The Yermakov Transfer

THE

YERMAKOV

TRANSFER

Derek Lambert

COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Arlington Books Ltd 1974

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1974

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008268367

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268350

Version: 2017-10-04

DEDICATION

To Patrick, my son, an avid

reader of Russian novels

EPIGRAPH

“When the trains stop that will be the end”

– Lenin.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Departure

First Leg

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

In Transit

Second Leg

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Arrival

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

DEPARTURE

Among those on board the Trans-Siberian Express leaving Moscow’s Far Eastern station at 10.05 on Monday, October 1, 1973, was the most powerful man in the Soviet Union and the man who planned to kidnap him.

They sat four coaches apart: the Kremlin leader, Vasily Yermakov, in a special carriage surrounded by militia and K.G.B. as thick as aphides, the kidnapper, Viktor Pavlov, in a soft-class sleeper with a Tartar general and his wife.

Yermakov, burly and jovial, sat at a desk in a black leather, wing-back chair smoking a cigarette with a cardboard filter and watching the K.G.B. screen the last passengers boarding the train. The peasants with their samovars, blankets, punished suitcases and live chickens looked apprehensive; but not as scared as the enemies of the State Yermakov had interrogated in the thirties. That was progress.

He stubbed out the cigarette as if he were squashing a cockroach. The abrupt movement alerted his two bodyguards and nervous secretary who hovered expectantly. Yermakov, as avuncular as Stalin, nodded approvingly: he liked disciplined obedience but not servility which he despised.

He said: “I think it’s going to snow.”

Now it had to snow.

“I think you’re right, Comrade Yermakov,” said the secretary, a pale man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles whose knowledge of Kremlin intrigue had given him neurasthenia.

The two bodyguards in grey suits with coathanger shoulders and pistol bulges at the chest, also voiced their agreement.

And outside it did smell of snow. The sky was grey and bruised, the faces of the crowds, marshalled for Yermakov’s departure, stoic with the knowledge of the months ahead. The atmosphere was appropriate for the journey into Siberia, the journey into winter.

For Yermakov the journey had a magnificent symbolism. The historic Russian theme of pushing east – while the Americans pushed west; the freeing of the Tsars’ manacled armies of slaves; the victorious pursuit of the White Russians; the new civilisation the young Russians had built on foundations of perm frost as hard as concrete.

The trip had been his own idea, already much publicised. A series of rallies in the outposts of the Soviet Union with speeches warning the Chinese massed on the Siberian border, dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and the Jews agitating to leave Russia for Israel.

He glanced at his wrist-watch as big as a handcuff. Five minutes to go. He drank some Narzan mineral water.

On the platform two plainclothes men hustled a passenger out of the station. A stocky, curly-haired man with a brown, Georgian complexion. He was bent double as if he had been kneed in the groin. Presumably his papers hadn’t been in order; or his passport had been stamped with the word JEW.

Yesterday there had been a Zionist demonstration outside the Central Telegraph Office in Gorki Street. Privately Yermakov thought: To hell with them. Let the trouble-makers go, keep the brains.

He pointed at the prisoner being dragged along, his feet scuffing the ground. “Jew?”

His secretary nodded, polishing spectacles. “Quite possibly. Security is very tight today.”

“In Lubyanka he will have ample time to learn by heart the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’”

“Article 13, Point 2,” said the secretary, replacing his spectacles.

“The Universal Declaration of Human Treachery,” Yermakov said.

Power flowed strongly in his veins. He stared at the wall-map of Siberia with the railway wandering across it. Now he was Yermak the outlawed Cossack who, in 1581, began the conquest of Siberia for Ivan the Terrible and was rewarded with a breastplate of armour, a silver drinking chalice and a fur cloak from Ivan’s shoulders.

The train throbbed with life, the troops outside snapped to attention. The moment of departure was only partially spoiled by the completion of Yermakov’s line of thought: Yermak’s career was cut short by a band of Tartar warriors: he tried to swim to safety but was drowned by the weight of the breastplate.

* * *

Viktor Pavlov who planned to hold Yermakov to ransom lay on his bunk in the soft-class sleeper with his face close to the sandbag buttocks of the Tartar general’s wife. He doubted at this moment whether the buttocks of Miss World would have aroused him.

From his East German briefcase he took a sheaf of papers covered with the figures and symbols of a scheme to automate the traffic system of Khabarovsk in the Far East of Siberia. To Pavlov, the computerised figures also gave the times agents would board the train, the distance out of Chita that the kidnap would be executed, the wavelengths of the radio messages to be transmitted from five European capitals; the long-range weather forecast and troop deployments east of Irkutsk.

