Nefski was referring to the bizarre incident of the Czech legion in World War I who, ironically, on their way home and fed up with delays, had held most of the Trans-Siberian Railway during the bloody civil war between the Reds and the Whites. Canadian and U.S. forces in Murmansk were trying even then to hamper the Revolution.
The lieutenant didn’t comment, the analogy between a few score of zhidy—”yids”— and the Czech legion being a monstrous exaggeration. Still, he knew Nefski had a point. Despite the fact that they would not know what part of the line was under infrared surveillance hidden in the birch taiga or monitored by the vibration meters of the kind perfected by the Americans in Vietnam to detect even foot traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a rail line could be uprooted by a child with a fistful of plastique and the guts to try. Anyway, with or without the dangers posed by the Jews, the subaltern was certainly not an old woman. Didn’t feel squeamish at all. In fact, and this he did not mention or even hint at to Nefski, the prospect of torturing the Jewess, Alexsandra Malof, a pretty, dark-eyed, and well-endowed nineteen-year-old, excited him. Compared with the usual run of ugly, stodgy peasants they had to deal with it would be a pleasant change. Sometimes Nefski let his men do an “Iraqi”—which meant the most diligent and loyal interrogators were given an hour or so alone with the woman in the cell.
The thought of the Jewess naked, tied to the bare birch bunk, breasts rising quickly up and down with her fear, thrilled him long before he heard them dragging her up the narrow staircase. He had an erection and so busied himself by the records cabinet, going over her file so that his back was turned to Nefski who, if he saw the subaltern’s condition, would make a great joke of it. Turning his head slightly to look out at the top of the stairwell, he glimpsed her and saw that after only several days of solitary she’d lost weight. But starvation initially gave some prisoners a more determined, alive look, separating them, as Comrade Nefski often said, into the “quick and the dead,” and made the ones who wanted to live more exciting. Yet their stubbornness was in the end a death sentence. When you took them back to cells after the initial interrogation and held out food as a reward, there was almost nothing they wouldn’t do.
As they hauled her through the door, he turned, holding the file low in front of him. He heard a high, buzzing sound and saw the fax light come on. Nefski was standing by the window, gazing out — his usual “disinterested” ploy — and so the lieutenant tore off the fax as the two guards pushed her into the chair. She was one of those women whose long, dark hair looked beautiful no matter what you did to them. He glanced down at the fax. It would make Nefski very happy: Novosibirsk “fully concurred” with Comrade Nefski’s “assessment of the Jewish problem.” Indeed, Novosibirsk HQ pointed out, it was partly because of sabotage in the Baltic states that many Russian gunners had found themselves firing dud rounds during the battle for Minsk. Comrade Nefski was instructed to “take all measures necessary for the solution of this problem in your sector of the TVD.”
She wasn’t wearing a bra. This was normal procedure, of course — some of the Jews had even tried to use shoelaces tied together to hang themselves rather than face KGB interrogation. And because she had done nothing to help the guards on the way up, resisting them as they dragged her full weight over every step, she was perspiring heavily; the faded, thin blue cotton prison tunic was clinging to her body like a wet sheet.
Nefski didn’t bother turning from the window as he spoke. Ilya grinned, the colonel always pulling this lidery— “big-shot”—bullshit, not deigning to look at the prisoner. That was fine. It gave Ilya more time to look at her. Already she’d responded by not responding, her lucid brown eyes focussing on some distant point beyond him — Jerusalem perhaps? He could feel the resistance in her like electricity in the air. He knew she wasn’t going to cooperate — not yet. This was a waste of time. Still, they always did this part by the book, and he opened the file, moving to the left of Nefski’s brutish, wooden desk to take notes. But now Nefski unexpectedly turned and shook his head. No notes. Ilya slipped the file away and closed the drawer with a satisfying click. No record of the interrogation; it was a good sign. They’d have a bit of fun with her. After all, Novosibirsk had given them carte blanche.