The Fall of Moscow Station (2 page)

“Any possibility of evac?” Pitkin asked.

“Negative,” Maines replied. He looked back at Kyra. The woman was still unconscious on the bed. “I'd have to carry GRANITE out . . . no good cover for action on that one.”

“Roger that,” Pitkin answered.

Maines moved to the apartment door, leaned against it, listening for voices or footsteps. They were four stories up, and he doubted he would hear anything, but the stairwell was close.

Two minutes passed and he heard a yell, then other cries . . . heavy footsteps somewhere below, he couldn't tell how many, but he would've guessed a dozen men if he'd had to lay money on a number. Then yells again, cries of surprise, someone protesting in guttural Spanish. The SEBIN search team had found the blood trail and followed it to its obvious end. They'd found nothing, assumed the family living in whichever apartment Maines had set up had treated their wounded prey and helped her escape to some other site. They would spend a long night in an interrogation room. Maines truly hoped that the SEBIN would accept their story and let them go, but if not, it was not his problem.

“This is MALLET,” he called out. “Hostiles have been diverted. Wait fifteen, then start her up and see if you can't find a hole. I think the cordon will start to break up.”

“Roger that,” Raguskus called back.

Maines parted the blinds again and watched the SEBIN lead a struggling couple out of the building into the street. The man and wife had no raincoats and they were soaked to the skin in seconds. Their hands were bound in front with zip ties. They protested their innocence and no one cared. The security team forced them into a waiting van, then boarded their own cars, and pulled out. The area was clear within ten minutes except for the onlookers and gawkers, still awed and amused by the spectacle.

“MALLET, this is PIGGYBACK, we have a hole,” Pitkin called out. “Will be at the way point in two minutes.”

“Roger that,” Maines replied. He let the blinds fall closed, moved to the bed, and checked Kyra's pulse. The girl was still down, but her pulse was steadier now. He grabbed her leather jacket and lifted her in his arms, her head cradled against his shoulder.

He moved slowly, careful to avoid the doorframes, handrails, and walls as he maneuvered his unconscious charge through the apartment, the hallway, and down the stairs. Maines didn't bother to look around corners or down bends on the stairwell. If there were still SEBIN in his path, he would not be able to outrun them with Kyra in his arms. He encountered no one. The blood trail on the bottom floor was smeared now from the bootprints of a dozen soldiers who hadn't been interested in collecting evidence for a prosecution.

Maines reached the door to the service entrance and managed to open it. The rain outside hadn't slackened in the least. The van sat five feet beyond the door, engine idling. The double side door slid open and he lifted Kyra in, Raguskus reaching out to pull the unconscious woman inside. He didn't bother to close the building door behind him and Pitkin had the van in motion before Maines could slide the van door closed.

“What've we got?” Rags asked, opening the trauma kit.

“One gunshot wound to the right triceps. Looks like she packed the wound, tied it off, and dosed herself with morphine without checking the syringe. Lost a significant amount of blood, but I don't know how much,” Maines replied. Abrams nodded, checked Kyra's handiwork, and set to work fixing her shoddy bandage. “Any word on an exfil plan?”

“I talked to Kain five minutes ago. She's got a private cargo flight lined up out of Colombia. We'll have to drive her across the border, but I know a few back roads across that aren't patrolled by the locals. Chávez uses them to ship supplies to the FARC, so we'll have to watch out for guerrillas, but we can manage them. We'll meet up with one of our pilots at a small airstrip outside of Cúcuta. Flight runs to Panama, then to Florida, then to Dulles. It'll take her a couple of days to get home and some of the puddle jumpers will be running pretty low to the ground and the Atlantic, so I hope she doesn't get airsick.”

“From the looks of her, I don't think that's going to be a problem,” Rags said. “It's a nasty wound, boss. She lost a chunk of muscle most of the way down to the bone. We'll have to keep her on morphine the whole way there. She'll need surgery when she gets back, and physical therapy after. I don't think she's going to remember much about the next few days. But she'll make it.”

