The Fall of Moscow Station

CHAPTER FOUR

The village of Vogelsang barely qualified for the title. The outpost was a tiny borough, not sixty miles west of the Polish border and home to fewer than a thousand people. Kyra suspected that only the solar-energy farm that dominated the southwestern quarter kept the place on the map. The only other site of interest was a deserted facility to the northwest that the Germans here were trying very hard to forget altogether.

Kyra navigated the Zehdenicker Strasse road that ran through the village center until the small town disappeared around a bend in her rearview mirror. A small railway station made of old brick and flanked by large oaks passed on her left as she paralleled the railroad tracks running north and south.

“There should be a turnoff to the left,” Jon advised, staring at an iPad.

“Paved road?” Kyra asked.

“We’re not so lucky.”

There was no marked crossing, so Kyra turned the truck and drove over the median, bushes scraping the undercarriage and doors until she reached the railroad tracks and bounced the vehicle across those too. She navigated down a slope and onto the cleared dirt pathway that ran southwest along the tree line. The trail darkened under the forest canopy as she made a long turn to the northwest. Kyra stopped the truck after a quarter mile.

“What is it?” Jon asked. The road ahead was open.

“I think we should park back here off the road and walk in through the trees. If there’s anyone in there, they’ll be watching the road.”

Jon didn’t like the idea, but Kyra could see that he had no good argument against it. She pulled the truck off to the side and killed the engine.

Jon stared at the iPad and manipulated the screen with his fingers. “GPS says we’re about a mile off. We could walk it in twenty minutes if we stayed on the road. Stomping through the brush… we’ll probably need an hour at least.”

Kyra shrugged and dismounted from the cab. She hoisted her pack out of the truck bed and fit her arms through the straps. “I’ve got no place to be right now,” she observed. “And it’ll take two at least if we’re trying to be quiet. I hope there’s nobody where we’re going, because it’s going to be pretty hard to walk quiet through all of this.” Jon nodded in agreement and took up his own pack. Kyra took the lead, pushing ahead on foot where their truck couldn’t go, Jon following behind.

The Brandenburg woods were so very like Virginia’s that Kyra wanted to get lost in them, thinking that she might see her family’s home on the James River when she finally emerged. She knew better and chased the childish thought out of her mind. There was a place far less welcoming somewhere down the overgrown path that she and Jon were walking.

After a half hour, they switched and Jon took the lead, trampling down the brush. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he stopped. “What?” Kyra asked, her voice quiet.

“Concrete wall,” he muttered back. Kyra followed his gaze and saw it, a solid obstruction not quite as tall as herself. The gray concrete was stained by weather but still intact. It ran through the woods perpendicular to the open trail to their right before turning northwest and running parallel off into the distance as far as Kyra could see.

“Actually, that’s good for us,” she offered. “We get behind it and the wall will muffle our sound and hide us from anyone watching the road.”

They approached the wall and Jon stopped, locking his hands together to offer the woman a step up. She put her foot in his hands and he lifted her up until she could pull herself over. “How big was this place?” she asked.

“Twenty-five miles on a side, give or take,” Jon replied. He gave himself a short running start up the wall and pulled himself over. “It’s amazing the spy planes missed it. Vogelsang was the Soviet’s first nuclear missile base outside of Russia. Fifteen thousand men and their families were stationed here. They refused to pull out and leave it until ’94, a good five years after the Wall fell.”

The abandoned base checkpoint was another half mile up the road, a small brick cabin. Bricks were missing from the wall, large sections of paint or siding still hanging from the sides. A pair of large Douglas firs stood watch where the Soviet guards had manned the post decades before them.

“I can’t decide whether this would be a good place to meet an asset or not,” Kyra remarked, looking around.

“It’s remote,” Jon offered. “The only people who would stumble onto you would be hikers and hobbyists.”

“Or intelligence officers looking for bad men,” Kyra responded drily. “But that’s the problem… it’s too remote. There’s no good cover story for being at a place like this, so far out. You’re either here because you’re curious, or you’re doing something you don’t want anyone to see. Nothing in between.”

Jon grunted and trudged on.

Reaching the main complex took another forty minutes. The trail broke open into a glade, then into a small city of crumbling buildings that was a horror film waiting to be made. Some of the buildings still looked to be in decent shape at a distance, while others looked like they were one good storm away from coming apart. Every window she could see was broken, whether from vandals or hard weather, Kyra couldn’t tell. On one windowsill leading into a men’s dormitory, a pair of leather boots sat where their owner had left them or some other visitor had replaced them. Massive hot-water heaters sat rusting outside dormitory buildings, turning green and red from oxidation. Murals still decorated the low concrete walls that ran down roads, showing laborers building fortifications and Soviet flags waving in a nonexistent wind. Cyrillic signs still sat upright, directing nonexistent pedestrians and cars toward the different buildings.

A concrete frieze of Lenin appeared as they turned a corner, the dead Soviet founder dressed in suit and tie, with an overcoat being lifted by an unseen breeze. Chunks of the stone had been torn out, and the bloodred background around the embedded statue had dulled with time and weather. “I’m surprised the Germans haven’t knocked that down by now,” Kyra said.

“Give them time,” Jon answered. “From what I read, the government wants to tear this whole place down.”

