Coercion

by Tim Tigner

  What Leo had not let slip was how or why he was flying. That story could never just slip out. The truth was, he had used rank, intimidation, and lies to gain the use of a military helicopter to smuggle a briefcase of God-knows-what to a dead-drop in Novosibirsk. He was playing messenger for his merciless masters.

  Leo suspected that his masters had many clever ways of circumventing Soviet security, but he had few details on how they worked or even what they wanted, and he didn’t care to speculate. As bad as his own situation was, the big picture was what haunted his dreams. In all likelihood, there were dozens if not hundreds of victims like him out there, a plague of conscripts secretly ravaging Russia—perhaps even the world. Who were they? What did their masters want? Where would it end?

  His masters demanded absolute secrecy. They expected him to be alone that night in the helicopter. They would likely interpret Andrey’s presence on this secret mission as an offensive maneuver, and then act accordingly.

  Gazing through the helicopter windshield toward the black horizon, thinking about the void that occupied the place where his future had been, Leo found the courage to be honest with himself. He had gotten drunk and let his plans slip because subconsciously, he longed to share his burden.

  Leo had kept his dreadful secret for a year, but he would not be able to hold it together for much longer. The stress of constantly deceiving everyone he loved and continually betraying everything he believed in was killing him. He had cancer of the soul. Ironically, in some regards it wasn’t killing him fast enough. Not knowing who his masters were, what they had in mind, when they were watching him, or where this would lead, was literally driving him mad. He did not want to go out that way.

  He needed to share his burden, to find a way out. Andrey Demerko was his best and only hope.

  Andrey was the finest strategist Leo knew, and a powerful operative as well. Even with Andrey’s help, however, he feared the situation was hopeless. Leo was no fool himself, and he couldn’t even fathom how to begin to fight.

  How do you attack an invisible enemy? Sure, he could try to uncover them, but how could he possibly avoid all the conscripted eyes and wary ears while scouring the darkness for his masters? How could he wipe them all out before they counterattacked? How do you thrust a sword when you don’t know who is friend and who is foe? Where do you turn when you can’t trust anybody? If they could reach a deputy minister, why not a minister? Why not a president? Gorbachev had a daughter. It was an agonizing situation for a soldier and a patriot to be in. He knew that the Devil was at work in his beloved country, and yet was powerless to fight.

  The gamble Leo faced was whether Andrey would choose to look past Leo’s traitorous acts to the coercion behind them and join Leo in the fight, or choose to follow protocol and have Leo arrested for treason.

  Back in the bar Leo had been about to take that gamble when Foreign Minister Sugurov’s call disrupted the collegial atmosphere, crumbling his will and providing a welcome chance to procrastinate.

  Perhaps now was the time? They were still three hundred kilometers from Novosibirsk. It would normally take the Mi-28 only an hour to cover that distance at full throttle, but to avoid radar Leo was flying contour to the ground at low altitude so their flight time would be closer to ninety minutes. Would that be long enough?

  His alternatives were very limited at this point. To save his friend, Leo had to find a way to make sure his masters did not see Andrey arrive with him. One option Leo had was to tell Andrey the truth, hoping to enlist his help but at least gaining enough understanding that he could then drop Andrey off somewhere before anyone saw them together. Alternatively, if Leo did not confide in Andrey, he would then have to contrive some inevitably far-fetched reason for getting his colleague out of the helicopter prior to reaching the airport. What could that possibly be? Leo started to brainstorm, but stopped himself abruptly. Who was he fooling? The time to talk had arrived.

  Leo took a deep breath and began. “Andrey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s time I told you how Maya died.”

  For a second there was a silence as, Leo assumed, Andrey tried to digest the implication of what he had just heard. Then the world erupted around them.

  An explosive crash somewhere behind them shook the helicopter violently before sending it into a plummeting spin. Time slowed down as Leo’s mind raced and the rotors passed one by one. Had another aircraft hit them? Did a fuel leak catch fire? Were they fired upon? The helicopter was behaving as though the whole tail were gone. It was uncontrollable. He realized that at the moment the cause didn’t really matter; the effect was all that counted.

