High Altitude Peril

The name is Ivan Kalashnikov. A KGB agent right out of college, I am now a top agent at the FSB, Russia’s internal security agency.

It was 1997 when the operation was declared. The operation was called “Operation Eagle Assassin”. It was when a rebellion had broken out in Russia and Kazakhstan and the UN Peacekeeping forces had to intervene. The rebels called themselves the “The Eagle’s Liberators”. Combats were taking place in the Ural Mountains and secret service agents like me were summoned to go into the networks of the militia and leak information about plans and assaults to the military. I was living in Moscow for the past 5 years and had a vast network of informants there and dotted across Russia when I had been called to Yekaterinburg, a city near the Urals where I would be briefed.

The briefing was simple: contact your informants, mingle with the rebels, dig out as much information as possible and the most important-DO NOT DIE or worse GET CAUGHT! At least two spies had perished before me and I was the only surviving agent in the region.

A week later I met my contacts, who had informants inside the militia and managed to arrange interviews and swear me into the rebellion as an Intel officer under the name of Andrei Nikolaev. I got my uniform, which was actually a WWII Russian soldier’s clothes and a mask. But the weapons were really modern. I got a Glock 17C, an American semi-automatic pistol, just like all the other strategy officers. All the weapons were smuggled from the U.S.A, I was told. At one time I could have sworn that I saw the captain carrying a Desert Eagle.50, another American made but highly lethal pistol.

I set up my network and started pinching information from the outpost, which was near the foot of the mountains. We almost never saw combat, mostly because the Peacekeeping forces were advancing from Kazakhstan, where a lot of the rebel outposts were situated.

I tried to find out where the main base was, but all the rebels just said, “ya ne znayu” which means “I don’t know” in Russian.

Soon after, I got transferred to the main base, probably because there was a shortage of manpower. The location of the base was classified...all I can tell you is that it was in a cold, deep valley. As an Intel officer I had access to the strategy tent - a place where all the assaults where planned. I was seated near the Chief Intel officer whose name too is classified. We only knew him as D’yavol. I was plain lucky to be sitting next to him because I got a great opportunity to look at all the plans and diagrams. I memorized them and later drew them in my notebook. They had some serious business going on. One of the plans showed that a week later a tank coming from the U.S.A that was to be air dropped near the city of Perm for the military was going to be intercepted and commandeered by the militia.

I set up my trusty Morse code machine, which fitted in my brief case (now that I think of it, it was kind of a miracle I could transmit messages from such a remote location) and started transmitting the data. Just as I was finishing, I felt a shadow move just outside the tent opening. I finished the last of the data and shut the briefcase and scrambled out of the tent as fast as I could. I saw a rebel frantically talking to a superior officer in Russian. All I could make out was “It’s him”.

As I was later told the rebels already knew that a spy was among them. They just did not know who it was.

The officer looked towards me and shouted,” Arrest him!” after which I was knocked down to the ground and handcuffed. I was taken to a tent away from the main base. They tied me to a chair and left me there till night. At night I was interrogated, cold water was splashed on my body, something you don’t want to experience when it is 2 degrees below freezing point. The interrogator was a tough man, he did all types of things to break my spirit, such as bringing a blow torch close to my wrist slowly roasting it as if it were a piece of meat. At last he ended up slapping me so hard he actually knocked out two of my teeth. After that I fell unconscious.

I remember waking up in a dark room with faint sunlight creeping in through a small window placed high up on the wall. I seemed to be in some kind of storage room (I later found out that I was in one of the many rooms in a research station that the militia had captured). I also noticed that I was now wearing an orange prisoner’s outfit. Suddenly the door opened and I blinked at the sudden light.

An officer walked in and to my surprise he looked quite like me! A plot to escape suddenly came to my mind. He said something in Russian about me being executed at dusk because of my “betrayal”. As soon as he turned his back to me I sprang up and knocked him to the ground and strangled him until he was unconscious. I took his clothes, his weapons, his boots and his scarf; he had a very noticeable scar on his left cheek and so I decided to cover my face with the scarf. I then hid his body in one of the many closets in the room.

I strode out and started to look for ways to escape. I found three:

i. A tunnel that led to the main base and then led to a road (the research station being above the main base).

ii. A helipad that was halfway between the station and tunnel.

iii. A ski route that led directly from the station to an airport some twenty kilometers away. This I found out by eavesdropping on a group of prisoners who happened to be scientists who had worked at the station.

I chose the third way because not a lot of patrolling was done there and it would be easy to slip unnoticed with a party of soldiers who would take a turn halfway through ski route to go towards the main base which was their destination.

I talked to some other rebels, who thought I was their officer, and learnt that another party would leave in an hour and also that only soldiers with special permission from headquarters could do so.

As I passed between the corridors, I found a heavily drunk soldier whose ID card bore the name of one of the soldiers whose name was called over the Public Address (PA) among the other men who were to leave in a few minutes on the expedition. I also saw something peeking out of his pocket. When I further inspected it, it turned out to be the permission slip sent from HQ.

I was thrilled at my continuing luck! Quickly snatching it from his pocket I rushed towards the rear part of the building where all the snowmobiles were kept. An officer was checking the slips (thankfully there was no name written on the slip) and assigning the rebels to their mobiles. I got placed at the last.

Just as we were leaving the officer in charge told me that I would be needed to pick up a first aid kit some way further from the turn on the ski route which took the party to the main base.

“That’s it! That’s when I escape!” I remember exclaiming to myself when the officer finished speaking.

The party consisted of fourteen members and it took about an hour travelling in the snow to reach the turn that all the others took. As I proceeded straight ahead a snow fall started. After about another hour of travelling I heard the light humming sound of an airplane. Knowing I would make it; I increased my speed and nearly ran slap-bang into the perimeter wall that surrounded the air field.

It was a civilian airfield that received goods and experienced occasional raids by the militia. The workers I met there were kind-hearted and lent me their clothes as soon as I told them that I was a spy and showed them my FSB credentials. They also managed to put me on a plane to an air base in the Chelyabinsk region.

At the air base, the soldiers escorted me to a registration office where I was put through a biometrics scan to verify I was indeed with the FSB. When it was established that I was speaking the truth, I was put on a military plane bound for Moscow where orders for my next mission were waiting! I was to fly to California, U.S.A. to investigate the illegal supply of arms to Russian rebels.

Stay tuned for my other adventures!