The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  “Sergey, that would set off an international incident like you would not believe,” Jack said calmly. The next conversations he heard were in Russian. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the emotional content was clear enough. They didn’t know what to do. That suited Ryan just fine.

  Clark was walking along a street three blocks from the waterfront when he saw them. It was eleven forty-five. They were right on time, thank God. This part of the city had restaurants and, though he scarcely believed it, some discos. They were walking out of one when he spotted them. Two women, dressed as he’d been told to expect, with a male companion. The bodyguard. Only one, also as per orders. It was an agreeable surprise that so far everything had gone according to plan. Clark counted another dozen or so other people on the sidewalk, some in loud groups, some in quiet couples, many of them weaving from too much drink. But it was a Friday night, and that’s what people all over the world did on Friday night. He maintained visual contact with the three people who concerned him, and closed in.

  The bodyguard was a pro. He stayed on their right, keeping his gun hand free. He was ahead of them, but that didn’t keep his head from scanning in all directions. Clark adjusted the scarf on his neck, then reached in his pocket. The pistol was there as he increased his pace to catch up. It wasn’t hard. The two women seemed to be in no hurry as they approached the corner. The older one seemed to be looking around at the city. The buildings looked old, but weren’t. The Second World War had swept through Talinn in two explosive waves, leaving behind nothing but scorched stones. But whoever made such decisions had opted to rebuild the city much as it had been, and the town had a feel very different from the Russian cities Clark had visited before. It made him think of Germany somehow, though he couldn’t imagine why. That was his last frivolous thought of the night. He was now thirty feet behind them, just another man walking home on a cold February night, his face lowered to avoid the wind and a fur hat pulled down over his head. He could hear their voices now, and they were speaking Russian. Time.

  “Russkiy,” Clark said with a Moscow accent. “You mean not everyone in this city is an arrogant Balt?”

  “This is an old and lovely city, Comrade,” the older woman answered. “Show some respect.”

  Here we go ... Clark told himself. He walked forward with the curving steps of a man in his cups.

  “Your pardon, lovely lady. Have a good evening,” he said as he passed. He moved around the women and bumped into the bodyguard. “Excuse me, Comrade—” The man found that there was a pistol aimed at his face. “Turn left and go into the alley. Hands out where I can see them, Comrade.”

  The shock on the poor bastard’s face was amusing as hell, Clark thought, reminding himself that this was a skilled man with a gun in his pocket. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and kept him out at arm’s length, with his gun held in tight.

  “Mother . . .” Katryn said in quiet alarm.

  “Hush and do as I say. Do as this man says.”

  “But—”

  “Against the wall,” Clark told the man. He kept the gun aimed at the center of the bodyguard’s head while he switched hands, then he chopped hard on the side of his neck with his right hand. The man fell stunned, and Clark put handcuffs on his wrists. Next he gagged him, tied up his ankles, and dragged him to the darkest spot he could find.

  “Ladies, if you will come with me, please?”

  “What is this?” Katryn asked.

  “I don’t know,” her mother admitted. “Your father told me to—”

  “Miss, your father has decided that he wants to visit America, and he wants you and your mother to join him,” Clark said in flawless Russian.

  Katryn did not reply. The lighting in the alley was very poor, but he could see her face lose all of the color it had. Her mother looked little better.

  “But,” the young girl said finally. “But that’s treason ... I don’t believe it.”

  “He told me ... he told me to do whatever this man says,” Maria said. “Katryn—we must.”

  “But—”

  “Katryn,” her mother said. “What will happen to your life if your father defects and you remain behind? What will happen to your friends? What will happen to you? They will use you to get him back, anything they have to do, Katusha ...”

  “Time to leave, folks.” Clark took both women by the arm.

  “But—” Katryn gestured at the bodyguard.

  “He’ll be fine. We don’t kill people. It’s bad for business.” Clark led them back to the street, turning left toward the harbor.

