Both men nodded.
Bemoaning his exhaustion, General Secretary Vorontsky said, "Vitali, I am going to get some sleep. Awaken me should anything happen." Then he turned his swarthy face on Popov. "When will the Soyuz launch from Baikonur?"
"In approximately forty hours," wheezed the general. "We must wait until our launch preparations are complete and the Intrepid's orbit passes over the cosmodrome." Popov looked as if he had one foot in the grave. His face was gray as his cigarette ash, and his eyes completely bloodshot.
Vorontsky nodded and left.
"Do you have all of the data you require from Pirdilenko in Plesetsk?" asked Kostiashak.
Popov looked at the KGB Chairman. Did this man never sleep? He seemed to possess some hidden reservoir of eneigy. His slicked-back hair was always in place. Even the creases in his pants remained razor sharp. "Yes, Comrade," sighed the general. "Additionally, we routinely receive launch-detection reports from the Aerospace Warning Centre, and we will be able to respond immediately should the Americans launch a rescue shuttle from their Florida cosmodrome."
Kostiashak flicked an ash. "Very well. I shall remain here to… observe."
Popov found it difficult to conceal his irritation. "Well then, Comrade Chairman, if you will excuse me. I must attend to the launch preparations."
Kostiashak smiled politely. "By all means, General."
After Popov left, Kostiashak pulled long and hard on his Pall Mall. He disdained Russian cigarettes, for they were like smoking a rope wrapped in cardboard. American tobacco was only one of the luxuries for which he'd developed a taste while at Princeton. Another was Scotch whisky. He exhaled the lungful of smoke and allowed himself a few poignant moments with his memories. Ah, yes, America — the land of plenty. So powerful and so rich, yet with millions in poverty. So technologically brilliant — and metaphysically shallow. Ruled not by a king or a parliament, but by a cabal of uncontrolled press lords. It was not to be believed, really. Americans had no… discipline. And the Chairman greatly admired discipline. But in his beloved Russia, even Kostiashak had to admit that discipline had run amok. The Soviet Union had turned itself into one large armaments factory that could not feed itself. His country was descending into an oblivion from which there would be no return. It had to change… had to. And the young KGB Chairman had reached back through time — into the inner bowels of Moscow Centre at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square — for the instrument to make it change.
Vitali Kostiashak had been born the son of a diplomat. Although Ukranian by blood, he'd been raised in foreign embassies for most of his life — where he often found himself an unwelcome visitor in a strange land. To combat the usual isolation of Russian diplomatic life — typically accentuated by the suffocating controls imposed by the KGB rezidentura within the embassy — the young Vitali threw himself into his studies, where he demonstrated a singular aptitude for mathematics and chess.
When Kostiashak reached his eighteenth birthday, his father was anointed with a prestigious posting to the Soviet embassy in Washington, where he served on Dobrynin's staff. It was with Ambassador Dobrynin's influence that the elder Kostiashak obtained a special dispensation for his son to attend Princeton, where the young Vitali did exceptionally well. He emerged eight years later with a Ph.D. in international studies from the university's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
While at Princeton, Kostiashak developed a fascination with American history, in particular the American Presidents. He found the Presidency possessed a more convoluted, more bloodstained, more treacherous legacy than the Russian czars could have ever hoped to achieve — from the Civil War, to Japanese-American concentration camps during World War II, to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, to John Wilkes Booth, to Teapot Dome, to Lee Harvey Oswald, to Watergate.
Yet it was during his study of the Presidency that Kostiashak struck upon an intellectual candle that would guide his professional life. He was in the Firestone Library, studying late one night as he often did, learning about a particularly magnetic President named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kostiashak read that when Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1914, he'd run for the nomination to the United States Senate from the state of New York. He was creamed by the Tammany Hall political "machine," and was despondent over his loss. Sensing the young man's depression, an old pol took Franklin aside and told him in a consoling voice, "Son… remember. First, you have to get elected.'' For Kostiashak, that one phrase— "You have to get elected" — was like a revelation, for it told him that to accomplish anything with his life — whatever it might be— he had to be in a position of power.
With his Ph.D. from Princeton and his father's sponsorship, he obtained a position in the Foreign Ministry, but the younger Kostiashak soon found that power sprang from the Party, not from the ministry's bureaucracy. In a highly unusual move, he left the Foreign Ministry to join the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—the Committee for State Security. It was a move that greatly chagrined and disappointed his father, but delighted his new masters. Inside Russia, the KGB was looked upon with contempt — and even though it employed a number of capable people, it was best known as a bunch of hoodlums who did not possess what they coveted most: class. Kostiashak was one of the exceptions who brought the KGB some class, and his superiors recognized this. As a result, his rise was meteoric, and he became widely respected for his brilliance and charm — as well as his ruthlessness.
It was during a counterintelligence operation that Kostiashak hitched his wagon to the rising star of the GOSPLAN Minister, who, upon Gorbachev's fateful demise, rewarded him with the post of KGB Chairman. Kostiashak was thirty-seven years old.
It is difficult for those in the West to comprehend the scope or nature of the power a KGB Chairman commands. It's as if the reins of the FBI, CIA, Military Police, National Security Agency, and Border Patrol were all concentrated in the hands of a single man, who had the license to wield the power like a Mafia enforcer — with no restraint imposed by the courts or the press. Like many things Russian, the KGB wasn't terribly cosmopolitan or elegant, it was simply massive. Some 400,000 of their number — which included agents, spies, troops, guards, data analysts, clerks, executioners, economists, wiretappers, crypt-analysts, cooks, forgers, microwave engineers, waiters, henchmen, and assassins — all fell under the power of the Chairman. And Kostiashak, who was singularly cosmopolitan and tres elegant, never shied from the use of power.
It was shortly after he assumed his duties behind the gray stone walls of Dzerzhinsky Square that Kostiashak became privy to a basement file which held the ' 'secret of secrets" of Moscow Centre. A file which had been passed down from Chairman to Chairman in a macabre legacy that reached back to the time of Lavrenti Beria — the dreaded chief of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. It was from this ancient file that the young Chairman chose his instrument.
Kostiashak, the former grandmaster, had played multiple-board chess with a variety of worthy opponents before. He found it a stimulating exercise for his warp-speed mind. But it was only that — an exercise. The Intrepid was real. And to win this very real, very deadly game he had to have the American spacecraft on Russian soil. Had to. Everything depended on that. He had no doubts the Americans would launch a rescue mission from their Florida cosmodrome. He intuitively felt it from the beginning, and Water Lily had confirmed it. He also sensed Popov's reluctance to employ the antisatellite device. One could never tell when a man like Popov would rise up in some moralistic outrage. It was a nuisance, but one that had to be anticipated. The American shuttle Constellation could not be allowed to reach the Intrepid, and therefore it would be best to have some insurance should Popov prove to be unreliable.