To Live and Die - Chapter 1 / Persona non Grata (1 of 2)

It happened when the farmers had already set out across the barren landscapes with their tools in hand, unsuspecting. The sun was fast rising in the east with a bright red glow that crept up over the mountaintops and awoke the city of Bodrum below. There was virtually no wind and the sky was empty of clouds. The heat would be tolerable up in the mountains but down below in the city, mixed with the car fumes and lack of a consistent breeze, it would be stifling to say the least by luncheon. And gasping up the mountain road from Bodrum was a hooded American M35 cargo truck.

            There had been many in that area for some time now and nobody had paid the least bit of attention to it. It was old, somewhat rusty and the windscreen was layered in thick dust. The six wheeler’s exhaust growled as it trudged up the steep mountainside slowly gathering speed. The driver had been given strict orders to take it to its destination without delay. One could have taken him for a boxer by the look of his hardened face and flattened nose but the passenger in the cabin would have been of most interest. He, like the driver and unlike the US army vehicle they sat in, were suited in Russian military dress.

The passenger was General Horishenko of the KGB and twice winner of the Order of Lenin Second Class. He had the look of someone who had seen combat at first hand, and relished it. His pasty skin was strung tight over its skeletal frame and looked like a man fast approaching seventy rather than sixty. He was grey at the sides and despite being a military man, his chin bore the five o’clock shadow. As he cleaned his TT-30 hand gun with brittle looking fingers he wondered whether he had made the right decision. He had done his deal with the devil no less. As the truck continued on its hilly ascent he debated as to whether his ten per cent cut was worth the destruction that would soon ensue.

The driver who hadn’t muttered a single word other than ‘get in’ during a journey that spanned nearly seven hours. He had been flown across the Turkish border from his station in St Petersburg and had touched down on a strip of land hardly worth the title of an airfield. He had no idea where it was and wasn’t told when he asked. It was the dead of night when he had arrived in Turkey and the sun far yet to loom over the mountain tops like it did now.

The truck continued to chortle along the deserted landscape bathed in a warm ray of sunlight. If the General had heard rightly from one of the eight agents hiding in the rear of the vehicle: they were making their way to a one horse down some twenty miles out of Bodrum. They too were disguised in Soviet uniforms and Horishenko was completely unaware of the manner in which they had been obtained. He wondered if this whole ghastly affair would go back to Moscow. The Presidium would put an order out of his execution and whether that was tomorrow, the day after, a year or even a decade after – they would catch up with him indefinitely. He would be trudging along the Amalfi coast or hand-in-hand with Irina through the market square in Rhodes town when he would hear a misplaced footfall on the cobbles and turn, then nothing.

The money he would earn from this ordeal was more than enough to retire comfortably. As Stalin himself had said some years ago, ‘you never leave’ and so his notice would come with a poison coated bullet from the KGB. He anticipated this and would be more than ready for when they came, but until then he would live the rest of his days in the lap of luxury. His son, Dimitri, would stay at the MGV or the Moscow State University and finish his degree in mechanical engineering. Hopefully he would get to live his life free of the knowledge of his father’s betrayal to the state. He was nearly finished anyhow and he too would disappear to pursue a career that stretched much further than that of the Soviet Union.

Horishenko rested his tired eyes for a moment and thought back to his childhood days in Siberia, ice fishing with his great uncle on Lake Baikal. He was sick of the cold and would retire somewhere warm should he not want to travel. He took Havana into considered but if not he would buy up a small private island off the coast of Jamaica. He would hang up a sign warning trespassers to keep out by fear of death. Yes, that’s exactly what he’d do. Nothing too obvious, just something small but it’d be perfect for he and his younger mistress. She had been his secretary during his brief time in Vladivostok. His wife of nearly twenty five years had understood and simply left the horrid, skinny little man. When Irina had heard of this she had moved herself into his flat in the heart of the city.

That was over six months ago and she had urged Horishenko to consider the prospect of retirement. And when a deal from SPECTRE travelled its way through the pipeline and had ended up in his lap he simply couldn’t resist. All he had to do was accompany the squad of men and stand guard as they stole a cache of American weapons. The weapons of which had left behind from the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had been a decade before and the US were too preoccupied with the guerrillas in South-East Asia to care about a small missing weapons cache. The USSR guarded the facility they were headed to, for the sake of maintaining the fragile image of Soviet-American co-operation. In other words, the President had the Soviet Union by the balls, but not for long thought the General. Soon after he had arrived in Turkey he had asked to get to a payphone. From there he called the number he had been given by the leader of this squad. SPECTRE One it was called. And, using the art of persuasion, had asked to double his five percent share of the proceeds. The agent who was in Cairo had accepted on the condition that the whole operation went smoothly and now he was nearing his destination.