Duel of Assassins (23 page)

He looked down at the scattered movement of the clock. And,
as too often happened, he found that the world’s insidious problems had
followed him inside his refuge. The truth was, of course, that despite the
clever trappings of nostalgia, he wasn’t his father. His trade was statecraft,
not tinkering, and the badly broken thing that he confronted, and which it was
his sworn business to put back together, was not a timepiece but a vast
country, fragmented along ancient fault lines from the irresistible tremors of
a new age. Its pieces, strewn like these ratchets and springs and pinions
across his worktable, were peoples—Slavs, Nordics, Kazakhs, Semites, Tatars,
Yakuts, Turks, dozens more, each further fractured into nations, tribes,
languages and faiths; and, in the case of the Moslems, threatening to unite
again under the banner of Islamic fundamentalism. They had been assembled into
the continent-straddling colossus of Russia, God knows how, by the great
warrior czars, Orthodox crusaders and Cossack adventurers; then forged and
hammered together on the anvil of mythic “Soviet Man” by Lenin and Stalin.

But it couldn’t last indefinitely.

Rybkin fitted a pinion to a plate, checked the meshing of
the teeth. At least this heirloom had a blueprint, a schematic for coherence.
His country no longer had. The world thought he was only accepting the
inevitable and helping to dismantle the colossus, divest himself of the parts
that didn’t fit, reorder those that did into a new, streamlined state. But the
world was wrong.

Alois Maksimovich had a desperate plan for putting his vast
land back together, a great deal of it anyway—exactly as the new Europe was
being shaped out of ancient, rivalrous states.

Amazingly enough, he had gotten his plan out of a think
tank—IMEMO, the Institute of World Economics and Inter-national Relations—the
same one that had first formulated
glasnost
and
perestroika
and
argued the wisdom of dismantling the Wall and letting Eastern Europe go its own
way, long before those astounding events came to pass. In the last months
Rybkin had spent considerable time in discussion with academicians from that
gray, nineteen-story building at 23 Trade Union Street in Moscow, looking at
their equations and economic and geopolitical models. Finally they had
persuaded him into a new direction, a direction almost as radical as that which
had resulted from their earlier idea that the new revolution—the STR, or
scientific-technological revolution—had made Bolshevism a dinosaur.

The U.S.S.R. was engaged in global chess against several
opponents at the same time, and faring badly. It was being rapidly encircled by
the new European juggernaut and the exploding economies of the Pacific Rim,
while experiencing its own energy crisis and customary stagnation, with no real
replacement for the trading partners it had lost in the demise of Comecon and
the retreat from Eastern Europe. Now the time had come for the Soviets to make
their decisive move, just like the Americans were doing—scrambling frantically
to link up with Japanese, while maintaining their dwindling ties to Europe.

Ironically, there seemed to be a consensus among Rybkin’s
domestic allies and enemies—like old General Marchenko—that their leader was
getting ready to dilute Soviet sovereignty, or sell it out altogether, in
exchange for inclusion in the new United Europe. What else did the “Common
European Home” and “Greater Europe” initiative boil down to? they wondered.
Wasn’t Europeanization from the Atlantic to the Urals the real thrust of the
upcoming Potsdam Conference? The only difference was that Rybkin’s allies
called it pragmatism and his enemies treason.

But the IMEMO academicians had convinced the Soviet
President he didn’t need to settle for being the last invitee at the feast of a
New Europe, didn’t need to go to Potsdam with his begging bowl in hand, lacking
as he did the energy reserves to export for hard currency and consumer goods.
If the European leaders weren’t eager to give him absolutely everything he
demanded—and he should demand a great deal more than equality, IMEMO said, and
surrender nothing—then there was another very large card he could play—or at
least show.

He could threaten to turn away from the West—and toward
Mecca. By continuing the long mea culpa over the invasion of Afghanistan, and
granting limited autonomy to the Central Asian republics, Rybkin could
dramatically improve his standing with the fifty-five million Soviet Moslems.
And he could go further yet. By expanding his already substantial economic and
military aid to the Middle East, and his presence in Syria, Iraq and Libya, he
could make the Soviet Union the real champion of the Islamic world. To solidify
that position, he could turn next to the Iranian fundamentalists, even help
them launch a new jihad to finally destroy Israel and overthrow the Saudi
regime.

The West would be outraged, of course. But in the final
analysis, the West—and especially energy-dependent Europe —didn’t need Israel,
it needed Middle Eastern oil—desperately, just as Russia did, and the Japanese
as well. And that oil would be firmly in the control of Rybkin and his new
pan-Islamic allies.

Europe would be at his mercy.

