The shadow war

by Glen Scott Allen

  Benjamin started to resist. "If you don't-"

  Natalya looked into his eyes. "No, Benjamin," she said, "I truly do."

  And so they made love again; only this time, Natalya's hands held his body with a kind of desperation. She pressed against him with an ardor that was hunger.

  "Please," she said, "let's make love like we are animals. Creatures without thoughts, without words."

  Benjamin held her, made love to her. Made love with her.

  Later, very late in the night, she was lying with her head on his shoulder and he was stroking her hair.

  "Natalya…," he began.

  Natalya didn't respond, and he decided she was asleep. But she was breathing softly with her eyes wide open.

  Later still, after Benjamin's chest rose and fell with the regular breathing of deep sleep, Natalya was still awake. She looked down at Benjamin, ran her hand lightly over his hair.

  "Ya lyublyu tebia tozhe," she said, almost in a whisper.

  CHAPTER 42

  As their small, rickety, pale blue bus bounced over the rough country road to Ratmino, through ever thicker pine forests, Benjamin caught glimpses of a wide, powerful river beyond the trees.

  "And that is?" he asked, pointing.

  "The Volga," answered Natalya.

  "It's beautiful," said Benjamin.

  The bus was crowded, almost entirely with older women, who Natalya had called babushkas. As far as he could tell, Benjamin was the only non-Russian on the bus.

  Natalya explained that the church to which they were going-the Sobor Pokhvali Presviatoy Bogoroditzy, or the Church of Our Praised Lady, built in 1827-was more than just a village chapel; it was in fact a cathedral, the largest and most important church in the "oblast." Since the rehabilitation of the Orthodox Church into Russian life, this particular church had received a constant stream of both the ardently faithful and the simply curious.

  She was sitting very close to him, holding his hand; he'd noticed all morning that the distance he'd sensed the day before was gone. He didn't know whether Natalya was simply beginning to trust him, or if her feelings ran deeper. As deep as his did, now.

  "When Lenin came to power, he had the churches closed, dozens of priests were shot by the Cheka. They destroyed architectural treasures, like the seventeenth-century church of St. Paraskevi. Children were told to bring icons from churches to throw on public bonfires. The rural churches were stripped of anything of value and then turned into storage sheds for vegetables."

  "But this one has been restored?"

  "It was luckier than most. The local peasants buried the icons and kept their location secret for seventy-five years. Then, after perestroika, they dug them up, restored them to the church."

  "Remarkable," Benjamin said. "Such… endurance."

  "It is not just endurance," Natalya said. "The Russian people are perhaps as superstitious as they are religious. The two reinforce one another."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well," Natalya said, "here is an example. In June of 1941, Stalin's archaeologists discover Tamerlane's burial site. There was a local legend that it was cursed, that if Tamerlane's sarcophagus was opened, the war god, as he was known, would visit catastrophe on the blasphemers within three days. Stalin pays no attention, orders the sarcophagus opened. A photograph was made of one of the archaeologists holding Tamerlane's skull aloft and sent immediately to Stalin."

  Benjamin looked intrigued. "And?" he said.

  "That was June 19. Three days later, Germany invaded the Ukraine," she said. "It was a disaster. The Germans moved through Western Russia like a whirlwind." Natalya smiled. "Suddenly, the 'godless Communist' Stalin ordered that the churches in Moscow be reopened, and he invited the Patriarch to the Kremlin for consultation. The Patriarch insisted that one of the most highly valued icons of the Orthodox Church, the Icon of the Mother of God of Kazan, be taken out of 'safe keeping' where it had been put by the Party, and that it be carried from Leningrad to Moscow to Stalingrad in a sort of religious procession; that such a pilgrimage would create a ring of protection around the three major cities, a ring the Germans would never break. Stalin agreed, the procession was made, and none of the three cities ever surrendered."

  Benjamin looked at Natalya slightly askance.

  "But surely you don't believe the icon had anything to do with that."

  Natalya shrugged. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. But you see? Superstition, religion-they are practically the same thing for most Russians. Which is why peasants will risk their lives for a painted statue."

  By now they'd reached the Church of Our Praised Lady. There was a small graveled lot that held several buses and cars. Facing them was a white wall with an arch topped with a gold dome and the double-barred Russian Orthodox cross, and beneath the arch a gate, through which they walked to enter the grounds of the church. To every side there were thick groves of maple and birch trees and rows of lilac bushes. Even with the approach of winter, the land all about the church on the banks of the Volga was richly green.

  The church was larger than Benjamin had expected, but not what he thought of as a cathedral. The architecture was instead Greek in style with two silver domes that were capped by black onion turrets and rose to points that supported large gold crosses. The church was painted white and a pale yellow color that by now Benjamin was identifying with almost all styles and periods of Russian architecture.

  Climbing the few, broad steps to a small, semicircular entranceway, they entered the double wooden doors of the church.

  Inside, Benjamin was again surprised: the restoration had been careful and thorough. The large, open space without pews, the arched ceiling high overhead, the stark white walls, the highly polished brown-and-green stone floor… all created the effect of a bright space full of energy. Around the edges of the church were carefully lined-up chairs, for the older visitors, of which there were many, and here and there about the floor were waist-high brass incense burners.

  Before them was the altar space, with its screen of painted murals, brilliant colors depicting Christ to the right and Mary and Child to the left, with various saints flanking them. On the walls and pillars were dozens of icons: some painted in simple styles on plain wood, others made of ceramic tiles, some in cloth, with the older relics preserved in framed glass.

  Natalya began discreetly looking around, obviously expecting to see her father somewhere, but also trying to appear the typical tourist, admiring the brightness and beauty of the church.

  About the time Benjamin was beginning to get worried, they were approached by a young man in a priest's cassock. He came up to Natalya and spoke to her in Russian. She answered, and then the priest led her toward one of the doors near the altar space. Natalya motioned for Benjamin to follow.

  Through the door, they then descended down a narrow, winding set of steps, to the church's basement. It was a large, open space, though with a series of half-walls extending from one end to the other and with an aisle down the center. Benjamin saw there were bricks beneath his feet, worn with time, and there was a musty, damp smell of a space long closed.

  The half-walls created several enclosures to the left and right, almost like stables; in some of these furniture was stacked, in others icons and other art for which there was apparently not room upstairs. In one such space toward the rear they could make out, through the dim light, the legs of someone sitting on a chair.

  The priest indicated they should go to that stall, then, taking Natalya's hand in his for a moment, he turned and left them.

  Natalya walked to the end of the basement, Benjamin following her. When they reached the last stall on the right, they discovered a man sitting there, looking somewhat uncomfortable on a chair that must have been at least a hundred years old.

  He immediately rose and came toward Natalya, saying "Natalya Nikolayevna!" They embraced warmly. Then he stepped back, surveyed her brunette hair, looked surprised.

  After they'd spoken a few more words in Russian, he turned
to Benjamin and extended his hand.

  "Nikolai Orlov," he said in only slightly accented English. "I am pleased to greet you."

  Nikolai was slightly taller than Benjamin, slightly thinner. Benjamin guessed he was in his late sixties. He had a long, narrow face, with extraordinarily bright blue eyes-he could see where Natalya had got the blue in her blue-green eyes-and close-cropped gray hair. His handshake was firm, and he placed his other hand on Benjamin's as they shook. Benjamin felt instant respect and trust for the man.

  "Benjamin Wainwright," he said, and then added, almost instinctively, "sir. And I am pleased to meet you, as well."

  Nikolai turned to Natalya again and spoke to her again in Russian. Then he motioned them to extract chairs from the stacks against the wall and sit down next to him.

  Once they were seated, Natalya close to Nikolai and holding his hand, she looked at Benjamin.

  "The first thing my father wants to know," she said, smiling, "is what the hell you are doing here."

  Benjamin looked surprised, started to say something.

