Red Templar

23

The two men jumped off the Trans-Siberian Express just as it slowed to begin the sharp curve past the small village of Chandrovo. They swung down on the long steel handrails on either side of the doorway, dropping down in a roll on the cindered track bed, then scrambled into the ditch. They hunched low as the train rumbled past in the early-dawn light. Apparently no one had seen their escape.

“Not so bad.” Eddie grunted, getting to his feet.

“Sure,” said Holliday. “We just jumped off the Trans-Siberian Express in the middle of nowhere after breaking a young lady’s neck.”

“Companero, it was I who broke the young lady’s neck, and she was holding a pistol in our faces.”

“True enough,” said Holliday. They watched as the train disappeared into the distance. “I wonder how long we’ve got.”

“They will look for the provodnitsa and perhaps find her. The police were to be waiting at Kirov. According to the schedule they will not arrive there until ten o’clock. At best we have three hours, but I would not bet on it.”

“So what’s our best bet for getting to Yekaterinburg?”

Eddie pointed to the west across a series of rolling fields. In the distance, perhaps a mile away, Holliday could see the bright gleam of water. “The Volga,” said the Cuban. “It flows to Kazan. Perhaps we can catch a local train there.”

“What are we supposed to do, swim?” Holliday asked.

“You didn’t study Russian geography in school the way we Habaneros did.” Eddie grinned. “It is the Volga. We will find a boat there; I guarantee it.”

“Lead the way,” said Holliday. They climbed out of the ditch, ducked under the farmer’s fence and headed for the distant river.

* * *

Whit Havers knocked on Assistant Deputy Director of National Security J. Hunter Kokum’s office door-located directly across from General Temple’s own office on the main floor of the West Wing-then stepped inside. Kokum, thin and gray, sat behind his desk, flipping through red-tabbed security reports, his trademark scowl on his face.

“What?” Kokum asked without looking up.

“Report on Black Tusk,” said Whit, using the appropriate code name pulled from the classified security computer file for the present operation in Russia.

“Any word?”

“Yes, sir, the asset was contacted in Amsterdam and agreed to take on the contract. Assuming that the targets would not be using regular air transport to reach their destination, he waited in the appropriate Moscow train station for the targets to appear.”

“And did they?”

“Yes, sir, at approximately seventeen hundred hours local time yesterday. They purchased a second-class compartment and boarded the train a few moments before it was to depart.”

“The asset is traveling with them?”

“No, sir. He saw them onto the train and then flew on ahead. He’s already in Yekaterinburg.”

“And if the targets leave the train before then?”

“Yekaterinburg is their destination one way or the other. It doesn’t really matter how they get there.”

“You seem pretty sure of yourself, Havers.”

“It’s logical, sir.”

“When you’ve done this for as long as I have you’ll come to understand that logic has very little to do with intelligence matters.”

“Yes, sir,” said Whit.

“What about Ducos?” Kokum asked. “You have the Frenchman under surveillance?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s he up to?”

“He appears to have gone on vacation, sir.”

“Where?”

“A town at the edge of the Pyrenees. A little village with an old castle on a hill. Montsegur, I think it’s called.”

“Find out about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Enjoying your first assignment as a case officer, Mr. Havers?”

“Yes, sir,” Whit answered-what the hell else was he supposed to say?

“Know why we have case officers for projects like this, Mr. Havers?”

“To oversee the operation,” answered Whit.

“That’s part of it, certainly, but it’s not the most important part, Havers.”

“No, sir?”

“No, Havers. The real reason is to have someone to flush down the shithole when the whole thing comes apart.”

Yevgeni Ivanovich Barsukov, imprisoned head of the notorious Tambov Gang of St. Petersburg, lounged in his cell at Vladimir Central Prison, smoking a British Senior Service cigarette and reading an American edition of TIME magazine.

On the table beside his comfortable upholstered chair was a large goblet of freshly squeezed orange juice and a lightly toasted English muffin slathered with butter and Dutriez Bar-le-Duc red currant jam.

At fifty-eight, Barsukov looked at least fifteen years younger. His graying hair was dyed the same brown it had been all his life, his neatly trimmed mustache and Vandyke beard colored to match.

He wore contact lenses rather than submit to spectacles, and although he had thickened slightly through the middle during his time in jail, he worked out several times a week and lifted weights on occasion. It was hot in the cell, and Barsukov was stripped to the waist, the five stars tattooed on each shoulder and the large crucifix across his chest clearly visible. Even if an inmate had never met Barsukov, the tattoos would tell the man that Barsukov was “prince of thieves,” a man of great power and position.

The cell was large, twenty feet by thirty or so, with four tall windows facing east. Most cells at Vladimir contained six inmates, but Barsukov shared with only one other, Sergei Magnitsky, his bodyguard and private chef. At the moment Magnitsky was preparing Barsukov’s breakfast of oladyi pancakes and sausages with a pair of George Foreman grills kept on one of the broad concrete windowsills.

Barsukov was serving a fourteen-year sentence for fraud and money laundering. Magnitsky had been convicted of no crime but had simply joined his boss in prison out of choice. In fact, both Barsukov and Magnitsky had committed murder many times over during the course of the last twenty-five years, but neither man had ever been convicted.

