Comrade Charlie Read Free Page B

slightly built Georgian and First Deputy of a service to which he had devoted his life to the exclusion of all else, even marriage. The other was his immediate subordinate, Alexei Berenkov, also a general, and head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its overseas espionage arm.
    It was a mark of their friendship that Kalenin had alerted Berenkov at the moment of the Kremlin summons, bringing the man from the First Chief Directorate on the Moscow ring road to the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square.
    The chief executive offices of the KGB are on the seventh floor of the original pre-revolutionary building, quite separate from the wartime, prisonlaboured extension added by Stalin. Berenkov waited for Kalenin’s return at a window overlooking the square, with its beard-tufted statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the service’s founder, and at the lights pricking on against the evening’s dusk in the GUM department store beyond, wondering how many others had stood at windows in the building as he was now, mourning the passing of previous traditions. A lot, he guessed: just as a lot more would, in the future, whatever that future was for their organization.
    Berenkov was a giant of a man, big in every way, booming-voiced and flamboyant-gestured. He was rarely affected by personal doubt, even during a period of imprisonment in Britain and thought that the current apprehension was unnecessary, supremely confident of his own ability to survive government policy changes. Which made Berenkov an unusual person. But then he was already unusual at his level within the KGB, someone with practical, gutchurning experience of what it was like to be an espionage officer in the field. From a London base he had operated clandestinely for more than ten years. Apart from rare snatched reunions under KGB guard in the hideaway places, he’d endured for all those years the separation from Valentina, the wife whom he adored. And still remained a getting-to-know stranger to Georgi, the son whose growing up from a child into a near-adult teenager he’d never known. Now Berenkov, a florid-faced man still heavy from the indulgence of being a Europe-wandering wine importer, which had been his London cover, enjoyed his equally indulgent and elitist existence in Moscow. He justifiably considered he had earned it all; the city centre apartment and the summer dacha in the Lenin Hills and the favoured Black Sea holidays and the Chaika limousine and the concessionary store facilities.
    The door into Kalenin’s office was electronically secured and Berenkov turned from the window at the faint sound of it being disengaged. Kalenin, a bearded man who did not often smile, appeared more serious than usual: he wore his full uniform, which indicated the formality of the encounter from which he had returned. He unbuttoned the tunic as he crossed the room, slumping into the high-backed chair.
    â€˜Well,’ he said, resigned. ‘We’ve been set our challenge by the new order!’
    Berenkov walked closer, finding a chair of his own. ‘The Directorate? Or ourselves?’
    â€˜It’s one and the same, isn’t it?’ said Kalenin, whose primary function was chief tactician of the KGB’s overseas activity.
    â€˜So what is it?’
    â€˜The Strategic Defense Initiative,’ announced Kalenin, shortly. ‘We will not only match but beat the American development.’
    â€˜What!’ said Berenkov, temporarily off-balanced.
    â€˜Those were the words,’ elaborated Kalenin wearily. ‘We are to identify the builders. We are to discover every detail of their technology and manufacture. Having obtained it we are to turn it over to our space technicians who will construct whatever the Americans are developing but in advance of that American development. And we will launch ahead of the Americans, proving yet again that the Soviet Union are leaders in space exploration.’
    â€˜Have they any