“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, that’s all I can think of at the moment. I’m sure you people will have more ideas as the situation develops. Let’s get moving.”
Moore, already headed for the door, paused and said, “One more thing, Mr. President. I’m going to get the SEAL hostage-rescue team working on this hijacking immediately. They’ll come up with something if anyone can.”
“Good idea. Now, Brick, you and Mike listen up,” the president said. “SEAL HRT needs every bit of information you guys can get on that airship hostage situation. How the hell do you deal with something like that? It’s not like a plane. Something that runs out of fuel and has to land sometime. Something SWAT hostage-rescue teams can board and overwhelm. A damn zeppelin can stay aloft indefinitely. So, what the hell do we do?”
Mike Reiter said, “I’ve just been thinking about that, Mr. President. And I don’t have a goddamn clue.”
H
awke awoke to a scream. A terrible, masculine scream that stretched on forever. It started high and went low, as if the dying author had jumped off a cliff. It was a death scream. Whoever he was, the poor bastard was now among the departed. And he’d gone out the hard way. The man hadn’t been far away, somewhere to Hawke’s right, maybe only fifty yards or so. What had happened to him?
The windows of the darkened machine Hawke found himself in were coated with a thick rime of frost. It was bloody freezing inside the military helicopter. He could see his breath in pale blue lights that shone down as if from high walls looming up beside the chopper. Groggy, he tried to raise his hand to wipe clear a porthole on the glass beside his head and found he could not lift it. His wrists were bound with plastic flex cuffs and lay helplessly in his lap.
He looked down. His wrists were connected by a thin steel chain to cuffs around his ankles. How long had he been out? He could feel the drugs still coursing through his veins, but the effects seemed to be wearing off. He observed himself to be all alone, abandoned by his captors. This was his fate? To freeze to death in the back of a Russian helicopter? It hardly seemed fitting or even fair.
Where was he?
On the ground. Certainly not Lubyanka. He had no sense of being in Moscow or any city, for that matter. Outside, the wind was howling, and he could smell the sea nearby, hear waves crashing against rock. He’d been drugged and flown here in a helicopter. But where the hell was here? He leaned his injured head, now bandaged, back against the metal bulkhead behind him and tried to get his brain rebooted.
As the fog inside his head gradually lifted, he dimly recalled the last conscious moments outside the Bolshoi. He’d been arrested. Dragged away from Anastasia. Before he’d blacked out, he’d been sure they were taking him to Moscow’s most notorious prison, the KGB’s private gateway to hell. But no, he was sitting all alone in the back of a helicopter freezing to death. And outside, not too far away, a man had just died in agony.
There came the sound of heavy boots crunching on snow outside. And wavering fuzzy discs of lights, flashlights in the hands of four or five men, laughing drunkenly as they neared the chopper. One of them, the pilot, yanked the forward left door open and clambered up into his seat. Frigid wind blew through the cockpit. Instantly, Hawke heard the whine of the turbo engine spooling up. The pilot yelled something in slurry Russian to the men outside.
The right rear door was pulled open, and a flashlight was shoved into his face, a foot from his nose. This was cause for further hysteria among the men outside.
A red-faced man leaned inside and shouted something incomprehensible in Russian. Hawke ignored him, finally interrupting his tirade to say, “Get somebody who speaks English, for God’s sake.”
There was more shouting, and now someone else was yelling at him.
“Out!” a younger guard shouted in English.
“Sod off,” Hawke replied. He was sleepy. His head hurt. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Hands reached inside for him and yanked him bodily out onto the frozen ground. He stayed on his feet but felt faint, as if he might collapse. Then someone shouted more Russian and jabbed him with a rifle muzzle. He managed to stagger forward a few feet and remain upright.
He looked around. The helo, now lifting off with a roar and a great rotor downdraft, had landed inside some kind of courtyard. There were high stone walls surrounding it, punctuated every fifty yards or so by towering black Gothic spires. Lights showed at the very tops, men moving around inside. Guard towers. He was in some kind of prison. On an island, he thought, for he had no sense of any mainland, and he heard the sea all around him now that the chopper had tilted its nose down and disappeared into the black night.
“Go!” the English-speaking guard said, prodding him in the direction of a large four-story building that looked as if Charles Addams had been the principal architect. It was all spires and gargoyles, black with soot. Because his ankles were bound, he could only take small, painful steps through the black and crusty snow. The result was more prodding and shouted insults in Russian.
