The Lone Patriot

by JT Brannan

  He hoped this was the place he was after, that what he was looking for was still here; he had read about it in classified Soviet-era files, but had never seen it himself, did not know if it even still existed. It might have been destroyed, or built over, or renovated and changed over the many years since the Soviets had used it.

  He pushed through double doors into the rear kitchens, found a door that led down into the basement storerooms and quickly took the stairs three at a time. As he reached the bottom step, he saw that the room was relatively small, but another door was situated off to the side and Cole edged it open, careful in case there was anyone outside.

  The coast was clear though, and Cole slipped out into a larger storeroom, just one of many that made up the basement level underneath GUM. Immediately, he started to trace his hands over the concrete walls, hoping beyond hope that he would find what he was looking for.

  If he didn’t, he would be cornered; and then he would be forced to surrender, or die.

  9

  ‘The signal’s been lost?’ Vinson asked for confirmation, and Michiko just nodded, unable to speak. Loss of the signal meant that her father might be dead, and the realization was too hard for her to handle.

  ‘Enemy situation?’ he asked, and she knew he was now trying to get her mind off the transmitter. She welcomed the reprieve, but when she started giving Vinson his information, she wasn’t sure it helped her to relax.

  ‘Kremlin guard have been mobilized, they’re in the GUM store now, alongside those FSB officers we already knew about. More FSB guys have been dispatched from the Lubyanka, and local police have shut down Red Square completely. From what we can tell, my father has about eighty, maybe ninety people after him, with more on their way.’ She sighed deeply, tears threatening at the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s over,’ she whispered to herself quietly, wiping at her eyes. ‘It’s over.’ The tears came freely now, and she turned to Vinson. ‘Why did he call the extraction team off?’ she demanded. ‘They could have got him out, they could have –’

  ‘He was right,’ Vinson said reasonably. ‘I gave the order to move when it was only a handful of FSB officers. It was risky, but doable. Cole knew the full alert had been given, he knew they would have had no chance in a gunfight with them, and he didn’t want them to take needless risks.’

  ‘They might have saved him,’ Michiko persisted, feeling betrayed but not knowing why.

  Vinson stood watching the organized chaos of the Force One situation room for several moments, before responding.

  ‘We’ve not heard that he’s dead on the Russian net yet,’ he asked her with a raised eyebrow, ‘have we?’

  There was a pause, and then Michiko looked up, the beginnings of hope on her face. ‘No,’ she conceded.

  ‘And another reason for the lost signal might be if the tracker – and Mark along with it – are on a subterranean level, so the signal can’t get out.’

  The hope was stronger now. ‘Yes,’ Michiko said, ‘yes, you might be right.’

  ‘And if he’s found his way into the basement,’ Vinson continued with a knowing smile, ‘then I might just have an idea where the clever bastard is heading.’

  Cole’s hands moved across a line in the floor, and his fingers traced the outline of a small rectangle. He cleared away the dust and debris, and there it was.

  Finally!

  He had checked all four walls first, before frantically scouring the floor, moving boxes and crates this way and that, desperately trying to find the hidden doorway before the soldiers and FSB officers managed to find him here.

  The trapdoor was camouflaged to look like the rest of the floor and – if he hadn’t known such a thing existed – it was unlikely that he would have found it at all.

  But he had found it, and was glad that those hours of classroom study over the years, schooled by various experts in espionage history, tactics and tradecraft, hadn’t been a complete waste.

  It had been Peter Wilde, he remembered, who had told him about the tunnels under Red Square. Wilde had worked for the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division through the fifties and sixties, and was one of the men behind the operations known as REDCAP and REDSOX, illegally putting Soviet defectors back into the country as agents. He’d debriefed a lot of men, and had heard about the tunnels from more than one of them.

  The tunnels led from the Kremlin as a form of escape, and Cole could well understand that; some led to nuclear bunkers, and others led to other parts of Moscow, where the leaders could be spirited away if the city came under attack.

