Red Storm Rising (1986) (15 page)

“Trying to make Nevsky look like Stalin, eh?”

“There is some of that,” Lowe agreed. “The strong man, all alone, a fatherly benefactor—some benefactor! Anyway you cut it, this is just about the best propaganda movie ever made. The punch line is that when Russia and Germany signed their nonaggression pact a year later, Eisenstein was detailed to direct a stage production of Wagner’s
The Valkyries.
Call it penance for offending the German sensibilities.”

“Oof. You study these guys more than I do, Chuck.”

Colonel Lowe pulled a cardboard box from under his desk and began to load up his personal effects. “Yeah, well if you have to face the possibility of fighting a man, you might as well learn all you can about him.”

“You think we will?”

Lowe frowned briefly. “I saw enough of that in Nam, but that’s what they pay us for, isn’t it?”

Toland stood and stretched. He had a four-hour drive ahead of him. “Colonel, it has been a pleasure for this squid to work with you.”

“It hasn’t been half bad for this jarhead. Hey, when I get the family set up down in Lejeune, why don’t you come on down sometime? There’s some great fishing down there.”

“Deal.” They shook hands. “Good luck with your regiment, Chuck.”

“Good luck here, Bob.”

Toland walked out to his car. He’d already packed up, and drove quickly out Terminal Boulevard to Interstate 64. The worst part of the drive home was the traffic to the Hampton Roads tunnel, after which things settled down to the usual superhighway ratrace. All the way home, Toland’s mind kept going over the scenes from Eisenstein’s movie. The one that kept coming back was the most horrible of all, a German knight wearing a crusader’s cross tearing a Pskov infant from his mother’s breast and throwing him—her?—into a fire. Who could see that and not be enraged? No wonder the rabble-rousing song “Arise, you Russian People” had been a genuinely popular favorite for years. Some scenes cried out for bloody revenge, the theme for which was Prokofiev’s fiery call to arms. Soon he found himself humming the song. A
real intelligence officer you are . . .
Toland smiled to himself, thinking just like the people you’re supposed to study . . . defend our fair native land . . .
za nashu zyemlyu chestnuyu!

“Excuse me, sir?” the toll collector asked.

Toland shook his head. Had he been singing aloud? He handed over the seventy-five cents with a sheepish grin. What would this lady think, an American naval officer singing in Russian?

It was just after midnight when the truck drove north across the Kemenny Bridge to Borovitskaya Square and turned right, toward the Kremlin. The driver stopped for the first group of Kremlin Guards. Their papers were fully in order, of course, and they were waved through. The truck pulled up to the second checkpoint by the Kremlin Palace, where their papers were also in order. From there it was five hundred meters to the service entrance of the Council of Ministers Building.

“What are you delivering this time of day, Comrades?” the Red Army captain asked.

“Cleaning supplies. Come, I will show you.” The driver got out and walked slowly around the back of the truck. “Must be nice, working here at night when things are so peaceful.”

“True enough,” the captain agreed. He’d go off duty in another ninety minutes.

“Here.” The driver pulled back the canvas cover. There were twelve cans of industrial-strength solvent and a crate of hardware parts.

“German supplies?” The captain was surprised. He’d been on Kremlin duty for only two weeks.

“
Da
. The Krauts make very efficient cleaning machinery, and the
vlasti
make use of it. This is carpet-cleaning fluid. This is for lavatory walls. This one here is for windows. The crate—ah, I will open it.” The lid came off easily since the nails had already been loosened. “As you see, Comrade Captain, parts for some of the machines.” He smirked. “Even German machines break.”

“Open one of the cans,” the captain ordered.

“Sure, but you won’t like the smell. Which one do you want opened?” The driver picked up a small prybar.

“That one.” The captain pointed to a can of bathroom cleaner.

The driver laughed. “The worst-smelling of all. Stand back, Comrade, we don’t want to splash this slop on your clean uniform.”

The captain was new enough on the job that he scrupulously did not step back.
Good,
the driver thought. He worked the prybar under the can’s lid, twisted, and popped his free hand down on the end. The lid flew off, and the captain was splashed by some flying solvent.

