The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  Two men, the settlement’s KGB guards, walked into the square and smartly saluted the officer, who had his back to Nami. It seemed to her a familiar back, as was the tilt of the man’s head, though she couldn’t place the familiarity. She put the feeling out of her mind and continued on her way. Her shift was due to start in twenty minutes and she still had to get home with the wood piled on her sled, light the kitchen fire, and kick her lazy husband out of his vodka stupor.

  Nami snuck another glimpse. New prisoners. They must be important to have arrived by helicopter with an officer to escort them. Perhaps they were political prisoners, Party members fallen from favor—there were plenty of those here already. She wondered what these new men had done, or not done, or thought, or not thought. There was no right or wrong in the Soviet Union, she had decided. Just the powerful and the powerless.

  One of the prisoners, a man with long white hair, coughed, coughed some more, then bent over with his hand over his face, hacking into it. He turned away from the guards as he coughed. The fit finished as Nami reached the edge of the square and the corner of a black timber house. The man took his hand away from his face as he stood up and Nami’s heart nearly jumped into her throat. She pulled the sled past the edge of the hut and leaned against it, her chest heaving as she hyper-ventilated. It was him. It was the doctor from the plane, the American politician. They had brought him here.

  Nami wanted to take another look, to make absolutely certain, but first she had to fight her fear of discovery. An inquisitive nature was not an admired quality among the camp’s inmates, or their KGB guards. Other inmates were shuffling through the square, ignored by the new arrivals. Nami decided that she would risk it and make another crossing. She held her breath, turned her sled around and walked out into the open. But the prisoners were no longer there. Her disappointment was intense. They must have been taken somewhere by their guards, guided by one of the camp’s KGB men. However, the officer with the familiar back was still standing around, talking to the remaining KGB man, enjoying himself, laughing.

  The sense of familiarity grew as she watched him, sneaking furtive glances. Then Nami realized that she was invisible to the men. Emboldened by the discovery, she circled around them, but the officer seemed to move, keeping his back to her. It was only when she reached the other side of the square that the man suddenly turned toward her. They looked at each other for what seemed like a minute, but was probably less than a second. There was no recognition whatsoever in his eyes; Nami was utterly invisible to him, made of glass, and he saw through her as if looking through a window pane. Nami wondered if she was already dead, killed by this man, the man she recognized instantly. His was a face she would never forget. The picture of a man standing on a truck appeared in her mind, along with his words: ‘I am Colonel Valentin Korolenko. I am an officer in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. You may know of this as the KGB.’

  Lingering in the square had caused Nami to be ten minutes late for her shift, an offense that earned her various threats of retribution. The intimidation was hollow, though, and she knew it. Her camp husband had a still, and his homemade vodka made him second in importance to the KGB stooges who were the camp’s overseers and his regular customers. Nami drifted through the day, lost in thought as she drove the rig, shuttling between the hillside being logged and the mill by the river. Seeing the Soviet officer and the American doctor after all these years triggered a flood of memories that she had managed to keep suppressed, because they were memories that had caused her much grief. Akiko was four years old when Nami had said goodbye to her in the Anchorage departure lounge. Now, Nami had a baby boy with her distiller husband; he was two, half the age little Kimba had been when Nami boarded KAL 007. She had remarried to survive. Her Russian husband was reasonably kind, and rarely beat her. She had learned which moods to avoid and life had settled into a secure routine. Nami wondered whether Hatsuto had also remarried, and whether he still remembered her.

  The day dragged on. Where would the new prisoners be housed? How soon would she be able to engineer an excuse that would enable her to talk to the American? New arrivals were popular for a time. They sometimes brought news of the world beyond. Here in this camp, there were no radios, no newspapers, no roads in or out until the river froze in the winter months. Civilization, the world beyond, was a dream. Nami gave herself a mental shake. She would have to be careful. If the authorities were aware that she and the American knew each other, one or both of them would be moved. And Nami had been moved several times to different camps since she had been taken prisoner. The moves were the hardest to take: new rules, new isolation, a reminder that she meant nothing to anyone in this ghastly human wasteland.

