The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  The limousine pulled up a deserted side street in what Stone could see was a poor neighborhood of southern Moscow.

  “That’s it,” Stone said, and the car came to a halt. He kissed Charlotte quickly and got out. “Hurry,” he said, and the Volga was gone.

  “Careful,” she called out.

  514 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  As Stone walked closer to the garage, he saw Stefan Kramer. “What are you waiting for?” he asked the young Russian. “Let’s go in!”

  “I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible.”

  “What’s the matter, Stefan? What is it?”

  “It wasn’t here before,” he said, leading Stone to the side door of Fyodorov’s garage. The garage in which his old cellmate had stored the explosives.

  The paint on the door was peeling, and what little paint was there was dark with engine grease. Glinting against the doorjamb was a large, sophisticated steel padlock.

  “This is new,” Stefan said. “They must have put it on just recently.”

  Stone looked at the lock, and then back at Stefan. “I’m pretty good with locks,” he said.

  78

  6:57 a.m.

  Shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of Revolution Day, two men from the GRU were driven to the side of Lenin’s mausoleum.

  Red Square was dark and deserted, with a lone militiaman walking across the cobbled expanse, several more sentries scattered at the perimeter. The two uniformed honor guards stood unmoving in front of the entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum.

  The younger man, carrying the bomb apparatus in a green military-issue gym bag, was wearing the vivid blue uniform of the Kremlin Guard. As he and his senior officer walked around to the rear entrance, the guard saluted. A security check, the guard would think. That was all.

  “Good morning, sir,” the guard said.

  “Good morning,” the older GRU man said. “Is the basement arsenal open?”

  “No, sir. You gave orders that no one be allowed in. It is locked.”

  “Who has the key?”

  “Solovyov, sir.”

  “He’s downstairs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They entered, and one level down came upon the next guard, who bolted to attention.

  “Please give me the key to the arsenal,” the senior man ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the guard said, and removed a key from a large ring attached to his belt.

  516 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  The two men entered the arsenal, closing the door behind them.

  “Get to work,” said the colonel general. His voice echoed against the concrete walls. The explosives expert set down the bag and removed its contents: the plastic bricks, the canister of gas, the blasting caps and grenades and batteries, and the many yards of wires. His face betrayed no emotion as he put the canister upright on the floor in the center of the room and began placing the grenades along the periphery.

  He adjusted the gas-release valves. Finally, he switched on the black electronic detonator and punched in 11:10 a.m., then made the last electrical connection.

  “It’s all ready,” he announced. “Right now it’s twelve minutes after seven. The Politburo assembles atop the mausoleum at ten o’clock. At eleven, the gas will begin to be released from the tank. It will slowly fill the room with an oxygen-rich, highly combustible cloud. At ten minutes past eleven o’clock precisely, the plastic charge will be detonated, and the cloud will explode. And the structure will be destroyed.”

  “Very good.” The older man walked across the room, inspected the wiring closely, glanced at the connections to the plastic explosive, a grayish brick wrapped in clear plastic, and paid particular attention to the time-release valves attached to the propane tank. At last he looked up. “Everything is perfect,” he said. He looked around the chamber for one last time. “Everything is perfect.”

  It was seven-fifteen.

  By seven o’clock in the morning, the chairman of the KGB had been rushed, in his Zil limousine, to the Kremlin Clinic on Granovsky Street. He could not move his right side, he complained, and he was attended to immediately by the esteemed neurologist Dr. Konstantin Belov. After a hurried examination. Dr. Belov confirmed that the chairman’s vital signs indicated a stroke, and ordered Pavlichenko transferred to the high-security clinic outside Moscow.

  When the ambulance orderlies arrived to take him to Kuntsevo, two pleasant-faced young men who surely had no idea what was about to befall their country, Pavlichenko looked up from his hospital bed and smiled.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 517

  He knew that if he remained too long at the KremHn Chnic he would be vulnerable, a sitting duck. That was why he had come up with this ruse: like a pea in a shell game, he would not remain in one place too long. At Kuntsevo he had arranged to be met by a small convoy of his forces. And in four hours or so, security precautions would be of no concern.

