“Don’t drink municipal water anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Stay away from any areas where masses of people are gathered. Don’t trust anyone in uniform…”
He paused to let that sink in.
“Don’t try to fight it out, because that is a loser’s game. The Soviet plan, or should I say, the plan of those on the third side, will be to foster instability and chaos and panic. The primary purpose of government in an advanced civilization is to prevent or minimize panic. That is it. Everything else is window dressing. You don’t have to invade a country to destroy it. The people will do that for you when their comforts evaporate.”
“Sounds ominous,” Clay said.
“You have no idea,” Volkhov replied. After a moment he said, “People who know such things will expect the bombs to start dropping immediately, but that won’t happen. They will want to maximize the damage from confusion and riots before they use bombs. You’ll have some time to get somewhere safe.”
“You mean we will have some time,” Vasily said.
“If I am alive, then yes. Anyway, as I mentioned during my boring speech, the higher-ups on both side know what is coming. It’s been planned all along. But the law of unintended consequences will come into play. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
“They’ll intend to launch missiles soon enough, but subordinates, and some free agents, and others throughout the system will have war-gamed that. The initial launches will be thwarted by massive EMP attacks in all of the critical places.
He paused and looked at the farmer-poet and the errand boy standing before him, his generals. He felt not a single bit, not even the scintilla of the slightest bit, of irony.
“We don’t have time for me to explain it all. Anyway… two weeks. That’s how long you’ll have. Then, the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key cards and codes and fail-safes and guarantees it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet.”
He stopped and let the word will sink in.
“Two weeks,” Clay said, nodding his head. “That’s if we get out of here.”
Vasily looked at Clay and said, “So, now you will have to be the one to imitate Vladimir’s voice. Can you do it?”
“I can,” he said, and Clay was pretty sure he could.
****
They went back over the plan quickly, noting that the guards would be expecting Vasily to exit at any time now. There was no benefit in making them suspicious. So after they had all agreed to the plan, Vasily shook their hands and departed. He was to grab the backpack, and head out the north door. His job was to not get caught, and to meet up with Pyotr.
“Do not turn back, no matter what happens,” they told him. They’d give him five minutes, then head out the south vestibule—the one through which Clay had entered this nightmare.
Five minutes passed like an hour. The air was so thick with expectation and fear and excitement and terror that Clay wanted to scream in order to cut through it – if only so that he could breathe.
Moving through the unlocked cluster doors, Clay and Volkhov tiptoed as silently as they could manage. All went well and they passed through the final door and turned to the right and Clay could see that the Tank’s door was open but the light was off and he assumed that Vasily had successfully removed the backpack.
Listening for a moment, they heard no sounds and that was a good sign because it meant that Vasily had made it outside without the guards being alerted or suspicious.
Clay and Volkhov had agreed that when they heard the lock in the inner door snap and when the door started to open outward, they would rush through the door and do their best to overwhelm the guard. There was supposed to be only one man standing guard, but he would be armed. Clay and Volkhov looked at each other with a shared agreement that they would see each other on the other side.
****
It was very dark and the overhead emergency lights provided little assistance, but the darkness should give them cover. Clay wondered for a moment about the mechanics of his body, how he should hold his voice out, just so, in order that his much smaller body could emit the same force of sound as the huge beast of a man.
He stepped to the door and felt the urgency in his belly. He cleared his throat silently and swallowed.
****
When they were ready and in place, Clay knocked on the door and with an authoritative voice commanded the guard to open up. He thought he did a pretty good job of it. He looked at Volkhov in the dim light and could see that the old man’s head was nodding approval.
The outer door opened and they heard the guard grunt and then they heard the key slip into the lock on the inner door, but then the sound stopped.
“Who is it?” the voice asked in heavily accented English, “say again who it is!”
“It’s Vladimir Nikitich, stupid! Open the damn door!”
They heard the grunt again and then the lock turned and the door began to pull outward and that is when they rushed through the door.
****
Clay slammed through the portal violently and felt the guard collapse into the vestibule wall as the door unexpectedly hit him across the face. He felt Volkhov rushing behind him, clasping on to the thin fabric of his prison jumper, and he saw the faint outline of the stunned guard with the machine pistol and he rushed him and put his hand on the gun, pushing it downward as he brought the full force of his body crushing downward against the darkened figure.
He was surprised when the guard recovered so quickly, and he felt the gun being ripped from his hand and a booted foot came upward and caught him in the chest and he was brutally kicked across the vestibule. He expected bullets to rip into his body at any moment, but Volkhov had responded like a man half his age and he crashed into the guard before he could raise the gun. With both hands the old man grappled with the gun and his head turned toward Clay, who had regained his feet…
The old man shouted “GO!” at the top of his lungs.
