The Redhunter Read Free Page A

to Ed about other matters, academic, national, collegiate, though never personal.
    Lord Alex Herrendon was tall, spare, well-groomed, his abundant hair silver. A trace of a smile on his face. “I was told you
     were waiting for me here,” he said. “I’m sorry if I kept you.”
    Harry stood. Herrendon motioned Harry back down with the deferential touch of a hand on his shoulder. “Please sit.” He slid
     his limber frame onto the chair Tracy Allshott had left behind. “And I will join you in a sherry. I gave the order to the
     steward coming in. You selected the favorite of my father, I discovered.”
    Lord Herrendon was animated on a subject he and Harry had resolved by correspondence to pursue.
    Herrendon eyed Harry. “It is very important to me that you were so intimately involved with Operation Keelhaul.”
    Harry Bontecou had served in the U.S. Army division that was involved in the repatriation of Russian refugees right after
     the world war. Three million Russians, against their will, had been sent back to the Soviet Union.
    Herrendon addressed Harry. “Which division were you with?”
    “The 103rd,” Harry replied.
    “Have you written on your experiences in 1946?”
    “No,” Harry said. “I never have.”
    Herrendon sipped his drink. For a few moments there was silence. Neither spoke. Then Herrendon said, “I had a jolly difficult
     time finding out where in the University of Connecticut to find you. Department of history, yes. But I did not know to put
     down ‘Storrs.’ ” He sipped and suddenly he smiled. “I should have asked Marcus Wolf to advise me. You noticed the story in
     the newspapers? He is angry at having run into some bureaucratic difficulty in getting a visa to visit America—” Harry nodded.
     Yes, he had seen the story.
    Another pause. And then, “I know about your late wife. I am sorry. But it is always easier, wouldn’t you agree—”he looked
     up—“not to get into personal matters?”
    “Yes,” Harry said, with some emphasis.
    “So let me quickly get to the matter I wrote to you about. My book. But now let me ease into the subject. Let me talk to you
     first, oh—permit an eighty-six-year-old historian to digress a little—talk a little about my Operation Keelhaul research,
     which will be a part of my bigger book. It will perhaps interest you to know that I received a call from the new Russian ambassador
     in February, telling me I would be receiving an invitation to visit the archives housed, as it happens, in Tolstoy’s estate—Leo
     Tolstoy’s estate—with permission to examine for my own purposes the archives the Soviet authorities wouldn’t let Nikolai Tolstoy,
     when doing his book on the question twenty years ago, look at.”
    Harry nodded but said nothing.
    “The offer came too late for Nikolai’s book. But they will be important for my own.” Harry looked at the eighty-six-year-old
     gentleman, admiring his confidence and apparent good health. “Which is … one reason I wrote to ask you to meet with me. A
     book about the Communist scene in the West—after the war. So I wrote back cautiously on the Tolstoy business. I am certain
     to want Russian cooperation on the book I am planning.”
    “You took the trip to Saint Petersburg?”
    “Yes. The man who dealt with me was a General Lasserov. A scholarly gentleman. We spent some time together, and we surveyed
     the estate—it is twelve hundred acres. The dwelling places—the mainhouse and the farmers’ quarters—will sleep four hundred souls. Non-dead souls. Aleksandr Lasserov, I would learn after several
     evenings together, was as a young man in Gulag for four years, sent there by Brezhnev, for what infraction I forget. He is
     eager to sort out the history of Soviet suffering and to analyze compliant responsibility for it by the West.”
    “He is talking mostly about Operation Keelhaul?”
    “Yes. Though not exclusively. He cares about American foreign policy and its neglect of Soviet