Once Upon a Time in Russia (16 page)

Words were words. Berezovsky was a master of words, and he knew they were only as strong as the intent of the men who spoke them. But any hope that Putin had just been posturing for the cameras was dashed, as Berezovsky watched the new breaking report that was now being replayed over and over again on his own ORT. In a different time, at an earlier moment in his life, the same report would have thrilled him to the core. But now, what was unfolding in front of him stirred an apocalyptic fear in his soul.

The episode itself had begun a few days earlier, when Putin had decided to follow his harsh words against the “Oligarchs as a class” by
putting the squeeze on one of the most well-known and powerful of them all, Vladimir Gusinsky, who also happened to have supported his competitor in the election, the mayor of Moscow. Gusinsky, Berezovsky's former enemy, had also helped keep Yeltsin in power—had been using his resources at Most Bank and his NTV network to push against Putin both before and after the election. Now Putin had struck back. A government investigation into Gusinsky had discovered that state money had been illegally moving from Gazprom, the gas giant, into Gusinsky's television and media network in the form of loans that weren't being paid back, and that there had also been episodes of tax evasion and corrupt enrichment. Gusinsky had immediately lashed back, angrily calling Putin a war criminal for the campaign in Chechnya. Gusinsky was promptly arrested.

During his short stay in prison, Gusinsky had apparently been given a choice: face criminal charges that could keep him locked up for years or sell his shares in Media-Most, NTV, and much of his other businesses—many of which were on the verge of bankruptcy—to Gazprom. If he went through with the sale, essentially divesting himself from Russian business, he would be allowed to leave prison, and the country.

Gusinsky had taken the offer. Upon his release a few days later, he sold NTV and his bank, took his remaining billions, and immediately fled to Spain.

Once upon a time, Berezovsky had celebrated when his rival had been forced out of the country. But this time, it was different. This was not temporary as it had been years before. Gusinsky wouldn't be coming back. One of the biggest and most powerful Oligarchs alive, a man worth billions, he would now live in exile. If he were ever to return, he would face criminal charges and, most likely, prison.

Listening to the journalists analyze the situation, Berezovsky
grew angrier. There was now no doubt: Putin intended to go after them all, one by one. Roman Abramovich, and probably Badri, would have cautioned him to stay quiet, under the radar. Putin wasn't yet gunning for him personally, and Sibneft and Abramovich's aluminum concerns were still bringing in barrels of money—from which Berezovsky was receiving his weekly payments.

But Berezovsky simply wasn't built that way—he couldn't sit still, he couldn't be silent. Such behavior was not in his nature. The way he saw it, he had faced many battles before. Why should he view Putin as anything more than another obstacle in his path? He had survived multiple assassination attempts, a near prosecution over Aeroflot, the battle with Korzhakov. He could survive Vladimir Putin.

Of course, in the past he had always had somewhere to turn, a krysha in the Kremlin with enough power to protect him, to set things right. But now the Family was gone. Tatiana still worked as Yeltsin's personal assistant without pay, but she didn't have any real power, and would soon be leaving the Kremlin for good. Yeltsin had retired and vanished into the country. On the political front, Berezovsky had few allies and no power base.

But that didn't mean the Oligarch was without weapons. He had his own money, he had Abramovich's continuing asset stream, and, most important of all, he had a television network.

All he really needed was for Putin to give him an opening and he would strike, quick and venomous, and show the young president that it would be better to negotiate than to fight an all-out war.

Berezovsky's hands balled into fists against the breakfast table. At the motion, he inadvertently touched the edge of the envelope that had been delivered the morning before, which he'd opened but left right where he had first read the contents. It was an invitation—not
addressed to Berezovsky, but to one of his business associates, another of the Oligarchs. The official, embossed calligraphy on the invitation itself was as ornate as Putin's inauguration ceremony had been; but the words—and the terrifying address, where a group of his best-known Oligarch colleagues had been invited, to attend an afternoon tea—were something out of the distant past.

