Tsar: A Thriller (Alex Hawke)

by Ted Bell

  “This sounds an awful lot like irredentism, and I don’t think you—”

  “If by that word you mean someone who advocates the restoration to their country of any territory properly belonging to it, then yes, that is exactly what I am saying to you. I am only speaking now of the territories mentioned. We can discuss Moldova and the ‘Stans’ at a later date.”

  “I must be misunderstanding you. Surely you’re not proposing to alter the national boundaries of the European Community?”

  McAtee looked up, surprised. His entire team had gotten up and gathered around his desk, lending him support. He smiled at them, grateful. He needed it.

  He continued, “What you’re suggesting would cast us back into the confrontation we put behind us at the end of the Cold War.”

  Secretary de los Reyes nodded her head, vigorously approving the tack the president was taking.

  Korsakov said, “Now, now, Mr. President, please. There is no need for confrontations. Let’s not even speak in those terms.”

  “Frankly, Mr. Korsakov, we don’t know each other. But let me assure you that you cannot expect me to remain silent and inactive while you prepare to cast aside all precedent and all the legal instruments that have given this world the stability it enjoys today. You are talking about illegally absorbing millions of citizens now happily part of other nations.”

  “Mr. President, this is not a negotiation. I had hoped to avoid just this sort of overheated rhetoric. But then, perhaps you haven’t considered the security dimensions of the moment we seem to have arrived at?”

  “Security dimensions? Is that a threat?”

  “You are aware of the terrible incident at Salina, Kansas.”

  “Of course, I’m aware of Salina. An unfortunate development. We’re sure it’s not likely to happen again.”

  “On the contrary, that is exactly what is likely to happen again. But this time to a major population center and without benefit of advance warning.”

  “Mr. Korsakov, think extremely hard about what I am about to say. You yourself are not nearly so immune to certain actions as you seem to think. Reprisals could be swift and overwhelming.”

  “You are in no position to threaten me, I assure you.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No. Trust me, as you will soon learn, you are not.”

  McAtee searched the faces of his team before replying. Each one of them made a slashing motion across the neck.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Korsakov. I am unable to continue this conversation any longer. Our ambassador will be in touch.”

  He hung up.

  “Play that back on speaker, will you, Betsey?” he said after a moment.

  The team stood around the desk and listened as both sides of the conversation were played. Jaws dropped, eyes rolled, but no one spoke when it was over. The implications of what they’d just heard were too profound to be assimilated in an instant. The world had just shifted on its axis, and the floor beneath their feet felt as if it might give way at any moment.

  “Well?” the president said. “Welcome to the parallel universe. We’ve fallen through a wormhole. I always wondered if things could get any crazier. Now I know.”

  “Good Lord,” the vice president said, managing a grim smile. “We’re back to October 1962. Maybe worse.”

  “Definitely worse. This man is insane. A genius, perhaps, but a raving megalomaniac. Khrushchev was merely a Commie thug with a grade-school education,” Mike Reiter said. The good-looking young director had only been on the job a few years. But he was a major history buff and had taught Russian studies at Georgetown before joining the FBI.

  Consuelo de los Reyes felt her cell phone vibrate and stepped a few paces toward the Rose Garden windows to take the call. She listened for a few moments, then turned back to face the group, shaking her head, her face drained of all color.

  “And the vice president’s wife? Is she all right?” they heard her say. She listened and then looked at McCloskey, nodding, giving him a brief smile that said she was okay.

  “Tell us what’s happened, Conch,” the president said when she’d ended the call.

  “The airship Pushkin, en route from Miami to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony, has just been taken over by Russian terrorists. One of the hostages managed to get to a satellite phone and call her fiancé in Miami. A man named Stokely Jones who does contract work for the Pentagon.”

  “Friend of Hawke’s,” Brick Kelly said. “Ex-Navy SEAL. Hostage-rescue specialist.”

