by Greg Cox
The blue spots were already fading from her vision when she spotted the silver pen lying amid the shadows. “Excellent,” she murmured, kneeling briefly to confiscate the weapon, which she tucked into her boot before reclaiming the stolen attaché case, which she carefully [348] closed and locked once more. Holding on to the case by its handle, she marched across the crypt to her cuffed prisoner, whom she savagely yanked to his feet. “Out!” she ordered, prodding him in the back with the muzzle of her gun.
“You’re making a terrible mistake, Colonel,” the American blurted passionately, spitting a mouthful of blood and broken enamel onto the floor. “Gorbachev and his reforms are the best chance your generation has to halt this insane Cold War, reducing the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war!” He looked back over his shoulder, making what sounded like a sincere, last-ditch effort to sway her from her duty and her designs. “Never mind what happens to me,” he sputtered, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. “You can’t let paranoia and misguided nationalism get in the way of world peace!”
“Quiet!” she demanded, pistol-whipping the back of the American’s head to silence his ridiculous pleas. He sounded just as insane and foolishly idealistic as Mikhail Sergeyevich himself. It occurred to her, though, that she could hardly have the man sharing his all-too-valid suspicions with the uninformed soldiers in Red Square; what if someone actually listened to his accusations, before Gorbachev and his traitorous confederates were entirely eliminated?
I cannot take that chance, she realized. “Wait,” she commanded her prisoner, temporarily halting his progress toward the exit. It was tempting to place a bullet in the man’s skull, ending his unwanted interference forever, but, no, it was important to find out precisely whom the imposter was working for, and how much they knew about the all-important operation now in progress. Just shut him up for now, she decided, putting the precious attaché case down long enough to remove the man’s blue silk necktie and use it as a gag to keep the American from speaking to anyone else. She tied the ends of the tie tightly behind the man’s head, then checked to make certain that the knot was secure. Yes, that will do. “Keep going,” she told the prisoner once more, jabbing her gun between his shoulders.
She propelled the American out of the Tomb into the clear, cold moonlight outside. The half-dozen soldiers posted at the entrance of the mausoleum reacted with understandable surprise as she escorted [349] the captured spy at gunpoint down the steps of the Tomb to the weathered stone pavement below. “Lenin’s Ghost!” gasped one of the guards, not realizing how perversely appropriate that exclamation was.
Later, she reflected, there would have to be an investigation into just how the shameless imposter had managed to insinuate himself into the Tomb, as well as into what had become of Lenin’s actual remains, real or otherwise. For now, however, she had much more pressing matters to attend to. She glanced down quickly at her wristwatch, chagrined to see that it was nearly 7:30 P.M., making it roughly late afternoon in Reykjavik. Time was passing swiftly and, according to plan, she needed to be in place within the Presidium, in the executive offices of the Supreme Soviet, when tonight’s operation went into effect:
“Yolki palki!” she swore under her breath. The imposter in the Tomb had cost her precious time. As much as she longed to interrogate the prisoner fully, to find out precisely how much he knew about the planned coup d’etat, she could not spare a moment to extract his secrets now. The classified documents in her case weighed down her arm, reminding her of a higher duty. “Take this spy into custody,” she commanded the guards, shoving the American toward the surrounding soldiers. “Escort him to Lubyanka on my orders, and have him confined there until I choose to question him. Leave his gag in place until then.”
“Da, Colonel!” said the eager commander of the guards, rushing forward to grab the American by his collar. He shook the prisoner ungently, taking pains to demonstrate his contempt for an enemy of the State. “I will deliver him there myself!”
Before the heavyset soldier could carry out her orders, however, a peculiar whooshing noise cut through icy night air. Komananov heard the sound of metal slicing into flesh and watched in surprise as the commander of the honor guard stiffened abruptly, then toppled face-forward onto the pavement. A flat steel hoop was embedded deep in the soldier’s back, surrounded by a rapidly spreading red stain. Gleaming in the moonlight, the metallic ring was half-buried in the man’s [350] spine, so that it resembled a handle by which the prone body could be lifted like a piece of luggage. What the devil? the colonel wondered, shocked by the soldier’s abrupt demise.
