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  "When was this?" Orlov asked.

  "Yesterday."

  "Why didn't you log it?"

  "I did," Rossky said. "With Minister Dogin."

  Orlov's features darkened. "All reports are supposed to go to the computer file with a copy to my office—"

  "That's true, sir," Rossky said, "in an operational facility. But we are not that yet. We won't be securing the link from your office to the Minister's desk for another four hours. Mine has been checked and secured, and I used it."

  "And the link from your office to mine?" Orlov demanded. "Is that secure?"

  "You did not receive a report?"

  "You know I didn't—"

  "An oversight," Rossky smiled. "I'll discipline Corporal Belyev. You'll have a full report— if I may call Belyev back— in just a few minutes."

  Orlov regarded the Colonel for a long moment. "You joined the Society for Cooperation with Army, Air Force, and Fleet when you were just fourteen, didn't you?" Orlov asked.

  "That's right," Rossky said.

  "You were an expert sniper at sixteen, and while other young men chose to leap Devil's Ditch from a running jump with a track suit and running shoes, you elected to leap the spikes at the widest point with heavy boots and a rucksack on your back. Colonel General Odinstev personally trained you and a select group in the art of terrorism and assassination, As I recall, you once executed a spy in Afghanistan with a spade thrown from fifty meters away."

  "It was fifty-two." Rossky's eyes shifted toward his superior. "A record for a kill in the spetsnaz."

  Orlov came around the desk and sat on the edge. "You spent three years in Afghanistan, until a member of your group was wounded on a mission to capture an Afghan leader. Your platoon commander decided to take the wounded man with you rather than administer the Blessed Death. As assistant commander, you reminded your superior that it was his duty to order the lethal injection, and when he refused you killed the commander— a hand over his mouth, a knife thrust to the throat. Then you took the wounded man's life."

  "Had I done otherwise," Rossky said, "high command would have ordered the entire group executed as traitors."

  "Of course," Orlov said. "But there was an inquiry afterward, a question as to whether the soldier's wound was sufficient to require death."

  "It was a leg wound," Rossky said, "and he was slowing us down. The regulations are quite specific on that count. The inquiry was merely a formality."

  "Nonetheless," Orlov continued, "some of your men were not happy with what you'd done. Ambition, a desire for promotion— those were some of the charges they made, I believe. There was concern for your safety, so you were recalled and became part of the special faculty at the Military-Diplomatic Academy. You taught my son and got to know Minister Dogin when he was still the Mayor of Moscow. Is that all correct?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Orlov moved even closer, his voice barely above a whisper. "You've served your country and the military vigorously for just over twenty years, risked your life and reputation. With all of this experience, Colonel, tell me: didn't you learn not to sit down in the presence of a superior officer unless given leave to do so?"

  Rossky's face flushed. He rose at once, slowly, his posture rigid. "Yes, sir."

  Orlov remained seated on the desk. "My career has been different than yours, Colonel. My father saw firsthand what the Luftwaffe did to the Red Army during the War. He passed his respect for airpower to me. I spent eight years in the Air Defense Forces, flying reconnaissance for four years, then helping to train other pilots in ambushes— drawing enemy aircraft into killing grounds of antiaircraft fire." Orlov stood and looked into Rossky's angry eyes. "Did you know all of this, Colonel? Did you study my dossier?"

  "I did, sir."

  "Then you know I've never had to formally discipline any of my subordinates. Most men are decent, even the conscripts. They only want to do their jobs and he rewarded for the work they do. Some make honest mistakes, and there's no reason to spoil their records because of that. I will always give a soldier, a patriot, the benefit of the doubt. Including you, Colonel." Orlov came closer until their faces were inches apart. "But if you try and go around me again," he said, "I'll catch you and have you returned to the academy— with a notation of insubordination on your record. Are we clear on that, Colonel?"

  "We are— sir," Rossky said, nearly spitting out the word.

  "Good."

  The men exchanged salutes as the General turned and headed toward the door.

  "Sir?" Rossky said.

