Shattered Bone (8 page)

The general taxied the small fighter to the tarmac and shut down the engines with his nose facing the waiting Prime Minister. He was pleased to see the man was alone, but he knew that they only had a few minutes to talk before they would be surrounded by insistent aides.

He quickly disconnected his G-suit and oxygen hose and extended the small steps that would allow him to climb down from the cockpit. Although the general was almost sixty, he was fit and agile and managed the narrow steps with ease. After reaching the ground he stretched his arms, cracked the kinks out of his back, then took off his flight helmet and gloves and hung them on one of the steps. Physically, the general was striking. He was tall and slender, with a square jaw, broad checks, and penetrating gray eyes. Thirty years earlier, General Lomov had been a poster boy for the Soviet Air Force. His face had appeared on thousands of propaganda billboards and signs, extolling the virtues of service to one's country. As a young captain he had toured the far reaches of the Soviet empire, recruiting young warriors to the Socialist cause. And though the years had passed and softened his features, still the general remained driven by the fires of ambition. He was cold and intelligent, and focused as a laser.

After stretching his muscles, he turned and gestured to Golubev to come over to the jet.

“Have you ever seen such a beautiful aircraft?” he asked as the Prime Minister approached.

“Never!” Golubev replied as he admired the general's fighter. When he noticed Lomov's name painted under the raised canopy, he smiled to himself at the general's vanity. It didn't surprise him that Lomov had his own jet. It fit his character perfectly. The general had the pride of a fighter pilot and over the years, Golubev had come to expect certain things from his ego.

“Does it perform in the air as well as it looks on the ground?” Golubev asked, after walking around the jet.

“Oh, it's a dream you could not understand, Mr. Prime Minister. There is nothing like it in the world. Anywhere.

Come here. Let me show you something.”

The two men climbed the tiny steps and crowded together so that they could peer into the cockpit.

“We have recovered the pilot,” Lomov whispered as he pointed to the head-up display. “He was brought in last week. He should be in Kiev by Wednesday.”

“Is he clean?” the Prime Minister asked as he looked in the direction the general was pointing. “We don't need the Americans asking any questions.”

“Clean as snow,” the general replied. “It was a perfect break. The Americans aren't asking any questions, aside from the normal investigation after one of their planes go down. They won't find anything unusual. It was a good plan. Simple and with little outside involvement.”

“Has he been briefed?” the prime minister asked.

“Not yet. Morozov is out of the country. But he should be back by tomorrow. He will meet with the pilot when he arrives on Wednesday.”

Two black sedans pulled through the gate and onto the tarmac, accelerating rapidly across the open cement. Both men turned to watch them as they approached.

“Which brings me to my next point,” the general continued. “Morozov feels he has found an additional financier. Someone who can give us all of the money we need to complete this operation. But he may have to be persuaded. I told Morozov he could use some of our people in Cuba, but he seemed to think he could handle it himself.

“After he meets the pilot in Kiev, he is going back to South America to get the money.”

“We are running out of time,” Golubev muttered.

“Morozov won't disappoint us,” Lomov assured his friend. “Yevgeni, haven't you learned that by now?”

“What about the girl?” Golubev quickly asked.

“That news isn't good. We've been watching her apartment, but she hasn't returned. Apparently she just disappeared. It could be hard to track her since we don't want to use any of our official people. Liski is working on it.”

Lomov nodded as they watched the sedans approach. The back doors of the second car began to swing open before it even came to a stop.

The two men climbed down from the aircraft. They turned to meet the welcome party, but before they were surrounded, the Prime Minister whispered under his breath. “Keep me informed, Victor. We have come too far to let things start slipping through the cracks. If the pilot is here by Wednesday, I want to meet him for myself. And soon. It would be nice to wait for the perfect excuse, but we can't afford that luxury. Time will not allow it.”

“Be ready to go hunting,” General Lomov nodded as he walked toward the waiting cars. “I will let you know.”

