The Domino Conspiracy Read online

  Now Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu, the former defense minister recently elevated to premier, had been summoned to Nikita Khrushchev’s office, which came as no surprise to either of them. Hoxha was a baby-faced man of medium build and moist, feminine eyes. Shehu was tall and gaunt with long, narrow hands, rounded shoulders, a wild nest of black, curly hair that tended to resist a comb and long, thin slightly bowed legs. By any standard he was a striking man, but this polished façade hid a remarkably brutal personality.

  “Let us speak clearly,” Khrushchev began. He had shed his suit coat, his shirt showing large sweat lines; the fringe of white down that remained of his hair stuck to his head with perspiration. “You were out of order, out of bounds.”

  “We’re not your puppets,” Hoxha said, but Shehu sensed tentativeness in his response. This came as no surprise; Hoxha was best on a stage where there was no chance of give-and-take. He had always been the theoretician and scholar, while it fell to Shehu to make things work, which meant shedding the blood of their enemies.

  “It’s time to put your national affairs in order!” Khrushchev thundered. Translation: Support us, not the Chinese. Or else.

  “Only when the Soviets share their wealth and only after they put their own affairs in order,” Hoxha answered. Translation: There would be cooperation only if the Soviets shared atomic-weapons technology with the Chinese and if Khrushchev retracted his long-standing condemnation of Stalin.

  Khrushchev immediately leaped to his feet, shook his beefy little fist at them and screamed, “You are pissing on me!”

  “Take back your allegations,” Shehu demanded before Hoxha could speak.

  “Where shall I put them?” the Soviet leader shouted.

  “Up your fat Ukrainian ass!” Shehu snapped.

  This exchange ended the meeting. Comrade Hoxha nearly ran out of the paneled office, but Shehu stopped, reversed course to Khrushchev’s desk and stuck a finger in the General Secretary’s face. “You think you can throw stones at us, but I warn you that your stones will fall only on your head.”

  These were the last words spoken directly between the Albanian leaders and Khrushchev’s revisionist renegades. Within hours Shehu and Hoxha had fled Moscow and taken a train through Czechoslovakia and Austria; one of their own aircraft came to fetch them from Italy. Hoxha had cowered in their compartment the entire journey, fearful that the Khrushchevites would retaliate, but they arrived home without incident.

  Malinovsky was pleased when word of this confrontation reached him. The split was assured; now the Albanians would sit seething in their mountain fortress contemplating ways to get even. Khrushchev had already dispatched high-level emissaries to Tirana to find ways to bring the Albanians back into the fold, but it would not work. At stake was the Soviet submarine base under construction at Vlorë; Khrushchev would try to keep the installation, but Malinovsky knew from his own sources that the effort would be futile. The plan was on schedule, but the defense minister kept this to himself. Winning a skirmish was not the same as winning a battle, much less a war, and despite this encouraging development there were many impediments ahead. Khrushchev had put a special investigator on the trail of Villam Lumbas, and if this man began to get too close something would have to be done, even if it triggered the General Secretary’s highly suspicious nature. In chess you had to anticipate your opponent’s moves, then remove his options. Now that the Albanians had declared their separation from the Soviets it was time to provoke the divorce.

  3 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1960, 3:20 A.M.Durres, Albania

  Mehmet Shehu stood at the end of the whitewashed stone room and watched Haxi Kasi work on the spy, who was of a rare type. Once revealed, most spies eagerly traded information against the illogical hope that they could save themselves. A minimum of pain usually started the flow of information, but not this time. Having been captured, the prisoner assumed he would die and had done all within his power to force his captors to accelerate the process so that what he knew would die quickly with him. Shehu and Haxi Kasi had dealt with such men before and knew information could be gotten from them, but it was an ever so delicate process requiring the interrogator to suspend the subject on the edge of the abyss of physical destruction. The human brain was an interesting organ; sometimes, when Shehu was in a reflective mood, he thought the mind might be the soul the Christians worshiped with such faith and fanaticism. That the mind worked in mysterious ways, however, was not as interesting to him as how it worked. If you guided a man to the brink of death, some inner mechanism of his brain would override the rational part and give you what you wanted. In the face of death, the inner mind seemed to act on its own behalf in a biochemical response rather than a rational one, but without due care and considerable luck the body could expire before the mechanism had a chance to work. To be successful with this type of man, you had to be as precise and patient as a surgeon, then hope the subject was gifted with a resilient natural constitution, something that body size could not predict. You never knew about a man’s ability to cope with pain until you methodically started hurting him.

