Mirror Image

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Five minutes after the Pentagon intercepted the communication from the Russian jets to their base, Interior Minister Dogin received a call from Air Force General Dhaka's office.

"Mr. Minister," said the caller, "this is General Major Dragun. The intercept craft you requested found no sign of foreign aircraft. Only military and civilian passengers from the train."

"Then the team must still be down there," Dogin said.

"Moreover," Dragun persisted, "the General has asked me to inform you that a train you commandeered in Vladivostok has been spotted at the bottom of the Obernaya Gorge, east of Khabarovsk."

"In what condition?" Dogin asked, even though he knew the answer. Damn Orlov and his team, he knew.

Dragun replied, "The train has been destroyed, utterly."

Dogin's mouth opened as though he'd been punched. It was several moments before he could draw breath to speak. "Let me talk to the General," he croaked.

"Unfortunately," said Dragun, "General Dhaka is in a meeting with representatives of President Zhanin. It will be quite some time before they're finished. Would there be a message— Mr. Minister?"

Dogin shook his head slowly. "No, General Major. There will be no message."

"Very good," Dragun said. "Good afternoon, sir."

Dogin slashed the cradle with the side of his hand.

It's over, he thought, all of it. His plan, his dreams, his new Soviet Union. And when Shovich learned that his money had been lost, his life would be over as well.

Dogin lifted his hand. When he heard a dial tone, he buzzed his assistant and asked him to get Sergei Orlov on the phone.

Or will he avoid me too? Dogin wondered. Maybe the Soviet Union had returned, though not in the way he'd expected.

Orlov came on immediately. "I was about to phone you, Minister. There's been a shoot-out in the museum. Colonel Rossky is in very critical condition, and one of his operatives, Valya Saparov, has been slain."

"The perpetrator—?"

"An agent who came in via Helsinki," said Orlov. "She escaped into a crowd of striking workers. The militia is looking for her now." He hesitated. "Do you know about the train, Minister?"

"I do," said Dogin. "Tell me, Sergei. Have you heard from your son?"

Orlov's voice was cosmonaut-professional. "There has been no communication with the people from the train. I know they were taken off— but I don't know about Nikita."

"I believe he's all right," Dogin said confidently. "There's been so much carnage, like in Stalingrad. Yet one or two flowers always survive."

"I hope you're fight," said Orlov.

Dogin took a deep breath, trembled letting it out. "I appear to be one of the casualties. I, General Kosigan, perhaps General Mavik— the ones who didn't stay to the rear. The only question is who will get to us first, the government, Shovich, or the Colombians who gave the money to him."

"If you go to Zhanin, you can request protection."

"Against Shovich?" Dogin snickered. "In a country where one hundred American dollars can buy an assassin? No, Sergei. My fortunes burned with the train. It's ironic, though. I hated the gangster and everything he stood for."

"Then why, Minister, did you ever get involved with him? Why did so many people have to suffer?"

"I don't know," Dogin replied. "Honestly, I don't. General Kosigan convinced me we could move him aside later, and I wanted to believe that— though I never did, I suppose." His eyes ranged over the old maps on his walls. "I wanted this so very much… to bring back what we've lost. To return to the time when the Soviet Union acted and other nations reacted, when our science and culture and military might was the envy of the world. I suppose, in retrospect, this was not the way to do it."

"Minister Dogin," said Orlov, "it could not have been done. Had you built this new union, it would have fallen. When I returned to the space center in Kazakhstan last month, I saw the bird droppings and feathers on the staircases, and the boosters covered with plastic that was covered with dust. And I ached for a return to the past as well, to the era of Gagarin and the time when our space shuttles, the Burans, were going to allow us to colonize space. We cannot prevent evolution and extinction, Minister. And once it has occurred, we cannot reverse it."

"Perhaps," said Dogin. "But it is in our nature to fight. When a man is dying, you do not ask if a treatment is too expensive or too dangerous. You do what you feel must be done. Only when the patient has died, and reason has replaced emotion, do you see how impossible the task was." He smiled. "And yet, Sergei— yet I must admit that for a time I thought I was going to succeed."

"If not for the Americans—"

"No," said Dogin, "not the Americans. It was just one American, an FBI agent in Tokyo who fired at the jet and forced us to transfer the money. Think of it, Sergei. It's humbling to think that one unassuming soul changed the world where the mighty failed."

Dogin was breathing easier now. He felt oddly at peace as he reached to the right and opened his top desk drawer.

"I hope you will stay on at the Center, Sergei. Russia needs people like you. And your son, when you see him— don't be too rough with him. We wanted to recapture what we once had… and he wanted to see it for the first time, outside the history books. Though the methods may have been questionable, there was no shame in the dream."

Replacing the receiver, Dogin looked at the map of the Soviet Union in 1945, and continued to look at it through clear eyes as he put the barrel of the Makarov against his temple and pulled the trigger.