The senior Red Army man was a colonel called Pankov. Despite his rank, he addressed Dimka with formal respect. “You want me to make a call, Dmitri Ilich?”

A second officer, Lieutenant Meyer, said: “I think it’s coming.”

Dimka looked along the track. In the distance he could see, approaching slowly, a line of low-slung open railcars loaded with long wooden crates.

Dimka said: “Why does everyone think it’s all right to be fifteen fucking minutes late?”

Dimka was worried about spies. He had visited the chief of the local KGB station and reviewed his list of suspected people in the area. They were all dissidents: poets, priests, painters of abstract art, and Jews who wanted to go to Israel—typical Soviet malcontents, about as threatening as a cycling club. Dimka had them all arrested anyway, but not one looked dangerous. Almost certainly there were real CIA agents in Sevastopol, but the KGB did not know who they were.

A man in captain’s uniform came from the ship across the gangway and addressed Pankov. “Are you in charge here, Colonel?”

Pankov inclined his head toward Dimka.

The captain became less deferential. “My ship can’t go to Siberia,” he said.

“Your destination is classified information,” Dimka said. “Do not speak of it.” In Dimka’s pocket was a sealed envelope that the captain was to open after he had sailed from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. At that point he would learn he was going to Cuba.

“I need cold-weather lubricating oil, antifreeze, deicing equipment—”

Dimka said: “Shut the fuck up.”

“But I have to protest. Siberian conditions—”

Dimka said to Lieutenant Meyer: “Punch him in the mouth.”

Meyer was a big man and he hit hard. The captain fell back, his lips bleeding.

Dimka said: “Go back aboard your ship, wait for orders, and keep your stupid mouth shut.”

The captain left, and the men on the quay turned their attention back to the approaching train.

Operation Anadyr was huge. The approaching train was the first of nineteen similar, all required to bring just this first missile regiment to Sevastopol. Altogether, Dimka was sending fifty thousand men and two hundred thirty thousand tons of equipment to Cuba. He had a fleet of eighty-five ships.

He still did not see how he was to keep the whole thing secret.

Many of the men in authority in the Soviet Union were careless, lazy, drunk, and just plain stupid. They misunderstood their instructions, they forgot, they approached challenging tasks halfheartedly and then gave up, and sometimes they just decided they knew better. Reasoning with them was useless; charm was worse. Being nice to them made them think you were a fool who could be ignored.

The train inched alongside the ship, its steel-on-steel brakes squealing. Each purpose-built railcar carried just one wooden crate eighty feet long and nine feet square. A crane operator mounted the gantry and entered its control cabin. Stevedores leaped onto the railcars and began readying the crates for loading. A company of soldiers had traveled with the train, and now they began to help the stevedores. Dimka was relieved to see that the missile regiment flashes had been removed from their uniforms, in accordance with his instructions.