FOUR
The boy took his punishment in silence, flinching with each blow of the strap, at the last hissing between gnashed teeth. Afterwards he disappeared into his room.
A weak man would have avoided his wife’s reproachful gaze. Venedikt looked Marta full in the face.
‘You think it’s overkill.’
She sighed.
‘A lack of respect isn’t a minor transgression. It’s the root. Strangle it at source.’ He was aware he was lapsing into the jargon he used with his men.
Yuri was fourteen, sullen but usually wise enough to stay on the right side of well mannered. Tonight, after arriving home an hour beyond supper time, his eyes had slid past his father’s, and he’d met Venedikt’s final warning growl with his back. He was a fine boy, fundamentally. He would learn, as Venedikt himself had.
Venedikt had never liked his own father, but had always respected him, all the more because the man had taught him that to be respected was more important than to be liked. His grandfather on the other hand he had loved, and still did, which was odd as he had never met the man. He knew Vasily Petrovich from the stories his grandmother had told of her late husband, from the sight and feel and smell of his exquisitely preserved uniform, the heft of the medals when he lifted them out of their box.
He sat in his study, tea at his elbow – he didn’t drink, was opposed to all intoxicants – and awaited Dobrynin’s phone call, the final confirmation that tomorrow was to go ahead. Gazing at the photographs arrayed on his desk and on the walls, he allowed his thoughts to wander.
His grandfather, his dedushka, Vasily Petrovich, had fallen in the Narva Offensive in the late winter of 1944, fighting with the Soviet Second Shock Army to liberate Estonia from the fascists and from its own collaborationist government. As the widow of a war hero his grandmother had been permitted to settle in Estonia after the war with her young son, Venedikt’s father. She had embraced it as her homeland, as had her son and his.
From Vasily Petrovich, a hero whom he had never met, Venedikt had learned respect. Respect for one’s people, and one’s country, that was so unbending one would lay down one’s life to keep it alive. It was because of an understanding of the value of respect that Venedikt had, after his national service, decided to join the Estonian defence forces. He had served the Ground Force, the Maavägi, with distinction, rising to the rank of ensign. In August 1991 Estonia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and announced that neither people who had settled in the country after 1940 nor their descendants had any automatic right to citizenship.
He was twenty-seven years old, young enough for the betrayal to be his first. It burned him.
Venedikt had been brought up speaking Russian, as had his parents. He could get by in Estonian but was not fluent enough to have a hope of passing the strict new naturalisation exam. Languages were not his strong point and the chances of his mastering the second tongue did not seem high. As such, he could remain a resident of the country, could continue his career in the armed forces, but was not permitted to vote in national elections. He was effectively stateless.
His career hit a glass ceiling or, as a fellow ethnic Russian junior officer put it, he “got drowned in the river of piss from above”. He failed to progress to junior lieutenant level while younger, less experienced men – native Estonians, of course – soared past him. Bright young professionals began the gentrification of Tallinn, pushing up property prices and forcing Venedikt and his parents into increasingly ghetto-like quarters on the outskirts.
In August 1994 the last Russian troops left the country. Venedikt stood in his uniform by the side of the road out of Paldiski, the barracks town west of Tallinn, and watched the military vehicles roll past. The crowds were sparse. Slow applause broke out, and went on for several minutes before Venedikt understood it was mocking in nature. Then the jeering began, a counterpoint to the clapping.
A young man next to Venedikt, a student of some sort, boozy-eyed and stinking, yelled, ‘Vene sead.’ Russian pigs. Venedikt was not aware of his elbow jabbing into the boy’s face, or the blows after that, but it didn’t matter because the whole process was laid out in detail, injury by injury, in the courtroom. Venedikt received eighteen months in prison, of which he served eight. His career in the military was over.
The phone startled him out of his brooding. It wasn’t Dobrynin. He listened, asked a few questions, then, when the other person had rung off, made a call of his own. Afterwards he sat back in his chair, the phone still in his hand. This was a possible complication.
Again the phone rang. This time it was Dobrynin.
‘Contact made, and the rendezvous is confirmed. Two p.m.’
He allowed himself to breathe out, slowly. In his head he had divided the operation into steps, major and minor, though nothing had been written down. The rendezvous tomorrow would be step two. Step three, the climax, would follow the next day.
He would not sleep well that night, he knew, so there was no point in going to bed early. But there was a risk his thoughts would wander back down the bitter avenues of injustice from which he’d once thought he would never escape. Instead he closed his eyes and called up the memories of an earlier triumph: step one in the operation.
*
The heat from the five bodies in the van fogged the windows almost to their tops. The engine couldn’t be turned on to clear the condensation because the exhaust fumes would betray their position. Venedikt was in the front passenger seat. Beside him the driver, Leok, one of them in spite of his Estonian name, rested his hands on the steering wheel, impassive, not a hint of nerves showing. The second van, commanded by Dobrynin, was back down the road, similarly buried between the trees.