  As a veteran pilot, Leo knew that the only thing you could do without a tail was brace for impact. He thought of Oxana and Georgy, and how he loved them. He thought of Andrey and Sugurov, and how he had betrayed them. He thought of Maya, and how he would see her now. Strangely enough, it occurred to Leo that he was not scared. Perhaps he had no fear left for himself. Perhaps he just welcomed death. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and thought about how sad it was for a man to go to his death knowing that he had failed.

  Chapter 3

  THREE MONTHS LATER. PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, NOVEMBER 1990

  Alex paused at the door to the hotel suite before knocking. He’d racked his brain to find a better path than this, one that didn’t stray into a moral gray zone, but there simply wasn’t one, and time was running out. He hoped that by leaving his gun at home, he would remain squarely on the side of the angels.

  He rolled his broad shoulders and visualized his next moves. All three men were bigger, and two were pros. He was counting on solid preparation, superior training, the element of surprise, and perhaps an angel or two.

  Alex scrunched his face a few times to relax his features. Then he smoothed his fake mustache, donned a smile, and knocked.

  The peephole darkened and then the larger of the two bodyguards, the one Alex had nicknamed Big, opened the door wide. Big’s three hundred pounds still blocked entry, but he wasn’t acting hostile. They had come all the way from Colombia to visit Stanford on the invitation of the baseball team, and Alex was dressed in a Cardinal uniform, complete with cap and bat.

  “I’m here to go over the schedule with Enrique, and answer any questions you might have. May I come in?”

  Big stepped back, allowing Alex to pass. Beyond him in the large opening between the suite’s sitting room and bedroom, Alex saw the second bodyguard. Ugly was sitting on Enrique’s back as the prospective Cardinal knocked out push-ups. It was an impressive display of strength and a powerful indicator of personality, and it played right into Alex’s hand.

  As he brushed past Big, Alex used his left hand to discreetly plunge a tranquilizer dart into the bodyguard’s left thigh while maintaining a friendly visage and warm eye contact with the others as they stood. Four quick but casual strides took him to within striking distance and exposed the rest of the bedroom. That was when his well-laid plan fell apart.

  Two more men were standing there. Large men with thick forearms crossing broad chests. They too were Colombians, but they clearly weren’t Enrique’s friends, teammates, or domestic servants. These looked like his father’s enforcers: rough, ready, and unreasonable.

  But first things first. Alex brought his bat up and around and across Ugly’s right wrist in a single sweep that carried all his momentum. As the crack of the bat and crunch of the bone gave voice to the violence of the blow and Ugly brought his good hand to his broken wrist, Alex used his left hand to pull a dart from the bandolier beneath his right sleeve and flick it forcefully into the wounded man’s backside. Already leaning forward to clutch his wrist, Ugly nose-dived into the carpet as Enrique scurried behind Rough and Ready.

  Outnumbered in close quarters, Alex knew that victory required speed, so he kept channeling his momentum. Accelerating the ash bat through a full arc, he launched it at Rough’s
forehead like a battering ram. As it flew he feigned a leap at Ready but spun instead, whipping another dart free in the process and sending it sailing toward Ready’s center of mass before his foe could reorient. There was a crack and a curse, and Rough and Ready both dropped, leaving Enrique the last Colombian left standing.

  “Sorry about your friends,” Alex said. “But I really needed to get you alone. Sorry about this, too,” he added, pulling another dart from his bandolier.

  Chapter 4

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, 1980

  “The Peregrine has hatched.”

  Victor had been just twenty-two when he heard those words for the second time. He was standing in a dimly lit, smoky room, watching horny fraternity guys make their last-ditch efforts to score liquor-loosened sorority girls while Pink Floyd blared numbingly in the background. Graduation was just twelve hours away.

