by Saul Herzog
“Yes,” she said. “It went down right on the border. I wanted to look into it, so I went out there.”
“To Ziguri?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Well,” she said, then her voice trailed off.
“Did you find the plane?”
“Not exactly,” she said, “but…”, she stopped herself talking.
“What was it, Agata?”
“I don’t want to say on the phone. Meet me at the office. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes, tonight, Kuzis.”
“Agata. What did you find?”
“One hour,” she said and hung up.
When she got to the office, there was no one there but the night watchman. He nodded as she passed, and she went straight up to the fourth floor.
Kuzis wasn’t there, and she made herself some coffee and put some change in the snack machine. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast at the hotel, and she was feeling faint.
She stood there, staring at the snacks, while the machine waited for her to make her selection.
“Agata,” a voice said from behind her.
It was Kuzis, standing by the elevator in a pair of tan slacks and a polo shirt that stretched taut over his belly.
“Kuzis.”
“What’s going on, Agata?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your weekend.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, leading the way to his office.
She pressed a button on the snack machine, and some chips fell off their shelf. She grabbed them and followed him.
“So,” he said, shutting the door behind her. “I take it from the sound of your voice that you found something important.”
“My voice?”
“Agata, I’ve never heard you so frantic.”
She took a deep breath.
“Sit,” he said.
She sat down. She looked around the office as if someone might have been there listening. It was just her and Kuzis.
“You look pale,” he said.
“I should eat something,” she said, opening the chips.
“Let me get something to calm you down,” he said, opening a compartment in his desk. He bent down and reemerged with a bottle of Swedish Aquavit and two glasses.
He raised an eyebrow, and Agata nodded. He poured them each a measure of the alcohol and handed her a glass.
She knocked back the entire thing.
“Okay?” Kuzis said.
“It’s good. Thank you.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I think I’m still processing what I saw.”
“Which was?”
“Well, you heard my message from yesterday, right?”
“A forestry plane,” Kuzis said.
“I spoke to the officer who filed the report. He said he saw it explode.”
“Explode?”
“Like it was shot out of the sky, Kuzis.”
Kuzis looked alarmed. He knew better than anyone what was at stake on the Russian border.
“Let’s slow down for a minute, Agata. You know what we always say about those provincial police reports. They see bogeymen beneath every bed.”
Agata sighed. They screened hundreds of reports every year. They were about as reliable as palm readings.
But this was different.
“This was no bogeyman. Unless bogeymen have learned to shoot guns.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I tried to find the crash site.”
“And someone opened fire at you?”
She nodded her head.
Kuzis’s eyes widened.
“A farmer with a shotgun?” he said.
“No, sir. Not a farmer with a shotgun.”
“Who then?” he said.
She had his full attention now.
“I don’t know. I ran before getting a look at the body.”
“Body?”
“I think I might have shot him.”
“Agata, what are you telling me?”
“I found something in the woods, Kuzis.”
“Something?”
“I found weapons, Kuzis. Russian weapons.”
“How do you know they were Russian?”
“AK-12s, AK-74s, rocket launchers, surface-to-air missile launchers.”
“Well,” Kuzis said, desperately seeking an explanation. “You were close to the border. Are you certain you didn’t cross over to the Russian side?”
“What if I did? Why would they have a cache out there at all? Why would they have maps of Latvian roads and bridges?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Why would they try to kill me, Kuzis?”
“All I’m saying,” Kuzis said, “is that we need to remain calm. We need to think this through.”
“I have been thinking it through,” she said. “I’ve been thinking it through for the past six hours. This is an advance drop.”
“In advance of what, Agata?”
Agata lowered her voice. She checked that the door was still shut, which of course it was, and said, “In advance of an invasion, Kuzis. That’s what.”
“Agata,” Kuzis hissed. “Please.”
“Please what?”
“You have to be careful what you say.”
She knew he was right. If the Russians were planning something, they’d know by now that someone had been snooping around their cache, and they’d be searching for her. Every year, dozens of people across Europe died in suspicious circumstances. They’d have a car crash, or a freak boating accident, or a sudden heart attack brought on by some Cold War-era poison.
The victims could always be traced back to Russia.
Outspoken critics of the regime.
Whistleblowers.
Journalists.
Activists.
The Kremlin didn’t care.
Molotov wanted the world to know it was him.
It was a message.
Get in my way, and this is what happens.
And what Agata had just seen, assuming it was what she thought it was, put her squarely in the bracket of getting in Vladimir Molotov’s way.
“Well,” she said. “What do we do about this?”
“If you really saw what you think you saw,” he said.
“I know what I saw, Kuzis.”
“Then we have to be discrete, Agata.”
“We have to warn High Command.”
“Yes,” Kuzis agreed, “but we have to be smart about how we do it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, leave it to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get them the message, but anonymously.”