  But legend had it that the tunnels also led here, to the GUM department store, so that Soviet leaders could visit after-hours and purchase luxury goods that were denied their fellow countrymen. As Orwell rightly put it, it seemed that in Soviet Russia, all animals were equal, but some were more equal than others.

  Wilde had shown his students a map of the underground system, compiled after meticulously cross-referencing the reports from Russian defectors. Cole remembered that map, as Wilde had forced them to memorize it in case they were ever compromised in Russia and needed a way to escape.

  The only trouble was that Cole had no idea what state of repair the tunnels were in; they might have been closed off, or they might have collapsed, or they might have been redirected to who knew where.

  But the trapdoor still offered Cole his best chance of escape; no matter what was down there, it had to be better than the hundred or so armed men and women who were after him upstairs. He just had to be careful not to head in the direction of the Kremlin; the last thing he needed was to emerge inside the guard room.

  He reached for the trapdoor, aware that the search had wasted a lot of time; he could already hear boots moving on the floor of the café upstairs.

  And then the door to the storage room opened, right next to him, an armed security guard highlighted against the brightly lit service corridor beyond.

  He had obviously been looking for Cole, but the look of surprise on his face showed that – in such a huge place – he hadn’t really expected to find him. For a few moments, he was subsequently at a loss to know what to do; then he started raising his pistol, fumbling for his radio at the same time, and the confusion of what to do only made both actions slow.

  Cole used the indecision to get the drop on him, reacting the moment he saw the man; he leapt to his feet and raced forward, kicking out at the guard’s kneecap before hitting him under the chin with the heel of his palm. The man sagged, dazed, and Cole dragged him into the room, banging his head off the doorframe as he went.

  Cole dropped the unconscious man to the floor and pocketed both the gun and radio before running back to the trapdoor, quickly locating the metal hook, buried under age-old dirt and grime. Cole dug it clear with his fingernails, grabbed hold of the hook and pulled. At first there was heavy resistance, and – even with every muscle fiber strained to breaking point – the old stone door refused to yield.

  Cole knew that the hook was never meant to be pulled up by hand – there had almost certainly been a pole to help open it back in Soviet days, and it had probably been in a much better state of repair too – but he had no time to look for one, and had to rely purely on his own strength to do the job.

  He groaned and gasped with the strain as he tried again, every part of him hurting; even his eyeballs felt as if they were going to pop right out of his head, such was the enormous pressure building within him.

  And then – Yes! – he felt the trapdoor give slightly, its age-old seals breaking open in a puff of dust; and once it began to give way, that was all Cole needed, and he kept on pulling and pulling, the stone door moving easier now, until it came up all the way, revealing the dark, empty space beneath.

  Cole could hear people descending the stairs now, knew it was only a matter of time before they came into this second room.

  He quickly propped open the trapdoor and dragged the unconscious security guard into the storeroom’s doorway, opening the door and leaving the man ther
e; he hoped it would look as if he had raced out of the room, further into the basement.

  And then he returned to the trapdoor, and – now almost entirely out of time – he rested a crate on top of it, balancing it at an angle, hoping that, when he closed the trapdoor after himself, the crate would fall on top, disguising his exit route.

  He heard shouts from next door and finally allowed himself to slip down through the hole in the floor, pulling the stone lid shut after him as he dropped helplessly through the dark, hearing the slamming of the trapdoor above him as the sealing of his own coffin.

  ‘You cannot find him?’ Dmitri Petrenko said in exasperation, unable to grasp how this had happened. His men – along with a detachment from the 1st Battalion of the Kremlin Regiment – had followed the target down into the basements of the GUM department store, where they’d found an open door, the unconscious body of a security guard, and nothing else.

  But, he reminded himself, the storerooms under GUM were vast, and the vicious little bastard might well have found himself a nice hiding spot, perhaps in one of the hundreds of crates and boxes that littered that area.

