ROGUESTATE, page 5
The Chechen War was a conflict that could end only one way—badly.
CHAPTER FIVE
Voice of America,August 31, 2000 –Russian newspapers are dubbing this past month as “Black August” – because of three major disasters. The month started with a terrorist bombing in the Moscow subways. Many believe it was the act of Chechen separatists. However, this tragedy was quickly overtaken by the tragic loss of theKursk and 118 sailors. The month ended with the spectacular fire at the Ostankino Tower.
Moscow, Russian Federation
Friday, September 1, 2000
10:30 A.M. (GMT + 3:00)
Captain Eduard Gurov hurried along the Kremlin corridors. He followed two armed guards assigned to thePrezidentskaya Sluzhba Bezopasnost ’s(Presidential Security Service) uniformed service. The PSB used to be the part of the KGB’s 9thChief Directorate, and it was charged with the protection of the Russian Federations top political and military leadership.
The 1996 scandals and excesses left the PSB stripped of most of the power it had inherited from the old KGB. No longer was it allowed to conduct independent investigations into the backgrounds of the President’s political opponents, to initiate law enforcement actions, or to command vast intelligence operations. It was little more than a hobbled agency dependent on other agencies to supply the gaps in its intelligence.
Eduard Gurov worked for the Federal Security Service (FSB), and until yesterday, he was assigned to the pacification project in Chechnya. Pacification was a gentleman’s term for genocide. He had spent his summer expelling Western journalists and directing FSB troops to relocate ethnic Chechens to barbed wire camps with tents and slit trench latrines.
The Russian Army allowed Grozny to burn last spring, and Eduard made sure any anti-government forces still trapped inside the cellars, basements, and shattered buildings burned too. He was part of fifty thousand FSB troops prowling the city’s perimeters. Occasionally, they found a rebel and used the hapless soul like a soccer ball before ending their miserable life with a bullet to the back of the head. Chechnya was becoming a bloodsport that cost the Red Army twenty-five to thirty men a week.
Two days ago, his commanding officer packed him aboard a helicopter on the outskirts of Gudermes east of Grozny. Eduard’s previous assignment was to hunt down and expel a particularly irritating journalist named Nigel Turner. Turner worked for one of the smaller British tabloids, but his by-line was carried in theWashington Post, International Herald Tribune, andThe New York Times. In addition, the nettlesome right wing American Internet news sites headlined Nigel’s Chechen stories with their ubiquitous hyperlinks. No matter what the Putin government wished to believe, it was still vulnerable to diplomatic pressure and international condemnation.
Eduard suspected Nigel carried a digital camera and a satellite modem. More than one photograph came across his desk recording summary execution of rebels by FSB troops. The photographs were reminiscent of the summary execution of a North Vietnamese spy by American soldiers. The public was never interested in the facts behind the photograph, and Turner put his own corrosive slant on the story. There were enough such incidents, and Turner usually captured the moment on a dreary gray day amidst the grimy Grozny ruins. The next day the photograph appeared across the world, and Pulitzer Prize rumblings were reported from London, New York, and Los Angeles. Eduard’s superiors would not be disappointed if Nigel became another unfortunate casualty.
The two guards came to a stop before a set of double oak doors. There were two more men with specially made short-barreled AK-74-SU submachine guns held across their bodies. Eduard sensed the tension. None of the PSB men spoke to him. They merely pointed their stubby assault rifles and grunted instructions. These PSB soldiers were not the illiterate farm boys Eduard picked off the walls in Grozny after a Chechen suicide bomber ignited his shrapnel-laden body. These boys had hard eyes and sure reflexes. Most likely they received training, real bullets for the rifles, and regular pay.
Eduard presented his credentials. Unlike most people, these PSB troops took their time to verify his wallet information against a clipboard. Contemptuously, the PSB handed Eduard his credentials and opened the door.
