‘I know, Vassily. You really are wonderful to get them. Of course, after the Comrade Chairman’s message –’
‘Yes, people are beginning to recognize our contribution at last, after all this time …Well, we start eating at nine, and after that we’ll have the music and dancing.’
Sementsev was rather good at the tango and foxtrot: the latest dances in his circle in the USSR of the eighties. None of that rock and roll, of course: the Chairman didn’t like it. So far ‘The Birdie’ was not frowned upon. People flapped their arms on the dancefloor and clapped their hands as they hopped. But the Soviet Deputy Minister of Culture had just warned that Western music undermined youth.
‘Of course there will be speeches and toasts and some moving patriotic songs,’ the colonel told his wife. It was Sementsev’s forty-fourth birthday. Entertainment always helped to cement contacts, especially when people were away from home, serving the Motherland in distant countries.
‘The guests may leave by midnight: but you realize, don’t you, that these important occasions sometimes continue into the small hours?’
‘Oh, yes, I know: that’s just fine! But you won’t be late, Vassily? You’ll be sure to be here to receive the guests?’
‘Of course I shall be, my little pigeon. Home by about a quarter to nine. I have some very important interviews and so on: State affairs you know.’ He broke off. One mustn’t talk about official matters to one’s wife, or on the telephone.
‘Is the hot water system repaired yet, Natalia? It is? Good. And remember to have the servants put the red bunting up across the chandeliers. Well, I must go now, there are some important visitors to see …’
Sementsev put the instrument back in its cradle and shouted into the hall. ‘Boy! Bring tea. And make it Indian tea with lemon and a lot of sugar, not that horrible green Chinese stuff!’
There were dozens of files to study. Moscow believed in keeping people busy. He leafed through the papers: reports on foreign infiltrators. He knew that none had been caught, or even really suspected: but the Kremlin had announced that foreigners, CIA men, were helping the Afghans; it would be a feather in his cap if he could find even one. He put that file aside for urgent attention. Then there were all the forms to fill in about former Russians, émigrés, resident in Afghanistan, and about suspect Afghans, people who had been abroad or who hadn’t been seen lately. Give those to Prem Lal, that stupid Hindu in Afghan State Security, the preposterous fool who thought he should have the Order of the Red Banner just for working thirty years undercover for us in the police in Kabul …
The morning wore on. At midday, Sementsev called for his big Chaika and driver to take him out to the Intercontinental to lunch. Kabul was warm, but the cool breeze from the Paghman mountains made it very pleasant.
From two p.m. until the office closed at four-thirty, Sementsev did more office work, but mostly mused about the important prisoner he’d got in the bag. It was a woman, an Afganka who had been educated in Europe, an official of the Afghan Red Crescent, raising funds from charity sales and luncheons among the diplomatic wives, that kind of thing. Her name was Halima Iskandari, and she had been married to a former professor at Kabul University, who had disappeared. Almost all the academic staff, of course, were traitors: three months after the occupation, over eighty per cent of them had fled from the socialist regime.
This woman hadn’t fled. When her husband disappeared – into Pul-i-Charkhi Jail, in fact – she had organized demonstrations by the families of the suspects, at the gates. When she was arrested and added to the catch, she had talked. Not directly, but foolishly. She had confided to another woman, one of Sementsev’s prisoner-informers, that she had information that the Russians wanted more than anything else. She knew, she said, the exact location of The Eagle’s headquarters.
And now, Sementsev smiled confidently to himself, she would tell him. The informant had been very clever, in two ways. She had pretended to cry and had constantly wailed that if only The Eagle were there, he would help them: and she had had the sense not to say anything to the Afghan guards, even to the commandant of the prison. She had reported the news directly to Sementsev. Too many Afghans were turubchas, ‘radishes’ – red outside, but white, non-communist, inside.
One of the reasons The Eagle and his band had got away with so much, Sementsev was sure, was that even the senior members of the Afghan Security Services were traitors. Or, at least several of them must be. Well, this time the KGB’s equivalent in Afghanistan, the KHAD, would know nothing about it; not until The Eagle was caught, anyway.