Whoosh! Before she or any of the other soldiers could react, another silver quoit came spinning through the air, striking a large, scowling soldier in the head. The guard instantly dropped to the ground; whether he was dead or merely unconscious, Komananov could not immediately tell. “Fyodor!” one of the guard’s comrades cried out in alarm, rushing to the side of the fallen soldier. “Who did this?”
Clutching the grip of her Makarov, Komananov searched frantically for the source of the missiles. There! she thought, looking up at the top of Lenin’s Tomb, where she spotted an unlikely figure striking a dramatic pose astride the uppermost block of the large granite pyramid. A muscular Indian or Pakistani youth, no more than sixteen years old at most, their turbaned assailant looked down at the colonel with yet another steel ring gripped in his right hand and five or six more threaded upon the bulging biceps of his left arm. Despite the chill autumn weather, the murderous youth wore only an embroidered cotton vest above his boots and trousers, with a strap or bandolier of some sort stretching diagonally across his broad chest and a silver metal band encircling his right wrist. His confident—no, arrogant—stance betrayed no fear of the armed and angry soldiers below. “Behold! I teach you the Superman,” he announced boldly, paraphrasing Nietzsche. “The lightning out of the dark cloud!”
Who? Komananov wondered, recognizing the grandiloquent declaration as the ravings of a decadent German philosopher, ably translated into Russian. Taking aim at the newcomer, she spared a second to glance over at the handcuffed American, now standing amid the fallen bodies of the ambushed soldiers. Was that recognition she saw in his eyes? The colonel felt convinced that Lenin’s impersonator knew exactly who this bloodthirsty terrorist was, even as she vowed silently that this ill-timed and extremely inconvenient rescue attempt would not succeed. “Don’t let the prisoner get away!” she shouted at the four remaining soldiers, then fired at the youth atop the pyramid. The blare of gunshots reverberated across Red [351] Square as she held the trigger down, emptying an entire clip at the daring assassin.
But the youth’s reflexes were almost superhumanly fast. Laughing insolently, he leapt out of the way of the fiery salvo, onto one of the lower tiers of the pyramid. Raising his right arm with remarkable speed, he expertly spun a silver hoop around his raised index finger, then sent it whizzing through the air at Komananov, who flinched involuntarily only seconds before the razor-sharp quoit sliced through the blue-steel muzzle of her Makarov, halting its destructive flight only centimeters from her own gloved knuckles. Shaken and frustrated, she hurled the now-useless pistol away from her. Surely he couldn’t have done that on purpose! she hoped breathlessly, horrified by the uncanny accuracy of the terrorist’s aim. Could he?
She recognized the flying ring now, her memory sparked by the youth’s Indian appearance and attire. It was a chakram, the traditional weapon of India’s famed Sikh warriors. But what was a teenage Sikh doing in the heart of Moscow, attempting to rescue a captured American spy? The possibility of a multinational intelligence operation, mobilized solely to counter the conspiracy against Gorbachev, sent shivers down her spine. How did these strangers find out about the operation? Our security was foolproof!
“Shoot him!” she ordered the surviving guards, who needed little encouragement to open fire on the cursed foreigner who had already struck down two of their comrades. Assault rifles unleashed their 5.45mm fury against
the assassin’s perch atop the pyramid, raising a deafening clamor and sending chips of red and black granite flying. Komananov winced at the damage done to the historic mausoleum, but monuments could be repaired; the safety and security of Russia’s future took priority. She would have sacrificed almost anything to keep the devious American and his Indian accomplice from sabotaging the operation. Russia had to be rid of Gorbachev!
Driven backward by the ferocious hail of gunfire from the unleashed AK-74s, the murdering Sikh retreated into the shadows at the rear of the pyramid, ducking behind the massive granite blocks.
