Lucky Bastard Read Online Free Page B

was quite certain what this directorate did, or even what its targets were. With a very small headquarters staff that was absolutely loyal to him, Peter operated outside the usual chain of command, running strange operations for obscure purposes all over the world—but primarily in the United States. He reported directly to the Politburo through his mentor and protector, Andropov, by now the head of the KGB. Through Andropov’s good offices and his own charm, Peter was also a favorite of the somewhat dimwitted general secretary of the time, Leonid Brezhnev. It was said in the KGB canteen that Peter could make Andropov laugh and Brezhnev think. This was enough to make anyone fear him.
    That was Peter’s advantage. Until those two turned on him or died, he was immune to the system. And even then, as we shall see, he was too much for his enemies. Peter could make anyone trust him, though few liked him. He also had a truly Napoleonic instinct for maneuver, timing, and choice of ground. And, of course, he was highly developed politically—utterly ruthless and without scruples or personal loyalty to anyone below him.
    I had been working under him for ten years. He had chosen me, plucked me out of the squirrel cage of espionage operations, because he sensed that he and I were kindred souls. Sensed it? I blurted it out to him on first meeting. I came to his notice when he visited my language school and I was assigned as his guide. From the start we spoke American English together; his was perfect. Within an hour I was saying things to him for which I could have been shot.
    Just before we met, I had been working in West Germany, my first major assignment abroad. I had arranged for the theft of several items of U.S. military technology. Over a period of months, these articles were removed, one by one, from an air base, dismantled, measured, and photographed, then returned. So far as I was able to tell, the Americans never knew that they had been missing. The cost of this operation in hard currency had been enormous, including huge bribes to all concerned and the subsequent murder, by poison, of the drunken American sergeant who had let us into the air base after I had covered him with a heap of boys and money. All the same it had been cheaper than developing the technology ourselves, so my superiors were pleased with me. I was decorated and promoted and selected for assignment to the target of targets, the USA.
    Peter knew all this. As we walked together from one building to another, he asked me what I thought this operation had accomplished. I replied, “The same as all other thefts of American technology, Comrade General! An admission of inferiority!”
    We were outside, fortunately. It was snowing—big wet theatrical flakes falling between us so that I saw him, an unreal figure to me anyway, as through a scrim.
    I was seized—do not ask me why—by an irresistible impulse to tell the truth. I replied, knowing that I was probably writing my own death warrant, that the Soviet intelligence apparatus had spent trillions since 1917 to steal inventions from the West. Had we devoted the same sums to research and development, I said, we might have a modern state capable of doing its own science instead of one that stole and lied about everything to hide its weakness. A state that sought to steal everything rather than go to the trouble of making it itself would surely fall in the end because by its every act of espionage it conceded the superiority of its enemies—correctly, because such a state had no intellectual or moral core and therefore no reason to exist.
    Peter listened intently to these wild words, smiling urbanely under his big snow-covered sable cap as though I had just told him a disarming bit of gossip that he, who knew everyone and everything, had somehow never heard before.
    He said, “Then you believe, Comrade Captain, that all espionage is counterproductive?”
    â€œIn the terms