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

The Russian president studied each man in the room, staring into their faces, summing them up, seeking their thoughts through their eyes. Some of the men returned his gaze with equally unblinking and cold-hearted stares, while others, generally the younger ministers, began to fidget in their seats. The Interior Minister seemed particularly anxious as he drummed nervous fingers across the arm of his chair. A few of the men stared off into space, too fearful to even look at Fedotov. The room nearly crackled with stress and only the generals seemed relaxed and at ease.

As the Russian president studied the faces, he almost smiled. Stalin was right. Nothing could be quite so persuasive as fear. The plan was so simple. Kill off the main competition, hit hard and hit fast, then watch the sheep as they flock to your side.

Fedotov sat at the table and gathered his notes. He was a wiry man, with thin brown hair atop a narrow face and pointed chin. Black eyes sat deep within his pock-marked face and his roman nose jutted out above pale, thin lips. Above his left eye was a jagged red scar, his badge from the night on the bridge. Behind his back, his enemies called him “Whorlest”-the “little mink.” Fedotov knew of the insulting nickname; but it never bothered him. In fact, he found it somewhat amusing. “Little mink.” It wasn't much of title, but it would do.

To most of his subordinates, Fedotov was a mysterious man, shrouded in a veil of paranoia and fear. He was a shadowy figure, a hard and ambitious man who had risen to power with such speed and direction that he left no trail in his wake. His personal life, if he had one, was a complete blank, nothing but a sheet of white paper, and it spoke volumes of the Russian republic that such a ghostlike figure could ever rise to such a position of power.

Unfortunately for the ministers and generals, Fedotov didn't suffer from the same lack of information about his rivals and enemies. There wasn't a single man seated around the table about whom Fedotov couldn't have instantly recited the most intimate personal details—from their habits of personal hygiene to their latest travels, from their political sympathies to conversations they had with their wives while lying in bed. Over the past thrce years, Prime Minister Vladimir Fedotov and his conspirators had committed enormous resources to collecting such information on the power elite, the most interesting and useful of which was compiled into thick but tidy dossiers and tucked away in his safe.

Fedotov looked up. “Comrades ... this meeting will be very brief,” he began.

“Thirty days ago, Sakarovek was killed, leaving me with the responsibility of leading our nation at a time of its deepest despair.

“Now, for those of you who don't already know, President Sakarovek was nothing but a coward. He brought more misery and suffering to our people than any leader since the Czars. Minister Sklyarov was a thief. And Secretary Moykola....” Fedotov's eyes blazed. “How can I even explain? He was a stooge for the West. A traitor and nothing more. It was my duty to send them to hell.”

The Deputy Prime Minister's face remained passive and without emotion. Fedotov's candor didn't surprise him. Everyone in the room knew what was going on. For the past several years they had seen the train coming. All they wanted was to get out of the way.

Fedotov cleared his throat and continued. “Some of you sitting here today were friends of these cowardly men. You know who you are. I know who you are. And while loyalty is an admirable trait, it doesn't change the truth. And each of you ... if you examine your hearts ... if you look at the facts ... you will see what I have told you is true.”

Fedotov paused. Absolute silence. No one looked away. “Now, I have called this meeting to make one simple point, and I want to be perfectly clear.” A screen behind Fedotov's seat suddenly flickered to life, and the lights in the room slowly dimmed. Fedotov studied the reaction of the men as a picture emerged on the eight-foot screen that was positioned behind him.

It was a picture of a little girl. She was dirty and horribly small. A hollow and frightened face looked up at the camera in hunger and desperation and a terror so real it leapt from her eyes. Tiny arms extended out from underneath a burlap sack of a dress. Her legs, no larger than her bony arms, huddled beneath her bloated stomach. She was reaching out. Reaching out to her mother. Her mother who lay dead and crumpled beside her.

“Her name is Tasha,” Fedotov said without turning around. “She is five years old tomorrow.” The ministers and generals sat motionless, barely able to breathe.

“Five years old, comrades!” Fedotov cried as he stood and turned toward the screen. “Look at her! She is only a child, and already she has lived through more horror and pain than all of our miserable lives put together!

