Kara Kush

  Peshawar City was teeming with refugees, expatriates, sympathizers of the rebel cause: Samir felt safe there, among his own. He was, however, very much alone, unable to confide in anyone. And he had weeks to wait until Jamal’s coming. It would be necessary to sell some of his gold coins to pay his way.

  Thus it was that after a week of walking through the bazaars and finding himself down to his last few rupees, Samir approached a goldsmith with two of his mohurs: two-thirds of an ounce of fine gold.

  The man tested it with acid, weighed it and offered the Afghan the gold price of $2000. Obviously one should not accept the first bid, Samir thought; he would see what others might give. Apart from some derisory offers of a few rupees, made by people deceived through greed into hoping that this untidy figure might be completely stupid, the price seemed fairly standard. There was one exception. A man in an antiques shop took one look at the coins, then two looks at Samir, and placed sixty thousand rupees, worth three thousand dollars, on his counter.

  Samir accepted at once, and – innocently – became quite attracted to the genial antiquary, with whom he soon found much in common. To be fair to Engineer Akbar’s servant the goldsmith, Rind by name, was a highly skilled operative. Anyone who had two gold mohurs of the Delhi minting of 1677, he guessed, might well have more of them. Everyone in Peshawar – like almost everyone in the rest of the subcontinent – dreamt of finding treasure: and not without reason, hoards were always turning up.

  Rind was not only a Soviet agent: he made a great deal of money buying antiques from the ignorant. The strategy with gold coins was practised and effective. If someone found coins, he would take them from one goldsmith to another to have their value assessed. Then he would return to the highest bidder and sell at least some of them: probably not too many, to avoid suspicion. Rind’s practice was to make sure that he offered the highest price, to ensure the man’s return. When he came back, he could be tracked to his home. More often than not, the gold was there, buried in the earth floor. A knife in the night, and the gold was Rind’s, for nothing. The system had produced many successes and no unfortunate consequences. People who found buried treasure almost always did two things: they moved it to their own houses, and they kept their mouths shut. For the police, therefore, the murder would always appear to be some kind of revenge killing, and the file would be closed for lack of information.

  Rind, who had developed almost a sixth sense for a really good haul, today invited his customer to the Café of the Green Roof for tea and talk. Although wary, Rind thought, Samir was undoubtedly lonely; and loneliness was the mark of a man with a secret in a town where it was never difficult to make friends, and very easy indeed if you had money to spend.

  Samir, though, was careful. The various men sent by Rind to follow him home reported after three of his visits that he had given them the slip in the maze of alleyways of the old town. Samir had not yet offered Rind any more gold, but he was clearly a man with something on his mind, so the spy decided to cultivate him.

  Samir was quite flattered by the attentions of his affluent friend, and by his suggestion that they might work together, dealing in antiques. Rind was not impressed by a couple of mohurs and besides, he had shown himself to be a fervent anti-communist.

  They had many things in common. Samir had spent three years in Narabia with Sirdar Akbar, and Rind spoke Arabic too. He had learned it in Moscow, but he did not mention that to Samir. He spoke with a Gulf accent, which was an added bond.

  Rind was biding his time, certain that Samir would invite him to his place of residence one day soon, when the Afghan suddenly forestalled him. It was their mutual knowledge of Arabic which had given him the idea, and the words, prompted by the burden of his responsibility, came tumbling out.

  ‘Mr Rind, you might care to help me with something I am working on. I am afraid that I might fall ill, or have difficulty in carrying it out. It would be wise to have a friend, so important is this matter.’

  ‘My dear friend,’ the spy showed his delight with a great smile which Samir took for friendliness, ‘I will help you in any way you wish, ba sar o chashm – on my head and eyes.’

  Whether it was from fear of illness, or the narcotic charas, hemp resin, which the Red agent had put in his water-pipe, Samir told the whole story to his new friend: and signed his own death warrant.

  The following day Samir was dead, stabbed through the heart in Rind’s garage, his body buried in a disused graveyard.