He saw human wraiths wandering around inside the yard, barely clothed; they were all wall-eyed, hairless men and women who seemed lost and demented. One of them, a female perhaps, loomed up in front of him, ghostlike, and opened her toothless mouth in a silent scream. A guard slammed her to the ground and kicked her out of their path.
He was passing through what appeared to be a forest of thick round stakes. He squinted his eyes in the blowing snow, trying to believe he was only imagining what he saw. The bodies of both men and women straddled the tops of the stakes. The stakes disappeared inside their groins. Some of them were still writhing and moaning in agony. Some of them, with the sharp points of the stakes protruding from their chests or necks, were mercifully dead.
Impaled.
He knew enough history to know that impaling had once been the favorite method of execution in this part of the world. A sharpened stake, penetrating the rectum, would kill you slowly, maybe in two or three days, before finding and piercing a vital organ. A dull stake, slowly inching upward as the weight of the victim did gravity’s work, could take a week or more. Ivan the Terrible earned his moniker by impaling thousands. Peter the Great had impaled his share as well. Not to mention Vlad the Impaler, more popularly known in legend as Dracula.
But Hawke, as he staggered through this gruesome forest, had had no idea this barbaric method of execution was still in use.
Just when he thought it could get no worse, a guard lurched drunkenly toward the nearest stake, jumped up, and grabbed some wretched woman by the ankles, yanking her down a foot or more further onto the bloody stake. She screamed in agony, and the guard let go, collapsing to the ground in hysterics. Hawke, unable to control his rising gorge, wrenched himself free of the guards, bent forward from the waist, and retched, his vomit spattering his shoes, staining the freshly fallen snow.
He now knew the probable fate of the poor bastard whose cries had woken him up from his drug-induced sleep. He closed his eyes and remained still, swaying on his feet until he was prodded forward toward a set of steps that led up to a massive wooden door, blackened as if by fire but still intact.
And so he entered the vile prison known as Energetika. It seemed as if the fires of hell must be raging below. Those blackened walls outside. And inside, the floors, windows, walls, even the heavy old furniture were covered with layers of black soot. Yet there was no industry anywhere near this island. If Energetika wasn’t hell on earth, surely it was close enough.
The jailer, a man with a stupid face beneath his green eyeshade and grimy, sooty clothes, sat behind a great carved desk littered with papers. He barely looked up when Hawke was presented to him. He took a swig of vodka from an open bottle on the desk, scrawled a notation on a random piece of paper, and pointed to a dark corridor leading off to the left.
“Why am I here?” Hawke shouted at the man as they tried to drag him away. He planted his feet and twisted free of their clutching hands.
“Why? Because you’re under arrest, of course,” the jailer replied.
“You speak English?”
“Obviously. We have schools in Russia, believe it or not. Even universities. Very civilized.”
“On what charge?”
“Espionage against the Russian state. Our new Tsar, he doesn’t tolerate spies. He executes them. I’ll see you at dawn, Englishman. They’re cutting a fresh stake for you now.”
“New Tsar?” Hawke cried as they grabbed him again. “Who is he? What’s his name?”
“His imperial majesty, Tsar Ivan Korsakov, that’s who.”
“I know him! We’re friends! I must talk to him.”
“Talk to the Tsar, he says?” the man said, and he and his comrades exploded with laughter. “Take him away,” the jailer said, wiping tears of mirth from his rheumy eyes.
Hawke’s new home was underground, three endless sets of steep stone steps that led downward into deeper gloom. A steel door was opened, and he was shoved inside, the door slammed shut behind him. He was alone inside a small, barrel-shaped cell whose bare, oozing walls seemed to be impregnated with tears. A flickering lamp stood on a stool in the corner, its wick swimming in fetid oil, illuminating his quarters.
He stood a moment and took inventory. A bucket for waste. A slab of metal secured to the wall on which lay a thin mattress blackened with age and God knew what else. He went to it and sat down, determined not to go mad before morning, determined to survive, whatever it took.
He had a son, after all. He was going to be a father. He held that moment in his mind, Anastasia whispering the joyous news in the dark, and used it build his fortress, thick walls and ramparts high and mighty. Against the world.