  It was dark by the time Nami finally pulled into the mill with a full load of logs on her rig. They had to be taken off with a crane and stacked by the road. She turned into the bay, pulled on the handbrake, and climbed down from the cab onto the frozen ground. The evening was cold with a biting wind. There was snow in the air. She wrapped her coat tightly about her to keep out the chill and watched the steel jaws of the crane close around a log on her rig. The machine lifted it out carelessly, bouncing and nudging the truck. The load swung over the logs already stacked and was lowered into place. But the crane operator released the log too late and it rolled backward off the stack with a series of heavy thumps that came up through the ground. An overseer came along with a flashlight, shone his light up into the crane’s control cabin and threw abuse at the operator. The door of the cabin opened and a hand waved back with a gesture of apology. The man was probably drunk, thought Nami, and more than likely on her husband’s liquor.

  The jaws of the crane swung back, slower this time, more carefully, and picked up a log that was larger and heavier than the last. The crane’s diesel motor gunned with the effort required to lift this load. The log came up, jaws clamped around it, and the operator swung it across to the stack. But he judged it poorly again, this time letting it go early. The log crashed onto the stack and bounced down the front. And then, suddenly, all the logs were on the move, tumbling over each other. The stack was collapsing. It happened fast. There was nowhere for Nami to go. The truck behind her and the lethal tumbling loads bouncing toward her blocked the only escape routes. She was dead. She knew it seconds before a massive weight struck her in the chest. There was no panic, just a sense of inevitable calm. And, in an instant, the world went black, an infinite and all-consuming nothingness where consciousness and pain were equally impossible.

  February 11, 2012

  Siberian Far East. The Trans-Siberian train rocked eastward toward Moscow through mile after slow mile of emptiness, the monotony of snow, ice and pine trees broken only by tunnels that plunged passengers instantly into complete and claustrophobic blackness.

  Ben lay on his bunk as he had done for the past thirty hours, lost in his own thoughts, and stared unseeing at the passing taiga through unwashed windows made semi-opaque by successive layers of dust. Akiko lay on her bunk on the other side of the cabin, gazing in the opposite direction, out through the cabin doorway, across the narrow hallway and through an equally dirty window at scenery uniformly cold and bland.

  ‘What do you think the chances are that we’ll see a Siberian snow leopard?’ Ben asked idly, sweating in the ninety-degree heat set by the carriage attendant, or provodnitsa—a tall, heavy-set woman who wore orange lipstick below a black mustache.

  ‘There are not many left,’ said Akiko, yawning.

  Ben wondered why the snow leopard question had meandered into his brain, and then remembered seeing the photo on the cover of the brochure for Siberian Winter Safaris. The thought led him to their guide, Oleg, who was now dead, burned from the inside out. What sort of people were these?

  ‘Do you believe what Luydmila said about the zero option?’ asked Akiko.

  Ben realized that his question about the tiger must have seeded similar thoughts in Akiko’s mind.

  ‘No, I don’t. You can’t cove
r up shit like that.’

  ‘But the tape is proof that it happened. People knew, but the world was told a different story. Yuudai knew, your father knew. Perhaps that was why he went . . .’

  ‘Went nuts?’

  ‘No, I was going to say that it was the reason he left your family. Isn’t it possible that he left because he knew staying would be dangerous to you and your mother? That is what a hero would do, and Curtis was a hero. He would sacrifice his own happiness to ensure your safety, wouldn’t he?’

  Akiko’s words formed into a solid lump at the base of Ben’s throat. He swallowed, but couldn’t remove it. What kind of man leaves his one-year-old son and never comes back? ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll never know.’

  ‘But it makes sense,’ she said softly. ‘If American intelligence knew that the plane landed and knew there were survivors, the greatest fear of the people hoping to hide the truth would have been 007’s captain returning to America to tell his story. Your father also knew the truth. He was friends with Yuudai, but he was bound by an oath of secrecy.’