  The orderlies lifted him gingerly from the bed and eased him onto the folding gurney they had brought in, apparendy awed by the responsibility of wheeling the chairman of the KGB down the clinic’s hallway, into the elevator, and into the ambulance. They seemed nervous and, for people who did this sort of thing all the time, even awkward. Pavlichenko was always amused by the effect his eminence had on ordinary people.

  He wondered whether these two men would be among the hundreds of emergency medical workers who would soon be called to Red Square, sirens screaming, to carry the burnt remains of the members of the Politburo. Would anyone survive? He thought it unlikely.

  The elevator stopped at the ground floor, and Pavlichenko was wheeled out into the cold, bright morning of Revolution Day.

  9:00 a.m.

  Miles of red bunting lined the streets, punctuated by giant portraits of Lenin and placards with the defiant, hortatory rhetoric of official Soviet propaganda: democracy, restructuring, speed-up! and lenin is

  MORE ALIVE THAN ALL THE LIVING! and TOWARD THE RADIANT FUTURE OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY, WIDESPREAD WELL-BEING, AND LASTING PEACE!

  Preparations for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution had begun weeks in advance. Posters had gone up in all public buildings, and red flags were everywhere, even on some cars; workers had struggled with pulleys and ropes to raise giant posters pasted onto wooden frames—fifty-foot-long banners of enormous supermen and super-women exhorting Russians to fulfill the decisions of the latest party congress.

  By nine o’clock in the morning, an enormous crowd had assem-

  518 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  bled near the Gorky Park metro station, the last stop on the subway, after which people had to walk toward Red Square. University groups aing red flags filed past athletes in uniforms and others pushing rubber-wheeled floats. A delegation of workers from the Red Proletariat Ball Bearing Factory marched alongside workers from Watch Factory’ Number 1, carrying good old-fashioned, hard-line banners that read

  WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE, ALL EFFORTS TO THE BATTLE FOR PEACE, and ONWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM. Outsidc the

  perimeter of Red Square were Uzbeks wearing black-and-white skullcaps, gypsy women with cloth sacks on their backs, and little girls with stiff white ribbons in their hair.

  A giant map of the world hung on the Kremlin wall above Lenin’s mausoleum. Icons of Marx, Lenin, and Engels had been placed on the side of GUM, the state department store that faced the square. The red brick Victorian structure of the Historical Museum, on another side of the square, was covered with portraits of the Politburo members, and a banner that read hail the Leninist foreign policy of the

  U.S.S.R.!

  In the center of all this, of all the commotion and all the triumphal posters, stood the dark-red mausoleum, looking tiny and insignificant, a child’s toy.

  Soon, Pavlichenko thought as he lay on the ambulance stretcher, the Politburo members, wearing their red ribbons, would be climbing the mausoleum. In just over two hours, the tomb would be a ball of fire, hurling chunks of porphyr' and labradorite, granite and
concrete into the dense crowd, killing hundreds of people.

  He la' strapped in the stretcher, being hoisted toward the ambulance—play-acting, as he knew he must. He hoped he was convincing.

  He remembered the ailing Konstantin Chernenko standing atop the tomb in February of 1984, presiding at Yuri Andropov’s funeral. The day was ice cold, and you could see clouds of frozen breath coming from the leaders’ mouths. Pavlichenko, not yet ascended to the Politburo, watched from the privileged guests’ section as the Spassky

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 519

  Tower bells chimed noon and Chernenko, not terribly bright and emphysemic on top of it all, looked around, uncertain what to do, and then Pavlichenko—and thousands of others—could hear Andrei Gromyko’s voice over the loudspeakers instructing the new leader: “Don’t take off the hat.”

  What fools the Russian rulers were!

  The orderlies lifted Pavlichenko into the back of the ambulance and locked the gurney and the intravenous stand into place. A minute later, the ambulance was moving, its siren wailing shrilly. The driver and his assistant looked back at him nervously, probably wondering what had happened to the KGB leader. Pavlichenko lay on the stretcher, seemingly napping.