“Shit!” It did smell bad.

“I
warned
you, Comrade Captain.”

“What is this garbage?”

“It’s used to clean mildew off bathroom tiles. It will come right out of the uniform, Comrade Captain. But be sure you have it dry-cleaned soon. An acid solution, you see, it could damage the wool.”

The captain wanted to be mad, but the man had warned him, hadn’t he?
Next time I’ll know better,
he thought. “Very well, take it in.”

“Thank you. I am sorry about the uniform. Don’t forget to have it cleaned.”

The captain waved to a private and walked off. The soldier unlocked the door. The driver and his assistant went inside to get a two-wheeled handtruck.

“I warned him,” the driver said to the private.

“You certainly did, Comrade.” The soldier was amused. He, too, was looking forward to going off duty, and it wasn’t often that you saw an officer get caught.

The driver watched his assistant load the cans onto the handtruck, and followed him as he wheeled it into the building to the service elevator. Then both returned for the second load.

They took the elevator to the third floor, shut the power off, and moved their loads to a storage room directly below the large fourth-floor conference room.

“That was good with the captain,” the assistant said. “Now let’s get to work.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” the driver answered at once. The four cans of carpet-cleaning fluid had false tops which the lieutenant removed and set aside. Next he took out the satchel charges. The colonel had memorized the blueprints of the building. The wall pillars were in the outside corners of the room. One charge went to each, fixed to the inboard side. The empty cans were placed next to the charges, hiding them. Next the lieutenant removed two of the false-ceiling panels, exposing the steel beams supporting the fourth floor slab. The remaining charges were attached there, and the ceiling panels replaced. The charges already had their detonators attached. The colonel took the electronic triggering device out of his pocket, he checked his watch, and waited for three minutes before pressing the button to activate the timers. The bombs would explode in exactly eight hours.

The colonel watched the lieutenant tidy up, then wheeled the handtruck back to the elevator. Two minutes later, they left the building. The captain was back.

“Comrade,” he said to the driver. “You shouldn’t let this old one do all the heavy work. Show some respect.”

“You are kind, Comrade Captain.” The colonel smiled crookedly and pulled a half-liter bottle of vodka from his pocket. “Drink?”

The captain’s solicitous attitude ended abruptly. A worker drinking on duty—in the Kremlin! “Move along!”

“Good day, Comrade.” The driver got into the truck and drove off. They had to pass through the same security checkpoints, but their papers were still in order.

After leaving the Kremlin, the truck turned north on Marksa Prospekt and followed it all the way to the KGB headquarters building at 2 Dzerzhinskiy Square.

“Where are the kids?”

“Asleep.” Martha Toland hugged her husband. She was wearing something filmy and attractive. “I had them out swimming all day, and they just couldn’t stay awake.” An impish smile. He remembered the first such smile, on Sunset Beach, Oahu, she with a surfboard and a skimpy swimsuit. She still loved the water. And the bikini still fit.

“Why do I sense a plan here?”

“Probably because you’re a nasty, suspicious spook.” Marty walked into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of Lancers Rose and two chilled glasses. “Now why don’t you take a nice hot shower and unwind a bit. When you’re finished, we can relax.”

It sounded awfully good. What followed was even better.

Toland woke to hear his phone ringing in the dark. He was still dopey from the drive up from Norfolk and the wine. It took a ring or two for him to react properly. His first considered action was to check the display on the clock-radio—2:11.
Two in the fuckin’ morning!
he thought, sure that the ringing was caused by a prank or a wrong number. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” he said gruffly.

“Lieutenant Commander Toland, please.”

Uh-oh.
“Speaking.”

“This is the CINCLANT intel watch officer,” the disembodied voice said. “You are ordered to return to your duty station at once. Please acknowledge the order, Commander.”

“Back to Norfolk right away. Understood.” Wholly on instinct, Bob rotated himself in the bed to a sitting position, his bare feet on the floor.

“Very well, Commander.” The phone clicked off.

