Terminal Velocity Read online

At the very beginning, Felix Dzerzhinsky had demanded a special police force for "the revolutionary settlement of accounts" and so was born the Cheka. And they generally exacted their payment in blood. As the initials of the organization changed over the decades: OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and now the KGB — that abbreviated litany of endless terror — so, too, had the official title for its most important department, the one that specialized in assassination, sabotage, kidnapping and extortion. These operations were designated Mokrie dela: the so-called "wet affairs," for they were wet with blood.

  Line F.

  The Thirteenth Department.

  Otdel 9.

  The Secret Division.

  Department V. As in Victory.

  And now it was known as the Department for Executive Action.

  Vichinsky, who had been seconded from the GRU — military intelligence — four years before, and his chief, Greb Strakhov, stood even deeper in the shadows behind the KGB's international murder squad. They headed the invisible Thirteenth Section, which specialized in only the most sensitive operations. And they were nearly always "wet."

  Strakhov was a stolid secretive man who had left Vichinsky free to extend their uneasily shared empire. And there was power for the taking. Especially since Executive Action had botched the big job in Rome by using an unreliable Turk.

  The colonel stamped his boots on the parquet floor and hung up his coat. Crossing to the table behind his desk he picked up the first of the three phones. "No calls. I do not want to be disturbed for the next hour. No, wait. Admit only Mozhenko."

  It would be Mozhenko who would be bringing written confirmation of the news that they had awakened him with at home that morning.

  Their American mole had finally gotten an assessment through to Moscow Center. It seemed that he had taken it upon himself to launch an all-out assault on Stony Man Farm, the Virginia headquarters of John Phoenix. The attack had failed. Phoenix had survived.

  The Russian cursed under his breath. He was surrounded by bunglers.

  Madness! Vichinsky clenched his fists. From the first time Phoenix had been identified, he had insisted that they lure the American into their own territory and take care of him themselves.

  Vichinsky crossed to the filing cabinet. He opened the second drawer and pulled out the file on Phoenix.

  Vichinsky knew there was still much work to be done before his plan could be put into motion — not the least problem being to find the American's present whereabouts. The colonel was glad that Strakhov was away from the office.

  Strakhov was spending the morning at the administration's computer center. Together with Lev Zalozny of Records and Archives, he was ostensibly checking through the newly centralized files on the KGB's foreign operations. Even Zalozny was not aware that Strakhov was preparing a digest of the organization's current position for the general secretary himself.

  Vichinsky knew there was a good chance that his boss would stay there for most of the afternoon, too, probably trying to find out if the data-processing center had turned up any more files or cross-indexed Chekist information on the Romanovs.

  From the previous head of his department, Strakhov had inherited the musty brief on the fate of the last czar and his family.

  In recent years Vichinsky's chief had been responsible for little more than investigating the claims of an East German pretender to the imperial bloodline and diverting Western interest in the Soviet Union's ultimate act of regicide.

  But for Strakhov, over the years, this historical curiosity had become a private obsession. He was fascinated by what had happened so long ago and still pondered the true fate of the czar's youngest daughter, the pretty teenager, Anastasia.

  Vichinsky would use this time by himself to further his own plan to neutralize the meddlesome Colonel Phoenix.

  He opened the file and stared at the photograph that had first been brought to their attention by Operations Analysis.

  Phoenix's name, his description, had begun to crop up in case after case, from San Francisco to South America, from Tuscany to Toronto. Then at last, a photograph. A grainy blowup of the American agent taken in Spain.

  More photographs had been obtained, now that they knew whom they were looking for. But hard information on the man's past had been impossible to acquire; even the American connection, with all his influence, was unable to come up with anything more than a sketchy outline for the past two or three years.

  Strakhov had been the man who found a double for Brezhnev in his final days. Then he had called Vichinsky in on the search for another official impostor, this time for their former boss, Andropov, when he first became ill in office.

