by Ted Bell
A thousand, then two thousand meters it soared, ever higher above the snowy white treetops, mounting toward the peak, dangling above a great ravine, six thousand feet below. Hawke, like most of the adults, had settled in on his steel bench, reading his London Times sports section, delving into the football statistics, highlights from the week’s matches. What the devil had gotten into Manchester United?
He looked up and smiled.
This last-minute vacation had very nearly not happened at all. The man for whom he worked in London, Sir David Trulove, had nearly nixed it just three days earlier. Trulove, who was chief of British Intelligence, or MI6, had his hands full as the holidays approached.
The bloody Chinese were hacking at Sir David’s electronic firewalls; a team of North Korean assassins, funded by the bloody Chinese, was even now somewhere in Britain, plotting his imminent demise. And then there was the beleaguered Putin, who wanted nothing less than to rule the world. A man whose bellicose belligerence was nothing short of—ah, well.
Bloody hell!
Hawke snapped back to his immediate reality. It was Christmas morn, after all, Christmas Day at last. The first one he and his son had celebrated together in years. It was his bloody work, wasn’t it? He was a warrior, after all—it was what he did—roam the world, looking for trouble. It was his never-ending missions that took him from one exploding end of the globe to the other that—he put his paper down and looked up in alarm.
Something was wrong. The former Royal Navy fighter pilot could sense it. He could feel it, and it set his teeth on edge.
The shuddering vibrations of the cable car had subtly changed, shifted into a lower gear. The metal floor beneath his ski boots hummed and thrummed a different tune. Odd. He looked up through the curved plexiglass windows above him. The tram’s two support cables and the thicker motorized one that carried them upward were all seemingly intact and seemed normal . . . and yet . . . and yet . . .
Hawke had long ago noted how passengers aboard big commercial jetliners exhibited signs of panic and fear when they became aware of small changes in the pitch of the jet engines. Almost everyone human had a nagging pinprick of fear when boarding an airplane. Or an aerial tram, for that matter—anything that had the ability to fall out of the sky or plunge thousands of feet into a mountain crevasse could cause palpitations and sweat.
He picked up his newspaper and dove back into the world of sport. What in god’s name really was going on with Manchester United? And why on earth was he so bloody jumpy? If there was anyplace on earth he and his son should feel safe, it was here in his beloved Switzerland. He got to his feet and tried to catch Alexei’s eye, but the boy was lost in the melee of shouting, shoving children.
Tristan was sitting quietly, focused on the crowd. His roaming eyes never stopped moving as he surveyed the myriad faces in the tram. His young charge was standing only inches from his left knee, well within what he’d long ago begun calling the “circle of love.”
There were shrieks of laughter from the children as the swaying car approached the peak. As they approached their destination and saw their red-clad schoolmates already whizzing about the snow white slopes, the noise reached a raucous crescendo . . . and then, without warning, there came a loud mechanical popping noise overhead, and seconds later, a kind of muffled bang that silenced everyone inside the car, adults and ski-schoolers alike. The cable car slowed its ascent of the mountain and then shuddered to a jerky stop.
Eyes opened wide in shock. They were so close! But they were suspended in space. And still dangled thousands of feet above the jagged rocks below.
And then the unthinkable happened.
Chapter Three
Provence
“I am become the plowhorse,” the frozen man alone in the rocky field said aloud, gazing up at the heavens.
Standing there in the vast black night, pelted with icy rain, sick with a raging fever, exhausted, hungry, filled with dread. He knew now that he was perhaps near the end.
And if he was truly honest with himself, maybe it was a blessing. How long could he last, really, running for his life? Running for cover, looking over his shoulder at the latest assassin hot on his heels? Holed up in a hovel in Siberia or some foul hostel in the backwaters of Bogotá. Endure a life of humiliation lived in constant fear? No. That was no kind of life for a man like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
He who had once bestrode the earth as if a god?
Now in his darkest hour, the courageous plans he’d been making for defeating the treacherous oligarchy that had turned on him, and a victorious return to power, seemed laughable. An epic march into Moscow rivaling Napoleon’s triumphant return to Paris after his humiliating yearlong exile in Elba? If you didn’t laugh at such folly, you would have to cry.
He had conceived of his grand plan last year in Davos, Switzerland, at the last meeting of the G7. That’s where he’d first sensed it, world leaders once his equals, if not his inferiors, now treating him with a certain hauteur, eying the Russian president with shark eyes, sharks who sniffed Russian blood in the water. It was not so very long ago that he had said, “When I enter the water, the sharks get out.”
Yes. Now in all his misery and despair, all of his wild dreams, all seemed the musings of a madman, clinging at straws, clawing at any dangling lifeline he chanced upon. And always, the brass ring, receding.
And now as he stood there somewhere in France, in the slanting rain, head bowed, he recalled another desolate farm in another country, another time. His grandmother’s few meager hardscrabble acres outside Stalingrad in Mother Russia. And he remembered the Putin family plowhorse, Fyodor, long his grandmother’s mainstay and salvation.
The year was 1953. Uncle Joe Stalin, that sadistic and bloodthirsty Communist fuckhead, was finally dead and buried inside the Kremlin walls. A feast even maggots could not abide.
