Ian Kharitonov
The Russian Renaissance
PROLOGUE
1941
Death was the only destination in the train’s five-year-long schedule.
Even its name sounded like a shrill omen. The Felix Dzerzhinsky, a 137-tonne locomotive, was a child of its era — an unstoppable mass of raw power fleshed in metal.
During 1936, its first year of operation, the Felix Dzerzhinsky coursed between Russia’s faceless stations and towns, hauling cattle. The animals had filled the tidy new freight cars with the lingering smell of their sweat and waste, parasites infesting the cracks between the hoof-dented boards, the feeling of imminent slaughter staying with the train forever.
Soon enough, the cattle was replaced by people. Men and women, old and young, most sick, some bleeding, all filled the freight cars heading to the gulags, towards a fate far more dreadful than that of the animals. The luckiest died on the way.
Now, as the war broke out, the Felix Dzerzhinsky carried a special cargo to the safety of Central Asia: hundreds of wooden crates stacked from the secret vaults of Leningrad and Moscow. Special passengers in the form of a six-man Red Army escort occupied the newly-fitted first class carriage.
The single beam of light sheared the night as the Felix Dzerzhinsky roared across the vast Kazakh steppe. The train pushed its boilers to the limits, charging to the invisible finish line. Yet its run was cursed by the presence of the treasured cargo.
Death still waited at the other end.
Inside the confines of the single passenger car, the gunshots boomed above the monotonous throbbing. The Red Army soldiers were too slow to react. They had not expected an attack from within. Not from their commander, Comrade Yehlakov of the NKGB.
At close range, Yehlakov blasted the heads of four soldiers keeping watch, each barely eighteen. While the other two fumbled for their bolt-action rifles, shocked awake from sleep, confused, Yehlakov finished them off.
The new car was now also smeared with death.
Yehlakov replaced the empty clip of his TT semiautomatic, and entered the driver’s cabin, gunning down the crew. The driver clutched his throat, trying to clog the wide open hole, and the torrent of blood gushing from it mingled with the soot on his hands. He stumbled, gurgling, looking at his black blood. A second gunshot destroyed his face, and he crashed over the corpse of his fireman.
Stepping over thier bodies, Yehlakov pulled the brake handle. The brakes locked onto the wheels and the enormous friction showered sparks in every direction. A piercing screech of protesting metal reverberated around the compartment. The train shook as it tried to restrain its own momentum. Gradually, the Felix Dzerzhinsky came to a stop.
Yehlakov climbed down from the cabin and looked around. The gloom was impenetrable. The train’s lamp would serve as a position marker.
Leningrad, the origin of the Felix Dzerzhinsky, was a city commanded by evacuation mayhem. Fuel, provisions, armaments and entire factories were being relocated from the advancing Germans, and many consignments lost in the process. The disappearance of the train, if it were ever noticed, would be written off to a Luftwaffe raid in Moscow by Army staffers fearful of repercussions. Yehlakov didn’t care much. There was little chance of Moscow surviving anyway.
A column of trucks appeared in the distance, their flickering lights drawing closer. The huge ZIS-5 vehicles stopped in front of Yehlakov, washing him in the beams of their headlights. In the blinding light he couldn’t make out the faces of the men approaching him.
“Right on time,” Yehlakov said, squinting.
“Too bad for you,” the man from the lead truck replied. Three figures leveled their machine guns at Yehlakov — the recognizable silhouettes of American Thompsons.
Yehlakov’s cry was cut short by a hail of .45-calibre bullets that shredded his body.
“All right men,” an order sounded. “Move, move, move!”
The tiny figures of two dozen soldiers scurried to the Felix Dzerzhinsky like scavengers ravaging a beached whale.
Reloading all the crates into the trucks proved to be a massive job, but the attackers carried it out with efficiency. Trouble arose only once. A crate crashed, bursting open, and antique icons poured from it onto the dusty ground. Gleaming through the darkness in their radiant halos were the faces of saints. The holy men gazed at killers with divine serenity, their eyes full of suffering and forgiveness.
After it was all over, raging flames engulfed the empty cars, and the attackers vanished back into the night.
The dead metal beast had completed its final, blood-drenched journey.
20??
Over its dynamic 200-year history, the town had gone through several incarnations, renamed and rebuilt with each change of ownership. Originally known as Akmolinsk, it had been a fortress established by Siberian Cossack troops who travelled south, at a time when the Russian Empire explored its own newly-acquired lands populated by nomadic Kazakh tribes. Later it became Tselinograd, a Soviet springboard to deluded ambitions in agriculture. And heading into the twenty-first century it assumed the title of Astana, the capital of independent Kazakhstan.
The word Astana meant precisely that — capital city.
James Quinn, the U.S. Ambassador to Kazakhstan, knew that this town still had a long way to go before it could be called a major city. Yet even in his tenure he had witnessed a staggering transformation that Astana was experiencing. Even though the place had a reputation of a huge construction site, Ambassador Quinn had never seen such rapid development as Astana was undergoing now. The man partly responsible for the new shape of Astana was Clayton Richter — an American businessman he was greeting in the VIP hall of Astana International Airport.
Richter had changed little over the years they had known each other. At fifty he was full of vigor and confidence, his gait lithe. He was lanky, a few inches taller than Quinn and a lot fitter, dressed in a silk shirt and designer jeans. Apart from a jacket draped over his arm, Richter carried nothing — in a few hours his private jet would be flying him back to the States.
Behind the casual appearance, traveling unaccompanied by a phalanx of aides and bodyguards, was a man wielding immense power. Clayton Richter was on first name basis with the President of the United States.
The privilege came with the position of CEO at Seton Industries. SI was a corporate juggernaut that exemplified globalization. From a core interest in energy infrastructure, Seton’s activities had expanded to transportation and logistics, construction and investment, finance and oil trade. Yet with such influence, SI avoided publicity, dealing in the realm of top-level government contracts. Wherever budgets were allocated, tenders announced, procurement initiated, Clayton Richter was there. Adding to the extensive international portfolio, SI had also scored a significant domestic coup. Through a host of affiliates and subsidiaries, Seton Industries ranked as the seventh largest contractor of the U.S. Armed Forces. For some, business was war, but for Clayton Richter war had become business.
Richter liked to call SI a small company with large resources — and the description was not far off the mark. The list of entities surrounding SI was ever-growing. Lawyers, bankers, manufacturers and intermediaries all serviced Seton’s needs without being fully cognizant of how far its tentacles reached. But stripped of the outer units it commanded, the company remained a compact nexus that was difficult to trace, let alone penetrate. Richter’s ingenuity created a mega-corporation that never caught attention. He appreciated the discretion as it gave him more leeway to choose his methods. The ones he often utilized were questionable at best, and mostly corrupt — from aggressive lobbying in Congress to bribery in Third World countries.