by Cap Daniels
“Oh, no no no. This is a Lutheran church, and the congregation meets in that stone building just there.” He pointed toward a more modern structure that still must’ve been a hundred years old. “But this not a thing to worry about. They will not be meeting for church until April of next year. There are only about two dozen people here on the island through the winter.”
I hefted Norikova over my shoulder, and then followed Pierre and Clark around the back of the ancient church, to equally ancient wooden doors opening onto a set of stone steps. The steps looked like they could lead into the pits of Hell…if Hell were a lake of ice instead of fire.
We made our way into the dungeon-esque cellar and discovered that someone—possibly Pierre—had gone to great lengths turning the space into a prison ward worthy of belonging to the gulag.
Pierre pointed into a makeshift metal cage with iron rings welded inside. “Put her in there.”
A small metal bucket rested beside an old iron bedframe. I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only person making Norikova pee in a bucket. Minutes after we’d secured her into her new home, she began to stir, pulling at her restraints and swearing in Russian.
Pierre watched her with practiced attention, taking in her every movement and listening intently to her language. A smile lit up his weathered face. “Welcome, Mademoiselle Spy, to my humble home that is now your home. Eh, for maybe a little while.”
She winced as the pain from her broken nose reclaimed its place in her brain, and then she twisted and turned in either a wasted effort to escape or an equally wasted attempt to gain some measure of comfort.
“Gde my?” she growled.
I waggled my finger in the air. “No, no. English. Remember?”
“It is okay,” said Pierre. “My Russian is good, and we are going to spend a lot of time together. I think she should speak any language she wishes. I will keep up.”
“Who are you?” she hissed.
“That is up to you, mademoiselle. I may be your roommate or your jailer. It is most entirely your decision.”
She turned to me with a look that I supposed was meant to appear appealing. “How long?”
As beautiful as she’d been before her nose encountered the bulkhead in the chopper, it was difficult to find her seductive in her current state.
“That depends on how your father reacts to my offer.”
Chapter 18
All Aboard
Clark and I took advantage of nearly frozen church pews and used them as cots. Wrapped in several woolen blankets, we were able to get a few hours of shut-eye. Our bodies appreciated the gift of sleep, and our minds demanded it.
I examined the knot on Clark’s skull and was relieved it wasn’t as serious as I’d feared. “Your head must be harder than I thought.”
He pressed his palm against his forehead and groaned. “That doesn’t stop it from hurting.”
“How’s your vision?” I asked, hopeful he’d be more mission-ready than he’d been the previous night.
“It’s better, but still not perfect. That was a nasty shot I took.”
“Yes, it was, but I need you at full strength. The next couple of days are going to suck.”
He chuckled. “Well, that’s nice to hear since the last two days have been so delightful. We’ve still got thirty-six hours before we get to Moscow. I’ll be fine by then.”
We couldn’t show up in Riga in a stolen Finnish Border Guard helicopter, so we opted for Pierre’s boat. It was a forty-eight-foot, steel-hulled commercial fishing boat with enormous diesels. It wasn’t anything close to luxurious, but it would certainly get the job done.
What sufficed as a marina on Ruhnu was little more than two dozen wooden pilings, and an extremely weathered, somewhat-floating dock. The ferry landing was adequate, but the ferry wouldn’t be running again until spring—except for the few times during winter when an icebreaker would cut a swath through the frozen Gulf of Riga to deliver meager supplies to the inhabitants of the island. The Gulf wasn’t frozen yet, but there were sheets of ice forming near the rocky shoreline. The thought of a frozen ocean made me cringe. I was really starting to miss the tropics.
The old workhorse of a boat made the sixty-mile trip to Riga look like a Sunday afternoon joyride. Ginger and Skipper provided us with Canadian passports with Latvian immigration stamps already inside. I had no intention of showing our actual passports when we crossed the Russian border, but getting through the Port of Riga would be challenging without some pretense of authenticity. How we’d get back out of Russia would depend on a thousand unpredictable variables, so I hadn’t bothered to think that far ahead yet.
