In Moscow, Kachak had had a three-room apartment overlooking Chistiye Prudi and access to a second flat, where he met with informants and screwed his girlfriends, one of whom was Abakumov’s wife. This, he believed, was the real reason he’d been sent to the end of nowhere. Now, instead of seeing the Clean Ponds out of his window, he woke to the sight of slag heaps and coal mines, enjoyed three hours of sunlight a day, and supervised men outfitted only slightly better than the slave-prisoners they were mandated to guard.
The call came from Beria himself. A Sabrejet pilot had crash-landed near the Yellow Sea but had eluded capture by poisoning himself inside his cockpit. A hundred Chinamen had been conscripted to haul the plane out of the water, saw off its wings, and, under the cover of an overcast night sky, roll the wingless aircraft to a control center, where it was dismantled further and loaded in pieces onto a convoy. Now, the security organs believed, another American F-86 pilot had been sent as a prisoner to one of Kachak’s labor camps. Kachak’s job was to find him and send him to Moscow. Kachak watched the sun setting outside his office window as he listened to Beria’s voice. It was 2:00 P.M. He smiled. “Do you think I know each zek personally?” he told his old boss over the phone. “We get three dead Americans a week here. Let them come and search at the bottom of the mine shafts.”
“I think you understand the consequence of this.”
“If they wanted him so much, why didn’t they bring him straight to Moscow from Andong?”
“They didn’t know the type of plane he was in.”
“And now they do.”
“The unit combed the hills and found parts. He’d been moved out by then.”
“So the military let him slip through their fingers. Why should we pay for their mistake?”
“This isn’t me you’re jerking around, Timur—it’s Koba himself. Stalin’s ordered the jet transported in pieces to the MiG design bureau.”
“Then what do those geniuses need the pilot for?”
“The dashboard is destroyed. Whoever was in there took a rock to the controls before he did himself in. They’ll need help reconstructing the panels.”
“So Koba has a plane without a pilot, and we might have a pilot without a plane. But let me ask you this….If he told them nothing in Andong, what makes the MGB think he’ll talk in Moscow?”
“What are you saying?”
“Nobody even knows if he’s still alive….”
“Paperwork says a shipment of Americans was sent through Vladivostok, then to you.”
“If he’s alive, let me work on him here.”
“This isn’t your specialty.”
“I’ll find a way.”
—
Captain Henry Robbins first refused to talk and, later, to eat. The food brought by the guards to his cell remained untouched. After five days the American pilot lacked the strength to get up from his pallet and was carried to the interrogation room and tied to a chair. He knew from his army training that if one had no food it was still wise to keep one’s body mobilized, to do calisthenics and massage the limbs, in order to delay muscular deterioration. But he was under the reign of a single goal now, and that was to die. Robbins did not expect his requests to be granted by the filthy Russians, but he continued to repeat them with an unremitting insistence calculated to infuriate his captors. Day and night had started to replace each other without his noticing. His chest pains and weak pulse he read as promising signs that death was nearby. What he had not counted on was the prolonged, creeping tow of time. The same feebleness that pinned him to his pallet made the minutes like hours, the hours like days. Time was an impossibly heavy stone raking him underneath it as it scraped on endlessly. Robbins was discovering the great cosmic mystery that only the dying know: the closer a man is to the moment of finality, the slower time’s drag. This, his final test and torture.
—
HE’D BEEN PICKED UP still wearing his G-suit, a holster strapped around his thigh, his suit pockets now almost empty of the candies he’d packed and sealed with friction tape in the event he would ever need to pull the ejection lever and punch out of the plane. For three days, he’d crawled down the rocky path that snaked east along the shrub-covered mountain. He tried to follow his wrist compass southward but could not be sure if he was in North Korea or across the Chinese border. He knew one phrase in Korean, nam amu jeongboga eobs-seubnida, which he believed declared a refusal to answer any questions apart from name, rank, and serial number. But the faces of the men of the anti-aircraft artillery unit that greeted him when he reached the bottom of the mountain path were neither Korean nor Chinese. The pistol strapped to his thigh was there to protect him in case he ran across a predator or an enemy soldier. But when he saw their number, Robbins understood that the gun was issued to him for a much simpler end—one he’d been too cowardly to take.
—
ON THE EIGHTH DAY his jailers arrived bearing strange instruments. From his bed, Robbins caught a glimpse of murky liquid sloshing around in a deep dish. A man in a white coat held a rubber tube in his hand. The guards sat him up. A warfare of faces swarmed around him. They were trying to squeeze the hose into his mouth. With an incomprehensible store of strength, he reached for the tube, but they twisted his wrists behind his back and grabbed his head in an armlock to keep him from shaking it. The man in the white coat pinched his nose, forced his mouth open with a spoon. They would let him neither live nor die. He was handcuffed and tossed on his stomach. His pants were pulled down, and the hose bearing life-giving nutrients was wedged up his rectum. He relaxed his muscles and thought, Let them, and soon after felt the wet, stinging comfort of his first shit in a week.
Shortly afterward, the doctor returned with new implements. Robbins’s lips were pulled back, and clamps like small stirrups were jammed between his molars, rotated up and down until his jaw could be pried open enough to slide in the gagging tube. Slowly, it was pushed down, like a fishing line being lowered by a child. Robbins felt himself gagging—a pain more violent than anything before. But the tube was undeterred by the spasms in his throat and stomach. Like a drowning man he drew in air through his nose; above him, the doctor’s redshot face went black, like a cinder turning to ash.
When Robbins came to, many hours later, it was with a cramp in his guts and the disappointing sensation that he was still alive. He sensed he was not alone. Somebody was seated beside him on the berth. “Captain,” he heard, in a voice clearly that of an American, and even more surprisingly, a woman. “I’ve brought you a little tea. It’ll make you feel better.”