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Kyra asked.

“No,” Jon admitted. “But I’ve been places that made me feel like this.”

“Like where?”

“Auschwitz, for one. The Holocaust Museum, for another,” Jon replied. “Don’t tell our German hosts I said that.”

“I do know how to keep a secret,” she assured him. “We could look around here for days and not find anything. Where do we start?”

Jon pulled out his iPad, checked the map, then oriented himself by looking at the buildings around them. “We’re here, I think,” he said, pointing at a spot in a large cluster of buildings. He moved his finger to a spot a kilometer or more to the southwest, another small village of overgrown buildings. “Strelnikov had a bad knee, so I’d guess he wouldn’t park far from wherever the meeting went down. The main road leads here.”

Kyra dropped her pack onto the concrete walkway and extracted a folding waterproof map case. She opened it and pulled out an old diagram — a Soviet military map of the Vogelsang facility, offered up by the German government at Barron’s request. She held her smartphone over the Cyrillic words, and watched the portable computer translate the foreign-alphabet print into English letters. She held it up next to Jon’s iPad. “Commandant’s office?” she suggested.

Jon shrugged. “Makes sense that the GRU chairman would take the base commander’s old home for himself, I guess.”

Kyra saw a sign with Cyrillic letters in neat rows, arrows next to the words pointing in different directions. She aimed her smartphone at the words. The sign appeared on her screen, the handheld computer thought for a few seconds, and the Cyrillic letters disappeared, overwritten by English in the same size. The top line read Commandant’s Office.

“That way,” Kyra said.

The commandant’s office was a two-story building with an enclosed red-brick entrance that jutted out from the front. The front steps were half as wide as the entire house, with low brick walls framing the sides. Rusted outlets for lights sat out above the front door, the bulbs long since smashed out. Iron rails topped the entry on three sides, forming a small veranda where the commandant might well have spent his evenings, smoking Cuban cigars and swilling the local beer or something harder shipped in from Moscow. The plaster siding had peeled away from much of the facade, exposing the brown brick underneath. The front door, weathered and split wood, hung open on corroded hinges and Kyra could see through the building all the way to the back. A large dormitory that had housed soldiers of the armored corps stationed at Vogelsang sat off behind some smaller trees a few hundred feet to the right of the house.

“Tire tracks, a few different sets… not sure how many,” Kyra said, searching the ground. “Pretty recent, I think. The ground is still a little muddy from the rain.” She climbed the low steps, stopped, and listened. She heard nothing, not even birds in the nearby evergreens.

“This was probably the nicest home on base, back in the day,” Jon observed. “Creeped out yet?”

“It’s just an old building,” Kyra said with a shrug. Central Virginia, home, had more than its share of abandoned old buildings, some as old as the Revolution itself. She extracted a flashlight from her pack and moved quietly inside.

The walls inside had faired little better than those without. The wallpaper was shredded and large chunks of broken drywall exposed the frames and wiring underneath. Fallen plaster crunched under her boots, and she kicked one of the larger pieces through a hole in the timbers of the floor. It rattled as it fell down a few feet. Kyra looked down.

“Footprints,” she said. “Boots by the look of them, but somebody had a pair of dress shoes.” The dust had been disturbed, mostly by shoes with fat treads, but also a pair with a flat sole.

They searched the ground floor and found nothing besides the signs of recent movement across the floor. Kyra used her smartphone to document them with digital pictures before the analysts moved up the stairs to the second floor.

The first two rooms were no different from the ones they’d seen on the ground floor, more entropy at work on the wood and wallpaper, but the third was what they’d come to see. A chair sat in the corner, a wooden stool in the center of the room. Both had only the smallest bits of dust on their seats. A length of cord sat on the floor next to a black hood.

“Bet you ten dollars this is where they arrested Strelnikov,” Kyra offered.

“Sucker’s bet. I’ll keep my money. The ante is too low to be interesting.”

“You think we should bag that stuff,” Kyra asked, nodding at the hood and the rope.

Jon shook his head. “Just photograph the room. If this is where Strelnikov checked out, then it’s a crime scene, technically speaking. I don’t think the Germans would be very happy with you tampering with evidence.”

Kyra shrugged, and photographed the room and its contents. She stared around, looking for any missed details. “There’s nothing else here. I don’t see anything that could tell us what Lavrov is working on.”

Jon’s gaze had become unfocused and Kyra recognized the thousand-yard stare that he fell into when he was thinking. “That Syrian officer wouldn’t have come all the way out here just to talk with Lavrov,” he said, working the puzzle as he spoke. “They could’ve done that at the embassy, or just over a secure phone. He must’ve come to Berlin so Lavrov could show him something… or give him something.”

“Maybe Lavrov wanted to show him that he’d caught Strelnikov?” Kyra suggested. “Show him that his operation was secure?”

Jon shook his head. “A photograph would have done that just as well. No need for him to see that in person, or at least not to see only that in person. He must’ve come here for something that Lavrov couldn’t just share remotely,” he suggested. “And Lavrov is a technology dealer.”

Kyra saw where his line of logic was going. “You think Lavrov brought him here to demonstrate something, or deliver something? A weapon?”

“Or some other piece of technology.”

“Why not do that in Russia?” Kyra asked.

