Duel of Assassins Read online

  DUEL of ASSASSINS

  Dan Pollock

  Tusitala Press

  The line from the Hagakure in chapter ten is quoted from The Way of the Samurai by Yuko Mishima, translated by Kathryn Sparling, copyright © 1977, Basic Books, Inc., New York

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual eents or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 and 2014 by Dan Pollock

  All rights reserved

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (from 1992 Pocket Books edition):

  This novel and its writer owe a considerable debt to the following:

  for making it all possible, Angela Rinaldi;

  for making it happen, Jed Mattes and Bill Grose;

  for editorial acumen and persistence, Dudley Frasier;

  for unflagging collegial support, Douglas Clegg;

  for structural insight and tutorial zeal, James Sewell;

  for guidance in Soviet matters, Paul Goldberg;

  and for invaluable technical assistance:

  Lt. Col. Harold Barr, USAF (Ret), Kenneth Goddard,

  David and Marie-Luise Pal and Ted Zahorbenski.

  By the same author:

  Lair of the Fox / Orinoco / The Running Boy / Precipice

  The author welcomes comments and questions on his blog: http://danpollock.blogspot.com

  Or email: [email protected]

  For Constance, my darling wife

  “The only tough part is the

  finding out what you’re good for.”

  —Owen Wister, The Virginian

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE ON KINDLE

  Prologue

  Lake Lugano, Italy–Spring, 1991

  He wasn’t sure whether he was in hiding, or early retirement. He’d led an active, Odyssean life. Dropout and hitchhiker at seventeen, carnival roustabout at eighteen, blue-water sailor and international vagabond at nineteen. Then, by dizzying turns in his twenties, he became a political defector, special forces commando, assassin and fugitive.

  Now, in his mid-thirties, youth’s roller-coaster ride seemed pretty well over. It had deposited him on a tranquil Alpine lake—a still-young man with an incredible past and no discernible future. And with nothing to do on this cloudless morning but guide a slightly-bigger-than-bathtub-size sailboat across sparkling sapphire water in a sigh of wind.

  Or maybe blow his brains out.

  Or start all over.

  Another possibility was that someone would track him down and blow his brains out for him, or—more exotically—jab him in the buttocks with a poison-tripped umbrella.

  A final one was that there would come one last summons from the General. But that possibility was daily diminishing. The General, exiled and apparently under virtual camp arrest, continued to concoct his grand plans and promulgate them along his secret network. But the time to act on those plans was rapidly slipping past. The General was on the point of becoming a relic, ending up very much as had old Chiang Kai-shek on his tiny island, shaking a withered fist at the mainland colossus. Events were passing the old soldier by. The summons must come soon, or not at all.

  And if it did not come, the still-young man would have to think seriously and quickly about turning his hand to something new. Or, more likely, set about marketing his hard-won lethal skills, since he didn’t fancy being a hired yachtsman again and couldn’t imagine working indoors.

  In harmony with these mental meanderings, he tacked the tiny boat lazily back and forth across the rippled mirror of Lake Lugano on the Swiss-Italian frontier. Each swing of the little boom and windslap of miniature mainsail carried him a bit nearer the spot from which he’d pushed off an hour before—the steeply terraced, picturebook village of Gandria at the foot of Monte Brè, five kilometers east of the town of Lugano.

  The final tack fetched him perilously near the seawall windward of his albergo, before he rounded dead into the wind, then backed the main and used the rudder in reverse to drift back slowly under the corrugated tin roof of the ramshackle quay. The hotdog landing was completely wasted on a pair of muscular, Nordic-looking girls waiting impatiently to take the boat out. One of them grabbed the bow line from him as he stepped off.

  “Sie kamen dreizehn Minuten zu spät!” she said, poking her sportwatch. “You are late thirdeen minutes!”

  “Sorry, ladies. Ran into some nasty weather out there.” He smiled as he trotted past them up the half-dozen steps to the albergo’s terrace. He settled at an empty table, extending his long, bare legs to a nearby plastic chair and was presently provided his standard morning fare—cappuccino, roll and the International Herlad-Tribune printed in Zürich.

  Whatever he was doing in Lugano, he really oughtn’t complain. The morning sunlight was a benediction, the onshore breeze fanned him attentively, the terrace was bright with flower boxes, and a sparrow on the railing was eyeing his breakfast cheerfully. The only imperfection was a wet itch under his bathing suit from sitting too long on a waterlogged boat cushion.

  He folded the newspaper back to the sports pages. Another baseball season was under way. He hadn’t seen a game in nearly twenty years, yet it was still comforting to scan the agate-type hieroglyphs of standings and box scores, old teams with new players, all conjuring the slow summer game.

  With less enthusiasm he flipped back to the headlines. The world had changed so drastically in recent years that his long-ago defection now seemed almost quaint. The East-West twain and European powers were getting ready to meet again in mid-July, he saw, at yet another symbolic site—Potsdam, where the Allies had assembled in ’45 to divide the defeated Germany. The ongoing wrangle over European realignment was expected to top the agenda, with everyone scrambling for a piece of the big new pie.