  Before he got rid of Samir, Rind had a complete picture of the situation; he knew all about the find of the treasure, and about the target, Prince Jamal. It would be easy to impersonate Samir in the negotiations with the Arab. He even knew about the Swiss bank arrangement: and a letter from Akbar on Samir’s body gave the code-word: ‘Goldenbird’, with which money would be accepted or given out by the bank without any questions. Any guerrilla organization, or KGB man, could draw, when the deal was struck, up to four billion dollars.

  Rind would report to Moscow Centre. They would, he was sure, allow the treasure to go to Narabia, since King Zaid would be buying it with his own and other oil states’ funds. The USSR would then be heir to the accumulated riches of the Gulf – without having to fire a shot, suborn a leader, or even organize a political party.

  It was testimony to the power of Soviet secret police training that Rind dismissed, almost instantly, the temptation to usurp the whole four billion and make it his own. The Russians, as they always boasted, looked after their own; and Rind’s chief – the man in Moscow whom they called The Snail – would reward him well. After all, it was the coup of the century: perhaps the greatest coup of all time. Besides, he reflected, the KGB left no operative in doubt as to what happened to traitors.

  That same night, the message – a report in detail and his own suggestions for action – went out through the automatic encoder of Rind’s special radio hidden in the dusty antiques shop in Peshawar. The radio’s dish antenna was directed towards the geostationary satellite of the Soviet intersputnik network twenty-two thousand miles above. This relayed west Asian KGB reports to Moscow, transmitting in ultra-short bursts, and operating on randomly changing frequencies. The high-security transmission equipment was a triumph of electronics engineering, next to impossible to locate. The transmissions were so short that nobody would pick them up, the Russians were sure of that. After all, their new Molniy, ‘lightning’, system was an adaptation of the Motorola rig made for the CIA in Scottsdale, Arizona, acquired by the KGB from American infiltration agents captured in Eastern Bloc territory.

  BOOK 3

  Halzun, the Snail

  ‘My spirit will stay in Afghanistan though my soul will go to God. My last words to you, O my son and successor, are: never trust the Russians.’

  King Abdur-Rahman Khan of Afghanistan

  1 Nurhan Aliyev, Uzbek Librarian

  Tashkent

  Uzbek SSR

  Soviet Central Asia

  MAY 24

  Just before midnight, Rind’s message reached the high-frequency section of the Communications Special Service Directorate on the fourth floor of the Committee for State Security’s building at No 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow.

  The duty cypher officer’s eyes widened as he looked at the prefix for the second time: classification ‘Total’, the highest rating there was. Such a signal must be communicated only to the big man himself, to Halzun, The Snail. And instantly. One ‘Total’ a year was the average.

  The officer lifted a red handset and alerted Highest Circles Liaison: Halzun’s number was restricted. Moments later the telephone rang in Halzun’s luxurious apartment half a mile away. The Snail listened, then hung up without comment. He stood for a moment, staring straight ahead. Halzun had intuition: a sixth sense born of a lifetime in intelligence. He rang for his car – a gleaming, black-and-silver ZIL Model 4104 monster with a twelve-foot, eight inches wheelbase, the ultimate in Soviet status symbols – and five minutes later was in his own office on the firs
t floor of the KGB headquarters.

  The red light went on, above his outer door. Little short of a nuclear war would justify intrusion while that light was on.

  At 4.00 a.m. Halzun was still at his desk. He had underlined two lines in Rind’s decoded message: ‘Request permission to negotiate sale of coins, impersonating representative of Sirdar Akbar.’ Beside the single sheet containing the message were three thin files, each with a bright red stripe and a multi-digit Communist Party membership number on the cover.

  Over and over he turned the dossiers around in his hands, reading and rereading their contents, seeking inspiration to match the information content; assessing and reassessing his agents’ suitability for the task.

  Finally, he made his decision, rose, and put the files away carefully in a small filing cabinet. After locking it he attached his personal seal to the drawer, switched off the red light and rang for his secretary.

  Night shift secretaries were men, and Halzun studied the expression on the ascetic face of the tall young Ukranian who stood impassively before him. The signal which had brought The Snail into the building in the middle of the night was, he could see, already a matter of office speculation.

  ‘Take a letter, Comrade Sivilskiy,’ said Halzun. He dictated briefly. ‘Send that to Tashkent, immediately, by air courier. And wait a moment.’