Eduard stepped through the door into a world beyond his comprehension. He recognized President Vladimir Putin noting his trademark dead-shark eyes and bad haircut. On Putin’s left sat Vice Admiral Viktor Patrushev, Chief of Naval Operations for the General Staff. To Putin’s right, General Anatoly Kvashnin—Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Further down the table, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev sat next to Interior Minister Vladimir Rushaylo.
Lesser aides sat behind their respective bosses. Eduard counted seventeen officers with clinking medals, and civilians wearing expensive Italian suits. His wrinkled uniform betrayed the thousand-mile journey from Grozny to Moscow. He squared his shoulders and waited for the doors to close behind him.
Putin fixed Eduard with flat dead eyes. “And you are…?”
Interior Minister Vladimir Rushaylo leaned forward on the table after one of his aides whispered to his ear, “This would be Captain Eduard Gurov.”
Eduard nodded curtly. The FSB was part of Rushaylo’s Interior Ministry. It caused Eduard to evaluate the reasons for his hasty trip—who had he insulted? “Yes, sir,” Eduard heard himself reply.
Putin leaned back in his chair considering the FSB officer. His own background went back to the cold days when the KGB ruthlessly ruled. “The man from Grozny,” said Putin, savoring the words like fine wine.
One chair remained at the table. It was on the other end of the table facing Putin and it had all the invitation of a pockmarked wall used by firing squads. “Have a seat,” offered Putin.
Eduard nodded again, noting for the first time the scowl on General Anatoly Kvashnin’s features. Terrific, he already had an adversary in the room, and he still had no idea why he had flown a thousand miles in the twenty hours. He stepped forward gingerly and sat down.
“Excellency, I repeat: I do not think this is a good idea,” pressed General Kvashnin.
Putin raised a hand silencing the General. “We will listen to what Minister Rushaylo has to say. I understand your concerns,” he continued. Turning from the General to Eduard and added, “Captain Gurov understands the secret world. He will not betray a trust.” The shark eyes held only a deadly promise of dismemberment should Eduard misjudge his authority.
Eduard croaked, “Yes, sir.”
Putin flashed him an engaging smile and asked, “How is Grozny?”
“Still burning,” he said quickly.
“Yes,” hissed Putin, reminding himself of the promise never to rebuild Grozny. It was a talisman to all who would dare oppose his government. He relished the anguish his army caused, and remembered the serious business that brought them together this afternoon. He discarded warnings that Chechnya was a black hole swallowing the still-functioning remains of the Red Army. He intended that the Chechens would bleed and bleed until all that remained were their bleached bones.
“What do you know about theKursk ?” demanded Admiral Patrushev.
Eduard pondered the question and wondered what the largest tank battle of the Great patriotic War had to do with anything. “Admiral, I have been in the field for several weeks. I apologize as to my ignorance…”
Defense Minister Sergeyev scowled loudly, “How can this peasant…”
Interior Minister Rushaylo cut off his chess partner, “Igor, it is because he has been in the field performing his duties that he is the right man.”
“And the Ostankino Tower fire…?” mused Putin.
Eduard crinkled his brow, “Sir, I slept most of the way from Grozny. I have not seen the news in two weeks.”
Sergeyev waited for Putin to continue, but black dead eyes continued to watch. The corpulent Defense Minister shrugged. “Proceed, Admiral.”
Eduard’s eyes darted from Minister to Admiral to Putin like a deranged pinball. Sand would have been an improvement over the dead feeling behind his lips—right man for what?
“Twenty days ago theKursk —pennant number K141—was sunk in the Barents Sea,” recited Admiral Patrushev. “We have floated several explanations for the international press suggesting everything from a collision with a foreign submarine to a World War II mine.”
Eduard nodded his head and asked, “Excuse me, Admiral—what is or was theKursk ?”
“A submarine!” snapped General Kvashnin. The Chief of the General Staff waved a disgusted hand in Eduard’s direction. “Send him back to his rock pile. He knows nothing!”
Putin remained mute focusing his attention on Eduard.
Minister Rushaylo turned sharply to General Kvashnin snapping, “He knows who Shamil Basayev is.”
