“I don’t know,” Barron admitted. “Could be either one. I wouldn’t put it past him to be playing both sides. You should read his leadership profile sometime. He’s not one to pass up an opportunity.”
“Fine by me either way,” Cooke replied, approving. “I don’t care if he uses us, as long as he’s letting us use him.”
“Let’s hope he’s looking at it the same way,” Barron advised. “It’s one thing to be strange bedfellows. But Russians love their chess and I’m not sure who the pawns are here.”
Lavrov took the long way to the hangar, driving his jeep slowly past the small boneyard of retired MiGs and Sukhois and Ilyushins that sat in a line on the eastern half of the field. He could see them all from his office window, decaying reminders of what Russia had once been. It was an infuriating sight to him. Each of those planes had had its day, the finest aircraft in the world of its time, a terrifying reminder that his country could exert its will where and how it chose. Now they were rusting in place, never to grace the sky again. Oh, the president was making a show of pouring money into new weapons, trying to show the world that the Kremlin was not to be ignored. He was a fool. It was simply more of what Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had all done, and look where that had taken the Rodina. The president had learned nothing from history, grasped no lessons.
Such as this field… there was such history here in this field. Fourteen hundred people had been trampled to death here during a celebration of the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in 1896, soaking the field in the blood of peasants. The czar had cared so little for the massacre that he hadn’t bothered to cancel his coronation ball that evening. It was a day remembered less than two decades later when the Bolsheviks rose up. The man who had shown so little regard for his people found that his people had none for him when the day of execution came. Did the Kremlin even remember what had happened here, and what had sprung from it? Lavrov was sure they did not, else this field would not have been left strewn with weeds and rusting metal and broken asphalt. It would have been a monument, not a boneyard.
Lavrov shook his head. It was a cruel thing, to have a vision that no one shared. To have to manipulate others and fool them into joining a cause was maddening. Why did no one else see what he saw? Grigoriyev did not see it. Maines certainly did not see it. He had hoped that the devushka, Kyra Stryker, would see it. He was not sure why, but that one pained him the most of all. Their conversation on the embassy roof in Berlin had given him such hope. She had read his operation against Maines like a voodoo witch reading the tarot cards. She had divined his entire campaign to strengthen America’s enemies by selling them technologies… but she had disappointed him at the critical moment. She should have seen him for the man that he was, not a greedy arms dealer.
He would go on. All of the great Russian leaders had been lonely men. He supposed that he had been a fool to expect better for himself.
Lavrov’s jeep slowed as it rolled into the hangar, the cargo truck trailing behind carrying men and crates. He killed the engine and stared up at the Mil Mi-26 cargo helicopter being serviced. The truck continued around him to the unloading station and men began leaping from the bed before the vehicle had stopped. The general dismounted and walked across the bright concrete floor to the rear cargo ramp to find the crew chief. The soldier was inside the cavernous metal stomach of the helo, checking the chains and straps binding the cargo boxes to the floor. “How long?” Lavrov asked the man.
The crew chief saluted the general, then rubbed a hand across his face, stretching out the leathery skin wrinkled before its time from abuse of cigarettes and cheap alcohol. “Another hour, I think, General. The cargo is ready, but we have to finish the maintenance checks and then top off the tank. But we will be ready on schedule.”
Lavrov nodded. “Very good. A Syrian friend of mine is waiting for this delivery and he is the impatient kind. I will be in the maintenance office.”
“Yes, sir.” Lavrov trudged down the ramp and exhaled, depressed in his spirit. He looked at his watch and wondered how much longer it would take Sokolov and his men to kill the woman and the other Americans.
The drive from Lubyanka took eighteen minutes. There had been traffic, but Grigoriyev’s motorcade had used lights and sirens to force its way past the civilian traffic and ignored whatever inconvenient laws would have slowed the trip. Cooke saw an airfield to her right, the sun glinting off a series of decrepit fighter planes lined up in a sloppy row. There was no movement on the tarmac, no trucks, no planes fueling. There were no lights in any of the buildings save one hangar near the center, and she wondered why the Russians had let a military airfield in the heart of Moscow sit unused and decaying.
The car turned left and slowed as it approached a security gate. The driver rolled down the window and showed his identification. Cooke heard them exchange words in Russian, then heated arguments mixed with several phrases she was sure were insults. The guard began waving wildly at the line of SUVs and cars behind Grigoriyev’s own.
The FSB director rolled down his own window and motioned the guard to come over. Barron leaned over and began whispering to Cooke, translating the conversation.
“You know who I am?” Grigoriyev asked.
“Yes,” the guard asked.
“Good. Open the gate.”
“Director, I must call my superiors for orders—”
“No, you do not. I am not a military officer, but I am in charge of the security of the Rodina and there are men inside your building who are traitors to your homeland and mine. So you will open this gate and allow this entire motorcade into this facility, and you will not warn anyone about it. If you fail to follow those orders, you will be arrested as a co-conspirator along with anyone else I decide to detain in the next hour, and no military officer in your chain of command will save you. Do you understand?”
The guard nodded, mute.
“Good. Now, again, open the gate.”
The guard returned to his post and spoke to his comrades. Cooke saw the young men look at their car, fear on their young faces. The guard pressed an unseen button and the gate opened, the barricade lowering beyond. Grigoriyev’s driver eased the car forward and the other vehicles behind rolled forward to follow.
“I never thought that fear of Lubyanka Prison would work in our favor,” Cooke whispered.
“Enjoy it,” Barron advised. “I suspect it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
“I am sorry,” Sokolov said. “I cannot help you now. Lavrov knows you are a prisoner and expects me to execute you and your friends. If I do not, he will execute me, I am sure.”
Kyra stared up at the man, trying to judge whether his sorrow was genuine. She thought it was, but she wasn’t sure that Russians expressed their emotions in quite the same way as her own countrymen. “Can you tell me what time it is?” she asked.
Sokolov looked at her, surprised, then at his watch. “It is nineteen forty hours.”
Kyra tipped her head back a bit and stared at the ceiling as she did the math. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to wait an hour.”
“Wait? You ask this as last request?”
“Do Russian prisoners get a last request?”
Sokolov shrugged. “No.”
“Then I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m not Russian. But if you’ll wait an hour, I don’t think you’ll have to follow General Lavrov’s orders,” Kyra advised. “That would be worth your time, if you really are sick of killing good people.”