  A stunning coed with long blond hair walked through the crowd to Victor as though he were starring in a beer commercial. She put her arms around his neck, gave him a knockout smile, and started to dance without saying a word. It was the kind of sultry, undulating dance that called up images of Arabian nights and set your blood afire as your throat went dry. After a nice wide-eyed stare, Victor ripped his gaze from Blondie’s cleavage and began to gyrate. She ran her tongue across her lips to focus his eyes and then mouthed the code in Russian.

  Victor dropped his beer on the frat house floor as his mind balked beneath the weight of a dozen questions and the burden of things to come. She steadied him as his knees grew weak, while his erection stayed his bladder. Now he understood.

  Once Victor stabilized, Blondie stepped back to scoff at him. Then she locked his eyes in a sober stare. “Remember, even at a party, you still serve The Party.” Then she turned and dissolved into the crowd while reality closed around him like an iron fist. After years of establishing deep cover in the US, Victor was being activated.

  He had come to the US five years earlier, a boy of seventeen. Once they implanted him with surgical precision, the KGB had withdrawn from Victor’s life like a disease in remission. They wanted his roots to grow, wanted him to branch out, blend in, and develop. He sensed their presence from time to time—watching him, measuring him, judging his competency for things to come. It didn’t really bother him. Life as a student had made his future with the KGB seem removed and abstract. He had put it out of his mind as something distant and foreign, like the threat of lung cancer to someone lighting a cigarette.

  Victor knew that his college years in America were one long job interview, a KGB test. Now that he was graduating, it appeared the results were in. How had he scored? That was no simple question. Oh, his grades were great, and his student leadership outstanding, but Victor was never sure what the men in Moscow were really looking for. The price of failure, on the other hand, was crystal clear. He supposed they wanted it that way.

  At least reacting to activation did not require much effort on his part. There were no bags to pack or bills to pay; they would take care of everything. Victor simply had to show up at the Air Canada desk, ready to go anywhere. He hoped Blondie would be accompanying him on the trip—a last-wish sort of thing—but it was not to be. Eight hours after graduation Victor found himself on the loneliest flight he ever took. Cyprus was a fine place to make a man disappear.

  He landed on the Mediterranean island with a backpack over his shoulder and his heart on his sleeve. During disembarkation on the Larnaca tarmac, Victor stepped back in the aircraft doorway so he could scan the waiting crowd while the other passengers descended the staircase. What was it going to be? Whom would they send? Would he ever leave this island?

  A newspaper dipped, a perfectly coiffed head looked up, and piercing eyes arrested his gaze: Father.

  Women flushed, men flinched, doors opened, doubts vanished—Vasily Karpov changed things just by walking into a room. The General’s charisma had little effect on Victor, however. He was immune. All he ever felt was fear, the fear of letting the Great Man down. Was it a good sign that his father had come personally, or a bad one? Victor swallowed hard even as he drew his hand away from the ceramic knife in his sleeve.

  Five minutes later, after a welcome as warm and tender as a court summons, Victor was sitting in silence in the passenger seat of a Mercedes. He was in the defendant’s chair, about to be read his sentence. Just get it over with.

  He worked hard not to fidget as his father exited west from the airport and accelerated toward the Troodos Mountains. Now that Victor knew he had a future, he was trying to take his mind off the fact that he was about to have it dictated to him. There was nothing on The General’s face, no indication, good or bad, of things to come. If his father ever had a heart, he had lost it long ago.

  They had driven a thousand vertical meters and were above the drifting mist when Karpov finally spoke. His words were the biggest surprise so far—yet but a subtle whiff of what was to come. “You’re one of the few people on this planet who has lived in both superpowers, Victor. Tell me, which do you prefer?”

  There was a loaded question. On the one hand, a KGB general was asking a deep-cover Soviet mole to choose between the US and the USSR. On the other hand, a father was asking his son if he would rather live in California or Siberia. Only one thing was certain: whether general or father, Vasily Karpov was all business. Victor would have to answer truthfully, defensibly, and quickly. He pictured the BMW he now drove—zero to sixty in under six seconds. Then he thought of the Lada he would have in Russia—zero to sixty only if he was lucky. And of course there was the food . . .