****
Time, in such moments, telescopes outward. Every moment, every motion becomes an infinity, an eternity. The reasons before you and behind you come into sharp focus in your being and you know what it is you are made of. Such moments are, perhaps above any other moments in one’s life, clarifying.
Clay was able to see in the darkness and he rushed forward to help Volkhov but it was too late and the gun fired and both Volkhov and the guard crashed to the ground.
Clay froze and heard Volkhov yell “GO!” again. This time it was weaker, less in bravery than in finality. He immediately knew that he did not want to waste the man’s sacrifice, and he pushed his way out the outer door and began to sprint along the south wall of the prison.
****
His right hand brushed lightly along the wall and the cold gripped him and he realized he was just in his prison garb. He could feel the cold assaulting his fingers through the cracks in the bricks where the mortar lines had crumbled and were now filled with flaking snow.
The gun fired again and when Clay looked back he saw the guard was backing out of the outer door and Clay felt himself sprinting as fast as he could run through the snow and down the gentle incline that led to the fence line. He lost one of his slip-on shoes in the snow, and then the other came off, and he fell down in a small snowdrift, but he clawed his way back up and kept running. He could see his breath rush out of his body like a spirit.
He ran for his life.
He broke towards where he knew the gap would be in the fence and was now running across the open field, struggling in his bare feet through the snow and from this point on things could only be called ‘surreal.’ He saw what looked like huge gray balloons floating all around him toward the ground and though he was confused he picked up his speed and looked over his shoulder to see if the guard was gaining on him.
He didn’t see the guard coming and thought perhaps that he had made it, and he ran toward the grey ballo
ons floating beautifully out of the sky and he listened intently in the distance for a gunshot. But he didn’t hear any.
He didn’t hear any gunshots.
****
When he came up over the last rise where he expected to see the fallen trees, he noticed that there were no trees at all. He ran toward the nothingness. In fact, any clue that would tell him that the storm had destroyed any section of the fence at all was now gone completely. The fence that stood now was shiny and new, and the ground was disturbed around it evidencing the new construction, then his vision of the new fence was obscured by one of the gray balloons and then another and another.
****
Clay Richter stopped and stared in the middle of the pristine field of glowing snow and watched the forms fall downward in the crisp moonlight. His eyes focused intently on the billowing orbs as they hung in the sky and just gently swayed in the reflective glow of the nighttime. They contrasted sharply with the clear, black sky, filling up with air and glow from the snow’s bright light. They were beautiful and wondrous… and then Clay realized what they were.
Parachutes.
As he watched one of them down while it fell silently through the cold, he realized that hanging from the bottom of the round parachute was a paratrooper with a rifle.
His heart raced, and then he knew he was saved.
****
Clay ran in the direction of one of the men, waving his arms like a drowning man in the sea of snow. Collapsing into a snow bank, he struggled to move on all fours, shouting that he was an American and that he had been captured by escapees from the prison. Rising to his feet he stumbled forward thinking that the man was too far away for him to see Clay clearly, but the soldier looked around and noticed him, anyway. He heard the sound of Clay’s yelling and he started toward him, raising his weapon as he did.
****
What’s going on? Clay struggled in his mind to ask that question. Then he suddenly realized they could not know who he really was because he was wearing prison garb. They could not know him.
He put his hands above his head and dropped to his knees. He showed them he meant no harm. He repeated his story loudly as a soldier walked across the snow toward him. Another was making his way through the distance and Clay could almost see them, could almost read their faces.
Then his heart sank. He looked back up into the paratrooper’s eyes, and followed the intent gaze. Off to the left. The paratrooper was not looking at him at all.
Clay looked across the field of snow and saw his tracks leading backward, toward the prison, toward the figure of a man standing in the doorway. The man stepped into the light underneath the overhang and then was followed by another, and another, and Clay followed the paratrooper’s eyes to see Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei walking towards them.
****
He saw the paratrooper raise the gun and he wondered if the soldier was going to shoot the three unarmed young men right there in the snow.
The man shouted to the trio approaching on foot, but—and this fact took time to penetrate Clay’s mind—the soldier spoke in Russian.
He spoke in Russian?
Clay saw his life flash before his eyes. He saw the tree swing and the cabin, and the inside of his brownstone, and Veronica. And Cheryl. Lovely Cheryl. He swallowed and looked up into the nighttime sky.
****
Clay heard the shouts in Russian and saw the waving angry menace of the bulldog Mikail. The gun moved slowly, lazily towards Clay and then Clay…
…heard its bark and felt its bite.
