***
The Russian Airborne Forces, or VDV, sometimes also known as Voiska Dyadyi Vacyi, or Uncle Vasya’s Troops, after their legendary postwar commander, Vassily Filipovich Margelov, are not élite Army units. Instead, the VDV are a separate but minor branch of the Armed Forces and like all separate and minor branches, no matter how good, constantly engaged in bureaucratic and budgetary warfare with all the other separate and minor and separate and major branches. General Trimenko rose to command the VDV in no small measure due to his political skills and contacts. Little escaped him, and he made it a point and a passion to personally select the next generation of generals. He mentored them. Dmitri Borisovich Suslov was his favorite. Therefore, he had a significant political interest in an American Jewess whom Suslov had praised perhaps a bit too often and perhaps a bit too ardently. He was still pondering what that political interest might ultimately involve when his aide, a young captain recovering from wounds incurred in Chechnya, showed her in.
For an instant, he couldn’t remember whether he should kiss this woman’s hand, which was the Russian custom, or shake it, which was the American custom, and which Russians thought was fearfully masculine. Then he realized the absurdity of his thoughts and instead of waiting for her to extend her hand to him, as Russian men did with women, he simply offered her his hand, a senior to a junior. “Thank you for being my guest. You appear to have walked. I would have sent a car for you.”
She smiled, her cheeks bright with the cold, a package clutched in her mittens. “Thank you, comrade General, but I wouldn’t miss the first real snowfall of the year.” She held out the package. “Good Georgian wine, if I may.”
“Indeed, there is always something magical about the first snow. Thank you for this. I understand American drinking customs differ from ours.”
“They do. We do not generally toast very much, and it is common to drink slowly while conversing.”
“Well then, Doctor, may I pour you a glass?” The captain materialized a corkscrew from a part of the universe that only he could see, then poured for them both. “Leave us, please, and show in Colonel Suslov when he arrives.”
“Yes, comrade General.”
“Do sit down.” He gestured to an upholstered chair by the fireplace. “Satisfy my curiosity, if you please. I shall ask plainly. You’re an American, a woman and a Jew.” Politely, he used evreika, not the offensive zhidovka. “How do you deal with this? Soldiers of any sort not being known for their tact.”
As accustomed as she had become to Russian directness, Olivia found herself blinking. “Well, American is not really an issue, although my lab administrator thinks that I am a magician because I am an American. I have a similar opinion of your mathematicians.” She looked at him to see if he was following her; he nodded. “As a woman, I neither ask for nor expect nor accept any special consideration. As a Jewess, I follow the Israeli tradition of giving as good as I get, and maybe a little bit better. Sometimes before I get it. Any one of these three could be a problem. However, I find the combination enables most soldiers to behave well. Also, I am much more a curiosity than a minority. That makes it easier.”
Trimenko managed not to choke on his wine. “As an Airborne officer, I think that’s an excellent Israeli tradition. Unfortunately, to be Russian seems to make one, to one degree or another, an anti-Semite. It seems to be, alas, in our blood.”
“I know that. I get some looks and I’ve heard some comments. But since I don’t look or act like anyone’s idea of a Jew, it’s just the usual comments are about being a woman in a male environment. Mostly from outside the brigade.”
“They would be. You must come as a shock to some.”
“I do.” She offered Trimenko a satisfied smile that he couldn’t help returning. “But my security team is extremely protective of me and very loyal.”
“You do know that safer, more comfortable accommodations are available for you at higher headquarters? This is an offer, nothing more, you understand?”
“I do. Thank you. But my work requires immediate access to people using my equipment. It speeds up field repairs and modifications and gives me ideas for the future.”
“Indeed, Doctor. You may understand where you can take us in ten years, but we understand that what you are doing now is so much better than what we have or could have gotten on our own.”
“Thank you. In any event, wherever I go, there is someone to look after me.”
“Doctor, you know that your odds mount up every time you go outside the wire.”
“I do know that. Nevertheless, I came here to do something.”
“And you are doing it and we like the results very much. Therefore, we will let you go on as you have.” He looked at her steadily. “I imagine that you long ago resolved personally never to be taken alive. I’m sure you also know, even if you haven’t been so informed, that we will not permit you to be taken alive.”