  Petrenko listened to the excuses of the man on the other end of the radio, but soon cut him off. ‘Keep searching,’ he ordered, even as he started to dial an internal number on the phone next to him. ‘I am sending thermal sensors and dog units to you. He must be there somewhere, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Major,’ came the reply, and Petrenko signed off the radio and spoke to the man on the phone, ordering the necessary equipment for the search.

  They had to find that man.

  Petrenko’s career – and maybe even his very life – depended on it.

  ‘The Kremlin Regiment has been mobilized?’ Mikhail Emelienenko said with a certain mixture of surprise and anger. ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’

  Emelienenko was sat at his desk at his official residence at Novo-Ogaryovo, still working despite the late hour. He was a workaholic, said many who knew him; especially the wife who he seldom saw, except for ceremonial occasions.

  He knew he should be in bed, asleep; after all, he had an early-morning flight to Minsk the next day. But he understood that you didn’t get anywhere in life except through hard work and ruthless dedication, and he was going to get somewhere in life. Some people might suppose that being President of the Russian Federation was enough, but not for Emelienenko; he wanted more, and was determined to do everything in his power to get it.

  Wars didn’t win themselves, and that was exactly what he was preparing for. If it meant he didn’t sleep for a year, then so be it.

  But what was this? A general alert in Moscow? What the hell was going on?

  General Igor Glazyev, the Director of the Federal Protective Service, coughed gently into the telephone as Emelienenko waited impatiently for his answer.

  ‘Well now, General?’ Emelienenko persisted. ‘Are you going to tell me what is going on, or do I need to come down there and deal with it myself?’

  ‘No, my president, no, that will certainly not be necessary,’ said Glazyev quickly.

  ‘Then tell me, and tell me quickly.’

  ‘Major Dmitri Petrenko of the Federal Security Service,’ the general explained, ‘gave the alert after a number of his own men were killed while trying to catch what he believes to be some sort of foreign agent.’

  Emelienenko immediately sat up straighter in his chair. He knew the name Petrenko; it was the man responsible for monitoring Veronika Galushka.

  ‘Details,’ Emelienenko demanded. ‘Give me details.’

  ‘An FSB team was monitoring a female subject, in the belief that she might make contact with a foreign agent of some kind, or an agent might try and contact her. Earlier tonight, while this woman was at a bar – the Duma – a man was routinely stopped inside by an FSB officer. A gunfight subsequently ensued in the bar, and the subject managed to kill or disable a number of officers and escape. Other units were sent after him, but there was a further gun battle outside the Ritz-Carlton on Tverskaya and the subject escaped again, ultimately reaching Red Square, at which stage his proximity to the Kremlin triggered the general alert to be given.’

  ‘I should have been told immediately!’ Emelienenko said bitterly.

  ‘I understand,’ Glazyev said, ‘and yet it seems that Major Petrenko thought his men could handle the problem and did not wish to involve people higher up than he.’

  Emelienenko knew what the general was saying – that it was Petrenko’s fault entirely. He might have even been right, Emelienenko conceded; but there was no time for recriminations now. ‘We will deal with Major Petrenko later,’ the president told Glazyev. ‘Right now we need to get this situation contained. What are the casualty estimates?’

  ‘Petrenko reports that five of his men were shot and killed, another shot and wounded, three more injured from hand-to-hand; six security guards from the Ritz-Carlton also badly injured by the target, including one who was shot in the shoulder.’

  ‘Civilians?’

  ‘Exact figures are not known, but it is thought that two people – a man and a woman – were shot inside the bar, and up to a dozen, maybe more, were shot outside the hotel. We do not know how many of these were fatal, as yet.’

  Damn it! What the hell was happening? Dead tourists in Moscow was the last thing he wanted.

  Unless, of course . . .

  ‘Make sure that this foreign agent is blamed for all the deaths,’ Emelienenko told the general, knowing he would also have to speak to the FSB director, make sure everyone had their stories straight for the media.

