The Charm School

by Nelson DeMille

  “Shut up, Marchenko.”

  Marchenko looked angry for the first time. He turned to Lisa. “You seem all right, which is why I don’t want to shoot you. But your friend here… well, I don’t meet many Westerners. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge by one spy. Yes?”

  Lisa said, “Will you give me my icon back? I promise not to bash it over your head.”

  Marchenko laughed. “I must have your oath to God.”

  “I swear to God I won’t bash it over your head.”

  “Good.” Marchenko leaned back and handed it to her. “You see? This religious relic started all of this unpleasantness. But I respect the believers. I have a female cousin my own age who believes in God. She became a Baptist for some reason. Another Western corruption, this Baptist religion. At least she could have become Orthodox if she wanted to be a martyr. Does this religion bring you comfort even now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Perhaps someday when I’m old, right before the end, I will talk to a priest about getting into heaven. God will understand. No?”

  Lisa replied, “I think even God can get pissed off by some people.”

  “‘Pissed off?’”

  Hollis said, “Marchenko, please, I implore you, shut the fuck up.”

  “Yes? I think perhaps I talk too much. Not good in my job. Perhaps I should work for Intourist. I could talk all day to Westerners.” He turned to Vadim and asked in Russian, “Do I talk too much?”

  “No, sir.”

  “See? Well, maybe I’ll be quiet for a while.” Marchenko settled back in his seat.

  Hollis looked at Lisa. “Relax.”

  She forced a smile and took his cuffed hands in hers. “Don’t feel bad.”

  “Okay.”

  They didn’t speak much for the next two hours, and true to his word, Marchenko didn’t say much either. Vadim was in worsening pain, and Hollis could see his wrist was twice its normal size. Vadim muttered an obscenity from time to time. The copilot belatedly remembered a first aid kit, and Vadim found codeine tablets in it. He took several of them.

  Hollis was certain that the pilot and copilot remembered perfectly well they had the first aid kit all along. Hollis had observed that casual cruelty in Russians before, a real indifference to the suffering of strangers. Once you drank with them or ate with them or had your little dusha dush, they’d give you the shirt off their backs, no matter how brief the relationship. But if you weren’t kith, kin, lover, or soul mate, you shouldn’t expect anyone to volunteer painkillers for a smashed wrist, and Hollis had even heard of that sort of indifference in hospitals. And to add insult to cruelty, the copilot offered the painkillers not to make Vadim feel better, but to let Vadim know they were available for the last two hours. Also, Hollis thought, the flight crew being Red Air Force, and the charter passengers being KGB, the cruelty was not altogether casual. Even more bizarre, Hollis thought, was the fact that Vadim was not angry with the pilots for their lack of sympathy, but was still glaring at Hollis as the source of his pain. Primitive, Hollis thought. But Russians reacted to the moment, not to abstractions. That was something to keep in mind in the days ahead.

  Hollis said to Lisa in a light tone, “Well, do you want to say the words, ‘I quit’?”

  She looked at him and said softly so no one else could hear, “I’ve been thinking. You and Seth promised I would be kept informed in exchange for my help.”

  “I’m keeping you informed. We’ve been kidnapped.”

  “Not funny, Sam. I think you both knew this might happen.”

  Hollis stayed silent a moment, then replied, “We suspected.”

  “More than suspected, I think. Do you know that Seth didn’t want me to get on that flight?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” But that was very interesting, Hollis thought. He said, “No one ever promised to keep you informed, Lisa. Not in this business. I’m not fully informed, obviously.”

  She nodded. “He… he was trying to tell me something, but I guess I wasn’t listening.”

  “Nor were you telling me what he said.”

  “Sorry.” She added, “He said you were a target and I should stay away from you.”

  “But you came along anyway.”

  “I love you, stupid.”

  Marchenko piped in, “I hear whispers. No whispers. No secrets.”

  Lisa ignored Marchenko and said to Hollis, “If I didn’t love you, I’d really be pissed at you.”

  “I’ll make it up to you. Dinner?”

  “At Claridge’s.”

  “You got it.”

  Marchenko said, “Dinner? Yes, we missed our lunch. I’m hungry.”

  Hollis said to him, “You can live a month on your fat.”

  Marchenko turned and looked at Hollis. “You will be eating rats to stay alive in the Gulag.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “That’s where we are going, my friend.”

  Nearly three hours after they’d begun their flight, the helicopter began to descend. Hollis spotted the old Minsk road running along the Moskva River and noticed a dozen clusters of izbas, any one of which could have been Yablonya. Then, unexpectedly, he did spot Yablonya. He knew it was Yablonya because it was a stretch of black charred log cabins along a dirt road. Grey ash lay where kitchen gardens and haystacks once were. A bulldozer had dug a long slit in the black earth, and half the burned village had already been pushed into it. Hollis looked away from the window. To the list of scores to be settled—Fisher, Bill Brennan, and the three hundred American fliers—was now added the village of Yablonya.