I piloted the boat, which is immensely easier than landing a helicopter in the dark, while Clark packed our go-bags from our larger kits. We couldn’t hump all of our gear into Moscow, so the smaller go-bags had to hold everything we needed.
Although neither of us spoke Latvian, my Russian, along with a wad of cash, was enough to make arrangements to keep our boat in the marina in Riga for a few days. A boy by the docks insisted that two weeks was too long because the Gulf could turn into a million-acre sheet of ice before then. I assured him that we’d be back before it froze, and if we weren’t, he could keep the boat. He heartily agreed to my terms.
We found a café and ordered enough coffee to thaw the parts of us that had frozen on the boat ride from Ruhnu. Latvian coffee, I learned, was much better than Israeli coffee, but I preferred the climate of Tel-Aviv.
Skipper answered my sat-phone call. “Hey, Chase. It’s good to see you made it to Latvia.”
“We made it, but it hasn’t been easy. Norikova is in the loving arms of your Frenchman, and we plan on catching the four-fifty overnight train to Moscow this afternoon.”
I heard keystrokes through the sat-phone.
“Okay, that should do it,” she said. “You’ll have two first-class tickets waiting at will-call.”
“Don’t you think first class is a little too obvious?”
“Nope. Ginger says first class is important. It’ll give you the privacy you need, and a window large enough to climb through if you need to get out in a hurry.”
“Okay, you’re the boss. I’m just along for the ride.”
She ignored my comment. “Do you need Norikov’s address again?”
“No, I have it memorized.”
As if she didn’t hear me or just wasn’t listening, Skipper read the address one more time. My memory was correct. The house would be on the Moscow River, and the young Swedish beauty who believed Gregor Norikov was her ticket to supermodel stardom would be occupying the old communist’s full attention on a cold Moscow Saturday night.
Skipper was right. The prepaid tickets were waiting at the will-call window for the two Canadians. The bored redheaded ticket agent barely glanced up at me, but locked eyes with Clark and tried to suppress a shy smile.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I said.
“What can I say? It’s a curse that I’m saddled with. Beautiful women can’t resist me.”
I shook my head. “You’ll know just how bad that curse is when a ticket clerk, the one person in all of Eastern Europe, remembers us when the FSB starts asking questions about the handsome young Canadians.”
The equally bored security agent not smitten with Clark searched our backpacks and found nothing more than extra mittens, a change of clothes, and a rolled-up comic book. What he hadn’t discovered was the concealed compartments containing two Glock 26 subcompact 9mm pistols, extra magazines, Ka-Bar fighting knives, lock picks, sat-phones, and a handheld GPS. The X-ray machine also missed them, thanks to the lead-thread woven baffles designed to look like insulated socks. Things were starting to go our way, and that scared the hell out of me.
We settled into our cabin and double-checked our inventory. Chalk up another good call to Skipper. She was right about the first-class compartment. Not only was it comfortable and would give us the privacy to catch up on much-needed sleep, but the sliding window
was of adequate size to allow even me to get off the train should the Russian der’mo hit the proverbial fan.
As trains tend to do, ours pulled out of the Riga-Passajieru station precisely on time and began her nightly sixteen-hour trek toward Moscow.