Still, thanks to the fucking Nazis, Mother Russia’s future had looked unspeakably grim.
This bleak, blackened landscape was the hideously cruel legacy of the Battle of Stalingrad. Death. Disease. Starvation. The one last horse remaining alive, Fyodor, was worked mercilessly. But the beast was dying before the boy’s very eyes. When Fyodor was gone, so too was hope for survival. He was too young to help in the field. His grandmother too old and too weak to plow.
And now Vladimir Putin, who found himself standing alone in the darkness of an empty field, battered by freezing rain, remembered Fyodor.
The boy had tried to do what he could for the horse. Shared what little food he could steal or forage. This while the citizens of the city were reduced to eating boiled shoe leather and drinking their own urine to survive. He had hauled blankets out to the shed in the dead of winter and draped them over the broad flanks of the great black stallion.
How the mammoth dray horse would stand alone for punishing hours in the field when day’s work was done. Stand there unmoving, as if constructed of marble, in the drenching downpour, absorbing all the pain the world could offer, unyielding, mute . . . heroic.
Fyodor still stood there in that hoary field, in Putin’s mind. The Putins’ plowhorse was Vladimir Putin’s stoic symbol for all the heroic Russian people had endured at the hands of the murderous Nazis in World War II. And a constant reminder of all they had suffered later at the hands of their other European enemies during that war. And more recently, the depredations and humiliations they’d suffered at the hands of the Americans and the British. And a reminder that his life’s mission was to avenge those ancient humiliations. To return Mother Russia to her rightful place on the world’s stage.
Front and center, and crowned in glory once more.
These memories, and there were many, had served him well over the years. Being small of stature, the boy had learned to defend himself through the art of judo, becoming a black belt. During his career, his steady ascent through the ranks of the KGB, the horrific lessons of his youth propelled him forward. He rose to the senior levels at his KGB post in East Berlin and w
as devastated when the Wall came tumbling down, and the Soviet Union with it.
He adjusted his sodden slouch hat, the one he’d stolen from the sleeping man in the little rail station on that first night alone on the ground in France. He’d taken the man’s greatcoat as well, cowhide, but lined with bearskin. The temperatures at night hovered around freezing. The paltry bits of food he had eaten after his own supplies had been exhausted were pilfered or recovered from garbage at the farms and small vineyards that dotted the countryside of Provence.
It had been several long and brutal weeks since he’d stepped out of a doomed airplane flying nine thousand feet above the earth.
Since he had one of the most famous faces in the world, he would have to remain in the shadows. He slept by day and traveled on foot by night. Slowly making his way south to Antibes on the Riviera, where he hoped his yacht, Tsar, would still be lying at anchor. He would simply sail away from the world. He would seek refuge at some remote anchorage, lost in the lower latitudes, among the countless reefs and isles of Polynesia . . . lost in the comforts of the beautiful bare-breasted women who adorned those shorelines.
That was his great hope, at any rate.
Chapter Four
He had literally dropped out of the world.
The news sheets he’d scavenge for in the tiny deserted rural rail stations all had differing accounts of the president’s fate. Some maintained he had been poisoned; others insisted he had been kidnapped by his enemies in the Ukraine or finally murdered by KGB dissidents or oligarch assassins from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—killers who’d failed so many times before. Or in the end, some said, was he simply a suicide who’d decided his life was a living hell and he was through with living it?
No one, save one, had any earthly idea.
The Kremlin was, and would remain, mute on the subject. Despite rumors about what had happened to the president’s airplane rippling through Moscow, the crash of his presidential aircraft high in the mountains, with the certain death of all aboard, the story had somehow been kept under wraps. As with the strictest of state secrets, it had been buried with the ashes of those who perished, their secrets never to be revealed.
But with the passing of time, the world had begun to believe the many alternative rumors. He’d been poisoned by his enemies, the powerful oligarchs in the Politburo. Or kidnapped by KGB thugs in open revolt, shot in the head, and dumped unceremoniously out of a chopper somewhere over the Black Sea.
That Vladimir Putin now slept with the fishes was perhaps the general worldwide consensus. Who knew?
And what of his former friend and protégé Dmitry Medvedev? His second-in-command? The prime minister had quickly seized the reins of power, becoming a puppet for the oligarchs who’d ousted him. But that was fine with Putin. He had found in recent days that he liked being dead. In fact, it suited him perfectly. As he’d often said to himself, when you’re dead, people stopped trying to kill you. Instead of the dismal view over your shoulder, you got to peer straight ahead into what, after all, might yet yield a glorious future!
As he continued his slow slog through the journey south, the world’s most well-known missing man had somehow sustained himself. He did it by returning over and over to what he now considered his grandiose notions of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Perhaps the improving weather had played a role. The cold front had moved out, carrying the rain clouds away, and the temperatures moderated a bit . . . and his spirits had likewise lifted with the morning sun.
And he regained, to a degree, a small sense of destiny.