  Swiftly he encoded an answer to Rind, in Peshawar: ‘Project authorized up to final negotiations with Arab king. But physical delivery of consignment subject to modification as we have a superior plan and am sending representative with full powers to organize transportation phase. HALZUN.’

  It was now 5.00 a.m. Halzun sat for a further hour at his desk, thinking about ancient artefacts, about metallurgy, about Ekranoplans: the new Surface Skimmers, which could transport enormous loads for great distances, the Navy’s ‘war-winners’.

  He would get in touch with the people connected with these things later in the day. His modification of Rind’s plan was, he knew, a masterpiece.

  Two days later Nurhan Nureivich Aliyev, Librarian and Chief Museum Curator, sat at his desk in the mock-oriental building of the Academy of Sciences, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Tashkent. The title had a fine ring about it, Nurhan had thought, when he was appointed seven years ago: in recognition of all his work in the art of ancient calligraphy. ‘A true artist, unsullied by religious superstition’, the news item in Pravda Vostoka had called him at the time. Most of those who cared about the old arts – poetry, ceramics, manuscripts and miniatures – had died: after all the Revolution was sixty years ago. Or else they had been polluted by the degenerate values of the oligarchs overthrown by Marxism-Leninism. Now there was a new Uzbekistan, the most progressive of the Central Asian Republics. There was a museum in Samarkand, showing how miserable people’s lives had been in the old days. Nurhan was thirty-six, strongly-built and almond-eyed, and intelligent. Yes, he’d made something of himself under socialism. His father had been a camel-driver. Under the old regime Nurhan, too, would have been a camel-driver.

  It hadn’t all been easy, though. A librarian and curator of the museum had to be a man of the pen and of the book, and a man of the desk. During the first two or three of those seven years, Nurhan had resented the constant ideological training, the military service – and the unarmed combat, the constant testing of those abilities which the Party had decided he possessed and should develop further.

  Ultimately, of course, he had come to understand the pattern and had fitted very comfortably into it. First, the KGB sought and found people with talent, young ones. Then they assessed them for other capacities. The latent abilities were brought out, developed, and eventually the many-sided Soviet Man began to appear. They had discovered that he had one unusual and unsuspected skill – that of killing – and when this had been perfected, he had understood the real meaning of achievement, as explained by the Party. ‘Once you can do something supremely well, and you can place that at the service of the Great Cause, you will ache to express yourself in the correct way, the Soviet Way of the Party, the People, and World Socialism.’ How true the words of the ideologists had been. He could feel the truth of it, enveloping him like a warm cloak on a cold night. The KGB did not waste people: it taught them, trained them, kept their details on file, or sleeping on a computer disk, but ready nonetheless.

  And just a few kilometres to the south lay feudal Afghanistan, where some deluded people simply did not understand socialist reality. Until a few years ago the place had actually been a monarchy! Now it was under a socialist government, but only Soviet expertise could tap the real potential of the people, help them modernize and form the link to the Far East; to Pakistan and India, beyond which lay the oil of Arabia and the Gulf. It should not be too hard for the fraternal helpers from the USSR who were now in the country. After all, the Afghan lingua franca, Dari, was almost exactly the same language as they spoke on the other side of the Oxus River. And Pravda Vostoka had explained, in long articles, how most Afghans were welcoming their liberation and exulting in their freedom.

  Today, however, on his desk was a long white envelope, the top left hand corner emblazoned with the emblem of the Soviet Union. He read the words on it, neatly typed in capitals: COMRADE LIBRARIAN NURHAN ALIYEV. URGENT. IMMEDIATE. Below that, in smaller letters, he saw the magic words: ‘Central Committee of the Communist Party, Uzbekskaya Sovyetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika.’

  It had come. The summons to the office of Comrade Gamidov, the First Secretary.

  Nurhan walked across the road, deserted except for the donkeys and buses, each moving as lazily as the other in the summer heat. He climbed the steps of the massive multi-storey building whose architecture he rather liked, although it had been described by a visiting western scholar as being of the ‘Brutalist School’. He showed his red-covered, official propusk, internal passport, to the sentry at the door. The man saluted and directed him to the porter’s window.

  ‘Comrade Aliyev? You are expected. First floor, Room 191.’