At some time during the night, he must have fallen off, slept. He felt rough hands pulling at him and shouting. A dream? No, it was just the moon-faced jailer and two other foul-smelling lackeys, come to fetch him. Somewhere, a red dawn must have been breaking.
It was time.
“Where are you taking me?” he demanded. Terror was rising in him now, unabated. He knew from previous experience that only through sheer force of will would he be able to subdue it and face whatever was coming like a man.
They pulled him to his feet.
“Just tell me where you’re taking me,” he said again, hearing the pathetic weakness of his pleas, but he couldn’t stop himself.
He had this irrational need to know. Was this it? The end? Yes or no, which was it?
If the end is near and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, old sport,
he thought to himself,
buck the hell up. Stiff upper.
And yet—
“
Tell me
, God damn you all!”
“Silence!” the jailer shouted, shoving him roughly toward the door. Hawke struggled with the plastic cuffs, knowing in his heart it was useless. There were three of them, two of them armed. What could he do? He had to think of something. But what? He deliberately dragged his feet, stumbled, fell forward with his bound hands outstretched to break his fall.
He rolled onto his back, and as a guard bent to lift him, he brought his knees up and caught him smartly under the chin. For his trouble, he got the butt end of the rifle across his jaw and was hauled to his feet again.
Hawke knew where they were taking him, of course. It must be dawn by now. Had to be.
And he was headed straight for a stake in the impaling yard.
B
ut at the end of the corridor, instead of turning to the right and climbing upward to the yard, the guards steered him left and began descending another steep stone staircase leading down. And then down another, the steps progressively harder to see in the guttering light of lanterns hung from the walls. His escorts seemed in an inordinate hurry for Hawke’s taste, and he could but wonder where they were going now.
“What fresh hell lies this way?” Hawke asked, not expecting a reply but feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that any new hell could hardly be worse than the one he’d believed most assuredly he was headed for.
“The dungeon,” the moon-faced jailer said simply.
“The
dungeon
? And what, pray, do you call where I slept all night? With wee beasties scratching their way across my floor? The bridal suite?”
His attempt at gallows humor elicited no reply, but it lightened his own heavy spirits as he descended into whatever subterranean inferno they had planned for him. The
oubliette,
most likely, a traditional feature of ancient forts, a deep well where a man was thrown and simply forgotten.
What the hell, he thought. He had to get off the bloody ride at some point. If this was his stop, so be it.
They passed along a few very grim corridors indeed, arches along both sides, each enclosing heavy wooden doors with small barred windows.
“This is us,” the jailer said, pulling out a huge key ring and inserting one of them into the lock. It clicked, and the door squeaked open. Hawke followed the jailer inside, still in the grip of the guards. They lowered him to the stone floor, first to his knees and then letting him fall over on to his side.
“I am back in one hour,” the jailer said, and with that, he and the two guards left, a great thud and a metallic clang as they pulled the heavy door closed behind them.
“Hello?” Hawke said, knowing he was not alone.
It was pitch black, but to his right, he saw the orange glow of a cigarette glow brighter and then dim as the smoker inhaled and exhaled.
“Good evening,” a disembodied voice said pleasantly. Heavily accented English. “If you can manage to crawl over here, you’d be better off sitting up here next to me on the cot.”
Hawke managed to sit upright on the damp floor, facing the strangely familiar voice.
“And why is that?” he asked, straining his eyes in the dark to see whom he was addressing.
“I’ve got a lead-lined mattress.”
“Sounds comfy, but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself. This prison was built on top of the deadliest radioactive dump in Russia. The Navy’s been dumping poisonous nuclear waste here for fifty years. Eat a fish caught anywhere in these waters, and you’ll glow in the dark for weeks.”
“Surely you’re not serious? A prison built atop a radioactive-waste site?”
“Fiendish, isn’t it?”
“Helps me understand our cultural divide.”
“You Brits lack Mongol blood. It’s your great weakness.”
“Perhaps I’ll join you up there after all. A bit chilly down here on the floor.”
“Deceptively chilly. Quite hot, in fact. One of the secrets of survival here is staying off the floor as much as possible This lowest level of Energetika is as close to hell as you can get.”
“Survival is possible? But how?”
“Sorry. I should have said postponing the inevitable.”
Hawke immediately clambered to his feet. “I’ve definitely decided to accept your offer.”
“Here, I’ll move over. Plenty of room.”