“I understand,” she said, flinching within. “If captured, I would likely be…” Her voice trailed off.
“And then sent on to Iran or whomever might wish to make use of your expertise. One of the penalties of success in war is that your enemies stay up at night, figuring out how you did it. Our enemies and their patrons have figured you out. Or so I have been informed. Ah…Colonel Suslov has arrived.”
Olivia inhaled a bit as Suslov, whom she’d neither seen nor spoken with for weeks, entered in dress uniform. The two men embraced and kissed in the Russian manner, with a genuine affection that Olivia still found startling. Then she rose and she and Suslov did not kiss. Or embrace. Her scent, beautiful and proud, made it hard for him to breathe, and he realized he was looking at her with genuine admiration. She’d allowed her hair to grow out a little and regained the weight she burnt off when deployed. Now it was her turn to appraise him. She had never really acknowledged that he was extremely handsome, with his gem-cut features and ivory skin, his startling green eyes and deep chestnut hair. He was also extremely brave, if his many awards, particularly one single gold star, hanging from an unembellished red ribbon, meant anything. He also wore the new Russian Federal award of the Order of Merit to the Motherland, for his service in Grozny.
Trimenko watched them shake hands very briefly, in the manner of two people trying not to acknowledge the obvious. Ah, well. And why was he not surprised?
Aware of the general’s appraising look, Olivia sat down. The aide materialized a glass of wine for Suslov, then left.
“Colonel,” said Trimenko genially, “Doctor Tolchinskaya and I were just discussing how she deals with being an American Jewish woman in this situation. Might I request your observations?”
“Major Malinovsky taught her to box,” he said dryly, looking down at his wine with a Russian man’s typical suspicion of such a beverage.
Trimenko exploded into laughter, then caught himself. “And has she had opportunity to make use of such excellent instruction?”
Olivia blushed. Suslov muttered, “It is spoken of with reverence and awe.” And with that, they moved to dinner.
After, they were drinking juice and mineral water and mostly sober when General Trimenko fixed Olivia in his gaze. “Now what, Doctor Tolchinskaya? Professionally and personally.”
Olivia was startled. Instinctively, she found herself looking to Suslov, knowing as she did so that the general was watching her. Suslov’s face was absolutely unreadable. Not hostile, not blank, not even calculating, but unreadable. Waiting. She waited him out, her eyes searching his for what he wanted, for what he needed. There was no help there. Olivia had accepted the dinner invitation because declining it had never really been an option. But she had not expected to find herself in a conversation that was in its own way as high-pressure and high-stakes as her conversations with Colonel Marianenko and Major Suslova back in Tver nearly a year and a half before. She realized she had been exceptionally foolish, not to be prepared for a question that sounded neutral but was in fact intensely personal. General Trimenko’s cu
riosity, insofar as it involved his favorite protégé, was far from abstract and far from entirely benign.
She was, she realized anew and intensely, a foreign woman far from home with no power, no real rights, in a small room with two very civilized men who were nevertheless immensely hard. Olivia decided that, for the next moment or two, she would be as hard as they were. She had earned it.
“I came here to use my brain, to deliver useful…”
“Toys,” Trimenko said in a quiet voice, intended to provoke her, to learn whatever might be of relevance.
“As you will. I am not offended. The value of my toys—I often think of them as my pets—has been proven to the extent that you now consider my capture a matter of State security. No country places such value on its toy makers. Russia has kept its word to me. I have not been asked to do anything that harms my country. Under the circumstances, we have behaved morally, I towards Russia and Russia towards me. When I came here, the science and the engineering were real to me. The people and the politics, not so much. You may fairly ask me what I was thinking back then about someday coming to terms with people and politics and I cannot answer you intelligently. I didn’t think of it at all. I know this. Just as my work belongs in the world, I belong in the world. In fact, because my work belongs in the world, I belong in the world. This is the part of the world in which I find myself and I am far from unhappy about it.”
“You should know,” Trimenko said slowly, “that I was Colonel Suslov’s battalion commander in 1978, when we took down the Kabul airport. I played a similar role as a junior officer in 1968 when we suppressed Prague Spring.”
“Along with my mother,” said Suslov suddenly, “who, with her snipers, played her own role in Budapest in 1956 and before that, in East Germany.”