  He was skimming the tedious story when the breeze riffled several pages and his eye was caught by a by-line on an opinion piece. Charlotte Walsh was a Washington-based columnist specializing in foreign affairs. She was also an attractive lady whom he’d spotted several times on a correspondents’ roundup shown on CNN’s European feed. He’d paid special attention because his contacts told him she was presently sleeping with an old rival. Small-world department.

  She, too, was writring about Potsdam:

  WASHINGTON—In the aftermath of yesterday’s surprise announcement that Potsdam’s Cecilenhof Palace is going to be dusted off for the next round of multinational summitry, perhaps a few random observations and speculations may be indulged. One wonders, for instance, if the Soviet members of the selection committee somehow prevailed over their North American and Euoprean counterparts. For Soviet President Alois Rybkin is known to have a certain affinity to style and symbol, and he might have seen in Potsdam
the poosibllity of securing a kind of historic home-court advantage.

  It was, after all, a Russian leader—albeit a bloody and infamous one—who made the unlikely choice of the old Prussian capital for the post-World War II conference. And it was over the Cecilienhof’s red baize table that the Nazi Reich was subsequently carved up almost precisely along the dotted lines laid down by that leader, Josef Stalin.

  Approaching a half-century later, that postwar dismemberment has been pretty well sutured back together. But it will be an equally critical operation that brings the heads of state together over the table at Potsdam—no less than the redefining of Europe, and the Soviet place therein.

  Naturally, Rybkin, beleaguered at home and abroad, seeks immediate access to the emergent colossus, as he has made abundantly clear with his own series of somewhat amorphous Greater Europe initiatives. To be left out at this critical nexus of European history could well mean a political death sentence for the Soviet leader—and, more important, an economic one for his country.

  Yet, ironically compounding his personal dilemma, Rybkin may face political doom whatever the outcome at Potsdam. For Soviet participation in the expanding Europe would doubltess entail the relinquishing of a goodly mea-sure of national sovereignty—a price exacted with varying degrees of predictable political agony from all signers-on. But the hard-line factions of Mother Russia, having been dragged kicking and screaming so far down westward paths in recent years, seem to have dug in their collective heels very deeply over the issue of sovereignty, and Alois Rybkin well knows it.

  Indeed, it will be a very high-stakes game later this summer at Potsdam, and the canny Soviet leader will have three-hundred million kibitzers massed close behind him, second-guessing his every hand—

  “Un altro cappuccino, Signore?”

  “No, Tino, grazie.” He put some coins down, folded the paper and left the terrace. An ornamental but infirm iron staircase led steeply over an arcaded alleyway to his room, affording a brief view of pastel tiers of houses stacked skyward like stone and stucco cliff dwellings. Inside his room, across the tile floor and through the open green-shuttered window, was a grander vista—the shimmering blue surface of Lake Lugano with Cantine di Gandria on the shore opposite. But he was momentarily blind to the luminous beauty. More urgent thoughts were rising rapidly to mind, stimulated by the paragraphs he’d just read.

  If anything was going to force the old General finally to act against Rybkin, this Potsdam Conference—with its implied threat to Svoiet autonomy—might just be it.

  In that hopeful light, perhaps it was also time to end this southern sojourn and move north—a little nearer striking distance—to await that summons. He could stretch his muscles a bit, hone his reflexes, get reaccustomed to taking physical risks. Even if there was no drumbeat along the General’s old network, at least he’d be that much readier for free-lance action.

  He crossed the room and threw open a tall pine armoire. On the top shelf were three hats—a silver motorcycle helmet, the blue beret of the Soviet special forces, and a black felt cowboy hat.

  He reached for the cowboy hat, eased it down over his thatched blond hair. Then he turned slowly to the dresser-top mirror and grinned back at the still-youthful gunfighter.

  One

  For terrifying seconds the old soldier could not remember where he was bivouacked—against which army, on what front, in what war. He knew only he was under attack. Then the approaching brushfire crackle of small arms was oblit-erated by the close concussion of an exploding grenade, shattering the old man’s anesthetic dreams. With a startled cry, Colonel General Rodion Marchenko awoke to danger.

  He grabbed for his rifle, cracked his knuckles instead against the birch headboard of the old Swedish sleigh bed—a grand-father’s wedding present that had followed the Marchenkos on postings from Havana to southern Sakhalin. The colonel general was, therefore, not on bivouac, but ensconced in his own quarters... which were... he ransacked his brains... yes! in a pine and birch forest southwest of Novosibirsk—a training battalion cantonment in the heart of the Siberian Military District.

  But the firefight was no illusion. Outside, machine-guns stitched the night, and another grenade blast shook the ground and Marchenko’s cabin. The Chekist sons of bitches were coming for him at last, he concluded, and armed with more than an arrest warrant. The room was pitch black, the bedside digital clock off, the telephone dead against his ear. If power and phone lines were both cut, radio frequencies would be jammed as well. And where in hell was Junior Sergeant Prokhov, his indispensable aide-de-camp? Already dead? Or safely away, as would befit a stukach, KGB stooge, a role which Marchenko had more than once suspected the ambitious lad of playing.