By Western standards, Barsukov’s lifestyle seemed wildly at odds with being incarcerated in what was without a doubt the most dangerous and violent prison in the Russian Federation, but Barsukov was more than the leader of a major gang outside the prison-he held the unofficial rank of smotryashchiye within the prison. If a prisoner needed an argument settled or was experiencing other problems, he would come to Barsukov, who served as the “watcher” or mediator, often the only thing between total chaos and a prison that ran on an even keel.

As Magnitsky waited for the sausages to cook he brought his boss a fresh cup of his preferred dark arabica coffee. Barsukov took an approving sip, then placed the cup on the side table beside his goblet of orange juice. He butted his cigarette, picked a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip, then took up his cell phone. From memory he dialed a number; he was old-guard, rarely writing anything down, and never committing a name or a number to the memory of an electronic device. The line rang twice before it was answered.

“I am looking for Father Deacon Ivan Yevseyevich Veniamino; is he there? No? Then perhaps you can give him a message for me; my name is Vladimir from St. Petersburg. That’s right. Please tell Father Deacon Veniamino that the bells should be rung in turns tonight. Yes; the bells should be rung in turns.”

He flipped off the phone and dropped it onto the table. Magnitsky would take it apart and dispose of it later.

“Come on, Sergei, those sausages must be done by now.”

“Coming right up, boss.”

It took them the better part of an hour to reach the shallow banks of the wide, slow-moving river, and another twenty minutes to find a short, waterlogged pier jutting drunkenly out into the water, built on rusted, half-submerged fifty-gallon drums. A long, high-prowed rowboat was tied up loosely to the pier. Several inches of water in the bottom of the boat smelled of old fish and dead worms, but it seemed solid enough. There was a wooden box of fishing tackle-very heavy line, big three-barbed hooks and below-the-surface floaters. There were also two pairs of heavy work gloves in the box and a ball-peen hammer, probably for killing whatever fish they caught.

“Sturgeon poachers,” said Eddie. “We read about them in school. They fish for the big female sturgeon, then dye the eggs black to make look like beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea. Fish can be an easy hundred pounds, even more.”

Eddie sat down at the oars, and Holliday unlooped the rope from the pier, then settled down by the transom. Both men pushed off, and in a few moments they were well out into the swirling currents of the dark river, Eddie doing little more than guiding their passage. The river was quiet as they moved through the early-morning mist, the silence interrupted only by the sounds of waterbirds by the shore taking to the air. After the constant clatter of the train it was a peaceful change. Holliday vaguely remembered a scene from The Great Escape, one of his favorite movies from the early sixties. Charles Bronson and John Leyton casually pick up a rowboat on the shores of the Danube and calmly row to safety. If it were only that easy.

They switched positions every hour or so and, taking the current into consideration, by noon Holliday figured they’d moved about fifteen miles or so downriver.

“How far to Kazan?” Holliday asked, getting behind the oars once again. Eddie settled by the transom, looking downriver.

“Perhaps fifty kilometers. I’m not really sure.”

Holliday rowed, his tired muscles already complaining. The mists were gone and a chilly breeze was blowing across the river, setting up little storms of ripples that he had to fight against to stay in position. After fifteen minutes or so Eddie suddenly told him to pull for shore.

“Why?” Holliday asked.

“I saw something,” said Eddie.

Holliday looked back over his shoulder, but all he could see was a stubbled field that had long since been harvested and a large, well-worn barn with an equally worn sign in large, flaking white letters on the side. The rowboat nudged the muddy bank.

“We may be in luck, I think,” said Eddie. A straight dirt road led directly to the barn’s big double doors. The Cuban pointed to the sign on the barn at the edge of the farmer’s field.

“I don’t get it.” Holliday shrugged, staring at the incomprehensible assortment of Cyrillic letters.

“Yuriya kul’tur pyli sluzhby,” said Eddie, grinning from ear to ear.

“You got me. I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“The sign says, ‘Yuri’s Crop-dusting Service,’” Eddie replied. He grabbed the hammer from the box of fishing tackle and stepped out of the boat. He climbed up the riverbank, heading for the barn. Holliday was right behind him.

Reaching the barn, Holliday saw that what he thought had been a dirt road was actually a short runway, less than two hundred yards long. Eddie stood at the barn doors. They were locked securely with a large brass padlock. The hasp, however, was screwed on the outside of the door, and it took only a few whacks with the hammer before the hasp had splintered away from the door. Holliday looked around. There was a cluster of farm buildings in the distance but they were a good mile or so away.

Eddie hauled open the barn doors and stared. “?Absolutamente perfecto!”

To Holliday it looked like a biplane left over from the First World War. The rust-colored primer and mottled brown paint on the aluminum hull were worn down to the metal in some places, and the fat rubber tricycle tires were totally bald. Spray nozzles lined the trailing edge of the lower wings, and there was an even larger nozzle directly behind the single, four-bladed rotary engine.

“What is it?” Holliday asked.

Eddie stepped up to the aircraft, running his big hand over the engine nacelle like a man examining a racehorse. “She is a Kukuruznik, a Maize Worker. Her real designation is an Antonov An-2. They used to use them a lot in Cuba but now there are only a few. There is even one of them in the Air Force Museum in Habana.”

“I’ll bet,” said Holliday. “Can you fly it?”

“Pero por supuesto, mi amigo-of course I can fly it.”