“Let us not get bogged down with peripheral issues. As I was saying before your pathetic attempt at denial, we know you work for the CIA. As such, I am sure you can understand how valuable it will be to the cause of the Soviet Union when you appear on television in defense of not just our government, but indeed our entire way of life. You will become world-famous, my friend.”
Ryan knew he had to respond. “I understand that if you torture a human being long enough, you can get that person to admit to anything. And if I understand that, the rest of the world will understand it as well.”
“I quite agree,” the major said. “Which is exactly why you’ve been selected to participate in Doctor Protasov’s research.”
“Why continue referring to him as a doctor?” Ryan said. “If he’s a torture specialist, just call him that.”
“I most certainly am a doctor,” Protasov blurted, his eyes flashing. “A research professional, not that I have to explain myself to the likes of you.”
The major continued as if Protasov had not even spoken. “Tell me what you know about psychotronics,” he said, folding his hands together on his desk like a university professor awaiting an answer from a student who’d been caught daydreaming.
Ryan blinked in surprise. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to come out of his interrogator’s mouth, but that wasn’t it. He shrugged in honest confusion.
“Never heard of it,” he acknowledged.
“I am no research scientist,” the major said with a smile that was every bit as cold as the one Protasov had offered earlier. “I am just a career military man working in service to his country. So I am afraid I cannot offer a textbook definition like Doctor Protasov can. But I feel it is important you hear this from me.”
The nausea in Ryan’s belly began ramping up. Despite the cordiality of the major’s words, his tone was harsh and his voice cutting. Ryan felt certain what came next would not be something he wanted to hear.
He was right. The base commander said, “You heard Doctor Protasov speak of his work in manipulating brain chemistry. That is one small part of the psychotronics program, a program that has been ongoing among scientists working in concert with the KGB for decades. Psychotronics, in its most general form, can be understood as mind control. It is the process of achieving desired results from a subject, or group of subjects, via external manipulation. The subject, of course, is typically unaware of any such manipulation.”
“Psychological torture might work eventually,” Ryan said, “but it’s going to take a long goddamned time before I bend to your will.”
“Did I say anything about utilizing psychological methods with you? I believe Doctor Protasov mentioned once already that his area of expertise is in electrical stimulation of brain tissue. There is nothing ‘psychological’ about it.”
Ryan stared at the man in mute horror.
“Oh, yes,” the major continued, clearly pleased he’d finally cracked Ryan’s stoic shell. “Perhaps you would like details?”
Ryan tried to hold the major’s gaze.
“I will take that as a yes. You see, the doctor will shave your head. He will drill through your skullcap and into the brain tissue. He will insert an electrical lead through the hole and using electrical impulses, will alter the very makeup of your brain.”
The commander smiled widely. “If the procedure is successful, inside of forty-eight to seventy-two hours, you will be saying whatever we tell you to say, willingly and enthusiastically. And you will be saying it to the entire world.
“And if he is not successful, well, let us just say you will be disposed of in the same manner as Doctor Protasov’s previous failed attempts. You will disappear, and I assure you, your body will never be found.”
19
February 2, 1988
7:50 a.m.
The mountains outside Mezhgorye, Bashkir
When she’d begun surveillance yesterday, Tracie had paid little attention to the administrative area inside the mysterious Soviet facility.
She had been far more interested in the razor wire fencing encircling the base, the positioning and sightlines of the guard towers and sentry stations, and the potential uses for the warehouse-like structures into which the base personnel filed first thing in the morning, only to reappear at the end of the day.
The administrative zone and its personnel had been an afterthought, the cadre of secretaries and assistants, all of them young women, who pushed pencils, filed forms, and answered telephones. They’d meant little to Tracie. Secretaries were secretaries, whether in the Soviet Union, the United States, or Timbuktu, the same in every culture: overworked, underappreciated, invisible.
But they were no longer invisible to Tracie.
They were suddenly of the utmost importance.
Because they were the one group of workers staffing the facility—besides senior personnel—who lived off base.
They were obviously locals, young women from Mezhgorye who had been hired by the Red Army following construction of the facility. The Soviets had apparently decided it was pointless to uproot administrative personnel from Moscow or Leningrad or Stalingrad and ship them out to the middle of nowhere to do a job any moderately intelligent woman could handle.
For the women who’d been hired, it had probably been the Bashkiri version of hitting the lottery. In a sleepy little village perched halfway up a remote mountain, virtually cut off from the outside world, job prospects must previously have hovered somewhere between minimal and nonexistent.
But the half-dozen or so secretaries and administrative assistants employed on the base were the exception. Steady employment, relatively high pay in comparison to the work they would otherwise be doing as waitresses or housekeepers, not to mention the prestige of going to work every day for the glorious Red Army, would instantly have raised their standard of living a notch above everyone else of their age and station in life.