Chief Academician Churkin had expressed it more judiciously:
“It was Bismarck, if you remember, who counseled Alexander II to turn away form
the West, that Russia’s true destiny lay eastward. Of course, Bismarck had his
own designs on the West. In any case, it is far from an ideal solution that we
propose, Alois Maksimovich. But it may very well be the optimum gambit, for
again and again it is the only one that comes up. Without this sort of Middle
Eastern strategy, we grow increasingly weak and Europe increasingly strong.
With it, and with a little luck, the situation can be reversed.”

How far he should go down this road would depend, to a great
extent, on what happened at Potsdam. Ultimately, if Europe and the Islamic
states alike spurned his overtures, he would be prepared to attack Iran and
Iraq—in overwhelming force, without any pretense of a “limited military
contingent” as in Afghanistan, and seize the oil he needed.

One way or another—unless Marchenko’s madman stopped him—he
would save this country yet, and restore its lost greatness—ironically the very
thing Marchenko had most desired.

He finished assembling the movement, mounted it, closed the
cherrywood and ebony case, wound the clock. Listened awhile as it ticked.

And heard a knock at the door.

Incredibly to Yuri Prilepko seated at the hydroplane and
steering controls of the midget sub
Flea
, his mysterious passenger slept
through much of the hour-and-twenty-minute trip to the Yalta coast. Prilepko
wasn’t privy to the assassin’s identity, but Captain Chapayev, sure of his
Michman’
s
sympathies and loyalties, had hinted sufficiently at the objective; in any
case, with Oreanda their destination, it was obvious. Think of it—to be able to
sleep before such a business!

Prilepko, on the other hand, had never been so wide awake in
his life, even during a four-man midget infiltration into NATO waters in the
Baltic years before. He stared ahead into the spectral tunnel the searchlight
drilled into liquid night, monitored every ambient sound, tracked every drop of
condensation that trickled down the bulkheads, consulted his obstacle-avoidance
sonar. Nor were his nerves steadied by the occasional pinging that resonated
through his hull—transmissions, he assumed, from one of the Grishas patrolling
the coast. It bothered him, even though he knew the
Flea
was too
minuscule to be detected by them, and would also slip unheard through the
coastal SOSUS chain—the Seabed Sound Surveillance System. But things could go
wrong; systems could easily malfunction. Which reminded him to verify, once
again, that his degaussing gear was properly activated to neutralize any
magnetic and acoustic coastal defenses.

Then, having reduced speed from fifteen to five knots,
Prilepko saw the sea floor shelving up. He gave a quick echo sounding; the
bottom was twenty-five meters, then nineteen, rising sharply. He reduced speed
to sixty revolutions—three knots—and came up to periscope depth. He allowed
himself only a quick look, barely breaking the surface.

Khorosho!
An easy swim, dead ahead in a faint wash of
moonlight, the cliffs of Oreanda were right where his chart and gyrocompass
said they’d be. Swiveling the lens around to port, the
Michman
picked up
the small lighthouse on Cape Ay-Todor. Damn perfect! He’d stuck the Flea right
up their impregnable asshole!

He slowed further, scraped bottom in ten meters of water,
went slow astern, stopped, settled gently, nearly level. He blew out his breath
as he took on more ballast. Then he turned to rouse his passenger.

*

Marcus hadn’t really been asleep, though his body felt the
acute need of rest. He had been in reverie, eyes closed, his sense of urgency
merely suspended, not forgotten. At some level, if only kinesthetically, he
remained aware of their steady movement through the water—and their
destination.

At first, he had tried to concentrate on the mind-clearing
dicta of the
Hagakure
, which again and again counseled the samurai
serenely to invoke his own death before embarking on mortal combat. But it
wouldn’t come. Marcus’ mind kept deflecting from the astringent focal point of
ki
,
into beguiling, somatic images; it sought escape, not confrontation. He
transported himself happily to the South Seas instead, flat on his back on the
foredeck of the gaff-rigged ketch
Tusitala
, watching the mainmast scribe
endless arcs against a lurid Technicolor sky.

The languorous undulance of the boat next triggered a series
of far more explicit images—of an afternoon orgy on a big schooner at anchor in
Jokaj Harbor, Ponape. He could no longer recall the name of the vessel—she was
a beauteous thing out of Auckland—nor of the two lissome Kiwi girls—their names
were fatuous and indistinguishable, something like Dora and Dee-Dee, or Donna
and Dodie. Memory dealt them back mostly in tandem flashes—lank, sunbleached
hair; nasal, singsong voices; freckled smiles; darting, pale eyes; light bikini
stripes on well-tanned hides.