Then, perhaps, Sementsev’s promotion would come through. He’d already been told by his mentor in Moscow that something might be done for him, if only there were some fact, some achievement, to back up a recommendation for a transfer to a more pleasant spot. ‘Frankly, Vassily Petrovich, though I have influence, there has to be something concrete to reward. I got you the posting to Kabul, remember, to enable you to distinguish yourself.’
Well, he’d provide something. The capture of The Eagle, the man that all Kabul looked upon as their hero.
He sat back in his chair. It was too soon to interview that Iskandari woman: they hadn’t finished softening her up. They could be very tough, those Afghan crones …
Yes, a posting to somewhere really comfortable, really pleasant. Paris? Rome? Washington? The head of the German Democratic Republic’s police mission in Kabul, now reorganizing the Afghan political police, had told him and Natalia wonderful tales of the life in the United States. He’d been there, operating under cover, undetected, for years.
A burst of wild, wailing music broke into his thoughts. Sementsev frowned. And he’d get away from all the physical danger that was getting worse in Kabul by the day. And from the incessant, hideous Indian film music, played day and night from the next-door building. There, the ‘Pakistan freedom movement’, the Zulfikar Organization had their offices. The Red Afghan government had given them sanctuary, when they stole a Pakistani aircraft. When the office closed, Sementsev had himself driven to a villa, formerly King Amanullah Khan’s, at Daral-Aman. It had been built, sixty years before, in Afghan-baroque style: a mixture of Saracenic and French-bourgeois. The general effect was of a wedding cake gone wrong.
This was the secret headquarters of his interrogation unit, the Special Information Service, the Khimama.
The house stood alone, in the middle of five acres of landscaped garden: one of those breathtakingly beautiful Afghan gardens which successive, astonished English travellers had admitted surpassed even those of their own homeland.
But, up the marble steps, beyond the Grecian pillars and inside the iron-studded olive-wood doors, the place was a prison. Much of the interior, the graceful reception rooms, the cool passages, the study and billiards room, had been removed. Inside the gutted shell there were now only barred cages, cells, interrogation rooms, and one or two offices for the administration. The staff were mainly Russian, with a few Afghan and Central Asian interpreters and guards.
He made his way to his comfortably furnished office, with its Daulatabad rugs, panelled walls and great Jacobean desk, and called for vodka: the Ukrainian kind, Gorilka, with plenty of red pepper, and some sunflower seeds. This was, after all, cocktail time in the West; and he was preparing himself for the gracious life over there.
His assistant, Kapitan Anatoli Smirnov, had the file ready.
‘Anatoli Grigorevich, how is the prisoner Halima Iskandari?’
The lanky, dark-haired youth shrugged, pushed out his lower lip, narrowed his eyes.
‘Not quite ready, Comrade Colonel.’
‘What treatment has she received?’
‘Chemical and “hot” physical treatment. It’s all in the report.’
Sementsev pursed his lips and flicked his eyes across the paper. Castor oil, sodium pentothal, the truth drug, beating with whips and rubber truncheons. He noted that the document was not signed. This was an internal reference paper. It would be destroyed as
soon as he was finished with it. Things like that didn’t go into the files.
‘All right, let’s go.’
He gulped his vodka and picked up a handful of sunflower seeds. Opposite the desk, on the far wall, was a padded door. The two men opened it and walked down three or four steps into the interrogation chamber.
It was not as well equipped as the Operations Room, the notorious torture chamber in the Afghan Interior Ministry’s basement, Sementsev reflected, or the Central Interrogation Office at the Prime Ministry, the Sedarat – but it produced far better results.
In the middle of the floor, shackled to an iron chair, sat a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, wearing what remained of an expensive jacket and skirt, in light tan cotton. She had a face that had been beautiful. Her black hair had been dyed: it was now growing out, showing white at the roots. She’d been stripped and beaten: stripes of blood showed through the fabric of her outfit, in front, on the thighs, across her back. Her eyes were red and bruised, and she was filthy dirty. She had a long nose and arched eyebrows, and she scowled at the two men as they entered.