  ‘“I will be prouder still if you embrace the truth,”’ Ben said.

  ‘“Spend it wisely and in pursuit of the truth.”’

  ‘We’re in a lot of danger here, Akiko,’ said Ben, stating the obvious. ‘I think I’ve only just realized how much. If possible, we’re going to have to be more careful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Akiko said.

  They retreated again into their own thoughts.

  ‘She is alive, and she is here,’ Akiko said eventually. ‘I know she is here.’

  ‘A lot can happen in twenty-nine years.’

  ‘I would know it if she was dead.’

  Ben nodded. They were here to give an impossible task their best shot. It was too late to deny Akiko hope.

  Akiko resumed her position on the bunk, her head more or less below the window through which Ben watched Siberia slowly pass by. She picked up a magazine, flipped through it and then put it down.

  ‘When do we get into Ulan-Ude?’ Ben asked. ‘One thirty in the afternoon Moscow time; eight thirty in the morning Ulan-Ude time,’ said Akiko, referring to the Trans-Siberian Railway’s odd hangover from the Soviet era when the world ran on Moscow time.

  ‘I’ll just lie here then,’ said Ben, his eyelids heavy with a combination of heat, boredom and lack of movement.

  ‘Ben! Ben! It’s him! Wake up! Wake up,’ Akiko hissed.

  Ben woke with Akiko leaning over him, shaking his shoulders, her nails digging into his skin, her face a mask of fear.

  ‘Who? What?’ he asked, confused with sleep.

  ‘Him! The man in the photo. The man Luydmila called Soloyov. He just walked past. I saw his eyes. He looked in, came to check on us.’

  ‘Which way was he headed?’ he asked.

  ‘There!’ She pointed.

  Ben was up and out of the cabin in a second. He raced down the narrow hallway, blocked by other passengers stretching their legs, gazing out the dirty windows, or going to the urn to get hot water for the discount traveler’s staples—instant noodles and tea. There was no sign of the man. Ben heard the door open and close at the far end of the carriage, letting in the sudden clatter of steel train wheels smashing over railway track joints. Someone had left this carriage, moving to the next one. He squeezed past the provodnitsa, who was delivering some unspeakable train food from the dining car to one of the passengers, and made a dash for the door. He slipped through into the next carriage. It was identical to the one he’d just left in every way, passengers loitering in the hallway in their socks, swaying gently with the movement of the train.

  A burst of track noise told him the door at the far end of the carriage had opened and then closed. And suddenly the world was plunged into utter blackness, as if a hood had been thrown over his head. The train had entered another tunnel. Ben couldn’t move without becoming totally disoriented, so he braced himself against a window and waited it out. He wondered what he was going to do. One of the passengers standing in the hallway lit a cigarette with a lighter and kept the flame burning. The train left the tunnel and light returned. There was no way he could catch the man, if indeed it was the guy in the photo. Soloyov could have entered one of the cabins in this carriage or the next, or the one after that, and he couldn’t check every cabin in the train. Defeated, Ben turned and made his way back to their cabin.

  When he got there, Akiko was gone. He panicked.

  ‘Kiko!’ he called down the hallway. Some of the passengers turned wearily to look at him, wondering what all the anxiety was about. ‘Akiko!’

  The door between carriages opened behind him. Ben spun around and raced to it. He went through the door moments after it closed and caught a father and his young daughter on the other side, stepping over the metal plate above the frozen tracks below. Ben gave the man a weak smile and closed the door. He turned in time to see Akiko coming out of the communal bathroom, dabbing her face with a towel.

  Ben’s relief was instant.

  ‘Did you catch him?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. I thought . . . I thought something might have happened to you.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

  They walked back to their cabin. Once inside, Ben said, ‘Thinking about it, it wouldn’t be a good idea for those guys to know we’re on to them. We want them to think they’ve got us just where they want us. If they were going to do us harm on this train, they probably would have done it by now.’