  The Major had divided his men into two groups. The smaller one was setting explosive charges on everything they could find. A light pole or a laser, it didn’t matter to them. The large group had cut down most of the KGB troops who’d tried to come here, and was arrayed around the control bunker. It wasn’t actually a bunker, but whoever had made the construction plans for the place had evidently thought that the control room should have the same sort of protection as those at the Leninsk Cosmodrome, or maybe he’d thought that the mountain might someday be subjected to a nuclear airburst attack. Most likely was that someone had decided the manual prescribed this sort of structure for this sort of place. What had resulted was a building with reinforced-concrete walls fully a meter thick. His men had killed the KGB commander and taken his vehicle, with the heavy machine gun, and were pouring fire into the vision slits cut in the structure. In fact, no one used them for looking, and their rounds had long since pounded through the thick glass and were chewing into the room’s computers and control gear.

  Inside, General Pokryshkin had taken command by default. He had thirty or so KGB troops, armed only with light weapons and what little ammunition they’d been carrying when the attack had begun. A lieutenant was handling the defense as best he could, while the General was trying to get help by radio.

  “It will take an hour,” a regimental commander was saying. “My men are moving out right now!”

  “Fast as you can!” Pokryshkin said. “People are dying here.” He’d already thought of helicopters, but in this weather they’d accomplish nothing at all. A helicopter assault would not even have been a gamble, just suicide. He set down the radio and picked up his service automatic. He could hear the noise from the outside. All the site’s equipment was being blown up. He could live with that now. As great a catastrophe as that was, the people mattered more. Nearly a third of his engineers were in the bunker. They’d been finishing up a lengthy conference when the attack began. Had that not been the case, fewer would be here, but those would have been out working on the equipment. At least here they had a chance.

  On the other side of the bunker’s concrete walls, the Major was still trying to figure this one out. He’d hardly expected to find this sort of structure. His RPG antitank rounds merely chipped the wall, and aiming them at the narrow slits was difficult in the darkness. His machine-gun rounds could be guided to them with tracers, but that wasn’t good enough.

  Find the weak points, he told himself. Take your time and think it out. He ordered his men to maintain a steady rate of fire and started moving around the building. Whoever was inside had his weapons equally dispersed, but buildings like this one always had at least one blind spot . . . The Major merely had to find it.

  “What is happening?” his radio squawked.

  “We have killed perhaps fifty. The rest are in a bunker and we’re trying to get them, too. What of your target?”

  “The apartment building,” the Archer replied. “They’re all in there, and—” The radio transmitted the sound of gunfire. “We will have them soon.”

  “Thirty minutes and we must leave, my friend,” the Major said.

  “Yes!” The radio went silent.

  The Archer was a good man, and a brave one, the Major thought as he examined the bunker’s north face, but with just a week’s formal training he’d be so much more effective ... just a week to codify the things that he was learning on
his own . . . and to pass on the lessons that others had shed blood for . . .

  There was the place. There was a blind spot.

  The last mortar rounds were targeted on the roof of the apartment block. Bondarenko smiled as he watched. Finally the other side had done something really foolish. The 82-millimeter shells didn’t have a chance of breaking through the concrete roof slabs, but if they’d spread them around the building’s periphery he’d have lost many of his men. He was down to ten, two of them wounded. The rifles of the fallen were inside the building now, being fired from the second floor. He counted twenty bodies outside his perimeter, and the attackers—they were Afghans, he was sure of that now—were milling about beyond his vision, trying to decide what to do. For the first time Bondarenko felt that they just might survive after all. The General had radioed to say that a motorized regiment was on the way down the road from Nurek, and though he shuddered to think what it would be like driving BTR infantry carriers over snow-covered mountain roads, the loss of a few infantry squads was as nothing compared to the corporate expertise that he was trying to protect now.

  The incoming rifle fire was sporadic now, just harassment fire while they decided what to do next. With more people he’d try a counterattack, just to throw them off balance, but the Colonel was tied to his post. He couldn’t risk it, not with a mere squad left to cover two sides of the building.