  If they could pin all of this on a foreign agent . . .

  Of course, it would be even better if that foreign agent were to be caught; he could then – alongside the American being held in Akvadroma – be paraded in front of the world, spies and subversives active within Russian territory. Yes, he thought with a smile, it could work out very well indeed.

  ‘Where is this man now?’ the president asked sharply.

  ‘He was pursued into the basements of the GUM store, my president,’ said Glazyev. ‘But the store rooms are very large, there are dozens of rooms and perhaps thousands of crates and boxes he could be hiding in. It will take time to search.’

  ‘Tell your men to work quickly,’ Emelienenko ordered, ‘we cannot –’

  A thought hit him then, details from the past, long-forgotten.

  ‘How did he access the basement?’ Emelienenko asked. ‘From which location?’

  ‘I believe it was through the entrance from the café, on the far side, level one,’ the reply came, and the president’s mind was working furiously.

  ‘The tunnels!’ he exclaimed at last, almost jumping to his feet. ‘The bastard is using the tunnels!’

  10

  The tunnel that Cole walked down was cold, dark and waterlogged. With the flashlight of his cellphone casting ominous shadows across the crumbling brick structure, he could see that the underground system obviously hadn’t been used in years; but it was still here, and it was certain to lead somewhere.

  Cole would have liked to run, but – with water covering the old floors up to knee-height – he simply couldn’t. As well as the resistance of the water, there was also the very real risk of injuring himself; there were all sorts of things beneath the water, various unseen obstacles that could seriously damage him if he traveled too fast. And yet he went as quickly as he could manage, all too aware that men and women with guns could be sent down here after him at any moment. The bigger the gap he got between himself and the others, the better.

  There was the cold, too; it would have been dangerous to be down here too long even without the water. But with the water, which felt like it was barely above freezing level, the possibility of hypothermia was very real. He had to keep moving, or else he might never make it.

  Of course, if anyone realized what he was doing – and still had the plans for this tunnel complex – they might just send troops to the points where the
tunnels emerged, and simply wait for him to appear. But that was, he reasoned, a risk that he would just have to accept.

  He was heading in what he hoped was the opposite direction from the Kremlin, but he had already been forced to choose from different branches at two intersections and – especially with the dark, and the semi-collapsed nature of some of the tunnels – he no longer had confidence that he was going the right way.

  He remembered the plans that Wilde had shown him, and was trying to aim for the tunnel exit which connected to the Bolshoi Theatre. According to the old spy, both Khrushchev and Brezhnev had enjoyed relationships with a succession of dancers who had performed there, and one of the exits supposedly let out directly into the star dressing room. Of course, the theatre itself had been extensively remodeled since then, and the location of the dressing rooms had been moved more than once. The original link with the tunnel may even have been destroyed or covered since those times. And as he dragged himself through the waterlogged tunnels, the walls and roof in a state of near-ruin, and with the cold already eroding his judgement, he had no idea if he would even end up at the Bolshoi anyway. For all he knew, he could be walking in circles, wandering right back into the path of the FSB and the Kremlin Guard.

  His cellphone had a compass that he tried to follow, but the thick walls, and whatever lay above him, caused the dial to sometimes spin wildly, and he found he could not rely upon it completely.

  Panic was at the edge of his consciousness, but he never allowed it to get any further than the edge; he had seen too many times what panic did to people, and wanted no part of it. Any time that he felt he was losing control, he would stop and reassess the situation, get a grip of himself, tell himself he was doing all the right things; he just had to follow his instincts, his training.

  The Bolshoi, he knew, was approximately a third of a mile in a straight line from Red Square, just under six hundred meters. He could calculate approximately how many paces that would be, even through the water, and had been monitoring his estimated distance as he went. With turns and curves in the tunnels though, he also knew that his estimation might be wildly incorrect; but at the same time, he was fairly confident that he was in the rough vicinity of the age-old exit.