“Good question. I don’t know,” he admitted. “But if the Syrian did come here for a weapons test or a technology demonstration, where would Lavrov set it up?”

Kyra pulled out the base diagram again. “Assuming he wanted to keep the demonstration secure, he wouldn’t want to do it around here. The base is enormous. Anyone could stumble in from a dozen different directions. There’s no way he could secure the place without bringing in a regiment, and that would be hard to hide from the locals.”

Jon stared at the diagram and put his finger down on a spot to the southwest. “The actual missile base? It would be easier to lock down a smaller group of buildings than this main complex… and it had its own living quarters, workshops, and hard storage bunkers where everything could be secured. If Lavrov wanted a self-contained space where he could mount up some actual security, that would be the place, because it probably was the most secure place on the base when this place was actually operational. But that’s just me doing some mirror imaging. I’m not a Russian intelligence officer.”

“It sounds logical. Let’s hope that Lavrov is a logical man,” Kyra offered in support.

“You think I’m wrong?”

“No, I’m worried that you’re right,” Kyra replied. “And I’m really worried that his people will still be there.”

“Then we call the Germans and let them clean the place out,” Jon advised. “Maybe everything gets wrapped up nice and neat.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“When have I ever been an optimist?” he asked.

They needed almost another hour to walk down to the missile base. The complex was far smaller than the main base they’d just left, but still large enough to be daunting. They reached the tree line, and Kyra stopped short. “Jon,” she said, quiet. “Up there.”

He looked up. Two wooden poles six meters tall rose from the ground with a heavy metal cable strung between them over a concrete slab on the ground, then fastened to the earth on either side like the guidelines of a tent. A steel girder, rust apparent on its surface even from a distance, hung suspended from the wire over the slab, five meters square underneath. More dark wires on each side ran down to enormous metal cylinders topped with gold ports, and several other wires ran into a concrete bunker buried in a hillside beyond.

“Are those power lines?” Kyra asked.

Jon nodded. “Good bet. Look where they run.” He pointed and Kyra followed the invisible line drawn by his hand to the large silver cylinders topped with gold stubs. “Those look like industrial capacitors.”

“No corrosion on them. Those are new,” she said. “Big ones too. They look like the ones you’d see in a power substation.”

Jon twisted his head, listening. “No buzz,” he said.

“Line’s dead?”

“Probably, but I’m not going to test it,” he replied.

“If this is where Lavrov was set up, he could’ve just pulled some generator trucks up and jacked in right there.”

“I don’t think so,” Jon countered. “Those wires run over to those buildings. Makes more sense that they’d put up a generator inside. It would be quieter than running it out in the open.”

Kyra scanned the close horizon, looking for movement or other signs of life. She saw nothing. “I don’t see anyone.”

Jon nodded, and they walked toward the odd setup. “It’s a test rig of some kind, I think.”

“A test rig for what?” Kyra asked. “I don’t see any kind of blast or scorch marks on anything. And if they were testing bombs or guns, the locals would’ve heard it. We’re not that far from the village back by the rail station.”

Jon pondered the question for a moment. “We should check out the bunkers.”

Kyra took the lead, scanning their surroundings as she walked. She stopped as they approached the building that was the power line’s terminus. “Any idea what this one is?” she asked, nodding toward the building.

“Missile storage silo is my guess,” he muttered.

“Still don’t see anyone,” Kyra noted. “The place is locked up… but the lock looks new from here. Still shines, no rust.”

The bunker was a concrete slab dug into the earth behind, with a flat roof that angled down into sloping sides. Moss covered the top side and was growing down the front wall toward the doors. The concrete was discolored where some kind of dark gray paint had started chipping loose near the top. The two doors in front were metal, rusting into shades of red and green. Kyra’s observation had been correct. The locks on both were silver, free of corrosion.

“Think you can break in?”

“O ye of little faith,” Kyra chided the man. “Wherefore dost thou doubt?”

“As much as I appreciate your talents, you might want to compare your lockpicking skills to someone a little closer to earth.”

Kyra extracted her lockpick set from her pack and set to work. Jon kept up the vigil behind her, scanning the buildings and woods for movement. The woman took less than a minute to pop the lock. She pulled it off, set it on the ground, and opened the door.

“No miracles necessary,” she offered.

“Very nice,” Jon muttered. He stepped inside the bunker and switched on his Maglite.

The bunker’s interior was an open cavern, like a miniature aircraft hangar. The floor was concrete, swept clean of debris, with single row of large cement slabs rising up in a line at regular intervals, each with an identical concave arc cut into the center. “They laid the missiles out on those,” Kyra realized. She looked up and saw a pair of rails running along the roof near the corners. “Chain and pulley system,” she noted. “Would’ve made it easy to lift and lower them when moving them in and out.”

Jon walked toward the far end of the bunker until his flashlight illuminated the back wall. Enormous metal boxes sat on skids, cabled together, with a single power line coming out of the last box on the right and snaking along hooks mounted in the concrete wall toward the entrance. “There are your generators,” he said.

Kyra’s light caught a dark shape by a pair of worktables and benches that ran along the wall opposite the power line. A backpack sat on the floor, the flap on the front hanging loose. She knelt down by it, lifted the flap, and pointed her light inside. “Camera… water bottle… notebook,” she said, moving the contents around. Other odds and ends were gathered in the bottom.