  Orlov looked back. The Colonel was still standing at attention. "Yes?" Orlov asked.

  "What your son did in Moscow— was that an honest mistake?"

  "It was stupid and irresponsible," Orlov said. "You and the Minister were more than fair with him."

  "It was out of respect for your accomplishments that we were, sir," Rossky said. "And he has a great career ahead of him. Did you ever read the file on the incident?"

  Orlov's eyes narrowed. "I've never had any interest in it, no. "

  "I have a copy," Rossky said. "It was removed from the records in general staff headquarters. There was a recommendation attached to it. Did you know that?"

  Orlov said nothing.

  "Nikita's company Senior Sergeant recommended expulsion for guliganstvo. Not for defacing the Greek Orthodox church on Ulitsa Arkhipova or beating up the priest, but for breaking into the academy supply depot to get the paint, and for striking the guard when he tried to stop him." Rossky smiled. "I think your boy was frustrated after my lecture about how the Greek armed forces sold weapons to Afghanistan."

  "What's your point?" Orlov asked. "That you were able to teach Nikita to attack helpless citizens?"

  "Civilians are the soft underbelly of the same machine that runs the military, sir," Rossky said, "a perfectly valid target in the eyes of the spetsnaz. But you don't want to debate established military policy with me."

  "I don't care to debate anything with you, Colonel," Orlov said. "We have an operations center to launch." He started toward the door, but Rossky's voice stopped him.

  "Of course, sir. However, since you've asked to be kept aware of everything pertaining to my official activities, I will log the details of this conversation— which now include the following. The charges against your son were not dismissed. The Senior Sergeant's report was simply not acted upon, which isn't the same thing. If it were ever called to the attention of the personnel directorate, it would have to be acted upon."

  Orlov had his hand on the doorknob, his back to the Colonel. "My son will have to bear the consequences of his own deeds, though I'm certain a military judge would take into account his intervening years of service, as well as the way in which the records were suppressed and then released."

  "Files sometimes show up on desks, sir."

  Orlov opened the door. Corporal Belyev was standing there and saluted smartly. "Your impertinence will be noted in my own log, Colonel," Orlov said. He looked from Belyev to Rossky. "Would you care to add to the entry?"

  Rossky stood stiffly beside his desk. "No, sir. Not at present, sir. "

  General Orlov walked into the hall and Belyev entered the Colonel's office. She shut the door behind her, and the General could only imagine what was taking place behind the soundproof door.

  Not that it mattered. Rossky had been put on notice and would have to follow the rules to the letter though Orlov had a feeling that rules might begin to change once the Colonel got Interior Minister Dogin on the phone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sunday, 10:15 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  Griff Egenes returned to the Oval Office.

  "State troopers are on the way to Forest Road," he said, "and one of my teams is choppering in from New York. They'll have this lunatic before the half hour."

  "He won't fight them," said Burkow.

  Egenes sat heavily. "What do you mean'?"

  "I mean, we've given him what he wants. He'll spout some radical crap a
nd let himself be taken."

  "Shit," said Egenes. "I really wanted to squeeze him."

  "Me too," said Burkow.

  The National Security Chief turned to Mike Rodgers. Though the mood in the Oval Office was grim, Burkow owned the gravest face of the group.

  "So, Mike?" Burkow asked. "Who are these creatures and how do we squash the rest of them?"

  "Before you answer," said the President, "can someone tell me if the Russians have anything going militarily that can snowball into an invasion? Aren't we supposed to watch for these things?"

  Mel Parker, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the administration's silent man, said, "While Ekdol was busy dictating terms of unconditional surrender, I rang Defense Secretary Colon. He called the Pentagon. I'm told that several Russian divisions are on maneuvers right at the Ukrainian border. Pretty big numbers compared to what they usually do in the region, but nothing that would have sent up a warning signal."

  "No troop movements anywhere else?" Rodgers asked.

  "NRO is putting all their resources into finding out," Parker replied.

  "But the border could be a staging area," the President said.

  "It could very well be," said Parker.

