War Plan Red

by Peter Sasgen

  After they surrendered Zakayev, made them take the woman and child down and dig their graves. Then, while the Russians, herded back-to-back in a circle, begged for their lives, Zakayev tied them up like a bundle of cordwood. After they were thoroughly doused with gasoline, he set them on fire.

  “Ali?”

  The mention of his name jolted him from the memory of that day.

  “Fighters! You have proven your dedication to the battle for Chechen independence,” Zakayev said.

  “We are fighting a war that we will gladly sacrifice our lives to win. There are still more battles to come, and because our work here is finished, I am releasing you from my command so you can return to Chechnya. There you will organize yourselves, form new cadres, and prepare for the collapse of Russia. When the collapse comes, it will come quickly, perhaps within days. Regional pro Russian administrators will try to maintain stability in Chechnya, but they and their puppet prime minister will fail because Russia as we know it will cease to exist. Align yourselves as quickly as you can with the new forces of independence that will emerge from the old regime. They will be Chechnya’s future.”

  Each man made a short, awkward speech and renewed his vow of loyalty to Zakayev. The girl produced a bottle of vodka. She filled glasses, jars, and tin cups, which the group, Muslims drinking Russian vodka, raised to toast Zakayev. “Za vashe zdarov’e!” Afterward each man had a private moment with Zakayev before departing. The man with the black band around his head waited until the others had departed before speaking to Zakayev.

  “I volunteer to stay behind, General, to make sure that Serov is dead. If he’s not, I will kill him.”

  Zakayev poured the man another vodka and one for himself. “Forget Serov. He can’t stop us now. No one can. Go back to Chechnya with the others.”

  “It has been a privilege to serve with you, General. Perhaps someday you will visit Grozny and I will have a new wife and children to present for your blessing.”

  “Yes, someday,” Zakayev said. He thought about what he himself had lost and what this man might gain. “Name one of your children for me.”

  The men loaded their gear in two cars and departed. One by one, the girl began shutting off the lights in the shop. The man who owned the shop, a Chechen, was due to return from a visit to his wife’s family in Pskov and scheduled to reopen for business in the morning without having laid eyes on Zakayev or his men. Or knowing that a freshly dug grave behind the shop had been hidden under parts from wrecked automobiles.

  Outside, Zakayev looked at the girl. The backpack hung from her thin shoulders. She had tied her hair back in a long ponytail sticking out from under a knit cap pulled down over her ears. To Zakayev she was just a beautiful child. “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  “Afraid of dying?”

  “That too.”

  She kissed his cheek. After a last look around the shop, she closed and bolted the door.

  5

  Moscow Central Morgue

  T he flesh looked cold and hard like alabaster. Scott didn’t touch it, just observed while the technician held up one end of the sheet like a tent flap.

  He almost didn’t recognize Drummond, which made his task bearable. With several days growth of beard—patchy gray stubble like iron wire—sprouting from a face with a pair of badly sunken cheeks, Drummond looked like he’d been hauled out of a Moscow gutter. Scott imagined Vivian waiting patiently in Falls Church to deliver Drummond’s dress blue uniform, freshly pressed and in a plastic bag, to the funeral home.

  Scott examined a small hole in Drummond’s left temple plugged with cotton stained pink. On the opposite temple he saw a large bulge sutured shut with coarse black thread where, the attending pathologist explained, under a mass of brain tissue and skull fragments he had excavated for and found the bullet that had burrowed laterally through Drummond’s head.

  Alex, hand to her mouth, hung back. “It’s him, isn’t it?” she said, unable to tear her eyes away.

  “Yes, it’s him,” Scott said.

  The morgue stank of death and antiseptic. It was a miserable concoction of cracked white and green tile and peeling paint. The only light came from fixtures hanging over the double row of stainless-steel autopsy tables, some of which held sheeted corpses waiting their turn. In a nod to the Americans, two aproned and gloved technicians had agreed to delay their work until the viewing was complete.