“Longstreet’s, I’ll wager,” Jon suggested.

“That British hiker?” Kyra realized. “Yeah, I wouldn’t bet against that.”

“Anything on the camera?”

Kyra picked up the device, a low-end Canon digital SLR. She searched for the power button, pressed it. “Not working. Battery might be dead. We could take it back to the embassy and get a new one… unless you want to preserve the crime scene.”

Jon looked around with his flashlight. “Something tells me that it won’t be here that long. If the Russians are done with these generators and the capacitors outside, I can’t imagine they’ll leave them here. And if they’re not done with them, they’ll be back.”

“I don’t think we want to be here for that.” Kyra swept her light over the worktables and benches. They were free of dust and tools, with only bits of wire and electronic parts sitting on top. She picked up a calculator, a cheap Hewlett-Packard. She fiddled with it, but it refused to go on. What appeared to be a digital voltmeter fared no better, as did a radio that sat on the floor under the table. “Busted junk,” she said.

Jon frowned. “All of them?”

“Yeah.” Kyra took the battery covers off. “Batteries all look fine. No corrosion.”

Jon pulled the batteries out of the devices and began dropping them one by one a short distance from each other, just a few inches off the table. Each made a solid thumping sound, and several remained upright.

“What are you doing?” Kyra asked.

“When a battery is used, the alkaline inside undergoes a chemical reaction that produces a gas that gets trapped inside the casing. The more it’s used, the more gas it builds up. Drop a charged battery onto a hard surface and it won’t bounce. Drop a dead battery, and the gas trapped in it will make it jump. It’ll usually fall over. Sounds muffled when it hits too,” Jon explained. He held up one of the batteries. “These still have a good charge.”

“So why do we care?” Kyra asked.

“The calculator, voltmeter, the radio… they all have good power supplies, but none of them work. And I’ll bet you that the camera’s battery is fine too.” Jon looked away from the battery in his hands to his partner, her face only half lit by her flashlight. “It’s just a theory, but think about it. Assume Lavrov is doing something up here, something he shows off to the Syrians. We know it’s something that he could transport without drawing a lot of attention. It doesn’t make a lot of noise, if any, but draws a fair amount of power.” He held the battery up again. “And it kills electronics.”

Kyra processed the evidence in her mind. “EMP?”

Jon nodded. “Basic physics… run enough electricity through metal coil connected to a capacitor and you’ll create a pulse that will generate an electrical current inside any computer circuit in range. If there’s enough power behind the pulse, it fries everything. Scientists say that one nuclear-generated EMP at four hundred kilometers over Kansas would make the entire continent go preindustrial in a few seconds. The Syrians don’t have a missile that could do that, but a Scud could reach Israel in a few minutes. Every time the Syrians face off against the Israelis, they get thrashed because the Israelis have better weapons. We sell Tel Aviv all kinds of high-tech gear that the Syrians can’t match, even buying from the Russians. But mount some really powerful electromagnetic pulse bombs on Scud missiles and set them off over the Golan Heights or Tel Aviv, and just maybe the Israeli military gets paralyzed. Same thing could happen to us.”

Kyra looked around. “The lights weren’t out in the village when we came through. If they were testing one of those, it must’ve been a small model.”

“Lavrov wouldn’t have needed to test a big one. EMP bombs aren’t complicated to build. The only real variables involved are the altitude when detonation occurs and how much power is behind the pulse. Maybe Lavrov’s people figured out how to build a more powerful version in a smaller package.”

“What’s the altitude ceiling for a Scud?” Kyra asked.

“For a Scud D? A hundred fifty kilometers, more or less… but they don’t need it to go a hundred fifty kilometers up. If there’s enough power behind the pulse, a kilometer or two above the battlefield will do just fine to kill every unhardened piece of gear dead… or do the same thing over a major city and kill all of the critical infrastructures in a direct line of sight of the device.”

“Strelnikov’s grandfather was Jewish,” Kyra realized. “It was in the file. Maybe he had a soft spot for Israel. He found out Lavrov was sharing EMP tech with the Syrians and came to us.” Kyra pulled out the smartphone and began to photograph everything in sight. Then she picked up the calculator. “Think the Germans would object if I took this?”

“Knock yourself out,” Jon said. “Time to be going, I think.”

They stepped into the daylight. The sun had reached the tops of the Brandenburg woods and the dark would be settling within the hour.

Jon picked up the padlock from the cement ramp where Kyra had laid it and turned his back to the base. He hooked the shackle over the entry doorway latch—

“Jon!” Kyra yelled.

Jon looked up.

Five men were talking toward them. They were dressed in plainclothes, short haircuts, with pistols drawn. They saw the Americans and shifted from a slow walk to a dead run, guns raised. The man on the far left fired and Jon heard the round strike concrete.

Jon dropped the lock, and the analysts ran for the woods, just to the south. More rounds hit the bunker, closer than the first. The men behind them yelled. Russian, he realized. He couldn’t understand their commands, but the cadence and guttural sounds of the language were unmistakable.