In the back of Venedikt’s van one of his men had an open notebook computer across his lap. He looked up and nodded to Venedikt; the target was on course. Venedikt gave an order and he and the others pulled the balaclavas down over their faces. The man with the computer raised his hand, balancing on a tense edge, then chopped it down and Venedikt shouted ‘Go,’ and the driver hit the ignition and gunned the engine and they surged forward on to the road. Yes, there was the first of the armoured vehicles cresting the hill and then stopping, stalled. Leok spun the van so that it was side on to the vehicle. The door slid open and the man with the rocket launcher knelt and hefted the weapon and took aim. Venedikt saw the man in the passenger seat beside the vehicle’s driver cringe behind the windscreen and mouth frantically to the driver but the driver was already through the door and rolling on the tarmac. From the back of the vehicle men spilled like ants from a hill, guards in body armour who pressed themselves against the sides of the vehicle but held fire because at this range their shotguns would be useless.
Venedikt’s man with the launcher fired. The windscreen disappeared and from inside the cab the man in the passenger seat screamed an instant before the blast tore him apart and blew the doors off from the inside. The guards sprang away from the sides of the vehicle and the other two men in the back of Venedikt’s van crawled out and opened fire with their rifles, Finnish Valmet Rk.62s that spewed over seven hundred rounds a minute and punched through the body armour of the guards and flung them jerking and bouncing across the tarmac.
Beyond the front vehicle Venedikt could see the second, slewed slightly to its left. Its own personnel were out on the road and disorientated, turning to face the van commanded by Dobrynin which had pulled out across the road behind them. Some of them had the good sense to crouch on the far side of their vehicle from Dobrynin and his men but then came the trump card, Venedikt’s man from between the trees, emerging on one knee and raising an RPG-28, a launcher that dwarfed the one used to penetrate the windscreen of the front vehicle. The yells of the guards grew frantic and they began to disperse, not caring if they ran across the sightlines of the men bearing small arms.
The twelve-kilogram round from the rocket launcher slammed into the side of the front vehicle, rocking it on its wheels so that it tipped, though it stayed upright. The vehicle was customised with galvanised steel armour designed to withstand high-velocity rifle ammunition but stood no chance against a projectile that could penetrate almost forty inches of hardened metal. The vehicle rocked again as the round exploded, shuddering and lifting this time off its back wheels like a bucking horse. Venedikt and his men swarmed towards the ragged oval rip in the side of the vehicle. One of the fallen guards, legs mangled, performed a half situp and tried to level his shotgun, face contorted, but a burst from one of the Rk.62s threw his head back. At the second armoured van the guards were down, most dead but two kneeling with their hands behind their heads. Venedikt gave his order and two of his men put single shots in the backs of the kneeling guards’ heads. The man with the RPG-28 had moved across and reloaded. He yelled a warning and Venedikt’s men stood clear as the second round punched the side open.
The noise would have been muffled by the dense surrounding forest, and along the road on either side bogus Road Closed signs had been set up to deter the sporadic traffic; but the guards would have notified the police as soon as the attack began, and speed was of the essence. Venedikt paced and gave orders as his men unloaded the contents from the wrecked transporters and filled the two vans. Here and there came a moan followed by a shot as one of his people walked round administering coups de grace. Dobrynin, his second in command, raised a hand.
‘Yefimov.’
Venedikt walked across the wet tarmac to Dobrynin who stood and looked down at Yefimov: the driver of the first armoured van, Venedikt’s man on the inside, the one who had supplied the intelligence about quantities and timing and guard numbers and vehicle specifications which had enabled the robbery to be planned with such precision. Yefimov, who had deliberately stalled the van to allow the trap to be sprung rather than taking the evasive action expected of the driver of a cash transporter. He’d been hit by a blast from one of the guards’ shotguns, his lower abdomen a swamp beneath his clutching hands.
Venedikt squatted beside him, gripped his elbow.
‘Pyotr Mikhailovich, you have served your country with great honour.’
The man’s grimace widened. His eyes looked into Venedikt’s.
Venedikt stood, drew his pistol from his belt holster. He thumbed off the safety and shot Yesimov in the forehead.
The vans’ engines were running, exhaust fumes clouding the brittle September air, and the last of the steel boxes was loaded, like the others undamaged by the rounds from the rocket launcher. The front van swung so that its passenger door presented itself to Venedikt. He sprang in and they were away. There was no cheering in the van. Triumphalism might have made them careless, and there were still the police to be avoided, the money to be counted to confirm that they had not been duped. But although Venedikt sat in grim silence, exultation gripped his chest and throat so fiercely he felt faint.
For you, dedushka, he thought.