  “He’s been autopsied,” Scott said, observing the long, sutured scar on the torso. “Why?”

  The pathologist started to say something, but Abakov spoke up. “Standard procedure. We check to see if there could be contributing circumstances.”

  “A heart attack or a seizure,” the pathologist added.

  “It’s pretty obvious what killed him, isn’t it?” Scott said, motioning that the sheet should be lowered.

  “It would seem so,” Abakov said, “but there are strict rules we must follow.”

  “Where’s the kid that they found with him. Radchenko.”

  “Gone,” said the pathologist.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  “Released to his family for burial,” Abakov said. “I can tell you he had a nearly identical wound to the head. Right-side entry but in his case the bullet exited on the left and did quite a bit more damage than you see here in Admiral Drummond.”

  “Do you have the bullets?” Scott asked.

  “I can get them,” the pathologist said, his eyes shifting to Abakov.

  Abakov gave a nod.

  They waited in silence for the pathologist to return. Abakov smoked, drawing it deep into his lungs.

  The smoke masked the faint odor of putrefaction lurking under one of the sheeted corpses on a nearby table. Alex looked pale.

  The pathologist returned with a blue plastic Ziploc bag containing two small-caliber bullets. Scott dumped them into the palm of his hand. The bullet taken from Drummond, the pathologist explained, was almost pristine. The other bullet had been badly distorted.

  “The bullet completely shattered the boy’s skull,” Abakov explained.

  “Where’s the pistol these came from?” Scott said.

  “Ballistics has it.”

  “I have a question,” Alex, still looking pale, said. “During your autopsy, did you check for semen on or in either body. In other words, could you tell if they had had sex? Did you find any…prezervativy?”

  she asked, using the word for condoms.

  The pathologist shrugged. “We found no such evidence. It would have been obvious if they had.

  Usually the rectum shows evidence of trauma—”

  “We assume,” Abakov broke in, “that they hadn’t gotten around to it. There was no evidence of any sexual activity, nor did we find any condoms.”

  After an awkward interval Abakov said, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?”

  Scott put the bullets back in the plastic bag and zipped it shut between a thumb and finger. “The hotel room in Murmansk where they died.”

  “What did the ambassador say?” Alex said. She handed Scott an iced vodka.

  “This is a nice apartment,” Scott said. Hers was in a block of modern but uninspired redbrick apartments within the U.S. Embassy compound. Alex had brightened it up with travel posters of California sunsets and Florida beaches. The furniture was barely serviceable, but by introducing a collection of vases and figurines made of blue-and-white traditional Russian Gzhel porcelain, lacquer boxes, and matryoshka nesting dolls purchased on the Arbat, she had created a warm, personalized environment.

  “What did he say?” she repeated.

  “I didn’t talk to him. I met with the deputy chief of mission.”

  “Stretzlof? He’s a pompous ass. And a boor.”

  “So I discovered,” Scott said. He picked up and examined a beautiful reproduction of a sixteenth-century Russian icon, a painting of the saints Comas, Jacob, and Damian dressed in colorful robes and with gold discs radiating saintliness floating behind their h
eads. “You have a good eye for this sort of thing.”

  “You have to be selective. The shops in Moscow sell a lot of junk to tourists, but if you shop around you can find exquisite things. Like a Chekhov first edition out of my price range.”

  “Mine too,” Scott said. “Stretzlof wants Drummond’s body shipped home as soon as possible. I got the impression it’s terribly inconvenient to have a senior military officer murdered in Russia.”

  “Stretzlof is the ambassador’s hatchet man. He fronts for the political section too. Did you meet the political affairs officer?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “He’s Stretzlof’s handpicked man. He and Stretzlof have gone out of their way at times to anger the Russians. I don’t get it, because we need them as much as they need us. We want a free hand in the Middle East; they want the same in Chechnya. But hey, I try to mind my own business.”

  She sat, chin cupped in a fist and looked at Scott. “This is a close-knit community and it’s hard not to step on toes,” Alex said. “Be careful which ones you step on.”