As the days turned into weeks, and the world started to forget about him, he began reformulating his plans for his ultimate return from exile. He wasn’t giving up the throne. He had left Moscow under existential threat. A man badly needing a break from the political noose tightening around his neck, still determined to save Russia or die trying. But he could see that now was not the time for that. That would come later. When he would have all the chips, all the pieces on the chessboard. And once more a vast fortune. Then, only then, would he be once more unstoppable.
Trying to prop up his regime, he had exhausted almost all of his own resources. The motherland itself was nearly flat broke. The cash and gold in Russia’s formerly vast Swiss reserves were at a dangerous all-time low. So was oil income.
His beloved Russian people, a population starving on pitiful wages after all those years of adulation, had turned on him en masse. There was precious little money for the food on the shelves of the stores; there was hardly even any money for their “Little Water,” the potion that fueled the nation. And kept them compliant.
Now there were riots everywhere. Kremlin Square. Theatre Square, inside the Kremlin walls of Red Square. It seemed they never stopped chanting.
“Putin, nyet, Putin, nyet, Putin, nyet!” Calling for his head.
Even his much-vaunted military leadership was no longer reliably loyal. Rumors swirled inside the Kremlin walls. The oligarchs! The oligarchs were seizing the reins of power! These were the words the cardinals of the Kremlin had taken to whispering, lowering their eyes whenever he passed by. There was simply no one left to trust. Literally no one. He’d made them all billionaires, and now they shunned him, detested him, spat on him in the street like the lowest of the lowest castes of Calcutta.
An Untouchable. But the hardest thing, the most painful realization of all, was this: no one feared him anymore.
And so, yes, now he knew what he had to do. Returning to his beloved yacht Tsar at this point would be the stupidest move he could make. How could he hide on a two-hundred-foot yacht with a bright red hull? It had most likely already been seized by the Kremlin! Polynesia? He’d been an idiot to even conceive of such a romantic fantasy.
No, he would simply evaporate, take himself off the world stage, to reappear only when the time was right. A time when he could recapture his stolen billions and even more! Amass another great fortune with which to build a new army and a new navy and do battle with the world on an epic scale. A new political class that feared, worshiped, and was loyal only to him. Militarily, an officer class that would lick his boots!
For now he needed a place to hide and bide his time. Time to plot every single one of his moves in exquisite detail. Cover every contingency. And slowly gather gold and glory and might back unto his bosom.
When the great warrior was ready, the world would take heed. And then he would strike a mighty blow that would stun the world into submission. He would break the oligarchy’s ironfisted hold on the Kremlin. He would have every bloody one of them executed in Red Square! Impaled upon posts to rot in the sun! A little trick he’d picked up from Peter The Great. And he would make Mother Russia whole again, and under his restored leadership, ready to vie for world leadership once more.
The election of a new American president had given him added hope. Here at last was a strong leader who understood how the world really worked; a businessman who knew the art of negotiation and the need for decisiveness rather than coy evasiveness. Here finally was an opponent driven by hard reality rather than wispy dreams. He had dealt with this man, and he thought he could deal with him now. If not an ally, then at least a kindred spirit.
Even though his appearance had changed dramatically, he still dared not take the little local trains for fear of recognition. His thinning blond hair, usually neatly trimmed, had grown long and scruffy. He now, for the first time in his life, had a beard. It had grown in thick and black, peppered with grey. He did not mind that it was filthy, matted with dried food and saliva. It was a badge of honor, that beard.
He was the warrior. He was in the field. His brains and his courage were his only weapons now. But he knew that somehow he would cover himself in glory. And soon.
Nothing else mattered.
Chapter Five
St. Moritz
A jolt, then a jarring explosion somewhere above their heads. Close. Somewhere up on the rear rooftop of the cable car. The st
able platform of those inside the tram instantly came unhinged. The floor beneath their feet dropped away—a sickening drop of a foot or two before jerking to a stop as the damaged cable somehow shouldered the shifting weight.
You could hear a pin drop inside. They all held their breath, men, women, and children alike, all fighting to gain control of the panic rising like bile inside them.
The rear cable most surely was severely damaged, barely able to support the weight of the rear of the car. The front cable was all that stood between them and plunging thousands of feet to certain death on the jagged rocks below.
In their guts, they all knew the essential truth of the thing: their very lives were now hanging by a thread, suspended ten thousand feet above the yawning ravine below. A sudden thought, like a runaway train, roared through Hawke’s mind. The chasm that was the ravine was rumored to be thousands of feet deep. None of them would ever be seen again!
And then the nightmare began in earnest.
With a loud twang, the cable supporting the rear of the gondola snapped in two, cleanly severed. The floor below suddenly became a precarious slide to the bottom, with human beings, backpacks, ski equipment, and everything else plummeting downward.
The bottom had dropped out of the world, this time for good. They waited an eternity for the death plunge that was to be their end. No one dared move . . . nor even breathe nor blink an eye. There was an unheard roar of fervent prayer in the doomed tram, and though no one could hear it, they were all part of the chorus now beseeching their gods . . .
The front cable had held!
The violence of the car’s instantaneous upending was particularly horrific for the children. All those formerly at the rear were now trapped at the bottom of the suddenly vertical tramcar. They were crushed and trampled upon and their pleas for help and screams of pain filled the air.