  Ivan Trichin, one of the casting directors of Mosfilm Studios, had helped them "cast" the needed double. Vichinsky had turned up at the meeting with the Phoenix photograph supplied by Operations Analysis. Trichin had caught a glimpse of the face beneath the thatch of dark hair. "Stefan Boldin? I thought he'd been..

  "Who did you say?"

  "Boldin. The poet. A Pole... a troublemaker."

  "Yes, of course," said Vichinsky quickly, remembering the dissident's trial. He even had a good idea where Boldin was now — being reeducated in the Gulag.

  He had said nothing more to Trichin, but it was at that moment he conceived of the Janus Plan...

  * * *

  "Give Oleg a hand unloading that cement," said Roykov. Stefan Boldin looked bleakly at his foreman. Roykov pulled one hand from its mitt and exhaled into his clenched fist. He stared across the snow at the half-laden truck. "Move! Or we'll never finish on time."

  Two weeks earlier, work had stopped because of the storm. Then they'd had a few days of watery sunshine, giving just enough warmth to start melting the first snowfall. But now the temperature was dropping again. Boldin moved unsteadily as his feet cracked the thin crust of ice, and the softer snow beneath sucked at his worn felt boots.

  He trudged up the low incline toward the cement truck the only way he knew how — one step at a time. It was the way he had learned to live his life.

  One day at a time.

  One crust of bread at a time.

  One cigarette butt at a time.

  Sometimes it seemed that Roykov asked the impossible, and yet Boldin willingly complied. He knew the foreman's one concern was that they fulfill their work quota for the day.

  Roykov wanted to make sure that all the men got their full ration that evening — nine hundred grams of bread and a bowl of salted fish soup. Besides, thought Boldin, this just might be his lucky day. He might be able to get hold of some paper from the cement sacks to wrap around himself under his coat.

  There was a single black bird perched atop an unfinished wall of the pumping station they had been ordered to build. Boldin hoped he could acquire the materials to build a slingshot to take advantage of the occasional feast that flew by.

  Pumping Station 27B was being built close to the western border of Siberia. The men were housed in the bare wooden barracks at Karashevo. It was but one of the hundreds of "corrective" labor camps inside the USSR.

  Since the Soviet Union occupies almost one-sixth of the world's land surface, it can be classed as the largest prison camp on earth. Its thousands of miles of borders are guarded by nearly 400,000 men under the control of the Chief Border Guards Directorate, one of the largest organs within the KGB empire.

  These guards face inward. The Russian people live out their whole lives within a cage of barbed wire and searchlights, mine fields and machine guns, informers and watchdogs.

  The party faithful have their ZIL limousines, their private shops stocked with Western consumer goods unavailable to the masses, and the dachas, the holiday homes on the Black Sea coast or in the Caucasus. They are the ruling class. But in order to ensure their continued hold on power, they have to rely completely on the ruthlessness and terror of the KGB.

  The KGB is the Soviet state. Its decisions are often arbitrary, but always final; its motivations unquestioned, and its authority unchallenged. T
he Russian secret police hold a power unparalleled in political history.

  As for the ruled, they are like people anywhere. The more opportunistic among them try to ingratiate themselves with their superiors in order to climb another rung of the party hierarchy. But most of the ordinary people simply struggle to survive under the numbing weight of totalitarian rule.

  Hidden within the vast body of Russia and its satellite socialist republics, riddling them like a cancer, lies that terrible network of imprisonment known as the Gulag.

  Pain and suffering are linked in an endless chain of interrogation chambers and forced labor camps, psychiatric hospitals and the frozen death mines of the Arctic. Uncounted millions have died in the Gulag, and today perhaps two million or more still slave for the hollow dream of communism.

  Stefan Boldin had only completed three long years of his twenty-year sentence.

  They had not broken the Polish dissident when they arrested him. He did not betray his friends under interrogation in the Lubyanka prison. He had somehow remained defiant at his trial. He had not succumbed, even on the freezing cattle train that brought him to Siberia. But it was here, at Karashevo, that he had finally broken.

