Chapter 501 - 36: Unit 10003
"Ivan Andreyevich Bolkonsky."
A long name with distinct Soviet characteristics, this was the name of the owner of a red document found inside the safe.
This person was born in the late 1930s and joined a mysterious organization named "10003 Unit" in the 1980s.
According to the documents, he was initially directly under Colonel Aleksey Savin, responsible for managing a large special fund.
Of course, Ivan was not engaged in accounting or similar work. Chen Zhou felt his work leaned more towards money laundering.
Within several complex bills, Chen Zhou saw records of the flow of small portions of funds.
And these small portions were calculated in hundreds of thousands of Rubles.
Chen Zhou did not know much about the Soviet Union, but he knew enough that this giant, which once stood toe to toe with the United States, had a Ruble that held considerable weight before its dissolution.
In the 1980s, a hundred thousand Rubles would probably be equivalent to millions of US Dollars today.
Matched with the vast funds was the strong and mysterious background of "10003 Unit."
The documents contained several pages of Ivan’s scrawled handwriting, which took Chen Zhou a long time to decipher and understand the Russian content.
The handwriting often mentioned General Mikhail Moiseyev, the Chief of General Staff, the Soviet Army General Staff, and several high-level figures in the Soviet Union’s scientific, military, and political fields.
Just judging by these names, the documents were invaluable—they were part of the truth hidden beneath the dust of history.
The funder of the unit was personally determined by the Soviet Minister of Finance, and the transactions Chen Zhou saw amounted to tens of millions of Rubles, which might just be the tip of the iceberg.
However, even though the national financial appropriation was also top-secret, it wasn’t enough reason for Ivan to place a brand new handgun inside the safe.
What truly caused a stir were the other documents related to the research funding of "10003 Unit," the funds’ destination, and the money laundering process.
According to the documents, this unit was unique and had few members because they researched how to use supernatural abilities to achieve military objectives.
To utilize these so-called supernatural abilities for psychological warfare, intelligence gathering, and military operations, the well-off Soviet Union generously allocated several large sums to 10003 Unit in batches.
Ivan’s personal records of several core missions included locating missing ships through telepathy;
predicting specific locations of nuclear facilities; assisting allied forces through enemy minefields; affecting the minds of enemy combatants with ultra-high-frequency radiation amplifiers; using telekinesis to disrupt NATO command systems; and entering dreams to monitor US nuclear missile activities.
Honestly, if this seemingly absurd special unit could achieve its goals after receiving the funds, Chen Zhou thought it would indeed be a great value.
Unfortunately, the supernatural abilities unit was already an absurd product influenced by the US-Soviet rivalry.
Ivan candidly stated in his handwriting that "this was a business that could earn him a fortune" rather than an event closely related to international politics.
For the colonel in charge of the unit, every core mission was a grand feast.
Funds allocated by the Ministry of Finance, once passing through Ivan’s hands, would immediately turn into "legal and legitimate income" and end up in Colonel Aleksey Savin’s pocket.
From 1979 to 1991, nearly twenty million Rubles of funds quietly disappeared.
During this process, Colonel Aleksey Savin naturally became as fat as a pig, not only with financial luck but also making rapid progress in military and political fields. By the last page of Ivan’s handwriting, the colonel had already become a general.
As Aleksey Savin’s most trusted "money laundering machine," Ivan’s life, however, was not comfortable.
Hua Xia has a proverb about "a cunning rabbit dying and the hound being cooked," and naturally, the Soviet Union had similar tales.
Ivan knew too much, so much that he had to die for others to feel secure.
In his last working years, he lived in constant fear, dreading being reckoned with.
So he converted his earnings into real estate, gold and jewels, antique collections, storing them across the Soviet Union, leaving only a few obscure lines of poetry for his descendants as if hinting at the treasure’s location.
Among the documents Chen Zhou obtained were two pages of poetry handwritten by Ivan.
Perhaps due to his limited Russian proficiency, Chen Zhou found that no matter how he translated, those poems made no sense, and given his little knowledge of Russia, deriving the exact location of "Ivan’s treasure" from the poetry was even more challenging.
...
Deciphering historical puzzles was far more intriguing than "Pure Blue Hell."
The mysterious reward of self-learning Russian books was professional and comprehensive. Analyzing word by word, checking against Russian grammar, it didn’t take long for Chen Zhou to painstakingly consume this batch of "raw meat."
...
September 12th was yet another drizzly day.
Having almost finished translating all the documents, Chen Zhou rubbed his temples, staring at the small black and white photo on the table in a daze.
It was an old photo clipped inside a blue document, picturing only a deserted, abandoned factory.
The only characteristic that could provide some information was several lines of Russian words painted in white on the factory wall and a hexagram drawn at the base of the chimney on the wall’s end.
Previously, Chen Zhou didn’t understand Russian, and although he knew this sole image from the safe was suspicious, he didn’t understand what it signified.
Now, through consulting books, he had translated those Russian words.