“They shine on all who heed their lessons.”
“The Sallow Souls will be back.”
Wareagle shook his head. “I don’t think so. Word of this will get out. The authorities will not be able to stand aside again.”
“But you will stay with us for a time. Let us find a means to repay our debt.”
“No action requires debt. Each exists unto itself, an entity alone. I must leave.”
Chief Silver Cloud nodded sadly. “I understand.”
“It is not your doing, Chief. You did just as the spirits wanted. But last night they came to me with a message: an old friend will soon need me again.”
The chief looked at him reverently. “Keep note of the road back, Johnny.”
“There is only one road, Chief Silver Cloud, and it passes everywhere twice.”
Chapter 18
General Vladimir Raskowski hated Bangkok. He had been able to survive thanks only to his air-conditioned town-house outside the city. Plenty of wealthy locals shared the beautifully landscaped area with him but he spoke to none of them, seldom venturing out.
Years before the city had held promise, but then westernization had set in. Now the American capitalists were spreading their cancer to yet another region that should have belonged to the Soviet Union. The result was a miserable, teeming, overcrowded city where consumerism ruled above all else. In the spring heat, the collective stink of the hordes inevitably wrinkled his nose. Raskowski was so sensitive about the smell that he felt the necessity of bathing three times a day, even on days when he didn’t set foot out of his townhouse.
He was even more sensitive about his height. Of course, at just over five feet four inches he was hardly a dwarf, but he knew that compared to other Soviet generals from past and present, he was a victim of the legend. All Soviet military leaders from Peter the Great on were supposed to have been large, strapping men, and Raskowski had risen through the ranks ever conscious of the fact that the more power he obtained, the more his height would betray him. He became obsessed with it; he ordered three pair of leather boots with custom-elevated soles. He had his desk placed on a platform. And when his curly, salt-and-pepper hair began to fall out in clumps, he had a transplant. Baldness would unfairly steal several centimeters of his height.
He had spent his younger years trying to compensate for his lack of height by building muscle. With the aid of a trainer for Soviet Olympic weightlifters, he had developed a body that was much too big for its frame. His arms were huge and knobby with muscle, his chest barrel-shaped. Raskowski had always been proud of the fact that all his uniforms had to be custom-tailored; that this was still true at almost age sixty made him even more proud.
Of course, he could no longer wear his uniforms in public, not while in exile, for they would draw too much attention to him. The few times he was forced to venture out into Bangkok he did so in Western clothes and did his best to look like a tourist. It made his flesh crawl and made him feel dirty. It was those rare hours outside his townhouse that set his expression so tight that his pointed chin seemed to curve upward for his nose. It shouldn’t have come to this. By all rights he should be General Secretary at this moment. He had worked for it and deserved it, but they had stolen it from him. He was a man from a different time they said, a relic from the past. Raskowski did not disagree. But times were the product of the people living in them. They were whatever those people made them and Raskowski knew exactly what he was making them now.
After stepping from the shower he used two towels to dry every inch of his frame. He put on a freshly pressed uniform. With the shades of his townhouse carefully drawn he could smell the fresh wool and see himself in the mirror as he was meant to be seen. Soon he would be free to wear the uniforms at his leisure once again. Soon his position within the Soviet Union would require him to. The wrongs were going to be set right. He was going to make them so. He was a man totally in control of his own destiny.
And the world’s.
The general towel-dried his hair once more and combed it neatly. The meeting he was about to chair would take place by conference call instead of in person, but he had showered and changed for it nonetheless. He pulled on his elevated boots and headed downstairs toward the windowless back room where the technological implements for these meetings had been set up.
Raskowski’s starched uniform snapped stiffly as he quickly passed the large bay window he had forgotten to draw the curtains over. No one saw him. No one was looking. Soon the whole world would be watching.
It didn’t have to be this way. He had brought the results of his Alpha project to the Politburo in loyalty and good faith, and he had suffered only embarrassment and heartache as a result. Raskowski refused to take their rejection lying down, but there were just too many of the weak old men and younger ones calling themselves “reformers” to beat back. He accepted his exile with enough grace to assure the opportunity to enact the “disappearance” he was planning. He had already recruited men in all levels of the Soviet government and military who felt as he did. When he made his move, they would be with him.
The key, though, remained the death ray. Once all tests were pronounced successful, Raskowski managed to launch the satellite that made his plan operational. All over the Soviet Union his people began laying the foundation for the tumultuous upheaval to come. Every phase of the operation, every minute detail, had been thought out to the letter. The destruction of Hope Valley went off brilliantly, as did his indirect contact with the Americans. All was perfect.
Until the unthinkable occurred. A scientific miscalculation, not his at all, threw the entire plan into jeopardy. It was left to Raskowski to lift it from the heap, to reform his strategy in a daring and nearly impossible plan. Impossible for others perhaps, but not for him. The true basis of brilliance, he had always believed, was the ability to deal with change. On the battlefield especially, and that was what the whole world had become. Only a handful of people were privy to the revised operation, and that was the way it would stay. Timing was everything now. The slightest slipup or miscalculation would destroy everything.
The back room contained only a single table and chair. Atop the table rested three speaker-phones: white, red, and green. Each of his main Soviet subordinates spoke over the same one every time and Raskowski had come to think of them, as they themselves did, in terms of the color of their speakers. Raskowski sat down in the single chair and eased it gracefully under the table, careful not to wrinkle his uniform.
“Green, are you there?” he asked at precisely eleven A.M. Bangkok time.
“Yes, sir,” the voice answered in Russian.
“White?”
“Here, sir.”
“Red?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Very good. Then let us begin. My report, comrades, is simple. Everything is proceeding on schedule, as planned.”
“What of the American response to our second message sent through Turkey?” asked White.
“Befuddlement and fear. Did you expect any less?”
“I expected considerably more,” White said. “I feel we are waiting too long to use the ray to its full capabilities.”
“The reasons for that strategy have already been discussed. Let us not waste time reiterating.”
“You had planned to provide us with the details of the final stage today,” Red reminded him.
“I’m afraid that must be put off for a brief time.”
“So this continues to be a question of trust,” noted Green. “You ask us to trust you, yet you do not return the favor.”