At ten past one they were in the Volvo and moving. At half past, they were too far away to hear the almost simultaneous series of booms and cracks as the presses, reel stands, and ink feeders crashed to the concrete floor.
So discreet were the explosions that the sleeping denizens of the Vorontsovo suburb were hardly roused. It was not until the guard lying outside had hopped laboriously around the building to the front gate and hit the alarm button with his elbow that the police were called.
The liberated guards found the phones were still working and called the factory foreman, whose home number was pinned up in the office. He arrived at half-past three and examined the devastation with horror. Then he called Boris Kuznetsov.
The Union of Patriotic Forces’ propaganda chief was there by five and listened to the factory manager’s tale of woe. At seven he phoned Colonel Grishin.
Before that hour the rented car and the Volvo had been abandoned just off Manege Square, where the rental would soon be found and returned to the agency. The Volvo, which was unlocked with its keys in the ignition, would certainly be stolen before then, and was.
The three former soldiers took their breakfast in the insalubrious café at the airport and boarded their flight to Helsinki, the first of the morning, an hour later.
As they flew out of Russia, Colonel Grishin was surveying the wrecked printing plant with black anger. There would be an inquiry; he would institute one, and woe betide anyone who had collaborated. But his professional eye told him the perpetrators were experts and he doubted he would find them.
Kuznetsov was distraught. Every week for the past two years the Saturday tabloid Probudis!, Russian for “Awake!,” had carried the words and policies of Igor Komarov to five million homes across Russia. The idea of establishing a major newspaper owned and run entirely by the UPF had been his, as had been the monthly magazine Rodina, “Motherland.”
These two vehicles, a mixture of easy contests with big prizes, sex confessions, and race propaganda, had carried the words of the leader into every corner of the land and contributed enormously to his electoral popularity.
“When can you be back in production?” he asked the head printer. The man shrugged.
“When we have new presses,” he said. “These cannot be mended. Two months, perhaps.”
Kuznetsov was pale with shock. He had not yet told the leader himself It was Grishin’s fault, he assured himself, the place should have been better guarded. But one thing was certain: There would be no Probudis! this Saturday and no special edition of Rodina in a fortnight. Nor even for eight weeks at a minimum. And the presidential elections were in six.
It was not a very good morning for Detective Inspector Borodin either, though he had entered the office in the Homicide Division of the militia HQ on Petrovka in good humor. His geniality during the previous week had been noted by his colleagues, but had remained unexplained. In fact the explanation was simple: his delivery of two valuable documents to Colonel Anatoli Grishin after the still unexplained bomb explosion at the Metropol had brought him a very handsome bonus to his monthly retainer.
Privately he knew there was not the slightest point in continuing inquiries into the outrage at the hotel. Restoration work had already begun, the insurers were almost certainly foreigners who would pick up the tab, the American guest was dead, and the mystery was total. If he suspected that his own inquiries concerning the American, ordered by Grishin himself, had something to do with his almost immediate death, he, Borodin, was not going to make an issue of it.
Igor Komarov was certainly going to be the new president of the Russian Federation in less than two months, the second most powerful man in the country would be Colonel Grishin, and there would be rewards to almost dizzying heights for those who had served him well during the years of opposition.
The office was abuzz with news of the destruction during the night of the printing presses of the UPF Party. Borodin put it down to Zyuganov’s Communists or some paid hoodlums from one of the mafia gangs, motive obscure. He was just airing his theories when his phone rang.
“Borodin?” said a voice.
“Detective Borodin speaking, yes.”
“Kuzmin here.”
He rattled his memory but it stayed blank.
“Who?”
“Professor Kuzmin, forensic pathology lab, Second Medical Institute. Did you send me the specimens recovered from the Metropol bombing? The file has your name on it.”
“Ah, yes, I am the officer in charge of the case.”