Despite his anger and frustration at how quickly his world had changed, Berezovksy had to applaud Putin's flair for the dramatic. An invitation to tea, asking the Oligarchs—as a class—to gather together in a place they all knew well—Stalin's Moscow home, as famous for the leader's purges as it was for various meetings of great political importance—it was a message that the Oligarchs would receive loud and clear. Putin's work wasn't finished; Gusinsky had been a warning shot, and they would do well to pay attention.

Berezovksy slammed his hand down on the invite—then crumpled it into a ball and threw it toward a wastebasket in the corner of his breakfast room. He himself hadn't yet received an invitation to the tea, but if he did, he would ignore the summons. He would go out on his yacht in the Caribbean or vacation at his home in the South of France. Let the other Oligarchs remain silent, let the others bow down to the new czar. Berezovksy wasn't going to stand by and listen to another lecture on business in modern Russia.
He had invented business in modern Russia
. Instead, he would enjoy himself and his wealth, all the while waiting, like a coiled snake, for Vladimir Putin to make a mistake, to misstep in any way.

And when it happened, Berezovsky would be ready. He would strike back, and Putin would realize who he was really dealing with.

August 12, 2000,

11:30 a.m., Barents Sea

B
ENEATH THE SEA IN
a nuclear submarine is a setting that few people in the world will experience; but for Lieutenant Captain Dmitri Kolesnikov, it was as natural and familiar as his childhood home in St. Petersburg, or the apartment he shared with his wife of three months, or the naval training camps where he had spent much of his young life.

Kolesnikov was crouched low in the cramped Seventh Compartment of the Oscar Class nuclear submarine—a 943-model attack vessel capable of carrying dozens of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, a battery of torpedoes, a dozen mines, a slew of antiaircraft mortars. Hell, it was one of the largest submarines ever built, over five hundred feet long, one of only five in the Northern Fleet. Bathed in the harsh, fluorescent light reflecting off the thick steel walls and iron-plated floors, he worked his way between the various hissing pipes and clicking knobs of his turbine station.

The vessel was still at periscope depth—right below the surface of the churning, frozen waters of this area of the Barents Sea, near
the desolate northwestern coast of Russia—and he could feel the slight rocking of the current, something that might have bothered the stomach and the inner ear of a less-experienced sailor but barely registered with him.

To say that Dmitri had been born a submariner would not have been an exaggeration; he had followed his father's footsteps into the navy, and into the company of men who lived much of their lives beneath the surface. His proudest achievement was the day he had gained command of this Seventh Compartment, making him an integral part of his crew of one hundred eighteen officers and enlisted men. They were brothers, all, who had chosen a way of life defined by the close, unique environment inside that submerged steel tube.

Dmitri worked diligently and efficiently at his station, as orders filtered through the intercom system above his head from the command compartment, four sections ahead along the chassis of the narrow vessel. Even though this was only a training mission, his crew was taking part in a series of naval games being conducted by the Northern Fleet, and he took his duties seriously. The truth was, every moment aboard a nuclear submarine had to be taken seriously. Every submariner knew there were no margins for error, that the only thing that separated them from certain death was a hull made of steel, titanium, and iron and the diligence of the brothers who also wore the uniform.

The brotherhood was so thick Dmitri could taste it in the air they all shared. A hundred and eighteen men breathing the same recycled oxygen, bathing in and drinking from the same recycled water. An almost organic system, unlike any in the outside world. The significance of every moment was made more real by the fact that there was no sense of night or day, no windows. The fluorescent light, a constant glow, penetrated Dmitri's thoughts even when he
slept on that steel shell of a bunk he called his own, in a room near the front of the sub, crowded together with brothers for months at a time.

It didn't matter that the two torpedoes his vessel was about to fire at the nearby battle cruiser—the
Pyotr Velikiy
—were actually dummy weapons, little more than fueled metal pipes that would do no more damage to the hull of the ship than a rock from a slingshot. For the men aboard the
Kursk
, the mission was as real as life and death.

