Dimka looked at him in fury. ‘Who’s in charge on the train?’
‘Colonel Kats is with us.’
‘Bring the dumb bastard here to me right away.’
Filipov did not like to do Dimka’s bidding, but he could hardly refuse such a request, and he went away.
Pankov looked an inquiry at Dimka.
Dimka said with weary rage: ‘Do you see what is stencilled on the side of each crate?’
Pankov nodded. ‘It’s an army code number.’
‘Exactly,’ Dimka said bitterly. ‘It means: ‘R-12 ballistic missile.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Pankov.
Dimka shook his head in impotent fury. ‘Torture is too good for some people.’
He had feared that sooner or later he would have a showdown with the army, and on balance it suited him to have it now, over the very first shipment. And he was prepared for it.
Filipov returned with a colonel and a major. The senior man said: ‘Good morning, comrades. I’m Colonel Kats. Slight delay, but otherwise everything is going smoothly—’
‘No, it’s not, you dim-witted prick,’ said Dimka.
Kats was incredulous. ‘What did you say?’
Filipov said: ‘Look here, Dvorkin, you can’t talk to an army officer like that.’
Dimka ignored Filipov and spoke to Kats. ‘You have endangered the security of this entire operation by your disobedience. Your orders were to paint over the army numbers on the crates. You were provided with new stencils reading “Construction Grade Plastic Pipe”. You were to paint new markings on all the crates.’
Kats said indignantly: ‘There wasn’t time.’
Filipov said: ‘Be reasonable, Dvorkin.’
Dimka suspected Filipov might be happy for the secret to leak, for then Khrushchev would be discredited and might even fall from power.
Dimka pointed south, out to sea. ‘There is a NATO country just one hundred and fifty miles in that direction, Kats, you fucking idiot. Don’t you know that the Americans have spies? And that they send them to places such as Sevastopol, which is a naval base and a major Soviet port?’
‘The markings are in code—’
‘In code? What is your brain made of, dog shit? What training do you imagine is given to capitalist-imperialist spies? They are taught to recognize uniform badges – such as the missile regiment flash you are wearing on your collar, also against orders – as well as other military insignia and equipment markings. You stupid turd, every traitor and CIA informant in Europe can read the army code on these crates.’
Kats tried standing on his dignity. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I’ve got children older than you.’
‘You are relieved of your command,’ said Dimka.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Show him, please.’
Colonel Pankov took a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Kats.
Dimka said: ‘As you see from the document, I have the necessary authority.’
Filipov’s jaw was hanging open, Dimka saw.
Dimka said to Kats: ‘You are under arrest as a traitor. Go with these men.’
Lieutenant Meyer and another of Pankov’s group smoothly positioned themselves either side of Kats, took his arms, and marched him to the limousine.
Filipov recovered his wits. ‘Dvorkin, for God’s sake—’
‘If you can’t say anything helpful, shut your fucking mouth,’ Dimka said to him. He turned to the missile regiment major, who had not said a word so far. ‘Are you Kats’s second-in-command?’
The man looked terrified. ‘Yes, comrade. Major Spektor at your service.’
‘You are now in command.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Take this train away. North of here is a large complex of train sheds. Arrange with the railway management to stop there for twelve hours while you repaint the crates. Bring the train back here tomorrow.’
‘Yes, Comrade.’
‘Colonel Kats is going to a labour camp in Siberia for the rest of his life, which will not be very long. So, Major Spektor, don’t make a mistake.’
‘I won’t.’
Dimka got into his limousine. As he drove away, he passed Filipov standing on the quay, looking as if he was not sure what had just happened.
*
Tania Dvorkin stood on the dock at Mariel, on Cuba’s north coast twenty-five miles from Havana, where a narrow inlet opened into a huge natural harbour hidden among hills. She looked anxiously at a Soviet ship moored at a concrete pier. Parked on the pier was a Soviet ZIL-130 truck pulling an eighty-foot trailer. A crane was lifting a long wooden crate from the ship’s hold and moving it through the air, with painful slowness, towards the truck. The crate was marked in Russian: ‘Construction Grade Plastic Pipe’.