He heard their pistols fire over the sounds of his own boots tearing through the grass and leaves. The rounds cracked the air open as they passed by the running analysts faster than sound. Kyra sprinted ahead of him, her breath already getting heavy. She looked back, saw she was outpacing her lumbering partner, and slowed up to let him close the distance.

They reached the woods and crashed into the undergrowth at full speed. The brush and weeds slowed them, and the trees forced them to run in anything but a straight line. Three hundred feet into the forest, Kyra ran up to one of the larger trees and stopped for a second, looking back. Jon caught up with her and looked back. He couldn’t see their pursuers, but their voices carried well enough as they cursed and yelled at the scrub pines and low bushes tearing at their legs and arms.

“Still coming,” Kyra said, her breathing rapid. She pulled her backpack off and tore open a Velcro pocket on the outside. “Which way?”

Jon looked up, and picked out the sun’s direction through the green canopy. “We’re running south. That means the road is that way.” He pointed left. “The truck is a mile down, there.” It would be at least a fifteen-minute run through these woods.

“A mile,” Kyra muttered. She pulled out a Glock 21, the clip already locked in. She racked the slide to chamber the first round. “Maybe we can slow them down.”

A Russian shouted in the distance, not quite so far away now, and the analysts started to run again. “We’re on friendly soil,” Jon yelled. “You’re not supposed to be carrying!”

Kyra leaned around the oak and sent three rounds back at the men behind. “Are you complaining?”

“Nope,” Jon told her. “Just don’t tell the Germans.”

“You keep telling me that.”

The woods were pulling on them, trying to slow them down. Surely it was doing the same for the men behind, but every shout seemed closer than the one before. Bullets whined through the trees around them. He could hear them tearing into the trees, dull thuds and hard cracks, but he could not see where they were hitting. Kyra broke stride, turning and firing as often as she dared, but there were far more rounds coming in their direction than she was sending back.

Jon looked left and saw the concrete wall that bordered the open road. They could jump it, get into the open, and put some distance between them and the Russian hunters before the men realized they had left the woods—

He saw movement beyond the wall. The Russians had seen the road and come to Jon’s own conclusion. Two of their pursuers had moved out to the road on the other side of the wall, flanking them. If they were Lavrov’s men, then they were Spetsnaz, he thought, and they had a clear path to run all the way to the truck. They would certainly reach it before he or Kyra would.

Five soldiers and five guns at least… two analysts and one gun, Jon thought. The odds weren’t hard to calculate. Even if he and Kyra turned west and moved deeper into the woods, the men would almost certainly run them to ground. There wasn’t enough distance between them and their pursuers, and the men behind were in better shape than he was. Kyra was young and fast, but Jon was past his prime.

He saw Kyra go down hard in the dirt ahead of him, stumbling over some growth in the brush. Jon thought for a moment that one of the Russians had finally drawn close enough to be accurate with his sidearm, but the girl scrambled to her feet and pushed off, trying to recover the speed she had lost. He was hardly fast enough to catch up before she was back at her full speed—

— no, not her full speed, he realized. Kyra was running slow so she wouldn’t lose him.

Run faster, old man, he told himself. His body refused to obey. He didn’t have more speed in him to give.

He looked at the young woman, the world moving in slow motion around him.

The enemy was too close, there were too many obstacles between them and the truck. Even without him plodding behind, every tree, every root, every dip in the ground would slow Kyra down. She couldn’t run at full speed over this damp ground. At every step, the earth was pulling at her feet, forcing her to use her strength to pull her feet back up. The road was in better shape, but it was no escape route. If she jumped the wall, the men on the open road would be in her path and they would have a clear field of fire. If she stayed in the trees, the enemy behind her would get into pistol range long before she reached the truck. She would be forced to stop running and find cover, and then the men on the other side of the wall would climb back over into the woods, get in behind her, and that would be that.

For three years, he’d tried to give her, this broken girl, what little he had to offer. He’d been the best friend he knew how to be, which wasn’t much, but she’d taken it and returned more than he’d ever given her.

Kyra needed more time, more space, and she didn’t have it. Maybe he could give her that.

He dug deep and decided he might have enough energy for one more sprint.

Kyra turned and fired again. Jon ran up to her and put his hand on the Glock. “Give me the gun,” he ordered. His words were labored, his lungs wheezing hard.

“What?”

Jon didn’t ask twice. He reached out and put his hand on the weapon. Kyra, confused, released it to him. “Keep running!” Jon yelled. Then he pulled away, running left for the concrete wall.

The Spetsnaz soldiers on the road were twenty yards ahead of them when Jon reached the concrete wall. He ran at the barrier at full speed, sprinted up, and pulled himself over. He hit the dirt on his feet, the mud absorbing some of the impact and the sound. He pushed off and ran after the Russians. The soldiers ahead hadn’t heard the sound of his boots in the wet dirt, their ears filled with the sound of their own gasping breath.

Jon raised the Glock, lined up the sights as best he could with one hand on a dead run.

He’d shot men before, once in Iraq. The dreams had haunted him for years, driven him into depression, and left him unsure whether he could ever kill another person again, even in his own defense. He knew the answer to that question now and he was at peace with the answer. The Russians would probably kill him and the act wouldn’t have a chance to torture him after.

Jon pulled the trigger.