Approximately a minute later, when the order to fire reverberated through the intercom, Dmitri felt the vessel tremble beneath his feet. His finely trained ears could hear the whisper of the torpedoes leaving the tubes, followed by the rush of water as they tore toward their target. Dmitri allowed himself a smile as he continued checking his turbine controls. The sheer power of his vessel never ceased to amaze him, releasing a kind of primal energy inside his own veins.

His mind was still picturing those twin mock torpedoes spiraling through the deep cold water a second later, when suddenly, there was a terrifying noise, a blast so loud that spikes of pain tore through his eardrums. The submarine—his entire world—lunged upward. Dimitri toppled forward, slamming into the hard metal floor chin first and for a brief second his vision blurred. Then his adrenaline spiked, his training kicked in, and his eyes opened.

Everything around him seemed to slow, as the chaotic moment unfolded. He could feel a surge of the sub's engines, as someone in the command center tried desperately to raise the ship. And then, just as suddenly, they were diving, but not in any controlled fashion, not in any manner he had experienced before in the smooth descent of the most sophisticated war machine of the Russian nation. This
was a desperate, horrifying plunge. Dimitri flung out both hands, grabbing hold of one of the nearest steam pipes in an attempt to hold himself upright—and then the entire submarine somersaulted, flipping him up into the air, then sending him crashing back down again. The fluorescent lights flickered, but somehow held; even so, all he could see was pure mayhem, a blur of equipment flying through the air, other crewmen crashing into the ceiling and the walls and the floor. The air filled with screams and the horrible screeching of rending metal. Even worse, Dimitri could hear the thunder of water rushing into the vessel—but thankfully, not yet into his own compartment.

His terror was intense, paralyzing, but Dimitri refused to give in. He concentrated on counting out the seconds as they descended, calculating depth. He had reached about three hundred and fifty feet when there was another ferocious crash, and his body was slammed upward—the sub careening at full descent into the ocean floor. Barely a second later, there were multiple explosions in rapid succession and the sickening feeling of part of the hull ahead tearing apart.

More frantic screams and then crewmen pushed past Dmitri, rushing toward the rear compartment. Without thinking, Dmitri let his own reflexes take over, and he followed them through the vessel, shouting for others to follow, grabbing a bleeding, wounded sailor by the arm, dragging him along.
Go, go, go
! They raced from his turbine compartment, Seven, into Eight, and then through that into the rear and final cabin, Nine. There was an escape hatch in the back of the ninth compartment, along with enough rescue, pressure-protective suits to keep them alive, even at such a depth. He had no idea what had happened, whether they had collided with something under the water, hit an errant mine or an enemy torpedo, or whether one of the dummies had simply malfunctioned and sent them to the floor. But
he was fairly certain that, once they had hit the bottom, the force had detonated their payload of real torpedoes. He could only be thankful that the sub wasn't carrying any nuclear-tipped armament during the training session. But he had no doubt that the submarine was damaged beyond repair. From the force of the explosions he had felt, and from the way the vessel had somersaulted on its way down to the ocean floor, he believed that the front half of the
Kursk
had been destroyed, perhaps all the way back through the command center, to the engines themselves.

Which meant they had very little time before power was gone, and along with it, the breathable air they had left.

He leapt forward into the rear compartment, and went to work with the other seamen, sealing off the cabin. Then he glanced around the small confines and counted the remaining crew.
Twenty-three men.
The Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth compartments had a crew of twenty-four all together. It appeared that almost all of them had made it to the back of the vessel. But the rest of the sub's crew was gone. Listening at the door they were sealing, he could hear nothing behind it but creaking metal and the rush of water. He could only hope that the rest of his brothers had died instantly as the vessel had crashed into the ground.

After they had finished sealing off the door, he turned his attention to the rear of the Ninth Compartment, to the group of crewmen milling around the escape hatch. But as he looked at the focus of their work, his stomach dropped. Even from across the compartment, Dimitri could see that the hatch was warped inward at the center—the metal curling over itself, the release mechanisms melded together in a tangle of iron and steel. The damage was severe, and with the tools they had available in the rear compartment, it was doubtful they were ever going to get through.