“They won’t believe it,” Agata said.
She knew what she’d seen, but looking at it now, under the harsh, fluorescent lights of State Police Headquarters, she could see how far-fetched it seemed.
“Did you get anything else?” Kuzis said. “Anything concrete?”
“Proof?”
He nodded.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the map and other documents she’d taken from the crates.
The map spoke for itself, but it was one of the other documents that really caught Kuzis’s attention.
It looked like a Russian military pamphlet. Something that would be distributed among troops on active operations. The paper had a waxy sheen to it for weatherproofing, and the Cyrillic letters looked foreign and menacing, a throwback to the Soviet days when the Russian army was not some distant threat but a daily reality.
Kuzis took the document from her hands and looked at it closely. Agata watched him. His face remained as blank and expressionless as a stone, but his eyes were wide with fright. He knew what he was looking at.
“There’s a table here detailing the composition of Latvian forests,” he said. “Birch, white alder, aspen.”
Agata hadn’t looked a
t it in detail.
“Look here,” he said, pointing to a graph filled with numbers.
“What’s that?”
“Estimates,” he said.
“Estimates of what?”
He turned the page. “Lots of things. This estimates the distance sound travels through birch and alder forests in January.”
“Kuzis,” Agata said.
“A snapping twig, eighty meters,” he said. “Troops on foot, three-hundred meters. An idling T-14, one kilometer.”
“This is an invasion plan,” she said.
Kuzis’s head nodded slowly. He was transfixed by the brochure like it was an artifact from another planet.
“The rifles I saw,” Agata said, “ they were the new AK-12s.”
“You’re sure?”
“I know the difference,” she said. “And the rocket launchers were SA-25’s.”
“That’s what happened to your pilot.”
She nodded.
It was terrifying. The Russians were coming. They were really coming. The Russians wouldn’t have issued those weapons for a training mission. They were preparing for real combat.
But somehow, Agata found herself letting out a long sigh of relief. It was as if, now that she’d passed on the warning, a huge weight had just been lifted from her chest.
She could breathe now.
Kuzis was on it.
He’d get the message up the chain of command.
He’d do his duty.
10
The Russian railway network was one of the wonders of the industrial age. It connected some of the most far-flung inhabited outposts on the planet, stretching from the remote borders of China and Mongolia and North Korea, to the very doorstep of Europe.
Of the earth’s twenty-four time zones, the Russian railway stretched across eleven of them.
The distance from Port Nakhodka, east of Vladivostok at the head of the Sea of Japan, to somewhere like Pskov, just inside the Latvian border, was greater than the distance from New York City to Honolulu.
The railway lines were unimaginably vast, unimaginably lonely. There were times when the train passengers were the only human beings within literally hundreds of square miles of territory. The lines crossed eighty mountain ranges. Of the one hundred longest rivers in the world, they spaned twenty-five.
Calling them a wonder was no exaggeration.
And they were achieved at a human cost that was almost beyond reckoning.
The cost in terms of human life made the Russian rail network one of the deadliest industrial undertakings in history.
There were wars that had cost fewer lives.
And there is one word that made it all possible.
Slavery.
That singularly dark blot on the history of mankind.
And Russia was not alone in utilizing it.
The briefest of surveys would show that the absence of slavery was, in fact, far rarer than its presence.
And no one was aware of the fact more than Joseph Stalin.
He boasted that he had more slaves than were used in the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty to erect the pyramids.
“Pharoah had a quarter-million,” he would say, and laugh.
In the United States census of 1860, the last one conducted before the Civil War, there were four million men, women and children enslaved in America.
In 1944, when the Nazi forced-labor system was at its height, and the Reich kept detailed receipts of the payments made by German corporations for the use of slave labor, the tally came to six-and-a-half-million.
Stalin loved statistics. They drove his enormous, ruthless Five Year Plans. He had a statistic for everything. And he was proud of them above all else.
He knew how many people were dying under his regime. And he also knew the tonnage for steel production, coal mining, grain production, and rail construction.
Everything had a number.
And privately, one of his favorites was the Soviet slave count. On that metric, he had outstripped every other nation and empire on the planet, whether of the past or of the present.
Under the Gulag system, Stalin secretly bragged that he owned more slaves than all documented past regimes combined. For most of his rule, there were over thirty-thousand forced-labor camps across the Soviet Union, with the largest of them held more than twenty-five thousand inmates.
Those inmates worked on many projects, but laying rail was the biggest.
Projects such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline, the Krasnoyarsk-Yeniseysk Mainline, the Amur Railway, the Primorsky Railway, the Sevzheldorlag Northern Railway, and the Eastern Railway could never have been completed without them.
Just one of those projects, the Tayshet to Bratsk portion of the Baikal-Amur line, would have taken, it was estimated, over two hundred years if voluntary labor, paid a regular wage, was used.
On the infamous Trans-Polar Mainline, three-hundred thousand enslaved dissidents worked ceaselessly on a thousand-mile stretch of rail to link the far-north outpost of Salekhard, on the Arctic Ocean Gulf of Ob, to the remote town of Igarka, a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
The workers, men and women, slept in canvas tents on the track and worked in temperatures below negative fifty degrees Celsius. Over a hundred thousand died, hauling ballast and laying steel on the line that would never be completed.
Never used.
A hundred thousand lives, lost for a line that went, quite literally, nowhere.
The guards, to maintain order and, presumably, pass the time, came up with some of the cruelest punishments on record.
One of their favorites was to tie a prisoner naked to a post and leave him. In the winter, death came mercifully quickly, but in summer, the prisoner died by being devoured by the millions of voracious, over-sized mosquitoes that hatched in the marshes.
A man could be transformed into a clean, chalk-white skeleton in a matter of days.
Another line, one that was actually completed, was the line from Moscow to Archangel. That thousand-mile stretch traveled due north from Moscow’s famed Belorusskaia Station, with one departure per week making the twenty-three-hour journey through Yaroslavl, Vologda, and some of the remotest territory in the country. About two hours before the train arrives at Archangel, a strategically important port on the Arctic Ocean, it passes a port of a different kind.
In 1957, at a site called Plesetsk, two-hundred kilometers south of Archangel, the Soviets built an intercontinental ballistic missile launch site. By 1961, four fully functional R-7 missile complexes were combat-ready at the location. The missiles were designed to carry a five-megaton payload, using rockets fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene. It could hit targets five and a half thousand miles away with an accuracy of about three miles.
The closest they ever got to being fired was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when one of the rockets was fully fueled and loaded with a live warhead. The missile was then wheeled to launchpad 41/1, where a single mechanical trigger would have sent it on a non-recallable, one-way flight to Minot Air Force Base in Ward County, North Dakota, where the new US Minuteman ICBMs were stationed.
For the time the missile sat on the pad, when a spark from the flint of a Zippo lighter would have been sufficient to send it on its way, it was, and remains to this day, the nearest the planet has ever come to nuclear war.
On the day that Arturs Alda’s plane was shot down over the Latvian border, pad 41/1 was used for an entirely new type of launch.
The launch was immediately picked up and tracked by an analyst at the Tenth Space Warning Squadron at Cavalier Air Force Station in North Dakota. Ironically, the concrete bunker he was sitting in would have been within the blast radius of the fueled R-7 that was almost launched in 1962.
The analyst was using the new Enhanced Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System that had just been installed as part of a new Space Force appropriations package passed by congress the year earlier. If it were not for the upgrades to the system, the lau
nch would have remained undetected.
Which, as it happened, it might as well have, because there was nothing the analyst, or anyone else at the Tenth Space Warning Squadron, could do about the behavior it exhibited.
The analyst tracked it diligently, and every day, more people came by his console to look over his shoulder at what it was he was tracking.
He wasn’t used to being a celebrity. He was an overweight former linebacker from New Hampshire, and during Canadian football season, he drove weekly to Winnepeg to catch the Blue Bombers games.
At first, the launch didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. A Soyuz rocket, the workhorse of the Russian space program, took off from pad 41/1 at just before dawn local time.
The launch was given the identifier Cosmos 2542, and it gave no indication of ever being anything more than a number on a spreadsheet, one of the countless objects tracked diligently, but unremarkably, by Space Command.
About five hours after its launch, however, it did something that no Russian satellite, or indeed, any satellite from any nation, had ever done before.
It split in two.
The same analyst, with a Boston Cream donut in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, dropped both immediately and called his superior.
“Sir, I’ve got something you’re going to want to see,” he said.
“What is it, Harper?”
“Russian launch 2542.”
“I see it.”
“Well, sir, it just split in two.”
“It did what now?”
“Split in two, sir.”
“You mean it broke apart?”
“No, sir,” Harper said, staring at his screen as intently as if he’d just found proof of extraterrestrial life. “I mean, the main satellite opened up, and a smaller satellite came out of it.”
“That’s not possible,” the officer said.
“Well, sir, someone better tell the Russians that.”
And that was how, two days later, Harper found himself in a secure conference room at the federal building in Bismarck with his boss, the head of the National Reconnaissance Office, and CIA Director Levi Roth.
“One satellite came out of the other?” Roth said when Harper concluded his presentation.
“Like one of those Russian dolls, sir,” Harper said. “I gave it a separate tag. Cosmos 2543.”
“But that wasn’t the last strange thing it did?” Roth said, looking through the printout Harper had prepared.
