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Against such a locust plague of eyes and ears there would be nowhere for the American to hide, Grishin advised Igor Komarov. This network of informants could penetrate every nook and cranny of Moscow, every hideaway and bolt-hole, every corner and crevice. If he did not lock himse
lf inside his own embassy, where he could do no further harm, he would be found.
Grishin was almost right. There was one place his Russians could not penetrate the tightly sealed world of the Chechens.
Jason Monk was inside that world, in a safe apartment above a spice shop, protected by Magomed, Asian, and Sharif, and beyond them a screen of invisible street people who could see a Russian coming a mile away and communicate in a language no one else could understand.
In any case, Monk had already made his second contact.
CHAPTER 14
OF ALL THE SOLDIERS OF RUSSIA, SERVING OR RETIRED, the one who in terms of prestige was worth any dozen others was General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev.
At seventy-three and just a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday, he was still an impressive figure. Six-feet one-inch tall, he carried himself bolt upright; a mane of white hair, a ruddy face weathered by a thousand bitter winds, and his trademark moustache jutting in two defiant points on either side of his upper lip marked him out in any gathering.
He had been a tank man all his life, a commander of mechanized infantry, had served in every theater and on every front over a fifty-year career, and to those who had served under him, numbering several millions in all by 1999, he had become a legend.
It was common knowledge that he would and should have retired with the rank of marshal, but for his habit of speaking his mind to the politicians and time servers.
Like Leonid Zaitsev, the Rabbit, whom he would never remember but whom he had once clapped on the back at a camp outside Potsdam, the general had been born near Smolensk, west of Moscow. But twelve years earlier, in the winter of 1925, the son of an engineer.
He could still recall the day he and his father had been passing a church and the older man had forgotten himself and made the sign of the cross. The son had asked what he was doing. Startled and fearful, his father had told him never to tell a soul.
Those were the days when another Soviet youth had been officially declared a hero for betraying his parents to the NKVD for anti-Party remarks. Both parents had died in the camps, but the son had been made a role model for Soviet youth.
But young Kolya loved his father and never said a word. Later he learned the meaning of the gesture, but accepted the word of his teachers that it was all complete rubbish.
He was fifteen when the Blitzkrieg erupted out of the west, on June 22, 1941. Within a month Smolensk fell to the German tanks and with thousands of others the boy was on the run. His parents did not make it and he never saw them again.
A strapping youth, he helped his ten-year-old sister along for a hundred miles until one night they jumped a train heading east. They did not know it, but it was a special train. Along with others it carried a disassembled tank factory out of the danger zone and east toward the safety of the Urals.
Cold and hungry, the children clung to the roof until the train came to rest at Chelyabinsk in the foothills of the mountains. There the engineers re-erected the factory called Tankograd.
There was no time for schooling. Galina went to an orphanage, Kolya was put to work in the factory. He stayed there for almost two years.
By the winter of 1942 the Soviets were taking horrendous losses in men and tanks around Kharkov and Stalingrad. The tactics were traditional and lethal. There was neither time nor talent for subtlety; the men and tanks were thrown into the muzzles of the German guns without thought or care for losses. In Russian military history that was how it had always been.
At Tankograd the demand was for more and more production; they worked sixteen-hour shifts and slept beneath the lathes. What they were building was the KV1, named after Marshal Klimenti Voroshiov, a useless article as a soldier but one of Stalin’s favorite toadies. The KV1 was a heavy tank, the Soviets’ main battle tank at the time.
By the spring of 1943 the Soviets were reinforcing the bulge around the city of Kursk, an enclave 150 miles from north to south that jutted 100 miles into the German lines. In June, the seventeen-year-old was detailed to accompany a trainload of KV1s west to the salient, unload them at the railhead, deliver them, and return to Chelyabinsk. He did all but the last.
The new tanks were lined up by the track when the regimental commander for whom they were destined strode up. He was amazingly young, not twenty-five, a colonel, bearded, haggard, and exhausted.
“I’ve got no fucking drivers,” he screamed at the tank factory official in charge of the delivery. Then he turned to the big flaxen-haired youth. “Can you drive these bloody things?”
“Yes, Comrade, but I have to go back to Tankograd.”
“No chance. You can drive, you’re drafted.”
The train steamed east. Private Nikolai Nikolayev found himself in a rough cotton smock, deep inside the hull of a KV1, heading toward the town of Prokhorovka. The Battle of Kursk began two weeks later.
Though referred to as the “Battle” of Kursk, it was in fact a series of raging and bloody clashes that spanned the whole enclave and lasted two months. By the time it was over, Kursk had become the biggest tank battle the world has ever seen, before or since. It involved 6,000 tanks on both sides, 2 million men, and 4,000 aircraft. It was the battle that finally proved the German Panzer was not invincible after all. But it was a close-run thing.
The German army was just deploying its own wonder weapon, the Tiger, packing a fearsome 88mm cannon in its turret, which, with armor-piercing shells, could take out anything in its path. The KV1 carried a much smaller 76mm gun, even though the new model Nikolai had delivered mounted the improved ZIS-5 longer-range version.
On July 12, 1943, the Russians began to counterattack, hand the key was the Prokhorovka sector. The regiment Nikolai had joined was down to six KV1s when the commander saw what he thought were five Panzer Mark IVs rand decided to attack. The Russians rolled in line abreast over the crest of a ridge and down into a shallow valley; the Germans were on the opposite crest.
The young colonel was wrong about the Panzer IVs; they were Tigers. One by one they picked off the six KV1s with armor-piercing sabot.