  "There's the goddamn problem," said FBI chief Egenes. "All this downsizing. We have too few HUMINT resources. A satellite can't tell us about foot soldiers bitching about tomorrow's march or what it says on a map inside a field tent. That's where the real intelligence is."

  "That's a problem," Rodgers agreed, "but it has very little to do with this situation."

  "How so?" asked Rachlin.

  "The truth is," said Rodgers, "this Groznyite didn't buy himself a thing."

  "What do you mean?" asked Tobey, who had been silent as she took notes for Burkow.

  "Assume there's an invasion," Rodgers said, "say Russia goes into the Ukraine. We wouldn't intervene."

  "Why not?" she asked.

  "Because then we'd be at war with Russia," Rodgers said, "and what do we do next? We don't have the capacity to wage an effective conventional war. We proved that in Haiti and Somalia. If we tried, casualties would be heavy and they'd be all over TV. The public and Congress would shut us down faster than a crap game in church. And we can't go in with missiles, bombers, and big-scale attacks because of the collateral damage and civilian casualties."

  "I'm crying big, fat, Betty Boop tears," Burkow said. "It's a war. People are going to get hurt. And if I'm not mistaken, the Russians fired the first salvo against a bunch of civilians in New York City."

  "We don't know that the Russian government authorized that," Egenes pointed out.

  "Exactly," said Secretary Lincoln. "And frankly, as unpopular as this might be, I'm not sure I'd want to see us fight a war for Eastern Europe, even a just one. Germany and France wouldn't join us. They might not even support us. NATO could conceivably turn on us. The expense of repelling Russia and rebuilding those nations after a war would be horrendous."

  "No," Burkow said with an edge of disgust. "Better to build another Maginot Line to keep the enemy out, like the Three Little Pigs and their house of straw. I don't buy that. I believe you go to the den of the Big Bad Wolf, napalm the bejesus out of him, and make a coat from what's left. I know that isn't the politically, sensitive thing to do, but we're not the ones who started this."

  "Tell me," Lincoln asked Rodgers, "did the Japanese send you a box of chocolates and a thank-you note when you stopped Tokyo from being evaporated by those North Korean nodong missiles?"

  "I didn't do it for a Pat on the back," said Rodgers. "I did it because it was right."

  "And we were all very proud of you," Lincoln said. "But I still count two Americans dead versus zero Japanese.

  The President said, "I'm in Mel's camp on this one, but we're losing sight of our immediate problem: who's behind this and why." He looked at his watch. "I'm scheduled to go on the air at ten past eleven to talk about the bombing. Tobey, will you have the speech updated to talk about the capture of the bomber thanks to the fast work of the FBI, CIA, and others?"

  The National Security Assistant nodded and walked to the nearest phone.

  The President regarded Rodgers. "General, is this why you advised me to capitulate to the bomber? Because we were going to do what he wanted anyway?"

  "No, sir," said Rodgers. "The truth is, we didn't capitulate to him. We distracted him."

  Lawrence leaned back, his hands behind his head. "From what?"

  "Our counterattack," Rodgers said.

  "Against whom?" Burkow asked. "The prick told us who he was with and turned himself in."

  "But follow the thread backward," Rodgers said.

  "We're listening," said the President.

  Rodgers leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Sir, Grozny takes its name from Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible—"

  "Why am I not surprised?" muttered Rachlin.

  "As far back as the Revolution, they've worked for political gain, not money," Rodgers said. "They were fifth columnists in Germany during the War and caused some minor trouble here during the Cold War. We traced some of the early, unmanned Redstone rocket failures to them."

  "Who finances them?" asked Parker.

  "Until recently," said Rodgers, "they were underwritten by extreme nationalistic political forces that needed terrorist enforcers. Gorbachev disbanded them in the mid-1980s, at which point they hunkered down overseas, especially in the U.S. and South America, and joined with the increasingly powerful Russian mafia in an effort to overthrow their westernized leaders."

  "So they must really hate Zhanin," said Lincoln.

  "You've got it," said Rodgers.

