Tracie breathed a sigh of relief. Between her CIA training, her background in linguistics, and her extensive experience the past seven-plus years working in and around the Soviet Union, Tracie was passably familiar with all Russian dialects and nearly fluent in the most common ones. But the co-official languages in this region were Russian and Bashkir.
She felt certain that “co-official” could only mean one thing: the Soviets had installed Cyrillic as an official language after occupying their satellite nation, but in reality the natives all spoke the language of their heritage, which was Bashkir, a Turkic language and one with which Tracie was unfamiliar.
Russian was clearly a second language for the innkeeper, one she had probably adopted late in life and with reluctance, but had done so out of necessity when the Soviets constructed the military base down the road. She had seen Tracie’s uniform and made the obvious assumption it inspired.
Tracie smiled tightly in an attempt to project an air of efficiency. She marched to the desk and said, “Good morning. I will require a room for a few days.”
“Of course,” the woman said. She lifted a guest register and dropped it onto the surface before spinning it around to face Tracie. “And how long will you be with us?”
Tracie scrawled Lieutenant Olga Koruskaya as illegibly as possible into the book and said, “It all depends how long it takes to perform my audit.” She felt confident the old woman would not question what exactly Tracie might be auditing. She would assume it was related to the base and would treat the subject as one of those things best left alone.
Her assumption was proven accurate when the woman offered a bland smile. Her disinterest could not have been plainer.
Tracie said, “If it is acceptable, I will pay in advance for a five day stay. If I leave Mezhgorye sooner, I assume you will have no problem refunding?”
“Of course,” the woman repeated. She seemed comfortable in her ability to say the phrase in Russian, using it as a go-to filler in the conversation.
Tracie paid her in Russian Rubles. The innkeeper swept the money into an ancient cash drawer and then glanced at the guest register before closing it and whisking it away. She offered no comment at the name Tracie had written, nor did she request any form of identification, likely assuming the odds of anyone appearing in this remote village in a Red Army uniform who was not who she claimed to be were practically nil.
Tracie thanked the woman and received directions to her room. She took her key and her bag and disappeared into a small but surprisingly comfortable bedchamber for several hours of much-needed sleep.
By the time she awoke, darkness had fallen. She dressed quickly and found a quiet restaurant, then spent the next few hours familiarizing herself as much as possible with Mezhgorye. While doing so, she worked her way slowly north in the Lada, eventually leaving the village behind and continuing up the mountain.
She was careful to avoid any roads that would take her too close to the Soviet base, which loomed to the west like a cancer. There would be guard posts and patrols and Red Army sentries with automatic weapons, and drawing attention to herself was the last thing she wanted to do.
Her mission was to observe, not to engage.
The base’s isolated location had served to keep it hidden from prying American eyes for years, so obviously placing it deep in the Ural Mountains had worked to the Soviets’ advantage. But with the inadvertent admission of its existence by two captured KGB assassins, Tracie felt she could use the seclusion to her own advantage, which was why she found herself creeping up the side of a mountain hours after sunset inside a Soviet-made SUV.
Finding the proper perch from which to conduct her surveillance was a job best suited to daylight, but time was at a premium and Tracie wanted to be in position at first light. So the prep work would have to be done in the dark. Not an ideal situation, but she’d dealt with worse.
And as it turned out, finding the right spot took less time than she’d expected. The road north out of Mezhgorye was poorly maintained and even less traveled than the one she’d come into town on. The area was barren and unpopulated. She pulled the Lada off the road behind a screen of trees—the muscular tires and four-wheel-drive transmission was coming in even handier than she’d expected—and within an hour of hiking had settled on a surveillance location.
Then she’d gone back to town and slept.
This morning she sat just inside the tree line along a ridge overlooking the Soviet facility. Dressed in camouflage all-weather gear and carrying food and water, Tracie hunkered down just as the sky was beginning to lighten, prepared to spend a full day unlocking the secrets of the base that had been unknown to the United States until just weeks ago.
14
January 31, 1988
Time unknown
Location unknown
Ryan Smith had been trying to convince himself that he could deal with his new reality. He’d been working on exactly that from the moment he was forced into the back seat of a car outside a Moscow tavern.
He should have known better than to leave the bar with a pretty young woman who’d approached him out of the blue and begun chatting him up, should have assumed the worst in that situation rather than the best. Hell, he should never have been in that situation in the first place. He knew as much.
But living and working under deep cover inside enemy territory was a lonely business. The fear of slipping up was constant, of accidentally blurting out a phrase in English, or of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and being uncovered as an American spy.
All he’d wanted was a little companionship, a few drinks with people his own age and a couple of hours away from the stifling responsibility of being the eyes and ears of the United States intelligence community in the home of the most dangerous adversary the nation had seen since the end of World War II.
What he’d gotten instead was his own worst nightmare.