“Did you get him?” Komananov called out harshly, inwardly cursing [352] the darkness that hid the assassin from her view. Her fingers held on tightly to the handle of her attaché case; she was determined not to part with it again. “Is he dead?” She signaled the soldiers to spread out around the bullet-scarred mausoleum, while keeping one eye on the American prisoner, who remained under guard by a single, acne-scarred, adolescent soldier, who gulped nervously as he clutched his rifle and looked about warily, no doubt fearing that spinning death would come winging out of the night at any moment, claiming him just as it had the first two victims of the Sikh’s lethal chakrams.
Komananov dropped to her knees upon the pavement and attempted to wrestle a rifle of her own out from beneath the lifeless body of the dead commander. Unwilling to let go of the all-important attaché case, she awkwardly and one-handedly tugged on the barrel of the AK-74. Moonlight glinted off the chakram protruding between the man’s shoulders, mocking her efforts even as the blood upon the cobblestones stained her hands, coat, and trousers. The beefy corpse was literally dead weight, and a struggle to move.
Gunfire sounded from behind the Tomb, and the colonel looked up hopefully, praying fervently to no one in particular that one of the soldiers had finally managed to put a bullet in the maddeningly elusive young Sikh. “What’s happening?” she shouted. “Did you get him? For hell’s sake, someone tell me he’s dead!”
A defiant war cry, in what sounded like Hindi or Punjabi, greeted the colonel’s strident outcry Her eyes tracked the sound to the very summit of the Tomb, where, after getting a running start across the crowning cube, the Indian youth leaped off the peak of the pyramid, landing on the Square below halfway between Komananov and the captured American. A flung chakram caught the soldier guarding the American in the throat, before he could fire a single shot, and the stricken guard dropped to the pavement, shredding his fingertips as he tugged uselessly at the sharpened steel ring wedged beneath his chin.
A muffled cry came from the gagged American, almost as if he was objecting to the ruthlessness of the Sikh’s methods. To the colonel’s amazement, the false Lenin suddenly snapped the chain linking his [353] cuffs and dropped to check the slaughtered soldier’s pulse before rising again and yanking off his gag with an angry gesture. “That’s enough, Noon!” he shouted in English at the Indian youth. “No more deaths!”
Things were happening so quickly Komananov could barely keep up with events. Where had the defeated American found the strength to snap his shackles in two, and why was he railing against his determined rescuer? She watched in alarm as the older man armed himself with the butchered soldier’s rifle.
“Over here! In the Square!” Komananov hollered hoarsely to the guards she had dispatched to circle the Tomb. Her knuckles whitened beneath her gloves as she tightened her grip on the attaché case and its incriminating contents. “Don’t let them escape!”
“Frustrated to the point of madness, she kept tugging on the rifle beneath the dead commander, but the inert corpse refused to budge. Responding to her cries, the three remaining guards came running from opposite sides of the Tomb, yet the American pinned down the soldier coming around the right corner of the mausoleum by laying down a relentless stream of automatic gunfire that forced the besieged guard to retreat back behind the bottom tier of the pyramid. That left only two more soldiers to converge on the Indian youth, who simultaneously charged toward Komananov, a savage glee shining in his eyes.
Looking directly into the face of the running Sikh, she was astonished to see that this “Noon” was every bit as young as she had first supposed, his scruffy black beard looking less than a year old. He’s just a boy, she marveled. A boy who had already killed three trained Russian soldiers. Looking beyond his shockingly adolescent countenance, she noted unhappily that the young Sikh still had three more chakrams threaded upon his upper arm, plus a curved silver dagger thrust into his belt. He’s better armed than I am, she realized. Damn him!
But instead of resorting to his fearsome quoits once more, Noon unstrapped another device from his back: what looked like a wagon wheel with heavy weights radiating out from the center of the wooden wheel. As the last two guards chased after the youth, unable to fire at him immediately for fear of hitting the colonel by mistake, the brawny Sikh lifted the ungainly contraption above his head and, grasping the [354] spokes around the central hub, began spinning the wheel at enormous speed. The outer weights orbited the youth, providing a defensive cordon around him, as he charged toward one of the two guardsmen, who was trying to circle around to get between the terrorist and the colonel. The unlucky guard, perhaps transfixed by the bizarre spectacle presented by Noon, did not get out of the way fast enough, and the spinning weights clipped him in the head, sending him flying. Clobbered, the soldier hit the cobblestones hard and did not get up.