  The authorities had discarded him, consigning the outspoken poet to a numbered fate like so many others before him. They did not even know that he was beaten.

  Here in the camps there was a harsh code of honor and loyalty, but those fine abstractions were subservient to survival. In Karashevo — from one day to the next — survival was all that really counted.

  "Boldin!"

  The once controversial writer put down the cement sack he carried and looked back down the slope to where Roykov, the foreman, was trying to attract Boldin's attention. The commandant's car waited for him on the track of packed snow.

  Neither the driver nor the guard said anything to prisoner #220143 as they drove back to the camp. Boldin assumed that either the Politburo had finally relented and granted him an exit visa, or that he was being summoned for another and perhaps even more publicized trial. One he dared not hope for, the other he dared not contemplate. Boldin simply stared at the desolate snowscape and blanked out his mind.

  It was not until he was sitting in the warmth of the commandant's office and was introduced to the high-ranking visitor from Moscow who offered him a cigarette, that Boldin felt this really might be his lucky day.

  Colonel Vichinsky scrutinized the prisoner's face as he held out his lighter. Boldin looked down at the floor. He did not want to give the appearance of staring back. Vichinsky, sitting on the front edge of the old wooden desk, shifted his position so that he could inspect the prisoner from another angle.

  Several times the colonel glanced at the black-and-white photograph he had set down on the commandant's desk, comparing Boldin's features with those of the man pictured there. Boldin thought it was his own portrait until he caught a long enough glimpse to see that there was a definite difference in the eyes.

  "This is not a comfortable place to be," Vichinsky said candidly, looking out of the window at a column of prisoners being marched across the compound. "But you need not remain here. There is something you can do to get out."

  Boldin remained silent. He would not give them the names of the printers who had circulated his poems. He'd held out before and, if that was what they wanted now, he hoped he could hold out again. In truth, Boldin was not certain that he could, but he'd try to play out this interview long enough to finish the welcome cigarette.

  "You bear a very close resemblance to a man we are interested in." The colonel observed Boldin's malnourished frame and pinched features. "At least, you did, and you can soon do so again. You will be fed well. You'll have better clothes. It won't be long before you are back to your old self again."

  Such honesty went against the very grain of his personality, but Vichinsky knew that if the Janus Plan was to work he must have this prisoner's willing cooperation.

  Still Boldin said nothing. He wondered what it was that they really wanted. Did they intend to take compromising photographs using him as a model? It had been so long since he had been with a woman that he doubted he could perform in such a role.

  Boldin stubbed out the cigarette and slipped the butt into his pocket. "When do I leave?"

  His decision was a reflex response. This was the best opportunity for survival that had been granted him since his arrival at Karashevo.

  "Immediately." Vichinsky permitted himself a thin smile of satisfaction. He had guessed right.

  * * *

  It had taken four months to effect the physical transformation that was necessary. Boldin was fed three square meals a day and all the snacks he wanted in between. An operation on his nose and careful grooming by a skilled hairstylist produced the results that Vichinsky was trying to achieve.

  Now the colonel stared down at the open file on his desk and compared the latest photo of the Polish convict with that of Colonel John Phoenix. He was well pleased with the progress that had been made, doubly so that it had been achieved entirely on his own initiative and without Strakhov's knowledge.

  Strakhov was hard at work drawing up a detailed master list of current KGB activities throughout the world for the leader of the Soviet Union. Vichinsky envied his boss the power represented by such knowledge, but not the tedious task of compiling it.

  The colonel lit another cigarette even though one was still smoldering in the ashtray. He would wait to find Strakhov's fatal weakness. His boss's passion for Anastasia was not enough of a lever to depose him; there must be something else. And Vichinsky was confident that he could put his finger on it.

  But today he would concern himself with Janus.

  The plan to trap Phoenix.

  Vichinsky had been staring at the two photographs for some time. He realized he could not tell the difference between the American and his counterfeit double.

  The Janus Plan was going to work.

  4

  Dawn approached as a blush of lemon above the dark, jagged line of the horizon behind them. Then the molten disk of the sun rose to burn away the sandy haze. To the untrained eye there appeared to be no movement at all in that jumbled spectrum of ochers, rusts and strangely velvet mauves. But from the snipers' vantage point, a single shaft of sunlight spearing down over the broken lip of the escarpment trapped a faint dancing cloud, just a lighter smudge against a background of deep brown.

  Bolan tipped his head toward the approaching convoy. He did not have to point it out. McCarter had already picked up the far-off rumble of the Russian vehicles.

  A six-wheeled armored car was riding point.

  The Englishman shifted the strap of the power pack dangling from his shoulder and wished he held a good rifle instead of a camera.

  To the left of their position, concealed behind a spine of bare rock, lay the main force of Abdur Jahan's ragged band. Jahan himself crouched beside the two Western "news correspondents." Bolan scanned the faces of these men who served Tarik Khan: weather-beaten skin, dark brows over hawk noses, they waited, proud and defiant.

  They were used to such waiting. They had outlasted the ambitions of other empires: the Persian hordes of Darius the Great; Alexander and his Macedonian army; Genghis Khan; the Arab cavalry and the British with all their pomp and ceremony and scarlet tunics.

  Now the Russian bear was astride their land, seeking out its age-old goal to reach India and the warm-water ports that ringed the Arabian Sea. But as the Soviet Union sought to expand its slave empire it had run into the mujahedeen, the soldiers of God, the holy warriors of Afghanistan.

  For four years the holy warriors had fought the Red Army colossus to a standstill. They would not be crushed. They would not submit meekly to the northern invaders.

  Despite crippling losses, lack of financial support from abroad and inadequate arms, they had stalled the Soviet thrust, tied up more than one hundred thousand troops, killed at least five thousand and inflicted another ten thousand casualties.

  They
would wait, strike, run and wait again. Even if the West would not aid them, the mujahedeen believed they had two things on their side. Time. And God.

  "Here." Jahan handed the tall American the ancient brass telescope. His English was thickly accented. "The Russians are foolish to set off so early. The sun will be in their eyes by the time they reach the top."

  Bolan accepted the telescope. He scanned the length of the valley. It was a lot wider than the Khazani rift, which lay thirty miles southwest of their present position. The road hugged the rumpled slope of the barren escarpment. On the other side was a rock-strewn riverbed, carrying a trickle of icy water. Bright emerald tufts of grass and purple flowers sprouted amid the boulders.

  The road wound perilously through a series of switchbacks. During the night the mujahedeen had used a long bullock team to tow the wreckage of a Russian tank into position at the top of the longest incline, where it would create a dangerous bottleneck for the approaching column.

  "Mostly Afghan regulars," said Bolan, inspecting the truckloads of soldiers interspersed with the supply carriers.

  Jahan spat in the dust. Their quarrel with the successive regimes in Kabul had started long before the present puppet-ruler had invited Moscow to send in their troops.

  "Fuel tankers in the middle,"' noted McCarter, who was using his camera's zoom lens for a close-up view of the convoy.

  Jahan had seen them, too. Whispered instructions were relayed to the two militia deserters who now manned a captured rocket launcher for the mujahedeen band.

  Bolan glanced back at their guide, Darul Mirza. On the journey in from northern Pakistan he had been full of heroic stories about nighttime exploits with his guerrilla comrades. But here, cowering in the scant cover of a shallow gully, he did not seem so confident and daring.

  As the spring warmth melted the mountain snows, hundreds of Afghan resisters would pour back over the Pakistan frontier to resume the fight. Darul Mirza would be busy in the coming weeks carrying messages and guiding occasional Western observers into the combat zone. He had told Bolan that he'd already brought another journalist in the week before, but where the man was now, he couldn't say.