The pistol kicked hard in his hand, the barrel jerking up. The shot was high, his aim thrown off by his own motion. He’d never shot anyone moving on the run before, but he was close enough. One of the soldiers went down as the .45 round punched into his shoulder, his body twisting and his legs collapsing under him.

The sound of the shot reached his companion’s ears just as the man started to tumble to the ground. The second Russian spun around, trying to line up his weapon, but the advantage of surprise had allowed Jon to pull the Glock back down and line up his own. His second shot fired a fraction of a second sooner than his target’s and the round struck the Russian’s chest on the right side, knocking off the soldier’s aim and spinning him as his Makarov pistol fired.

The Russian’s bullet tore into Jon’s right thigh, ripping his pants and spraying blood from the gory hole in his skin, and sent him into the dirt. His vision went blurry from the pain, fire burning in a straight line through his leg. Still, he tried to focus, scrambling to raise his gun and cover the two fallen Russians with the Glock in case one of them wanted to be persistent, but neither man was moving.

“Jon!” He heard Kyra’s voice.

“Keep going,” Jon said. The pain in his leg was sharp and burning even hotter now. The femur was broken, he could tell that much. If the bullet had struck the deep femoral artery or the great saphenous vein, he would bleed out right there in the dirt maybe before the other Russians could reach him and their comrades. “Get to the truck.”

He looked at the Glock. The pistol’s slide had locked open on an empty clip. He didn’t know whether Kyra had another clip in her bag or not.

“No! You’re—”

He couldn’t see Kyra. She was on the other side of the concrete wall. His voice sounded weaker to his own ears now. He was going into shock. He fought it. There were two more pistols on the ground ahead of him. Jon dropped the useless Glock and tried to stand and his leg collapsed under him. He started to crawl through the dirt toward the closer weapon. “Get moving. You have to go.”

“No!” Kyra yelled at him. She’d seen his head go down behind the wall, hadn’t seen it come back up. The Russians behind her were getting closer. She could hear their shouts. If she ran back a few feet, she could sprint up the wall as Jon had and get to the other side. But he was wounded… she could tell that much from his shaky voice. He’d been shot, but where she didn’t know. She couldn’t help him walk and handle the Glock at the same time… and the pain of whatever wound Jon had sustained would wreck his aim. In a few moments, he might not even be conscious.

It didn’t matter. She backed up a few feet to get her running start—

— something arced over the fence and landed in the dirt, skidding toward her. Kyra looked down.

It was a pistol… not the Glock. A Makarov.

Jon had taken out the soldiers on the other side of the wall.

Kyra picked up the Russian firearm. I’m coming, Jon—

She heard another sound, more feet in the dirt on the other side of the wall. The Spetsnaz soldiers had heard the gunshots from the road and jumped over. There was more shooting from Jon’s position. A different sound from the Glock. Jon had shot two men, which meant there had been two Makarovs. Jon had thrown her one and gotten to the other. The Russians fifty yards behind her on the other side of the wall returned fire. She couldn’t see what was happening.

“Go!” Jon said from the other side of the wall. His voice was hoarse now, weak.

Kyra ran to the wall, jumped, and tried to pull herself over with her one empty hand. A bullet hit the stone, sending small shards into her cheek, and Kyra’s reflexes forced her to let go. She fell into the dirt behind the wall, landing hard on her side.

“Jon!” she yelled.

He didn’t answer and she heard no more firing from his position. More shouts in Russian came from the road, closer now. She couldn’t make it over the wall. The Spetsnaz would reach Jon in seconds and they would kill her if she came over the wall, Makarov in hand.

Her training finally took over, crushing her emotions and forcing her to move, her legs refusing her order to stop, instead determined to carry her to safety.

I’m sorry, Jon.

Kyra ran. It was what he wanted her to do, and she hated him for it.

She heard the Russians’ voices grow quieter as she moved farther away. There were no sounds of men crashing through the woods behind her now, no sign they were trying to flank her on the road, no more gunshots. Perhaps the Russian soldiers had contented themselves with capturing one American… or had they killed him? Kyra’s mind rebelled at the thought, trying to force God or the universe to keep it from being true.

Her legs kept moving of their own accord, her body flying over and around the obstacles in her path without the help of her mind, which was still focused on the place behind her where her friend was lying.

She reached the end of the wood line, where the concrete road turned at a right angle to the east. Kyra ran up the wall, pulled herself over, and landed on her feet in the grass on the other side. The truck was down the road another half mile. Her lungs were wheezing, her legs weak rubber. Don’t stop. She heard the order in her head but didn’t know from where it came… certainly not her own conscious mind.

Kyra looked around the corner of the concrete wall back up the road. The sun was behind the trees now, and the shadows had melted into each other. The light would be gone in minutes. She could see no more than an eighth of a mile down the road and there was no one in sight. No yells, no shouts. Kyra pushed herself onto her feet and ran as hard as the adrenaline allowed.

She saw the truck after another three minutes of running, and she didn’t stop until she was standing by it. She fumbled for the keys, almost dropped them. Her hands were shaking harder than she could ever remember. She got the door open, threw her pack and the Makarov onto the passenger seat, then managed to push the key into the ignition. She locked her shoulder belt and fired up the engine.