“She lives in Voroshilovgrad, along the Ukrainian border. Look at her bloated stomach and the horrible rash, the results of the scarlet fever from which she suffers. She has no medicine. She has never even seen a doctor. Every day, like millions of our children, she gets but a few ounces of food. Her life is but hunger and horror. Though living, she is already dead.

“As a nation, we have come to the point where our children are raised in a world of such hopelessness and gloom that it seems they are left with only three choices. Die of starvation. Die of disease. Or live in a world of despair.

“And this ... ,” Fedotov continued, pointing to the mutilated corpse in the picture, “this is Tasha's mother. She and twenty-three of her villagers were killed early this evening in an attack by Kazakhaki bandits. For the past five years, the bandits have been free to roam across our border and plunder our people, all the time knowing they can find protection to the south. The Ukrainian government claims they are powerless to stop them. They claim to have exhausted all available means.

“I, for one, don't believe them. And I think that the time for action has come.

“If there could be a last straw, if there could be one final insult, or one single incident so rending that it changes our lives, then look at this photo and tell me, where will we draw the line?”

Fedotov fell silent. It was as if a massive weight had pressed down on the assembled audience. The room turned oppresively hot. No one moved.

The picture slowly faded out, and the lights in the room flickered on once agam.

“Over the next few months, I want you to think of Tasha,” Fedotov ordered as he took three steps toward the head of the table. “I want this image forever engraved in your brains.

“Because comrades, I vow to you now. I make you this solemn promise.

“By my life, by my heart, by my soul, things are going to changc. You are going to change. I am going to change. Our nightmare has come to its end. It is time to rebuild our nation. It is timc to reclaim our power.

“So, remember Tasha, comrades, and know this one thing. Beginning right here. Beginning right now. Things ... are going ... to change.”

___________________________ 

__________________________       

BOROVICHI SS-18 MISSILE FIELDS, NORTHWESTERN RUSSIA

F
IFTY-SEVEN KILOMETERS SOUTHEAST OF
B
OROVICHI
, R
USSIA, BURIED
deep under the rolling hills, lay “Satan's bedroom”—the launch facilities for the SS-18/mod 5 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Built very early in the 1990s, the missile complex was comprised of one hundred missile silos and four central launch facilities spread out over a thousand square kilometers of the sub-arctic tundra. The silos extended more than thirteen stories into the rock and soil and were capped by thick steel doors. Enormous bundles of buried wires and fiber-optic cables linked the silos and the launch facilities. The whole complex was an incredible engineering marvel, to the tune of more than a hundred billion rubles.

Yet, to the casual observer, the complex doesn't even exist. The wet tundra extended for miles around, with no buildings or fences in sight. The rolling, treeless hills showed no scars of construction, and a man could walk for days over the complex and never suspect that billions of rubles in technology lay just underneath the wet soil. The native herdsmen, with their goats and their sheep, walked among the unseen missiles every day. There were stories and rumors that tried to explain why they had not been allowed to graze the tundra for several summers, but the theories that the natives came up with were not even close to the truth. The herdsmen never had any idea that they were living atop the most powerful weapons on earth.

Nicknamed “Satan” by western intelligence, the SS-18 was capable of dropping each of its ten nuclear warheads to within just feet of their targets. Each of the ten warheads had the same destructive power as one million tons of TNT. The enormous Sukhoy rockets had a range of over 11,000 miles, placing virtually every target within the Northern Hemisphere at risk. Its sheer potential for destruction, coupled with its pinpoint accuracy and range, made “Satan” the most feared weapon the Soviets had ever developed.

But it wasn't the mass destruction of its cities that the Americans feared, for they knew that the missiles were only pointing at strategic targets. The thing that made the SS-18 so destabilizing was the fact that it could destroy the United States' ICBMs before they could be launched from their silos. It could destroy all of the manned bombers that were sitting alert before they could get in the air, as well the entire fleet of nuclear submarines, even as they sat in their protective pens.