“Understood, sir.”
Nikita turned to Fodor. “How is the phone?”
“It will take several minutes to repair,” Fodor said as he crouched beside the lantern.
“Do it quickly,” snapped the Lieutenant, huffing out white clouds of vapor. “What else did the General say?”
‘Just to stop the train and come on the line,” Fodor said. “That’s all.”
“Damn this,” Nikita said. “Damn it all.”
As the Sergeant’s crew pulled flares from a supply sack, Nikita ordered the civilians to restack the crates. A soldier came in from the next car, looking slightly rattled, and Nikita sent him back to secure the crates and make sure the soldiers there stayed alert.
“Tell the caboose to be on the lookout,” Nikita added. “We may be approached from the rear.”
The Lieutenant stood with his legs apart in the center of the car, bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet.
He tried to put himself in the place of his enemy.
The tree may have fallen or the tree may have been placed there. If the latter, then the ambush had failed. Had they struck the tree, they’d have been stopped beside a cliff-an ideal place from which to pick off the soldiers on top of the train. But here, hundreds of yards away, they could get maybe one or two soldiers before being spotted. And there was no way anyone could approach the train without being seen and, once seen, shot.
So what, then, is their game?
His father had called to tell him to stop the train. Had he known about the tree? Or had he learned something else, perhaps about explosives or ambushers ahead?
“Hurry!” Nikita said to Fodor.
“Almost ready, sir,” the Corporal replied. Despite the cold, his forehead was flush and spotting with perspiration.
Nikita was becoming angrier with the helplessness he felt, and increasingly aware of a weight in the air around him. It was more than just the isolation and dampered sounds. It was a growing sense that whether he was predator or prey, the enemy he sought was very near.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Tuesday, 3:50 P.M., St. Petersburg
“I think they forgot all about us.”
Private George was amused by the thought as he drove toward the Hermitage, negotiating the tricky turns he had to make after crossing the Moika River. He stayed to the right of the Bronze Horseman, then turned right on Gogolya Street and made his way toward the adjoining Palace Square.
Peggy had shut off the radio after Orlov and Paul Hood had switched satellites and it became clear that no one else was coming on the line. After leaving their shaken but grateful passenger off, she and George decided to continue on to the Hermitage, where they could leave the car, lose themselves in the crowd, and get their bearings before undertaking the second part of their mission.
“I mean, that’s kinda rude, don’t you think? We travel like watery walnuts a couple thousand miles, do the job, and no one bothers to get back on the line and say, ‘By the way, guys-nice work.'”
“Did you come here for their approval?” Peggy asked.
“No. But it’s nice to get it.”
“Don’t worry,” Peggy said. “I have a feeling that before we’re out of here, you’ll crave anonymity.”
As the white columns of the Hermitage came into view, growing amber in the late afternoon light, George could hear and then see the army of workers that Captain Rydman had warned them about.
He shook his head. “Who’d’ve ever thought it?”
Peggy said, “Probably the last time anyone protested here was when it was still called the Winter Palace and Nicholas Il’s itchy guards gunned the workers down.”
“It’s scary,” George said, “that there are people who want to bring the iron heel back.”
“Which is why I don’t mind not getting thanked,” Peggy said. “It’s fear keeps us going, not a pat on the rump. Vigilance is its own reward. That’s how Keith felt.”
George looked at her in the rearview mirror. There wasn’t a hint of nostalgia in her voice for her dead lover, nor did he see the loss in her eyes. Maybe she was one of those people who didn’t cry in public, or perhaps not at all. He wondered how she would react when they reached the building where Keith had died.
There were at least three thousand people scattered across the large checkerboard of the Palace Square. They were facing a low stage and podium that had been erected in front of the General Staff Arch. Police were directing traffic away from the square, and Peggy told Private George to pull over before they reached them. He parked next to an outdoor cafe with brown umbrellas over every table, each umbrella advertising a different brand of beer or wine.
