A Covenant of Spies

Chapter Four: Dead Bodies-1

Chapter Four: Dead BodiesMy mind was firmly on the streets of Prague as I sat and listened to the regular update on the situation in Afghanistan. NATO was gearing up to take overall control of security in that country, but for the time being, tensions had been steadily rising on the border of Pakistan, with Taliban militants crossing unopposed and raiding Afghan army and police positions, causing considerable casualties. British forces were still stationed in Helmand province in the south of the country, one of Afghanistan's most volatile regions, and the production of opium had reached an all-time high.

At an earlier meeting, I had made a joke about that fact, asking if it had anything to do with our continued presence, but it fell on stony ground and nobody commented or smiled. Those around the table had a spasmodic sense of humour, it seemed, regulated by who cracked the joke. There was no shared humour at this meeting as it was quickly moved along to other subjects. We had several points of intelligence inside Pakistan, all under one controller who I knew reasonably well, but I had no first-hand knowledge of the MI6 officer overseeing the only source we had inside the Taliban. All other intelligence in Afghanistan came from the Americans via various channels. I gave a short account of the declassified information on what was happening, vis-à-vis intel gathering and distribution, along with a brief summary on the results of two incursions into Taliban positions by special forces operating under the command of the SIS field Controller. The Prime Minister and his press secretary nodded their heads in recognition of my report and the various ministers around the table closed the SIS folders, and the meeting moved on to other matters.

One of the points that was discussed at the Cabinet meeting that day was what to do with the seven Polish soldiers whose artillery battery had mistakenly shelled the village of Nangar Khel in Afghanistan, tragically killing six civilians, including a pregnant woman and a baby. The British Government, along with other NATO countries, were being canvassed for their recommendations as to punishment and although none of it was within my remit, we had intelligence sources within Poland and their thoughts were being asked for. Predominately, our intel came from political sources, but there was a high-ranking military commander being run out of The Box, our name for the Vauxhall Cross home of MI6 headquarters, who was part of an operation on Russian soil I'd met some years ago when he was just a major and I was on the spy.

In essence, the collective recommendations from fellow NATO governments was that the seven soldiers should be charged with war crimes and face trial at the UN's Court of Justice in The Hague. As I put forward the approach advocated by our source inside the Polish military, I was painfully conscious of my time in Prague with the Kavas. Major-General Wójcik, my present source in Poland, wanted them to make an atonement in a practical sense, not wasted on some ceremonial display. Poland would supply the monetary resources and building materials for two schools, and his seven troops would assist in building them. If his suggestion was accepted, then perhaps their denouncement would be less allegorical and more beneficial to Afghanistan. All of this debate resonated in a personal sense to me.

I had offered no pageant nor memorial to the person I sacrificed. No stateliness to the bullet that struck the back of his head, taking most of his unlined forehead with it as it exited and lodged in the timber stanchion of the boathouse in which we met. No sound of a gun being fired was heard, nor was a bullet or casing discovered or looked for. Nor was Dalek Kava's disfigured body, which sank swiftly to the bottom of the Vltava River in the early hours of a freezing Saturday morning as I silently lowered it over the side of a small row boat. That was how I dealt with Faversham's order and his Operation Donor. Without following instructions to the letter, I used my initiative and figured that with Dalek's departure, it cleared the way for the conversion of Jana to London's vision of western ideals. But as it transpired, she had visions of her own.

* * *

“Don't patronise me, Jana. I do not deserve that.” It was Dalek who reacted first to his sister's accusation of me being a spy.

“Yes, I do think he's a spy, but if anyone can be certain it's you, isn't it? After all, you have your ears glued to Lenárt's phone extensions and your eyes in his memos. You love it, being one step ahead of us less important creatures in the rumour stakes. Can you see it in this Englishman's eyes? Is it in the way he dresses? Perhaps the image of an overcoat collar turned up, standing in a doorway with a burning cigarette between his fingers of one hand as the other rests on the butt of the gun in his inside pocket, hmm?” he croaked at his sister as he stood inches from me his face reddened by drink and flushed by rage.

Jana grabbed hold of my arm, dragging me from Dalek, leaving him alone with his mumbles and complaints of inadequacy and ineptitude of his sister and the Communist regime, to be answered from the vodka bottle he clutched to his chest. What she told me as we walked away arm in arm did not completely come as a surprise.

“He is loud about his weakness and silent about his strength. His work is magnificent, they say. He is irreplaceable or so his boss says. Said as much at all the party committees who sit and want to take his party card away, restricting his ability to work. But he talks and shouts too much and doesn't know when to stop! So far, I've kept him out of trouble and kept myself out of the s**t storm that's waiting to sweep him and me away. It's only a matter of time before he's exposed, and then they will come after me.

