Andriy learned Ukrainian at his father’s knee, and that was not all. He learned, too, of his father’s land, of the great, sweeping vistas of the Carpathians and Ruthenia. He imbibed his father’s loathing of Russians. But the father died in an automobile crash when the boy was twelve; his mother, tired of her husband’s endless evenings with fellow exiles around the sitting-room fire, talking of the past in a language she could never understand, Anglicized both their names to Drake, and Andriy’s given name to Andrew. It was as Andrew Drake that the boy went to grammar school and the university; as Andrew Drake that he received his first passport.
The rebirth came in his late teens at the university. There were other Ukrainians there, and he became fluent again in his father’s language. These were the late sixties, and the brief renaissance of Ukrainian literature and poetry back in the Ukraine had come and gone, its leading lights mostly by then doing slave labor in the camps of Gulag. So he absorbed these events with hindsight and knowledge of what had befallen the writers. He read everything he could get his hands on as the first years of the seventh decade dawned: the classics of Taras Shevchenko and those who wrote in the brief flowering under Lenin, suppressed and liquidated under Stalin. But most of all he read the works of those called “the Sixtiers” because they flourished for a brief few years until Brezhnev struck yet again to stamp out the national pride they called for. He read and grieved for Osdachy, Chornovil, and Dzyuba; and when he read the poems and secret diary of Pavel Symonenko, the young firebrand dead of cancer at twenty-eight, the cult figure of the Ukrainian students inside the USSR, his heart broke for a land he had never even seen.
With his love for this land of his dead father came a matching loathing of those he saw as its persecutors. Avidly he devoured the underground pamphlets that came out, smuggled from the resistance movement inside; he read the Ukrainian Herald, with its accounts of what befell the hundreds of unknowns, the miserable, forgotten ones who did not receive the publicity accorded to the great Moscow trials of Daniel, Sinyavsky, Orlov, Shcharansky. With each detail, his hatred grew until for Andrew Drake, once Andriy Drach, the personification of all evil in the world was called simply the KGB.
He had enough sense of reality to eschew the crude, raw nationalism of the older exiles, and their divisions between West and East Ukrainians. He rejected, too, their implanted anti-Semitism, preferring to accept the works of Gluzman, both a Zionist and a Ukrainian nationalist, as the words of a fellow Ukrainian. He analyzed the exile community in Britain and Europe and perceived there were four levels: the language nationalists, for whom simply speaking and writing in the tongue of their fathers was enough; the debating nationalists, who would talk forever and a day but do nothing; the slogan daubers, who irritated their adoptive countrymen but left the Soviet Behemoth untouched; and the activists, who demonstrated before visiting Moscow dignitaries, were carefully photographed and filed by the Special Branch, and achieved a passing publicity.
Drake rejected them all. He remained quiet, well-behaved, and aloof. He came south to London and took a clerking job. There are many in such work who have one secret passion, unknown to all their colleagues, that absorbs all their savings, their spare time, and their annual holidays. Drake was such a man. He quietly put together a small group of men who felt just as he did; traced them, met them, befriended them, swore a common oath with them, and bade them be patient For Andriy Drach had a secret dream, and, as T. E. Lawrence said, he was dangerous because “he dreamed with his eyes open.” His dream was that one day he would strike one single gigantic blow against the men of Moscow that would shake them as they had never been shaken before. He would penetrate the walls of their power and hurt them right inside the fortress.
His dream was alive and one step nearer fulfillment for the finding of Kaminsky, and he was a determined and excited man as his plane slipped once more out of a warm blue sky toward Trabzon.
Miroslav Kaminsky looked across at Drake with indecision on his face.
“I don’t know, Andriy,” he said. “I just don’t know. Despite everything you have done, I just don’t know if I can trust you that much. I’m sorry, it’s the way I’ve had to live all my life.”
“Miroslav, you could know me for the next twenty years and not know more about me than you do already. Everything I’ve told you about me is the truth. If you cannot go back, then let me go in your place. But I must have contacts there. If you know of anybody, anybody at all ...”
Kaminsky finally agreed.
“There are two men,” he said at last. “They were not blown when my group was destroyed, and no one knew of them. I had met them only a few months earlier.”
“But they are Ukrainians, and partisans?” asked Drake eagerly.
“Yes, they are Ukrainians. But that is not their primary motivation. Their people, too, have suffered. Their fathers, like mine, have been for ten years in the labor camps, but for a different reason. They are Jews.”
“But do they hate Moscow?” asked Drake. “Do they, too, want to strike against the Kremlin?”
“Yes, they hate Moscow,” replied Kaminsky. “As much as you or I. Their inspiration seems to be a thing called the Jewish Defense League. They heard about it on the radio. It seems their philosophy, like ours, is to begin to strike back, not to take any more persecution lying down.”
“Then let me make contact with them,” urged Drake.
The following morning, Drake flew back to London with the names and addresses in Lvov of the two young Jewish partisans. Within two weeks he had subscribed to a package tour run by Intourist for early July, visiting Kiev, Ternopol, and Lvov. He also quit his job and withdrew his life savings in cash.
Unnoticed by anyone, Andrew Drake, born Andriy Drach, was going to his private war—against the Kremlin.
A GENTLY WARMING SUN shone down on Washington that middle of May, bringing the first shirt sleeves to the streets and the first rich red roses to the garden outside the French windows of the Oval Office in the White House. But though the windows were open and the fresh smells of grass and flowers wafted into the private sanctum of the most powerful official in the world, the attention of the four men present was focused upon other plants in a far and foreign country.
President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat—his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his predecessors, who had favored personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate executive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well.
But there Bill Matthews drew the line. When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-dog grin that had originally gulled the voters into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next-door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top.
Seated in upright armchairs across the desk from the President were the three men who had asked to see him alone that morning. Closest to him in personal terms was his Assistant for National Security Affairs. Variously referred to in the environs of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building as “the Doctor” or “that damned Polack,” the sharp-faced Stanislaw Poklewski was sometimes disliked but never underestimated.