  Do I pull back now? The longer I can keep them away from the building, the better, but should I do my withdrawal now? His thoughts wavered at that decision. Inside the building his troops would have far better protection, but he’d lose the ability to control them when each man was separated from the next by the interior walls. If they pulled inside and withdrew to the upper floors, they’d allow the Afghan sappers to drop the building with explosive charges—no, that was the counsel of despair. Bondarenko listened to the scattered rifle shots that punctuated the sounds of wounded and dying men and couldn’t make up his mind.

  Two hundred meters away, the Archer was about to do that for him. Mistaking the casualties he’d taken here to mean that this part of the building was the most heavily defended, he was leading what was left of his men to the other side. It required five minutes to do so, while those he left behind kept up a steady drumbeat of fire into the Russian perimeter. Out of mortar rounds, out of RPG projectiles, the only thing left to him besides rifles were a few grenades and six satchel charges. All around him fires blazed into the night, separate orange-red flames reaching upward to melt the falling snow. He heard the cries of his own wounded as he formed up the fifty men he had left. They’d attack as one mass, behind the leader who’d brought them here. The Archer flipped the safety off his AK-47, and remembered the first three men he’d killed with it.

  Bondarenko’s head snapped around when he heard the screams from the other side of the building. He turned back and saw that nothing was happening. It was time to do something, and he hoped that it was the right thing:

  “Everyone back to the building. Move!” Two of his remaining ten were wounded, and each had to be helped. It took over a minute as the night shattered yet again with volleys of rifle fire. Bondarenko took five and ran down the building’s main first-floor corridor and out the other side.

  He couldn’t tell if there’d been a breakthrough, or if the men here were also falling back—again he had to hold fire because both sides were identically uniformed. Then one of those running toward the building fired, and the Colonel went to one knee and dropped him with a five-round burst. More appeared, and he nearly fired until he heard their shouts.

  “Nashi, nashi!” He counted eight. The last of them was the sergeant, wounded in both legs.

  “Too many, we couldn’t—”

  “Get inside,” Bondarenko told him. “Can you still fight?”

  “Fuck, yes!” Both men looked around. They couldn’t fight from the individual rooms. They’d have to make their stand in the corridors and stairwells.

  “Help is on the way. A regiment is coming down from Nurek if we can hold on!” Bondarenko told his men. He didn’t tell them how long it was supposed to take. It was the first good news in over half an hour. Two civilians came downstairs. Both carried rifles.

  “You need help?” Morozov asked. He’d avoided military service, but he had just learned that a rifle wasn’t all that hard to use.

  “How are things up there?” Bondarenko asked.

  “My section chief is dead. I took this from him. Many people are hurt, and the rest are as terrified as I am.”

  “Stay with the sergeant,” the Colonel told him. “Keep your head, Comrade Engineer, and we may yet live through this. Help’s on the way.”

  “I hope the bastards hurry.” Morozov helped the sergeant—who was even younger than the engineer—go to the far end of the corridor.

  Bondarenko put half of his men at the stairwell and the other half by the elevators. It was quiet again. They could hear the jabbering of voices outside, but the shooting had died down for the moment.

  “Down the ladder. Carefully,” Clark said. “There’s a crossmember at the bottom. You can stand on that.”

  Maria looked with disgust at the slimy wood, doing as she was told like a person in a dream. Her daughter followed. Clark went last, stepped around them, and got into the boat. He untied the ropes and moved the boat by hand underneath where the women were standing. It was a three-foot drop.

  “One at a time. You first, Katryn. Step down slowly and I’ll catch you.” She did so, her knees wobbling with doubt and fear. Clark grabbed her ankle and pulled it toward him. She fell into the boat as elegantly as a sack of beans. Maria came next. He gave the same instructions, and she followed them, but Katryn tried to help, and in doing so moved the boat. Maria lost her grip and fell into the water with a scream.