Maines nodded. “Good to hear. Question is what to do about that idiot back at the station.”

“Nothing we can do,” Pitkin replied, disgusted. “Director of national intelligence put him in there, nobody below him can pull Rigdon out. But I'd bet after this, none of us are going to be down here very long. Stryker just proved that our best asset is a double agent for Chávez. We're probably all burned now. We might as well not bother coming back once we cross the border.”

“Roger that.” Maines looked down at Kyra's face one last time, then leaned back against the van's metal bulkhead and closed his eyes, the tension starting to drain from his own body.
Seventh Floor idiots at Langley
, he raged to himself.
No, not just there. At Liberty Crossing and the White House too. Making a
political donor a
station chief. They don't care about who they put in front of the guns. They just want to run their little wars and push their little armies around. We're all just cannon fodder . . . loyalty only running in one direction. Didn't used to be like that, and no way to fix it. No way at all.

Maines opened his eyes and listened to the rain pounding on the thin metal walls of the van and the broken asphalt under the tires. “SEBIN know all of us now, thanks to Rigdon. Might as well not bother coming back once we cross the border,” he repeated, his voice quiet.

Fools. They're all a bunch of fools up there.

There were more borders in the world than the ones on the maps.

Vogelsang Soviet Military Base (Abandoned)

65 kilometers north of Berlin, Germany

General Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov kept a steady pace as he walked through the abandoned streets, though not fast enough to satisfy his impatience. He could not walk faster, not anymore. The cushions between several of his vertebrae were eroding, so the doctor had said, and walking any serious distance was agony. He had taken the painkillers before setting out this morning, but they weren't up to the task. He ignored the pain as much as his discipline allowed, which was very little.

The road was familiar. That wall of trees to his right hadn't been there in his youth, and now, though pleasant on the eyes, it blocked his view of the old buildings he knew were sitting beyond. No matter. Strelnikov hardly was paying attention to the scenery. Vogelsang brought back memories thick as the flies swarmed these woods during the summers. He had been stationed here in his youth, when the first Soviet nuclear base outside of the
Rodina
had sheltered fifteen thousand soldiers and their families. It had been a lively place, an entire Russian town cultivated inside East Germany, where the signs all had Cyrillic letters and children had always been running between the buildings, some to the cinema, others to the school or the playground.

Now Vogelsang was a desolate waste, empty and crumbling, with trees growing up through the floors of some of the buildings. Grass erupted in straight lines through the concrete seams of the open spaces, and the buildings were all turning a uniform gray as their paint eroded. There was hardly an intact window anywhere, though most still had metal bars covering the openings. Doors were missing or hanging open. The wind made an ugly sound as it passed through the structures, the cracks in their facades creating a symphony of whistles and moans that combined in random tunes. The Germans wanted to level this reminder of the days when they had been in bondage to his country, but it seemed like nature was determined to do it first.

Why meet here?
he wondered. The old general's knees had quivered when he'd recovered the meeting instructions that his CIA handler had left at the dead-drop site in Moscow. He'd had to read them twice, but there had been no mistake. Was it all coincidence, or did the CIA know his history? If that, what purpose could they find in calling him here? That was a question they were going to answer before he would answer any of theirs.

He stopped to orient himself, trying to remember which decrepit building was which, and his old mind wandered. His memory of the place became as real as the world around him and for a minute the pain in his back was gone. Strelnikov recognized the old theater across the intersection, where he had met his wife. He'd courted Taisia here and they'd dreamed of building a dacha a few miles north to retire in the German woods—

Foolish old soldier
, he cursed himself. “No time for that,” he muttered. Maybe after the meeting.