But there was imponderables beyond the computer’s electronic brainpower. For one – a jealous Tartar general who considered his elephantine wife to be irresistible; for another – the arrest of one operator before he had boarded the train (although they had made allowances for casualties); for yet another – the unknown occupant of the bunk above Pavlov. The computer in his brain had allowed for six imponderables.

There were four bunks in the compartment, a small table and lamp, a dearth of space. Pavlov chose the bunk underneath the vacant bunk in case he needed the advantage: he presumed the general had chosen the bunk above his wife in case of some frailty in the structure.

The general’s wife was unpacking a suitcase. Flannel nightdress, striped pyjamas, toilet bag, bottle of Stolichnya vodka, bottle of Armenian brandy, two loaves of black bread, goat’s cheese, four onions and a pistol.

The general, who was in civilian clothes, loosened his tie and said: “Nina, the vodka.” He took a swig, wiped the neck of the bottle and stared at Pavlov in case he had been sexually aroused by a movement of pectoral muscle, a creak of corset. Reassured, he handed the bottle to Pavlov.

Pavlov shook his head. “No thanks.”

The general frowned, stroking his drooping moustache.

An enemy in the compartment, Pavlov decided, was an unnecessary complication, but so was liquor.

The general’s wife began to peel an orange so that, with the vodka, the compartment smelled like a sweet liqueur. Juice spat in Pavlov’s eyes.

He explained: “I’ve got work to do.” Waving the sheaf of papers. “I must have a clear head.” He had learned the wisdom of telling lies which were also the truth.

The general took another swig. “A scientist?” His tone was hopeful because, of the two classes of citizens – The Military and others – scientists ranked highest in the latter. “Nuclear, perhaps?”

“Let’s just say I’m a scientist.” The Military appreciated secrecy.

Pavlov had been screened three times before getting his rail ticket. He had been cleared because he was the leading authority on computers, because he was married to a Heroine of the Soviet Union waiting for him in Siberia, because there was no reference to his Jewishness on his papers.

He returned to his documents while the general unwrapped a mildewed cigar and his wife started eating sunflower seeds, blowing the husks on the floor. There were three agents already on the train, none with JEW on their passports, each with an ineradicable strain of Jewishness in them; each a fanatic, each a possible martyr.

Martial music poured through the loudspeakers as the train picked up speed through the outskirts of Moscow. It became an anthem to which Pavlov supplied the words:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem

let my right hand wither away;

let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

above my highest joy.

The door opened and the missing passenger entered. A powerful man with polished cheeks, black hair thinning; built for the outdoors – hunting moose in the taiga, breath frosting the air; incongruous in his dark blue suit, uncomfortable beneath any roof. He breathed fresh air into the compartment, greeted them breezily, said his name was Yosif Gavralin and swung himself into the berth above Pavlov.

Pavlov wondered what rank he held in the K.G.B. He thought he must feel vulnerable in the upper bunk. A single upwards thrust of a knife.

The general sucked unsuccessfully at his cigar. Smoke dribbled from its fractured stem. “Cuban,” he said with disgust, giving it to his wife who squashed it among her sunflower husks.

* * *

In the next compartment, Harry Bridges, an American journalist almost trusted by the Russians, read the carbon copy of the story he had filed that morning to New York via London. He read it without pride.

It was a description of the Communist Party leader’s departure for Siberia which a messenger had taken to their office in a penitentiary-style office block in Kutuzovsky Prospect to telex. It was uninspired, dull and hackneyed. But it would be published because it announced that the paper’s Moscow correspondent, Harold Bridges, was the only Western reporter – apart from correspondents of communist journals like the Morning Star – permitted to cover the Siberian tour.

But at what cost?

From his upper-berth Harry Bridges glanced speculatively at the English girl lying on the lower-berth bunk across the compartment. Somewhere on this train there was a story better than the speeches of which he had advance copies. Any story was better. The girl, perhaps – the only possibility in the compartment they shared with a train-spotter and an Intourist guide. Once Bridges would have looked for stories: these days they were handed to him. Once he would have instinctively asked himself: “What’s a young English girl with a hyphen in her name and fear in her eyes crossing Siberia for?”

No more. There were a lot of answers Harry Bridges didn’t want to find out; so he didn’t ask himself the questions. Just the same old instincts lurked so he smiled at her and asked: “Making the whole trip?”

