Marlantes Cold Victory

Main
ISBN: 978-1-80471-107-1
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. At an embassy party, Finnish-American Arnie Koski and Russian Mikhail Bobrov drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly - but clandestine - cross-country ski race. But the stakes becomes higher than either could imagine. While the two skiers are unreachable in the arctic wilderness, news of the race is leaked to the media, with Russia's brutal secret police awaiting the outcome... Another masterful novel from the author of the modern classic Matterhorn.

A graduate of Yale and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten Air Medals. He lives in Washington state, USA.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marlantes, Karl

Leseproben

Tuesday, December 10, 1946
Ferry Terminal, Turku, Finland
She’d followed Arnie Koski a long way from Edmond, Oklahoma. Louise Koski was now standing on the open passenger deck of the Stockholm-Turku ferry as it formed a channel through the thin, early December ice leaving floating shards reflecting the wan sunlight in its wake. The angle of the somber sun in a clear comfortless sky was only a held-out fist above the southern horizon. Wrapping herself against the cold in her stylish but inadequate coat, Louise watched the low snow-covered shoreline slowly pass behind on both sides as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings of Turku grew into distinct shapes, interspersed with occasional gaps where a now-bombed-out building had stood before the war. Arnie came up from behind and hugged her. She snuggled into his chest, shielding herself against the slight but icy wind. Arnie was wearing civilian clothes under a heavy wool army greatcoat. He kissed her hair, and she turned to look up at him. His eyes shone with the excitement that he wouldn’t allow himself to show on the rest of his face. “Is it like coming home, somehow?” she asked. “In a way.” Three words made an average sentence for Arnie. They entered the open water of the harbor and the icebreaker that had been preceding them moved aside to let the ferry nose into the terminal. The line going through customs wasn’t long. Travel between Finland and Sweden was only just beginning to revive so soon after the war. A Finnish customs official examined their passports and Arnie’s diplomatic papers. The customs official looked up at them. “Is this all of you?” he asked in accented English. “Just two,” Arnie replied. Louise felt a twinge. She was thirty and despite several army doctors declaring that she was perfectly healthy, she’d already suffered two miscarriages in five years of trying. She desperately wanted children, and the clock was ticking. The family remained, as Arnie said, just two. When they emerged from the terminal, a young man in his early twenties with thick blond hair walked up to them, his breath showing a bright white cloud. He asked in English, “Lieutenant Colonel Koski?” Arnie nodded and answered yes in Finnish. “Pulkkinen,” the man said and grabbed both of their suitcases. Pulkkinen silently led them to a khaki 1942 Chevy Fleetmaster sedan with diplomatic plates. The white star of the US Army was still on the driver’s door. Louise pulled herself closer to Arnie’s ear. “Loquacious,” she whispered. “If you think Dad was taciturn . . .” he whispered back. He left the rest unsaid, which made her smile. Like father like son. Pulkkinen stowed the luggage in the trunk and held a rear door open for her. Louise expected to be in the back seat; Arnie would want to pump the driver for as much information as he could. The leather of the rear seat was cold. She didn’t look forward to the three-hour drive to Helsinki. Constantly clearing the window condensation with her coat sleeve, Louise watched the bleak landscape of farms interspersed with tracts of snow-dusted trees slide by. It was only three in the afternoon and already the sun was setting. Arnie was talking in his fluent Finnish with Pulkkinen. She could feel Arnie’s excitement for his new posting, military attaché to the American legation in Helsinki, Finland. It wasn’t just his new posting; it was hers as well. Every woman knew that all high-level diplomatic jobs took two people—and this was their first one. His end was gathering military intelligence. Her end was providing the social lubricant and connections that made his job easier. That meant what her mother called socializing. Just months before, she’d been an ordinary army wife. Could she do the job? She was immensely proud of Arnie. It was a real coup, a position like this as a light colonel. But she worried that she would let him down. Several of the wives at the State Department briefing had gone to East Coast colleges like Vassar and Sweet Briar. She’d gone to the University of Oklahoma. Many had been to Europe before the war. She’d never ventured east of the Mississippi River. They came to the briefings dressed exactly right, seemingly without much thought or effort. Her Emily Post was getting dog-eared. Then there