"I am not," Chiun sniffed. "I am but a poor homeless old man who has given everything to an adopted foundling who repays the kindness he has been shown with baseless suspicion. While you are thinking of more unsolved mysteries to blame on me, I will be waiting in the car."
As the old man breezed between them, Remo said, "It was just a passing thought. Besides, I never blamed you for the Titanic, the Hindenburg or the Lindbergh kidnapping."
"See?" the Master of Sinanju said knowingly to Brandy. "Where I actually deserve credit, he gives none."
With that he swept from the room.
"Don't listen to him," Remo assured the FBI agent. "Now he's just bragging."
As the trio headed to the door, Anna Chutesov shook her head. "Men," she muttered.
"Tell me about it," Brandy agreed.
"Maybe we better keep the top up for the ride across town," Remo said as he pulled the office door shut. "One stiff breeze and both your Bella Abzug hats could get blown into the Timothy Leary Memorial Pot Plantation."
Chapter 19
General Boris Vanovich Feyodov hated his country with every fiber of his existence. It was a hatred forged from betrayal and humiliation. A personal, visceral loathing that could not help but be stronger than everyday antipathy.
This attitude was newly born. The old Boris Feyodov had loved the old Mother Russia. It was this new bastard incarnation of the nation he loved that Feyodov so reviled.
The son of a field marshal who had fought in the Great Patriotic War, Feyodov had learned early on that rank equaled privilege. For the family of Marshal Gregori Feyodov, there were no food lines, no stores with empty shelves. Their needs were small, of course, as was right for all good Communists, but those needs were always met. There were houses and cars and an old Armenian woman who helped his mother with the cleaning. Once every year there was a summer vacation at a Party dacha on the Black Sea.
By studying his father, young Boris Feyodov had come to understand exactly how the world worked. When Boris came of age, his father had pulled strings, getting his son an early commission in the Red Army. Clever, resourceful and possessed of an innate sense to know whom to stroke and whom to avoid in the Party leadership, Feyodov had quickly climbed the ranks. All who watched his rapid rise to general could not help but be impressed by the way Feyodov played against both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Communist system. The little boy from Smolensk, son of the great Field Marshal Gregori Feyodov, was truly a virtuoso. His instrument? Communism itself.
Feyodov achieved the rank of general in the 1970s, back during the time of SALT and detente. Back then, it was understood that the West was in its death throes. Capitalism was bloodied and reeling, desperate to appease. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was respected and feared. When the great Russian bear arched its mighty back, men from Washington to Peking to all points in between quivered like frightened children. At that time to be a Russian general was to be a god among men.
It was as a god that General Feyodov assumed command of the Sary Shagan Missile Test Center. The collection of hangars and bunkers was his own personal Olympus. He strode through halls and across tarmacs, head held high, never out of full uniform. The soldiers under his command worshiped him, and the civilian workers were terrified of him.
It was at Sary Shagan that Feyodov's true reputation began to grow. Until the time of his appointment there, he had always been his father's son. Certainly he was clever enough, but Party leaders assumed that he had gotten where he had largely because he was son of a field marshal. That was only partly true. Sary Shagan was the turning point of Party sentiment toward the younger Feyodov.
There was never a challenge sent to the base that was not accepted by its commander. Projects sent there were completed on time and under budget. The iron-handed rule of General Boris Feyodov kept order and garnered results.
When in the 1980s the Americans announced their desire for a missile defense program, Boris Feyodov and Sary Shagan were given the task of producing a Soviet version.
Feyodov had driven the team of scientists like dogs. The men worked, slept and ate at the Kazakhstan facility. Only one weekend every four months were they allowed to go to visit their families off base.
The work schedule was brutal, even by Feyodov's normally harsh standards. If questioned, the general would have claimed that he was only doing his duty. But the truth was, he had another motivation. One he dared not speak aloud.
Like a religious visionary, Boris Feyodov had detected something that had gone unnoticed by his countrymen. The son of Field Marshal Gregori Feyodov had seen the end.
The West was no longer timid. Unlike the cowardly days of the sixties and seventies, America had now gone on the offensive. Challenges to Soviet authority that would not have been dared a generation before were becoming common. Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. For the first time in years, Mother Russia had begun to lose ground. Feyodov was one of the first to smell change in the air. And it terrified him.
General Feyodov understood communism. He knew how to exploit the nuances of that system to his advantage. Without it, Boris Feyodov was hollow. And it was this fear of what might be that motivated him to push his men.
For more than a year he drove the scientists to complete their task, hoping that their work would hold together the splitting seams of socialism.
When the work was done on what was supposed to be the prototype for a line of high-tech Soviet weapons, the order to test had come down from the Kremlin itself.
At the time the head of the USSR had been in office for less than a year. This new general secretary was younger than any who had preceded him. Swiping away the cobwebs of fear, he had been appointed to give a smiling face to Russian communism. This fact alone was offensive to General Feyodov. Who cared if the hated West ever saw you smile?
Still, the order had given Feyodov hope. Especially after he learned what his target would be. The test had gone flawlessly. When the American space shuttle burst apart in the blue sky like a clod of white dirt, the general had allowed himself a moment of hope for his country. His first in several years.