I had never been closer to the Russian border. I sensed the motion of the train, but the movement I felt in my embattled heart was from the memory of the man who taught me how to perceive the world, who sacrificed so much for his country, and who loved a beautiful woman who was born, served, and died behind the Iron Curtain that once figuratively hung less than two hundred miles ahead of me, where I would cross the border between Latvia and Russia for the first time in my life. Dr. Robert Richter spent his life fighting for the freedoms my country was founded upon, and in the midst of the Cold War, he had fallen in love with Katerina Burinkova, a Soviet KGB officer. He fathered a beautiful daughter who would grow to become one of the world’s most elite assassins and most accomplished agents of the SVR—the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Fate, or perhaps depravity beyond measure, would deliver that beautiful young assassin into my arms, and ultimately into Dr. Richter’s life, as if from the darkest depths of his anguished memory of loving her murdered mother. The web of deception woven so skillfully by the Russian masters had collapsed, sending Anya Burinkova—my mentor’s daughter—into the pits of a prison so unimaginably horrible that no one, not even Anya herself, could imagine she would ever again see freedom. I held in my hands the power to set her free, and the weighted responsibility of facing the consequences of doing so. I bore that weight with the unquestioned faith that Dr. Richter would have given his last breath to save his beloved daughter from the hell in which she suffered, and I owed it to him to make that impossibility a reality, no matter what the cost. I would see Anya Burinkova walk again in freedom, but I would do so at the cost of delivering Ekaterina Norikova, an enemy of my country and freedom, back to her father, and back to the Rodina to continue her fight against everything I held dear.
“Chase! Do you want two or three?”
Clark’s words yanked me from my stupor. “Huh?” I mumbled.
“Do you want two or three spare mags? I’m only taking two. If we get in a gunfight so bad that two extra mags won’t solve it, the third one sure won’t make any difference.”
“Oh, yeah. Just two is fine.”
He took on that confused puppy look he wears so well. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking about Dr. Richter.”
“You’re going to need to focus. We’re not in Kansas anymore, and it ain’t the Wizard we’re off to see.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We heard a rough knock, and Clark grabbed every piece of hardware he could and shoved it beneath the mattress of the bunk.
I slid open the door, and the conductor asked a question in what I assumed was Latvian, so I answered in Russian. “Everything is perfect. Thank you.”
“Spasibo,” he said, and continued through the train car checking on passengers.
Announcements were made over the intercom of the train in Latvian, Ukrainian, Russian, and butchered English. I ignored most of them, but the mention of dinner in the dining car caught my attention. I pushed the call button for the conductor, and he arrived a few minutes later. I asked if we could have dinner in our cabin, and he was obliged to happily say, “Da.”
Our dinner arrived half an hour later, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d never spent any time aboard passenger trains, especially not in Europe, so I imagined the food was similar to airline fare. I was wrong.
The salad and soup courses arrived simultaneously, delivered by a uniformed steward wearing white gloves. Precisely eleven minutes later, the main course of roasted lamb, steamed baby carrots, and a rice dish I couldn’t identify arrived in the arms of the same steward. He cleared our salad plates and soup bowls, poured an Italian Zinfandel, and disappeared. We ate as if we’d just come off of a hunger strike. Dessert of chocolate pie with caramel and vanilla ice cream arrived twenty-five minutes later with two cordials of vintage port and two cups of steaming black coffee.
“I need to spend more time on trains,” I said through a mouthful of chocolate pie.
“Oh, yeah. The food is always amazing. I wonder why the airlines can’t get it right.”
The steward returned to clear our dessert and asked if we wanted anything else. We tried to avoid eye contact and waved him off. Not only did I not want the redhead at the ticket counter to remember us, I also didn’t want to plant any roots in the memories of anyone aboard the train. If Clark’s theory of something always going wrong were to hold true, there would be a plethora of questions after the two Canadians had come and gone.
Chapter 19
Friends in Cold Places
Some decisions are always made during the planning stage of any operation, and likewise, some must be made based on conditions in the field. We discussed whether we should ride the train to Moscow Rizhsky station, or if we should make our exit on the outskirts of Moscow when the train slowed to enter the city. We had no way of knowing the level of security we’d encounter at the station or if the place would be littered with surveillance cameras. I wasn’t particularly fond of having our faces plastered on every fencepost and telephone pole in Eastern Europe, so I decided getting off the train would be the better option.
