Ted Bell - Tsar

The president took a deep breath and sat back in his chair, looking at the chief of British intelligence. “Sir David, I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back on the phone with the Kansas governor. Get those poor people out there in Salina to safety. I’ll speak to you soon. Safe journey back to London.”

“Good-bye, Mr. President. Thanks for your time. And good luck to you. It looks as if we may stand together yet again.”

“It does, sir, it certainly does.”

The president was distracted, already on to his next call, his next crisis, but he looked Trulove in the eye and spoke from his gut.

“We’re it, you know, Sir David. Our two countries. The last barricade. We’re all that’s left. God help us.”

Hawke pressed his forehead against the icy window of his small train compartment. He cradled a mug of lukewarm tea in both hands, grateful for the small amount of heat it offered. The train was slowing, wheels screeching, the air beyond the frosted glass smoking with snow, clouds of frothy white whirling about outside, obscuring everything. From somewhere ahead, the plaintive cry of the train’s whistle, a hollow call that could have sprung from the bottom of his heart.

Were they finally arriving?

He was on the last leg of his journey to Anastasia. He’d been at his window for hours, staring out at the frozen tundra, mesmerized by the view and thoughts of the new woman in his life. Hours had passed since he’d awoken from a sleep as deep and dark as the grave itself. He’d climbed down from his warm bunk and sprung to the window, his heart hammering. Was it love he was feeling, or was it merely the thrill of the game? Perhaps both? He knew this grip of conflicting emotions was powerful enough to paralyze him if he weren’t careful.

So he sat by his window and forced himself to look at things he could actually see.

He saw Russia. He saw its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, all bleached white by the moon and bright stars. He sat for hours on end and watched as Russia flew past, wrapped in glittering clouds of snow and ice.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours since he’d received his orders and begun his onward journey. He’d said good-bye to Diana and Ambrose at the Bermuda airport and climbed aboard an RAF transport. He’d slept in the rear, freezing, on top of the mailbags, all the way to RAF Sedgwick, then caught a commercial flight into Russia, landing at St. Petersburg. He presented himself at immigration as Mr. A. Hawke, senior partner, Blue Water Logistics, Bermuda. He had a Bermuda passport that, even to his jaded eye, was a work of art. A four-color brochure inside his briefcase described the worldwide shipping capabilities of his new company. Just in case anyone was interested.

Since boarding the train at St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky Vokzal station, he’d had nothing to eat but Ukrainian sausage, which resembled a kilo of raw bacon coated in herbs, and some smoked cheese, which he found he simply couldn’t stomach. The kind of meal that you only want to see once but worry might resurface at any moment.

The Russian beer, however, was delicious. At the last big station, all of the passengers had jumped from the train and run for the buffet. He’d followed and had purchased a loaf of black bread and a bottle of Imperia vodka, primarily for warmth, he told himself. It was long gone.

Alone inside his compartment, despite its faint stench from the lavatories, not quite neutralized by the eau de cologne of some recently disembarked passenger and the smell of some fried chicken, pieces of which he’d finally found stuffed under the seat cushions, wrapped in dirty grease-stained paper, he was quite content.

He’d bought a ticket for a kupe class compartment. This entitled him to a set of bunks, a small table, storage space, and, most important, a lockable door. By Russian standards, this was relatively cushy train travel. The next class down was a bed in an open train carriage with about forty other passengers, mostly Russian or Mongolian traders with stacks of bags of their stock in trade. Not much sleeping went on back there, rather a lot of beer drinking and fighting over the use of the toilet. The lavatory attendant, a grumpy elderly babushka, kept the one clean toilet on the carriage locked for her personal use.

Hawke knew he was back in Russia.

He glanced at the green glow of his wristwatch. It was after two o’clock in the morning, but the night was lit up like day. The citizens of St. Petersburg called their midsummer evenings the White Nights.

That beautiful town, the northernmost city of any size on earth, is so far north that the sun never really quite dips below the horizon during midsummer. This, of course, was December, but still, it was the whitest night Alex Hawke had ever seen. He could easily be reading by his window, and beyond it, a full moon on snow, not the sun, created the white night flying by his window.

He found himself bewitched by the luminous, enchanting landscape. As time passed, the succession of huge views from his window aroused in him such a feeling of spaciousness that it made him think and dream of the future. One that might well include the beautiful Russian woman whose face he so longed to see.

But, he reminded himself again, he was in Russia on a mission. It was no time for lovesick dreaming. It was time to reimmerse himself in the hard reality of Russia and all that menacing old word Russia once more implied.

It was time, he knew, to rearm, to steel himself for whatever lay ahead. What the British secret services had long called the Great Game with the Russians was afoot once more, and he was headed deep into the thick of it. Harry Brock was already waiting for him in Moscow, meeting with Red Banner’s newly recruited case officers and speaking with potential targets Stefan had indentified within the KGB. Spies with a price were not hard to come by in the new Russia.

In Bermuda, Ambrose Congreve, much improved every day, was happily ensconced in Hawke’s office at Blue Water. Appointing the former chief inspector of Scotland Yard temporary chief of station for the fledgling MI-6 division had been C’s idea, and Hawke thought it an inspired one. Especially when he learned that Ambrose was always summoning Pippa Guinness to his office, asking her to have this or that typed, or, better yet, please bring him a fresh pot of tea, no lemon, thank you. He was still in a wheelchair, but had said his leg seemed to be healing nicely.

As the endless miles rolled by, Hawke remained at his window, trying to summon his old memories of Russia. His mind found an ugly landscape of crumbling factories and idle collective farms, back streets of towns crowded with prostitutes, beggars, hawkers, hustlers, and peasants, all humming with activity, a scant few worthless things for sale in clogged lanes of shops with mostly barren shelves, selling matches and salt, sweatshops making T-shirts and plastic shoes.

But for the occasional intrusion of police, life went on. Politics was merely a nuisance you tolerated, with mostly bemused indifference. And what looked at a distance like total anarchy and chaos? Close up, it was meticulous order.

He wondered how much country life had changed in the years since the collapse of the old Soviet ways. Out here, probably not at all. The New Russia you read about existed only in places like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. The New Russia was all about money and power, and there was precious little of either to be found out here, where field was followed by field only to be swallowed up by another black forest.

He could make out an occasional farm building, buried under a mantle of snow. Or now and then, at a desolate country crossing, he’d catch a glimpse of snowy lane, winding back up a hill, disappearing amid a copse of frosted trees. It wasn’t until you got beyond the great cities of Russia, he now realized, that you could sense the vastness of this ancient land. Its true size, its scope, its immensity, were literally unimaginable.