LITMIR.BIZ

       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, who thought cavalry had gone out with the Charge of the Light Brigade, shrugged.

      ‘I didn’t know they had any. It’s all tanks and humvees now, isn’t it?’

      Shalakov gave Nico a look of sarcastic pity.

      ‘You don’t know the Red Army doctrine of horse warfare. I was taught this as a cadet in Budenyi Cavalry Academy in Moscow. Never mind the mechanized age, cavalry units are still an important independent arm of war and can be deployed in many ways.’

      He began counting the ways on his fingers.

      ‘They can be used for reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance and patrols, but they are essentially raiders. They can attack at speed, silently and with minimum preparation. They can operate at night, cross narrow mountain passes and swim rivers.’

      He spat over the side into the silky-smooth water of the marina.

      ‘Horses. We should have made more use of them in Afghanistan.’

      ‘So how many studs were there?’

      ‘At their peak, during the Great Patriotic War, there were forty-seven. Half that number by my own time, and most of those were then sold off by Yeltsin. They were geographically separated right across the Soviet Union, so that we got a spread of animals biologically suited to different kinds of terrain. In the cavalry we did much research into this.’

      ‘I didn’t know you were a cavalry man.’

      ‘Not for many years. But I always kept a few horses. And I bought six of the stud farms from the government. The best ones, of course. Now we are creating a new hippodrome in Moscow. One day it will be the greatest centre in the world for racing horses.’

      Nico was used to this kind of talk. With Shalakov everything he touched would one day be the greatest, the priciest, the ultimate in grandeur.

      ‘That would be something, General,’ he agreed.

      Shalakov motioned for the steward to refill Nico’s champagne flute and followed up by asking, almost casually,

      ‘You know this market well? I mean the racehorse market, here in the west?’

      So this was the reason Shalakov had invited Nico today: he had a new project in mind.

      ‘Oh yes,’ said Nico blithely. ‘I know it inside out.’

      He sipped thoughtfully from his glass. It was not strictly true, but since he regularly attended the cream of Europe’s race meetings—Deauville, Ascot, the Curragh—he knew people who’d be only too willing to feed him the inside track on classic breeding, bloodstock sales and top trainers.

      ‘And are you contemplating a particularly large investment, General?’

      ‘I never do anything by halves. And, as you well know, I deal only in the finest.’

      By the time Nico went ashore he had agreed to make enquiries about how Shalakov could acquire and manage a string of the best racehorses in Western Europe.