“I understand that you and the General go back a long way. I also understand that your family has a certain military tradition. Are you giving me to understand that this tradition consists largely of suppressing non-Russian peoples who deserved better?”
“Our families and to a lesser extent we ourselves lived through these cruelties, you understand,” Trimenko said. “They did not occur in a vacuum. Czechoslovakia in ‘68 was not Hungary in ‘56 and still less East Germany in ’53. We always understood that permitting any crack in the Warsaw Pact would result in its collapse. It took us longer to realize we no longer needed the Warsaw Pact. There was a joke amongst us back then. ‘Russia is the only country on earth surrounded by hostile Communist powers.’ We finally chose not to be surrounded any longer. At least, not to the West. It was, all things considered, a wise decision.”
“I apologize,” Olivia said with dignity.
“There is no need. You have your own history. And now you are a small part of ours,” Trimenko said, adding sugar to his tea, offering her the bowl, realizing as she accepted it from him that even her hands were scarred.
“Indeed, I am a small part of your history now. So I wish to tell you that I can no longer function as someone simply providing tactical toys. The work matters, of course, and I intend for it to go on. I came here thinking only of my work. That is no longer enough.”
“It would be less complicated for us if it were,” Trimenko said. It was not, he realized, saying these things that made her gaze so difficult to bear. It was the knowledge that anyone could be direct. But directness with honesty was rare.
“I know the implications of my work at the tactical level and beyond. But I should like to contribute more than toys.”
“What are you asking?”
“I don’t know. I know that you have to rebuild your nation and one part of that is rebuilding the Army. My toys, my pets, point to the road you must travel.”
“We have studied how your Army recovered from Vietnam. After all, it did quite well in Desert Storm.” He was fencing with her, guarded but gentle.
“The Girl Scouts could have done as well with that kind of technology against that kind of foe.”
An unfairly clever woman. Trimenko decided to add a little pressure before asking the question that might crush her. “Do you know that in 1937, the NKVD arrested, amongst others, the aircraft designer Mikhail Tupolev and his design team, along with the Petlyakov and Myasischev design teams and turned them into prison workshops?”
“I do.” Her eyes never left Trimenko’s. “A prison workshop is not in the bargain I made. It never will be.”
“We do not do such things any more. But we do have closed cities. Still. The one here near Moscow is Krasnoznamensk, and there is Sosnovy Bor near Petersburg. Living and research conditions in them are, all things considered, quite good. Far better than what you enjoy in Chechnya. And given what you are doing, you would be regarded as relevant. I am saying this. If you wish to move beyond tactical toys to sensors of strategic significance, it is possible. But not in your small lab. If you entered one of these places, you would be cared for accordingly. Professionally and personally.”
“General Trimenko, I must express my doubt that, as Chief of Airborne, you have standing in these matters or authority to offer me anything. So I’ll assume that we’re playing games to test my reactions. Very well. You, as in the State, can confine me to one of your luxurious cages. That is within your power, just as you can kill me. My lab administrator can now replicate the basic technology I have created. He won’t do it very well, and neither he nor anyone else can take it where I can, but he will be adequate to your immediate needs and he is, after all, Russian. You can do anything in the world to me except the one thing you imported me for. You cannot make me think or create at any level. And I will do neither in a closed city, no matter what the professional opportunities and satisfactions, or how luxurious my cage.”
Suslov rose, moved his chair so he was sitting very close to her. “Doctor Tolchinskaya, the country we were born into and genuinely loved and served as best we could is no more. It cannot be brought back as it was, and should not be. We knew how senseless and needless so much of its cruelty was.” Sorrow in his voice. “Now you are offering what you can to help us resurrect something out of the wreckage that is Russia today, so that it can be part of the world without shame. Do I understand you correctly?”
“Yes. I say this as an American who will never cease to be American, who certainly is not a Communist, who does not make the mistake of thinking she is Russian, much less wanting to be Russian. I came here to become what I always knew I was, including how I wanted to live. How can you of all men want that I should be less than what I am?”