Tracie had spent most of last night working on two tasks: warming up after spending the day hunkered down in the snow and wind of the Ural Mountains, and considering the problem of how the hell she was going to stand any chance of infiltrating a fortified military base all by herself without being captured or filled full of Russian bullets.
And she had come to the conclusion that the secretaries were the key.
She kicked herself for not paying closer attention yesterday morning when the young women had been reporting for work. The fact that she’d considered them irrelevant to her assignment at the time didn’t matter—she should have spent just as much brainpower and mental energy analyzing them as she had every other aspect of the camp.
Today she would rectify that oversight.
She’d made sure to get up plenty early. Ate a hot breakfast and stuffed all her survival clothing into her bag, then tossed it into the front seat of the Lada before motoring through town and back up the mountain to her surveillance location. She hadn’t dared risk bringing the wrong kind of attention to herself by leaving Mezhgorye while dressed in her all-weather gear, so she’d been forced once again to change clothes inside the SUV upon reaching her destination.
But she did so without interruption—the odds of another vehicle passing by on what amounted to a little-used mountain lane were practically nil—and by seven-thirty a.m. was back in her little surveillance nook. Yesterday the administrative personnel had begun arriving for work just before eight, and she assumed today would be no different.
She was right. The first secretary turned onto the base’s long access road a little after seven forty-five, and the other five followed shortly after in a steady stream of ancient Ladas, Volgas and one hideous orange Moskvitch sedan that had to be older than Tracie.
By eight o’clock all six of the women had parked in what was apparently their designated lot and entered the administration building. The arrival protocol Tracie thought she had observed yesterday, when she had only been half paying attention, was repeated with each secretary’s arrival.
Two
of the women carpooled to work and arrived together, so there were only five vehicles to observe rather than six. But the guards handled every arrival in exactly the same manner: the secretary rolled up to the sentry’s shack, and then slowed and waved what looked like an ID badge at the building. Before she had even come to a stop, the gate was opening in anticipation of her arrival, and each time the secretary motored through the front gate and onto the base undisturbed.
In not one instance did the sentry step out of the guard shack.
In not one instance did the secretary roll down her window.
In not one instance was the badge inspected by a sentry.
Tracie tracked the last arrival until the woman disappeared inside the administration building, then sat back and considered what she had just observed.
The sentries’ laxness was not particularly surprising, she decided. For all its impressive security measures—the dual, presumably electrified razor-wire fences, the multiple guard towers, the patrolling sentries with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders—this facility was isolated almost beyond imagination.
It had clearly been here for years and yet had never been detected by the United States, even through the most sophisticated airborne surveillance measures available. The only community for hundreds of miles in any direction was Mezhgorye, and the KGB had undoubtedly vetted its citizens rigorously during construction of the base.
That corners were being cut and security measures ignored was human nature. There was little reason for the Soviets to feel any sense of concern regarding security. Each secretary had obviously been issued an identification card or badge of some sort, and the official entry protocol was probably a visual inspection of the ID by the gate guard.
Over the years, and day after endless day of boring routine, the sentries had gradually become less observant of security protocol, the current slipshod operation being the inevitable end result. The sentry’s nose was probably buried in a book—based on the extremely limited flow of vehicular traffic entering and leaving the base, manning the guard shack had to be one mind-numbingly tedious detail—and he probably had little desire to step outside the heated shack and into the brutally cold morning mountain temperatures.
Tracie smiled and nodded to herself. There still were some details to work out, but she’d already decided the Soviets’ substandard security measures would be her ticket onto the base.
She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and resumed watch.
***
February 2, 1988
10:10 a.m.
Tracie had by now accepted as a certainty that anything of interest happening on the secret base was happening underground. It would explain everything:
The fact that there were far more workers stationed at the facility than capacity to accommodate those workers inside the limited number of structures above ground.
The fact that the personnel stationed on the base swarmed out of the residence buildings first thing in the morning and then, with rare exceptions, disappeared from view until late afternoon or evening.
The fact that the buildings into which the workers disappeared each morning were so bland and unidentifiable. There was nothing to indicate their possible uses, because they had no use, other than to act as subway stations of a sort, departure points for the personnel in their descent via elevator or stairs to various areas of responsibility.
It made perfect sense from the perspective of the Soviet Union. If you were going to construct a secret facility deep inside a remote mountain chain, why not take the extra step of tunneling into the side of the mountain? Doing so would provide increased security and render the base nearly invisible from the prying eyes of your enemy.
It would have been an expensive and time-consuming project, but with the Soviet economy and policies geared toward the military, and the Russians’ obsession with secrecy, the expenditures of time and resources probably seemed not just reasonable, but desirable.