  “I had a chat with Brigadier General Carroll,” he said.

  “The defense attaché.”

  “He offered to help expedite matters, but I told him we could handle things. I didn’t tell him that we were going to Murmansk.”

  “Maybe you should have. If Stretzlof finds out, he’ll have a fit. He’ll say you’ve overstepped your orders.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Scott said.

  She looked at him guardedly. He sensed a cool, analytical intelligence at work and knew that nothing would likely escape her notice.

  “It’s a long trip,” she added.

  “Only twelve hundred klicks. We’ll be back before dinner. Besides, it’s Abakov’s helicopter and gas, so it won’t cost Uncle Sam a penny.”

  “What do you hope to accomplish by going to Murmansk?” Alex said.

  Scott prowled the living room. He seemingly was bursting with energy, the room barely able to contain it. “I don’t know. But I want to find out what the hell happened. Somebody killed Frank and that sailor and I want to know why. Maybe there’s something Abakov’s men overlooked.”

  She threw him a questioning look. “Are you saying that the FSB is covering something up?”

  “You tell me. What were you two doing in Murmansk that would be so sensitive someone would kill Frank? Remember what Abakov said? He believes the U.S. is trying to conquer Mother Russia. If someone believes that and killed Frank, they could have killed you too.”

  Alex gnawed at a fingernail. “We don’t do classified inspections of nuclear weapons—don’t go anywhere near them. Abakov believes that nonsense because he can’t adjust to the new Russia. He wants things the way they were under Brezhnev, when the KGB ran the country. Then he got regular paychecks and could go around scaring the shit out of Russian citizens. Now he has to be nice to people, especially Americans. He’s a dinosaur who can’t adjust to a kinder, gentler Russia.”

  “Can you think of any reason someone would kill Frank and that boy?”

  “I told you, Jake, all we did was inspect and inventory reactors and their fuel, and monitor radiation levels at the sub bases. Sometimes it was pretty boring work. What kept it from being boring all the time was that Frank was fun to work with; plus, he kept scrupulous notes, which made the job of writing reports easier.”

  Scott slugged down his drink. “Then maybe that’s where we should start looking: at Frank’s notes.”

  Alex punched a code into a wall-mounted keypad and shut off the embassy’s nodal security system inside Drummond’s apartment. She and Scott stood in the foyer listening to a hum from the refrigerator and a ticking clock on a table in the tiny living room. Like Alex’s apartment, Drummond’s was spare, and he’d made no effort to personalize it. A few well-thumbed Russian language magazines and a National Geographic lay on a Scandinavian-style coffee table in the living room. Other than a coffeemaker and box of sealed premeasured packets of coffee, the kitchenette was bare.

  Alex said, “Frank took all of his meals at the embassy mess.”

  “He always used government mess whenever he could,” Scott said.

  “He kept his papers here,” Alex said. “Each apartment is equipped with a safe. Sensitive materials are held at the chancery, but then, he and I didn’t handle top-grade material.”

  She led Scott past a small bedroom that held Drummond’s personal effects to an even smaller room off the hallway that had doubled as his office.

  A laptop computer, neatly stacked file folders, a laser printer, and reams of packaged copy paper took up all the space on a trestle table. Pens and pencils, points carefully aligned, stood at attention in a ceramic cup with a smiley face on its side next to a pair of radiation monitors equipped with belt clips.

  To the left of the table a paper shredder on a stand hung over an empty wastebasket. More files and papers had been left neatly stacked on the floor. Drummond had squared everything away before going to Murmansk. Even his caster chair had been parked just so under the table.

  Scott sat down and turned on the desk lamp. He selected a thick file from the stack on the floor and opened it. A rough draft of a report had blue-penciled corrections scribbled over the pages and margins.

  Scott skimmed the first page of a report on the threat posed by loose fissile materials in Russia.

  “Tell me what you’re looking for,” Alex said. “Maybe I can help. This stuff is pretty technical.”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for, and that’s the problem. Maybe there’s something here that might give us a hint.”

