Scorpion Winter

Chapter One

Penal Colony 9

Siberia, Russia

The prisoner Pyotr S. lay awake in the darkness, listening to Lev die. The cell was icy cold. Inside Strafnaja Kolonija Dyevyit, Penal Colony 9, a prison so secret its existence was known to only a handful within the FSB’s headquarters in Moscow, even hardened prisoners accustomed to some of the coldest temperatures on the planet shivered in their sleep. The temperature outside was -51 Celsius, 60 below zero Fahrenheit. The prison was a solitary island in the vast forests of the Siberian taiga, covered with snow; still more snow fell silently through the floodlights on the outer fence.

Pyotr listened to the desperate gasps from the bunk above him as Lev struggled for every breath. Once, after midnight, it got so bad that he thought of killing Lev to get it over with. But if one of the suki bitches told on him, it would mean the beating cells. Pyotr waited.

He heard a harsh grating sound as if Lev were trying to say something, and waited for Lev to exhale, only it never came. Pyotr raised his head and listened intently, ears straining for every sound. Inside the crowded cell with eight men crammed into a space designed for two, there were only the usual snores and muffled coughs. Even Fyedka the Belly-who it was said would eat excrement if you put it in a bowl-and his usual racking cough, was finally still.

Carefully, so as not to wake the others, Pyotr slid out of his bunk. He felt his way to the middle bunk above his and put his hand on Lev’s chest. There was no rising of the chest, no heartbeat, nothing. It was like touching stone.

Finally, he thought. He himself had been a prisoner for twelve years now, and Lev had been there longer than anyone. Some said Lev was a prisoner going back to the old Gulag. Once, he’d heard that Lev had been a big shot, a real nachalstvo. But of this, Pyotr knew nothing. Lev had been imprisoned for “activities against the state,” but who hadn’t? What was it Gruishin, his first cell-block leader, a true vor v zakone- thief-in-law-used to say? “Brothers, sometimes even breathing is an activity against the state.”

Pyotr heard someone stir. It sent a ripple of fear through him. Idiot, he told himself. He had waited all night for a chance at Lev’s boots, and now he was frittering his opportunity away. Lev’s boots were made of real felt and still good, while his own were worn through. Gruishin used to tell new prisoners: “You need three things here: food, good boots, and to keep your mouth shut. Anything else and you’re free soon enough.” That’s what the old-timers called dying: going free.

It wasn’t easy pulling on Lev’s boots. Pyotr’s feet had gone numb with the cold. He knew he should stamp his feet, but he couldn’t risk it. Once they were on, he began to feel a stinging in his feet. A good sign, but he would have to be careful. He would have to switch Lev’s boots for his own. Every boot had to be accounted for. He scratched his head. Was there anything else of Lev’s he could use?

The crucifix.

God only knew how Lev had managed to hang onto it all these years. “For my son,” Lev had told him once. That day in the factory when little Sasha had gone after the Musselman with his knife. Crazy little zek. The guards had been furious. After they shot Sasha, they waded into the prisoners, beating them with iron bars, then left them chained outside in the snow. That was the night Big Pavlo, who had taken Sasha for a wife, couldn’t stop his tears and in the morning his eyes had been welded shut forever by the ice. Lev thought he was going to die that night. They all did. He and Pyotr had been chained together. “If I should die, get the crucifix to my son,” Lev had begged him, his teeth chattering like castanets. “Give it to the Armenian doctor, Ghazarian. When he comes on his monthly visit. Promise me.”

Pyotr had promised.

Pyotr reached for where he knew Lev kept the crucifix hidden in a chink in the wall near his bunk. At first he couldn’t find it, but then he felt it with his fingertips. It was a little silver thing, bent and tarnished, that could be cupped in the palm of your hand. He slipped it inside a pocket he had sewn in his underwear. For a moment he considered swapping it to the Adventist for a pack of cigarettes. It ought to be worth at least that, he thought. But then he felt ashamed. Lev had been a good fellow. One who would share part of his meal or a cup of tea with you if you needed it. And if he wanted it to go to his son, well that’s where it should go, Pyotr thought, stepping on one of the suki bitches sleeping on the concrete floor as he headed for the piss bucket.

He watched the steam rising from the stream of urine that began to freeze the instant it hit the piss ice. He would slip the crucifix to the Armenian doctor the next time he came, he decided, touching the fabric over it for luck.

A simple sort, this Pyotr, the CIA’s Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis would later conclude in an emergency PDB report to the President. What the Russians, after a few vodkas, like to call a “Russian soul.” He had no way of knowing that the decision he had just made would launch a crisis that within the CIA would be called the Agency’s “moment of truth” and would force the President of the United States to an action he would think about every day for the rest of his life.