  About three minutes later, Hollis looked back out the window. They were at about five hundred feet now, and he saw the beginning of Borodino Field, the earthworks, monuments, then the museum. The pine forest came up, and the helicopter dropped more quickly. He saw the wire fence and the cleared area around it, then the helipad that Alevy had pointed out in the satellite photograph.

  Lisa leaned over beside him and looked out the window. “Are we landing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Charm School.”

  PART IV

  Wherever your travels in the Soviet Union take you, consult our Guidebook, and you will find the addresses of the camps, jails, and psychiatric prisons in your area: Slaves are building Communism… Visit them!

  —Avraham Shifrin

  The Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union

  31

  “The Charm School,” Lisa said. “Mrs. Ivanova’s Charm School.”

  “Yes.”

  She spoke as if to herself. “The place Gregory Fisher mentioned, the place Major Dodson came from, where we went on the way to Mozhaisk… . We’re going to get a closer look at it now, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.” Hollis added, “They are going to question you, so the less you know, the better.”

  “Question me? Interrogate me?”

  “Yes.” He could feel her hand tightening over his. He said, “Just prepare yourself for some unpleasantness. Be brave.”

  She drew a deep breath and nodded.

  Marchenko turned in his seat and smiled at them. “Not Sheremetyevo. But you knew that.”

  “Yeb vas,” Hollis said.

  “Yeb vas,” Lisa agreed.

  “Fuck you,” Marchenko replied.

  Vadim poked his head between the seats, looked at Hollis and Lisa, and made a cutting motion across his throat.

  The helicopter continued its sloping descent toward the landing area, which Hollis noted was a natural clearing of tall yellow grass in the pine forest. On the south edge of the clearing was a log cabin he’d seen in the satellite photo. A narrow dirt track, barely visible among the pine trees, began at the cabin and ran a hundred yards south to the main camp road.

  Most of the mile-square camp was not much more discernible from a few hundred feet, Hollis saw, than it had been from the satellite a few hundred miles up. Yet, because he had seen much of the world from the ai
r, he could sense the general layout. There was a roughly circular gravel road that ran around the inside of the perimeter, probably a service road for the watchtowers. The main camp road was two lanes of winding blacktop that roughly bisected the camp from east to west. This road passed through the main gate and was actually a continuation of the one they had taken up from Borodino Field.

  As they descended to about a hundred feet, Hollis saw on the main road a grim-looking concrete building in the center of the camp, probably the headquarters. Not far from that was a long wooden building with a green roof whose purpose he could not guess.

  Some distance south of these two buildings was another clearing, but this one was man-made, a perfect rectangle, the size of a soccer field, which it undoubtedly was, and which could double as a parade ground or assembly area, a standard facility for any school or prison camp. In fact, as the helicopter got lower, he could see bleacher stands that would accommodate close to five hundred people.

  Between the soccer field and the south perimeter of the camp, he saw the metal roofs of long barracks-like buildings that would be the separate compound within the compound for the KGB Border Guard detachment.

  Hollis sketched an aerial map in his mind and committed each detail to memory.

  As they descended to about fifty feet, his eye caught something odd, and he looked at an area of the treetops about midway between the dachas and the headquarters. He realized that he was looking at a huge camouflage net covering about an acre, supported by living pine trees whose tops poked through the net. An axiom of both combat flying and spying was that neither aerial photographs nor overflights were a substitute for a man on the ground. He was about to be the man on the ground.

  The helicopter settled onto the snow-dusted landing field. The copilot drew his pistol and slid open the door. Marchenko climbed out first, followed by Vadim. The copilot motioned with his gun at Lisa, and she took her bag and icon and jumped down from the helicopter, refusing Marchenko’s hand. The copilot looked at Hollis a moment and asked, “Where did you think you were going to take this helicopter?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “The American embassy, perhaps?” He glanced at the pilot and said, “Neither of us would have flown you there.”

  Hollis got his bag and held it in his cuffed hands. He stood, crouched over in the low cabin. “Then I would have killed you both and flown it myself.”

  The copilot backed away from Hollis. “You’re a real murderer.”

  “No, I’m an American Air Force officer who is being kidnapped.”

  The copilot’s eyes widened in surprise. “Yes?”

  Marchenko called out, “Come along!”

  “Call my embassy and tell them Colonel Hollis is here. I’ll see you get fifty thousand rubles for you and your friend here.”

  Again, the copilot glanced over his shoulder. “Get moving.”

  Hollis edged toward the open door.

  The copilot said softly, “You shouldn’t have broken that man’s wrist. Do you know who those two are?”

  “Intourist guides. Remember my offer.” Hollis jumped down from the helicopter to where Marchenko stood with Lisa and Vadim near a Zil-6, a Red Army vehicle somewhat like an American jeep but larger. Hollis heard the helicopter lift off and felt the rush of wind pushing him forward.

  Marchenko opened the rear door of the Zil and said, “Colonel Hollis, then Vadim, then Miss Rhodes.”

  Hollis pushed his cuffed wrists under Marchenko’s nose, “Unlock these.”

  Marchenko shook his head. “Get in, please.”

  Hollis said to Lisa, “Get in first.”

