“Yes.” Hollis added, “They are going to question you, so the less you know, the better.”
“Question me? Interrogate me?”
“Yes.” He could feel her hand tightening over his. He said, “Just prepare yourself for some unpleasantness. Be brave.”
She drew a deep breath and nodded.
Marchenko turned in his seat and smiled at them. “Not Sheremetyevo. But you knew that.”
“Yeb vas,” Hollis said.
“Yeb vas,” Lisa agreed.
“Fuck you,” Marchenko replied.
Vadim poked his head between the seats, looked at Hollis and Lisa, and made a cutting motion across his throat.
The helicopter continued its sloping descent toward the landing area, which Hollis noted was a natural clearing of tall yellow grass in the pine forest. On the south edge of the clearing was a log cabin he’d seen in the satellite photo. A narrow dirt track, barely visible among the pine trees, began at the cabin and ran a hundred yards south to the main camp road.
Most of the mile-square camp was not much more discernible from a few hundred feet, Hollis saw, than it had been from the satellite a few hundred miles up. Yet, because he had seen much of the world from the air, he could sense the general layout. There was a roughly circular gravel road that ran around the inside of the perimeter, probably a service road for the watchtowers. The main camp road was two lanes of winding blacktop that roughly bisected the camp from east to west. This road passed through the main gate and was actually a continuation of the one they had taken up from Borodino Field.
As they descended to about a hundred feet, Hollis saw on the main road a grim-looking concrete building in the center of the camp, probably the headquarters. Not far from that was a long wooden building with a green roof whose purpose he could not guess.
Some distance south of these two buildings was another clearing, but this one was man-made, a perfect rectangle, the size of a soccer field, which it undoubtedly was, and which could double as a parade ground or assembly area, a standard facility for any school or prison camp. In fact, as the helicopter got lower, he could see bleacher stands that would accommodate close to five hundred people.
Between the soccer field and the south perimeter of the camp, he saw the metal roofs of long barracks-like buildings that would be the separate compound within the compound for the KGB Border Guard detachment.
Hollis sketched an aerial map in his mind and committed each detail to memory.
As they descended to about fifty feet, his eye caught something odd, and he looked at an area of the treetops about midway between the dachas and the headquarters. He realized that he was looking at a huge camouflage net covering about an acre, supported by living pine trees whose tops poked through the net. An axiom of both combat flying and spying was that neither aerial photographs nor overflights were a substitute for a man on the ground. He was about to be the man on the ground.
The helicopter settled onto the snow-dusted landing field. The copilot drew his pistol and slid open the door. Marchenko climbed out first, followed by Vadim. The copilot motioned with his gun at Lisa, and she took her bag and icon and jumped down from the helicopter, refusing Marchenko’s hand. The copilot looked at Hollis a moment and asked, “Where did you think you were going to take this helicopter?”
“That’s my business.”
“The American embassy, perhaps?” He glanced at the pilot and said, “Neither of us would have flown you there.”
Hollis got his bag and held it in his cuffed hands. He stood, crouched over in the low cabin. “Then I would have killed you both and flown it myself.”
The copilot backed away from Hollis. “You’re a real murderer.”
“No, I’m an American Air Force officer who is being kidnapped.”
The copilot’s eyes widened in surprise. “Yes?”
Marchenko called out, “Come along!”
“Call my embassy and tell them Colonel Hollis is here. I’ll see you get fifty thousand rubles for you and your friend here.”
Again, the copilot glanced over his shoulder. “Get moving.”
Hollis edged toward the open door.
The copilot said softly, “You shouldn’t have broken that man’s wrist. Do you know who those two are?”
“Intourist guides. Remember my offer.” Hollis jumped down from the helicopter to where Marchenko stood with Lisa and Vadim near a Zil-6, a Red Army vehicle somewhat like an American jeep but larger. Hollis heard the helicopter lift off and felt the rush of wind pushing him forward.
Marchenko opened the rear door of the Zil and said, “Colonel Hollis, then Vadim, then Miss Rhodes.”
Hollis pushed his cuffed wrists under Marchenko’s nose, “Unlock these.”
Marchenko shook his head. “Get in, please.”
Hollis said to Lisa, “Get in first.”
She got in, and as Vadim tried to follow, Hollis shouldered him aside and got in the middle beside Lisa. Vadim sat beside Hollis and said in Russian, “I’m going to beat your fucking face to a pulp.”
“With which hand?”
“You shit—”
“Please!” Marchenko shouted. “Enough!” He got into the front passenger seat and said to the driver, “Headquarters.”
The Zil moved across the grass field toward the log cabin about a hundred yards off. Hollis looked at the cabin as they drove by and guessed it was probably once a woodsman’s izba, a relic from a time when such a thing as a lone woodsman existed in this communal nation. But now it sprouted two antennas and was probably the radio shack for the helipad.
The Zil entered the narrow track that cut through the dark pine forest. Lisa took Hollis’ hand and said into his ear, “I’m going to be brave.”
“You are brave.”
The Zil came to the end of the track and turned left onto the main blacktop road. Hollis noticed that the pine trees on either side of the road were huge, rising forty to fifty feet into the air, and the spreading bough canopy was so heavy that little light reached the ground. Now and then he saw log-paved lanes, what the military called corduroy roads, leading off the main road. Down some of these lanes he saw houses that he hadn’t seen from the air. He was surprised but not shocked to catch sight of an American ranch house, then a white clapboard bungalow. They were most probably residences, he thought, for the Charm School students and their American instructors, set in the Russian bor to enhance the illusions that made this place so unique.
Lisa spotted one and said to him, “Look!”
“I see them.”
“This is bizarre. What is—?”
“No questions.”
She nodded. “All right.”
Marchenko, too, was staring out the window. He said to Hollis, “This is very odd indeed. Do you know what this place is?”
Hollis had assumed that Marchenko didn’t know much beyond his kidnapping assignment. Hollis replied, “It’s a secret CIA base camp. You’re under arrest, Marchenko.”
Marchenko turned around in his seat and looked at Hollis in a way that led Hollis to think the man almost believed him. What a country. Marchenko finally smiled. “You joke. Tell me, what kind of structures are those in the woods?”
“They’re called houses.”
“Yes? I saw American houses in a movie once. Those are American houses.”
“Very good.”
Marchenko turned back to the front and peered out the windows. “I don’t understand this place.”
Hollis noticed that the light snow was mostly on the pine branches and little of it had reached the moss-covered ground. This was a place, he thought, of perpetual darkness, a place where even at high noon in the summer there would be little light.