by Thomas Craig
Be there, Anders thought involuntarily. You Russian son of a bitch, be there!
He felt his body molded to the fold-down seat as the Galaxy lifted away from the runway. Its undercarriage thudded up moments later. He looked at the MiLs.
Banks, glittering shoals, islets, one like an animal curled up, another kidney-shaped. Would they get as far as…? The thought faded.
Be there, he thought firmly. Be there.
The tracked army recovery vehicle was nose down in the river, like a fishing bird. Its powerful crane, mounted over the turret of the converted tank chassis, slowly drew the Zil sedan out of the mud and water. Great broken plates of ice, gray and wallowing like a ship's wreckage, lurched in the space of open water the accident and the recovery operation had created in the frozen river. The water was little more than a soupy dark swirl beneath a clouded sky. The afternoon was already beginning to darken. There was a tiny flurry of sleet in the chill wind, one of Baikonur's very irregular and unexpected snowfalls.
The car's windows and flanks streamed as it was swung over the SKP-5 vehicle toward the shallowly sloping bank, which was churned and printed with caterpillar tracks—
— and the narrower, half-obscured tire prints from the Zil, Priabin thought, shaken into wakefulness by the sight of the car and the knowledge of its passengers and their condition. The somber, chilly scene disturbed him.
When he'd finished with Orlov — the old man knew no more than he had already told, he was convinced of it — he'd stopped for tea in the canteen, then made his way up to Viktor's office. To find that Viktor and the actor had not returned. Three hours after his telephone call. Immediately, he had begun to worry. He sensed danger, even violence. The actor had called someone — Rodin, it had to be. What had happened to Viktor?
Eventually, as if only confirming something he already knew, a police patrol found signs of — an accident, a car had evidently gone into the river… on the route Viktor had said he would take. Yes, yes, I'll come at once. What? The army? To get the car out… very well, you've called in the army…
Holding the Zil aloft like some cup or trophy contested for and won, the SKP-5 ground and chugged its way back out of the water. The disturbed plates of gray ice slid and grumbled together, as if healing the breach in the river. The streaming car hung nose down; something tilted and restrained pressed against what remained of the shattered windshield. Army frogmen, who had attached the crane's cables and hooks to the car after it was located on the riverbed, half buried in the thick ooze, walked out of the freezing water. Other frogmen, in reserve, hurried toward them with tea or coffee and blankets and warm capes and parkas. Their interest in the Zil was minimal now that it was coming ashore.
Priabin blew sleet from his open mouth and pulled the hood of his parka closer around his head. Like a gesture of mourning. Viktor Zhikin's body threatened to loll out of the broken windshield and across the car's hood; it would then slide like an awry tailor's dummy, Ml into the riverbank mud.
He shuddered. The car was carefully set down at the top of the bank; almost a car again, intact for a moment in the poor light. He hurried up the slope, his rubber boots slipping on the churned mud, while police and army crowded gingerly around the wreck. The SKP-5 was uncoupled and chugged away, slithering lizardlike toward the tarmac of the road.
A car had crashed, skidding on the icy surface of the road that ran alongside the river. Two people had, unfortunately, drowned. That's all there was to it, Priabin thought. It was simply a coincidence that the car happened to be driven by his KGB second-in-command. Viktor.
He pushed the others aside, his emotions supported by his rank. People parted. He touched at, then lifted Viktor's head. Water seeped from Viktor's lips and nostrils. Bruising begun and halted by death. Gashes. He touched the face, feeling the embedded glass pricking and cutting his fingertips, his palm. His eyes watered with the cold wind and with the contact of the dead man's cold, wet skin. He snatched his hand away, sniffing. Moved around the car to the passenger door, tugged it open — no damage to the car, no evidence of a collision to drive it off the road, no violent skid marks on the tarmac behind it? — and a second body flopped dutifully and dramatically out of the door like dirty water escaping; to loll lifelessly as a doll, wet hair touching the churned mud at the roadside.