  She got in, and as Vadim tried to follow, Hollis shouldered him aside and got in the middle beside Lisa. Vadim sat beside Hollis and said in Russian, “I’m going to beat your fucking face to a pulp.”

  “With which hand?”

  “You shit—”

  “Please!” Marchenko shouted. “Enough!” He got into the front passenger seat and said to the driver, “Headquarters.”

  The Zil moved across the grass field toward the log cabin about a hundred yards off. Hollis looked at the cabin as they drove by and guessed it was probably once a woodsman’s izba, a relic from a time when such a thing as a lone woodsman existed in this communal nation. But now it sprouted two antennas and was probably the radio shack for the helipad.

  The Zil entered the narrow track that cut through the dark pine forest. Lisa took Hollis’ hand and said into his ear, “I’m going to be brave.”

  “You are brave.”

  The Zil came to the end of the track and turned left onto the main blacktop road. Hollis noticed that the pine trees on either side of the road were huge, rising forty to fifty feet into the air, and the spreading bough canopy was so heavy that little light reached the ground. Now and then he saw log-paved lanes, what the military called corduroy roads, leading off the main road. Down some of these lanes he saw houses that he hadn’t seen from the air. He was surprised but not shocked to catch sight of an American ranch house, then a white clapboard bungalow. They were most probably residences, he thought, for the Charm School students and their American instructors, set in the Russian bor to enhance the illusions that made this place so unique.

  Lisa spotted one and said to him, “Look!”

  “I see them.”

  “This is bizarre. What is—?”

  “No questions.”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  Marchenko, too, was staring out the window. He said to Hollis, “This is very odd indeed. Do you know what this place is?”

  Hollis had assumed that Marchenko didn’t know much beyond his kidnapping assignment. Hollis replied, “It’s a secret CIA base camp. You’re under arrest, Marchenko.”

  Marchenko turned around in his seat and looked at Hollis in a way that led Hollis to think the man almost believed him. What a country. Marchenko finally smiled. “You joke. Tell me, what kind of structures are those in the woods?”

  “They’re called houses.”

  “Yes? I saw American houses in a movie once. Those are American houses.”

  “Very good.”

  Marchenko turned back to the front and peered out the windows. “I don’t understand this place.”

  Hollis noticed that the light snow was mostly on the pine branches and little of it had reached the moss-covered ground. This was a place, he thought, of perpetual darkness, a place where even at high noon in the summer there would be little light.

  Lisa said, “I haven’t seen a single person.”

  Hollis nodded. Neither had he, and the unsettling thought came to him that they were all gone, moved to another location as had happened when the American rescue force had raided Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam. But as he peered through the forest he saw lit windows in some of the houses, and smoke rose from the chimneys. No, he thought, they are still here. The KGB had not properly evaluated the situation and had not broken camp yet.

  The Zil continued slowly along the road, and coming up on the right was the long green-roofed building Hollis had spotted from the air. It was a single-story building of white clapboard with a very homey-looking front porch. There were rockers on the porch and a red-and-white Coke machine against the wall near the double front doors. Through a large picture window Hollis got a glimpse of some men and women, and on a wall hung a large American flag. Hollis had the impression of a small-town Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, and as the Zil passed by, he saw a black-and-white sign over the double doors that said just that: VFW , POST 000.

  The Zil moved on, then came to a halt in front of the headquarters building, a grey two-story hulk of precast concrete slabs, most of which had the familiar cracks that were a trademark of the prefab industry in these parts. Steel reinforcing rods protruded here and there and bled orange rust over the deteriorating concrete. A KGB Border Guard stood in a plywood booth, and to the right of the booth was the headquarters’ entrance. Standing in front, wearing the long green greatcoat
with red shoulder boards of the KGB, was Colonel Petr Burov.

  Marchenko got out and said, “Come, come. You don’t keep a colonel waiting.”

  Vadim opened the rear door and got out, followed by Hollis and Lisa.

  Burov looked at them a long time, then said, “Well, this is what you wanted to see, wasn’t it, Hollis?”

  Hollis didn’t reply.

  Burov said to Marchenko, “Why is he handcuffed?”

  “He tried to hijack the helicopter.” Marchenko explained to Burov with great diffidence in his voice, altering somewhat the exact events at the airport and on the helicopter.

  Burov looked at Vadim’s swollen wrist, now the size of an orange, then looked at Hollis but said nothing. Burov stared at the icon in Lisa’s hands. He said to her, “If you were Catholic or Protestant, you’d have to carry only a small cross for comfort.” He laughed, and Marchenko and Vadim laughed also.

  Lisa said in Russian, “Go to hell.”

  Burov slapped her hard across the face, knocking her to the ground.

  Hollis bent down to help Lisa to her feet, and as he did, Burov swung at him, catching him on the jaw and sending him staggering back. His knees sagged, and he dropped to the ground, then stood unsteadily.

  Burov flexed his right hand and watched Hollis as he straightened up. Burov said, “Well, that evens the score for Lefortovo.” Burov looked at Vadim and said in Russian, “The stomach.”