Bridges’ assessment of Libby Chandler was half right: she didn’t possess a hyphen but she was scared. She nodded. “But not as far as Vladivostock. No foreigners are allowed there, are they?”

“A few.” Bridges didn’t elaborate because he was one of the few allowed inside the port on the Bay of the Golden Horn, a closed city because of its naval installations.

Some said Harry Bridges had sold his soul. He didn’t contradict them; merely reminded himself that his accusers were the correspondents harangued by their offices for missing his exclusives.

A girl attendant knocked on the door to see if they were settled. They said they were but she couldn’t accept this. She tidied their luggage, tested the lamps and windows, distributed copies of Lenin’s speeches. Through the open door came the smell of smoke from the samovar she tended.

Bridges clipped the carbon of his first dispatch into a springback file and consulted the advances. Yermakov attacking the dissidents at Novosibirsk, the Chinese at Irkutsk, the Jews at Khabarovsk.

They’ll have to do better for me than that, Bridges decided. Not only would Tass give the speeches verbatim so that every paper in the States would have stories through A.P. and U.P.I., but the weary rhetoric wasn’t worth publishing. He needed an interview with Yermakov.

He stuck the file under his pillow and lay with his head propped on one hand. In the old days he would have mentally recorded everything in the compartment including the names, occupations and ages of his fellow travellers. He had always done this when flying in case the plane crashed and he was the sole survivor with the story: the names of the crew – in particular the stewardesses – and the credentials of the passenger next to him.

The train-spotter was filling his notebook with figures. The dark-haired Intourist girl with the heavy, sensuous figure was shuffling papers beneath him, rehearsing her recitation for a tour of a hydro-electric plant.

He caught the glance of the blonde English girl and they exchanged the special smiles of travellers sharing experience. He passed his pack of cigarettes to her but she refused. He bracketed her as twenty-two years old, University graduate, the defender of several topical causes, apartment in Chelsea (shared).

But what was she scared of?

Unsolicited, the professional instincts of Harry Bridges began to surface. “Are you breaking your journey?” he asked.

“Three times,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.

“Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk, I suppose. They usually offer you those. In fact they’re the only places they’ll let you off.”

The Intourist girl made disapproving sounds.

Bridges said: “Anyway, you’re travelling in distinguished company.”

“I know. I didn’t know anything about Yermakov being on the train.”

“So we’ll be together for at least a week.”

She looked startled. “Why, are you breaking your journey as well?”

“Wherever he stops” – Bridges pointed in the direction of the special coach – “I stop.”

“I see.” She frowned. She should have asked why, Bridges thought. Total lack of curiosity appalled him.

The train-spotter from Manchester joined in. “It’s going to be difficult to know when to go to bed and when to get up. They keep Moscow time throughout the journey.”

It was too much for the Intourist guide. “We sleep when we’re tired. We get up when we wake. We eat when we’re hungry.” She reminded Bridges of an air stewardess sulking because her affair with the pilot had run into turbulence.

“And we drink when we’re thirsty?” Bridges added. He grinned at the girl. “Would you like a drink?”

“No thank you.” She reacted as if he’d asked her to take her clothes off; it was out of character.

“Well I’m going to have one.” He slid off the bunk into the no-man’s-land between the berths. No one spoke.

He closed the door behind him and stood in the corridor hazed with smoke from the samovar. Frowning, he realised that he had set himself an assignment: to find out what the girl was scared of.

* * *

The serpent face of the pea-green electric locomotive of train No. 2 with its yellow flashes, red star and weather-proofed picture of Lenin nosed inquisitively through the fringes of Moscow. The driver, Boris Demurin, making his last journey, wished he was at the controls of an old locomotive for the occasion: a black giant with a red-hot furnace and a smoke-stack breathing smoke and cinders: not this sleek, electric snake.

For forty-three years Demurin had driven almost every type of engine on the Trans-Siberian. The old 2-4-4-0 Mallets built at Kolumna; S.O. classes from Ulan-Ude and Kransnayorsk; towering P-36 steam locos, E classes now used for freight-switching; American lease-and-lend 2-8-0’s built by Baldwin and ALCO for the United States Army which became the Soviet Sh(III); and then the eight-axle N-8 electrics renumbered VL-8’s.

Time had now begun to lose its dimensions for Demurin. He was prematurely old with coal dust buried in the scars on his face and he lived in a capsule of experience in which he could reach out and touch the historic past as easily as the present.