  ‘Why kill Sergei and Oleg?’

  ‘I don’t know. Luydmila said Sergei was killed because those guys had a history with him. And she believed Oleg was tortured to obtain information he might have had about us. All he could have told them was that we’re looking for your mother and that we were headed for Ulan-Ude. And now they’re on this train, keeping an eye on us.’

  ‘Waiting,’ said Akiko.

  ‘Yeah, but for what?’

  ‘Seriously, don’t you go anywhere without that hat?’ Lana asked as she took a seat. ‘You got some kind of horrible scalp disease or something?’

  Kradich ignored the questions. ‘You look awesome, but I was kind of hoping that with legs like yours you’d be wearing a short skirt.’ He puckered his lips. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

  Lana leaned across the table, kissed him quickly and then whispered in his ear, ‘Don’t push it, buddy boy.’

  The waiter came over, asked how they were doing, and handed out menus. Lana asked for mineral water and a few minutes in which to interrogate the wine list. The waiter bowed slightly and said, ‘Certainly, madam,’ before walking off to service another table.

  Both Lana and Kradich were getting paranoid about this case. In a town as small as Washington, and especially where FBI Special Agent Miller Sherwood was concerned, they felt there had to be a reason for seeing each other outside of usual office hours. Having a burgeoning relationship was Kradich’s idea. Despite his ulterior motives, Lana went along with it—there was no easier cover story.

  ‘I had a look at every page on Garret’s website and there’s no mention of Buck, and only the one photo,’ she said, getting down to business. ‘I googled him. He’s mentioned in the odd news article as being the governor’s security advisor.’

  Kradich scoped the reasonably full restaurant. ‘Perhaps Garret just likes having the guy around—they’re both ex-Company. And Buck’s been with the governor a very long time.’

  ‘Back to my first question,’ said Lana. ‘How did you go? Find anything? Or are we here under false pretenses?’ She leaned forward and adjusted his collar for appearance’s sake.

  ‘Did I find anything on our Mr Buck? No, nothing of consequence. I can tell you that he was in the Green Berets in Vietnam, but, unusually, his service records have been sealed. I can’t get to them. And I can’t dig into his CIA career, either, because that’s classified, too, along with every other CIA personnel file, I might add. Interest
ingly, though, I did discover that Hank Buck worked for the office of the National Security Advisor for about a year. From November ’82 to October ’83.’

  ‘Then he worked for Bill Clark,’ she said.

  ‘Back then, Buck was a middleweight. He worked specifically for a guy called Des Bilson, Clark’s senior aide, who died from AIDS before anyone really knew what it was. Buck’s employment records from those days—which aren’t classified and are in the public record—have him leaving the office of the National Security Advisor the day Clark resigns. I’ve got nothing more on him. He never married, has no family. He’s a bit of a mystery.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Lana, disappointed.

  ‘But I do have something interesting. Shouldn’t we order first?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think I’ve found confirmation that 007 really did land on Sakhalin.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No. I started with the assumption that it landed at one of the Soviet bases on the island and that most, if not all, of the passengers and crew survived. In that scenario, one passenger in particular would have gotten Ivan all excited.’

  ‘Lawrence McDonald.’

  ‘Exactly. So I went through all that declassified stuff I sent you on the congressman—the files on his so-called “Western Goals” intelligence network, the Reinhard Gehlen/Du Berrier/George Patton connection and so forth. And it got me thinking . . . If the Soviets got their hands on a man like that, there’d be consequences. What do you think you might see a few months down the track?’

  ‘Once they’d broken him?’

  ‘Yeah, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that they would have broken him. Along with the torture, they’d have told him that the world believed everyone on board KAL 007 was dead. There would have been absolutely no hope of a prisoner exchange. You can bet the KGB would’ve shown McDonald pictures of his own funeral and probably an obituary or two just to drive home the hopelessness of his position.’