“Well, you’re a bloody fool.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I have just finished my examination of the remains of the body recovered from that hotel room. Along with a lot of bits of wood and glass that have nothing to do with me,” said the irascible pathologist.
“So what’s the problem, Professor? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
The voice on the phone was becoming shrill with rage.
“Of course he’s dead, poltroon. He wouldn’t be in bits in my lab if he was running around.”
“Then I can’t see the problem. I’ve been years in Homicide, and I’ve never seen anyone more dead.”
The voice from the Second Medical Institute took a grip on itself and dropped to the coaxing tone of one speaking to a small and rather dim child.
“The question, my dear Borodin, is, Who is dead?”
“Well, the American tourist of course. You have his bones there.”
“Yes, I have bones, Detective Borodin.” The voice stressed the word detective to imply the policeman would have trouble finding his way to the washroom without a guide dog. “I would also expect to have fragments of tissue, muscle, cartilage, sinew, skin, hair, nails, entrails—even a couple of grams of marrow. But what do I have? Bones, just bones, nothing but bones.”
“I don’t follow you. What’s wrong with the bones?”
The professor finally exploded. Borodin had to hold the phone away from his ear.
“There’s nothing wrong with the bloody bones. They’re lovely bones. They’ve been lovely bones for about twenty years, which is the period I estimate their former owner has been dead. What I am trying to get into your pin-size brain is that someone took the trouble to blow to bits an anatomical skeleton, the sort every medical student keeps in the corner of his room.”
Borodin’s mouth opened and shut like a fish’s.
“The American wasn’t in that room?” he asked.
“Not when the bomb went off,” said Dr. Kuzmin.
“Who was he anyway? Or, as he is presumably still alive, who is he?”
“I don’t know. Just a Yankee academic.”
“Ah, you see, another intellectual. Like myself. Well, you can tell him I like his sense of humor. Where do you want me to send my report?”
The last thing Borodin wanted was for it to land on his own desk. He named a certain major general in the militia Presidium.
The major general received it the same afternoon. He rang Colonel Grishin to give him the news. He did not get a bonus.
By nightfall Anatoli Grishin had mobilized his private army of informants, and it was a formidable force. Thousands of replicas of the photo of Jason Monk, the one taken from his passport, were circulated to the Black Guard and the Young Combatants, who were spewed onto the streets of the capital in the hundreds to search for the wanted man. The effort and the numbers were greater than during the hunt for Leonid Zaitsev, the missing office cleaner.
Other copies went to the clan chief of the Dolgoruki underworld mafia with orders to locate and hold. Informants in the police and immigration services were alerted. A reward of one hundred billion rubles was offered for the fugitive, a sum to take the breath away.
Against such a locust plague of eyes and ears there would be nowhere for the American to hide, Grishin advised Igor Komarov. This network of informants could penetrate every nook and cranny of Moscow, every hideaway and bolt-hole, every corner and crevice. If he did not lock himse
lf inside his own embassy, where he could do no further harm, he would be found.
Grishin was almost right. There was one place his Russians could not penetrate the tightly sealed world of the Chechens.
Jason Monk was inside that world, in a safe apartment above a spice shop, protected by Magomed, Asian, and Sharif, and beyond them a screen of invisible street people who could see a Russian coming a mile away and communicate in a language no one else could understand.
In any case, Monk had already made his second contact.
CHAPTER 14
OF ALL THE SOLDIERS OF RUSSIA, SERVING OR RETIRED, the one who in terms of prestige was worth any dozen others was General of the Army Nikolai Nikolayev.
At seventy-three and just a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday, he was still an impressive figure. Six-feet one-inch tall, he carried himself bolt upright; a mane of white hair, a ruddy face weathered by a thousand bitter winds, and his trademark moustache jutting in two defiant points on either side of his upper lip marked him out in any gathering.
He had been a tank man all his life, a commander of mechanized infantry, had served in every theater and on every front over a fifty-year career, and to those who had served under him, numbering several millions in all by 1999, he had become a legend.