“The marketers didn’t waste any time coming here,” he grunted disapprovingly to Peggy as they stood side by side.
“They never do,” she replied, then noticed that one of the police officers was looking at them.
George noticed him too. “They’ll ID the car,” he said.
“They won’t expect us to stay in the area, though,” Peggy said. “As far as they know, we’ve completed our mission. ”
“Don’t you think our friend Ronash has already given them physical descriptions which are being faxed all over St. Petersburg?”
“Not quite yet,” she said. “But we do have to get out of these uniforms anyway if we’re going to leave as tourists.” Peggy checked her watch. “We’ve got to meet Volko in an hour and ten minutes. I suggest we go inside. If we get stopped on the way I’ll tell them we’re from the Admiralty, which is a block to the east. I’ll say we I re just watching to make sure the crowd doesn’t spill over. Once we’re inside, we’ll change, pose as a young couple in love, and make our way to the Raphael.”
“Finally, a masquerade I can relate to,” George said as they started toward the square.
“Don’t like it too much,” Peggy said. “We’re going ,o have a little spat inside so I can stalk off and strike a conversation with Volko.
George grinned. “I’m married. I can relate to that too.” The grin broadened. “Strikers among strikers,” he whispered. -I like the irony.”
Peggy didn’t return his smile as they went around the fringes of the crowd in the Palace Square. George wondered if she’d even heard him as she looked at the orderly mob, at the sculptural grouping over the General Staff Arch, at her feet-anywhere but the Hermitage itself and the river beyond, on whose banks Keith FieldsHutton had died. He thought he saw dampness in the comers of her eyes and a heaviness in her step that he had not seen before.
And he finally, happily, felt close to the person he had been sitting beside, hip-to-hip, for the better part of a day.
FIFTY-NINE
Tuesday, 10:51 P.M., Khabarovsk
Spetsnaz soldiers were trained to do many things with their chief weapon, the spade. They were left in a locked room with just the spade and a mad dog. They were ordered to chop down trees with them. On occasion, they had to dig ditches in frozen ground with them, ditches deep enough to lie in. At a specified time, tanks were rolled over the field. Soldiers who hadn’t dug deep enough were crushed.
With the help of Liz Gordon, Lieutenant Colonel Squires had made a special study of spetsnaz techniques, searching for those that best accounted for the remarkable endurance and versatility of their soldiers. He couldn’t adapt them all. Regular beatings to toughen the soldiers would never have been approved by the Pentagon, although he knew commanding officers who would have sanctioned them gladly. But he adapted many spetsnaz methods, including his favorites-their ability to create camouflage in a very short time and to hide in the unlikeliest places.
When he had learned about the soldiers posted on top of the train, he realized they’d be watching the treetops, cliffs, boulders, and snowbanks along the route. He knew that someone in the engine would be watching the tracks for explosives or debris. But he also knew that he had to get under the train unseen, and that the best place to hide would be on the tracks themselves.
The glow of an engine-mounted headlight would be diffused and dull, and the soldiers would be paying careful attention to the rails. So he felt safe using a small hatchet to hack through two of the dry, old crossties, chop a shallow ditch in the railbed, lie on his back, and have Grey cover him and his sack of C-4 with snowleaving an arm-thick tunnel on the side so he could breathe. After interring Newmeyer nearby, Grey hid behind a boulder, far from the train; when Squires and Newmeyer tackled the two cars and the fireworks started, Grey would move on his target, the engine.
Squires had heard, then felt, the drumming approach of the train. He hadn’t been nervous. He was below the surface of the rails where even the cowcatcher, if there was one, wouldn’t touch the snow piled on top of him. His only concern was that the engineer see the tree too soon or not see it at all and collide with it. In the latter case, not only would the train be damaged but the wheels would kick the tree back and over him, in which case he would be, as he’d joked to Grey, “ground Chuck.”