The moment was short-lived.
As soon as the spacecraft was obliterated, Feyodov received the call. He was stunned when he recognized the uncultured voice of the general secretary.
"You are calling with congratulations, comrade General Secretary," Feyodov had said proudly.
"Yes," the general secretary agreed, in a way that made it sound as if the opposite were true. "I did not think you could do it," Russia's premier said.
"We are Russians," General Feyodov had said. "Proud sons of the Revolution."
"Yes, yes," the general secretary said. He actually sounded anxious. "Feyodov, I am beginning to rethink this program. It was instituted before I assumed this office. What we-what you-have done today..." He took a deep breath. "The Americans, Feyodov, will not understand."
Though tempted, Feyodov refrained from instructing the general secretary of the Soviet Union on the indifference he should feel toward the concerns of the Americans.
It was then that the general secretary had issued the most shocking order General Boris Feyodov had ever received. The general was commanded to obliterate every member of the team responsible for creating the particle-beam weapon.
Feyodov wanted to resist, but to refuse a direct order from the premier would be to invite the considerable wrath of a system that the general understood all too well.
In the end he had done his duty. The civilian scientists were killed on the spot. The technicians and military personnel were shot later on. When he was finished, knowledge of what had truly transpired that day was limited only to Boris Feyodov and the highest levels of the Kremlin.
The explosion that should have heralded a great new day for the struggling Soviet Union ended up sounding its death knell. The world began to unravel not long after.
The great technological advance Feyodov had helped usher in was minuscule
when weighed against the achievements of the West. The Soviet Union simply could not afford the arms race with America. Funding to the military was cut. This included the Sary Shagan base.
For his obedience and silence, the general secretary eventually transferred General Feyodov to another post.
A new espionage agency was being created. If Russia could not beat its enemies with brute military force, it would do so with cunning. It was to be the most secret agency ever to exist. Formed ostensibly to battle internal problems, it would actually be an international force like none other. More clandestine than the KGB, Cheka or Shield, it would employ only three men: General Feyodov and a pair of very special field operatives.
The general secretary himself had blackmailed the Americans into turning over two of their top agents. When given his appointment to this start-up agency, Feyodov had his doubts that a pair of American agents would willingly work for the sworn enemy of their country. He was told by the premier that they were mercenaries, based in Communist North Korea, and thus were not beholden to any nation. To Feyodov's disgust he learned that the two men who would be his new stealth operatives worked purely for monetary gain.
And so General Boris Feyodov, late of the Sary Shagan Missile Test Center, had come to Kitai Gorod in Moscow to set up his clandestine agency in an ominous concrete building with bricked-up windows and no visible entrance.
And there he waited for the agents that never came.
It turned out that there was some problem with the contract of the two operatives. General Feyodov became head of an agency of which he was the sole member. Not that he had time to nurse this latest humiliation.
Almost before he had time to settle in, he was ordered to vacate his post as director. The Institute, as his agency was called, was being turned over to a special adviser to the head of Russia. A person who had been a field operative and who, because of some terrible secret, could no longer work abroad.
He had met his successor briefly. To make his disgrace complete, Feyodov had been shocked to find that it was a woman. A mere slip of a girl with cold blue eyes, an attitude of snide superiority and a fat briefcase locked with the seal of the Soviet president.
Feyodov left the Institute gladly. Let this woman have her big empty building and whatever secrets she carried with her in her government attache case.
By now he knew that the end was near. For him and for his beloved Russia.
He had become just another general after that. With postings at crumbling bases all over the dying empire. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, Feyodov had remained in the military, dutifully obeying the commands of his civilian superiors. Eventually, he had gone to Chechnya, accepting a battle command for the first time in his lifelong army career. For Feyodov, this would be the final nail in the coffin of a grand life grown pathetic.
Chechnya had been a trouble spot ever since the death of his beloved Soviet Union. Like many others before it, the predominantly Muslim republic craved independence. Another bleeding scrap of meat to tear off the wheezing, dying body of the shrunken Mother Russia.
Feyodov didn't see the situation as very complicated. The Muslim separatists were infected with the same disease that had plagued what had once been the great Soviet empire. The rebels embodied all the disloyal, anarchic traits that had killed the USSR.
Boris Feyodov took command in Chechnya with one thought on his mind: revenge. These miserable Muslim dogs would pay for all of his own personal defeats and humiliations.
The bombardment against the capital of Grozny was vicious. They bombed from land and air. Day after day of punishing, endless assaults against the city, ordered by Boris Feyodov with the blessing of the Kremlin leadership.
When the bombing stopped and the smoke cleared, Feyodov declared victory. The rebels were defeated. Those left alive had fled the city.
The taste of triumph thick in the air, the general had climbed into the lead truck in the convoy that would reclaim Grozny for Russia. He and his men rode down from the hills, through the pathetic barricades and into the heart of the city. For a few brief moments-as he beheld the buildings, collapsed at his order, and passed by the burning cars and along cratered streets-Boris Feyodov was once more a god.