It had started innocently enough topside. Marcus, the
luncheon guest from a neighboring boat, hunkered down to spread suntan lotion
on their sleek brown backs. It had moved, then, with stunning suddenness below
decks to a V-shaped, reflection-bathed cabin in the bows, where Marcus began
heaving big sailbags off the bunks to make room for horizontal recreation. But
the girls rapidly changed their minds, or couldn’t wait. They had attacked him
from behind, stripped him and then themselves, oiled him to rampant hardness.
They took turns straddling him as he stood, his back braced against a bulkhead,
gritting his teeth, pumping and posting like a carousel steed. Well, why not
cooperate? Wasn’t that the classic advice for the rapee? To his everlasting
credit, Marcus had managed to endure till each transfixed and well-lubricated
Kiwi had collapsed in his arms, before he groaned, shuddered and slumped to the
deck beside them.

The satiated sighs, he recalled, changed to giggles as the
trio became aware of the stentorian snores that still emanated from the uncle’s
cabin amidships. Five minutes later Marcus and the girls had jumped overboard,
raced each other twice around the seventy-footer and climbed back up to nap and
sun themselves on the fantail.

“How about I rub some more of that oil on your backs?”
Marcus had deadpanned, and the girls had shrieked.

And in the midst of that stuporous contentment, there had
come to him a small moment of self-awareness. He had thought:
This is what
it feels like to be having the time of your life.

It was true—there was never to be an afternoon quite like
that again—and how odd that he had known it! But now the long corridors of
memory were invaded by a sudden sensation of weightlessness. The sub was
sinking—or, rather, settling down. He opened his eyes on the enveloping
blackness, heard the distorted clinkings of fiberglass hullplates skidding
along the bottom. Reluctantly, Marcus Jolly shook off the cloying fantasy of
fourteen summers previous. It was twenty-one minutes after eleven; they’d made
good time. He collected his gear and scooted ass-backward to the wet-and-dry
chamber.

He huddled there in the tiny space, mask on, hugging his
knees and adjusting the mini-regulator of his flashlight-sized air canister as
Michman
Prilepko flicked a switch and the watertight bulkhead doors banged shut. Then,
through the tiny window, he got Prilepko’s thumbs-up—the order to flood. Marcus
hit the pump lever, and the tiny compartment began to fill with water—his
second tepid bath in the Black Sea this night, with the summer ocean
temperature at least seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

As the chamber slowly filled, Marcus felt a little like
Harry Houdini, preparing for one of his death-defying underwater escapes. But
had the great magician ever attempted anything so perilous as that which Marcus
was embarked upon this night? Not likely. And just as he imagined Houdini might
have done, Marcus began psyching himself for the great task ahead. He gave himself
permission to slip out of control, for a more instinctive self to come forth
and take possession. Social conditioning sloughed off, his body came alive, his
senses more acute, his reflexes cocked and ready to fire. The lukewarm water
was inching up his torso, the air venting into the adjoining cabin area, the
increased pressure squeezing in on him. As the tide covered his face, he blew
out his nostrils to clear his eardrums, bit down on the mouthpiece of the
mini-tank’s regulator and began to breathe normally.

Now he opened the vent in the upper hatch to equalize
pressure, then opened the hatch itself and clambered out onto the
Flea
’s
fiberglass casing. A minute later, having reclosed the hatch, he was arrowing
up through thirty meters of lukewarm ink toward a graying ceiling, trailing his
tethered warbag. He barely broke surface, and sank again before he could fill
his buoyancy vest. The Black Sea, he knew, might in places equal the
Mediterranean in warmth, but never in buoyancy. Its salinity was much lower,
owing to the constant freshwater infusions of the Danube, the Dniester, the
Dnieper and the Don. With the vest inflated, Marcus switched to snorkel, saw he
was a bit farther offshore than he would have liked. He estimated a
thirty-meter swim to the foot of the cliffs.

He hoped to hell that was Cape Ay-Todor light over there and
that these were the right cliffs, because if they weren’t, there wasn’t a damn
thing he could do about it. His underwater taxi would be already on its way
home.

Snorkeling in, he picked up a sound like an underwater
tom-tom—distant, but growing perceptibly louder. Presently he ventured a
surface peek, saw a dazzling white glow behind Cape Ay-Todor, caught a low,
turbine-diesel throb. An instant later a blinding searchlight stabbed the
night, froze a green-breaking wave, then swept on as the high-raked bows of a
patrol boat emerged behind the cape. Marcus recognized the Grisha II, one of
the favorite craft, he knew, of the KGB’s Maritime Border Guards Directorate.
He hoped Prilepko had the
Flea
well out to sea, for if detected, the
Grisha might give chase and—unless Prilepko convinced them he was prowling the
coast in the middle of the night for an old sunken ship—it might lob one of the
dozen World War II-type depth charges carried in its rails. But the patrol
boat’s searchlight instead swung round to rake the cliffsides, and Marcus
quickly submerged.