Snow had fallen overnight and continued into the morning. The countryside looked like a postcard winter wonderland, but the beauty of the landscape belied the truth of the country. Russia had one hundred forty million people, most of whom lived in poverty. Most Americans could never have understood the conditions the people of Russia endured, nor how they withstood some of the harshest winters on the planet. Although Bernard Baruch coined the term “Cold War” in 1946 to describe the ever-diminishing relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, he could just as well have been describing the yearly battle the Soviet people fought against Mother Nature from October through April every year of their lives.
There would be nothing easy about getting off the train on the outskirts of Moscow. I didn’t know how much it would slow when we approached the city, but I was confident the train wouldn’t continue the pace we’d made through the night. Aside from the possibility of getting hurt when we jumped, we had to consider plenty of other factors, as well. The most obvious was the need to acquire transportation. We couldn’t just walk into Boris and Natasha’s Rent-A-Car, throw down a credit card, and sign for a Chevy Cavalier. We had to survive the jump with no injuries, determine our position, and requisition a car, none of which would be easy in the best of conditions, but doing it in the snow added an element that neither of us was looking forward to.
We agreed it would be better to step from the back of the caboose to avoid being run over should we roll the wrong direction when we hit the ground. I set out to explore the train in an effort to find the easiest way to get through the caboose and onto the aft platform without drawing too much attention. Most of the passengers were either staring out the window at the snow-covered landscape or busy with their newspapers from around the world. I made the most of the opportunity to move about relatively unnoticed. The escape looked straight forward, and the sliding doors at the rear opened easily on their tracks.
I returned to our cabin and briefed Clark on what I’d found. We agreed if the train slowed sufficiently, we’d turn the caboose into our exit ramp.
The schedule put us at Moscow Rizhsky station at 9:42 a.m., so we estimated we’d make the outskirts of Moscow a few minutes after 9:00. We made our way separately through the dining car and coach class cars to the end of the train. Clark went first, with me following about four minutes behind. No one offered so much as a glance at the six-foot-four, backpack-wielding Canadian. I hoped Clark had garnered no more attention, although I imagined if there were any fair maidens along the way, he wouldn’t have passed up the opportunity to wink and smile.
&nbs
p; Reaching the last door of the train, I estimated we were doing over sixty miles per hour—far too fast to survive a fall unscathed.
“At what speed are you willing to risk a jump?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” I said.
“It’s risky, but I still think it’s a better plan than dealing with security at the station.”
“I think we need to consider the possibility of one of us getting hurt. If I go first and don’t fare well, maybe you should consider continuing and taking your chances at the station.”
He shook his head. “No way. I’m not leaving you alone and wounded on the side of the tracks in Moscow. Are you kidding me? I’ve seen how Russian girls swoon over you. You’d have half the women under eighty tending to your wounds, and the other half pregnant. I’d never see you again. We’re going together.”
I chuckled. “I have to admit, I am big with the over-seventy Muscovite girls. It’s a burden, but we all have our crosses to bear.”
The train began to decelerate.
Clark said, “Okay, Playboy. It’s time to shit or cut bait. Or maybe fish or get off the pot. Whatever it is, it’s time to do it.”
I slid the door to its stops and stepped onto the platform with Clark half a step behind me. The ground was whirring by as we continued eastward, still at forty miles per hour.
I glanced over my shoulder. “What do you think?”
The look on his face told me what he was thinking before he said it. “It’s too fast. A few bruises are okay, but a broken bone any bigger than a finger is going to send this operation down the crapper.”
I nodded in agreement and watched the frozen, snow-covered earth continue past the toes of my boots. That’s when the gods who hear the prayers of an assassin came to our rescue.
The speaker above our heads crackled, and the conductor spoke again in every language he knew. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentleman, but we are forced to make a temporary sidetrack delay to allow another train to pass. We will be back on our way in just a few minutes, and we will still make our scheduled arrival time at Moscow Rizhsky station.”