2
They drove almost two hundred kilometres north-east of Moscow, to the village of Orlyoni, in the darkness of Sunday morning. Turning off the main road here, passing a police check-point, they travelled another ten kilometres due east along what had once been little more than a winding cart track but now was a narrow paved road, with huge banks of frozen snow pushed into both ditches by ploughs. The country here was heavily wooded, undulating, without habitation. The trees were fir, cut fifty yards back from either side of the road, but from then on rising steeply and thickly in long avenues over the many small hills that dotted the area. It was part of a huge forestry development covering thousands of acres of what had once been a great estate before the revolution. Now it had been sealed off and, with the lodge at its centre, made over to the KGB. It was their country seat, as it were, used, among other things, to entertain guests — for shooting in the winter, and for training seminars and conferences in the summer.
The sky had just started to lighten as the half dozen cars drew up in front of the hunting lodge. Set on a hill which sloped gently away over open parkland down a long valley towards the forest, its tall chimneys and decorated gables caught the first thin rays of the sun while the men beneath stamped their feet about in the half-light of the forecourt. In the folds of the valley itself, below them to the west, there were still pools of complete darkness, broken here and there with haloes of mist, the tops of a few trees just visible, sticking up through these ponds of milk. The weather was grey, indeterminate and the temperature well below freezing. But the message in this early dawn was clear: quite soon the sharpness would catch fire and the sun would explode all over the short day.
In the long hall of the lodge the men gathered round a huge mahogany table where breakfast had been prepared: there was vodka and two silver samovars of burbling tea. The service was solicitous, the fare more than ample. The house and all its period furnishings had been preserved meticulously. There was an air of old bounty and tradition everywhere. Indeed apart from the electric grill for the cutlets and other burning meats there was nothing in the hall, and no human activity at that moment, which might not have passed there at a hunting breakfast a hundred years before.
The men, numbed after their drive, spoke little at first. But soon, with plates in their hands, tentatively fingering the hot meat, gathering round the two log stoves at either side of the hall, they began to take on the lineaments of a mild humanity. And later they were further encouraged by small, quick draughts of vodka and burning tea. The smell of woodsmoke, warm leather, gun-oil, the effects of raw spirit and simmering tea, drew about and stirred within the men a mood of expectant euphoria they could not resist.
The atmosphere in the hall, which had at first gradually relaxed, now quickly tightened. And by the time cigarette smoke drifted upwards past the boars’ heads and other trophies which ringed the walls, there was a clear sense of impending, irresistible release over the whole party.
The big hall doors were opened. A wall of air moved in over the company, crisp and cold as broken ice. The stoves roared quickly in the sudden draught; the waiters shivered; the men moved out into the forecourt — putting on their greatcoats, fur helmets, and gathering up their guns — with happy fortitude. And the sun, for that moment, perched in the mists of the eastern horizon, an orange bird held briefly in a cage of hills and trees before flight.
They set off westwards in a group down across the open parkland towards the forest. Here, at the lowest part of the valley, where the line of trees began sloping upwards for miles ahead of them, they were briefed by the head gamekeeper. The hunting block they were taking for the wild boar, he explained, would follow the oldest part of the plantation in the shape of a huge inverted L: a four-kilometre long first leg, bordered on the left by the road and guard fence of the estate, and then a shorter leg, starting with a clearing of rough underbrush turning northwards. For the first part of the hunt they would spread out along the kilometre width of the block, in line abreast, each of the dozen or so hunters accompanied by a gamekeeper. Shortly after they started, beaters would gradually move towards them from the northern extremity of the block so that, ideally, in this pincer movement, their quarry would be pushed towards the junction of the two arms by both parties and trapped in the clearing of the woods four miles ahead of them.
Outside a gamekeeper’s hut at the edge of the trees, they drew lots for position in the line. The head keeper checked the slips of paper. Yuri Andropov found himself at the extreme right-hand end of the line; the Czech Colonel was in the middle, with Alexei Flitlianov and Vassily Chechulian at two points in between them. The group broke up and moved along the line of trees towards numbered posts which had been set up several hundred yards apart as starting markers.
It was just after eight o’clock when a whistle pierced the woods and the men left the trampled snow at the bottom of the valley and began to move upwards through the light clean white carpets that lay between the long avenues of fir.
Two grouse suddenly exploded just in front of Alexei Flitlianov before he’d gone many steps into the forest, their wings beating sharply in alarm, squawking as they skimmed along beneath the branches further into the woods. He stopped, shaken for a moment. His keeper joined him, a small, wizened-faced man in an old fur cap with earflaps, his hands rather dirty, oily. He looked more like a garage mechanic than a sportsman.
‘Those are easier shooting,’ he said, trying to establish too immediate a cameraderie, Flitlianov thought. ‘With shotguns. These boar are difficult animals. You were here last year weren’t you, sir? I remember you got a big tusker then.’
‘No. That was Comrade Chechulian.’
‘Oh yes, of course. You’re right. It’s hard sometimes to tell people apart — all in the same kind of hunting clothes.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ The man had put his finger on it at once, Flitlianov thought: everyone in more or less the same kind of clothes, this shooting while moving forward in a line, the chance of a stray boar running back between two positions, a rifle swinging round in a 90 degree arc. An accident in these circumstances could be made to seem the most natural thing in the world. He had realised this from the beginning, of course, two days before at their meeting in the Rossiya Hotel. But he had long before agreed to go on this hunting expedition — he went every year — and could not therefore have avoided the occasion today: in Andropov’s present surprising mood he might fall upon anything as evidence of guilt.
He had been puzzled by Andropov’s behaviour at the meeting: he’d said there had been no intention of conducting a purge among his deputies but this was exactly what seemed to be happening. Was he trying to raise Chechulian from some cover? Was Vassily, who shared some of his own background, the man he suspected of this conspiracy? He seemed an unlikely candidate. But anything was possible. And it was in this vague cloud of suspicion and invention which Andropov now held over his deputies, that Flitlianov saw the answer to the mystery: Andropov was not sure of anything. He was simply intent on creating a mood of alarm, of psychological unease, by suggesting that he had complete knowledge of the conspiracy — so that the man or men involved would become unnerved, make a mistake, break cover. Andropov was in the middle of an elaborate bluff and this day’s hunting, Flitlianov felt sure, was a potentially dangerous part of it. Anything might happen. And thus he had laid his plans accordingly: he would move himself, long before anything could happen. The garage mechanic was not to be trusted of course. He would have to be the first to go.