He remained under snorkel till the vibrations had died away,
and he judged the Grisha had vanished eastward toward Yalta. A couple of things
were now clear. One, Marcus was definitely in the right vicinity; and two,
Rybkin’s security people weren’t entirely ignoring the possibility of a hostile
approach from the sea. Which led to the question: How long would he have before
the Grisha returned to light up the cliffs?

He’d better hustle.

Towing the warbag, he paddled toward shore, carried along by
a slight tidal surge, then held off by a backwash. Approaching steep cliffs
with no shelf or shingle, he was glad he didn’t have real surf to contend with.
Fortunately, as he drew nearer, he saw the bulging bluffs weren’t nearly as
formidable as he’d been warned, and had prepared for. They were fissured,
veined and eroded. And the cliff base afforded a tiny ledge where he was able
to strip and stow his skindiving gear, wedging and weighting the bundle with
the ropes, climbing harness and carabiners he wouldn’t be needing. Unless he
was fatally mistaken, he would be able to scale this rock wall with little
trouble. He had done far more difficult free-climbs assaulting
mujahideen
strongholds, and carrying considerably more than the vastly lightened
warbag—down to perhaps a dozen kilos—that he now slung on his back. Without
further delay, he began moving swiftly up the cliffs, choosing a route,
wherever possible, that traced the deepest shadows.

Twenty minutes later, soaked with perspiration, Marcus was
crouched under an overhang just below the top. He could have reached this point
in a quarter of the time had he not taken vast care to avoid dislodging even
pebbles or clinking his backpack against the rocks. And despite the exertion,
he had managed to keep his breathing nearly inaudible to himself. The brow of
stone immediately above was cowled with thick shrubbery. Against the
moon-grayed sky, the twisted silhouettes looked like holly oaks and juniper. He
needed to get up there and hide in their cover. He planned his moves carefully,
then froze.

Footfalls were approaching along a pathway above, and before
they died away, the damn Grisha came back. Marcus burrowed deeper into shadow
and bit off a blasphemous prayer as the laserlike searchlight scythed twice
across the cliffs, the second pass only meters below his legs.

After the patrol boat vanished, it took him another fifteen
minutes to worm his way over the brow, clinging to rocky knobs and exfoliated
cracks, and to slither into the dark cave of shrubbery, feeling ahead for loose
twigs or tripwires. He lay prone several minutes, listening, watching,
gathering his mind. Thick vegetation extended to the edge of a stoneflagged
path, gray-washed by a distant floodlight. Under the circumstances, Marcus
wasn’t worried about triggering any line-of-sight microwave systems. But anyone
checking the cliffside perimeter with thermal imaging would spot him instantly.
Which made him abandon the idea of trying to hide out anywhere in the compound
with the Dragunov sniper rifle, hoping for an eventual shot. The chances of
finding any cover around here secure for more than a few minutes were basically
nil. He would have to rely on a quick strike, in and out.

A KGB guard walked by, kneeboots glossy in even the faint
light, near enough to touch. Marcus had timed four sentry passes, averaging
five minutes between. He’d better take out the next one.

The man showed up maybe twenty seconds early, solitary like
the others. Marcus waited till he’d gone a stride past, then sprang and looped
a guitar string around the neck and tightened as he kicked the knees out from
under. In an instant the throttled guard was dragged back into the shadowed
shrubbery, expecting instant death, hearing instead a fierce whisper in his
ear:

“Stop thrashing, asshole, or I’ll pull this fucking thing
tight. Tell me where Rybkin is, and I just knock you out. I’m good at it,
you’ll live. Keep silent, you die now, like this.” Marcus cinched the garrote,
watched the eyes bug, arms and legs flail. “Nod your head, I let you breathe.
Make a sound above a whisper, you’re dead.”

The guard nodded frantically. Marcus gave him air. The voice
rasped, a strangled whisper: “If I tell you... you’ll kill me anyway.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s the only chance you got.”

“He’s in his quarters... main palace”—an arm gestured
feebly—“on the third floor... you can’t get in.”

Marcus tightened the noose again. “You just pointed to the
KGB barracks, asshole. I know the layout. One more lie does it. I hear Rybkin’s
an insomniac, likes to putter in a workshop. Is he there tonight?”