The little actor, Rodin's lover. As expected. Priabin felt an unreasoning hatred well up in him at the cause of Viktor's death. No skid marks? An accident?
Viktor might have died just because this little poof had panicked, tried to grab the wheel perhaps? Viktor might have died that way, but instinct, damn instinct, made him suspect other hands, an arrangement, a plan.
He was aware of the army uniforms that surrounded him, and aware that they outnumbered the KGB uniforms present. Why did he suspect that this was not an accident? Because it had killed Viktor? Was it simply grief getting in the way of reason, like a powerful bully? He stared at the actor's still head. You, he thought, you made a phone call from the theater, you spoke to someone — and then this happened. You'd have been shit-scared, because you were in real trouble and you knew what we wanted to ask you about—Lightning. The logic of the sequence was as tight and aching as a band of cold steel around his temples. He could not remove it. What had he heard? Loose talk because of the cocaine, mock toasts, murmured in-jokes? Enough to know what was meant, what was intended?
Viktor, Viktor, he thought. Why did you let him make that call? He must have called Rodin, yes. Priabin sighed. Coming out from his office, to this spot, driving through the failing afternoon light beneath the low, uncommon cloud cover, he had become convinced there had been no accident; he had been summoned to witness a design, a deliberate thing. Someone had wanted the actor shut up— and they'd shut Viktor up, too.
He felt his chest and throat fill with misery and useless rage. He glanced again at the actor's head near a frozen puddle. The voices of those around him had retreated to desultory murmurs, like those of people attending a funeral. The actor's bald spot was streaked with strands of water-darkened hair. Then he looked across the car at Viktor's graying temples above the scratched, glass-filled cheeks. It would have been so easy — an army patrol to stop the car, quick, decisive blows, a just-as-quick shove to the car, and down the river-bank and into the water… slipping out on the ice, breaking through it, vanishing up to the level of the roof. It must have been like that.
He wiped his eyes and nose. Lit a cigarette, hunching into the folds of his parka to do so. The first exhaled smoke was whisked away by the wind; as insubstantial as any protest, any action he might contemplate. Lightning had killed Viktor, he was certain of it. Rodin had threatened him after his slip of the tongue, and he had been frightened, too. Kedrov had used it as a lever, a bribe, to make the Americans sure to rescue him; the little queer actor had panicked as soon as Lightning was mentioned, panicked enough to make a desperate phone call.
Every mention of it was like spiffing gold; people rushed to retrieve it.
"What?" Priabin snapped, startled back into the cold wind and the enclosing, bare, low hills that hemmed the scene. He glared at Dudin, the senior KGB officer for the town of Tyuratam. The man's expression was still shocked, but in a less personal way than Priabin knew must be true of his own features.
"I said, sir" — Dudin was careful with the occasion and Priabin's rank; Captain Dudin—"can I get the bodies loaded aboard the wagon now? Or do you want Forensic to inspect the car with — while they're still in place?" Dudin shuffled his feet, blew on his gloved hands.
"Let — get Forensic to examine the car first," Priabin said carefully, aware of each syllable, weighing its unhurried, neutral tone. Why? Give nothing away, he answered himself. The numbers of army parkas and overcoats seemed to press toward him like a hostile crowd. Rifles — holsters — guns. Instinct outran logical deduction, but he moved with the certainty of a strong swimmer in calm, familiar waters. "Yes," he repeated, "Forensic first."
The approaching car was
moving fast, and its engine noise distracted him. Made him flinch, seeing the crashed, soaking Zil in front of him, as if he heard the accident happening in his head. He turned. Coming from the direction of the main complex, not from Tyuratam. A German car, silver-gray. A small, quick sedan, a BMW. He knew it had to be Rodin's car, the general's wealthy, privileged son's shiny toy. Yes.
Rodin, capless, got out of the car and hurried toward the wreck. His fine, thin hair was immediately disarrayed about his head. He pushed blindly past Dudin, then his eyes met Priabin's with a wild look. He seemed unnerved by the stare of the KGB colonel. Carefully, as if pointing, Priabin lowered his gaze, drawing Rodin's anxious, frightened eyes after it.