Eduard latched onto the name of the man he had been hunting for ten months as if it was a life preserver on a stormy sea. “Yes, Minister, I know the man,” he answered, desperately unsure what dismissal meant, but sensing he had no desire to find out.
Shamil Basayev was the de facto leader of the Chechen rebel army. He was a soft-spoken man who kept his family in neighboring Dagestan. He managed a far-flung group of field commanders as he prosecuted aJihad against the Russian invaders. In a holy war, there is no room for compromise and no quarter given. He was determined to drive the enemy from his homeland. While the Red Army had easily occupied the Kamyshev, Kalinovskaya, Nadterchnaya, Kargalinskaya and Chervlennaya with relative ease, the mountainous regions to the south proved much more difficult. If there was one man whose head the Russian Commanders wanted mounted on a pike, it was Shamil Basayev.
Rushaylo allowed his lips to fold upwards, or perhaps he had cramps; Eduard remained uncertain. “We can fill him in about your precious submarine, but there are not many men who understand Shamil Basayev. Captain Gurov is one of the few.”
“A submarine we can’t easily replace, Vlad,” reminded Minister Sergeyev. The bitter truth was closer to impossible. Numerous military programs remained on the drawing board or unfinished in shipyards and factories. The Russian Federation was nearly bankrupt due to rampant corruption and extraordinary ineptitude. TheKursk was a permanent loss to the Russian Federation—they did not even have the opportunity to sell it to the Chinese.
Rushaylo nodded impatiently. He understood the woeful inadequacies of the Russian Navy and the last weeks had demonstrated the need for trained crews before the entire world. Russians have no sense of humor when it comes to their own blunders.
Eighteen months in Chechnya and ten months chasing Basayev taught Eduard to recognize fear. These men were afraid—at least, the Ministers were. The military men were angry and they yearned for a target they could easily smash. Basayev and his bandit formations preferred to hit and run. Mayhem and slaughter were Basayev’s trademarks as the suicide bombers had become more brazen since the rebels abandoned Grozny. Eduard ordered men assigned to his command to shoot first and send the bomb-sniffing dogs in later. After all, they were only Chechens, and Chechens were not even human.
Admiral Patrushev cleared his throat and continued. “TheKursk was anOscar II class submarine assigned to the Northern Fleet in Murmansk. This summer the Northern Fleet conducted combat exercises in the Barents Sea. Three weeks ago, theKursk suffered a massive explosion. The entire crew of one hundred seven men, nine fleet officers, and two civilian weapons engineers were lost.”
Patrushev did not mention that his son was one of the fleet officers assigned to theKursk . If he had believed the disinformation campaign charging a foreign submarine with the collision, it is quite likely the Admiral would have launched his own private war against the Americans. The letter sitting in the folder next to Putin suggested a different enemy. Another war was bleeding the army white. The last twenty years mocked the Russian Bear with failures in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the loss of their empire. Admiral Patrushev wanted to kill someone very much, but Shamil Basayev was nothing more than a name.
“We believe a torpedo exploded inside the forward torpedo room of theKursk and inflicted massive damage to six of the ten watertight compartments. It was very quick.” He concluded wondering if his son had suffered and promising the Chechen Moslems and their holy war that they would feel a father’s wrath.
“Are you familiar with the name Dzhokhar Dudayev?” asked Rushaylo.
Eduard bobbed his head affirmatively. Dudayev was a former Soviet Air Force General who left the military behind when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. He found himself at the head of a parade and became Chechnya’s president. Dudayev brought with him a desire for freedom, a hatred of the Soviet system, and knowledge of the army’s weaknesses. It made him a lethal foe. The Red Army had managed to kill him with a massive rocket attack in 1996.
“Ancient history, Minister,” replied Eduard.
“Yes, yes,” murmured Rushaylo. The Minister gave Putin a sidelong glance along the polished table cluttered with briefing papers and water glasses. Eduard became acutely aware of the dead eyes evaluating his person. The President of the Russian Federation made a gesture with his shoulders calculating that Captain Eduard Gurov could easily vanish into the Gulag. The vast Siberian wilderness where summer was measured in mere weeks and winter in long months was sprinkled with camps where a man could be lost forever. It was tool built by the Czars, and some things would never be dismantled.