“I could tell you that it would be easier for him,” Trimenko answered, his voice now gentle and warm. “You have known him long enough to know how ambitious he is, in the same way that you are. Command of a Spetsnaz brigade is not a normal part of the track to higher command in Airborne. But it can be. I asked Colonel Suslov to take it, arranged for him to take it, because 22 Brigade was a broken unit we desperately needed for this war, and because his success with that brigade would be an unanswerable demonstration of his fitness for higher command. He succeeded. I know I speak for Colonel Suslov that he would not demand or expect from or want for you any less in your own field, now or in the future.
“But that is only part of the matter. Doctor Tolchinskaya, this is a man I would see as Chief of Airborne to follow me. He or whoever holds that job will deal with problems that are unimaginable even by the standards of today.”
“Then, comrade General,” Olivia answered, “by that standard and by the standard of my own proven worth, I have earned what I am asking, which at this point is to look seriously towards the strategic development of my work. I intend to continue to earn the right to do that as long as I live.”
“I recognize the potential value of your work for what I and others are trying to accomplish,” Trimenko answered. “However, Doctor Tolchinskaya, you must understand that this is not entirely about your future. It is also about Colonel Suslov’s.”
“I…don’t understand,” Olivia said defiantly. The
two men looked at her with identical expressions. That is unworthy of you. And then she realized she could no longer pretend. And then she slowly turned a deep, painful, dark red. And then she said, very simply, “I’m an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” Suslov admonished gently. “You simply lost track of the purpose of the conversation.”
“I’m an idiot,” Olivia repeated.
“Have it your way,” Trimenko said affably. “I will note that you have studiously avoided admitting the real reason you’re here tonight. You will note that I’ve given you ample opportunity to evade the issue. You have taken it.”
“So that I could prove that I’m an idiot?”
“Intentionally or not, you have almost succeeded. I must now benevolently permit you to succeed no more. Are you aware of why you’re here tonight?”
“To have the Chief of Airborne make me a shiddoch,” she murmured.
“Or to stop one,” Suslov replied. “Major Malinovsky once told me what a shiddoch is.”
“Then someone please tell me,” Trimenko interrupted.
“An arranged marriage.”
“Excuse me,” Olivia said hastily. “I have overstayed my welcome. I’ll be leaving for America immediately. Or maybe Israel. Or Alaska, where I have never been, although as that was Russian once, it may be again. Or maybe…”
“Doctor, you have not come close to overstaying.”
“Would you permit me to briefly excuse myself while I come to terms with this catastrophe?”
“Of course. My aide will show you the way.”
When she returned, both men stood to her. They smiled benignly. “Doctor, may I send you home in a car?”
“Yes, thank you, General.”
“Colonel, would you see her out?”
“It will be my pleasure, General.” In the foyer, Suslov wrapped Olivia’s soft grey lace shawlette around her throat and shoulders and helped her into her brindled coat, careful not to actually touch her despite his obvious desire. Because of his obvious desire. “You were not an idiot,” he said softly.
“I was. I knew why I was there. But I hoped that if I talked long enough, hard enough and fast enough, the two of you would either forget or I could at least distract you long enough to escape. Tell me, did you come up for this specifically?”
“No. And yes. My sister told me that she made you a certain promise.”
She looked straight at him. “Yes.”
“Much the same as the promise we made each other. Never to live in captivity of any kind.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad she did. Of all things, I hate slavery. The enslavement of women by men, beyond any compromise. You know our mother Inna was a slave for a time, and when she killed her ‘husband’—her captor—and escaped… her mother, father, and brothers wanted to murder her because she had ‘shamed’ them. This was in 1941 and the Soviet Army was so desperate for infantry that they were even accepting women. They called you, they trained you, and if you managed to kill a German or two before you were killed, you had done your duty. She insisted upon changing her name and her nationality, which she was allowed to do because her grandmother was Russian, and perhaps also because some NKVD officer understood that after what she’d been through and done, Russia was getting a usable new Russian. She became that and more. She would never, for the rest of her life, have anything to do with Crimean Tartar nationality and I know she never grieved for the deaths of her family when Stalin deported the Tartars. So remember: Many things may be imposed upon you. This is Russia and you have chosen a post of danger. But we will protect you from any attempt to reduce you to slavery.”
She could hear the car arrive. “Do you speak for your general as well?”
“Why else would he ask me to see you out? Now go home, my friend. We will see each other in Chechnya.”
“Thank you.”