was the actual job, essentially being a secondary and subtle channel for any information that Arnie might find useful—or want to communicate—picking up on slight changes in tone, nuances of conversation, and cultivating the contacts that would help Arnie do his job. Her problem, however, was knowing what useful information was. The State Department briefings had been long on protocol: who got seated where at parties, how to address the wife of an ambassador versus the wife of a career diplomat, when not to shake hands, what to wear when. But the single brief lecture on what was actually happening in Finland, what America wanted—what the Soviet Union and Finland wanted—had been cursory. To her disappointment, she found that State was no different than the army. There was an unspoken assumption that the wives wouldn’t be interested, so they were spared the details. Their husbands could fill them in if they really wanted to know. That attitude on the part of State and the army, however, did not ease any of the pressure. If this assignment went well, Arnie could make full colonel, paving the way to general. If not, she remembered the wife of another military attaché, half-sloshed at a cocktail party in Washington before they left, offering “helpful” advice. “Screw this up and your husband’s career is over.” Louise was all too aware that many a promising army career had been cut short by an awkward wife who lacked social skills. The French, whose literature she had studied in college, had a single word for it that she hoped would never be applied to her: gauche. But the French spent their entire childhoods learning how to be French. She only knew how to be polite in Oklahoma, and trying to learn diplomatic protocol in a couple of weeks of lectures was like trying to learn a foreign language without ever being able to practice speaking. She would never be fluent. Right now, however, her free-floating anxiety about whether she was up to the job of making this assignment work was ambient background for a related and more specific worry. Would their household items, which they’d shipped over a month ago, especially her clothes, be waiting in Helsinki? If not, that would mean buying several dresses, and it would be with their own money. What would they think of her—and Arnie—if she had to go to a fancy embassy party in—she looked down at her sensible wool skirt—this? Were there even dress shops in Helsinki? They passed a crossroads in the dark and Pulkkinen pointed to the road on the right. “Porkkala.” A single word. No emotion. “Porkkala?” she asked. Arnie turned to look back at her. “The Russian navy base.” “A Russian navy base? Here? We’re no more than twenty miles from Helsinki. No one said anything about it in our briefings.” “With another base in Estonia they control the sea approaches to Leningrad,” Arnie said. “Part of the deal.” The “deal” referred to the Moscow Armistice, which was signed on September 19, 1944, ending the fighting between Finland and the Soviet Union. She had heard of the agreement in the briefings, but Arnie had had to explain its consequences in more detail on the ferry. The deal had been very bad for the Finns. In November 1939, the Soviet Union, then an ally of Hitler’s Germany, had invaded Finland. The Finns fought bravely and alone against enormous odds in what became known as the Winter War, inflicting massive casualties on the Soviet juggernaut, stopping it cold, and earning the accolades of the entire free world. Accolades, however, were all they got. With no help from the West, exhausted and out of hope, they signed the first armistice with the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940, giving up over 10 percent of their land. Fearing the Soviets wanted even more, they again sought help from neutral Sweden and the Western Allies to shore up their defenses. Again, they got none. So, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Finns joined with Germany to take back the territory they’d lost. They regained all of it. They however continued, some would say foolishly, to help their German ally lay siege to Leningrad. Leningrad never fell, and Stalin never forgot. In June 1944, when the Germans were falling back on Berlin and facing the Allied landings in Normandy, Stalin took his revenge. With overwhelming superiority in men and equipment, fueled with massive matériel support from the United States, the Red Army drove the Finns back toward Helsinki. But by September 1944, the campaign had cost the Soviet Union close to a million casualties. For every dead Finn and German, there were four dead Russians. Stalin decided it would be better for the Soviet Union to make peace than to continue to pay the enormous price of conquering Finland by force. The Finns, spent and starving, their German allies facing sure defeat, signed a terribly punitive second armistice. This one cost Finland even more land than the previous one in 1940 and, in addition, the entire Porkkala peninsula just west of Helsinki, along with its large naval base. It further...