Stephanie’s thoughts remained fixated on Admiral Alexander Vitruk. They needed to check his war record, his relationship with Lagutov, and with Putin.
‘If Russian troops are on American soil without our permission we need to get them out now, and we’ll be looking for Britain’s support in that,’ said Holland.
‘I would be happy to call President Lagutov to mediate a settlement.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? Swain doesn’t either. It’s not mediation that’s needed. Lagutov cannot get away with this. We can fix it the hard way or the easy way, but for sure we fix it.’ Holland sucked in his cheeks and looked out the window as they crossed H Street and slowed to go into the White House.
‘It might not be Lagutov,’ said Stephanie as the limousine drew up at the front door.
‘He’s the Russian President,’ said Holland. ‘The buck stops with him.’
Secret Service agents took them through to the windowless Roosevelt Room, which lay at the center of the West Wing of the White House. With a long rectangular conference table, it was used for meetings into which the President could drop by from the Oval Office across the corridor. Prusak was waiting for them and was about to speak when Holland said, ‘I’m uncomfortable with them being here.’ He deliberately used the third person. ‘You cannot bundle me up with some foreign leader and an ambassador. That border is under joint US-Canadian command. It does not involve Europe.’
‘Europe may be intrinsic to anything that occurs, sir,’ said Prusak. ‘Whatever is happening out there, the possibility of a mistake or miscalculation is very real.’
Holland jabbed his thumb towards Stephanie. ‘And she wouldn’t have the clearance for what’s going on.’
Prusak betrayed only a flicker of impatience in his eyes. ‘The President has asked that both Prime Minister Slater and Ambassador Lucas be here. She worked with us closely in Moscow. As you know, sir, her ex-husband is Harry Lucas, former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and she was given an extra level of clearance for that.’
‘I need to see the President alone,’ persisted Holland.
‘In fact, the President has asked you all to join him in the Oval Office. I know it’s unusual, but this is an unusual evening. He is about to speak to President Lagutov in the Kremlin.’
SIX
Admiral Alexander Vitruk secured his hat, earflaps down, and encased his face in a sealskin and wool scarf. The helicopter door opened, and he jumped to the ground into a strong wind that howled across the small military base on the island of Ratmonova that the Americans called Big Diomede. A rectangle of low-rise buildings dating back to the 1940s stood in a tiny natural harbor protected by high granite cliffs. There was no runway for fixed-wing aircraft, just a concrete helipad ringed by lights which were piercingly visible then darkened by a swirling blizzard that blinded the eyes and turned the air so cold a man could get frostbite in seconds.
He waved thanks to the pilots and clapped the shoulder of the waiting Colonel Ruslan Yumatov. The wind’s roar made conversation impossible. Yumatov pointed through the blizzard towards the main base building whose front double doors were lit by two overhead lamps. There was urgency in the young colonel’s expression. They stepped into the warmth, stamping snow off their boots.
‘It’s a go, sir,’ Yumatov said, shaking his hat and scarf. ‘You asked I didn’t contact you while airborne. We have one medical M-8 on the island.’
‘With paramedics?’
‘And a midwife and a doctor. We had intercepts on their phones and radios. A native girl, aged fifteen. Akna Ondola. Pregnant. Her life is in danger. Two M-8s and four KA-52s are airborne at the border, waiting your orders.’
The KA-52s were Russia’s most advanced attack helicopters and the M-8 a workhorse troop carrier. Three, in relay, would deliver seventy-two men to the island in a few minutes. Vitruk had flown two thousand miles from his headquarters in Khabarovsk to the closest airbase at Egvekinot and from there by helicopter to the island. Its small helicopter base had never been designed for such activity. More than fifty years old, the buildings celebrated Stalinist military pragmatism, weather-beaten concrete blocks, overheated inside, with a smell of polish and disinfectant and ceilings stained dirty brown by decades of cigarette smoke. Flickering fluorescent lighting strained the eyes. Given time, Vitruk could have pulled it all down and rebuilt. Instead, he had imported a military mobile base with quarters for the extra troops, hangars for helicopters, and a field hospital with a sanitized operating theater.
The old mess room to his left was now the command and control center, facing north-west to the Russian mainland and not across the border. To his right was the base’s main reception room, underused, its design unchanged from Soviet times, with a faded portrait of Nikita Khrushchev on the wall. Vitruk stepped in, hung up his coat, and poured coffee from a table urn, one for him and one for his colonel.
‘Well done, Colonel,’ he said, handing Yumatov the cup. ‘Fast and good work.’
There was a moment of quiet between them. Yumatov at six three was a good half-foot taller than his commanding officer, wiry with a thin sharp face and the physique of a long-distance runner. Vitruk was short for a soldier, stumpy with wide shoulders and hard, unsettled features. Yumatov, not yet forty, had been named as among the most talented officers of his generation. His home, wife, and two children were at the other end of Russia in St Petersburg, and he had to be cautious because he was still building the foundations of his career. Vitruk, on the other hand, at fifty-eight, was divorced and his only daughter had died many years ago. Without family, he craved risk and high stakes and he needed a younger, bright officer like Yumatov at his side against whom he could test his ideas.
Even though Vitruk was in command, they knew that if this operation went wrong they would both be finished, while success would make them national heroes and deliver Vitruk to the Kremlin. Vitruk detected a hesitancy as Yumatov turned his gaze away. ‘Are you with me? Say it now, Ruslan, and leave without consequence. Stay and you will be glued to me and follow my every order or I will gun you down with my own pistol. Is that understood?’
The day after the American presidential election, Vitruk had flown to Moscow to meet President Viktor Lagutov. Thoughtful, balanced, fair, uninterested in money, Lagutov was not the decisive and over-reaching figure Vladimir Putin had been. He was a Putin antidote, delivered by the Moscow establishment to give Russia a period of calm. Lagutov knew he wouldn’t last. Nor did he want to. He was Russia’s breathing space until it craved another strongman.
Lagutov was also Vitruk’s patron, and Vitruk his protégé. Lagutov had spotted Vitruk’s talent when he gave an economics lecture at a college in Khabarovsk, the military city in the region Vitruk now commanded. Vitruk was a Siberian peasant from a broken family. His father was riddled with drink, and the military became his lifeblood. Lagutov later told him that he had identified three qualities — high intelligence, determination, and ruthlessness. But that was a quarter-century ago, and there would always be a moment in the protégé—patron relationship when power shifted.
Lagutov could have met him in the yellow triangular Senate Building, the Russian President’s everyday office, or, worse, the drab Building Fourteen from where the faction-ridden administration ran its monopoly on power. But no — Vitruk was led to the high-domed Vladimirsky Hall in the Kremlin’s Grand Palace, whose opulence underlined Russia’s sophistication and its sense of destiny. In the late tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir I had unified a weak Russia with Orthodox Christianity and expanded and secured its borders. Vitruk was escorted along the deep maroon carpet of the palatial hall while above him, written into the stucco patterns of the magnificent dome, was the insignia that was fitting to his plan. Benefit. Honor. Glory. Dignified and tasteful, with its unfolding sense of space, its marble, arches, and columns, this hall was the nucleus of the whole of Russia. It was a fitting venue for the meeting.