  The old man’s bare feet hit the cold pine floor. He craved his spectacles but dared not take time to grope for them in the dark. He lurched ahead, tripped over his slippers, toppled an ivory Kwan Yin from her candlestand as he plowed into the adjoining office to his campaign desk. It took long, maddening seconds to locate the emergency power switch recessed in the kneehole, but—God be praised!—after a few fitful gulps the seldom-used generator kicked in, feeding juice to the brass desk lamp.

  The colonel general’s eyes swept once across the scarred mahogany surface, cluttered with the memorabilia of a long, illustrious career. He lingered a moment over two gilt-framed photographs—of the beloved wife now eleven years buried, and the gangly daughter posed in front of her dacha with only the paw of her plump sewing-machine-commissar husband visible after Marchenko’s careful scissor-cropping.

  Do svidanya, my darlings, he bid them silently as he reached out to the desk’s right corner and the meter-high replica of the Golub I. The rocket model, with its stylized dove insignia, was tethered to a thin launch rod and sheathed in a gleaming white silo tube. As Deputy Commander of Strategic Rocket Forces back in the early Seventies, Marchenko had championed the development of this prototype missile and its subsequent military deployment as the SS-9 Scarp.

  The colonel general unscrewed the protruding nose cone, where the SS-9’s twenty-five-megaton warhead would have been housed, and set it beside him. From the desk’s left double drawer he extracted a bottle of Stolichnaya, uncapped that as well, gulped the ninety-proof liquid fire. Gunfire continued to erupt as the old officer opened the middle drawer, withdrew a sheet of his stationery, a favorite Parker pen, and began outlining in Cyrillic script, now grown palsied, the essential points of his final operational order. He worked quickly against the crescendo of weaponry and a new and ominous sound—the grinding approach of battle vehicles.

  After the final slashes of his signature—R. I. Marchenko—the colonel general blotted hastily and folded the paper into a tight square, heedless of the smearing of any patches of still-wet ink.

  *

  Outside in the dark compound three BTR-70 armored personnel carriers converged on Marchenko’s pine-log residence, their 7.62-millimeter turret machine guns trained on his door. From each dark, slab-sided vehicle—through roof hatches and between-wheel hull doors—a stream of smaller shapes emerged against the moonless night to swiftly encircle the structure. These were KGB commandos in black body armor and nonreflective ballistic helmets with headset radios, a dozen from each APC, armed with AKR submachine guns, 9-millimeter pistols and grenades.

  The operation thus far had been as effortless as a practice run-through. The little camp had been stripped of regular army units during the previous weeks. The remaining “shadow battalion,” comprising only a few training officers and reservists, had yielded to the attackers with the predictable ease of a regimental whore. The BTR 8x8s had encountered no mobil patrols outside the perimeter, and a single concentrated fusillade took out both the undermanned guard posts.

  Only a small core of soldiers had fallen back toward their commander’s quarters, but these had fought the mechanized advance bravely, if quite futilely. They were cut down, one after another, by the BTR machine-gunners with the aid of their laser optics, or wer
e blown up, along with their hiding places, by 30-millimeter grenades from the BTR’s roof-mounted launchers. The bullet-riddled corpse of the last of these defenders now lay heaped across the single step to Marchenko’s cabin, forming a final pitiful barricade—until it was booted aside by Pavel Starkov, lieutenant colonel, KGB Second Directorate for Counterintelligence.

  Starkov paused a moment while a specialist sergeant placed explosive frame charges around the door. The faintly lighted window had surprised Starkov; there had been no mention in the briefing of any auxiliary power unit in the camp. Through the window only a bare anteroom was visible; Marchenko must be in the bedroom or office beyond. Perhaps the old Cossack was preparing a boobytrap—or his own suicide. In any case, the decision had come down from KGB chief Biryukov himself, or perhaps from even higher. Starkov was to take his men in without benefit of CS gas or stun grenades, and hold his fire. Biryukov wanted certain questions put to the old man before he was executed.

  Starkov started a count into his headset. On five, front and rear doors were blown apart. The lieutenant colonel led the charge through the anteroom and into the office beyond; seconds later the rear assault unit burst in, all half-dozen commandos instantly fanning out and targeting their short-barreled AKRs on the stoop-shouldered old man sitting behind the desk in his nightshirt.

  “Who the fuck are you guys supposed to be?” Marchenko addressed the encircling commandos as though he were conducting inspection. To Starkov’s considerable relief, the colonel general was unarmed—unless he was planning to chuck that half-empty bottle of vodka at them, or use his desktop rocket model as a bludgeon. Out of uniform, the old man looked frail, almost cadaverous, his sharp Ukrainian features shriveled, the papery skin jaundiced in the lamplight.

  Starkov stepped forward and raised his polycarb visor. “Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Starkov, Military Counterintelligence.”

  “SMERSH!” the old man spat. “What kept you? I’ve been expecting you vermin for months now.”