Kyra sat in the seat, hands on the wheel, and looked up the road. Jon was up there, somewhere, dead or alive she didn’t know. She thought for a moment that she might go after him, drive the truck at full speed, and run over anyone in her way.

Perhaps she could drive back up the road. She wanted to hunt the Spetsnaz, shoot them or run them over. Then she could help Jon crawl into the truck. The nearby village surely had some kind of medical facility, a first-aid kit if nothing else—

Fool, the thought came. Idiot. The Russian men on the road were trained Special Forces soldiers. They outgunned her, and they could simply jump back over the wall if she tried to run them over… no, she wouldn’t even get that close. She’d have to turn the headlights on, to keep from running Jon over on the off chance he was still alive and lying in the road. The Russians would see her coming long before she would see them. One shot into the truck cab and she would be finished.

Jon had taken out two only because he’d managed to gain the element of surprise. In the dark, she would have no chance against them… and Jon wouldn’t have wanted her to try.

Kyra put the truck into gear and U-turned it across the road. She made her way back to the Zehdenicker Strasse road, driving on autopilot, paying no attention to her surroundings. There were no headlights behind her. Her training forced her to notice that much. She turned south onto the highway and continued through the village until she passed the solar farm. Then she found a side road, pulled off, and drove into some farmer’s field, where the truck would be hidden from traffic by more thick woods. Then she stopped, killed the engine, and unbuckled her belt.

She stared into space at nothing, then got out of the vehicle. Kyra walked three steps before falling forward into the grass. Her body started to convulse and she lost her lunch, spewing bile onto the ground until there was nothing left but dry heaves.

Then Kyra fell onto her side, curled up, and cried harder than she ever had, great racking sobs that left her shuddering on the ground, until she had no strength left to move at all.

From the outside, the old headquarters of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate, was remarkable only for its size. The edifice was a decaying nine-story tower encased in glass that loomed over a family of mismatched industrial buildings and the old Khodynka Airfield. There was no beauty in its design or its cold construction, which fact was demonstrated clearly by the new headquarters building to the east. That structure was as modern as any in Moscow, concrete and glass covered in metal, with all the amenities.

Colonel Anton Semyonovich Sokolov would not have admitted it, but he missed Lubyanka. Not for the finer interior of the upper floors or the larger, cleaner office he’d once used in the KGB’s old headquarters when that organization and his own GRU had worked together in a tenuous alliance. Any man would want those amenities again, but the interrogator’s desires ran deeper. It was the spirit of the place that he wished he could recapture here. Lubyanka’s reputation alone had been enough to break most men and women who’d been brought to his room there. Confessions, whether true or not, had been easy to come by then. Not so much now that he had to work in this unremarkable site. “The Aquarium” just didn’t create the same fear in the Russian heart. If his superiors had cared to ask his opinion, he would have admitted that. He would have said that something valuable had been lost, something needed to keep his country orderly and powerful.

Still, there was a job to do, and if the building could not lend him any help, he would have to push on and find other ways when his services were required. There had been little of that in recent years. The unfortunate clientele who had come this way of late had been activists whose crimes mainly had involved discomfiting the political elites, or businessmen who had made the error of thinking that the buyout offers given by those same elites were invitations to bargain, the start of negotiations and not the end. He did not like plying his trade on such people. They were not true threats to the Rodina.

The phone on his old metal desk sounded, a shrill electronic ring. An encrypted call, he saw. He lifted the handset. “Ya slushayu vas.” I’m listening to you.

The caller’s voice was familiar enough. “Anton Semyonovich. You are in good health?”

“I am, General Lavrov, though I fear the flu is coming soon enough,” Sokolov replied. “I catch it every year.”

“Then I will tell you vyzdoravlivay skoreye now,” Lavrov replied. “I trust you are not busy?”

A trick question, always. To say he was unoccupied would have flirted with an admission that he was dispensable. Telling the lie always was safer easier. “Always, but with nothing so pressing today that I cannot shunt it aside if you require my service.”

“Very good,” Lavrov said. “I am coming home, and I have received some information from a new source that we have some unfaithful colleagues in our ranks. The source is very sensitive and touches on a project of unusual importance. I can trust your discretion?”

“Always.”

“I regret that open trials could only threaten the project’s security, so they will not be permitted. I will pass you the names one at a time as I confirm the reliability of the information. I will require you to detain the individuals quickly and with no publicity whatsoever. You will be allowed a small unit of men. I will designate who will assist you with the apprehensions. You will not speak of the operations to anyone, even colleagues within the GRU. This will be entirely compartmented. Your duty will be to locate and detain them, then determine quickly what information they have given up to the Main Enemy. After that, you will be free to dispense justice to each criminal as you see fit, but you will report to me the disposition of each case, after which I will give you the next name.”

The Main Enemy, Sokolov thought. The United States. The CIA. Almost three decades since the Soviet Union had fallen and his GRU leaders still used the same terms and thought the same ways as before. “Ya ponimayu.” I understand. There was no question that the general’s vision of “justice” would be very narrow despite his promise that the interrogator had the latitude to decide matters for himself.

“Ochen’ khorosho. You must not delay for any reason. There will be no time for lengthy investigations now. We must repair the project’s security as quickly as you can move.”

“I can begin today, as soon as you identify the team members. But they must not question my orders, or I will not be able to guarantee you the discretion you desire,” the interrogator warned him.

