Citizen. Charlie Brooks

Чтение книги онлайн.

       4

      Retired General Stanislav Shalakov, the soldier-son of peasants, ideally preferred an entourage of real men; men who could be relied on to fall on a live grenade, or shove a bayonet deep into a Chechen belly. So he would not, under normal circumstances, have associated with an opportunist civilian like Nico. In his eyes—well-practiced at the game of assessing human character—the younger man’s sunglasses and doorknocker beard failed to conceal manifest weaknesses: the effete belo-emigrant background and the ingratiating cupidity. But while Shalakov had uncounted billions of roubles at his disposal, his yacht had only recently embarked on the seaways of western-style opulence. He knew instinctively how a Nico Nikolayev could be useful to him.

      Shalakov’s power base in the Red Army had been neither a fighting division nor a highprofile piece of window-dressing such as the cosmonaut programme. Unglamorously, but far more profitably, Shalakov had been head of the Catering Corps.

      In terms of manpower, the Red Army had been probably the largest organization in the world and Shalakov’s position gave him extraordinary hidden leverage. Only the most foolhardy of his fellow generals ever crossed him, and they quickly discovered their mistake. The time would come, on campaign or exercise, when the food supply chain inexplicably broke down. On the Chinese border fifty troops starved to death after their rations failed to come through. In Kandahar food poisoning decimated a battalion. Shalakov had ways of making sure such disasters were not laid at his door; instead they invariably caused the general in the field to be summoned to Moscow and stripped of his rank.

      With the coming of Gorbachev, then Yeltsin and Putin, Shalakov eased into a political role. Having ridden out the storms that wrecked the Soviet empire, he began to construct a private conglomerate of his own, bringing to the task the same ruthlessness he’d employed as a soldier. He oversaw the privatization of the army’s vast network of ranches and farms, meat-packing plants and fish canneries, orchards and wheat prairies, making sure the pick of them ended up in his personal ownership; and for a fraction of their true worth. The resulting conglomerate’s sheer size and strategic importance gave Shalakov behind-the-scenes influence. The Minister of Agriculture was his personal nominee. He dined once a week with the Minister of Finance and the head of the Bank of Moscow. He out-drank Boris Yeltsin and spent holidays at the Black Sea dacha of ‘Vovochka’ Putin.

      Yet increasingly he understood that the state needed Shalakov more than Shalakov needed the state. And so his acquisitive eyes turned abroad, to the hot spots of the world. Shalakov had decided to go international.

      Nico found out that it wasn’t so easy to get inside Shalakov’s camp. But he kept appearing here and there and never missed a chance to pay his respects to the Russian general whenever possible. He sidled up to Shalakov’s blackjack table in London. He effected an introduction to a Grand Prix driver in Monte Carlo. But he was struggling to get on the pay roll. Until, a good two years after Nico had sidled up to his table in the Voile Rouge, Shalakov invited him for drinks aboard his yacht, Rosebud. Bought during the 2009 financial crash from a hedgefund owner, she was a substantial vessel, with eight staterooms and a crew of thirty. As usual Shalakov made an oblique approach to the subject he wanted to discuss.

      ‘Do you know how many stud farms the Red Army had for horse breeding?’

      Nico, СКАЧАТЬ