Ryan had known capture by the Soviets was a possibility, had accepted that risk as the price of making a difference in the world. And he’d tried to prepare as best he could for that prospect before ever getting into the field. In fact, a fairly significant portion of his initial training two years ago had focused on what to expect from the enemy should be ever fall into their hands.
It was training all operational assets received, and Ryan had passed his with flying colors. But his method of dealing with the possibility of KGB capture had been to approach it as a theoretical situation, a game to be beaten, a puzzle to be solved.
Now that the theoretical situation had become hard reality, he realized he was nowhere near as prepared for it as he’d thought. He tried to present a stoic front to his captors, but fear was now his constant companion. The shaking hands, the queasiness in the pit of his stomach, the nearly crippling panic attacks, the sweat soaking into his shirt, it was all of that and more.
He would never again see his parents. Never tell his mom he loved her.
He would never again play softball on a Friday night and then grab a few beers with his buddies.
He would never settle down and get married, never have children.
He was destined to die alone and unacknowledged deep inside the USSR, just another nameless and faceless enemy of the Soviet State.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, choking back the bile that had begun to rise in his throat, forcing a calmness into his expression that he did not feel. The last five days had been a whirlwind of near-constant travel, of shouted accusations and endless interrogations, of good cop/bad cop questioning and ongoing threats of public execution.
Ryan thought he had acquitted himself well thus far. He’d given the Soviets nothing, insisting even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary that he was simply a young man traveling the world, that he’d sneaked into Russia on a whim and out of a misguided sense of adventure, nothing else.
The story was preposterous, of course. The KGB had him dead to rights. They couldn’t prove their charges beyond a shadow of a dou
bt, but what the hell difference did that make? It was their country and their system, and they could do whatever they wanted to him, whenever they wanted to do it.
So far, that had meant moving him around.
A lot.
He’d been blindfolded and driven to a location in Moscow for his initial questioning, of that he was certain. The car ride hadn’t lasted long enough to take him anywhere else.
He’d been tired and scared and a little drunk, and he’d known the Soviets would want to take advantage of his shock and confusion. There had been bright lights and angry interrogators and promises to shoot him in the head and dump his body in a trash-littered parking lot if he didn’t admit to being an American spy.
He’d admitted nothing.
By the time the initial questioning ended, Ryan was more than frightened and exhausted; he was hung over as well. The Russians moved him immediately and he dozed in the cargo box of a truck, hands cuffed behind his back, body bouncing and flopping as the drivers seemed to take the bumpiest roads they could find, and at the highest speeds manageable.
Two of the longest days of Ryan Smith’s life followed. He was kept constantly on the move. He slept when he could, denied accusations of espionage over and over. They were made by different people and in different places, but they were all essentially the same: that Ryan Smith was an enemy of Mother Russia and would be dealt with accordingly.
He denied them all, exactly as he’d been taught to do. But he knew he couldn’t hold out forever. He wasn’t close to breaking yet, but he would get there eventually, everyone did, and his worst fear was that the Russians would force him into a televised admission of espionage, an admission that would be broadcast around the world and that his horrified parents would see on the nightly news.
And then the Soviets would execute him.
After the second day of travel and questioning, the situation changed. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but to Ryan, who had become hyper-aware of every element of his captivity, it was noteworthy. The travel continued but the questioning stopped, more or less.
He began to suspect the Russians had arrived at a decision about what to do with him, which opened up a whole new range of terrifying possibilities. Things had definitely shifted in terms of the KGB’s actions. Instead of carting him from one location to the next, chaining him to a series of tables and marching interrogator after interrogator out to take their shots at breaking him, his captors loaded him into a truck—they always moved him in the back of a covered cargo truck, although why they would do that instead of using a car Ryan had no idea—and moved him again.
This time, though, instead of a one or two or three hour trip between KGB stations, they drove at least six hours, taking a short break after that time to refuel and allow Ryan to stretch his legs, and to take a leak. The six-hour driving time was a guess, since they’d confiscated Ryan’s watch. It may have been longer.
The point, though, was that this trip felt different, like perhaps he was now headed to some final, more permanent destination, and that destination was nowhere close by.
Ryan received what he took to be confirmation of his theory when he was tossed once again into the truck immediately following his bathroom break, and the vehicle hit the road for another marathon driving session.
The condition of the thoroughfares was passable in and around major cities such as Moscow, but Russia was vast, and great swaths of its infrastructure were crumbling from neglect. Most of the roads the truck was now traveling were bumpy and curvy, poorly engineered to begin with and then haphazardly maintained.
Ryan’s hands remained cuffed behind his back, and a length of thick chain kept his ankles shackled to an iron strut bolted into the truck bed. With no seat belts and only a rough bench on which to sit, he was at the mercy of the winding roads and sadistic driver, being tossed side-to-side, the risk of a broken neck a constant.