  "Is joke," Nikolai said, patting Benjamin on the shoulder. "Sort of. I ask Natashka what brings you together. For your story, I mean. How do you come here in all this… khren, this mess?"

  "Well," Benjamin said. "That's quite a story."

  And then, as he had with Natalya, he started at the beginning, with the call from Fletcher to the Library of Congress, his arrival and meeting with Samuel Wolfe, and their subsequent investigation into Fletcher's death. But this time he tried to leave no detail unmentioned, thinking it was important that Nikolai understood the implications of passwords and poisons and sudden, inexplicable deaths. He wanted to make certain Nikolai grasped the full sinister background of everything that had happened to him, to know exactly what his daughter had become involved with.

  With Natalya translating from time to time, Benjamin tried to include everything that had happened to him: Fletcher's death, Edith's "accident" with her bees, Wolfe's veiled warnings, his suspicions of a wider conspiracy (though even now he stopped short of including what he thought he'd seen in the Foundation mural)-everything to impress on Nikolai the danger his daughter faced.

  Yet oddly enough, it wasn't until Benjamin came to the part about his discussions with Anton Sikorsky that Nikolai showed signs of anxiety, and finally anger, until he and Natalya were engaged in what sounded like a fierce argument, not a word of which Benjamin understood.

  "I'm afraid," Natalya said with exasperation, "my father does not trust Anton's role in all this. Especially as he once worked for the Soviet Ministry of Defense. How do you know you can trust him, he wonders, especially after he disappeared."

  Benjamin started to answer, but Nikolai stopped him.

  "Now it is my turn to tell a story," Nikolai said. "Then you will understand my suspicion.

  "Imagine," he began, "it is August 1968, at the heart of the Cold War."

  CHAPTER 43

  From the air, Uzhur looked no different than so many other Siberian villages: ancient houses of blackish brown logs nestled in low, rounded hills and connected to the nearest villages by a solitary, narrow road, a road that wound through the hills and occasional thick pine forests, appearing lonely and alien in this vast landscape.

  "Uzhur," in the area's ancient Khakas language, meant "hole in the ground." None of the long-dead tribesmen who named it, and none of its living inhabitants, could know just how ironic that name would prove to be.

  But if one could somehow see through solid rock, they would discover what made Uzhur different than the other villages around it. They would see what appeared to be a submarine, or parts of a submarine, buried five hundred meters underground. They would see the secret underground village designated Uzhur-4.

  The rooms of this secret village had rounded ceilings and walls, the doors were oval-shaped rather than rectangular and set with large metal wheels in their centers, and everywhere there wound parallel rows of pipes and conduits. But, unlike in a submarine, the hallways bent and twisted at sharp angles, and were constructed of three-meter-thick concrete; beneath the rooms and hallways were dozens of oversized shock absorbers, each a meter wide and driven ten meters into solid granite. The curved, angled hallways, massive walls, and giant springs were all designed to allow the structure to withstand seismic shock waves of up to 500 psi-say, for instance, from the nearby impact of a one-megaton nuclear warhead.

  The buried village's inhabitants didn't call it Uzhur-4; they called it, with fierce Russian irony, Solnechnyy Uzhur-Sunny Uzhur. There were only thirty such inhabitants, each of whom visited for a two-week duty shift, after which he returned for ten days to his surface home and wife and children, but as silent and pale as the sterile crypt in which he kept vigil.

  And what they kept vigil over were the thirty-three SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles of the 39th Missile Division, 33rd Guards Missile Army, Omsk. Each missile was topped by the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, the R-36M, twenty-five megatons of instantaneous hell. The official manual of the Strategic Rocket Forces labeled the missiles "Voyevoda," a word from the old Russian that meant something like Chieftain, or simply Boss. The name the Americans gave the missile was even simpler, and perhaps more accurate: Satan.

  Uzhur-4 was a village of uniformly light gray and green rooms, harshly echoing hallways, shadowless fluorescent lights, unpalatable recycled air, and absolutely inviolate routines. A village whose sole purpose was to destroy a significant portion of the world. A village that didn't exist.

