Scott started packing a bag for Washington. Radford’s summons, like everything about him and the SRO, was a mystery. Black ops and a secret budget to carry them out gave Radford enormous power to influence events around the world. Like the Yellow Sea operation. Scott shuddered inwardly. It had been a nightmare. And even though the board of inquiry had exonerated him, it had not erased the uncertainty about his fitness to command a nuke that lingered in the minds of many of his superior officers. Maybe the summons from Radford would change some minds.
Scott finished packing, then looked around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. His gaze settled on the door to the spare bedroom, which held boxes filled with the remnants of his former life as a husband. He kept the door closed so he wouldn’t be reminded of it. Yet, it was hard not to be, especially when he heard the couple next door arguing, their fights punctuated by exploding crockery.
Not like the Scotts, he thought. They had always fought their battles in thundering silence.
The memory of the last time he saw Tracy was burned in his brain. Her lovely wide mouth a tight, angry slash, she had held him in a withering gaze, violet eyes dark with anger. To avoid a scene when Rick arrived in his new Corvette to pick her up, she had aimed her cell phone at him like a gun and screamed, “Get out! Get out or I’ll call the police.” When Scott returned the next morning, Tracy was gone.
That night Scott dreamed he was looking through a periscope at a North Korean frigate. Her twin stacks vomited smoke as she swung around and charged. Christ, they’ve spotted us! In a heartbeat the frigate’s bow began to fill the periscope’s field of view. Fear rippled through his guts. Too late now to run for it: He was committed; the SEALs had to be recovered. He had to fire torpedoes, had to save the men, but his orders went unheeded, shouted down by Tracy yelling, “Get out!..Get out!..Get out!”
2
Thick clouds pressed down on the golden spires and gilded domes of the imperial city. A snarl of traffic wormed around Moskovsky Station at the Square of Insurrection, with its tangle of southbound rail lines, trolley buses, and trams. On Nevsky Prospekt the traffic inched past a narrow street, at the dead end of which was a scrubby car repair shop surrounded by rusty Volgas, Moskvichs, and Zhigulis.
Parked out of sight in a lot next to the shop strewn with crumpled fenders and car doors was a burgundy BMW sedan and a gray Volvo station wagon.
Alikhan Zakayev warmed himself at a kerosene heater in an unoccupied bay of the shop. Greasy tools, engines, and dismantled transmissions littered the floor and workbenches. Zakayev, a smallish man, wore a cashmere navy topcoat like a cape over a double-breasted suit. His hooded eyes took in several thickly built, unshaven, menacing-looking men sitting on a bench. One of them stroked a thin black-and-white cat happily kneading his pant leg. Another man toyed with a SIG 220 .45 pistol equipped with a laser sight, its red dot coursing over walls, ceiling, and Zakayev’s body.
“Put that away,” Zakayev said.
The SIG disappeared instantly.
Zakayev didn’t like the flamboyant display of arms for which his followers had a penchant much like their penchant for expensive German cars. Zakayev’s taste in cars ran more to Volvo station wagons.
Zakayev touched his pencil-thin mustache and said, “What are you doing?”
A beautiful young girl perched on a stool, her leather miniskirted bottom protected from grease by a clean shop rag, looked up from a thin paperback book. “Reading.”
“You can read later.” Zakayev jerked his head in the direction of a storeroom off the main part of the shop from which a desperate keening sound emerged. “Find out what’s taking so long.”
The girl was very tall and had huge, heavily made-up eyes. She had on dark purple stockings and spike-heeled boots. She strode across the shop on a pair of long, wonderfully shaped legs and, with a handkerchief to her nose and mouth, entered the storeroom only to emerge a moment later.
“He says it is no use,” the girl said from behind the handkerchief.
“No use?”
“See for yourself.”
Zakayev stepped gingerly across the shop floor, avoiding patches of grime and oil. He entered the store room. The strong smell of shit and piss shocked his nostrils, but he ignored it. He couldn’t ignore another smelclass="underline" burned flesh and hair. A naked man built like a bull hung by his wrists, which were bound with wire, from the hook of a chain fall rigged from a ceiling beam. Mechanics employed the chain fall to lift engines out of cars; now it held what looked like a charred side of beef.
The bull had been badly beaten and his hair and scalp had been burned away, leaving only a blackened skull. Zakayev’s eyes went to the man’s groin, where his genitals had been. What he saw was the charred stump of a penis and carbonized testicles. That he was still alive was a tribute to his physical condition or perhaps all the vodka he drank.
Another man, a huge hairy ape wearing dark glasses and with a black cloth band wound around his head, stepped back from his work. He had on a leather apron over black clothes and in one hand held an acetylene torch, its roaring tapered blue-white flame capable of biting through case-hardened steel.
Sweat glistened like diamonds on the ape’s forehead. He shrugged and thumbed the gas valves closed.
The flame sputtered, popped, died. “You won’t get anything else out of him, General.”
“So it’s the Winter Palace.”
“He swore it. And I believe him.” The ape looped the torch and hoses over a pair of gas tanks lashed to a hand truck. He wiped sweat from his eyes.
Zakayev gazed at the bull — what was left of it — hanging from the hook. The stench was overpowering.
It reminded him of another time, in Chechnya. He and his men had waited all night in a soaking drizzle, hidden in rubble off the main street in Grozny where it intersects the city’s main square and the Sunja Neva.
To their rear was Minutka Square, where refugees came to seek family members and buy food and medicine, and which Russian forces repeatedly attacked with artillery and air strikes. After more than eight years of fighting, thousands of Chechen civilians had been killed there.
The Russian assault unleashed at dusk had left more than two dozen women and children mangled in their own viscera near the market, which had been reduced to a pile of broken sticks and mortar.
Zakayev assumed that Russian Spetsnaz — special forces — would launch a follow-up probe to assess the damage. He looked around at his men, most of whom were young enough to be his sons. Gripping their weapons, eager for revenge, they huddled against the cold. It was a spectral scene: a jagged landscape lit by yellow gas flares from broken pipes, smoke blacker than night roiling skyward.
Nothing moved but a few stray cats and dogs and a homeless old man on crutches seeking shelter.
He heard it first. “Listen.”
A snorting diesel engine. A Russian BTR-80 armored personnel carrier poked its camouflaged boatlike prow around a sharp bend in the road and rocked to a halt. The BTR’s turret, sprouting machine guns, smoothly traversed the killing field. Zakayev silently urged the Russians on. He knew they were wary, especially at night.
Another snort and the BTR inched forward, its big tires throwing off clods of mud. Perhaps these Russians were new arrivals and still fearless or just plain stupid. Whatever, Zakayev got ready. He stripped a plastic bag from an RPG-7 grenade launcher, pulled the safety pin from the conical warhead, and, shouldering the weapon, poked its nose through an opening in the rubble. He took aim on the lumbering vehicle and, as it drew abreast of his hide, squeezed the trigger.