It was common knowledge that he would and should have retired with the rank of marshal, but for his habit of speaking his mind to the politicians and time servers.
Like Leonid Zaitsev, the Rabbit, whom he would never remember but whom he had once clapped on the back at a camp outside Potsdam, the general had been born near Smolensk, west of Moscow. But twelve years earlier, in the winter of 1925, the son of an engineer.
He could still recall the day he and his father had been passing a church and the older man had forgotten himself and made the sign of the cross. The son had asked what he was doing. Startled and fearful, his father had told him never to tell a soul.
Those were the days when another Soviet youth had been officially declared a hero for betraying his parents to the NKVD for anti-Party remarks. Both parents had died in the camps, but the son had been made a role model for Soviet youth.
But young Kolya loved his father and never said a word. Later he learned the meaning of the gesture, but accepted the word of his teachers that it was all complete rubbish.
He was fifteen when the Blitzkrieg erupted out of the west, on June 22, 1941. Within a month Smolensk fell to the German tanks and with thousands of others the boy was on the run. His parents did not make it and he never saw them again.
A strapping youth, he helped his ten-year-old sister along for a hundred miles until one night they jumped a train heading east. They did not know it, but it was a special train. Along with others it carried a disassembled tank factory out of the danger zone and east toward the safety of the Urals.
Cold and hungry, the children clung to the roof until the train came to rest at Chelyabinsk in the foothills of the mountains. There the engineers re-erected the factory called Tankograd.
There was no time for schooling. Galina went to an orphanage, Kolya was put to work in the factory. He stayed there for almost two years.
By the winter of 1942 the Soviets were taking horrendous losses in men and tanks around Kharkov and Stalingrad. The tactics were traditional and lethal. There was neither time nor talent for subtlety; the men and tanks were thrown into the muzzles of the German guns without thought or care for losses. In Russian military history that was how it had always been.
At Tankograd the demand was for more and more production; they worked sixteen-hour shifts and slept beneath the lathes. What they were building was the KV1, named after Marshal Klimenti Voroshiov, a useless article as a soldier but one of Stalin’s favorite toadies. The KV1 was a heavy tank, the Soviets’ main battle tank at the time.
By the spring of 1943 the Soviets were reinforcing the bulge around the city of Kursk, an enclave 150 miles from north to south that jutted 100 miles into the German lines. In June, the seventeen-year-old was detailed to accompany a trainload of KV1s west to the salient, unload them at the railhead, deliver them, and return to Chelyabinsk. He did all but the last.
The new tanks were lined up by the track when the regimental commander for whom they were destined strode up. He was amazingly young, not twenty-five, a colonel, bearded, haggard, and exhausted.
“I’ve got no fucking drivers,” he screamed at the tank factory official in charge of the delivery. Then he turned to the big flaxen-haired youth. “Can you drive these bloody things?”
“Yes, Comrade, but I have to go back to Tankograd.”
“No chance. You can drive, you’re drafted.”
The train steamed east. Private Nikolai Nikolayev found himself in a rough cotton smock, deep inside the hull of a KV1, heading toward the town of Prokhorovka. The Battle of Kursk began two weeks later.
Though referred to as the “Battle” of Kursk, it was in fact a series of raging and bloody clashes that spanned the whole enclave and lasted two months. By the time it was over, Kursk had become the biggest tank battle the world has ever seen, before or since. It involved 6,000 tanks on both sides, 2 million men, and 4,000 aircraft. It was the battle that finally proved the German Panzer was not invincible after all. But it was a close-run thing.
The German army was just deploying its own wonder weapon, the Tiger, packing a fearsome 88mm cannon in its turret, which, with armor-piercing shells, could take out anything in its path. The KV1 carried a much smaller 76mm gun, even though the new model Nikolai had delivered mounted the improved ZIS-5 longer-range version.