He saw the flash at the muzzle and thought how beautiful it was, how much it looked like fireworks. He felt bullets ripping into him and sensed a jerking in his body. The breath ran through him and then out of him and he noticed the beautiful fog it made against the clear night air, rising up like a spirit.
He collapsed on the snow.
****
The last thing Clay Richter saw was his own blood in sharp contrast with the whiteness of the pristine snow. It ran in little rivulets along the fresh packed snow where his body had fallen and then sank into the white and beyond that into the ground he loved so dearly and from whence he’d come. The last thought he ever formed, which slowly gripped his fading mind, circling in and around his consciousness like a vise until it held in him for an instant like a thin point of light or like a star in relief against the midnight sky, was a sentence that never had its own chance to find its period.
Always leave yourself a way o
****
Vasily Romanovich Kashporov heard the gunfire, and then he heard it again, and then once again. Looking over his shoulder and up the hill he saw the outline in the dark sky of the silent paratroopers gliding down in and around the prison walls and its fence and its fields.
A half-dozen came down in the street, drifting past the grocery between the Church and the shops and the houses. Some others looked as though they might have landed on top of the gymnasium.
He shivered just a bit in the cold wind and ducked his head as he pulled the shoulder straps up on the backpack and tightened them slightly across his chest.
He set his square face towards Pushkin Street and the light brown house on the end which even at that very moment had a candle showing through the window.
He knew the house well. He’d often passed it on his errands in and around the village and many times he had stopped to admire its many raised gardens and unique landscaping.
That was where he knew he’d find Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky.
From The Poems of C.L. Richter:
Lullaby for My Daughter
Little one, your hair undone,
Your legs all full of flying
You saved me from the Me, Myself,
and with so little trying.
Before you came, life's endless game
was won when worlds were winning.
And then life's toils and chase of spoils
was stopped, and worlds stopped spinning.
You spin upon the needles head
and, needless, heed my pleading
that all life's cares be plowed to shares
of bounty for thy needing.
The night comes strong as day grows long
and sunrise preps her entry.
Now sleep, dear one. The moon, the sun,
and nature be thy sentry.
CHAPTER 10
Warwick was a nice enough town, if one were merciful enough to forget, even for a moment, its purpose in the world. Nestled deep in a thick forest, in a sleepy little hollow shielded on all sides by ancient mountains cut through by dissecting rivers and grinding glacial ice, the town was beautiful in its way, like many New England towns.
In the spring and summer, its verdant plateau was adorned with the delicate purple blooms of the deadly nightshade and the brief yellows of lady slipper orchids. In the fall, the leaves of its towering canopy of yellow birch, black cherry, red oak, and white pine trees drifted lazily through the crisp mountain air and piled along the streets and in the forest bed in heaps of luscious reds and golds. It was a quaint place, shrouded in antiquity, despite its relative youth.
One might easily have found resting in those piles of leaves, for example, on a normal autumnal evening, a man who by dress and mannerisms resembled (if one didn’t know better) the image of a colonial Rip Van Winkle. Or a man looking like that mad monk Rasputin might have been found raking those leaves, gathering them into neat little piles to be composted as he nodded to the women passers-by, or watched the children playing Cossacks and Robbers in the street.
All in all, Warwick (often called Novgorod, as a nickname, by the locals) had the quality of a foreign town in a foreign land, as if the inhabitants had come from some other country and brought the bricks and stone and wood of their ancestral homes with them, along with their clothes and language and customs. It was the kind of place one rarely sees in the landscape of American modernity. This, in the particular case of Warwick, was especial
ly convenient, since almost no one had ever seen it.
There was only one road leading into and out of Warwick and, in the recent twin natural disasters—the raging superstorm called Sandy and the even more powerful blizzard that followed in its wake—even that route had been cut off.
Where the town had drawn its sustenance, beyond the ample and well-worked vegetable gardens and the livestock that dotted its streets and lay hidden in its valley, had always been something of a mystery, even to those who lived there.
There had been no convoys of trucks along its lone corridor, no planes flying low and touching down on a secluded runway. Somehow the town had simply, since its inception in the late 1950’s, in a time when two superpowers were engaged in a cold war, been re-supplied through capillary action from some unknown source or sources. The Spar grocery and the smaller specialty markets—the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers—seemed to remain perpetually well stocked, though the selection was probably more limited than one might find in a land where competition thrived.
Most American towns, villages, and even tiny hamlets either grew or they died. Warwick, by contrast, just maintained. The same forces that multiplied or diminished growth in small town America were not at work in Warwick. Competition for labor from nearby cities, children escaping small town life for college or for excitement in the Metropolis, young adults fleeing the staid and boring village for… well… for anything else, even for war, these were not defining factors in Warwick.
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