The night had become very still, he noticed, and bright twinkling stars shone down between scattered clouds. He hadn’t been in the Russian countryside at night, and the deep, dark quiet surprised him. Spooky.
Through an opening in the trees, he saw the rolling fields below. The moon broke through a cloud and revealed a dozen polished obelisks standing like shimmering sentries over the dead. “Borodino.”
Dodson nodded.
Fisher thought he saw something in his rearview mirror. Dodson noticed and looked back through the rear window.
Fisher ventured, “Someone following us?”
“I don’t see anything.” He added, “They’re searching on foot, because they think I’m on foot.”
“Right.”
“I wish you hadn’t left that tire mark in the sand, however.”
“Sorry.” Fisher thought a moment, then added, “This mother can outrun anything in the USSR.” He smiled in spite of himself.
Dodson smiled in return.
Fisher found the car slowing as the slope flattened. He said, “Who’s after you? What did you do?”
“Long story.”
Fisher nodded. “Fucked-up country.”
“Amen.” Dodson studied an Intourist highway map, then slipped it into his side pocket. “You have a city map of Moscow?”
“Under your seat.”
Dodson found the folded map and opened it.
Fisher said, “It’s all in Russian. You know Russian?”
“Hardly a word. Everything was in English. That was rule number one.”
Fisher began to ask something, then thought better of it.
Dodson studied the map. “I did read in American newspapers that there was a new American Embassy somewhere near the Moskva River, but the articles weren’t too specific. I don’t see it here.”
“It’s near the Kalinin Bridge. You want to go there?”
“Ultimately.”
“Okay… we have to cross that bridge on my way to the Rossiya.”
“That’s where you’re staying?”
“Right. I can drop you off at the embassy.”
“I wouldn’t get past the Soviet militia at the gates.”
“Why not?”
“No passport,” said Dodson. He looked at Fisher a moment, then said, “Let me see your passport.”
Fisher hesitated, then drew his passport from the inside pocket of his windbreaker.
Dodson took it, studied it and the visa stapled to it by the light of the glove compartment, then handed it back.
They were nearly out of the pine forest now. Ahead lay copses of bare birch, a few lonely poplars, and the fields of Borodino. A hundred meters beyond the base of the ridge, the Pontiac came to a gradual halt. Fisher looked at Dodson, waiting for instructions.
Dodson said, “If they catch us together, they’ll shoot you.”
Fisher felt his mouth go dry.
“Or worse, they’ll send you to where I just escaped from. So we’re going to part company here. I’m going cross-country to Moscow. You’re going to find the highway and drive there. You’re going to the embassy. I’m going to figure out what to do when I get to Moscow. I may try to contact you at the Rossiya. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“I may try to contact the embassy by phone. I need all the rubles and kopeks you’ve got on you.”
Fisher took out his wallet and removed the one-, five-, and ten-ruble notes. “About a hundred and fifty.”
Dodson took the notes.
Fisher found seventy-five kopeks in his pocket and handed them over.
“Can’t promise I’ll pay you back.”
Fisher shrugged. Fisher didn’t care if he never saw the money or Dodson again. Especially if it meant getting shot. He thought he should have listened to the Intourist lady and stayed in Smolensk.
Dodson glanced back in the rear of the car. “You going to open a farm stand?”
“Huh…? Oh, no. Gifts. You can take what you need.”
“You have candy? Packaged food?”
“Candy in the plastic bag back there. Some peanuts. Snacks.”
Dodson leaned back and retrieved the bag with the name and address of a West Berlin Konditorei stamped on it. “Last outpost of junk food, right, kid?”
Fisher forced a smile. “Right.”
“Okay, listen to me, Greg Fisher. I am going to tell you something, and you are going to listen like you never listened to a prof at Yale. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“My name is Major Jack Dodson. I am an American Air Force officer.”
Fisher nodded. “Air Force.”
“I am — I was — a POW. I was shot down over North Vietnam in 1973.”
Fisher looked at Dodson. “Jesus… you’re an MIA!”
“Not anymore, kid. Listen. I have been held here in Mrs. Ivanova’s Charm School since 1974—”
“Where?”
“That’s what we call it. Don’t interrupt. I am going to give you some important details. You will get to the embassy before I reach Moscow. I may never reach Moscow. But you will. You will ask to speak to a defense attaché, preferably the Air Force attaché. Got that? Attaché.”
“Yes. Attaché.”
Dodson studied Fisher for a long moment, then said softly, “I don’t know what fate brought us together on this lonely road, Greg Fisher, but I think it was God’s will.”
Fisher simply nodded.
“I am going to tell you a very strange story now. About the Charm School.” Dodson spoke and Fisher listened without interruption. Fifteen minutes later Dodson said, “You make sure they understand you and believe you. There are a lot of men whose lives depend on you as of this moment, Mr. Fisher.”
Fisher stared through the windshield with unfocused eyes.
“Are you a patriot, Mr. Fisher?”
“I guess… I mean in the last few weeks…”
“I understand. You’ll do what you have to do.”
“Yes.”
Dodson reached out and took Fisher’s hand, which was limp and wet. “Good luck, and as we used to say on the flight line, God speed.” Dodson opened the door and left quickly.
Fisher sat motionless for a few seconds, then looked out the passenger side window. Major Dodson was gone.
Gregory Fisher felt very alone. In a moment of crystal clarity, he completely grasped the meaning and the consequences of the secret that had just been revealed to him, and an awful fear suddenly gripped him, a fear unlike any he had ever known in his short, sheltered life. “This one’s for real.”
Gregory Fisher got his bearings from the Kutuzov obelisk shining in the moonlight. He found the lane flanked by the monuments to the Russian regiments, then spotted the white limestone museum, and within a minute he was on the poplar-lined road heading toward the iron gates.
Approaching the gates, he saw they were now closed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake—” He hit the accelerator, and the Trans Am smacked the gates, flinging them open with a metallic ring that brought him out of his trancelike state. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Fisher pressed harder on the accelerator as he negotiated a series of shallow S-turns. Coming out of a long turn, he saw the old Moscow road dead ahead. He cut sharply left onto it with squealing tires.
Fisher snapped on his headlights and saw the signpost he’d passed earlier. He made a hard right into the farm lane that led back to the main Minsk — Moscow highway. “Should have taken this road the first time. Right? Did I need to see Borodino? No. Saw War and Peace once…. Read War and Peace too… that’s all I needed to know about Borodino….”
His chest pounded as the Pontiac bumped over the potholed pavement. He could see lights from distant farm buildings across the flat, harvested fields. He had an acute sense of being where he wasn’t supposed to be, when he wasn’t supposed to be there. And he knew it would be some time before he was where he was supposed to be: in his room at the Rossiya — and longer still before he was where he wanted to be: in Connecticut. “I knew it.” He slapped his hand hard on the steering wheel. “I knew this fucking country would be trouble!” In fact, despite his nonchalance of the last eight hundred miles, he had felt tense since he’d crossed the border. Now a neon sign flashed in his head: NIGHTMARE. NIGHTMARE.