Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  From somewhere behind them Holliday heard a distant, drawn-out scream and he smiled. At least one of the Spetsnaz team had been impaled on Ivan the Terrible’s tiger trap. One less for him to deal with.

  As they moved on down the corridor, Eddie seemed to be leaning more and more heavily on him.

  “What’s wrong, compadre?” Holliday asked.

  “Muy cansado, mi amigo, muy cansado,” answered Eddie in a mumble.

  “Cansado, tired?”

  “Si, very tired.”

  “We can rest for a minute,” offered Holliday.

  “Just a little minute.” Eddie sighed, sinking down to the dusty brick floor. Seated, Holliday crouched down beside him and gently peeled back the rear of his jacket. There was no blood on the back of his shirt. No exit wound, which meant he was almost surely bleeding internally. Holliday grimaced. How far from the chamber to the Saint Boris cathedral? Two hundred yards, three. They’d gone less than half that in almost fifteen minutes, and he could hear footsteps echoing in the tunnel behind them now. Maybe it was time to stop and fight. What? Bricks against AK-47s?

  “We gotta go, Eddie boy,” said Holliday, putting on his worst Irish accent.

  “Leave me, tio,” muttered Eddie.

  “?Tio? I’m not your uncle, and this isn’t some stupid Audie Murphy film where that round-faced little Mr. Perfect stays back to zap a hundred crazy Japs with his machine gun and when he runs out of bullets he starts whipping them over the head with the red-hot barrel. You’re coming with me and you’re coming right now, goddamn it!”

  “?Que? Who is this Audie Murphy?” Eddie asked. Holliday dragged him to his feet, got his arm under his shoulder and stumbled forward. A few yards later the tunnel turned sharply to the left and then ended. Holliday would have fallen over the edge if his headlamp beam hadn’t dipped out of sight first.

  “Shit,” said Holliday. He played the light from his lamp over the edge and realized where they were. A foot beneath him the pile of broken rubble drifted down to the old metro station with its waiting self-powered car. He suddenly realized he could see a faint light coming from the driver’s cab in the front of the car. There was someone inside. As calmly as he could he reached up, switched off his own lamp and eased Eddie downward until his legs were dangling over the edge of the opening.

  “Remember the old metro station we saw with Genrikhovich and Ivanov, the priest?”

  “Si,” said Eddie, his voice quavering with fatigue.

  “It’s right under us. There’s somebody on the train. Some kind of guard, I think. I’m going to take him out, but I’m going to have to leave you here for a minute or two. You okay with that?”

  “Si, Popo Tio.” Eddie smiled. He was in some kind of shock-driven la-la land now.

  “Okay,” said Holliday.

  “Okay.” Eddie nodded, his eyes half-closed in sleep. The footsteps behind them were much louder now.

  “Shit,” said Holliday.

  “Si, mierda.” Eddie grinned.

  Holliday eased Eddie to one side, then lowered himself carefully down onto the pile of rubble. He made his way blindly down the pile, concentrating on the little square of weak light coming out of the front of the subway car. He finally reached the platform. The doors of the car were still open. He stepped quietly inside, gripped the door handle of the driver’s compartment tightly with one hand and rapped on the door with the knuckles of his other hand.

  The door burst open and a belligerent bullet-headed figure appeared, iPod buds dangling from his ears. Holliday could distinctly hear Slayer’s “Angel of Death” playing at earsplitting volume.

  “Kto yebat’ ty?!” Bullet Head grunted angrily. Holliday slammed the door in the man’s face as hard as he possibly could. Bullet Head dropped like a stone, heavy metal still pounding out of his ears.

  “It’s me, the angel of death,” said Holliday, and began stripping the man of his weapons.

  38

  It took Holliday at least five minutes to ease Eddie down onto the pile of rubble below the open floor of the tunnel and another three or four to get him down to the platform and settled into one of the seats on the train. By the time he actually sat down at the driver’s seat of the self-propelled subway car he could actually hear the raised, echoing voices of the Spetsnaz team coming after them. They kept on calling out for Boris Byka, presumably their name for Bullet Head, who was still out cold on the rear of the platform where Holliday had dragged him.

