“You seriously think the Russians may have something to do with this Kansas situation, Mr. President?”
“It’s possible. But I’m beginning to think the Russians have something to do with everything on the damn planet lately. Nothing those people do would surprise me at this point. They’ve pulled out of the arms treaty, they’re flying long-distance bomber sorties over Guam again, they’ve got troops massing on the NATO borders, they’re retargeting European cities with their missiles, and they’re selling advanced weapon systems to our most feared enemy, Iran. Friend or foe, David, you call it.”
The president took a deep breath and sat back in his chair, looking at the chief of British intelligence. “Sir David, I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back on the phone with the Kansas governor. Get those poor people out there in Salina to safety. I’ll speak to you soon. Safe journey back to London.”
“Good-bye, Mr. President. Thanks for your time. And good luck to you. It looks as if we may stand together yet again.”
“It does, sir, it certainly does.”
The president was distracted, already on to his next call, his next crisis, but he looked Trulove in the eye and spoke from his gut.
“We’re it, you know, Sir David. Our two countries. The last barricade. We’re all that’s left. God help us.”
H
awke pressed his forehead against the icy window of his small train compartment. He cradled a mug of lukewarm tea in both hands, grateful for the small amount of heat it offered. The train was slowing, wheels screeching, the air beyond the frosted glass smoking with snow, clouds of frothy white whirling about outside, obscuring everything. From somewhere ahead, the plaintive cry of the train’s whistle, a hollow call that could have sprung from the bottom of his heart.
Were they finally arriving?
He was on the last leg of his journey to Anastasia. He’d been at his window for hours, staring out at the frozen tundra, mesmerized by the view and thoughts of the new woman in his life. Hours had passed since he’d awoken from a sleep as deep and dark as the grave itself. He’d climbed down from his warm bunk and sprung to the window, his heart hammering. Was it love he was feeling, or was it merely the thrill of the game? Perhaps both? He knew this grip of conflicting emotions was powerful enough to paralyze him if he weren’t careful.
So he sat by his window and forced himself to look at things he could actually
see.
He saw Russia. He saw its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, all bleached white by the moon and bright stars. He sat for hours on end and watched as Russia flew past, wrapped in glittering clouds of snow and ice.
It had been nearly twenty-four hours since he’d received his orders and begun his onward journey. He’d said good-bye to Diana and Ambrose at the Bermuda airport and climbed aboard an RAF transport. He’d slept in the rear, freezing, on top of the mailbags, all the way to RAF Sedgwick, then caught a commercial flight into Russia, landing at St. Petersburg. He presented himself at immigration as Mr. A. Hawke, senior partner, Blue Water Logistics, Bermuda. He had a Bermuda passport that, even to his jaded eye, was a work of art. A four-color brochure inside his briefcase described the worldwide shipping capabilities of his new company. Just in case anyone was interested.
Since boarding the train at St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky Vokzal station, he’d had nothing to eat but Ukrainian sausage, which resembled a kilo of raw bacon coated in herbs, and some smoked cheese, which he found he simply couldn’t stomach. The kind of meal that you only want to see once but worry might resurface at any moment.
The Russian beer, however, was delicious. At the last big station, all of the passengers had jumped from the train and run for the buffet. He’d followed and had purchased a loaf of black bread and a bottle of Imperia vodka, primarily for warmth, he told himself. It was long gone.
Alone inside his compartment, despite its faint stench from the lavatories, not quite neutralized by the eau de cologne of some recently disembarked passenger and the smell of some fried chicken, pieces of which he’d finally found stuffed under the seat cushions, wrapped in dirty grease-stained paper, he was quite content.
He’d bought a ticket for a
kupe
class compartment. This entitled him to a set of bunks, a small table, storage space, and, most important, a lockable door. By Russian standards, this was relatively cushy train travel. The next class down was a bed in an open train carriage with about forty other passengers, mostly Russian or Mongolian traders with stacks of bags of their stock in trade. Not much sleeping went on back there, rather a lot of beer drinking and fighting over the use of the toilet. The lavatory attendant, a grumpy elderly babushka, kept the one clean toilet on the carriage locked for her personal use.
Hawke knew he was back in Russia.
He glanced at the green glow of his wristwatch. It was after two o’clock in the morning, but the night was lit up like day. The citizens of St. Petersburg called their midsummer evenings the White Nights.