  The prisoner was short and wiry with olive skin, curly black hair, several old diagonal scars on his belly, narrow hands and feet, and an extraordinarily long penis. Throughout the interrogation they kept him unclothed, in part to humiliate him but more to have immediate access. He had given his name as Adriatik Constantin, which might or might not be legitimate; he had been arrested in Lescovic near the Greek border, but thus far they had been unable to trace any family ties and nobody in the village acknowledged knowing him. They had picked him up on an anonymous tip, plucking him out of an area that traditionally harbored Greek infiltrators; some were saboteurs, but more often they crossed the border merely to collect information and disseminate anti-Hoxha propaganda. Seldom did such tips lead to anything, but this time they had gotten the Greek. Constantin’s government had long coveted southern Albania, just as the Yugoslavs constantly plotted to annex the north. The prisoner had gone silent as soon as he was taken; the Sigurimi detachment that arrested him was immediately suspicious of the man’s professional demeanor and had alerted Kasi, who called Shehu.

  The interrogation was now in its third day, and while Kasi looked as fresh as when they had begun, the Albanian premier was exhausted. He stood outside the glare of the arc lamps, dropped his sweat-soaked shirt on the floor, toweled himself dry and put on a fresh shirt. It would have been easier to bring in other interrogators, but Shehu’s instincts told him they had hold of something unusual; because of this they decided to limit access to the prisoner until they had a better idea of what they were dealing with. So far the two men knew nothing except what their time-honed instincts told them, which was that this dark little pig was more than a simple infiltrator.

  The Greek’s tolerance for pain was remarkable, which was typical of the race, Shehu thought. It was the trait central to Greek legends and most respected by their enemies. An hour ago Kasi had dumped Constantin facedown, braced his boot against the man’s spine, lashed his elbows together, then pulled his elbows back until both shoulders dislocated with loud pops. Despite the damage the prisoner had not made a sound.

  Now Kasi had the man on his back in a spread-eagle position; he stood beside him, talking softly in a friendly voice. This was an integral part of the technique that he and Shehu had first learned from Spaniards, then perfected over many years of trial and error. When you racked certain men with pain, you should address them politely as if you were engaged in a conversation over afternoon tea, and you must never lose your temper. This created a contrast that the brain had difficulty dealing with, especially as the pain mounted and the prisoner weakened.

  Thus far they had been extremely patient, but now Shehu sensed that it was time to escalate the violence. He rejoined Kasi and nodded toward the table where there was a siphon and a length of rubber hose.

  “We’ve been rude,” Shehu told the prisoner. “Some pure Albanian water will refresh you.”

  “Albanian
s bathe in shit,” the prisoner muttered. “Your women gave birth to syphilitic turds with limbs and call them children.” Shehu was impressed. The man wanted to make them so angry that they would kill him quickly, and lesser interrogators might have done so. But not this time.

  Kasi slid a wooden yoke over the man’s neck, pushed his head into a slot and tied a leather strap across his forehead to immobilize him. Then they pulled him across a cot on his back so that his upper body hung down, clamped the siphon over his mouth, connected the hose to a faucet and turned it on.

  “No doubt our guest is thirsty,” Shehu said. “It would be impolite to neglect him.”

  The prisoner’s eyes flashed as his belly filled with water and began to swell. From time to time Kasi extracted the siphon and whacked the prisoner’s stomach with a truncheon, causing him to vomit. After each blow they reinserted the hose.