“What is it, honey?” Marty asked.

“They need me back at Norfolk.”

“When?”

“Now.” That woke her up. Martha Toland bolted upright in the bed. The covers spilled off her chest, and the moonlight through the window gave her skin a pale, ethereal glow.

“Don’t I know it.” Bob stood and walked awkwardly toward the bathroom. He had to shower and drink some coffee if he had any hope of reaching Norfolk alive. When he returned ten minutes later, lathering his face, he saw that his wife had clicked on the bedroom TV to Cable Network News.

“Bob, you better listen to this.”

“This is Rich Suddler coming to you
live
from the Kremlin,” said a reporter in a blue blazer. Behind him Toland could see the grim stone walls of the ancient citadel fortified by Ivan the Terrible—now being patrolled by armed soldiers in combat dress. Toland stopped what he was doing and walked toward the TV. Something very strange was going on. A full company of armed troops in the Kremlin could mean many things, all of them bad. “There has been an explosion in the Council of Ministers building here in Moscow. At approximately nine-thirty this morning, Moscow Time, while I was taping a report not half a mile away, we were surprised to hear a sharp sound coming from the new glass-and-steel structure, and—”

“Rich, this is Dionna McGee at the anchor desk.” The image of Suddler and the Kremlin retreated to a corner of the screen as the director inserted the attractive black anchorperson who ran the night desk for CNN. “I presume that you had some Soviet security personnel with you at the time. How did they react?”

“Well, Dionna, we can show you that if you can hold a minute for my technicians to set up that tape, I—” He pressed the earphone tight into his ear. “Okay, coming up now, Dionna—”

The tape cut off the live picture, filling the entire screen. It was on a pause setting, with Suddler frozen in the middle of a gesture to something or other, probably the part of the wall where they buried important Communists, Toland thought. The tape began to roll.

Simultaneously, Suddler flinched and spun around as a thundering report echoed across the expanse of the square. By professional instinct the cameraman turned at once to the source of the sound, and after a moment’s wobble, the lens settled in on a ball of dust and smoke expanding up and away from the strangely modern building in the Kremlin’s otherwise Slavic Rococo complex. A second later the zoom lens darted in on the scene. Fully three floors of the building had been stripped of their glass curtain wall, and the camera followed a large conference table as it fell down off one floor slab that seemed to be dangling from a half dozen reinforcing rods. The camera went down to street level, where there was one obvious body, and perhaps another, along with a collection of automobiles crushed by debris.

In seconds, the whole square was filled with running men in uniform and the first of many official cars. A blurred figure that could only be a man in uniform suddenly blocked the camera lens. The tape stopped at that point, and Rich Suddler came back into the screen with a LIVE caption in the lower left corner.

“Now, at that point the militia captain who had been escorting us—the militia is the Soviet equivalent of, oh, like a U.S. state police force—he made us stop taping and confiscated our tape cassette. We weren’t allowed to tape the fire trucks or the several hundred armed troops who arrived and are now guarding the whole area. But the tape was just returned to us and we are able to give you this live picture of the building, now that the fires have been put out. In fairness I really can’t say that I blame him—things were pretty wild there for a few minutes.”

“Were you threatened in any way, Rich? I mean, did they act as though they thought you—”

Suddler’s head shook emphatically.

“Not at all, Dionna. In fact, more than anything they seemed concerned for our safety. In addition to the militia captain, we have a squad of Red Army infantrymen with us now, and their officer was very careful to say that he was here to protect us, not to threaten us. We were not allowed to approach the site of the incident, and of course we were not allowed to leave the area—but we wouldn’t have, anyway. The tape was just returned to us a few minutes ago, and we were informed that we’d be allowed to make this live broadcast.” The camera shifted to the building. “As you can see, there are roughly five hundred fire, police, and military personnel still here, sorting through the wreckage and looking for additional bodies, and just to our right is a Soviet TV news crew, doing the same thing we are.” Toland examined the television picture closely. The one body he could see looked awfully small. He wrote it off to distance and perspective.