  “You don’t need to answer that,” Karpov said, cracking what appeared to be a genuine smile. “Actually, if you set aside language and the proximity of relatives, there is only one honest answer to the question. The average American has ten times the purchasing power of the average Russian, and twenty times the choices. And then there’s the weather. What I really want to ask you is this: Why? Why is that the case?”

  Why indeed, Victor thought. Both the US and Russia were superpowers. The populations were roughly the same. The Soviet Union, with more than double America’s landmass, had far more natural resources. Russia’s population was better educated, its single-party government less encumbered. So what was it? Why would his father be asking . . . ? It took a couple of minutes, the hot and sweaty kind, but when he got it, Victor knew he had the right answer. But was it the correct one? “Bad management.”

  “Precisely.”

  Victor began to glow—for the first time in his life, he had said exactly the right thing to his father. And his father, for the first time since Victor had met him, seemed to be human. As it turned out, Karpov was just setting him up for the punt.

  “We’re going to change all that.”

  The words hit Victor with near-physical force, sending him reeling. Father was not one to fantasize or speculate.

  Karpov pressed on. “Why is the Soviet Union considered a superpower?”

  “The Red Army, our nuclear arsenal, the KGB . . .”

  “Correct. Now a tougher question: Are those criteria still appropriate?”

  “To determine if a country is a superpower?”

  “Yes.”

  What did his father mean? By suggesting that military power was no longer appropriate, he was also implying that something had replaced it. What criterion could make a country more worthy of the superpower moniker than military might? Again, the lightbulb clicked on and the glow returned. “No. Now that nukes have leveled the field, economic power determines who rules.”

  “You’re absolutely correct.”

  Another genuine smile. Victor braced himself for the next punt.

  “When I was your age,” Karpov continued, “I came to that same conclusion. For months it tormented my mind like a broken tooth. You see, Victor, for men like you and me, defining an issue is not enough. We have to solve it.”

&nb
sp; “How do you solve something like that?” Victor couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  Karpov’s smile began to melt. “The same way you solve any other problem: by acting.

  “I spent a couple of years planning, and then, for the last twenty years, I’ve implemented. Thus far, I have managed to get most of the pieces in place. A great chess match is about to begin, Victor: us against the world. And you know what? We’re going to win.”

  Victor found his head spinning again, but his father pressed on. “We’re going to win because we’ll be the only ones who know the game is on. A decade from now, the Soviet Union will be an economic superpower, and I will be at the helm.”

  Karpov finally paused, allowing Victor to swallow the princely news. “Digestion will come later,” he said, “meanwhile, let me paint the broad strokes.

  “You are the fourth, and you will be the final person to know of my plan. As you might guess, Igor Stepashin and Yarik are the other two. The three of you will know the general plan, and everything about your own area of contribution, but for security reasons none of you will have all of the specifics. Those will be shared when the need arises.”

  Victor nodded.

  “I call us the Knyaz.”

  “The Nobility?”

  “We needed a name, and I liked the irony.”

  “A bastard and three orphans: nobility indeed.”

  “Yet destined to rule,” Karpov replied, his tone making it clear that Victor was not to take this lightly.

  “Why give us a name?”

  “The moniker adds a layer of anonymity. Yarik, Stepashin, and I learned at a young age of the tremendous tactical advantage a group gains by working together when nobody knows that its members are connected. Deception is, after all, at the heart of all warfare.”

  Victor realized that his confusion was apparent when Karpov continued.

  “For example, a key element of my plan has been to move the four of us through a series of positions that provide the Knyaz with strategic advantage. This was no small task, as the positions in question were all highly coveted. But, with the others working in the background to subtly promote the one while simultaneously sabotaging his likely competition—”