The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

in Karlshorst, the heart of the huge KGB detachment in East Berlin. Once a fashionable residential district, Karlshorst found its place in history when the German Wehrmacht signed the documents of surrender in May 1945. The museum building itself, the site of the historic unconditional capitulation by Field Marshal Keitel, Admiral von Friedenburg, and General Stumpf, had in the early days of the Third Reich served as a Wehrmacht officers club, but for the last forty-five years the word Karlshorst had become synonymous with the Soviet Committee for State Security. And now I was walking along the quiet Rheinsteinstrasse with Rem Krassilnikov on a brilliant fall day in Berlin forty-five years after the German surrender and one day before the reunification of East and West Germany. Ted Price, who had succeeded Hathaway as counterintelligence chief, was with me for the Gavrilov meetings, as was Moscow chief Mike Cline. I had left my colleagues back in the KGB safe house with Leonid Nikitenko, the First Directorate counterintelligence chief, while I took a walk with Krassilnikov.

“Milton, do you know how many people died in the Great Patriotic War?” Krassilnikov said, inspired, I assumed, by the solemnity of the setting and the historical shift that was just a day away.

“Russians or total?” I asked, wondering where he was headed with his question. I did not yet know the man well, but each time we had met he had revealed a little more of himself. I had been surprised to learn earlier that he was an admirer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but not necessarily Robert Browning, he’d insisted with a smile. Now, I sensed, I would be catching another glimpse of this complex man, something less poetic than either Elizabeth or Robert Browning, something closer to the suffering Russian soul.

“I’ll give you both numbers. It was more than twenty-one million Russians, and about fifty million people worldwide. All because of what started here in Germany before you were born.” Krassilnikov, always careful with his choice of words, seemed preoccupied. Something was clearly bothering him, something beyond the casualty figures for the Second World War.

“How many troops did you lose in the battle of Berlin, Rem?” I asked, probing.

“More than you lost in the whole war. You Americans were clever, as usual, to let us take Berlin. For every German we killed, Marshal Zhukov lost four men. And do you know what happens tomorrow? Do you know why I wanted to have the meetings here start before tomorrow?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“Yes. Because even though we fought our way into Berlin forty-five years ago at great human cost, and even though we have been one of the four powers occupying Berlin since 1945, after tomorrow, I am told, I will need to apply for a visa to come to Berlin. Our military will have some arrangement until they formally withdraw, but my colleagues and I will need visas after tomorrow. Do you find irony in this?”

The truth was, I did. This was my third meeting with Krassilnikov in less than a year, and I had seen our personal relationship evolve from that of archadversaries ever wary of the other’s motivations to opponents being drawn by events into areas of common concern. The evolution was incremental, extremely hesitant on both sides, and nothing even approaching trust had yet developed. But there was a realization that our world was changing. The changing world was a new element in the relationship with this man so consumed by the counterintelligence challenge he faced from the CIA that he could spare no time to contemplate another reality—that his system was faltering. Rem Krassilnikov, the man whose first name was an acronym for “World Revolution”—Revolutsky Mir—could not see that it was over, except perhaps in fleeting moments that he could as quickly subordinate. He still seemed convinced that if only the CIA would stop undermining socialist unity and the USSR at every point of contact, the crisis would pass. In that moment, I thought Krassilnikov was trapped in the same time warp that had captured Paul Redmond. The two men ought to meet, I thought. They had much in common.

Krassilnikov and I had taken this little walk at his suggestion. I always kept in the back of my mind the possibility that, depending on the circumstances, I might one day offer him an alternative to his KGB pension. I was certain that he had the same thoughts about me. It was what we did for a living. So when he suggested a walk during a break in our Gavrilov meetings in the KGB safe house two hundred yards behind us, I agreed. Now, walking down the Rheinsteinstrasse with this white-haired KGB lieutenant general, I saw a man opening up for just a moment. With Germany about to be reunited in less than twenty-four hours inside the NATO structure, it was all but over for the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Western Group of Forces was still in place in East Germany, but that seemed as much because there were growing fears that the Soviet government wouldn’t be able to provide the returning soldiers and their families housing and support if they all returned at once. Here in Germany, where the Soviets had made the Western Group a way of life, things were predictable, at least. Back in Moscow the future was a wide-open field of uncertainties.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course there’s irony in this. Would you have predicted it?”

“Would anybody?” Rem asked without sarcasm.

“Probably not. Germany is reunited tomorrow. The Warsaw Pact can’t last. It’s over. Now we’re both faced with trying to figure how we adjust to each other in the changed world. Maybe it was easier before all this change. Have you ever thought about that?”

“Who has time? I have a job to do, as I am certain you do. But we will have to start working toward a more rational relationship,” Krassilnikov said.

“You’ve said that before, Rem. I think I agree. I’m still