  Boris had been armed with a folding-stock AK-103 assault rifle, an OC-23 Drotik twenty-four-round automatic pistol, half a dozen RGD-5 fragmentation grenades and a very nasty-looking Kizlyar Scorpion bowie knife. Plenty of killing power, but the seven or eight guys coming down the tunnel would be at least as well armed, and with Eddie down the odds were pretty bad.

  Holliday stared at the control panel. Lot of gauges, a big chrome steel T-throttle in the middle of the dashboard and a single pedal on the floor. The T-bar had black plastic inserts at the ends of the T.

  There were five big buttons on the right. One red, one green, one yellow with a black lightbulb printed on it and two white ones. The white ones had arrows on them, the arrow on the top button pointing up, the arrow on the bottom button pointing down.

  The one with the lightbulb seemed reasonably self-explanatory, so he pushed it down with his thumb. The lights in the car flickered on, then off, then on again, and there was the sudden sound of a generator kicking in. He pressed the button with the downward-pointing arrow. There was a pneumatic hiss and the doors thumped shut.

  “So far so good,” he muttered. If he assumed the throttle was just that, a throttle, that meant the pedal on the floor was probably the brake. That left the small problem of motive power. In his world, red meant stop and green meant go, but this was a subway from Stalin-era Soviet Russia, so he pressed red instead. There was a mechanical moan like a car started up in freezing-cold weather and then a stuttering roar, and the whole car began to vibrate.

  The throttle was resting in a notch, which Holliday assumed was the idle position. He gently slipped the T-bar out of the notch and gave it a tiny nudge, then let it go; the car moved forward a few feet before some sort of automatic device cut in and the car stopped dead. Holliday frowned, confused, and then realized that by letting go of the right-side black plastic insert on the throttle he’d initialized an automated dead man’s switch. His father had been a locomotive driver for one of the old unconsolidated New York railroads and had talked about dead man’s switches, but this was the first time Holliday had seen one in action.

  He pulled the throttle handle back and into the notch, feeling something definitely disengage as he did so. The clutch. He looked out the open doorway of the driver’s cab. Eddie was slumped against the nearest seat across the aisle, his eyes half-closed.

  “Eddie?”

  “Si.”

  “Stay awake, amigo. I’ve almost got us out of here.”

  “Bueno,” mumbled the Cuban.

  “Here we go.” Holliday eased the throttle out of the notch, keeping his right thumb down on the plastic insert. He pushed the throttle forward little by little; the car groaned and clanked but began to rumble out of the old station.

  As he pushed the throttle farther the Spetsnaz team in the tunnel began to fire blindly, catching the back end of the car as it moved out of the station, shattering glass and puncturing the cracked plastic covers on the seats. One of the team even managed to toss down one of his RGD-5 grenades onto the platform. Unfortunately it was all a bit too late. The bullets did no real damage to the train, and the grenade only blew out a few tiles on the walls and ceiling and put a few white-hot pieces of shrapnel into the unconscious Bullet Head’s brain. By the time the first man reached the platform, the rear lights of the self-propelled car were already vanishing around a curve in the tunnel and Bullet Head was as dead as a doornail.

  On that uneventful night in his equally uneventful life, Felix Fyodor Fosdikov sat in the toasty warm cab
of his big GS-18.05 motor grader and watched the first snow begin to fall in the Kuntsevo district a few miles south of the Moscow Ring Road. As he watched the heavy snow begin to turn the world a uniform, featureless white, he bit into his wife’s black bread-sauerkraut-sausage-and-goat cheese sandwich and chewed. He took a sip of the hot, vodka-laced coffee his wife had prepared for him in his old battered thermos. During the spring, summer and fall Felix Fyodor drove a garbage truck for the Central Moscow district, which he preferred to snow removal.

