Major, KGB. Overweight.
Has a predilection for hashish cigarettes, which accounted for his discoloured
teeth. Small, cold dark eyes pierce subordinates. Approaching retirement.
***
Thick pillows flounced on either side of him, Kasayiev sat up in bed and jabbed at the dozen or so pickles surrounding the Russian crabmeat and mayonnaise. ‘Damned pickles with everything!’ He swore, eyes heavy with lack of sleep.
Though he was still verging on
irritability, the breakfast went down well, washed all the way with jet-black
Turkish coffee. His teeth crunched the tiny cool pickles. He ate them only
because the doctor said they helped break down body fats. He preferred Spanish
onions, though. He belched and realised that he’d come a long way since those
far-off days in Spain.
He remembered the day well, 16th
September, 1936. As a recruit of six months’ experience, he had arrived in
Spain at the age of sixteen together with fifty other pilots. To fight for the
Republicans.
A lump still rose in his throat as
he recalled first seeing his own I-15 Ilyushin standing on the airfield: the
Spanish dubbed the I-15s Chato,
snub-nose – yet he had thought it the most beautiful creation on earth – and
all his!
His fellow-pilots had difficulty
curbing his youthful exuberance. He dearly wanted to slaughter the
Nationalists, to blast their Fiats, Heinkels and Junkers.
But training-classes demanded his
time and attention. Recognition classes; strategy; and, laughably, he was
expected to teach Spaniards to fly as well. Him, with only a hundred hours
under his belt.
Then came his first kill. His
heartbeat quickened at the memory. He had been dawdling negligently when he
spotted a squadron of nine Fiats above him, appearing from behind a bank of
cloud. The dryness of mouth and rapid pulse-rate came back to him as if the
events had only happened yesterday. He had slammed the throttle wide open and
climbed to meet the enemy, the exhilaration of surprise attack quashing any
fears he harboured. He didn’t have time to be afraid.
Yanking the stick hard over, he
kicked on the rudder-bar and was abruptly swinging in behind the formation as
it slid past. A Fiat drifted into his sights and he fired, wide eyes peering
with a mesmerised glaze through his goggles as the bullets flashed and sparkled
on the enemy’s wings. Then tracer lanced past his cockpit and he knew fear;
pure survival-instinct hauled back on the stick, and the craft frantically bounced
higher. He glanced back. The Fiat was nosing earthwards, blazing furiously, and
his heart soared. He never did recall landing.
That kill had been his introduction
to the slaughter of battle. It seemed so clinical, far removed from the
hand-to-hand fighting on the ground.
By the time the Italians attacked
Madrid in March 1937 he was a hardened veteran of the skies. Together with his
compatriots, he systematically cut the Italians to ribbons, strafing endlessly
as the poorly led rabble became bogged down in the mud left by recent rain. It
was sickening to begin with, but after the ninth or tenth run in, it became
automatic, merely capricious target practice. The Barcelona highway was
littered with burning transport and hundreds of corpses, creating their own
bottleneck, enabling the Chatos to deliver their death-blows at will. Carnage
was too mild a description of their efforts.
Blood-lust figured in Kasayiev’s
life from that moment. He reveled in inflicting pain on his women in Madrid and
particularly relished the death of an enemy especially if he could see the poor
pilot futilely beating off the flames as his plane plummeted.
Much of the credit for the Italians’
rout was attributed to Commander Berzin, head of the Intelligence Directorate
of the Soviet General Staff and codenamed ‘Goriev’ whilst in Spain. Berzin
became Kasayiev’s hero.
So late in 1937 he was shattered
when he learned that Berzin had been recalled to Moscow under a cloud. Berzin
faced charges of being a Trotskyite; the tribunal found him guilty and he was
shot, as were so many high-ranking officers in Stalin’s senseless purges.
With the memory of Berzin’s
execution constantly in his mind, Kasayiev determined to keep his nose clean
and actually distinguished himself. Throughout the years of 1937-38 the great
purges kept most officers in thrall; many were grossly unhappy at the prospect
when the Soviet hierarchy decided to recall them on realizing that the
Republicans’ cause was lost.
But Kasayiev was not among those
singled-out for purging. Instead, he found himself halfway around the world at
Langchow, embroiled in the Soviet-Japanese conflict, flying his I-15 amidst the
twisting mêlée of a hundred aircraft. He acquitted himself in countless
sporadic duels with the Mitsubishi ASMs. But he soon discovered that his
beloved I-15 was quite inferior to the Japs’ Nakajima Ki27s: he was shot down
but survived with only minor wounds.
It was while recuperating that he
allied himself with a sallow character in the Intelligence Section, Lieutenant-Colonel
Lobanov.
He then remembered his hero, Berzin,
and guessed correctly where the real power lay. Not in a soldier’s hands, nor
an airman’s, nor a sailor’s. But in the Secret Service.
On his return to active duty he
repeatedly requested a transfer to Intelligence and finally, in 1942, he was
successful and joined the NKVD in time to fight the Nazi menace.
He had committed some vile things in
his time, mainly to satisfy his gross appetite for blood. But nothing he had
perpetrated could match the vileness of those Nazi pigs.
Kasayiev’s fingers trembled at the
memory of the concentration camps he had personally seen. And he lit a hashish
cigarette to calm himself.
As the hemp coursed through him and
did its work, he cursed his susceptibility.
Every time he reminisced on his
career, he came round to his numerous encounters with the Gestapo. He should
know better by now.
Whenever he came across an ex-SS man
– usually working in another Security Department, such as the First Chief
Directorate or Department V – he couldn’t refrain from revealing his naked
hatred.
***
On November 26, The Prague Papers are released, published by Crooked Cat. It is
based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some
knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of
agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose
career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.
Certain information was divulged in order
for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the
third secret file to be released ahead of the book. Others will follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment