by Warren Fahy
Geoffrey and Nell sat upright in the uncomfortable seat of the empty antique train car as they observed the tumultuous landscape piling higher and higher around them until a man finally entered the train through the forward vestibule. He was middle-aged, lithe, and well groomed with elegantly cropped silver hair that matched his expensive dove-gray suit. His sunken face and hollow eyes reminded Geoffrey of Boris Karloff. Maxim entered behind him. “Let me introduce you to my right hand. This is Galia Sokolof. Galia, these are the scientists.”
Galia smiled. His cadaverous eyes brightened as he clasped both their hands. “I am so happy you decided to come. It is so very nice to meet you. Now, if you’ll excuse us both for a while longer.” He and Maxim departed to the front of the train car and spoke to each other in rapid Russian.
“God, I hope we’re not crazy, honey,” Geoffrey whispered.
“Oh, we’re crazy,” Nell said. “But that’s why I married you, darling.” She squeezed his hand.
9:16 A.M.
At last, after a long and circuitous haul up mountain grades past peaks, lakes, rivers, and gorges, the train reached a village named Gursk and exhaled an expulsion of steam as if announcing the town’s name. To the left of the tracks, Geoffrey saw a row of shops and restaurants boarded up along the bank of a rushing blue river. To the right, a majestic mountain rose over the town, its peak flashing the sun’s rays like a pyramid’s capstone. Rusted mining equipment, teetering conveyors, mountains of tailings, and hundreds of dilapidated barracks swathed the foothills of the mighty peak.
The town was a curdled mix of well-preserved ancient and run-down modern buildings, with half-timbered façades next to cinder blocks and tin roofs.
“This is Maxim Dragolovich’s city?” Nell whispered.
“Oh, we are definitely crazy, sweetheart.…”
9:21 A.M.
They arrived at the train station of Gursk, which blocked off their view of the city and the mountain to the north as they came to a hissing stop. The station was one of those patronized buildings in third-world countries that leap out of their surroundings with fraudulent promise, a chunk of propaganda dropped in like a leaflet from a bomber. The cracked concrete roof was supported by a dramatic colonnade of cement columns with alcoves along a back wall displaying Russian revolutionaries, now chipped and sprayed with graffiti. The bronze lampposts were dark as molasses, their glass domes shattered. The ceiling had dripped rivers of rust across the cracked marble platform.
As they stepped off the train, Maxim waved his arm cheerfully. “This way!”
They followed east along the platform. Nell and Geoffrey could not see anyone inhabiting the town in either direction and wondered if it was abandoned. They breathed the cold fresh air as the chill of apprehension froze into a panic.
Maxim and Galia led them to the east end of the platform, where the roof was missing and heavy pillars reached skeletal hands of rebar into the azure sky. There they turned at a railed-in stairway that descended in the opposite direction. Urging Nell and Geoffrey on, they went down the stairs, at the bottom of which was a steel hatch facing north. Galia produced a key and turned it in the door. Then he cranked a wheel like the ones on submarine hatches, and the stubborn hinges shrieked as he pushed the door open.
Inside, Maxim pulled down a large switch on the wall, and halogen lamps hanging from the ceiling flared to life over what appeared to be a small subway station. An antique subway car sat on rails perpendicular to the tracks of the train station above.
After closing and locking the door behind them, the older man turned to Geoffrey. “All aboard,” Galia said, smiling.
“Please, Doctors,” Maxim said, climbing into the subway car ahead of them and holding out a hand for Nell.
“OK,” said Nell as she climbed in and Geoffrey followed her. Galia headed to the front of the car. The carriage rocked, and they were suddenly zooming forward—and then down. The glazed white tiles lining the tunnel reflected the car’s blazing running lights as they accelerated. Geoffrey saw heavy insulated electrical cables running along the tracks to either side as they plunged deeper into the earth and their ears popped.
“Where the hell are we going, Maxim?” Geoffrey blurted.
Nell nodded. “Yeah?”
“You’ll see,” Maxim said, watching them now with an abstract smile as they rattled through the glittering tunnel, which enlarged suddenly, a sign hanging from the ceiling that answered Geoffrey’s question in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets:
POBEDOGRAD
“Pobedograd,” Nell read, noticing the suffix. “A city?”
“You’re kidding,” said Geoffrey.
The tycoon nodded, laughing deeply as they whooshed down the tunnel.
“What does the name mean?” Nell asked.
“Victory City,” Maxim said. “Hold on, now!”
The train clattered down the white wormhole, swerving right, left, left, right, and always down deeper as the temperature rose. At last, a smudge of light at the end of the tunnel resolved into a subway station floating in the black void: “Here we are.” Maxim opened a hand at the window as the subway car emerged into a cavern that stretched to their left, containing what seemed to be a train yard. The surreal train depot ahead was crowned with a rococo entablature inlaid with Cyrillic white letters a yard tall: SEKTOP 7.
“Sector Seven?” Geoffrey asked.
Maxim nodded. “Yes, Dr. Binswanger. The city is divided into seven sectors.”
Brass streetlamps highlighted the white marble platform like a rectangular layer of cloud suspended in the solid darkness.
The car stopped at a right angle to the station’s platform. They detrained onto a lower landing to the right of the car, and Nell felt the temperature rise into the high 60s. They walked north, as far as they could tell, toward the station, and smelled engine exhaust thick in the air.
Coming out from behind the subway car, they saw a droning portable generator the size of a truck trailer parked on the tracks to the left of the station’s platform. Electrical cables ran from the generator to a conduit under the platform, into which much larger cables from the tunnel also fed. Geoffrey’s eyes followed the blue rails of the train tracks in front of the station, which headed west as they converged in total darkness.
“You’re probably wondering where the tracks go, Geoffrey?” Maxim observed. “Some say workers breached a pocket of poison gas while digging that tunnel. Two hundred men were sealed inside to die. Their ghosts still haunt Pobedograd, or so the locals say.” Maxim gave them a sardonic glance. “Others believe it goes all the way to Moscow.”
Maxim climbed stairs to the platform and greeted the men there, who looked like bodyguards and brandished automatic weapons. The billionaire led them all into the station house through its doorless entryway. A steel beam supported the high, pitched ceiling inside. The far wall framed a great window of thick leaded glass reinforced with wire mesh. Steel shutters fixed against the ceiling were obviously designed to swing down and seal the window like a blast shield. Geoffrey and Nell could hardly believe the view through the window.
Coming out of the void, a skyline of a city gleamed, trimmed with colored lights reflecting in a subterranean river, a miniature Hong Kong under a sky of solid rock. The far bank of the river was lined with three-story apartments, restaurants, and nightclubs, some still under construction. Behind them, wedge-shaped city blocks of taller buildings with Gothic, classical, deco, and modernist façades, rooftops, and pinnacles radiated from a towering star-shaped building thirty-five stories tall at the center, which reached up to the ceiling of the vast chamber. The central tower was fused to one of two natural columns of rock that buttressed the capacious cavern. Colorful neon lights covered the tower’s angular walls like a Las Vegas hotel. A five-pointed Soviet star extended long points across the limestone ceiling from the tower’s crown, shedding a soft glow that plated the city with a silver luster like permanent moonlight. Nell and Geoffrey looked at Maxim with wide e
yes.
“This is my city,” the oligarch said. “The last place on Earth that is still free.” He looked at his guests, and he smiled. “What happens in Pobedograd, stays in Pobedograd.”
Geoffrey noted Maxim’s dark eyes burning as he surveyed his subterranean metropolis. “You built this, Maxim?”
“I bought this, Geoffrey. For $382,772 from the Kaziristani government.” The magnate laughed. “Soviets built it. Or more precisely, their slaves did. One of those slaves, buried somewhere down here, was my grandfather.” Maxim waved, and one man activated a switch beside what appeared to be a large door to the right of the window. Geoffrey noticed SEKTOP 6 stenciled in faded red letters on the door as it slid sideways into the wall to reveal steps leading down to two Mercedes limousines parked at the curb in front of the station.
Maxim and Galia got into the lead limo, waving in Geoffrey and Nell, who sat across from them. Maxim’s bodyguards got into the limo behind them.
“You said there are species that you need us to identify,” Nell said. “Is this where they come from?”
“We will get to work soon enough, Doctor.” Maxim knocked on the partition behind him, and the car moved forward. “This natural cavern is almost largest ever discovered, I’m pretty sure. Surrounding it are others even bigger! Before Soviets came, the village of Gursk mined salt here for seven centuries. They helped carve this world beneath Mount Kazar. Soon city’s power plant will be online, in a few hours now, I believe. Isn’t that right, Galia? Then my city will be entirely self-sufficient and will burn as bright as day. Then we will no longer need anything from the surface. It will be a very luxurious resort to live in, don’t you agree, Geoffrey?”
“As a last resort, I guess,” Geoffrey conceded. “It’s certainly a spectacular place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”
To the right of the train station, a string of dim streetlamps arched over a baroque bridge with gilded wreaths carved into the balustrades. As the limos cruised over the bridge, Nell and Geoffrey looked out the left window at the black currents of the river between lampposts wrapped with bronze dolphins. A ghostly waterfall glowed blue in the distance, cascading down the western wall of the cavern. To the right of the bridge, the sparkling river seemed to drop down, flowing deeper into a channel that disappeared under the eastern wall.
“My River Styx!” Maxim proclaimed.
“Wow,” Nell whispered.
On the other side of the river, they turned right and then left, heading north along the city’s eastern edge. Three-story buildings displaying a dozen European architectural styles flickered past them on either side in their jiggling headlights. Many were lit up and apparently inhabited. Small electric cars zoomed through the city’s streets. They passed shops, apartment houses, fire stations, factories, banks, nightclubs, and grocery stores. It was like a museum of architecture, Nell thought as she observed the people on the streets. They were mostly well-dressed adults or construction workers. She noticed no children, though one woman appeared to be pregnant. “How many people live here?”
“Almost five thousand right now,” Maxim said. “Mostly workers, but guests have begun to arrive.” He activated a special cell phone in the car to check for messages.
Between blocks, Nell and Geoffrey saw spokelike streets radiating from the central tower’s pointed ramparts. At the head of each avenue stood a hulking bronze colossus posed in righteous glory. She recognized Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and other revolutionary heroes. From the star-shaped tower’s pinnacle, the five points of the glimmering star stretched over the city’s main avenues. Some of the streets were lit only by construction crews and traversed by trucks and forklifts. Other avenues were empty, twilit, and still.
“Pobedograd was originally a giant bomb shelter,” Maxim said, turning off his phone. “For Communist Party elite—in case they succeeded in destroying world. I turned it into a playground for rich, and a haven for oppressed—two classes that are often same, eh? But I am only law here. Don’t worry, I’m benevolent dictator.”
The refined city surpassed anything they had seen on their journey across the impoverished countryside of Kaziristan. Here, Geoffrey thought, under a mountain.
“Stalin was addicted to underworld,” Maxim explained. The hulking magnate’s body was outlined in the window of the limousine like the profile of a mountain. His black hair and beard flowed like basalt over his shoulders as he flashed a look at Geoffrey with volcanic eyes. “Koba dug railroads and cities across Soviet Empire. Places where he could plan his disasters, and hide from their consequences. He was Devil, Dr. Binswanger.” Maxim looked grimly through the window.
“Koba?” Nell asked.
“You mean Stalin?” Geoffrey asked.
“Da,” Maxim grunted.
“You mentioned your grandfather,” Geoffrey said.
Maxim nodded. “My grandfather was doctor, like yourself. A physicist. For telling truth, he was sentenced to Belbaltlag so he could help dig White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, which was very first gulag. Prisoners used pickaxes and shovels to dig one-hundred-forty-mile canal in only twenty months, at cost of twenty-five thousand men—some say one hundred thousand. Nobody really knows.” Maxim shrugged and spread the fingers of one hand, shaking his head. “Records are sketchy. The canal was too narrow for ships, however. So it was nothing more than mass grave for criminals, counterrevolutionaries, and enemies of state. My grandfather survived Belbaltlag. One of few. He survived two more gulags, as well, until he arrived here. He was tough man.” Maxim looked at Nell. “But here, at Pobedograd, he died, along with seventy-five thousand other men who were building this glorious hiding place for Koba.”
“Stalin.” Nell nodded softly.
“Da.” Maxim sipped from a silver flask, which he offered to Geoffrey and Nell, who politely refused. The oligarch continued, occasionally dropping articles as his cadence stressed certain phrases and words with explosive volume: “My father was genius, like my grandfather! Unlike him, however, he did not try to work inside Soviet system. He was entrepreneur in black market, instead. They branded him a gangster, just like me. Gangsters were only ones getting anything done in Russia in those days. Today, still true. The Party did not care. All they cared about was who was breaking law and if they received sufficient bribes to look other way. Our state made us what we had to be in order to survive, Geoffrey. I stepped into my father’s shoes at seventeen, after he was murdered by officials who were not bribed enough. Since then, all Russian authorities are my enemies. And I am theirs, since then.”
“I see,” Nell said with a worried glance at Geoffrey.
Maxim slapped Geoffrey’s thigh, grinning in a conspiratorial expression. “You see this city, Geoffrey? It’s nothing! The ground of Moscow is hollow with such places. Some were dug centuries ago by Ivan the Terrible. Others are so secret, even Russian government possesses no record of their construction!” Maxim laughed heartily, his Russian humor a potent cocktail of despair, outrage, and futility mixed with sly self-mockery. But there was a hidden declaration of war in his laugh, as well. “Under Moscow, Stalin’s underground was intended to keep state officials safe. Instead, it became refuge for enemies of state. Even in Stalin’s time, a black market of dissidents and geniuses, smugglers and rebels, all marked for murder, took root underground. During the ’70s, I, too, was saved, more than once, by hiding in Stalin’s catacombs. Many connections I made there helped me carve my slice of Soviet Union when it collapsed. By bribing the right officials and guaranteeing paychecks to oil, gas, and mine workers when Russian state could not, I gained their loyalty and kept power on so people would not freeze. I kept factories, schools, and hospitals from closing when no one else knew what to do. But when Russian government began hunting down so-called oligarchs, to reclaim what they call the ‘Party’s gold,’ I left, with my family and all of my wealth. That is something Russian government can never forgive, or forget. I own homes on all five continents—twenty-seven estates from Italy to Hawaii, from M
anhattan to Hong Kong, from Israel to Costa Rica. I own a fleet of aircrafts, including three DC-10s, an American football team, an Italian basketball team, a French movie studio, and cable news networks in Australia, Eastern Europe, and Brazil. I moved all of my money and all of my family and friends out of Russia so I could not be blackmailed. Many of them live here now. And yet, at any moment, I could be assassinated. Three of my friends, other so-called oligarchs, have been murdered in broad daylight in major cities outside Russia. One was killed in downtown Manhattan. Digitalis in his Diet Coke. Another was killed in Argentina. Polonium in his toothpaste.” Maxim shrugged. “I am hunted wherever I go. Except here!”
Geoffrey noted the heavy security the billionaire was traveling under and glanced darkly at Nell.
They arrived at a giant steel door guarded by armed men. They read faded red letters stenciled on the steel: SEKTOP 2. Maxim waved out the window, and the guards activated a switch. The door rolled sideways into the wall and revealed a road that proceeded uphill into another part of the city.
The low ceiling over the road resembled the barrel vaulting of a Gothic monastery now. This section of the city seemed to be unoccupied and dark.
“This was a garrison for Stalin’s guards,” Maxim remarked, waving at the windoow. “It was built as shelter for villagers of Gursk six centuries ago. He sealed all sectors of city with lead-lined doors to protect them from floods, fires, radiation—or revolution.” Maxim winked sardonically at Nell.
There was no illumination in this sector except for their cars’ headlights. Nell noticed a few rats scurrying across the street in front of the limo.
“Most people born into poverty and oppression deserve it, I think,” Maxim inveighed. “The world they are willing to live in is their natural habitat, like crocodiles in mud or rats in sewers.”
Nell was startled as Maxim leveled his piercing gaze at both of them.
“And most people born into freedom and prosperity don’t deserve it, either—since they did nothing to create it and nothing to preserve it. Indeed, they do a little more each day to tear it down, if only by looking the other way while it crumbles. That is the sad truth, my friends.”
