Ted Bell: Phantom

He supposed his friend Ambrose Congreve was right when he’d accused Hawke of having a “violent addiction to being left undisturbed.” If so, so be it.

The British Intelligence officer’s normally strong blue eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, his cheeks charred with black stubble, the thickly bunched muscles of his shoulders and upper arms stiff, aching from long confinement in his tiny quarters. He stretched his long legs out before him as best he could. He wasn’t one to complain, but the plain fact was he was bloody miserable. He lit a cigarette and turned his face toward the filthy cracked window.

Behind him, a pair of polished steel rails stretched west across a frozen expanse of Russian tundra. The tracks angled upward and traversed the Ural Mountains and led to the main rail station at the ancient city of St. Petersburg, where Hawke had begun his journey. He had made this long railway trek from the city once before. Memorable. And everything looked just as he’d remembered it: it had not changed for the better.

The Rodina.

The Motherland.

The bareness of the outline of the countryside like a Japanese watercolor, the mountain ranges, snowcapped, and the stark trees etched black against the sky, scant evidence of humanity, much less civilization. Just… white… nothingness.

Hawke sat back, closed his eyes, and slowed his breathing. He was, understandably, a bit on edge. Not the dull edge of nagging anxiety, but the razor-sharp knife edge of fear. Alex Hawke had a very reasonable expectation of being shot dead in a few short hours. He’d visualized it many times: The train screeches to a halt at the tiny station. He peers out the window. He steps down onto the icy platform. The grey men are there, waiting. The Dark Men. Guns drawn, huddled just beyond the pool of lamplight. The Englishman had murdered their Tsar. Now it was his turn to die in a volley of gunfire.

Or not.

This nameless dread of the unknowable was directly contrary to Alex Hawke’s staunch militaristic nature. He possessed a rigid backbone of considerable renown, both as a combat-hardened flyboy in the Royal Navy and now in the SIS, or Secret Service. He’d always had an appetite for war when it was necessary. One of his World War II great heroes, the outspoken American U.S. Army general George S. Patton, had said all there was to be said on the subject of the proper state of a man’s mind heading into battle. “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”

Hawke lit another cigarette, summoning the belligerent ghost of Patton and his pearl-handled pistols to his side, puffing furiously, working up a head of steam for whatever might lie ahead. He could scarcely believe the treacherous ease and facility with which he had set himself up: perfectly framed for calamity, or devastating heartbreak. Or, if he got very, very lucky, indescribable bliss.

Because there was, of course, an alternative scenario. A possibility, admittedly an extraordinarily slim possibility, existed that Hawke might soon be reunited with the one woman he loved. A reunion he would have deemed an absolute impossibility just a short time ago. Was she really alive? He’d witnessed her death with his own eyes, had he not? Far more likely, he’d fallen prey to a cunning lie. It was, after all, the way his enemies traditionally worked. Bait. Switch. And kill.

Yes. A well-baited trap laid for him by the Kremlin’s spymasters at the KGB. He was sure of only one thing: a fool’s death sentence should it prove he’d been stupid enough to take the Russians’ bait. Naive enough to let his much-vaunted common sense take a backseat to his grievously broken heart. He allowed himself a thin smile. Hell, it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. And he was still kicking.

He inhaled deeply, the sharpness of cheap Russian tobacco taking its bite, telling himself this whole thing was just another hostage rescue, for God’s sake. Hardly out of the ordinary for one of MI6’s most reliable warriors. God knows, he had countless search-and-rescue operations successfully under his belt. Including a dicey affair involving Her Majesty the Queen the year prior. He had a few scars, like anyone in his line of work. More than a few. But, by God, he thought, taking another drag, he wasn’t dead yet. Still. Look at his hands shaking. Like an old woman who’s just seen a fleeting shadow on her bedroom wall.

This time the rescue attempt was intensely personal. It had been three long years ago that he had flung himself into love like a suicide to the pavement.

Her name was Anastasia. Closing his eyes, he could see her even now, see his beloved Asia standing on the platform of the tiny Russian rail station at Tvas, waiting for him, her cheeks aglow in the frosted air, golden ringlets peeking from beneath the white mink cowl that framed her lovely face, her wide-set green eyes gleaming in anticipation of his appearance. Dear God! How desperately he’d longed for that moment when he’d enfold her within the protection of his arms and never let go.

But he had let her go, hadn’t he?

No, not let her go.

Under extenuating circumstances, granted, but the cold, hard fact remained:

He had murdered his own true love in cold blood.

Disconsolate, lost, Hawke pulled a torn and well-worn photograph from inside his leather jacket. A fading black-and-white snapshot of Anastasia Korsakova, radiantly alive, on the snowy steps of the Bolshoi ballet theatre. Asia stared back at him, her profound beauty still a knife deep to the heart after these years. How this pain created a longing for his fleeting youth, that halcyon time before he had ever prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Never again, he told himself constantly. Alex Hawke had learned a hard lesson the hard way:

A man must never place himself in a position to lose. He must search out and find only those things he cannot lose. He must develop a heart as hard as flint.

And, after all his bloody pain and suffering, now this truly bizarre twist of fate. His beloved Anastasia, if you believed the Kremlin rumors anyway, was still alive. After narrowly escaping a death sentence for treasonous acts against her father, the late Tsar, she was rumored to have spent two years or more imprisoned in Moscow’s notoriously cruel Lubyanka Prison. Now, so he’d heard from his Russian friend the great Stefan Halter, she was held prisoner at a high-security Siberian KGB facility, Jasna Polana, the former winter palace of her father. British spooks even had a nickname for it, stolen from a spy tale by the American author Nelson DeMille: the Charm School.

But.

“It could all be a ruse.” He still heard Stefan Halter’s sonorous voice echo in his mind. “After all, you and I are the only two eyewitnesses to General Kuragin’s treason against the late Tsar. If Kuragin is ever to feel completely secure within the walls of the Kremlin, his only option is to eliminate us. To lure you back to Russia in search of Anastasia by encouraging false hopes would be a standard KGB ruse. As you well know, my dear friend.”

C, his superior at Six, had been told only that Hawke was “headed up into the Swiss Alps for a bit of thinking and hiking, perhaps an assault on the Eiger.” Had Alex told his colleagues in the SIS the truth, Sir David Trulove would never have allowed this bizarre misadventure. Hawke was entirely too valuable, far too weighty a capital investment, to have himself shot out of a cannon on some wild-goose chase, indeed, chasing a woman who, by all accounts, was in all likelihood long dead.

The beckoning trap, in fairness, had been exquisitely set. Not only had Anastasia survived, he had been told, but she’d borne him a son in prison. A son! So here he was, the forlorn fool driven onward by hope alone. But. If, by some miracle, Anastasia and his son truly were alive, he was determined to find some way, any way, to smuggle them out of Russia to safety. Precisely how he would achieve this, he had no bloody idea. All he knew was that he was bound and determined to rescue his little family in the unlikely event that they were still alive. Or simply die trying.