  “Jake, the only thing I know for sure is that Radchenko was assigned to the K-363. We went aboard the sub and did a walk-through and met the crew, but I don’t specifically remember meeting him. I mean, they are all young and look alike with their short haircuts. Frank interviewed some but not all of the K-363’s sailors in private ashore to see if any would be suitable to work with Earth Safe securing materials. We had some problems with that, but nothing we couldn’t handle.”

  Scott’s senses came alert. “What kind of trouble?”

  “The captain of the K-363 made it clear that he didn’t want us on his boat and that he definitely didn’t want us talking to his men ashore—or anywhere else for that matter.”

  “What was his name—can you remember?”

  “How can I forget? Kapitan Third Rank Georgi Litvanov. A prick.”

  “Kapitan third rank—a full commander. What did he do?”

  Alex frowned. “He flat-out told us to get the hell off his ship. He even ordered one of his—what do you call them?—michman—”

  “Warrant officers.”

  “Right—to escort us off the boat.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, you know Frank. He used that charm of his to defuse the situation, and the next thing he and the michman were swapping sea stories.”

  “What did Litvanov do about that?”

  “What could he do? We had permission from the commander of the Russian Northern Fleet as well as the Interior Ministry to do our work. Litvanov sure as hell didn’t like it but he had to go along with it. I know that the captain of a naval vessel is God, but he had to relinquish his kingdom to a higher authority.”

  “This Radchenko was a krasnoflotets—an able seaman. What did he tell Drummond?”

  “I don’t know, because I didn’t sit in on the interview.”

  “But Frank rejected him.”

  “Yes. Radchenko had hardly any experience in nuclear power. He was just a striker getting on-the-job training. I think he doubled as a mess cook.”

  Scott raked fingers through his hair. His eyes roamed Frank’s desk, darting from object to object. “It doesn’t make sense. Frank was always looking out for the welfare of his crew, especially the enlisted men. He understood their problems and knew that a ship and CO is only as good as its crew. But Frank wouldn’t necessarily sit down and knock back a
few cold ones with his boys. And not this boy. Yet, there he was in Frank’s hotel room.”

  “Maybe he had information Frank wanted.”

  “What information?”

  Her mouth tightened. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, say he did, but why meet him in a shit hole of a hotel? And why the need for secrecy?” Scott considered for a long moment, gazing down at the gray carpeting as if he might find the answer written there. He looked up. “Did Frank say anything at all about a meeting?”

  “Not a word. Just that he was going to wrap things up and head back to Moscow.”

  “By the way, any idea what happened to his cell phone? I didn’t see it listed on the FSB’s inventory of his personal effects.”

  She shook her head. “It’s missing. Someone must have stolen it.”

  “It’s useless without his activation code,” Scott said.

  At length Alex’s shoulders sagged. “Maybe…”

  “Maybe what?” Scott said.

  “Maybe Abakov was right. Maybe Frank and the sailor…”

  “Come on, Alex. I know you don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t want to, but I can’t think of any reason that Frank would have met with a half-illiterate navy conscript in a hotel near the base. Everything would have been covered in the private interviews.”

  “Then there’s got to be another explanation.” Scott turned back to the desk. “What about his computer?

  Maybe there’s something useful on it.”

  “I doubt it,” Alex said. “Most of the stuff he copied to the hard drive was encrypted technical material, and I don’t have the access codes.”

  “I thought you said he kept the high-security stuff in the chancery.”

  “He did. Even so, this stuff is sensitive, and that’s why he used a twenty-eight-bit encryption code.”

  “Isn’t that overkill?”

  “Probably, but he was careful.”

  “Right, and a man who’s that careful wouldn’t meet a sailor from Olenya Bay in a hotel room in Murmansk unless it was damned important.”

  Alex said nothing. She knelt beside Scott and booted the laptop sitting on the table. He inhaled her scent, a light fragrance in her hair from the shampoo she had used. The desktop came up on the screen.