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.