Free Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

still. The man stroked the top of her foot lightly. Most people shake hands, but with Matorin, it was a little different.

    Formally, Sergey Matorin was an SVR staff officer with the rank of major assigned to the Executive Action Department (Department V). Informally, he was a chistilshchik, a “mechanic,” an executioner of the Russian secret service. In the KGB years, this department was known variously as the Thirteenth Department or Line F, or simply as mokroye delo, “wet work.” During the height of the Cold War, Line F had managed kidnappings, interrogations, and assassinations, but in the new SVR such things were said not to be even remotely contemplated or condoned. Granted, fractious Russian journalists were found shot in Moscow elevators, or regime critics succumbed to high concentrations of radionuclide polonium in their livers, but that had nothing to do with the modern Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. The age of the “umbrella pokers” had passed.
    During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Matorin served as a team commander in the elite Alpha Group of Spetsnaz, at that time under the command of the KGB. A screw came loose during Matorin’s five years in the valleys of Afghanistan, and the threads were permanently stripped. His eight-man team had followed orders, but Matorin didn’t much care about command. He was essentially a loner who liked to kill people.
    He was hit during combat by a metal splinter that blinded his right eye, leaving it an opaque milky white. Tall, whip-thin, his face pocked and scarred, Matorin wore his gray hair plastered over a cadaverous skull. This and a sharp hook nose gave him the appearance of an undertaker. After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, on rare occasions he was seen in SVR headquarters ghosting through the offices of Department V. Younger officers stared in fascination at this throwback Polyphemus. Older employees turned away and crossed themselves.
    Even though he was now deployed on occasional “special tasks,” Matorin missed the action of Afghanistan. He thought about it often. He had the ability to go back there in his mind, to see the sights, to hear the sounds, to smell the smells. Certain moments would spontaneously trigger his memories. These unexpected trips were the best, the most vivid, including the music. He could hear perfectly the staccato notes from the rubab and the crescendo beat from the tablas.
    Matorin stroked Dominika’s foot just as he had stroked the foot of the pegged-out Afghan bint that one afternoon in the Panjshir Valley. His teamhad rigged a canopy over the blades of the Mi-24 helicopter and tied down the corners so there was a large shaded area for the men to sit. Earlier they had gunned a group of muj on the road, landed to collect booty, and found the girl hiding among the rocks by the roaring river.
    She was about fifteen years old, dark hair, almond eyes, her clothes worn and dusty, the usual filthy camp follower. Every Soviet military man serving in Afghanistan had heard stories about what Afghan women did to Russians taken prisoner, so there was no love lost for the girl. She was straining with the cords around her wrists, but the double loop around her neck threatened to strangle her if she struggled too much. She swore and screamed and spat at the eight Alpha Group commandos who stood in a circle around her. Matorin squatted between her widespread legs, secured at the ankles, and watched her struggle. He reached out and held her sandy foot and caressed it. At the touch of the infidel the girl screamed and bellowed and called out to the hills, to her fellow fighters, to come to rescue her.
    She needn’t have objected to someone simply touching her foot. There was more to come. In the next fifteen minutes Matorin had carefully sliced off her clothes with a short sheath knife and had unwrapped her hijab. She lay supine in the dust, under the canopy that billowed gently in the wind. A soldier poured water over her face,