The uniformed Soviet soldier, standing below the windows, saluted.
Two Russians, dressed in the standard Moscow heavy black suits of outmoded cut, stood up. They had been sitting on a padded wooden bench which was bolted to the floor.
The whole place was bathed in blinding white fluorescent light, from a dozen long tubes fixed to the ceiling, protected by armoured glass.
Sementsev sat down and spoke to her in Dari. He already knew that she did not, or would not, speak Russian.
‘Good evening, my lady. Are you ready to talk?’
She spat, though there was no saliva in her mouth. Sementsev smiled. He rather enjoyed this kind of thing: you might almost say, he reflected, that he had a taste for it. A little violence did a man good. A pity Natalia didn’t share his interests: but, even then, he did manage to knock her about a bit from time to time. And it was a good old Russian custom, wasn’t it? Every Russian worth the name would admit that.
‘Mrs Iskandari: we know that you know where the man called “The Eagle” is to be found. You are going to tell us, and then we shall frame the charges for your trial. What you say now will determine whether you get a light or a heavy sentence.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about! I have told your men that I did not say anything to that woman in the prison! She’s imagining it, or she’s insane!’
Her voice was a croak, and she felt unutterably weak.
Sementsev sighed, apparently with annoyance, in fact with pleasure. What a pleasant little apéritif to his evening’s entertainment.
‘What you do not realize, Halima dear, is that people always talk, always confess. You have read, and heard, no doubt, that “so-and-so was tortured, but would say nothing”. We who are actually involved in such things know that this is simply not true. There comes a point, if the police officer knows his job, when the suspect must talk. The mind and body, or one or the other, simply demand it. Oh yes, it makes a good film, makes a good tale, this “and he did not speak”. The only circumstances in which people don’t talk is when something has been bungled, or where the operator has lost interest.’
This was a long speech for him, but he had used it dozens of times, and liked it. Besides, in his experience it was true. The only truth he had not told her was that some people who tried to hold out went raving mad.
‘Bring the Scorpion.’ He hardly turned in the direction of the Mongolian-faced jailer, one of the two in civilian clothes, as he gave the order.
Two lengths of electric cord were clipped to the metal chair. They led to a box with a glowing dial.
At a signal, one of the men switched it on. The woman jerked in convulsions. By the eighth shock she was screaming, as the amperage was decreased and increased, to prevent her getting used to it.
They threw a bucketfull of cold water and carbolic disinfectant over her. When they stopped, all she wanted was a cigarette. But she couldn’t have stood much more, and the Russians knew it.
Sementsev smiled again. No point in making it too easy. Besides, he still had one or two other little tricks to use. He stood up and took his assistant back to his room for a few more vodkas: Wyborowa, from Poland, this time, his favourite.
The two guards had taken the Scorpion machine out, leaving the soldier to watch Halima. He sat quietly, looking at her. Grasping at straws, she thought that she might, even at this stage, manage to outwit the Russian beast. If she did not, she feared that she would talk. If not now, then under more drugs, and if not that, they would have something else.
He looked like a Turkestani. Perhaps there was a chance.
She spoke to him in colloquial Dari. ‘Are you a Moslem?’
He lifted his big, close-shaven head and turned red-rimmed eyes towards her. It was forbidden to talk to prisoners, but he usually took risks when he felt like it.
‘I am an Uzbek.’
There wasn’t much time. She knew he had a Caucasian dagger, very sharp, in his boot. She’d seen it during the last beating. ‘For God’s sake, brother, kill me, now!’ She couldn’t talk if she were dead.
‘Why, lady?’ He was not surprised, only curious.
‘What does it matter?’
He said nothing.
‘My relatives will give you a hundred gold pieces.’
The Uzbek was looking interested. They’d certainly flog him, but he could say that she’d looked like breaking loose, or something. He’d get his gold. It was a wild hope but it looked as if he might really do it. He was certainly not too squeamish.
But when the Uzbek stood up, as if to walk towards her, Sementsev and the lanky Smirnov came back into the room.
