So instead, the whole group was going in blind. Worse, Luke’s team was supposed to be the civilian oversight, but they were participating in a mission that was underwater—ice water—something they had no training for. Precious few American soldiers had training for ice water immersion.
“This whole thing,” Murphy said, “strikes me as FUBAR.”
Luke wasn’t sure if he agreed completely. But he was sensitive to the fact that Murphy still probably thought Luke’s poor decisions had led to the deaths of their entire assault team in Afghanistan.
If Murphy, or Ed, or even Swann or Trudy decided they wanted out of this mission, it was fine with Luke. People had to make their own decisions—he couldn’t decide for them.
Suddenly, he wished he had talked to Becca before leaving on this trip. Now it was too late.
“We’ve got less than two hours until our ETA,” the older man said, glancing at his watch. He looked at Donaldson, who was still holding the thick orange bodysuit. Then he made a spinning motion with his hand, like the arms on a clock moving rapidly.
“I suggest you get this demonstration underway.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
9:15 a.m. Moscow Daylight Time (10:15 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time, September 4)
The “Aquarium”
Headquarters of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)
Khodynka Airfield
Moscow, Russia
Blue smoke rose toward the ceiling.
“There is a great deal of movement,” the latest visitor, a pot-bellied man in the uniform of the Interior Ministry, said. His voice belied a certain anxiety. It was nothing in the timbre of the voice. It didn’t tremble or crack. You had to have the right ears to hear it. The man was afraid.
“Yes,” Marmilov said. “Would you expect anything less from them?”
Although the office had no windows, the light had changed as the morning progressed. Marmilov’s swooping, hardened hair now resembled a type of dark plastic helmet. The overhead lights seemed so bright it was as if Marmilov and his guest were sitting in the desert at midday, the sun casting deep shadows into the fissures carved into the ancient stone of Marmilov’s face.
People sometimes wondered why a man with such influence chose to run his empire from this tomb, underneath this bleak, crumbling, run-down building well outside Central Moscow. Marmilov knew about this wonder because men, especially powerful men, or those aspiring to be powerful, often asked him this very question.
“Why not a corner office upstairs, Marmilov? Or a man like yourself, whose mandate far surpasses just the GRU, why not get yourself transferred to the Kremlin, with a wide view of Red Square and the opportunity to contemplate the deeds of our history, and the great men who have come before? Or perhaps just watch the pretty girls passing by? Or at the very least, a chance to see the sun?”
Marmilov would smile and say, “I do not like the sun.”
“And pretty girls?” his friendly tormentors might say.
To this Marmilov would shake his head. “I’m an old man. My wife is good enough for me.”
None of this was true. Marmilov’s wife lived fifty kilometers outside the city, in a country estate dating to before the Revolution. He barely ever saw her and neither she nor he had a problem with this arrangement. Instead of spending time with his wife, he stayed in a modern hotel suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, and he feasted on a steady diet of young women brought directly to his door. He ordered them up like room service.
He had heard that the girls, and for all he knew, their pimps as well, referred to him as Count Dracula. The nickname made him smile. He couldn’t have chosen a more fitting one himself.
The reason he stayed in the basement of this building, and didn’t move to the Kremlin, was because he didn’t want to see Red Square. Although he loved Russian culture more than anything, during his workday, he didn’t want his actions tainted by dreams of the past. And he especially didn’t want them handicapped by the unfortunate realities and half-measures of the present.
Marmilov’s focus was on the future. He was hell bent on it.
There was greatness in the future. There was glory in the future. The Russian future would surpass, and then dwarf, the pathetic disasters of the present, and perhaps even the victories of the past.
The future was coming, and he was its creator. He was its father, and also its midwife. To imagine it fully, he couldn’t allow himself to become distracted by conflicting messages and ideas. He needed a pure vision, and to achieve this, it was better to stare at a blank wall than out the window.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the fat man, Viktor Ulyanov, said. “But I believe there are some in our circle who are concerned by the activity.”
Marmilov shrugged. “Of course.”
There were always those who were more concerned about the skin on their own necks than on leading the people to a brighter day.
“And there are some who believe that when the President…”
The President!
Marmilov nearly laughed. The President was a speed bump on this country’s path to greatness. He was an impediment, and a minor one at that. Ever since this President had taken the reins from his alcoholic mentor Yelstin, Russia’s comedy of errors had worsened, not improved.
President of what? President of garbage!
The President needed to watch his back, as the saying went. Or he might soon find a knife protruding from it.
“Yes?” Marmilov said. “Concerned that when the President… what?”
“Finds out,” Ulyanov said.
Marmilov nodded and smiled. “Yes? Finds out… What will happen then?”
“There will be a purge,” Ulyanov said.
Marmilov squinted at Ulyanov in the haze of smoke. Could the man be joking? The jest wouldn’t be that Putin finding out would lead to a purge. If handled incorrectly, of course it would. The jest would be that at this late date in the preparations, Ulyanov and unnamed others would suddenly be thinking about such a thing.
“The President will find out after it is too late,” Marmilov declared simply. “The President himself will be the one who is purged.” Ulyanov, and any others he was speaking for, must know this. It had been the plan all along.
“There is concern that we are arranging a bloodbath,” Ulyanov said.
Marmilov blew smoke into the air. “My dear friend, we are not arranging anything. The bloodbath is already arranged. It was arranged years ago.”
Here in Marmilov’s lair, a laptop computer had sprouted like a mushroom next to the small TV screen on his desk. The TV still showed closed circuit footage from security cameras at the oil rig. The laptop showed transcripts of intercepted American communications translated into Russian.
The Americans were tightening a noose around the captured oil rig. A ring of temporary forward bases were appearing on floating ice within a few miles of the rig. Black operations teams were on high alert, preparing to strike. An experimental supersonic jet had received clearance, and landed at Deadhorse perhaps thirty minutes ago.
The Americans were set to strike.
“It was never the intention to hold the rig for very long,” Marmilov said. “This is why we used a proxy. We knew that the Americans would take back their property.”
“Yes,”