  When you worked garbage you found all sorts of useful and potentially valuable things you could sell at the big tailgate markets in Mozhaysk and other places outside the city. In his forty-six years on the job he’d found everything from a perfectly good gold watch to a pink-enameled artificial leg. Even if what you found wasn’t worth anything, there wasn’t a day that went by working garbage that wasn’t interesting.

  Still, driving the big motor grader had its good points. He was alone in the high, glassed-in cab, so there was no one to answer to when the sauerkraut, cheese and sausage produced their inevitably pungent brand of oily farts, and no one to complain when he filled the cab with smoke from the cheap bulk cigarettes he favored.

  He finished the first sandwich and started on the second. At sixty-two, with all those years on the job, he was getting far too old for the work, but he couldn’t see himself sitting around watching television or growing tomatoes in their little allotment, and his small pension wasn’t going to let him do much more than that. It didn’t matter, really; one way or the other his wife’s sandwiches and the vodka and the cigarettes would get him eventually, either from a heart attack on the road or straining on the toilet fighting to pass the rock-hard bowel movements the sandwiches caused.

  Felix Fyodor glanced out of the side door of the cab. The blade of the grader was marked with reflective tape at five-centimeter intervals, like a ruler. When the snow reached the first strip of tape he would begin his route. The route took him east along the perimeter road of the big forest plot with the double razor-wire fence, then south and west and north until he got back to where he was right now. When he finished the big square around the forest plot, he’d put the grader onto the closest on-ramp of the highway into the city, then grade the snow all the way to the Ring Road and back again. Then he’d take a piss break, have a snack and do it all over again. On a night with a predicted heavy snowfall like tonight he’d probably do the run seven or eight times before his shift was over.

  Once, years ago, he’d asked about the property behind the wire and he’d been told to mind his own business, but eventually he’d heard enough whispered stories to figure out that the land had been Stalin’s Moscow dacha-the place where he’d spent most of the great patriotic war and the place he’d died in on March 5, 1953, supposedly full of Alzheimer’s or syphilis or something and poisoned by the KGB chief Beria to keep him from signing death warrants for just about everyone in the government, including Beria. Someone had wanted to make a museum out of the place, but how did you make a museum for a mass murderer? Khrushchev had stopped the idea and the place had been empty and abandoned ever since. Felix Fyodor took a bite out of the second sandwich, trying not to think of the heartburn already climbing up his chest. It would be a long night and he needed nourishment. He looked down at the markers on the plow and wished the snow would fall a little faster. He was parked within a few yards of the entrance to the whole estate, and it spooked him more than a little.

  They traveled along the almost arrow-straight tunnel, the only illumination coming from the broad beam of the self-propelled car’s headlight. Holliday kept the throttle pushed about halfway forward, and according to the speedometer they were going ninety kilometers per, which translated into roughly fifty-five miles per hour. At the forty-five-minute mark that meant they’d gone about forty miles from the original station beneath the Kremlin. On the seat outside the operator’s compartment Eddie had fallen into a half-conscious doze, rocking gently with the motion of the train, his big head lolling, his eyes closed.

  As they rolled onward Holliday tried to assess the chaos they had left behind them in the subway station. By now the Spetsnaz team would have reported to their bosses and the word would have gone up the chain of command-someone had hijacked Stalin’s secret subway from more than half a century ago and was hightailing it up the line to wherever it ended up. Personally Holliday didn’t care. At the first opportunity he wanted to get off the damn thing and figure out some way to get himself and Eddie safely behind the walls of the American embassy.

  There was a heavy clanking from the tracks beneath the wheels and suddenly the throttle moved under Holliday’s hand, dropping halfway back to the neutral notch. The car slowed. A minute later there was a second sound from the tracks and the throttle smoothly moved back under his hand. The car slowed to a walk, and ahead Holliday could see that they were coming into a station. As they moved up to the platform Holliday released his hand from the throttle. The car rolled on for a few yards and then stopped. The doors hissed open. Wherever they were going, this was it. The platform was dark.