  “My God, poor Bonnie,” the vice president said, wandering dazedly over to a sofa and collapsing into it. “She’s okay?”

  “Yes. That’s what the hostage told Mr. Jones. She had seen her, and she was okay.”

  The president stood up, staring at Charlie Moore.

  “Everyone, listen carefully. I want you and your teams to initiate the following measures immediately. Lock down all Russian assets in this country. Everything. Seize all bank and real estate assets, detain and arrest the crews of every Russian ship in every U.S. harbor. Euro Command in Germany needs to crank up, now, General Moore. I need you to ascertain our offensive strike capability as of right this minute. Have the chief of naval operations send a flash message to the fleets, putting them all on high alert worldwide. Tell the CNO we need to know where all of our subs are, in the North Sea, around Kiel and St. Petersburg, also on the other side, Vladivostok. Tell him to get our carriers out of harm’s way immediately. With me so far?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Next. A flash message to the Air Force. We need to know exactly what our immediate bomber and fighter capabilities are and where. And we need to activate the capacity to jam the Russians’ low-level combat satellites, and do it now. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, that’s all I can think of at the moment. I’m sure you people will have more ideas as the situation develops. Let’s get moving.”

  Moore, already headed for the door, paused and said, “One more thing, Mr. President. I’m going to get the SEAL hostage-rescue team working on this hijacking immediately. They’ll come up with something if anyone can.”

  “Good idea. Now, Brick, you and Mike listen up,” the president said. “SEAL HRT needs every bit of information you guys can get on that airship hostage situation. How the hell do you deal with something like that? It’s not like a plane. Something that runs out of fuel and has to land sometime. Something SWAT hostage-rescue teams can board and overwhelm. A damn zeppelin can stay aloft indefinitely. So, what the hell do we do?”

  Mike Reiter said, “I’ve just been thinking about that, Mr. President. And I don’t have a goddamn clue.”

  52

  ENERGETIKA

  Hawke awoke to a scream. A terrible, masculine scream that stretched on forever. It started high and went low, as if the dying author had jumped off a cliff. It was a death scream. Whoever he was, the poor bastard was now among the departed. And he’d gone out the hard way. The man hadn’t been far away, somewhere to Hawke’s right, maybe only fifty yards or so. What had happened to him?

  The windows of the darkened machine Hawke found himself in were coated with a thick rime of frost. It was bloody freezing inside the military helicopter. He could see his breath in pale blue lights that shone down as if from high walls looming up beside the chopper. Groggy, he tried to raise his hand to wipe clear a porthole on the glass beside his head and found he could not lift it. His wrists were bound with plastic flex cuffs and lay helplessly in his lap.

  He looked down. His wrists were connected by a thin steel chain to cuffs around his ankles. How long had he been out? He could feel the drugs still coursing through his veins, but the effects seemed to be wearing off. He observed himself to be all alone, abandoned by his captors. This was his fate? To freeze to death in the back of a Russian helicopter? It hardly seemed fitting or even fair.

  Where was he?

  On the ground. Certainly not Lubyanka. He had no sense of being in Moscow or any city, f
or that matter. Outside, the wind was howling, and he could smell the sea nearby, hear waves crashing against rock. He’d been drugged and flown here in a helicopter. But where the hell was here? He leaned his injured head, now bandaged, back against the metal bulkhead behind him and tried to get his brain rebooted.

  As the fog inside his head gradually lifted, he dimly recalled the last conscious moments outside the Bolshoi. He’d been arrested. Dragged away from Anastasia. Before he’d blacked out, he’d been sure they were taking him to Moscow’s most notorious prison, the KGB’s private gateway to hell. But no, he was sitting all alone in the back of a helicopter freezing to death. And outside, not too far away, a man had just died in agony.

  There came the sound of heavy boots crunching on snow outside. And wavering fuzzy discs of lights, flashlights in the hands of four or five men, laughing drunkenly as they neared the chopper. One of them, the pilot, yanked the forward left door open and clambered up into his seat. Frigid wind blew through the cockpit. Instantly, Hawke heard the whine of the turbo engine spooling up. The pilot yelled something in slurry Russian to the men outside.

