Erin? Where was Erin? Where was…
MacPherson knew he should head back to the Situation Room.
Ilyushkin’s speech was set to begin in two minutes.
For Muscovites, it would air in prime time—9:00 p.m., Monday night, Moscow time—1:00 p.m. in Washington. But MacPherson knew it was not just 140 million Russians who were desperate to know about Sergei Ilyushkin and the regime that now controlled them. An anxious world waited as well.
With an enormous nuclear arsenal, the Russian Bear — however wounded, however weakened since her prime during the Cold War — was still a force with which to be reckoned. She could annihilate tens of millions of souls in the blink of an eye.
Was that Ilyushkin’s plan? MacPherson wondered. How closely did he intend to follow his mentor’s playbook? How long did they have?
Bennett was startled by someone barging through the door.
He had not seen or heard another human being since… since when? His mind was blank. The last thing he could remember was Mohammed Jibril executing the duly elected president of Russia, his foreign minister, and his chief of staff. How long ago had that been?
An orderly entered with a television on a cart, plugged it in, adjusted the picture, and then left as abruptly as he’d entered.
Bennett’s mind reeled. He knew he must be a prisoner of the Sergei Ilyushkin regime. His life span had to be measured in days, if not hours. He couldn’t remember eating. He couldn’t remember talking. He could barely remember human contact of any kind.
And now they wanted him to watch television?
Bob Corsetti entered the Oval Office alone.
The president waved him in and glanced at the grandfather clock near the door. It was time to join the rest of the NSC in the Situation Room. But something was wrong. He could read it in Corsetti’s strained expression.
“Something on your mind, Bob?” asked MacPherson.
“Mr. President, the others are worried,” Corsetti began.
“They should be,” MacPherson agreed.
“No, not just about Ilyushkin. They’re worried about you.”
MacPherson looked in his friend’s eyes. They had known each other a long time. They had been through many battles together. Corsetti’s counsel had won MacPherson two terms as governor of Colorado and two terms as president of the United States. So though MacPherson hated “constructive criticism” as much as any politician, he was, at least, willing to listen to a man with a track record of success.
“You guys afraid I’m going to take the country into a war we can’t afford?”
“No, Mr. President,” Corsetti said quietly, “into a war we can’t win.”
A test pattern appeared.
The signal was immediately picked up and simulcast by every broadcast and cable-news network in the U.S., as well as in most countries around the world. Then a digital clock appeared in the lower-left-hand corner of the screen, counting down from thirty seconds.
A hush settled over the Situation Room. Not since the Cuban missile crisis had the country been so close to war with Moscow.
Three, two, one…
The clock struck zero, and the picture faded in from black. On the screen was the new czar of Russia. But it was not — as expected — the face of Sergei Ilyushkin that a waiting world saw. It was, instead, the face of Yuri Gogolov.
19
“Esteemed citizens of Russia and dear friends…”
Gogolov’s eyes burned into the camera.
“… today begins the resurrection of Mother Russia.”
Eliezer Mordechai watched the speech on his computer.
He had no need of anyone translating the speech. He had been born in Siberia. He spoke Russian fluently. And the miracle of modern technology allowed him to download the broadcast directly from the Russian satellite feed.
Besides, there was something about being able to hear the cadence and rhythm of Gogolov’s voice without a filter or middleman of any kind that seemed to provide an additional window into the man’s soul.
“The new Russia seeks peace, not war. But she also demands justice, and she will not be deterred. Too long have the Russian people lived on the Titanic. Too long have we known our ship of state was sinking even as we watched our leaders and their cronies emasculate our military and loot our national treasures.
“Once we were the envy of the world, rich in culture, rich in history, the first to put a man into space. The world trembled in our presence. Today we are fast becoming a third-world country. In 1991, the year the Soviet Empire was allowed to fall apart, the average life expectancy for a Russian man was sixty-five years. Today it is fifty-nine — fifteen years below that of American men — and it continues to drop.
“Before 1991, no Russian went hungry. No Russian went without first-rate medical care. No one was abandoned. Everyone was cared for. Yet today, one in five Russians lives below the poverty line, earning an average of two hundred rubles a month — about thirty American dollars — not enough to survive on, much less live with dignity and respect. Why? What happened to us?”
Where was Ilyushkin? Mordechai wondered. Why wasn’t the man who had set this madness in motion seizing the spotlight?
Mordechai’s thoughts immediately flashed back to the files Al-Hassani had given him in Babylon just a few days before. According to documents in those files, Saddam Hussein had secretly paid Ilyushkin tens of millions of dollars to help Iraq circumvent international economic sanctions in what became known as the U.N. oil-for-food scandal. The documents specifically showed that Saddam wanted Ilyushkin to persuade Boris Stuchenko, then president of Lukoil, to buy embargoed Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices.
The plan was simple enough in concept: Stuchenko would resell the Iraqi oil on the global petroleum markets at a markup, thus making a fortune. Saddam would use the illegal proceeds to buy arms to prepare for another showdown with Washington. And Ilyushkin would use his share of the illicit profits to continue building an ultranationalist fifth column inside Russia in the hopes of one day taking over the Kremlin.
The files indicated that the scheme had been in operation since the early 1990s, and for most of the time it had worked like a charm — except for the fact that Saddam’s regime had been toppled, Stuchenko was dead, and Ilyushkin was nowhere to be found.
Had Gogolov been paid off by Saddam as well? No, Saddam’s correspondence with Ilyushkin and Zhirinovsky had never mentioned his name. How then had Gogolov climbed to the top of the greasy pole?
“What went wrong?” Gogolov continued, so calm, so dignified that he seemed more like an American CEO than a homicidal neo-Nazi. “Are we without natural resources? Of course not. We are one of the biggest producers of oil and natural gas in the world. Are we without human resources? On the contrary, Russians are among the most educated and innovative people on the face of the earth. Then what has become of us?
“I will tell you. Russia has been raped — devoured by men driven by greed insatiable and untamed. Take the late Grigoriy Vadim. Did you know our former president had more than $23 billion stashed away in Swiss banks? Did you know that he was wholly bought and paid for by Boris Stuchenko, the Siberian oil baron for whom ‘rampant corruption’ is too mild a descriptor? It is true. But Stuchenko was getting restless. He did not like writing checks in the shadows. He wanted the world to know how big a player he was — head of Russia’s largest oil company and owner of Russia’s most corrupt politician. So Vadim and his forces paid two Chechen terrorists to have Stuchenko killed, and in so doing, they have set into motion a crisis with the United States that threatens to spin out of control.