  Holliday switched on his miner’s lamp, then stepped out of the driver’s compartment and helped Eddie to his feet. They stepped off the train. The platform was completely barren-no signs, no gates, no nothing, just an arch of dark-glazed brick and a single exit. There were half a dozen lights in the ceiling behind wire screens, all of them dark. The place felt like a tomb.

  He and Eddie made their slow way to the exit, the light on Holliday’s helmet painting the way. Eddie’s breathing was ragged, but at least he was still conscious. The exit was in the exact center of the platform-an alcove and four steps leading to a small vestibule. The vestibule was square with a low ceiling, and was completely without decoration. There were two doors, one obviously for an elevator, the other more like a hatchway, with a large round locking wheel in the center. There were faded Cyrillic letters above the wheel.

  “Can you read what it says?” Holliday asked.

  “Bomboubezhishche,” read Eddie, not hesitating at all over the mouthful of a word. “Bomb shelter.”

  Holliday pressed the single button beside the elevator doors and remarkably they creaked open. He helped Eddie inside the plain gray steel compartment. There were two buttons on the wall. He pressed the top one. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise.

  * * *

  The United States Embassy in Moscow consists of a ten-story office block, a connecting, windowless security block, a series of low barracks-style offices, all surrounding a central courtyard and further surrounded by a tall brick wall. There is only one means of access and egress to the complex-the front gate, which in turn has several well-hidden anti-suicide bombing measures as well as a SWAT team on twenty-four-hour duty. To get into the main building, any guest or official must first pass through a sally port, which allows movement of only a single individual at a time and in one direction.

  The bachelor and guest quarters at the embassy were located at the far end of the complex and offered only the most basic amenities-bathroom, shower, bedroom with a single narrow bed, a desk and a telephone. The decor was resolutely beige. The telephone in the room being occupied by Brinsley Whitman Havers rang at three twenty-five in the morning. Whit had been having trouble sleeping, knowing that his man was in play, and he picked up on the second ring. It was the security office, a man named Tapsinger.

  “Yes?” Whit said.

  “You’d better get over here pronto, sir; there’s a lot of back chatter in the air about your boy.”

  “Which one?”

  “The target, as I understand it, Holliday.”

  “What kind of back chatter?”

  “FSB back chatter, sir, and it’s coming out of the Kremlin itself. Scary stuff, sir. Seems he’s hijacked Stalin’s old private subway train. There’re bodies everywhere. This stuff is going all the way back to Washington. Somebody’s in it up to his eyeballs. It’s starting to sound like a first-clas
s international incident.”

  “Shit,” said Brinsley Whitman Havers. What was it Kokum had said about the real reason they had case officers? To have someone to flush down the shithole when the whole thing came apart? Something like that. “I’ll be right there.” He sighed, already seeing the water swirling around the bowl, and him along with it.

  39

  The elevator opened up into someone’s pantry. Holliday could tell it was a pantry because the walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with cans and jars and boxes. The cans all had black-and-white illustrations of their contents on paper labels, as did the boxes. It was hard to tell about the jars, because over the years most of them had burst, their contents long turned to mold, the mold vanished into the air, leaving nothing but shriven remains behind, like mummified human organs in an Egyptian tomb. Everything in the little room was covered in a thick coat of gray dust. It had been a long time since anyone had taken food from here.

  The only exit from the pantry led into a good-size kitchen equipped with thirties- or forties-era gas appliances. There was a wooden table and four straight chairs in the center of the room. Like everything else, the table and chairs were thick with dust. The floor was gray linoleum, the ceiling raw-pine beams and rafters. The windows above the big dry sinks were small, the plain dark curtains pulled.

  The kitchen led in turn to a broad carpeted hallway with a set of stairs going up on the right. There were two doors beyond the stairs, one leading to a plainly furnished living room, the furniture old, upholstered and dreary. The other door led to a study. A velvet-upholstered banquette stood at the end of the hall beneath a row of wooden pegs still hung with heavy winter coats. Holliday eased Eddie down onto the banquette, his back against the patterned wallpaper.