  “What is that?” someone called from the landside end of the pier.

  Clark ignored it, grabbing the woman’s splashing hands and pulling her aboard. She was gasping from the cold, but there wasn’t much Clark could do about that. He heard the sound of running feet along the pier as he turned on the boat’s electric motor and headed straight out.

  “Stoi!” a voice called. It was a cop, Clark realized, it would have to be a damned cop. He turned to see the glimmer of a flashlight. It couldn’t reach the boat, but it was fixed on the wake he’d left behind. Clark lifted his radio.

  “Uncle Joe, this is Willy. On the way. The sun is out!”

  “They may have been spotted,” the communications officer told Mancuso.

  “Great.” The Captain went forward. “Goodman, come right to zero-eight-five. Move her in toward the coast at ten knots.”

  “Conn, sonar, contact bearing two-nine-six. Diesel engine,” Jones’s voice announced. “Twin screws.”

  “Will be KGB patrol frigate—Grisha, probably,” Ramius said. “Routine patrol.”

  Mancuso didn’t say anything, but he pointed to the fire-control tracking party. They’d work up a position on the seaward target while Dallas moved into the coast at periscope depth, keeping her radio antenna up.

  “Nine-seven-one, this is Velikiye Luki Center. Turn right to new course one-zero-four,” the Russian voice told Colonel von Eich. The pilot squeezed the microphone trigger on his wheel.

  “Say again, Luki. Over.”

  “Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to turn right to new heading one-zero-four and return to Moscow. Over.”

  “Ah, thank you, Luki, negative, we are proceeding on a heading of two-eight-six as per our flight plan. Over.”

  “Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to return to Moscow!” the controller insisted.

  “Roger. Thank you. Out.” Von Eich looked down to see that his autopilot was on the proper heading, then resumed his outside scanning for other aircraft.

  “But you are not turning back,” the Russian said over the intercom.

  “No.” Von Eich turned to look at the man. “We didn’t leave anything behind that I know of.” Well ...


  “But they ordered you—”

  “Son, I am in command of this aircraft, and my orders are to fly to Shannon,” the pilot explained.

  “But—” The Russian unsnapped his straps and started to stand up.

  “Sit down!” the pilot ordered. “Nobody leaves my flight deck without my permission, mister! You are a guest on my airplane, and you’ll goddamned well do what I say!” Damn, it was supposed to be easier than this! He gestured to the engineer, who toggled off another switch. That shut off all the cabin lights in the aircraft. The VC-137 was now totally blacked out. Von Eich keyed his radio again. “Luki, this is niner-seven-one. We have some electrical problems aboard. I don’t want to make any radical course changes until we have them figured out. Do you copy? Over.”

  “What is your problem?” the controller asked. The pilot wondered what he’d been told as he gave out the next set of lies.

  “Luki, we don’t know just yet. We’re losing electrical power. All our lights have gone bad. The bird is blacked out at the moment, say again we are running without lights. I’m a little worried, and I don’t need any distractions right now.” That bought him two minutes of silence, and twenty miles of westward progress.

  “Nine-seven-one, I have notified Moscow of your problems. They advise that you return at once. They will clear you for an emergency approach,” the controller offered.

  “Roger, thank you, Luki, but I don’t want to risk a course change right now, if you know what I mean. We’re working to fix the problem. Please stand by. Will advise. Out.” Colonel von Eich checked the clock in his instrument panel. Thirty more minutes to the coast.

  “What?” Major Zarudin asked. “Who got on the airplane?”

  “Chairman Gerasimov and an arrested enemy spy,” Vatutin said.

  “On an American airplane? You tell me that the Chairman is defecting on an American airplane!” The officer commanding the airport security detail had taken charge of the situation, as his orders allowed him to do. He found that he had two colonels, a lieutenant colonel, a driver, and an American in the office he used here—along with the craziest damned story he’d ever heard. “I must call for instructions.”