  Their destination, Kuntsevo, was fifteen miles outside Moscow, on the Minsk Highway. Once it had been Stalin’s dacha; it was where Stalin had died. But in 1953 it wasn’t a hospital and had no medical equipment whatsoever. The Great Leader had died with virtually no medical technology to sustain his life. They had even put leeches on his temples.

  Kuntsevo.

  For a week or so, he would rule the Soviet Union from his hospital bed, just as Yuri Andropov had done for six months in 1983. For much of 1983, Kuntsevo was the Kremlin. With the rest of the world ignorant of the state of Andropov’s health, he spoke to his fellow Politburo members on the phone, seeing only the KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, using him as a messenger boy to the outside world.

  This time, Pavlichenko would have the assistance of forty or so trusted assistants, poised throughout Russia, ready to do his bidding. The Sekretariat was prepared to release immediately the irrefutable evidence that would link the U.S. National Security Council with the attack.

  It would all happen in a few hours.

  The ambulance screamed down the middle lane of the highway and soon came to a halt.

  Had they arrived so soon? The ambulance had made a turn and had stopped.

  520 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  Palichenko strained to see the stone walls topped with barbed wire that surrounded Kuntsevo, but the windows of the ambulance were too high. All he could see were streedights.

  Streetlights.

  They weren’t in Kuntsevo at all—there were no streetlights in Kuntsevo.

  9:20 a.m.

  The black Volga had driven around for almost an hour, searching for a wav to penetrate the heay securitv’ that surrounded central Moscow. The headquarters of the GRU, the Soviet military-intelligence branch, was inaccessible. Every ten feet there seemed to be KGB guards; the normally tight Revolution Day security had gotten even tighter, with the presence of the American President and his part'.

  Only those who were part of official delegations were permitted into the square, whose entry points were overseen by rows of grim-faced KGB guards in gray uniforms with the red letters “GB” on their shoulders. They were called the VV soldiers, the Vnutrennaya Voiska, or internal troops, harvested not from Moscow but from Russian villages, and they were one hundred percent Russians—not a Moslem or Mongol face among them.

  There was no way to get to the commandant of the mausoleum; it was impossible. They were left with one strategy: the driver would have to negotiate with one of the guards, if they could find one who was not KGB: Red Army, perhaps, or GPU, for they were all out in force this morning. If he could persuade one of them of the urgency— persuade a soldier to talk to his superior officer, and maybe one would have the good sense to listen.

  “Over there,” the driver said. He pointed at a small gaggle of Red Army soldiers.

  “Go,” Gharlotte said.

  He accelerated, the wheels squealing, until they were abreast of the soldiers. He rolled down the window and said, “Where is your commanding officer?”

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 521

  A voice replied, but it was not one of them. It came from the other side of the car: a KGB guard was fast approaching. “What is your business, comrade?”

  “I need to talk to one of these fellows’ commanders,” the chauffeur replied.

  The guard arched his eyebrows. “What is your business?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Charlotte said. She sat in the front seat, instinctively slumping down as the guard approached and peered into the window.

  There seemed to be a spark of recognition in the guard’s eyes, and he looked even more closely. “Stop this car, officers,” he told the others. “Arrest them.”

  ”Now,” Charlotte whispered to the driver. “Up ahead. That group of MVD militsiya. Do it!”

  With a bewilderingly swift motion, the driver slammed the car into gear and barreled ahead, knocking the KCB guard to the ground. A bullet was fired into the back windshield, but only the surface of the bulletproof glass cracked. They had made it the hundred feet or so to the next checkpoint, which did not seem to have any KGB guards in attendance. Charlotte rolled down her window and, quickly glancing at the epaulets on the men’s uniforms, knew these were indeed MVD, Ministry of Internal Affairs.

  “Arrest me,” Charlotte called out.

  79

  9:40 a.m.

  The chairman of the KGB reached for the pistol he had concealed in the large front pocket of his hospital robe. “Where are we?” he asked the driver warningly.