When they had shut the door, the Uzbek saluted again. Well, that was that. The last hope gone.
Sementsev snapped his fingers. ‘Now, madame, we shall continue. Will you speak?’
She shook her head. ‘Burn in Hell!’
He laughed. This was going to be good. ‘Bring the man in.’
The man must have been in the corridor just outside. Within a few seconds he was hurled into the room, fell sprawling onto the floor and was dragged across to lie between Sementsev and his victim.
‘Farid!’ She had thought her son was safe, among the guerrillas somewhere, after he had been reported missing, three months before. Now he lay there, a once-massive twenty-five-year-old reduced to a bundle of rags, caked with blood, one arm broken, one eye missing, moaning and half-dead. Her baby, Farid, a captain in the Guards, champion marksman, best athlete in his regiment, father of her grandchildren. This rag doll.
‘Water.’ At Sementsev’s command the Uzbek splashed the captain back to consciousness.
He sat up, saw his mother, and tried to reach out to her.
Sementsev rubbed his hands together. This was better than the theatre.
‘He doesn’t know anything, I promise you!’ The woman shouted in her agony, her eyes were beseeching Sementsev to show some mercy, praying that something might save her son.
‘Now,’ said the Russian, ‘I shall have this traitor’s throat cut in front of you if you don’t talk. It took a great deal of trouble, and much of our blood, before we caught him. He should die anyway, for his treachery to socialism, to his country and to his soldier’s oath.’
He looked at her with an obscene sneer, the excitement rising inside him.
‘Unless, that is, you care to tell us where The Eagle is. In that case, his trial will result in, shall we say, only about twelve years’ rigorous imprisonment. And that is light. The Russians we retrieve from the terrorists – they die.’
‘Can I speak to him?’
‘Say anything.’ He made a mock-courtly gesture.
‘Farid Jan, can you hear me?’
‘Yes, Mother.’ He tried to smile, but his contorted face would not obey. It looked terrible. Before he was handed over to the Russians, Guards Captain Farid had been tortured by the Afghan KHAD–i-niza
mi.
‘Farid, you are an Afghan soldier. Be ready for death.’
It looked more like a smile now. He mumbled, ‘I am ready. I entrust you to God.’
Halima Iskandari bared her teeth. ‘Russian, lower than a monkey! You are not human beings! If you wish to do so, kill this man. Because he is a man, he is ready!’
Sementsev was slightly sensitive to the criticism that he lacked human attributes. Indeed, as with many Russians, it was the pointing out of the obvious which annoyed him. Uncultivated Russians, for example, as Halima knew, usually became enraged at being called uncultured. Halima reflected that this, in many cases, was like being angry if you said that someone had a nose on his face. Sementsev lost his temper. He’d show her. This should break her.
‘Cut his throat.’ The soldier took out a very large spring-knife, snapped it open, and slashed at the young man’s jugular, as Farid murmured the last words of the phrase ‘Verily we are from Him, and to Him we shall return.’
The blood gushed onto the floor. Within four or five minutes, the body had been removed, and the place neatly scrubbed by two shivering prisoners with buckets and brushes. The smell of carbolic again filled the room.
Sementsev recovered his temper when he saw the mother shuddering uncontrollably at what she had seen. He looked at his watch. Plenty of time for the next scene.
He gave an order. A small table and a fresh bottle of vodka, with a small glass and salted nuts and raisins, kishmish, was put before him.
The woman was moaning like an imbecile, but Sementsev was glad to note that she had not entirely taken leave of her senses. The next item on the programme would undoubtedly provide a fitting and successful climax.
She did not look up when the door clanged and another battered figure was thrown at her feet.
Sementsev waited. Women were always curious. All it needed was to arouse their curiosity a little.
‘Mrs Iskandari, who do you think we have here? I wonder if you can guess?’
Sure enough, she looked: slowly at first, then with a jerk of the head. It was her daughter, beautiful Roshana, brilliant artist, a noisy but fascinating girl, with her mother’s looks and her father’s personality, people said. Eighteen years old.