She saw all this by floodlights. The ships had to be unloaded at night, by order of her brother. All other shipping had been cleared out of the harbour. Patrol boats had closed the inlet. Frogmen searched the waters around the ship to guard against an underwater threat. Dimka’s name was mentioned in tones of fear: his word was law and his wrath terrible to behold, they said.
Tania was writing articles for TASS that told how the Soviet Union was helping Cuba, and how grateful the Cuban people were for the friendship of their ally on the far side of the globe. But she reserved the real truth for the coded cables she sent, via the KGB’s telegraph system, to Dimka in the Kremlin. And now Dimka had given her the unofficial task of making sure that his instructions were carried out without fail. That was why she was anxious.
With Tania was General Paz Oliva, the most beautiful man she had ever met.
Paz was breathtakingly attractive: tall and strong and a little scary, until he smiled and spoke in a soft bass voice that made her think of the strings of a cello being caressed by a bow. He was in his thirties: most of Castro’s military men were young. With his dark skin and soft curls he looked more Negro than Hispanic. He was a poster boy for Castro’s policy of racial equality, such a contrast with Kennedy’s.
Tania loved Cuba, but it had taken a while. She missed Vasili more than she had expected. She realized how fond she was of him, even though they had never been lovers. She worried about him in his Siberian labour camp, hungry and cold. The campaign for which he had been punished – publicizing the illness of Ustin Bodian, the singer – had been successful, sort of: Bodian had been released from prison, though he had died soon afterwards in a Moscow hospital. Vasili would find the irony telling.
Some things she could not get used to. She still put on a coat to go out, although the weather was never cold. She got bored with beans and rice and, to her surprise, found herself longing for a bowl of kasha with sour cream. After endless days of hot summer sun, she sometimes hoped for a downpour to freshen the streets.
Cuban peasants were as poor as Soviet peasants, but they seemed happier, perhaps because of the weather. And eventually the Cuban people’s irrepressible joie de vivre bewitched Tania. She smoked cigars and drank rum with tuKola, the local substitute for Coke. She loved to dance with Paz to the irresistibly sexy rhythms of the traditional music they called trova. Castro had closed most of the nightclubs, but no one could prevent Cubans playing guitars, and the musicians had moved to small bars called casas de la trova.
But she worried for the Cuban people. They had defied their giant neighbour, the United States, only ninety miles away across the Straits of Florida, and she knew that one day they might be punished. When she thought about it, Tania felt like the crocodile bird, bravely perched between the open jaws of the great beast, pecking food from a row of teeth like broken knives.
Was the Cubans’ defiance worth the price? Only time would tell. Tania was pessimistic about the prospects for reforming Communism, but some of the things Castro had done were admirable. In 1961, the Year of Education, ten thousand students had flocked to the countryside to teach farmers to read, a heroic crusade to wipe out illiteracy in one campaign. The first sentence in the primer was ‘The peasants work in the cooperative,’ but so what? People who could read were better equipped to recognize government propaganda for what it was.
Castro was no Bolshevik. He scorned orthodoxy and restlessly sought out new ideas. That was why he annoyed the Kremlin. But he was no Democrat either. Tania had been saddened when he had announced that the revolution had made elections unnecessary. And there was one area in which he had imitated the Soviet Union slavishly: with advice from the KGB he had created a ruthlessly efficient secret police force to stamp out dissent.
On balance, Tania wished the revolution well. Cuba had to escape from underdevelopment and colonialism. No one wanted the Americans back, with their casinos and their prostitutes. But Tania wondered whether Cubans would ever be allowed to make their own decisions. American hostility drove them into the arms of the Soviets; but as Castro moved closer to the USSR, so it became increasingly likely that the Americans would invade. What Cuba really needed was to be left alone.
But perhaps now it had a chance. She and Paz were among a mere handful of people who knew what was in these long wooden crates. She was reporting directly to Dimka on the effectiveness of the security blanket. If the plan worked, it might protect Cuba permanently from the danger of an American invasion, and give the country breathing space in which to find its own way into the future.
That was her hope, anyway.
She had known Paz a year. ‘You never talk about your family,’ she said as they watched the crate being positioned in the trailer. She addressed him in Spanish: she was now fairly fluent. She had also picked up a smattering of the American-accented English that many Cubans used occasionally.
‘The revolution is my family,’ he said.
Bullshit, she thought.