“Each week, he gets deeper and deeper involved with this Solidarity s**t and I can't be sure how long my influence will hold. I've seen some of their union literature at home and when I asked him what it was for, he said he intended distributing it around the city university with his friends as soon as they can all get together. This coming Sunday was mentioned. If that were to happen and he was to be arrested, which the State Security would definitely do, then let alone his job, my job would go as well and we'd both end up a state cell as I doubt he could keep his mouth shut.

“I know exactly how important I could be, Frank. I am in a position of trust within the highest levels of government in this country, but I can also be dangerous. It was I who told my father of Khrushchev's visit. No information like that is broadcast in this country before it needs to be. Yes, his position at the factory was important for security, and he was told of a visit, but he had no knowledge of who was coming. I heard who it was through work. I knew my father hated Khrushchev. He'd told me stories of him often enough. My father was a wicked man, but apparently not as wicked as Khrushchev in his estimation. He knew the risks he faced. He also knew that death was imminent; he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks before I told him who was the 'important person' we were expecting. Like my father, my brother knows the risks he takes, but that's where the likeness stops. Dalek does not know the consequences. I have no option but to want my brother stopped, Frank. If you want me to spy for you and continue supplying information to London, then I want you to kill my brother.”

Yes, that's what she said to me—continue supplying and kill my brother. There was more to come from her.

“I loved him, but how can I now? I have been looking for a way out of the mess he's constructing for us both to drown in, and you're it. I know I'm putting my trust in you to do it, but I have no other choice.”

* * *

My attention was back in the room where the upcoming elections in Poland had the attention of the Prime Minister. The corruption that had caused the early calling for a new government must have been foremost in his mind when he announced that the UK would side with her allies in calling for the war crimes of the Polish soldiers to be answered in the Hague, where they were to be denounced in the name of pious correctness.

My thoughts were that if you train a man to kill, don't be surprised when he does, and as men we make mistakes. That's part and parcel of being human. But correctness states that those that are killed, are only those that deserve death as judged by those whose innocence is the greater. I don't suppose the reasons for the Prime Minister's decision was that much different to Jana's in wanting me to kill her brother. Both were made to conform to an ideological orthodoxy that suited their individual aspirations, but I suffered from no ideology. I just wanted the acclaim of having Jana Kava's political convictions with her hands planted deep in the pockets of the serving Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, one Jozef Lenárt. A huge feather in my cap if I could pull it off.

* * *

It didn't take long for me to learn just how much Jana was heartless in her approach to everything and everybody in life. She was almost as bad as me. There was a selfish motive behind all she had undertaken since losing her mother, even those basement confinements were for a contrived reason. She would purposely antagonise her father into sending her below the house in order to read the letters he had written when serving in the Soviet army. He had accumulated many about the extrication from Nazi hands of Leonid Khrushchev. Leonid was held by the Nazis at Majdanek concentration camp built amongst the beautiful rolling countryside on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, in Eastern Poland. His father was told of his recapture by the advancing Soviet army and Jana found copies of the pitiful memos sent by Khrushchev Senior to Joseph Stalin, begging for his son's safe repatriation to his father's keeping. She also read a copy of Stalin's refusal, and more importantly, Khrushchev's acceptance of Stalin's order of assassination.

In 1956, General Kava was amongst the select few to hear firsthand the denunciation of Stalin, who to millions of Russians was the divine father of Soviet Russia, and the man Jana's father had faithfully served. The hairs on the back of his neck stood upright in anger as he listened alone on a private radio in the army barracks in Prague. Here was the new Soviet leader telling the Russian people that their war hero had made cataclysmic errors leading to needless deaths and economic waste. According to Nikita Khrushchev, their once worshipped God was satanic. When the full contents of Khrushchev's speech became more widely known, it shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its Communist satellite allies, notably in central Europe.

General Anotoly Vladislav Kava had stored away a collection of stories in the basement listing riots throughout the USSR when Khrushchev's words were read to special meetings of party members in factories, farms, offices and universities. At such meetings in Georgia, where Stalin was born, members were outraged at the denigration by a Russian of their own national hero. Some people were killed in the ensuing uprisings, and trains arrived in Moscow from Tbilisi with their windows smashed and carriages wrecked. The general unrest in the Warsaw Pact was reaching meltdown in condemnation of new Premier Khrushchev's brand of communism.

In the autumn of 1956, Poland was ready to explode, and in Hungary an anti-Communist revolution overthrew the Stalinist party and government; General Kava pleaded restraint to the Czechoslovakian Communists and, utilising the control he had of the secret police, the StB, managed to deflect the volatile emotions being expressed throughout the country away from revolution, but he did not do that out of respect to the reforming First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He did it to save a repeat of the deaths of party leaders and political heads that happened in the other countries where bloody revolts had taken place. His opinion had not changed; he hated Khrushchev enough to want him dead.