  "But if they're not tied to the government," the President said, "what can they be planning in Eastern Europe? A military operation of any size can't be run without the approval of the Kremlin. This isn't Chechnya, with a handful of generals in the field dictating military policy to President Yeltsin."

  "Hell," Rachlin observed, "I never believed he wasn't calling the shots behind his hand the whole time."

  "That's just it," Rodgers said. "Something big just might be run without the Kremlin. What we saw in Chechnya in 1994 was the beginning of a trend toward decentralization in Russia. It's a big country with eight time zones. Suppose someone finally woke up there and said, 'This is like a dinosaur. It needs a couple of brains to make the whole work'?"

  The President regarded Rodgers. "Has someone, in fact, done this?"

  Rodgers said, "Before the blast, Mr. President, we intercepted a bagel order sent from St. Petersburg to a shop in New York."

  "A bagel order?" said Burkow. "Get real."

  "That was my reaction," said Rodgers. "We noodled around with it, but it didn't make any sense until after the blast. Using the Midtown Tunnel as a point on a grid, one of our cryptologists figured out that it was a map of New York, with the tunnel as one of the highlights."

  "Were the other points secondary targets?" asked Egenes. "After all, the World Trade Center bombers had alternate targets, including the Lincoln Tunnel."

  "I don't think so," said Rodgers. "It looked to our analyst like stops in the bomb-making process. Now, Larry— you'll bear me out on this. For a couple of months now, we've been picking up microwave radiation from the Neva in St. Petersburg."

  "It's really been cooking over there," Rachlin agreed.

  "We thought the radiation was coming from a TV studio being built in the Hermitage," said Rodgers. "We now believe that the studio is a front for some kind of top-secret operation."

  "A second 'brain' for the dinosaur," said Lincoln.

  "Exactly," said Rodgers. "It was financed, apparently, using funds approved by Interior Minister Nikolai Dogin."

  "The loser in the elections," said the President.

  "The same," Rodgers said. "And there's one thing more. A British agent was killed trying to have a look at the place. So something is going on there. And whatever it is, whether it's a command center or military base, it's pr
obably connected to the attack in New York through that bagel order."

  "So," said Av Lincoln, "we have the Russian government, or some faction thereof, in league with an outlawed terrorist group and, quite possibly, with the Russian mafia. And they apparently control enough of the military so that they can make something major happen in Eastern Europe."

  "That's right," said Rodgers.

  Rachlin said, "God, how I'd love to grill that arrogant little Grozny rat personally when we have him."

  "I guarantee we won't get a thing from him," Egenes said. "They wouldn't have told him anything, then let him hand himself over to us."

  "That would be kind of dumb," Rachlin agreed. "They gave him to us just so we could took good, like we wielded a swift and terrible sword of justice."

  "Let's not spit on that," the President said. "We all know that JFK had to compromise the U.S. military in Turkey to get Khrushchev's missiles out of Cuba. The fact that only half the deal came out made him look like a hero and Khrushchev a chump. So," he said, "let's assume that, through St. Petersburg, a government official ordered the attack in New York Could it have been President Zhanin?"

  "I doubt it," said Secretary Lincoln. "He wants a relationship with the West, not war."

  "Do we know that for sure?" Burkow said. "Speaking of Boris Yeltsin, we've been snowed before."

  "Zhanin has nothing to gain," said Lincoln. "He ran against military expenditures. Besides, he and Grozny are natural-born enemies."

  "What about Dogin?" the President asked. "Can this be his doing?"

  "He's a likelier candidate," said Rodgers. "He paid for the place in St. Petersburg and probably owns the people in it."

  "Is there any way we can talk to Zhanin about it?" asked Tobey.

  "I wouldn't risk it," said Rodgers. "Even if he's out of the loop, chances are good that not everyone around him is trustworthy."

  "So then what's your plan, Mike?" Burkow said testily. "From where I sit, one bomb has effectively put the United States on the sidelines. Christ, I remember when things like that used to galvanize people and get us into wars."

  Rodgers said, "Steve, the bomb hasn't stopped us. From a strategic point of view, it may have helped."