  In this village that didn't exist, a group of men in pale blue overalls were sitting in a room with couches, chairs, a Ping-Pong table, a television set-everything that might have made the room a den in someone's home. But the walls were of concrete painted gray, the floor was also concrete but painted pale green, the lights were harsh fluorescents, and the men acted with the controlled ease of soldiers who might at any moment be required to resume rigid discipline. And, even though the room was on the surface, there were no windows, for the room, and the small building in which it was contained, were buried under ten feet of earth, earth that was planted with pine trees and shrubs and therefore, from the air, indistinguishable from the other dozens of small hills around it.

  The men were watching television: a news report from Moscow about the growing Czechoslovakian crisis. The stolid reporter was saying that anti-Soviet leaflets were being distributed in Prague, that a radio station had been seized by rebels and renamed "Free Bratislava," and that it was broadcasting calls to the Czech people to resist by all means necessary the "invasion" by tanks and soldiers of the Warsaw Pact. One troop train had already been derailed, and many Red Army soldiers had been killed, some by weapons clearly marked "Made in the U.S.A." Finally the broadcast changed to other news.

  "Counterrevolutionary bastards!" said one of the men sitting around the television.

  "To think, one hundred and forty thousand brave Red Army men died ridding them of Hitler-and this is how they thank us!"

  Another of the men-the name tag on his overalls read ORLOV, N.-turned to a man on the couch next to him, whose tag read LEVEROTOV, V.

  "What do you think?" he said. "Will NATO come to the rebels' aid?"

  "I think," Leverotov said, putting out a cigarette, "our 'sausages' are a cold compress on the hotheads in the Pentagon. But they are wild Americans." He smiled. "Who knows that they will dare." He looked up at a clock. "Come on, it's time for our watch. And remember, we have a very important drill today."

  Saying "pakah," giving a few mock salutes to the other men in the room, they walked out of the room, down a short hallway to a small medical clinic.

  After a thorough medical examination, they reentered the hallway and walked to an elevator. There was a keypad next to the elevator, and Leverotov punched in a numbered code. The doors opened and they entered, typed another numbered code on another pad inside the elevator. Its doors closed and it began to descend.

  Thirty minutes later
found the two men sitting in another room, much smaller, with barely enough space for the two high-backed, padded chairs they occupied, and a huge instrument panel that stretched the length of the room. They sat at opposite ends of the panel. Each of them was holding a small white metal key, and both keys were inserted into identical locks. Their eyes were watching two small screens, each set above the panel, angled down toward them. The screens flickered for a moment, and then each displayed, in an incandescent, wavering green, two words: BATTLE ALERT.

  Orlov looked quickly over to Leverotov. "Battle Alert?" he said, his voice rising slightly. "Not Training Alert?"

  "Shut up," said Leverotov. "You know the procedure. Follow it." And then he began a countdown. "Three, two, one… turn!"

  Simultaneously the two men turned the small, white keys. An amber light above each lock went off, and immediately a red light next to it came on. Each man then raised his right arm slightly and positioned an extended index finger over a large round white button. Their eyes were fixed on rows of lights beneath each button, watching closely as the lights turned in sequence from red to green.

  When the last little round light had turned green, Leverotov said, "Arming sequence complete," to which Orlov replied, "Confirmed, arming sequence complete."

  The words "BATTLE ALERT" disappeared from the screens over their heads, instantly replaced with the words "RED STAR." Both men looked to the binders open before them, traced with a finger down a column of words.

  "Firing verification Red Star," said Leverotov.

  "Firing verification Red Star confirmed," replied Orlov.

  "On my mark," said Leverotov, and raised his finger to the white button, while Orlov, like a mirror image, did the same. "Three, two, one… fire!"

  Both fingers pressed and held the white buttons. The green lights above the buttons blinked out. The words "RED STAR" disappeared from the TV screens. Still the men held down the white buttons. There was a long moment of silence… then a speaker set in the ceiling of the room crackled.