"Back to Norfolk right away. Understood." Wholly on instinct, Bob rotated himself in the bed to a sitting position, his bare feet on the floor.
"Very well, Commander." The phone clicked off.
"What is it, honey?" Marty asked.
"They need me back at Norfolk."
"When?"
"Now." That woke her up. Martha Toland bolted upright in the bed. The covers spilled off her chest, and the moonlight through the window gave her skin a pale, ethereal glow.
"But you just got here!"
"Don't I know it." Bob stood and walked awkwardly toward the bathroom. He had to shower and drink some coffee if he had any hope of reaching Norfolk alive. When he returned ten minutes later, lathering his face, he saw that his wife had clicked on the bedroom TV to Cable Network News.
"Bob, you better listen to this."
"This is Rich Suddler coming to you live from the Kremlin," said a reporter in a blue blazer. Behind him Toland could see the grim stone walls of the ancient citadel fortified by Ivan the Terrible-now being patrolled by armed soldiers in combat dress. Toland stopped what he was doing and walked toward the TV. Something very strange was going on. A full company of armed troops in the Kremlin could mean many things, all of them bad. "There has been an explosion in the Council of Ministers building here in Moscow. At approximately nine-thirty this morning, Moscow Time, while I was taping a report not half a mile away, we were surprised to hear a sharp sound coming from the new glass-and-steel structure, and-"
"Rich, this is Dionna McGee at the anchor desk." The image of Suddler and the Kremlin retreated to a comer of the screen as the director inserted the attractive black anchorperson who ran the night desk for CNN. "I presume that you had some Soviet security personnel with you at the time. How did they react?"
"Well, Dionna, we can show you that if you can hold a minute for my technicians to set up that tape, I-" He pressed the earphone tight into his ear. "Okay, coming up now, Dionna-"
The tape cut off the live picture, filling the entire screen. It was on a pause setting, with Suddler frozen in the middle of a gesture to something or other, probably the part of the wall where they buried important Communists, Toland thought. The tape began to roll.
Simultaneously, Suddler flinched and spun around as a thundering report echoed across the expanse of the square. By professional instinct the cameraman turned at once to the source of the sound, and after a moment's wobble, the lens settled in on a ball of dust and smoke expanding up and away from the strangely modem building in the Kremlin's otherwise Slavic Rococo complex. A second later the zoom lens darted in on the scene. Fully three floors of the building had been stripped of their glass curtain wall, and the camera followed a large conference table as it fell down off one floor slab that seemed to be dangling from a half dozen reinforcing rods. The camera went down to street level, where there was one obvious body, and perhaps another, along with a collection of automobiles crushed by debris.
In seconds, the whole square was filled with running men in uniform and the first of many official cars. A blurred figure that could only be a man in uniform suddenly blocked the camera lens. The tape stopped at that point, and Rich Suddler came back into the screen with a LIVE caption in the lower left comer.
"Now, at that point the militia captain who had been escorting us-the militia is the Soviet equivalent of, oh, like a U.S. state police force-he made us stop taping and confiscated our tape cassette. We weren't allowed to tape the fire trucks or the several hundred armed troops who arrived and are now guarding the whole area. But the tape was just returned to us and we are able to give you this live picture of the building, now that the fires have been put out. In fairness I really can't say that I blame him-things were pretty wild there for a few minutes."
"Were you threatened in any way, Rich? I mean, did they act as though they thought you-"
Suddler's head shook emphatically.
"Not at all, Dionna. In fact, more than anything they seemed concerned for our safety. In addition to the militia captain, we have a squad of Red Army infantrymen with us now, and their officer was very careful to say that he was here to protect us, not to threaten us. We were not allowed to approach the site of the incident, and of course we were not allowed to leave the area-but we wouldn't have, anyway. The tape was just returned to us a few minutes ago, and we were informed that we'd be allowed to make this live broadcast." The camera shifted to the building. "As you can see, there are roughly five hundred fire, police, and military personnel still here, sorting through the wreckage and looking for additional bodies, and just to our right is a Soviet TV news crew, doing the same thing we are." Toland examined the television picture closely. The one body he could see looked awfully small. He wrote it off to distance and perspective.
"Dionna, what we seem to have here is the first major terrorist incident in the history of the Soviet Union-"
"Since the bastards set themselves up," Toland snorted.
"We know for certain-at least we've been told-that a bomb was detonated in the Council of Ministers building. They're certain it was a bomb, not some kind of accident. And we know for sure that three, possibly more people were killed, and perhaps as many as forty or fifty wounded.
"Now the really interesting thing about this is that the Politburo had been scheduled to hold a meeting here at about that time."
"Holy shit!" Toland set the aerosol can on the night table, one hand still covered in shaving cream.
"Can you tell us if any of them were among the dead or wounded?" Dionna asked at once.
"No, Dionna. You see, we're more than a quarter of a mile away, and the senior Kremlin officials arrive by car-when they do, that is, they come in from the other side of the fortress, through another gate. So, we never even knew that they were here, but the militia captain with our team did, and he kind of blurted it out. His exact words were, 'My God, the Politburo's in there!"'
"Rich, can you tell us what the reaction in Moscow has been like?"
"It's still pretty hard for us to gauge, Dionna, since we've been right here covering the story as it unfolds. The Kremlin Guards' reaction is just what you might imagine-just like American Secret Service people would react, I supposed mixture of horror and rage, but I want to make it clear that that rage is not being directed against anyone, certainly not against Americans. I told the militia officer who's been with us that I was in the U.S. Capitol building when the Weathermen's bomb was set off, back in 1970, and he replied rather disgustedly that Communism was indeed catching up with capitalism, that the Soviet Union was growing a bumper crop of hooligans. It's a measure of how seriously they're taking this that a Soviet police officer would comment so openly on a subject that they're not all that willing to discuss normally. So, if I had to pick one word to describe the reaction here, that word would be 'shock.'
"So, to summarize what we know to this point, there has been a bombing incident within the Kremlin walls, possibly an attempt to eliminate the Soviet Politburo, though I must emphasize we are not certain of that. We have had it confirmed by police at the scene that at least three people are dead, with forty or so other wounded, those wounded being evacuated to nearby hospitals. We will be reporting throughout the day as more information becomes available. This is Rich Suddler, CNN, coming to you live from the Kremlin." The scene shifted back to the anchor desk.