  “Please,” Kasi said as he removed the siphon, “kindly tell us your business in Lescovic.”

  “Fucking your mother’s mouth,” the Greek hissed.

  “My mother thanks you for your many kindnesses,” Kasi whispered. He replaced the siphon and this time dropped a wet cloth over the man’s nose. With water pumping into his stomach through his mouth the prisoner was forced to inhale air through his nostrils, but now the wet rag hindered his air route and approximated a sensation identical with drowning. Immediately his chest began to heave violently.

  “Has your thirst been quenched, comrade?”

  After a time they removed the cloth and siphon and Constantin gasped as fresh air spilled into his lungs. “I would have had your mother sooner, but a rabid dog was already fucking her,” he gasped.

  Kasi looked at his superior, shook his head, then drove the truncheon into the man’s mouth, shattering his teeth and lips. “I thank you on Mother’s behalf. Our Greek is obstinate,” he said as they repeated the process and the prisoner’s shoulders started slapping the stone floor as he struggled for air.

  Kasi started to remove the wet cloth, but his superior stopped him. “Leave it.”

  “Could kill him,” Kasi said matter-of-factly.

  Shehu shrugged. “Give him a close look at death.”

  While the man choked, Kasi pulled a hand-driven generator over to the body, knelt, twisted two electric wires around the man’s penis, then stood and began cranking. The man’s body lifted violently and shuddered while the room filled with the fumes of burning flesh. Shehu disconnected the water hose and drove his heel into the prisoner’s stomach while Kasi kept cranking current into him.

  After twenty more minutes of alternating shocks and water, Shehu lifted the wet rag off the man’s face and saw in his eyes that his resistance was broken. They left him on the floor and questioned him slowly. He gave them five names and a brief outline of his role.

  Afterward the Albanian premier walked outside with Kasi. The sea air was warm, the sun rising. “I’ll make the arrests myself,” Kasi said.

  “Do it quietly,” Shehu said. “Each of them is a step upward.”

  4 TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1960, 9:15 P.M.Moscow

  Roman Trubkin was the sort of man Nikita Khrushchev liked: smart, resourceful and openly ambitious. Best of all, Trubkin had a positive attitude; he was the sort of man who searched constantly for ways to assist the General Secretary to achieve his goals rather than listing reason after reason why and how a particular endeavor might fail. Despite this, Trubkin was no toady. He could be blunt and ardent in his opinion even if it put him at loggerheads with or risked the displeasure of his superior. Khrushchev thought, This one has balls, and so far Trubkin had shown this assessment to be true.

  As so often was the case, Khrushchev had recruited the man to his service at the precise moment when Trubkin’s prospects seemed most bleak. Nothing created indebtedness like rescue from oblivion. Having been among the pilots selected to train as cosmonauts earlier in the year, Trubkin had moved quickly to the forefront and had become the odds-on favorite to be the first man in space. Soon after, he had developed an inner-ear problem that left him disoriented at six G’s or more. When his ailment didn’t respond to therapy, Trubkin was removed from further consideration. As soon as he was informed of the development, Khrushchev recognized an opportunity and recruited him.

  That he needed his own source inside the Soviet rocket program irked the General Secretary no end. Were it not for his own vision, Soviet rocketry would still consist of no more than engineering blueprints and expensive wooden models. In the wake of Stalin’s death he had focused on concentrating his power and support inside the Party, but he did not neglect longer-range goals. The Great Patriotic War had left its imprint, and he would make sure that no foreign power would ever again have the nerve to attack the Motherland. The key to this, he was certain, was the development of rockets, which the Germans had pioneered and the Americans were taking to new levels. To counter the Americans, the Soviet air force was pressing for its own long-range bomber force to match what their enemies had, but it was apparent that Soviet designers could not give the air force what it required. This being evident, Khrushchev decided to look at rockets, and the route to Soviet rocket superiority, he decided, resided in the mind of one Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, a longtime bad boy and resident of Stalin’s gulags, an aeronautical engineer distinguished by a sharp tongue to match his brilliance.