  The orderly sitting next to the driver answered. “Outside Moscow, sir.”

  “What’s going on?” He curled his forefinger around the trigger. The charade was no longer necessary, so he struggled at the straps, trying to free himself. “We’re not in Kuntsevo,” he said, drawing the gun from his robe and pointing it at Stefan, “and I suggest you take me there immediately.”

  But Stefan Kramer and a close friend, Zhenya Svedov, the son of one of Yakov Kramer’s fellow prisoners, swung themselves out of their seats and were immediately joined by a third, who leaped out from beneath a stretcher behind the front seat: Charles Stone was out of the ambulance, slamming the doors behind him.

  Pavlichenko sat up and fired a shot, spider-webbing the windshield.

  “I don’t suggest you fire again,” Stone spoke in Russian, in a clear, strong voice. He and the two others had spread themselves out at a distance around the vehicle: Stone aiming his Clock on one side; Stefan on the other, aiming a revolver his father had kept since World War II. The chairman of the KCB could see at once that he was outnumbered, and for a moment he froze.

  Stone watched Pavlichenko, who seemed relaxed and confident, his gun casually pointed, as if this whole thing were but a brief interruption that would soon be over.

  Of course it had been a simple matter for Stefan to get the ambulance and the uniforms, but Stone had been stunned at how simple it had been to go right into the Kremlin Clinic with no security credentials at all, just an ambulance operator’s uniform. Even in the Soviet Union, hospital security was lax: speed in saving lives displaced the Soviet instinct for security.

  Stone had picked the deadbolt on the garage with improvised tools selected from Stefan’s medical-assistance bag: a long metal curette which he bent to simulate a torsion wrench, and a long steel pin used for testing “pinprick sensation.” Quite an assortment of explosives and detonators had been left there, obviously in order to implicate the Kramers in the Red Square bombing.

  Knowing that Pavlichenko had readied a room at Kuntsevo for later that day, and that the CAT scan would appear to have been done at the central Kremlin Clinic on Granovsky Street, Stefan had theorized that Pavlichenko would have put in a call for an ambulance. This was confirmed by Chavadze�
��s information: a bed was being readied for a Politburo member this morning at Kuntsevo.

  And Stone and Stefan, joined by Stefan’s friend Zhenya Svetlov, had managed to arrive first, before the real ambulance.

  “Who are you?” Pavlichenko asked tranquilly. “A foreigner, it must be; I can hear that. Let me urge you to surrender at once. Do you realize the gravity of what you’re doing? I think you may not know that you’ve abducted a member of the Soviet government. Please be thoughtful and put down your weapons.”

  From the right side of the ambulance came the voice of Charlie Stone. “And not just any member. A traitor within the government.”

  Pavlichenko shook his head and laughed gendy. “You are dangerous, crazy people, and I am afraid you are terribly deluded. I urge you not to speak such nonsense to me.” So close, so very close to the end, and this. Who were these people? Not ordinary MVD, probably not GRU.

  Pavlichenko had not fired a gun in years, even decades, not since KGB Vysshaya Shkola arms instruction. But he knew that combat drew upon not just weapons but also psychology. These men were young, and they seemed not to be professionals. If they could not be intimidated by the enormous power of Pavlichenko’s office, they could certainly be outthought, outmaneuvered. He was strong; they were weak.

  “If you insist upon going through with this charade,” Pavlichenko said, shaking his head sadly, “please be my guest and do so, but I warn you that the might of the entire Soviet Union will be massed against you. You may harm one man, but you will not survive.” The three men had not shifted their positions; two guns remained leveled at him from either side, and he kept his pointed at the foreigner to his right. “Terrorism is a seductive thing, I imagine. You three no doubt think that by taking a member of the Politburo hostage you will change the world. But please understand that taking my life will make no difference in the end.”

  “I know about M-3,” Stone said. “I know about how a young aide to Beria was propelled to power. With the help of some cynical Americans. Who didn’t know how naive they were being.”