“Good,” Vostov said, a tone of bitterness in his voice. “It was too bad their crew all survived. What was the second thing?”
“The GRU reports that they’ve picked up intelligence that American frogmen have placed nuclear mines in our major ports. They claim that the mines are two megaton hydrogen bombs. At least two dozen of them.”
“Yeah, right,” Vostov said, shaking his head. “Remind me to order Mikhail to find one of these and dredge it up as proof. This all has the ring of pipelined disinformation to me. Something to make us afraid, not something real.”
Vostov looked up as a knock came at the door and four men entered the room, the first the defense minister, Marshal Radoslav Mikhail Konstantinov, the elder statesman of the military. He walked in slowly, with a quiet dignity. The man had to be in his late seventies, Vostov thought, his full head of hair completely gray, his face ruddy. Mikhail’s hand shook with palsy as he reached to shake hands with Vostov, who stood to greet him. Rumor had it that Mikhail had Parkinson’s disease, and that his treatments were starting to fail. Pasternak had wondered aloud about Vostov appointing a replacement for him, and they’d both toyed with the idea of Mikhail nominating his own successor, but the rising opposition to Vostov’s governance made them both cautious, and they’d postponed the decision.
“Good morning, Mikhail,” Vostov said, his voice deep and gravelly. “Sorry to roust you out so suddenly for this trip.”
Konstantinov just smiled, his face lighting up when he smiled, his eyes shrinking to horizontal slits. “I’m glad to be with you on this trip, Mr. President. I was going to suggest we move this up in the schedule anyway, since the mission is vital.”
The room grew louder as the aircraft’s jets spooled up to full power. Vostov waved the men to their seats. Outside the windows, the runway and the Moscow surroundings blurred by, the plane shaking with vibrations as the aircraft sped up on the runway, but in a few seconds the cabin inclined upward and the vibrations disappeared, the groan of the landing gear retracting loud for a moment. When the cabin quieted, the deck seemed to get steeper for a few minutes with the engine noise easing somewhat as the plane flew over Moscow’s center city and then over the outskirts, the jet throttling back up as it flew over Moscow Ring Road.
Vostov looked over at Mikhail’s deputy, short and barrel-chested General Osip Prokopiy. Vostov had never approved of Prokopiy. He insisted on keeping his hair too long, a thick beard gracing his face, obscuring the knot of his necktie. He was an Orthodox Christian and insisted the beard and hairstyle were part of his religious practice. He was a quiet man, diffident and reserved, but — according to Mikhail — the smartest mind in the ministry. Vostov had his doubts, but he’d pay attention to what Prokopiy had to say on this voyage.
Vostov nodded over at the pair from FSB, Gennadi Sevastyan and Avdey Ozols. When the Soviet Union fell, the magnificent and successful KGB, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security, was split in two. The mostly domestic functions of watching the population, tracking diplomats and foreign spies on Russian soil, and interior counterintelligence became those of the FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service. The foreign mission of spying abroad and black operations, formerly those of KGB’s First Chief Directorate, became the tasks of the SVR, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii, or the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Tonya Pasternak had once proposed the idea of reuniting the SVR and FSB back into a combined organization and giving it the traditional name of the KGB, but Vostov opposed the idea. That would concentrate entirely too much power in one organization. Many of the old Soviet bosses after Stalin had risen to prominence in the KGB, to the point that it could be inferred that the intelligence community ran the country. Despite Vostov being a former KGB officer in the decade before its split into the SVR and FSB, he deeply distrusted a reunited and integrated KGB. He’d prefer to deal with internal security separately from foreign operations. From a pragmatic aspect, each organization was jealous of the other and routinely devoted resources to spying on their opposite numbers, which could keep a coup from happening. And in the abstract, Vostov was convinced that an integrated KGB would be bad for the country and would be unpopular with the citizens, and anything unpopular with them could cause him to lose an election.
The Chairman of the FSB, General Gennadi Sevastyan, was tall and slender, with a handsome open face graced with bushy eyebrows and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His age was indeterminate, either late forties or mid-fifties. In working with Sevastyan over the past decade, Vostov had grown to trust the man, inviting him to the presidential offices for after-work drinks of the vodka that only politicians and diplomats could obtain. Sevastyan was a family man, like Vostov, with two children in grade school, with a pretty and friendly wife. His hobbies were rowing, his dacha on a river where he would row a one-man scull for hours while dictating memoranda on a waterproof recorder, his deputy the recipient of all of Sevastyan’s memos and random thoughts.
“Gennadi,” Vostov said, smiling at Sevastyan. “Good to have you with us.”
Sevastyan smiled and nodded. “We almost lost Avdey from this trip. I caught him just as he was climbing into a plane.”
“Oh?” Vostov looked at the FSB Deputy Chairman, Colonel General Avdey Ozols. Ozols was much older than Sevastyan by at least a decade, a trim man of medium height who had a rigid posture and a military bearing. He was a storied FSB operative, having been involved in the hostage rescue from the Chechen takeover of the Moscow Dubrovka Theater in 2002, when 850 hostages were taken. Most were rescued, with the forty terrorists killed, and despite the loss of 131 hostages during the counter-assault, Ozols had been credited with the public relations win. Ozols had gone on to half a dozen more high-profile successes, and was considered a viable successor to Sevastyan. As head of the presidential security detail in addition to his normal duties, he was a man Vostov trusted as deeply as Sevastyan. If only, Vostov thought, his trust for their opposite numbers in the SVR were as deep.
“I was headed to a trouble spot, but as it turned out,” Ozols said, “my people took care of things before the door could shut on the plane.”
“Well, I’m glad we got you here in any case,” Vostov said. “So, Tonya, can you go over what our itinerary is for this trip one more time?”
For the next ninety minutes, Pasternak briefed the five men, the room’s displays lit up with her presentation on the Status-6 torpedoes, the Belgorod and the Losharik. Early in her briefing, the Mach number indicator showed the Tu-144 reaching Mach 1.95. As she wrapped up, the plane slowed and the cabin tilted downward as the jet made its approach to Murmansk Airport. A few minutes later, the jet touched down and taxied to the military terminal. The FSB and defense officials stood. Vostov waved to Pasternak to stay.
“Gentlemen, go ahead. We will meet you at the Sevmash Shipyard. I have something to go over with my chief of staff.”
Once the engines were shut down, the jet became ghostly quiet and the air inside cooled.
“You wanted to talk to me, sir?” Pasternak prompted.
“Yes, Tonya. Something serious is happening in my personal life.”
“It’s Larisa, isn’t it?”
Vostov knew Pasternak had never liked Larisa, thinking her entitled and immature. Her dislike might have been fueled by her thinly disguised desire to have a more personal relationship with Vostov.