  Aliyev patted the white dust from his trouser-legs and straightened his tie. In the outer office a pretty secretary in a black dress with a large white collar, properly dressed for administrative work, led him to a large cool room, with a fan whirling in the centre of the ceiling. The First Secretary, a tall man with slant eyes, rose from behind his desk.

  ‘Nurhan! How nice to see you, Comrade. We haven’t met since cousin Halide Akhmetova’s wedding! What a day that was!’ He fished in a box and brought out a huge Upmann Havana cigar. The girl appeared with a silver tray. On it was a bottle of dry shampanskoya, the very best, and two glasses.

  ‘Prince Goltisyn established this brand before the Revolution, on his estates in the Crimea,’ said Luty Gamidov; ‘and the USSR will soon be the largest champagne maker in the whole world.’

  ‘It is an honour to be here, Comrade Gamidov.’ Aliyev was, it was true, a distant relative of the First Secretary, but he hardly thought that he merited this kind of reception.

  ‘Socialist, Cuban cigars are the best in the world, like our Sovyetskaya eekra, or what foreigners, for some reason, call caviare,’ Gamidov went on. ‘Soon there will be nothing, even in the West, which we don’t have in a better form than anyone else in the world.’

  ‘Yes, Comrade First Secretary.’

  ‘Oh, call me Luty, Nurhan – anyway in private. And don’t feel too overwhelmed. I have news for you now, good news: but I am also happy that today I have heard that I am, finally, a Candidate-Member of the Politburo.’ He raised his glass.

  ‘Comrade Luty, warmest congratulations to you for a well-deserved promotion and to your continued good health and long life.’

  ‘And to you, with thanks, and to the tireless Toilers of the East.’

  They drank, and the secretary brought in another chilled bottle. They must have a huge refrigerator here, Nurhan thought. His own, which he considered quite a prize, was tiny. And always breaking down. ‘This comes from the Highest Quarters,’
said Gamidov. He held out an envelope, large and grey, with a number stamped on it: Z/22/133S Moscow Centre.

  Nurhan took it. The flaps were sealed with red wax. The symbol was not the usual hammer-and-sickle. It looked like a halzun, a snail. The Russians, of course, had no letter ‘h’, unlike the Central Asians, and would call it ‘galzun’. Which was why Hamidov, there at the desk, was Gamidov to the ethnic Russians: much as the Nazi monster had to be Adolf Gitler, or Khitler.

  And Halzun was the code-name (was it his real name?) of the man at the Foundation for Traditional Arts, near Moscow, for whose message he had been told to wait. Aliyev was a ‘home sleeper’. Ordinary sleepers were people sent abroad under deep cover until they were activated at a prearranged command. Nurhan, as a home sleeper, carried on a useful ordinary job in the USSR while he awaited his summons to special duty.

  ‘Ardent revolutionary greetings,’ said the First Secretary, and stood up once more to show that the meeting was at an end. He knew that Aliyev was aching to read his instructions.

  The envelope did not give him much information. It contained an Aeroflot one-way ticket to Moscow and a telephone number. The enclosed note, typed on an old-fashioned, manual Cyrillic machine, said only, ‘Telephone Halzun on arrival’. Moscow 221-0762 is the number of the central switchboard of the KGB, manned around the clock.

  Nurhan Aliyev was on his way.

  The big Ilyushin IL-62 jet from Tashkent to Moscow that Thursday morning was crowded with Uzbeks hugging baskets of fruit, bundles of rugs, embroidered hats, slippers and watermelons. One, who called himself Buyuk Shikarchi, The Great Hunter, even had a miniature deer with him. All these things were being taken by the Uzbeks to be sold by their compatriots in the Union capital’s free-market stalls. It was not easy to get a permit to live permanently in Moscow, but some of them, perhaps as many as three thousand, had done it. Each one had relatives left behind in Central Asia. There was no barrier to a brief visit to Moscow – one could stay there for up to three days without a permit – and it was safer, much safer, to carry the merchandise oneself from the Uzbek family plot than to entrust it to the State Railways. People travelling by train, or those working on one, had plenty of time on the five-day journey to rifle its cargo. The newspapers even carried reports of whole trains disappearing into thin air.