“Where are we?” Hawke asked his fellow prisoner, taking a seat next to the man on the lead-shielded cot.
“A small island off St. Petersburg. Energetika was originally a fortress built by Peter the Great to guard the approach to Kronstadt Naval Yard.”
“Might I have a cigarette?” Hawke asked, getting as comfortable as he could, his back against the cold stone wall, his shackled legs dangling over the edge of the thin mattress.
“Hmm, of course. How rude of me. I should have offered you one.”
The man leaned forward with the pack, the cigarette still in his mouth, and in the red glow, Hawke finally realized whom he was speaking to.
“Thanks,” Hawke said, raising his manacled wrists and pulling a smoke from the pack. He stuck it between his lips, opened the matchbook, and lit up, puffing hungrily.
“Not at all,” Vladimir Putin replied. “I’ve got an endless supply. That jailer’s on my payroll. As are a majority of the guards. Vodka?”
“Good God, yes.”
The former president of the Russian Federation produced two small tin cups and a bottle of Stolichnaya. He filled both cups to the brim and passed one to Hawke. He took a small, burning sip despite his urge to down it all at once. Nothing had ever tasted so good, so pure, so absolutely necessary before. Nothing.
Hawke said, “I’d heard you were in residence here. Never expected to pay you a visit, of course. I’m Alex Hawke, by the way.”
“Oh, I know who you are, Lord Hawke, believe me. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Call me Alex, won’t you?”
“Doesn’t care for titles,” Vladimir Putin said, and extended his hand. “I recall that now, from your file. Alex, I am called Volodya.” Hawke shook it with both of his. The man’s grip was firm and dry and somehow reassuring.
“You’ve been here for some time, yet you’ve still got your hair and teeth, Volodya,” Hawke said. “Unlike most of the poor wretches I saw wandering around up in the yard.”
“My lead-lined mattress, you see. Miserably uncomfortable, but it serves its purpose. And I’ve got lead liners in my shoes as well. I can’t stay here forever, but I’m all right for the time being.”
“If you call this all right.”
“Better than the forest of limbless trees up in the yard, believe me. I’m sure you saw it? Our orchard of death.”
“The orchard of death. Good God, impaling. Who’s responsible for that barbarism?”
“Your new friend, of course. Count Korsakov. Or Tsar Ivan, I should say. An old-fashioned Russian, he quite enjoys the spectacle of impaling. I’m sure he plans to attend your introduction to the stake, whenever that should happen.”
“They really made him Tsar?”
“Hmm. It’s been his plan all along. Now that he’s eliminated every obstacle and hint of opposition, it’s reality.”
“He put you here?”
“He did. Or rather, he had Kuragin do it. Korsakov prefers to stay in the background while others achieve his ends. Fancies himself the wizard behind the curtain. Never dirtied his hands once in all the years I’ve known him.”
“What was your crime? The world never knew why you disappeared. Even Auntie Beeb was stumped on that one.”
“Auntie Beeb?”
“Sorry. Slang for the BBC.”
“Success was my greatest failing in Korsakov’s eyes. I brought Russia back from the brink of absolute chaos. And naturally, he loathed the fact that I was a democrat.”
“You? A democrat? That’s hardly our perception of you, sir.”
“You in the West never understood me. I was in the process of building democracy, but doing it at my own speed. At a pace suitable to a country with a centuries-old tradition of autocracy. You saw what happened when we rushed headlong into democracy. Utter disaster and chaos. The greatest political disaster of the twentieth century. Anyway, that’s ancient history. The simple truth is, I was far too popular and thus too powerful for a man who dreamed only of autocracy, of Tsardom.”
“Sounds like he’s come out swinging now.”
“He has, certainly. He’ll rule the world, you know. It’s only a matter of time.”
“We’ve heard that before. I believe Stalin and Lenin had similar notions. The great workers’ revolution it was called back then.”
“Korsakov is different. He’s a legitimate genius. Nobody can stop him now. Even the Americans blasting satellites out of the sky with all their secret Star Wars weaponry can’t touch him. More vodka?”
“Yes, please. Perfect. Thank you.”
“I’ve got to say, under the circumstances, you’re the cheery one, aren’t you, Lord Hawke? Sorry. I mean Alex.”
“Cheerfulness in the face of adversity. You’ve heard that one, I’m sure.”