  But where Khrushchev’s interest in rocketry had been solely military, Korolev had his heart and his slide rule fixed on the stars. Roman Trubkin had uncovered Korolev’s secret—indeed, he had suspected the truth from the moment he saw Korolev’s R-7 sitting on the gantry—but he had no one to tell and no interest in doing so as long as he was likely to be the one to ride the gigantic rocket into space.

  The day Trubkin told Khrushchev the truth was etched in the General Secretary’s mind. “Would you use a battleship to defend coastal waters?” Trubkin began. “General Engineer Korolev has built a rocket that will take us to the far reaches of space, but will never rain warheads on our enemies.” There were many reasons for this, he explained: the volatile propellant meant fueling could not be done until just before launch, which meant there would be no fast-launch capability; the system itself was too large to hide and move around, so it would have to be dug in; and the R-7 could not reach a target on the other side of the earth without mid-course corrections from land and sea-based tracking units, which meant that if these stations were destroyed, the rockets would be next to useless. Conclusion: Korolev had created something to satisfy his own interests, not the Soviet people’s. The R-7’s strategic military value was marginal at best.

  Khrushchev had raged for days, then after regaining his self-control had dispatched other agents to verify what Trubkin had told him. Their opinions were unanimous: Korolev had duped him! Despite his crowing over Soviet rocket superiority after the Sputnik triumph, he was faced with the naked truth: there was no Soviet superiority, no “missile gap,” as Western reporters called it. What to do? It was a delicate and dangerous situation. Quietly he mobilized several new military-rocket efforts, all of them intended to develop an effective ICBM purely for military use. Meanwhile, he maintained his propaganda effort and pushed Korolev to get a man into space. There had been enough unmanned flights, and an entire kennel of dogs had produced nothing but expensive extraterrestrial turds; what he needed was a Soviet man in orbit. If this could be accomplished, the propaganda value would be incalculable, especially with Kennedy due to move into the White House. The new president would inherit a bad situation; American journalists were hammering away at the missile gap. If he could put a man in space, Khrushchev reasoned, he would gain a huge bargaining advantage over the new president. A man in space would suggest superiority where none existed, and the Western press would seal this perception, which would buy time.

  Now they were within months of seeing man’s age-old dream come to fruition. Most important, Nikita Sergeievich would get all of the credit unless something went wrong. Then Khrushchev had gotten a mes
sage from Trubkin that deeply disturbed him, and he had summoned him to Moscow.

  In October there had been an accident at the Tyuratam rocket base. More than a hundred men and women had died and the General Secretary had sent Trubkin to investigate. His verdict coincided with the experts’: ignition malfunction. When the launch sequence reached zero, nothing had happened and hundreds of technicians scrambled prematurely out of their protective bunkers to find out what had gone wrong. Minutes later the ignition had engaged without warning and caught everyone in the open. The disaster had been effectively hidden from the West, but dozens of key personnel had been killed and Khrushchev demanded to know why. The two-word message from Trubkin had been decoded by the General Secretary himself. It read: “Human error.”

  Trubkin was a slight man with the curly black hair of a Jew, a receding hairline, and the dull eyes and flat face of a serf. The former pilot moved slowly and talked with great difficulty, these behaviors masking an exceptional analytical mind and superior political instincts. He stood stiffly at attention, awaiting orders from his supreme commander.

  Khrushchev held up the message. “Explain.” He left the man at attention; it was important for him to understand the seriousness of the situation.

  “There is an engineer called Lumbas,” Trubkin began, “Viliam Pavelovich Lumbas. His expertise is in ignition-sequencing circuitry.”

  “Never heard of him,” Khrushchev said, who prided himself on knowing the key rocket people.

  “Nor had I, and in many ways he is purely a minor figure, but in the aftermath of the accident his role is taking on major proportions.”

  “He fucked up, did he?” Then Khrushchev quickly added, “Was it sabotage?” The West was forever trying to recruit Soviet citizens to work against their government.