That beautiful town, the northernmost city of any size on earth, is so far north that the sun never really quite dips below the horizon during midsummer. This, of course, was December, but still, it was the whitest night Alex Hawke had ever seen. He could easily be reading by his window, and beyond it, a full moon on snow, not the sun, created the white night flying by his window.
He found himself bewitched by the luminous, enchanting landscape. As time passed, the succession of huge views from his window aroused in him such a feeling of spaciousness that it made him think and dream of the future. One that might well include the beautiful Russian woman whose face he so longed to see.
But, he reminded himself again, he was in Russia on a mission. It was no time for lovesick dreaming. It was time to reimmerse himself in the hard reality of Russia and all that menacing old word Russia once more implied.
It was time, he knew, to rearm, to steel himself for whatever lay ahead. What the British secret services had long called the Great Game with the Russians was afoot once more, and he was headed deep into the thick of it. Harry Brock was already waiting for him in Moscow, meeting with Red Banner’s newly recruited case officers and speaking with potential targets Stefan had indentified within the KGB. Spies with a price were not hard to come by in the new Russia.
In Bermuda, Ambrose Congreve, much improved every day, was happily ensconced in Hawke’s office at Blue Water. Appointing the former chief inspector of Scotland Yard temporary chief of station for the fledgling MI-6 division had been C’s idea, and Hawke thought it an inspired one. Especially when he learned that Ambrose was always summoning Pippa Guinness to his office, asking her to have this or that typed, or, better yet, please bring him a fresh pot of tea, no lemon, thank you. He was still in a wheelchair, but had said his leg seemed to be healing nicely.
As the endless miles rolled by, Hawke remained at his window, trying to summon his old memories of Russia. His mind found an ugly landscape of crumbling factories and idle collective farms, back streets of towns crowded with prostitutes, beggars, hawkers, hustlers, and peasants, all humming with activity, a scant few worthless things for sale in clogged lanes of shops with mostly barren shelves, selling matches and salt, sweatshops making T-shirts and plastic shoes.
But for the occasional intrusion of police, life went on. Politics was merely a nuisance you tolerated, with mostly bemused indifference. And what looked at a distance like total anarchy and chaos? Close up, it was meticulous order.
He wondered how much country life had changed in the years since the collapse of the old Soviet ways. Out here, probably not at all. The New Russia you read about existed only in places like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. The New Russia was all about money and power, and there was precious little of either to be found out here, where field was followed by field only to be swallowed up by another black forest.
He could make out an occasional farm building, buried under a mantle of snow. Or now and then, at a desolate country crossing, he’d catch a glimpse of snowy lane, winding back up a hill, disappearing amid a copse of frosted trees. It wasn’t until you got beyond the great cities of Russia, he now realized, that you could sense the vastness of this ancient land. Its true size, its scope, its immensity, were literally unimaginable.
There was never any vehicular traffic at these infrequent crossings, ever. No trucks, no cars, no tractors. Were there simply no combustion engines outside the cities? None at all? A few hours earlier, they’d slowed for a crossing, and he’d seen a mule cart with an ancient driver on his box, bundled against the freezing north wind, the reins clenched in his frozen fingers. The man was so still on his perch that Hawke feared he might have simply frozen to death while waiting for the long train to pass.
The train slowed further, and he guessed by the hour that they might finally be approaching his destination, a tiny country station on the way to nowhere.
He stood and gathered his few belongings. He was already wearing his long black woolen greatcoat against the cold and his thick black cashmere scarf and his Russian fur cap, purchased from a kiosk at the St. Petersburg station. He reached up to the top shelf for his luggage.
He had with him his old leather Gladstone portmanteau, primarily because of its twin false bottoms. The two visible compartments were filled with clothing and shoes and his few books. Two secret compartments contained one pistol each, twin SIG Sauer 9mms, plus enough Parabellum ammunition to start a small war. Another, smaller compartment housed his powerful Iridium Globalstar satellite telephone. The guns and the phone had been waiting for him in a luggage storage locker at the St. Petersburg train station.
The train lurched to a stop, and he leaned over to peer out his window. The window framed what looked like a charcoal sketch. There was the tiny station house with its puffing chimney. Beside it were birch trees, laden with hoar frost. Their branches, like smoky streaks of candle wax, looked as if they wished to lay down their snowy burdens on the building’s steeply pitched roof.