As apotheoses went, this one was short-lived. The first gunshot came from the darkened doorway of a tumbledown apartment building.
In the lead truck, General Feyodov jumped. He wasn't quite sure what the noise was. After all, he had never heard a bullet fired in battle before. At first he thought it might be a firecracker.
The next shot sounded an instant later, followed by the next and the next until they became a nightmare chorus. His uncertainty sprouting wings of desperate fear, Feyodov dropped down. Bullets whizzed overhead.
Panicked, he jerked his head around.
His driver was dead, slumped over the steering wheel. The men in the back of his truck had already suffered heavy casualties. Bodies were tumbling from the trailing trucks. Terror washed over the Russian troops.
Bullets thudded into metal.
He ordered his men to attack. They were already firing.
He ordered them to protect him at all costs. No one could hear him over the raging gunfire.
He ordered retreat. They were surrounded. Blinded by fear, Feyodov grabbed for the door handle. Twisting it, he fell to the ground. As the men above him fought for their lives, their commander crawled beneath the dark belly of the lead truck. Terrified hands covered ears; elbows and toes dragged him forward.
The truck was at the side of the road. A stairwell led into the shadowy basement of a bombed-out building.
Unnoticed by rebel or soldier, Feyodov toppled down the concrete stairs. Bloodied and dirty, he scurried beneath the collapsed archway and crumbled ceiling.
As the battle raged in the street far above his basement hideaway, General Boris Feyodov fled deeper and deeper into the shadows. He crawled until he could go no farther. As the final shots were fired and the last Russian soldier spilled his blood on the streets of Grozny, the general who had abandoned his troops was far away, cowering in a dank corner of his basement haven, his knees tucked up to his chin, rump settled into a cold, muddy puddle.
He was found eight days later.
The general was malnourished and dehydrated. He had soiled himself, drinking from the same filthy puddle.
As soon as he was pulled from the basement he was shipped back to Moscow. To have the leader of the Russian forces in Chechnya appear weak, gaunt, disheveled and cowardly, would only help to further the rebels' cause.
The war would be fought without him.
It was during the long months of his recuperation that Boris Feyodov the loyal Soviet, Boris Feyodov the aparatchik, Boris Feyodov the Communist Party virtuoso, finally learned the truth about himself. He had found that-no matter what his service rank was-he had never been a soldier.
Feyodov had gotten where he had by manipulating the Communist system. Early on it was his father's intervention. Later it was a flawlessly executed practice of strategically alternating between political backstabbing and bootlicking. He had compelled others to follow his orders at gunpoint so that his star might shine more brightly. At his various cozy appointments, his successes came on the strained backs of others. But he-Boris Vanovich Feyodov-could never claim credit for personally achieving anything in his life.
On the day he was released from the hospital, Feyodov learned that he had been dishonorably discharged from the military the day he had been discovered in the Grozny cellar.
For Boris Feyodov-with his career gone, his country lost and the only world he understood vanished into the mists of history-there was only one way out. In his service trunk he found his father's old World War II revolver, a treasured memento of the only Feyodov who had truly earned his rank.
With a bottle in one hand and the great field marshal's gun in the other, Feyodov staggered out into the cold streets of Moscow. Near a chain-link fence that overlooked the river he took a las
t bracing swig of vodka. Smashing the bottle to the frozen ground, he slurred a curse at the cold air and stuck the barrel of the gun into his open mouth.
And there he stood. The night wind cutting through his greatcoat. The twinkling lights of the city reflecting on the rolling waves, now a garish siren call to capitalism.
Feyodov struggled with the gun. His teeth and tongue tasted the metal. His finger almost touched the trigger.
But in the end he was too much the coward. Drawing the cold barrel from between his chapped lips, he hurled the gun into the Moscow River. Boots crunching on the broken glass, the general fell sobbing against the fence.
The weeks after that were a blur of hard drink and a hazy gray twilight of pitiful anguish. He barely remembered being approached at a bar by a former subordinate in the Red Army-a colonel who had been stationed at Sary Shagan. The months-long hangover hadn't even lifted before he found himself working for the black market.
So he became a criminal. So what? Wasn't everyone in Russia a pimp or a whore to the West these days? And since it seemed unlikely he would ever work up the nerve to kill himself, he would have to eat. Besides, this new Russia inspired corruption. No, it deserved it.
Many of his new associates were former military men like him, betrayed by the system that had made them all gods.
No one knew of his disgrace. The war in Chechnya was too important for the Kremlin to allow news of its cowardly general to be leaked to the public.
Almost without effort, Feyodov climbed the ranks. He soon learned that capitalism and communism were not so different at their most basic levels. He applied his old tactics to his new life, killing or currying favor until in scarcely more than a year's time he became one of the new power elite in Russia. A crime lord.
Many who marveled at the way he worked the system assumed the old Communist had become a born-again capitalist. But the truth was, Boris Vanovich Feyodov was the hollowest of hollow men, loathing life but frightened of death. He did what he did only because he had no idea what else to do.
When he was approached by the fools of Barkley early on in his new career, he agreed to see them only because of their promise of money.
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