Unlike the fatally perplexed guardsman, Komananov recognized the exotic implement being employed by the Indian teenager, although she had never actually seen it used in combat before. It was a chakar, another traditional Sikh weapon. Intelligence briefings on arcane martial-arts techniques, however, hardly prepared her for the sight of a veteran soldier being laid low by a spinning wheel. Who is this boy? she wondered, aghast. And for whom is he working?
As the remaining guard slowed his pursuit, wary of being walloped in the head like his comrade, the Sikh turned to face him, taking care to keep both himself and the colonel in the soldier’s line of fire. Muscular arms rippled as he arched his back and flung the entire chakar at the last guardsman. The massive wheel spun through the air like a flying saucer, or a chakram, its menacing weights whipping around the rotating hub. Under attack, the guard fired into the air, trying futilely to bring down the chakar in flight, only to dive hurriedly out of the way as the whirling missile crashed to earth exactly where he had been standing only seconds before.
Grinning wolfishly, the Indian youth paused for a heartbeat to savor the havoc he had wrought, then lunged again at Komananov with inhuman velocity. Abandoning her tussle with the recalcitrant cadaver and its infuriatingly inaccessible rifle, the distraught colonel reached hastily for the silver pen tucked into her boot. Perhaps there was still time to figure out its firing mechanism ... !
She barely had time to get to her feet, however, before Noon was behind her, with his knife to her throat. “I’ll take that,” he stated with casual authority, snatching the disguised weapon from her fumbling fingers. “Stay back!” he commanded the surviving guard, who was only [355] just scrambling back onto his feet after dodging the hurled chakar. “Drop your weapon or she dies!”
“No!” Komananov cried desperately. Her life didn’t matter, not so long as the operation survived. The Sikh and the American could not be allowed to endanger the master plan any longer. She dropped the attaché case gently onto the pavement, hoping that Noon would leave it behind should he take her hostage as he fled. “Shoot him! Shoot him now!” she shrieked.
The soldier hesitated, no doubt reluctant to take responsibility for the death of a high-ranking KGB officer. The Sikh took advantage of his indecision to throw Komananov over his shoulder, as effortlessly as though she were a child, and dash for the unguarded entrance of the Tomb. “Seven!” he called out in English to the American, who was still providing cover for Noon by firing his stolen assault rifle at the soldier trapped behind the right-hand corner of the pyramid. “Follow me!�
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His vibrant voice had a peremptory tone, leading the confused colonel to wonder just who was in charge, the Indian teen or the older American? She had little time to ponder such enigmas, though, as the racing Sikh took the stairs up the front of the Tomb several steps at a time, his headlong pace unhindered, so it seemed, by the weight of the full-grown KGB agent draped over his shoulder. Komananov flailed madly, struggling to free herself, but could not break free of the Sikh’s iron grip. Every lunging stride left her jarred and breathless, and she clenched her teeth to keep from accidentally biting down on her tongue.
“Leave be,” he ordered curtly in Komananov’s own tongue, “or I’ll snap your spine!” Reaching the top of the steps, he turned beneath the square entrance of the Tomb. “Hurry!” he shouted to his American ally, once again switching to English. “We must leave this place at once!”
But Lenin’s sacrilegious imposter, whose code number was apparently “Seven,” was not ready to leave Red Square just yet. In a startling display of speed and marksmanship, he shot the rifle out of the hands of the soldier peeking out from around the corner of the Tomb, then spun around quickly and did the same to the guard who had dodged [356] the chakar. Blue sparks flared along the grooved stock of the latter soldier’s AK-74 as the American’s bullets blasted the rifle out of the guard’s grip. Suddenly finding himself empty-handed, the soldier ran for safety, leaving Number Seven momentarily in control of the Square. Komananov’s desperate hopes were dashed as the American snatched up the attaché case she had already reclaimed from him once before. No! Not again! she raged silently, while the impatient Sikh urged his fellow terrorist to greater speed. “Faster!” Noon called out from the entry to the Tomb. “Hurry! Before reinforcements arrive!”