Eventually he decided to forego the bench entirely. Instead of sitting on it he crouched on the floor below it, jamming his feet against the strut and pushing himself against the back wall of the cab. In this way he was able to minimize the likelihood of cracking his skull open by being thrown across the cargo hold.
But it was a tiring way to sit, and a dangerous way to travel, which he supposed was the point.
And he was bitterly cold. Perhaps that was the reason the KGB was using a truck to transport him when a car would have served the purpose just fine. The rear cargo area was unheated, and February in Russia featured temperatures that could take a man’s breath away, and not in a good way.
Again, that was probably the point.
The Russian day was overcast, grey and dank. The thick canvas covering the cargo bed included a flap at the rear, approximating a door, through which Ryan was loaded and unloaded. His captors had left the flap unhooked and as it blew in the breeze, he could see darkness was falling quickly in the Russian countryside.
Temperatures would soon plummet, and as cold as it had been riding in the back of the truck during the day, Ryan knew his situation was about to get much more dire.
He wondered if the plan was to drive through the night.
He wondered if he would still be alive by morning if that was the plan.
The truck began to slow and Ryan felt a flash of hope. It was probably irrational, and he knew it was probably irrational but he didn’t care. Maybe the day’s misery was about to end. Maybe he could get at least a few hours of warmth and sleep.
The vehicle turned off the main road—if the pothole-strewn cow path they’d been traveling for the past several hours could even be called a road—and the driver slowed further, eventually screeching to a stop. The crunch of boots on frozen ground signaled the approach of someone on the driver’s side, and then muffled voices floated through the canvas.
After a moment the driver shifted into gear and the truck lurched forward. The canvas flapped open and Ryan caught a glimpse of an armed sentry reentering a small guard shack. They’d driven onto a military installation.
The truck slowed again and then ground to a halt, and Ryan’s previous optimism vanished in an instant. He’d known it was unfounded but hadn’t been able to stop himself from getting his hopes up. The smell of diesel fuel assaulted his senses, almost eye-wateringly strong, and he knew they weren’t stopping for the night.
They were barely stopping at all.
They were refueling again for the third time and would be continuing on. The two men in the front of the truck were obviously trading off driving, probably dozing inside the cab between stints at the wheel. It had become clear they were going to continue virtually non-stop until arriving wherever the hell the KGB had decided to transport their newfound prize. It was probably uncomfortable duty for the drivers but it was almost unbearable for Ryan.
The driver’s door creaked open and then slammed shut, and a moment later one of the Russians appeared at the rear flap. He unlocked the chain binding Ryan’s ankles to the iron U-bolt and then gruffly signaled him to exit the truck.
Ryan slid along the floor and then dropped to the ground, shivering uncontrollably. The driver escorted him to a restroom while the driver’s partner fueled the truck.
A sense of hopelessness threatened to overwhelm Ryan as he relieved himself in the tiny bathroom that was barely more than an outhouse. A portable heater struggled to warm the shack but mostly failed.
He looked desperately for a way out, but the bathroom had only one entrance, and a Russian soldier armed with a Makarov semi-auto pistol was standing on the other side of it.
And even if Ryan could somehow manage to escape, what would be the point? His handcuffs had been removed to allow him to pee, but the heavy length of chain remained shackled to his ankles, and this installation was located deep in the Russian wilderness. He was poorly dressed for the weather conditions and would likely not survive the night in the brutal cold even if he could somehow get the drop on his captor and make his way off the base.
Trying to hide on
the base would be pointless.
Thoughts of escape were pointless.
Everything is pointless, Ryan thought miserably.
He zipped up and exited the bathroom, stopping for just a moment to remove the hopelessness from his features and replace it with bland nonchalance. He would not give the Soviets the satisfaction of knowing they’d broken him this quickly and easily. He thought about his father, who had served in the infantry during World War Two and who was one of the toughest men Ryan had ever known. He focused on Dad and on making him proud, even though the reality was his father would never learn Ryan’s fate.
He clamped his jaw tightly shut and exited the bathroom. The soldier escorted him back to the truck and secured the chain.
The escort disappeared without a word. A moment later he reappeared holding a blanket to his chest. “You are not supposed to have this,” he said in Russian, “but what my superiors do not know will not hurt them, eh?”
Ryan focused on the blanket with the single-minded intensity of a starving man admiring a steak dinner. When the guard tossed it to him and then returned to the truck’s cab, Ryan felt a rush of gratitude unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He’d heard of the Stockholm syndrome but had never understood how a captive could feel anything but a burning hatred toward the people who had taken him.
Now he understood.
He wrapped himself in the blanket and felt marginally warmer, although he continued to shiver violently.
The truck’s diesel engine coughed to life, and moments later they were back on the road, churning through the gathering night toward an unknown destination.
15
February 1, 1988
2:15 p.m.
The mountains outside Mezhgorye, Bashkir
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 130