On July 12, 1943, the Russians began to counterattack, hand the key was the Prokhorovka sector. The regiment Nikolai had joined was down to six KV1s when the commander saw what he thought were five Panzer Mark IVs rand decided to attack. The Russians rolled in line abreast over the crest of a ridge and down into a shallow valley; the Germans were on the opposite crest.
The young colonel was wrong about the Panzer IVs; they were Tigers. One by one they picked off the six KV1s with armor-piercing sabot.
Nikolai’s tank was hit twice. The first shell tore off all the tracks on one side and peeled open the hull. Down in the driver’s seat he felt the tank shudder and halt. The second shell took the turret a glancing blow and careened off into the hillside. But the impact was enough to kill the crew.
There were five men in the KV1 and four of them were dead. Nikolai, battered, bruised, and shaken, crawled out of his living tomb to the smell of running diesel fuel on hot metal. Bodies got in his way; he pushed them to one side.
The gun commander and gunner were sprawled over the breech, blood and mucus running from mouth, nose, and ears. Through the gap in the hull Nikolai could see the Tigers racing past, through the smoke of the other blazing KV1s.
To his surprise, he found the gun turret still worked. He hauled a shell up from the rack, pushed it into the breech, and closed the mechanism. He had never done it before, but he had seen it done. Usually it took two men. Feeling sick from the blow to his head down below and the stench of fuel up above, he turned the turret around, put his eye to the periscopic sight, found a Tiger barely three hundred yards away, and fired.
It turned out the one he had picked was the last of the five. The four Tigers up ahead did not notice. He reloaded, found another target, and fired again. The second Tiger took his shell in the gap between turret and hull, and exploded. Somewhere beneath Nikolai’s feet there was a low whump and flames began to trickle across the grass, spreading as they found more pools of fuel. After his second shell the remaining three Tigers noticed they were under attack from behind and turned. He took his third one side-on as it pulled around. The other two completed their turn and came back at him. That was when he knew he was dead.
He threw himself down and fell out of the rent in the KV’s side just before the Tigers’ answering shell took away the turret in which he had been standing. The ammunition began to explode; he could feel his blouse smolde
ring. So he rolled in the long grass, over and over, away from the wreck.
Then something happened that he did not expect and did not see. Ten SU-152s came over the ridge and the Tigers decided they had had enough. There were two left of five. They raced for the opposite slope and the crest above it. One got there and disappeared.
Nikolai felt someone hauling him to his feet. The man was a full colonel. The shallow valley was studded with wrecked tanks, six Russian and four German. His own tank was surrounded by three of the dead Tigers.
“Did you do this?” asked the colonel.
Nikolai could hardly hear him. His ears were ringing; he felt sick. He nodded.
“Come with me,” said the colonel. There was a small GAZ truck behind the ridge. The colonel drove for eight miles. They came to a bivouac. In front of the main tent was a long table covered in maps, being studied by a dozen high-ranking officers. The colonel halted the truck, strode forward, and threw up a salute. The senior general looked up.
Nikolai sat in the front passenger seat of the truck. He could see the colonel talking and the officers looking at him. Then the senior among them raised his hand and beckoned. Fearful that he had let two Tigers escape, Nikolai came down from the truck and marched over. His cotton blouse was scorched, his face blackened, and he stank of petrol and cordite.
“Three Tigers?” said General Pavel Rotmistrov, Commanding Officer, First Guards Tank Army. “From the rear? From a wrecked KV1?”
Nikolai stood there like an idiot and said nothing.
The general smiled and turned to a short, chunky man with piggy eyes and the insignia of a political commissar.
“I think that’s worth a bit of metal?”
The chunky commissar nodded. Comrade Stalin would approve. A box was brought from the tent. Rotmistrov pinned the order of Hero of the Soviet Union on the seventeen-year-old. The commissar, who happened to be Nikita Khrushchev, watched and nodded again.