Satisfied with the silent communication, Rushaylo turned back to Eduard, and the forty-year-old FSB Captain wondered anew why he had joined these men.
It was Putin who spoke next. “Captain Gurov,” he began.
Eduard’s attention returned to the head of the table.
“I would be less than honest with you if I said everyone agrees with your presence today. However, Minister Rushaylo reports you are the man for the job.”
Eduard nodded his head slowly as Putin shuffled through a stack of papers until he came to a dog-eared personnel folder. After a moment, Eduard realized it was his personnel folder and the bottom of his stomach dropped through the floor. His mind wandered back to the fearful sensations bouncing off the walls and the quick-witted guards. These were men accustomed to instilling fear in others—little had changed in the leadership of the Russian Federation besides titles and stationary. The Czars still ruled.
“According to your service record, you began your career when the KGB was still a formidable force,” Putin intoned proudly. “We knew how to deal with Chechens and Jews and those pesky Believers didn’t we?”
Slave labor still existed beyond the Urals. Rumors of the camps and a religious zealotry contributed to the problems of taking rebels alive. The Chechen bandits believed a paradise awaited them on the other side of death’s curtain. Eduard knew better—there was nothing but cold, black, blankness, or so he believed. He dare not express his own doubts as to the veracity of his atheistic teachings—yet, so many other things he had been taught as a child and a soldier turned out to be false.
“Yes, Excellency,” he said quickly.
“We asked about the traitor Dudayev a few minutes ago. We were in a similar position in 1995. We had Grozny more or less surrounded and could have brought a stronger force to bear. We could have finished these bandits then!” Putin declared. His eyes flashed magnetically as his lips barely concealed the ravenous desire to rip Dudayev asunder.
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev folded his pudgy paws on the table as Putin reclined in his chair. “General Dudayev understood chess. Do you play?”
Eduard managed to nod.
Sergeyev sighed heavily. He was a man who lived with secrets and revealing any was akin to sending his favorite child off to war. “In chess the best way to keep your opponent off balance is to threaten the king,” he observed. “Dudayev did just that when he planted a nuclear weapon in Gorky Park and promised to detonate it if we did not back off in Chechnya.”
“We should have crushed them at the time,” muttered General Kvashnin.
The rumors had filtered through the Moscow offices, but no one ever found a weapon. The peace negotiated seemed reasonable given the problems the Red Army was having in prosecuting action inside Grozny.
“General Dudayev knew we would disregard his threat as the desperate ramblings of a rebel, so he included proof.” The word came out with the velocity and viscosity of a yellowish, gray phlegm ball. “The class weapon he threatened to detonate had a very specific and quite secret arming code. General Dudayev included the code in his note.” Sergeyev did not add that no one in the Defense Ministry could verify the veracity of the code. It turned out the knowledge had been discarded to the KGB’s dusty archive shelves, and the weapon was the brainchild of one of his predecessors—Iurii I. Andropov, Chairman of the KGB and General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was a man who knew how to crush his enemies.
The FSB’s secret institutional memory, inherited from the KGB, suffered a peculiar form of amnesia, and it could only recall vague rumors suggesting a class of weapons similar to the one Dudayev claimed to possess. Three years later, the Russian leadership was astounded to learn Dudayev had supplied the correct arming code, and the weapon he threatened to use had been built at Arzamus-16, the Soviet Union’s premier nuclear weapons design laboratory.
Sergeyev examined Eduard’s furrowed brow and added soothingly, “Not to worry; your Chechen rebels do not have a nuclear bomb. Those weapons have been…” he fumbled for the word, “…been accounted for.” It was a fiction everyone seemed pleased to believe and a few even prayed fervently to be true. There was a deeper secret these men would not let loose even after the fact. Eduard had no desire to probe the state’s accounting.
“Two days ago we received a new letter from the Chechens. This time it was signed by Shamil Basayev,” explained the Defense Minister.
