“From the looks of her, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Rags said. “It’s a nasty wound, boss. She lost a chunk of muscle most of the way down to the bone. We’ll have to keep her on morphine the whole way there. She’ll need surgery when she gets back, and physical therapy after. I don’t think she’s going to remember much about the next few days. But she’ll make it.”
Maines nodded. “Good to hear. Question is what to do about that idiot back at the station.”
“Nothing we can do,” Pitkin replied, disgusted. “Director of national intelligence put him in there, nobody below him can pull Rigdon out. But I’d bet after this, none of us are going to be down here very long. Stryker just proved that our best asset is a double agent for Chávez. We’re probably all burned now. We might as well not bother coming back once we cross the border.”
“Roger that.” Maines looked down at Kyra’s face one last time, then leaned back against the van’s metal bulkhead and closed his eyes, the tension starting to drain from his own body. Seventh Floor idiots at Langley, he raged to himself. No, not just there. At Liberty Crossing and the White House too. Making a political donor a station chief. They don’t care about who they put in front of the guns. They just want to run their little wars and push their little armies around. We’re all just cannon fodder… loyalty only running in one direction. Didn’t used to be like that, and no way to fix it. No way at all.
Maines opened his eyes and listened to the rain pounding on the thin metal walls of the van and the broken asphalt under the tires. “SEBIN know all of us now, thanks to Rigdon. Might as well not bother coming back once we cross the border,” he repeated, his voice quiet.
Fools. They’re all a bunch of fools up there.
There were more borders in the world than the ones on the maps.
CHAPTER ONE
General Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov kept a steady pace as he walked through the abandoned streets, though not fast enough to satisfy his impatience. He could not walk faster, not anymore. The cushions between several of his vertebrae were eroding, so the doctor had said, and walking any serious distance was agony. He had taken the painkillers before setting out this morning, but they weren’t up to the task. He ignored the pain as much as his discipline allowed, which was very little.
The road was familiar. That wall of trees to his right hadn’t been there in his youth, and now, though pleasant on the eyes, it blocked his view of the old buildings he knew were sitting beyond. No matter. Strelnikov hardly was paying attention to the scenery. Vogelsang brought back memories thick as the flies swarmed these woods during the summers. He had been stationed here in his youth, when the first Soviet nuclear base outside of the Rodina had sheltered fifteen thousand soldiers and their families. It had been a lively place, an entire Russian town cultivated inside East Germany, where the signs all had Cyrillic letters and children had always been running between the buildings, some to the cinema, others to the school or the playground.
Now Vogelsang was a desolate waste, empty and crumbling, with trees growing up through the floors of some of the buildings. Grass erupted in straight lines through the concrete seams of the open spaces, and the buildings were all turning a uniform gray as their paint eroded. There was hardly an intact window anywhere, though most still had metal bars covering the openings. Doors were missing or hanging open. The wind made an ugly sound as it passed through the structures, the cracks in their facades creating a symphony of whistles and moans that combined in random tunes. The Germans wanted to level this reminder of the days when they had been in bondage to his country, but it seemed like nature was determined to do it first.
Why meet here? he wondered. The old general’s knees had quivered when he’d recovered the meeting instructions that his CIA handler had left at the dead-drop site in Moscow. He’d had to read them twice, but there had been no mistake. Was it all coincidence, or did the CIA know his history? If that, what purpose could they find in calling him here? That was a question they were going to answer before he would answer any of theirs.
He stopped to orient himself, trying to remember which decrepit building was which, and his old mind wandered. His memory of the place became as real as the world around him and for a minute the pain in his back was gone. Strelnikov recognized the old theater across the intersection, where he had met his wife. He’d courted Taisia here and they’d dreamed of building a dacha a few miles north to retire in the German woods—
Foolish old soldier, he cursed himself. “No time for that,” he muttered. Maybe after the meeting.
He found the building after another half hour’s walk. The base commandant’s office had been a high-class facility in its prime. Now it was a shell, but good enough for a clandestine meeting, he supposed. He trudged up the small flight of concrete steps onto the landing, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.
The loop came down over his head. Strelnikov thought it was a garrote, and he was sure a metal wire was about to crush his windpipe and choke off his air. But the attacker pulled it short and Strelnikov felt a fat cotton rope force itself between his teeth, to stop him from biting down.
In that instant, Strelnikov knew that the man behind would not kill him, not in the next few minutes anyway.
One hand pushed his head forward and down while others seized his arms and pulled them high over his head, spreading them like a chicken’s wings flapping in the air. The pain surged in his shoulders, narrowing his vision into a black tunnel, and for a moment he was sure the men would keep pulling until the rotator cuffs tore, but finally they stopped before he passed out. More hands stripped his coat and shirt from his body. The Russian general offered no protest.
There are no suicide pills hidden in my clothes, young comrades.
When he was stripped to the waist, Strelnikov’s arms finally were allowed to fall free. The men behind him pulled a hood over his head and suddenly he was blind.
His pants were pulled down to his ankles and Strelnikov was pushed down to sit on a stool. His shoes were pulled from his feet. More unseen hands covered with latex gloves searched his body, leaving nothing untouched. His captors forced him to stand, then bend over.
You will find nothing in there either, he assured them in his thoughts, but Strelnikov didn’t bother saying the words. He had no plan to end his life on his own terms, but his promises would carry no weight with these men and he held his silence. Strelnikov had known the cavity check would be coming, but it was painful all the same. Suicide pills were small and the men were thorough, if not gentle. The rope in his mouth was a convenient outlet for that particular pain, and Strelnikov bit down hard until the clinical search was finished.
He was pulled by his arms, pushed around corners, and marched in circles until he could not longer orient himself by memory. They dragged him forward and up a staircase, then into some room, and he heard a door close behind. He was made to dress in what he knew to be a blue jogging suit. His modesty restored, his assailants removed the hood. The men wore no masks and Strelnikov knew soldiers when he saw them. The hair, the bearing, the efficient manner told him that these men were Special Forces.