“No.”
“Comes from our Royal Marines ethos. The four elements of the commando spirit: courage, determination, unselfishness, and my all-time favorite, cheerfulness in the face of adversity. My father taught me all four when I was six years old. I’ve tried to take them to heart all my life.”
“Your father was an admirable man,” Putin said, raising his cup.
Hawke clinked it with his own and said, “Well. A bit of dirty weather ahead, that’s all. Nothing for it but to batten down various hatches, right? We all cross the bar sooner or later.”
“There’s an oil lamp hanging above my head, Alex. If you’ll return my matches, I’ll provide a bit of light for you.”
Hawke handed him the matches, and Putin lit the wick, throwing shadowy silhouettes of the two men against the farther wall. Putin looked at him carefully in the flickering lamplight, as if he were coming to some kind of decision.
“Do you know why you’re here, Alex? Here at Energetika, I mean.”
“No idea. I’m a simple English businessman on a business trip. Like everyone else in prison, I’m completely innocent of any and all crimes.”
“He put you in this poisonous hole, you know.”
“He?”
“Korsakov, of course. Have you met him?”
“I have. Very charming but with the eyes of a fanatic.”
“He wants you dead.”
“Why? What have I ever done to him? I’m madly in love with his daughter, for God’s sake. I plan to marry her.”
“And she’s in love with you, I’m told. Part of the problem.”
“What problem?”
“You are a highly unsuitable match for Anastasia, princess of Russia. Your background is wholly unacceptable.”
“Unacceptable? I’m descended from some rather scandalous pirates, I’ll grant you, but that shouldn’t be held against me. On what grounds?”
“Your father, to begin with.”
Hawke almost choked on his vodka. “My father? He died when I was a boy of seven. After a long and distinguished naval career, I might add. What on earth has he to do with any of this?”
“I can answer in one word,” Putin said as he emptied his cup. “Scarp.”
“Scarp,” Hawke said, and leaned back against the wall, savoring his cigarette and his vodka.
“Scarp,” Putin repeated. He liked saying the word, liked the harsh sound of the single syllable.
“Funny, that,” Hawke said. “That’s the second time in three days that benighted rock has come up in conversation. Korsakov was going on about it, too, at his winter palace. Something about stalking on the island during the Cold War. I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. Sounded a bit daft on the subject.”
“Korsakov keeps a list. People he wants to kill. Naturally, I’m on it. That’s why I’m here. Doing the slow burn, they call it. But you, well, you’ve been on the list since the day you were born.”
“Have I, indeed? I understand you being on it. Politics. But what the hell’s he got against me?”
“In October 1962, your father killed the only man Ivan Korsakov ever loved. His older brother, Sergei.”
“My father killed a man on Scarp? Ridiculous. How? It’s not possible. My family has had a shooting lodge there for generations. I’ve been going myself for years. It’s a tiny island. Any kind of foul play or disappearance would have been reported. I’ve never heard a thing. My father, by the way, killed any number of people in the line of duty. But he was no murderer.”
“Who said anything about murder? Ivan’s brother was KGB, like all of us. During the height of the Cuban missile crisis, it was learned that your father figured in a British plan to infiltrate a secret Soviet facility up near the Arctic Circle. Operation Redstick. This was at a very critical moment in the standoff. Khrushchev couldn’t allow our operations to be penetrated. Colonel Sergei Korsakov was dispatched by KGB to Scarp to eliminate your father.”
“And?”
“Obviously, your father eliminated Colonel Korsakov.”
“And the body?”
“Your father buried him, I suppose. Kept his mouth shut about it. That’s what I’d have done.”
“And so I’m tossed into the dungeon, like some latter-day Count of Monte Cristo, thrown into the bloody Château d’If for a crime I did not commit?”
“Yes. A great irony, isn’t it, that it was the Tsar’s own daughter who discovered you on that deserted beach and delivered you up to her father’s sacrificial altar.”
“I suppose it is rather ironic. Revenge, is it, then?”
“Exactly. Revenge of the very best kind. Keenly anticipated and long awaited.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t done away with me sooner.”
“Ah, but our Tsar likes to savor his revenge. Anticipate it. In any case, there were hundreds of political enemies who needed exterminating at the stake, all ahead of you on the list. You he sees as mere fun. He wants to toy with you, a cat-and-mouse game.”