“I will tell them personally that they are at your disposal,” Lavrov confirmed. “Stand by. You will have my telex with the first name within the hour.”

“Can you tell me how many names are on your list?” Sokolov asked.

“Not yet,” Lavrov admitted. “We are unsure as to the scope of the penetrations. The preliminary information our asset has provided suggests at least three penetrations of the GRU itself, but there could be more. So you must not take on any other tasking from any other officers until I tell you that this operation is complete. But I expect the whole matter should not take more than a few weeks.”

“Yes, sir. I await your orders.”

“Do svidaniya,” Lavrov said.

“Do svidaniya,” Sokolov repeated. The call disconnected, he replaced the phone on its handset and leaned back, already lost in his thoughts. This was all irregular and surely illegal, not that it mattered. There were procedures for dealing with moles, laws for what came after, and Lavrov had just waived them all aside. Why? he wondered. To protect Lavrov’s new source? That was possible. Aldrich Ames, the CIA’s last great traitor, had given up the names of every CIA mole he knew at once, trying to burn anyone who could identify him. The KGB had taken them all out so quickly that the Americans had known immediately what had happened and Ames’s desperate plan had turned on him. His attempt to protect himself had given his CIA colleagues the very evidence they needed to find him. A series of state trials now would surely have the same effect… and yet Lavrov had told him to move quickly. No matter how their assets went dark, through public means or private, the CIA surely would realize that its access was being clamped off.

Did the CIA already know about Lavrov’s source? Was that the reason the old general was demanding such speed and secrecy? That was an intriguing thought. Perhaps Lavrov wanted to catch the moles before the CIA could exfiltrate them or warn them to run, or before some news service could run a story that would warn them just the same.

A race, then? The CIA and the GRU, both running toward the same set of targets, and he would determine which service reached each mole first.

Sokolov felt a small surge of guilt rise in his chest. It was one thing to extract a confession of guilt from the accused so they could be moved along to a righteous sentence, but that was not his task here. Lavrov clearly considered the word of his source, whoever that was, as good as a confession. Sokolov’s only job was damage assessment and control. Locate, detain, evaluate, neutralize. Such clinical words.

His orders were set, but orders and duty were not always the same. Sokolov closed his eyes and began to consider whether his heart and his mind were still one and the same.

Lavrov cradled the phone and stared down at the sheet of paper on his desk. It was double-spaced, neatly typed, two columns that reached halfway down the page. He imagined the CIA would gladly have one of its drones put a missile through his window to destroy the list. He was not yet sure that Maines had given him every name the American knew, but there were enough that the traitor’s former masters in Virginia must be in a panic.

Where to begin? Every person on the paper would be dealt with, and quickly, but the CIA would be conducting an exercise very much like the one he was performing right now. If they could only save a few before the Russian dragnet fell, who would they choose? Who would they sacrifice that others might live? It was a fascinating puzzle of a kind that Lavrov had never had to tackle before.

The young woman from the roof — Maines had said her name was Stryker — could have been very useful to him right now, were she cooperative. The concept of a Red Cell fascinated the GRU head… a group of analysts who, among other things, imagined themselves to be the enemy and tried to think as the enemy did. It was a concept not unknown to his predecessors. The old spy school at Vinnytsia where KGB officers had lived as Americans, shopped at 7-Eleven, and spoken English in homes where they ate roast beef and cherry pie had been a brilliant idea. Even the CIA had thought so. But such techniques had fallen out of use and Lavrov had no training in them.

He touched a finger to the first name. Are you more important to the CIA than the next name? Or the last?

Lavrov shook his head and cleared his mind.

Stryker, the woman… she had seen the test platform at Vogelsang. His men had caught her and her associate emerging from the missile storage bunker. Had she deduced what he had demonstrated there?

Assume that she has, Lavrov thought. That was easy enough. It was his natural inclination to consider worst cases.

If she knew of the EMP, did she know of the other advanced technologies that the Foundation had shared with America’s enemies over the years? It was possible. The Chinese stealth plane had been lost in its first confrontation with the U.S. Navy three years before. The Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group had used a very unusual radar network in the Battle of the Taiwan Strait. Had they been forewarned?

The nuclear warhead the Iranians had been constructing in Venezuela had been captured last year, the covert facility utterly destroyed with a Massive Ordinance Penetrator as neatly as a tumor excised by a surgeon’s laser. Hosseini Ahmadi, the Iranian program’s leader, had been executed on his own plane at the airport, a single bullet to his forehead. It was still unclear who had pulled that trigger and Lavrov hadn’t thought the Americans were that ruthless, but his own sources in Caracas had confirmed that they had been aboard Ahmadi’s aircraft when he’d climbed the stairs, then left just before his corpse had been carried back down.

Assume that she does.

Other operations had come off undisturbed, so the CIA clearly did not know the full scope of the Foundation’s work. But if they knew of the program generally and the EMP specifically, would they not try to stop him from sharing that technology, as they had the others?

Lavrov focused on the paper again, reading each name. Which of you could tell Miss Stryker and her friends of the EMP? Its design? Its location? How we will deliver it?

Would those be the people the CIA would try to save?

Perhaps not… but they would be, he supposed, a very good place for him to start.