And the notion of constructing a military facility underground, of tunneling into a mountainside, was far from unprecedented. The United States had done exactly that with the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, building the facility over the course of half a decade back in the early 1960s.
Tracie had never been to Cheyenne Mountain, but she knew the base was fortified to withstand a nuclear attack. She wondered if this facility was constructed to similar standards.
She supposed she would soon find out.
***
February 2, 1988
4:55 p.m.
The surveillance dragged. Few vehicles entered or departed the base. During the hours between early morning and late afternoon, when most of the non-administrative personnel were underground—assuming Tracie’s theory was correct—the place became a virtual ghost town.
Still, she remained attentive, determined not to miss anything of significance. In reality, though, she was just passing the time. Waiting for the five o’clock administrative quitting time.
When it finally arrived, she sat a little higher in the snow, boredom gone, completely focused on the administration building from which the secretaries were beginning to emerge. Tracie would have only thirty seconds or so during which she could observe all six women before they reached their cars, so intense focus would be necessary if she were to select the right woman and give her plan the best chance of succeeding.
She eliminated two of the secretaries from consideration the moment they exited the building. They were both overweight, noticeably so, with body types utterly unlike Tracie’s.
Another woman was eliminated next, due to her height. Tracie guessed if they stood side-by-side, the secretary would tower over her by a good eight inches or more.
That left three possibilities, and Tracie zeroed in on them one-by-one, spending several seconds on a quick examination of each before moving to the next. None were exactly what she was looking for, as was to be expected.
But one of the young women looked as though her height was probably within an inch or so of Tracie’s, and her weight within maybe eight to ten pounds. Her mousy brown hair didn’t come close to matching Tracie’s flame red, but that difference was a minor one and could be easily mitigated.
Tracie made her decision. She abandoned her long-distance examination of the other five women and trained her binocs solely on the one she had selected. The woman looked a few years younger than Tracie, maybe twenty-two, and she climbed into a little yellow Volga sedan that had probably rolled off the assembly line sometime around Tracie’s eighth birthday.
The five cars carrying the six women started up at roughly the same time, and they motored toward the front gate in a slow-moving conga line. Greyish-white exhaust trailed the vehicles, swirling into the sky and disappearing. The sun had set almost an hour ago, and the cars exited the parking lot’s ring of dirty light, their headlights illuminating the darkness of the access road with varying degrees of success.
Less than a minute later the convoy reached the guard shack. In what was obviously a nightly ritual, the guard opened the gate as the vehicles approached, and all five cars passed through while barely slowing. They continued along the access road and then turned right as one and accelerated toward town.
The perch Tracie had chosen from which to conduct her surveillance was located high above not just the base, but Mezhgorye as well. Her aerie offered a decent view of perhaps seventy-five percent of the village, and she hoped the woman she’d selected—and continued to track with the glasses—made her home somewhere inside that portion of town.
If not, she would be forced to tail her quarry tomorrow night as she left the facility. It would cost an entire day, and that was time Tracie could ill afford to lose.
The cars reached the village and split up, each turning toward their own homes. Tracie caught herself mumbling, “Come on, come on,” willing the woman she’d selected to stay within her line of sight.
She did.
The Volga sedan motored through town an
d then wound its way into—and through—a residential area before easing to a stop outside a large, blocky wood-frame structure.
Tracie zoomed in on the scene as best she could. She wished she had higher-power glasses. From this distance she stood no chance of reading street addresses—if there were even road signs or building numbers, which she doubted—so she would have to commit the general location of the home to memory and then retrace the route as best she could once she’d descended the mountain.
The secretary climbed out of her car and hurried to the building’s entrance, her breath condensing and drifting away in the illumination of a single security lamp. She yanked open the exterior door and was gone.
Tracie lifted the glasses and studied the structure. It was two stories, built in a rectangular configuration, basic and austere. Clearly an apartment building. Judging by its size, Tracie guessed it contained six separate residences, three small apartments on each level.
There was obviously no way of knowing which apartment belonged to the secretary, or even on which floor she lived, but that problem Tracie could work around. Of much greater importance was the question of whether the woman lived alone or shared the apartment with a roommate, or perhaps even a husband.
That was unknowable as well.
Tracie would have to do what she always did: prepare as thoroughly as possible and then improvise when things went wrong.
She watched the building a little longer, not sure what she was looking for. No one came or went. She took some extra time and committed the driving route to memory, then packed her equipment and returned to the Lada, chewing on her bottom lip, lost in thought.
20
Date unknown
Time unknown
Unidentified Soviet military installation
Ryan had no idea what time it was when Doctor Protasov entered his room. Might have been afternoon of the day he’d been brought here, might have been the next morning. Might have been neither. Someone had administered a sedative the moment they plunked him into this hospital bed, and there was no way of knowing how long he’d been unconscious.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 133