The revelation carried frightening possibilities.
“Asiyah, what does he really want?”
“My father wants to challenge the United States of America. He dreams of reuniting Russia and Kazakhstan — to take over Russia. With President Alexandrov gone, he feels he will have no rival in the elections after the referendum. And he intends to use the Kremlin collection — and the Amber Room — as the means to become the President of Russia. He feels it can be a political chip, a symbol of reunion guaranteeing him to ascend the throne. He is obsessed with it. And worst of all, he is dead serious about fulfilling his dream.”
Sokolov shook his head in disbelief.
“Does your father think he’s on a divine mission? Did he brand himself as a Special One chosen by fate?”
“You’re almost right, but it’s much worse. He believes he is Tore.”
Sokolov gave her a quizzical look.
“What does it mean?”
“Tore is what the Kazakhs call a Genghisid. A direct descendant of Genghis Khan,” Asiyah explained. “He even resorted to DNA testing to confirm the genealogy.”
“Confirming it as true?”
“Don’t be so surprised. Genghis Khan’s eldest son Jochi had offspring of forty boys, at the very least. And his grandson Kublai Khan, the ruler of China and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty, had twenty-two sons. There are approximately sixteen million Genghisids in the world today, so it’s not uncommon, and many Kazakhs like to think of themselves as Tore. Some of them have valid grounds for that, including my father. But only the spear side qualifies, of course, and it’s one of the reasons my father hates me. He believes it is his destiny to restore the might of the Golden Horde. The true Golden Horde, guided by radical Islamism. He will trump everyone who considered him a pawn in their game — the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians — and command the world’s only superpower. Russia will be the first step, and from then on he will have an arsenal to go further. Including a new-age weapon in his possession. If I’m going to die, Gene, I must die trying to stop him.”
Sokolov let out a breath.
“Frolov may be a motherless bastard, but he’s right,” he said. “We have to go there. Destroying the base, we will destroy Timur Kasymov.”
“To hell with Frolov. We must do it for our own sake.”
Asiyah turned away, lost in thought. As if musing aloud, she spoke in a calm, detached voice.
“He thought he’d done enough to kill me, you know? When I come back I’d love nothing more than to see the look on his face as I crush his dream.”
“You sound certain that he will be there, at Aralsk-7.”
“I am sure he went there straight after Olympia. He thinks no one can find him there. He will feel invincible, but I will prove him wrong. I will kill him.”
PART V
1
Not only did all Russian roads lead to the capital, but every waterway seemed to as well. Heading back to the city along the Moscow Canal, the New Star approached the canal’s starting point, the North River Terminal — an architectural triumph of cascading arcades that culminated in a clock tower.
The North River Terminal served as a gateway to a network of rivers connecting Moscow to five seas — the Baltic, the White, the Black, the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. The entire system of the Moscow Canal, incorporating locks, terminals, hydroelectric power stations, and gigantic water reservoirs was a feat of engineering that stretched for 128 kilometers. And it was a lifeline that Moscow would have died without. By the 1930’s, the Moskva River had dried up into a muddy creek. Knowing that the city was doomed, Stalin had ordered a canal built joining the Moskva and the Volga, bringing the water of the great Russian river to the walls of the Kremlin. It had taken almost five years to complete, using the manpower of 100,000 inmates of the gulags—10,000 of which had died building it, their remains buried in that soil forever.
Victor escorted Eugene from the yacht without so much as letting him say goodbye to Constantine. Again he felt that he was separated from his brother completely. Even if they kept Constantine aboard, there was no guessing where in Russia the New Star herself would vanish to without notice. Only now, worse than before, Constantine too would not have any knowledge of his brother’s fate.
A glossy black Mercedes S 600 was waiting for Sokolov and Asiyah; Victor got behind the wheel. As the car sped through the city, Asiyah said, “Where are you taking us? The Lubyanka?”
Victor did not reply.
Looking outside, Sokolov let his memory absorb the streets and the people who walked them, the buildings and the trees, saying goodbye while he had the chance.
He loved Moscow, and he loved his country. Bitterly, he reflected how much Frolov had misjudged him. Did the FSB Director think that he would only defend Russia through leverage against him? Perhaps it was the only way Frolov operated, the notion of patriotism lost on him in favor of personal power and control, measuring others by the same yardstick. But Sokolov still remembered what service to his country meant, and these were not empty words to him. He had chosen a profession of saving lives, but he had always known that one day, to save lives he would have to go to war. Sokolov admitted he had been preparing himself for something like this, the ultimate test of his worth to his country. His worth after Beslan. As a man holding a military rank, and as a Cossack, he considered fighting for his country to be both duty and honor. The Frolovs of this world would never understand that.
And there was no mistaking that war was the only course of action to stop Kasymov.
The Mercedes made its way east of Moscow to a sleepy suburbia of villages, lakes and residential blocks. In a town named Balashikha, the car turned to a road that cut through fields and a receding forest. The road ended in a thick concrete wall which was topped by a coil of barbed wire. The wall was gray and weathered, bearing no signs or markings denoting the nature of the installation it enclosed. Considered by some to be a military base, it had far too many surveillance cameras peering at the outside world to really be one. Rising beyond the wall, visible through a shield of trees, were the rooftops of several low buildings, a sandy-yellow tower over a dozen stories high, and, incredibly, the dome of a small church.
The gate opened and the Mercedes drove inside, without any security checks. The road continued past the church to a multi-level garage, four hundred meters away. Killing the engine, Victor got out the car and his passengers followed him to the sand-colored headquarters. It was an imposing structure that looked like two different chunky high-rises wedged right through each other down the middle and stuck at right angles. Other buildings, three or four stories high and shaped like blocks of concrete, were interconnected around the towering axis, forming tiers and appendixes that sprawled a hundred meters wide. Taking up the space between the headquarters and the garage was an unpaved running track and an obstacle course two hundred meters long.
“What is this place?” Asiyah asked.
“The home of the Alpha Group,” Sokolov said.
“This place is called the FSB Special Purpose Center,” Victor said drily.
In 1974, KGB Chairman Andropov authorized the creation of a counter-terrorist force, which was assigned to the Seventh Directorate (Surveillance) and called the A Group. The first live combat mission carried out by the highly secret unit came five years later in Afghanistan, an operation to storm the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and kill President Hafizullah Amin. Following that success, the A Group — or Alpha, as the media later named it — went on to specialize in hostage rescue and fighting terrorism primarily within Soviet borders. To conduct black ops in foreign countries, the KGB set up a different unit in 1981, known as Vympel. The two groups had been classified even inside the KGB, so for years neither Alpha nor Vympel had known anything of each other’s existence. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB’s special forces had been incorporated into the FSB, becoming Directorate A and Directorate V. And in 1998, they had been united by FSB Director Putin to function within the Special Purpose Center.