He found the building after another half hour's walk. The base commandant's office had been a high-class facility in its prime. Now it was a shell, but good enough for a clandestine meeting, he supposed. He trudged up the small flight of concrete steps onto the landing, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

The loop came down over his head. Strelnikov thought it was a garrote, and he was sure a metal wire was about to crush his windpipe and choke off his air. But the attacker pulled it short and Strelnikov felt a fat cotton rope force itself between his teeth, to stop him from biting down.

In that instant, Strelnikov knew that the man behind would not kill him, not in the next few minutes anyway.

One hand pushed his head forward and down while others seized his arms and pulled them high over his head, spreading them like a chicken's wings flapping in the air. The pain surged in his shoulders, narrowing his vision into a black tunnel, and for a moment he was sure the men would keep pulling until the rotator cuffs tore, but finally they stopped before he passed out. More hands stripped his coat and shirt from his body. The Russian general offered no protest.

There are no suicide pills hidden in my clothes, young comrades.

When he was stripped to the waist, Strelnikov's arms finally were allowed to fall free. The men behind him pulled a hood over his head and suddenly he was blind.

His pants were pulled down to his ankles and Strelnikov was pushed down to sit on a stool. His shoes were pulled from his feet. More unseen hands covered with latex gloves searched his body, leaving nothing untouched. His captors forced him to stand, then bend over.

You will find nothing in there either
, he assured them in his thoughts, but Strelnikov didn't bother saying the words. He had no plan to end his life on his own terms, but his promises would carry no weight with these men and he held his silence. Strelnikov had known the cavity check would be coming, but it was painful all the same. Suicide pills were small and the men were thorough, if not gentle. The rope in his mouth was a convenient outlet for that particular pain, and Strelnikov bit down hard until the clinical search was finished.

He was pulled by his arms, pushed around corners, and marched in circles until he could not longer orient himself by memory. They dragged him forward and up a staircase, then into some room, and he heard a door close behind. He was made to dress in what he knew to be a blue jogging suit. His modesty restored, his assailants removed the hood. The men wore no masks and Strelnikov knew soldiers when he saw them. The hair, the bearing, the efficient manner told him that these men were Special Forces.

They checked his mouth with a penlight and a dental pick for false fillings or other implants. Strelnikov offered no resistance. These men had specialized tools for wrenching open the jaws of anyone who stupidly thought they could keep their mouths shut as far as the rope allowed. Finding nothing, they finally removed the cord, cleaned up their kit, and evacuated the barren room. Strelnikov watched them go, waiting for the door to close before turning to the interrogator he knew was still inside.

“Good evening, Stepan Illarionovich.” General-Major Arkady Lavrov, director of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU), sat in a cheap wooden chair by the corner of the door.

Strelnikov said nothing for several seconds, his mind pondering the surprise, and then he spoke. “Good evening, Arkady Vladimirovich.” He made his way to the lone wooden stool in the room. It looked like it was original to the building and he hoped it wouldn't crumble under his weight.

“It looks so very different, does it not, the old base?” Lavrov asked.

Strelnikov exhaled long and slow. “It's hard to say. Time is cruel to memories,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm. What he'd said was true in so many ways. To admit that this country was a better place now than when the Soviet empire had controlled its eastern end would have been to admit that he had spent his life in the service of a mistake.

Lavrov waited for the other man to say something else, then finally spoke when the silence grew too painful. “It has changed, very much. A testament to our failures.” He pressed his lips together. “We were in Berlin that night. Do you remember, on the embassy roof? We watched the people dancing on the Wall.”

“I do,” Strelnikov said. “That was an unhappy night.”

“Yes, it was. I question, sometimes, how we did not foresee what happened that evening,” Lavrov admitted.

“We did not see it,” Strelnikov advised him, “because we lacked the great virtue that would have let us predict it.”

“And that would be?”

“Honesty. The Kremlin would not hear of failure, so we would not let ourselves consider the possibility.”

Lavrov let out a quiet laugh after a moment. “Yes, you are right, but not all of us were so blind.”