To the bald spot, the lank strips of hair like drying leather thonging the stained, soaked yellow sweater. Rodin sobbed chokingly, just once. He did not look up, though he appeared to wish not to look at the dead actor. Did not wish to touch, kneel beside, stare into the dead eyes of—
— wanted not to be there, Priabin concluded. Yet aware of what he would find even before he saw it. He had not dared to hope for anything better than this. Priabin felt himself embarrassed, as if he had intruded upon a scene of private mourning. Eventually, Rodin looked up, still kneeling.
They understood each other entirely as their eyes met. Priabin's gaze waited for the young man like a statement of arrest. The KGB officer even nodded, half-consciously, confirming what he had learned, what had been confirmed for him. Rodin looked aside, his cheeks blanched, his eyes wet and shameful.
He called you, Priabin recited silently. He sensed Rodin gathering his story together like wisps of material to be woven. But you panicked, too, you told others. It was dangerous, but then you had no choice. You knew what you'd done, what you'd find here. He called you, and you set the dogs on him and Viktor, my friend.
Because of Lightning.
Slowly, now…
Rodin's face was bleak as he turned once more to Priabin, his hps primed with their cover story. Seeing the young man's obvious fear chilled Priabin. Ahead of him, something like — he glanced involuntarily at Zhikin's dead face — something like that, unless he was careful, so careful. They'd killed now, the barriers had come down, the cage had been left open.
And their panic was evident, too.
Care, care… Priabin stared over Rodin's blowing hair, even as the young man began his halting, unconvincing story. The low, surrounding hills were closer in the gathering twilight. Sleet blew spasmodically. He was cold. Tracks down to the river, a mud-stained car. He was alone, even though Dudin's bulky frame was close behind Rodin. He must keep his head down, he told himself; attract no suspicion.
Viktor-
Begin an act, then. Begin to dissemble even while you're listening to this nasty, murderous little creep. Act a part. Tell them nothing about Kedrov, just find him before they do. He knows about Lightning. When I know, Viktor, I'll have them.
He couldn't tell anyone, not yet, not until he had Kedrov. Then, oh, then, he could present Moscow Center with Zhikin's murderers — the fucking army! He'd screw them into the bloody floor before he'd finished with them, present them on a plate to the Politburo, to the Chairman.
I promise you, Viktor, I promise.
So play-act.
He sketched on his features a dim attentiveness that was without the least suspicion, as Rodin's story tumbled out. He shivered. Hodin, recovered for the moment, was explaining how he had heard, wondered if the accident had anything to do with… Sacha had been arrested, he'd been told…
Zhikin's body was being lifted gently upright in the driver's seat, being fed slowly back through the broken windshield by one of the Forensic officers. The man handled the body carefully, almost reverently. But the head flopped grotesquely on its broken neck, filling Priabin's throat with bile.
4: Dropping Zone
General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin of the Strategic Rocket Forces, deputy commandant of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, lay awake and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom. The shadows up there, in the corner, were warm and brown, not dark; they mirrored both his satisfaction and his concern. Lightning—and his son; the defense minister s pleasure and congratulations at progress, and his son's appearance at the scene of the accident that had killed that— actor.
The shadows darkened and lightened, as if catching his mood as it varied.
The television broadcast had been amusing — for the most part. The old buffoon Nikitin had appeared against a backdrop of the Kremlin and a frozen river Moskva, Calvin the American President against a snowbound Washington projected behind him. They had danced their mincing, polite dance, the deceived and the deceiver; a farce. Calvin, as predicted, had had to pledge himself to appear in Geneva more than a week earlier than he had expected — all that had been satisfactory, most pleasing. Rodin had been able to laugh at both statesmen equally. Nikitin, doing only what the army wished, though he did not know it, thought he was in the driver s seat. Calvin would not risk the opprobrium of world opinion by being seen to hesitate now. The final touch to the canvas of the launch of the shuttle on Thursday and its rendezvous with the American craft in orbit was pure comedy. Nikitin thought that a good idea, too, the idiot.