  The right rear door was pulled open, and a flashlight was shoved into his face, a foot from his nose. This was cause for further hysteria among the men outside.

  A red-faced man leaned inside and shouted something incomprehensible in Russian. Hawke ignored him, finally interrupting his tirade to say, “Get somebody who speaks English, for God’s sake.”

  There was more shouting, and now someone else was yelling at him.

  “Out!” a younger guard shouted in English.

  “Sod off,” Hawke replied. He was sleepy. His head hurt. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Hands reached inside for him and yanked him bodily out onto the frozen ground. He stayed on his feet but felt faint, as if he might collapse. Then someone shouted more Russian and jabbed him with a rifle muzzle. He managed to stagger forward a few feet and remain upright.

  He looked around. The helo, now lifting off with a roar and a great rotor downdraft, had landed inside some kind of courtyard. There were high stone walls surrounding it, punctuated every fifty yards or so by towering black Gothic spires. Lights showed at the very tops, men moving around inside. Guard towers. He was in some kind of prison. On an island, he thought, for he had no sense of any mainland, and he heard the sea all around him now that the chopper had tilted its nose down and disappeared into the black night.

  “Go!” the English-speaking guard said, prodding him in the direction of a large four-story building that looked as if Charles Addams had been the principal architect. It was all spires and gargoyles, black with soot. Because his ankles were bound, he could only take small, painful steps through the black and crusty snow. The result was more prodding and shouted insults in Russian.

  He saw human wraiths wandering around inside the yard, barely clothed; they were all wall-eyed, hairless men and women who seemed lost and demented. One of them, a female perhaps, loomed up in front of him, ghostlike, and opened her toothless mouth in a silent scream. A guard slammed her to the ground and kicked her out of their path.

  He was passing through what appeared to be a forest of thick round stakes. He squinted his eyes in the blowing snow, trying to believe he was only imagining what he saw. The bodies of both men and women straddled the tops of the stakes. The stakes disappeared inside their groins. Some of them were still writhing and moaning in agony. Some of them, with the sharp points of the stakes protruding from their chests or necks, were mercifully dead.

  Impaled.

  He knew enough history to know that impaling had once been the favorite method of execution in this part of the world. A sharpened stake, penetrating the rectum, would kill you slowly, maybe in two or three days, before finding and piercing a vital organ. A dull stake, slowly inching upward as the weight of the victim did gravity’s work, could take a week or more. Ivan the Terrible earned his moniker by impaling thousands. Peter the Great had impaled his share as well. Not to mention Vlad the Impaler, more popularly known in legend as Dracula.

  But Hawke, as he staggered through this gruesome forest, had had no idea this barbaric method of execution was still in use.

  Just when he thought it could get no worse, a guard lurched drunkenly toward the nearest stake, jumped up, and grabbed some wretched woman by the ankles, yanking her down a foot or more further onto the bloody stake. She screamed in agony, and the guard let go, collapsing to the ground in hysterics. Hawke, unable to control his rising gorge, wrenched himself free of the guards, bent forward from the waist, and retched, his vomit spattering his shoes, staining the freshly fallen snow.

  He now knew the probable fate of the poor bastard whose cries had woken him up from his drug-induced sleep. He closed his eyes and remained still, swaying on his feet until he was prodded forward toward a set of steps that led up to a massive wooden door, blackened as if by fire but still intact.

  And so he entered the vile prison known as Energetika. It seemed as if the fires of hell must be raging below. Those blackened walls outside. And inside, the floors, windows, walls, even the heavy old furniture were covered with layers of black soot. Yet there was no industry anywhere near this island. If Energetika wasn’t hell on earth, surely it was close enough.