The capsule embraced the slave labour that had helped to build the railway; the corrupt economies which had sent trains charging off frost-buckled track; the life and times of Tsar Nicholas II who had baptised the railway only to die by the bullet beside it; the Czech Legion which had converted the coaches into armoured cars after the Revolution; Lake Baikal which had contemptuously sucked an engine through its ice when the Russians tried to cross it to fight the Japanese.

The railway’s heroes, its lovers and victims, peopled Demurin’s capsule. At seventeen he had stood on the footplate of a butter train bound for Vladivostock carrying 150 exiles to the gold and silver mines, with soot and coals streaming past his face: now, nearly half a century later, he was an attendant in a power house.

He scowled at his crew, bewildered by the fusion of time. “How are we doing for time?”

His second-in-command, a thirty-year-old Ukranian with a neat, knowing face and a glossy hair style copied from a 1940 American movie still, said: “Don’t worry, old-timer, we’re on time.”

The Ukranian thought he should have been in charge. Demurin’s rudimentary knowledge of electric power was notorious, and on this trip he was merely a symbol of heroic achievement. “Be kind to him,” they had said. “Get him there on time on his last journey.” If you fail, with Yermakov on board, they had implied, prepare yourself for a career shunting fish on Sakhalin island. The Ukranian, whose ambition was to drive the prestige train between Moscow and Leningrad, intended to keep the Trans-Siberian on time.

Demurin wiped his hands with a cloth, a habit – no longer a necessity. “Steam was more reliable,” he began. “I wonder …”

The Ukranian groaned theatrically. “What, old-timer, the line from St. Petersburg to the Tsar’s summer palace at Tsarskoye Selo?” But, although he was half-smart, he wasn’t unkind. He patted Demurin’s shoulder, laughing to show that it was a joke. “What do you remember, Boris?”

“In 1936 I was on the footplate of an FD 2-10-2 which hauled a train of 568 axles weighing 11,310 tons, for 160 miles.”

The item had surfaced like a nugget on sinking soil. He didn’t know why he had repeated it. It bewildered him all the more.

The Ukranian thought: That’s what Siberia does for you.

“Did you know,” Demurin rambled on, “that when Stalin and his comrades travelled on the Blue Express from Moscow to the Black Sea resorts they had the train sprayed with eau-de-cologne?”

The Ukranian didn’t reply. You could never tell what nuance could be inferred from any comment about a Soviet leader, dead, denounced or reinstated. All the carriages were crawling with police: it was quite possible that the locomotive, as well as the coaches, was bugged. He stared uneasily at the darting fingers of the dials.

Demurin was silent for a few moments. Silver birches flickered past the windows. Time had overtaken him, the trains had overtaken him. Timber, coal, diesel, electric. What next? Nuclear power? He smelled the soot and steam of his youth, stared round a curve of track with snow plastering his face. He stayed there for a moment, a year, a lifetime, before returning to the electrified present.

“Mikhail,” he said, “make sure we have a smooth journey. Make sure we keep to time. You understand, don’t you?”

The Ukranian said: “I understand.” And momentarily the smartness which masked knowledge of his own inadequacies was nowhere visible on his neat, ambitious face.

* * *

It was 10.10. The train was gathering speed and it would average around 37 m.p.h. It would traverse 5,778 miles to Vladivostock, pass through eight time zones and, without interruptions, finish the journey in 7 days, 16½ hours. It would normally make 83 stops, spending 13 hours standing at stations. It would cross a land twice the size of Europe where temperatures touched –70°C and trees exploded with the cold. It would circumvent Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, inhabited by fresh-water seals and transparent fish that melt on contact with air. It would skirt the Sino-Soviet border where Chinese troops had shown their asses to the Soviets across the River Amur, where the threat of a holocaust still hovered, until it reached the forests near Khabarovsk where the Chinese once sought Gin-Seng, a root said to rejuvenate, where sabre-toothed tigers still roam. At Khabarovsk, which claims 270 cloudless days a year – no more, no less – it would disgorge its foreigners who would change trains for Nakhodka and take the boat to Japan. The train had 18 cars and 36 doors; the restaurant car boasted a 15-page menu in five languages and at least a few of the dishes were available.

In a small compartment at the rear of the special coach a K.G.B. colonel and two junior officers occupied themselves with their own statistics: the records of every passenger and crew member. The colonel had marked red crosses against fourteen names; each of those fourteen was accompanied in his compartment by a K.G.B. agent. As the last outposts of Moscow fled past the window the colonel, whose career and life were at stake, stood up, stretched and addressed his two subordinates. “Now check out the whole train again. Every compartment, every lavatory, every passenger.”