The broadcast had ended with a flurry of despicable images. Satellites being deployed, SS-20s and cruise missiles being withdrawn, silos being emptied of ICBMs, barbed wire being rolled up, tanks going into mothballs — the music of Beethoven accompanying the lurid betrayals. That last couple of minutes had distressed and angered him. Even Zaitsev's call from Moscow had not sufficed to restore his confidence and good humor. Zaitsev, the defense minister and leader of the pro-army faction on the Politburo, had dismissed Rodin's anger as futile. The withdrawals voorit be happening, will they? he had assured. Why be angry, then, with the fiction?
Nevertheless, it was easier for Zaitsev to be dismissive, at Stavka — general staff — headquarters or the ministry, than it was to feel lighthearted at such rubbish here in Baikonur. The images of, of — surrender had ruffled his good humor. After a few large whiskeys he had retreated to his bed. And slowly, his confident mood had returned.
Only the thought of his son, Valery, disturbed his calm now. He studied the darker shadows on the ceiling. An old cobweb hung there, drifting back and forth in the heat rising from the lamp. Rodin distracted himself from his son by allowing the images of the broadcast to return. And Nikitin's voice and other voices seeped into his mind, to be met with a frozen, confident contempt.
We cant afford your toys any longer! That had been one of Nikitin's outbursts at a Politburo meeting, so Zaitsev assured the general staff. We must have this treaty with the Americans before we are bankrupted by you and your games! The army must pay the grocery bill!
My God.
They had laughed, he and his cronies. It had taken almost a year to persuade the Politburo to keep Linchpin, the laser weapon project. And to keep it secret and outside the terms of the damn treaty. A small victory in the middle of the army's defeat by the politicians.
Rodin felt his temperature rising, but did not quell his emotions. They visited him now like the familiar twinges of old age; known and tolerable. And they strengthened his resolve. Lightning would change everything. By Friday, the world would be different. The Nikitin faction on the Politburo would be subservient once more. The treaty would be — worthless to the Americans.
Peasant women bewailing another bad harvest… corruption throughout the civil service… always the same wailing cries of the inefficient and incompetent—we cant afford you. We want to sell you out, sell our country out.
'Hie bedside telephone rang, startling him. His recriminations had been as leisurely as a reverie. He sat up in bed, the shadows in the comer of the ceiling now without meaning. The clock on the bedside table showed it to be almost midnight.
"Rodin. Yes?"
"Comrade General — Serov here. Have I disturbed you?"
Serov. GRU commandant.
"What is it, Serov?" Why did he always re
act to Serov's voice or presence with a certain hostility? He shook his head.
"Sir — General, it's a delicate matter…"
Serov was being uncharacteristically sensitive and hesitant.
"Is it Lightning?" Rodin asked, too quickly. He almost hoped that it was. Lightning was not a delicate matter, merely crucial. Something prickled in his chest like a warning of illness.
"No, comrade General, it's your son," Serov announced, his adopted tact no longer present. His habitual sneering calm had reasserted itself. Rodin felt his own hostility rising.
"Valery? Lieutenant Rodin?" he corrected himself. "What about him?" He wanted to ask, what is wrong, what has happened? And surprised himself with such a wish. Something chilly seemed to wrap itself around his heart like a cold scarf. "What about my son?" Control of his voice was an effort.
On the ceiling, the shadows were larger. The central heating seemed to have switched itself off
"I — General, I have considered this matter very carefully. I suggest that your son should be sent on leave, perhaps even to Moscow, for the present. Perhaps a two-week furlough?" Serov's manner seemed incapable of retaining deference for much longer. The bully in him was always close to the surface.
"You call me at midnight to tell me that?" Rodin blurted in reply. "To suggest he go on leave?" Genuine irritation had been recovered; he felt more in control of himself.