  The jailer, a man with a stupid face beneath his green eyeshade and grimy, sooty clothes, sat behind a great carved desk littered with papers. He barely looked up when Hawke was presented to him. He took a swig of vodka from an open bottle on the desk, scrawled a notation on a random piece of paper, and pointed to a dark corridor leading off to the left.

  “Why am I here?” Hawke shouted at the man as they tried to drag him away. He planted his feet and twisted free of their clutching hands.

  “Why? Because you’re under arrest, of course,” the jailer replied.

  “You speak English?”

  “Obviously. We have schools in Russia, believe it or not. Even universities. Very civilized.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Espionage against the Russian state. Our new Tsar, he doesn’t tolerate spies. He executes them. I’ll see you at dawn, Englishman. They’re cutting a fresh stake for you now.”

  “New Tsar?” Hawke cried as they grabbed him again. “Who is he? What’s his name?”

  “His imperial majesty, Tsar Ivan Korsakov, that’s who.”

  “I know him! We’re friends! I must talk to him.”

  “Talk to the Tsar, he says?” the man said, and he and his comrades exploded with laughter. “Take him away,” the jailer said, wiping tears of mirth from his rheumy eyes.

  Hawke’s new home was underground, three endless sets of steep stone steps that led downward into deeper gloom. A steel door was opened, and he was shoved inside, the door slammed shut behind him. He was alone inside a small, barrel-shaped cell whose bare, oozing walls seemed to be impregnated with tears. A flickering lamp stood on a stool in the corner, its wick swimming in fetid oil, illuminating his quarters.

  He stood a moment and took inventory. A bucket for waste. A slab of metal secured to the wall on which lay a thin mattress blackened with age and God knew what else. He went to it and sat down, determined not to go mad before morning, determined to survive, whatever it took.

  He had a son, after all. He was going to be a father. He held that moment in his mind, Anastasia whispering the joyous news in the dark, and used it build his fortress, thick walls and ramparts high and mighty. Against the world.

  At some time during the night, he must have fallen off, slept. He felt rough hands pulling at him and shouting. A dream? No, it was just the moon-faced jailer and two other foul-smelling lackeys, come to fetch him. Somewhere, a red dawn must have been breaking.

  It was time.

  “Where are you taking me?” he demanded. Terror was rising in him now, unabated. He knew from previous experience that only through sheer force of will would he be able to subdue it and face whatever was coming like a man.

  They pulled him to his
feet.

  “Just tell me where you’re taking me,” he said again, hearing the pathetic weakness of his pleas, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  He had this irrational need to know. Was this it? The end? Yes or no, which was it?

  If the end is near and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, old sport, he thought to himself, buck the hell up. Stiff upper. And yet—

  “Tell me, God damn you all!”

  “Silence!” the jailer shouted, shoving him roughly toward the door. Hawke struggled with the plastic cuffs, knowing in his heart it was useless. There were three of them, two of them armed. What could he do? He had to think of something. But what? He deliberately dragged his feet, stumbled, fell forward with his bound hands outstretched to break his fall.

  He rolled onto his back, and as a guard bent to lift him, he brought his knees up and caught him smartly under the chin. For his trouble, he got the butt end of the rifle across his jaw and was hauled to his feet again.

  Hawke knew where they were taking him, of course. It must be dawn by now. Had to be.

  And he was headed straight for a stake in the impaling yard.

  53

  But at the end of the corridor, instead of turning to the right and climbing upward to the yard, the guards steered him left and began descending another steep stone staircase leading down. And then down another, the steps progressively harder to see in the guttering light of lanterns hung from the walls. His escorts seemed in an inordinate hurry for Hawke’s taste, and he could but wonder where they were going now.

  “What fresh hell lies this way?” Hawke asked, not expecting a reply but feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that any new hell could hardly be worse than the one he’d believed most assuredly he was headed for.

  “The dungeon,” the moon-faced jailer said simply.

  “The dungeon? And what, pray, do you call where I slept all night? With wee beasties scratching their way across my floor? The bridal suite?”