The dimly lit sign over the doorway read “
Tvas
.” The stationmaster’s office was lit from within, and inside the yellow room, he saw the silhouette of a tall woman bundled in furs, pacing back and forth. His heart leaped at the sight of her, and he raced from his compartment, careened down the narrow corridor to the platform, where he jumped from the train.
Her face was at the stationmaster’s window, peering out at the arriving train, as he grasped the doorknob and pushed inside, instantly grateful for the warmth of the small stove glowing in the corner.
Anastasia turned from the window and smiled at him.
“You’ve come” was all she said.
She was covered head to toe in white sable, an abundant coat reaching the tops of her snowy boots. Her head was covered with a matching sable cowl, and her golden curls fell beside her cheeks, still rosy with the cold. Her hands were clasped inside a white fur muff, which she let drop as she moved quickly toward him across the scuffed wooden floor.
“Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering the stationmaster who stood beside his counter. He was a small fat man who wore a grey Tolstoyan shirt with a broad leather belt, felt boots, and trousers bagging at the knees. He looked a kindly enough fellow, but a tiny gold pincenez on a wide black ribbon quivered angrily on the end of his nose.
“Nikolai, this is my new friend whom I’ve been telling you about.”
The Russian bowed, saying something under his breath to Anastasia.
“He says you’re very handsome but that I shouldn’t have come all this way for you on such a night. He’s very protective. I’ve known him since I was no taller than a poppy.”
“Come here,” Hawke said to her, dropping his portmanteau to the floor and spreading his arms wide.
She ran to him, and he enfolded her in his arms, burying his face against hers inside the warmth of her furry cowl, inhaling the fresh outdoor scent of her, the perfume of her skin, finding her lips and kissing them, at first softly and then with a sudden urgency that surprised even him. He’d struggled mightily to banish her from his mind for all the long hours on the train, and now he was overwhelmed at the strength of the feelings suddenly welling up inside.
“You look so—beautiful,” he said, aware of the word’s ridiculous inadequacy, holding her away from him so he could look into her brightly shining green eyes, hardly able to believe anyone could ever be or look or seem so lovely.
“And you, handsome prince.” She laughed. “Come to Mother Russia at last, have you? Come along, now, we’ve got a long journey yet.”
“Are we walking?” Hawke said. “I saw no sign of a car. Or a road, for that matter.”
“A car?” She laughed again. “You think an automobile could travel two feet in snow this deep? Get your bag and follow me, bumpkin.”
She bent to retrieve her dropped white muff, then hurried to the still-opened station door, turned and said good-bye to the stationmaster, then rushed outside. Hawke grabbed his bag and followed her, catching up with her under the single lamp illuminating the snow-covered platform. It had begun to snow again, snowflakes coming down one by one. They spun slowly and hesitantly before finally settling like fluffy white dust on the sparkling blanket of already fallen snow.
“Kiss me again,” she said, and he did, standing under the lamppost, aware of old Nikolai peering out at them from a corner of the window. She saw him, too, and pushed Hawke away.
“Now, follow me, sire. Your carriage awaits.”
He followed her, matching her determined march through the deep snow stride for stride, their boots making a great crunching sound. They made their way around the side of the station house to the rear, their angular shadows preceding them across the new-fallen snow. There in the moonlight, three white stallions stood abreast of each other, harnessed to a magnificent gold and blue sleigh. A troika.
He hurried toward this apparition, having never seen a conveyance quite so marvelous in his life.
He ran his hand along the steaming, glistening flank of one the three enormous stallions. The restless horses were snorting great clouds of white steam from their flaring black nostrils and pawing the snow impatiently. As he approached the sleigh and ran his fingers over the bodywork, he could see that it was a dark blue decorated with shooting stars and comets, all the wonders of the heavens, carved into the wood and picked out in gold leaf.
“My God, Anastasia, what a lovely thing.”
“Isn’t it?” she said, climbing up into the sleigh. “It was a gift from Peter the Great to one of my more illustrious ancestors. Baron Sergei Korsakov gave Peter a billion rubles to help him defeat Louis XIV. Luckily for us, Peter won. As a reward, the Tsar also built for us the roof you’re going to be sleeping under tonight.”