Джозеф Файндер - The Moscow Club

“Very good.” The older man walked across the room, inspected the wiring closely, glanced at the connections to the plastic explosive, a grayish brick wrapped in clear plastic, and paid particular attention to the time-release valves attached to the propane tank. At last he looked up. “Everything is perfect,” he said. He looked around the chamber for one last time. “Everything is perfect.”

It was seven-fifteen.

By seven o’clock in the morning, the chairman of the KGB had been rushed, in his Zil limousine, to the Kremlin Clinic on Granovsky Street. He could not move his right side, he complained, and he was attended to immediately by the esteemed neurologist Dr. Konstantin Belov. After a hurried examination. Dr. Belov confirmed that the chairman’s vital signs indicated a stroke, and ordered Pavlichenko transferred to the high-security clinic outside Moscow.

When the ambulance orderlies arrived to take him to Kuntsevo, two pleasant-faced young men who surely had no idea what was about to befall their country, Pavlichenko looked up from his hospital bed and smiled.

He knew that if he remained too long at the Kremlin Clinic he would be vulnerable, a sitting duck. That was why he had come up with this ruse: like a pea in a shell game, he would not remain in one place too long. At Kuntsevo he had arranged to be met by a small convoy of his forces. And in four hours or so, security precautions would be of no concern.

The orderlies lifted him gingerly from the bed and eased him onto the folding gurney they had brought in, apparently awed by the responsibility of wheeling the chairman of the KGB down the clinic’s hallway, into the elevator, and into the ambulance. They seemed nervous and, for people who did this sort of thing all the time, even awkward. Pavlichenko was always amused by the effect his eminence had on ordinary people.

He wondered whether these two men would be among the hundreds of emergency medical workers who would soon be called to Red Square, sirens screaming, to carry the burnt remains of the members of the Politburo. Would anyone survive? He thought it unlikely.

The elevator stopped at the ground floor, and Pavlichenko was wheeled out into the cold, bright morning of Revolution Day.

9:00 a.m.

Miles of red bunting lined the streets, punctuated by giant portraits of Lenin and placards with the defiant, hortatory rhetoric of official Soviet propaganda: DEMOCRACY, RESTRUCTURING, SPEED-UP! and LENIN IS MORE ALIVE THAN ALL THE LIVING! and TOWARD THE RADIANT FUTURE OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY, WIDESPREAD WELL-BEING, AND LASTING PEACE!

Preparations for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution had begun weeks in advance. Posters had gone up in all public buildings, and red flags were everywhere, even on some cars; workers had struggled with pulleys and ropes to raise giant posters pasted onto wooden frames – fifty-foot-long banners of enormous supermen and super-women exhorting Russians to fulfill the decisions of the latest party congress.

By nine o’clock in the morning, an enormous crowd had assembled near the Gorky Park metro station, the last stop on the subway, after which people had to walk toward Red Square. University groups waving red flags filed past athletes in uniforms and others pushing rubber-wheeled floats. A delegation of workers from the Red Proletariat Ball Bearing Factory marched alongside workers from Watch Factory Number 1, carrying good old-fashioned, hard-line banners that read WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE, ALL EFFORTS TO THE BATTLE FOR PEACE, and ONWARD TO THE VICTORY OF COMMUNISM. Outside the perimeter of Red Square were Uzbeks wearing black-and-white skullcaps, gypsy women with cloth sacks on their backs, and little girls with stiff white ribbons in their hair.

A giant map of the world hung on the Kremlin wall above Lenin’s mausoleum. Icons of Marx, Lenin, and Engels had been placed on the side of GUM, the state department store that faced the square. The red brick Victorian structure of the Historical Museum, on another side of the square, was covered with portraits of the Politburo members, and a banner that read HAIL THE LENINIST FOREIGN POLICY OF THE U.S.S.R.!

In the center of all this, of all the commotion and all the triumphal posters, stood the dark-red mausoleum, looking tiny and insignificant, a child’s toy.

Soon, Pavlichenko thought as he lay on the ambulance stretcher, the Politburo members, wearing their red ribbons, would be climbing the mausoleum. In just over two hours, the tomb would be a ball of fire, hurling chunks of porphyry and labradorite, granite and concrete into the dense crowd, killing hundreds of people.

He lay strapped in the stretcher, being hoisted toward the ambulance – play-acting, as he knew he must. He hoped he was convincing.

He remembered the ailing Konstantin Chernenko standing atop the tomb in February of 1984, presiding at Yuri Andropov’s funeral. The day was ice cold, and you could see clouds of frozen breath coming from the leaders’ mouths. Pavlichenko, not yet ascended to the Politburo, watched from the privileged guests’ section as the Spassky Tower bells chimed noon and Chernenko, not terribly bright and emphysemic on top of it all, looked around, uncertain what to do, and then Pavlichenko – and thousands of others – could hear Andrei Gromyko’s voice over the loudspeakers instructing the new leader: “Don’t take off the hat.”

What fools the Russian rulers were!

The orderlies lifted Pavlichenko into the back of the ambulance and locked the gurney and the intravenous stand into place. A minute later, the ambulance was moving, its siren wailing shrilly. The driver and his assistant looked back at him nervously, probably wondering what had happened to the KGB leader. Pavlichenko lay on the stretcher, seemingly napping.

Their destination, Kuntsevo, was fifteen miles outside Moscow, on the Minsk Highway. Once it had been Stalin’s dacha; it was where Stalin had died. But in 1953 it wasn’t a hospital and had no medical equipment whatsoever. The Great Leader had died with virtually no medical technology to sustain his life. They had even put leeches on his temples.

Kuntsevo

For a week or so, he would rule the Soviet Union from his hospital bed, just as Yuri Andropov had done for six months in 1983. For much of 1983, Kuntsevo was the Kremlin. With the rest of the world ignorant of the state of Andropov’s health, he spoke to his fellow Politburo members on the phone, seeing only the KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, using him as a messenger boy to the outside world.

This time, Pavlichenko would have the assistance of forty or so trusted assistants, poised throughout Russia, ready to do his bidding. The Sekretariat was prepared to release immediately the irrefutable evidence that would link the U.S. National Security Council with the attack.

It would all happen in a few hours.

The ambulance screamed down the middle lane of the highway and soon came to a halt.

Had they arrived so soon? The ambulance had made a turn and had stopped.

Pavlichenko strained to see the stone walls topped with barbed wire that surrounded Kuntsevo, but the windows of the ambulance were too high. All he could see were streetlights.

Streetlights.

They weren’t in Kuntsevo at all – there were no streetlights in Kuntsevo.

9:20 a.m.

The black Volga had driven around for almost an hour, searching for a way to penetrate the heavy security that surrounded central Moscow. The headquarters of the GRU, the Soviet military-intelligence branch, was inaccessible. Every ten feet there seemed to be KGB guards; the normally tight Revolution Day security had gotten even tighter, with the presence of the American President and his party.

Only those who were part of official delegations were permitted into the square, whose entry points were overseen by rows of grim-faced KGB guards in gray uniforms with the red letters “BB” on their shoulders. They were called the VV soldiers, the Vnutrenniye Voiska, or internal troops, harvested not from Moscow but from Russian villages, and they were one hundred percent Russians – not a Moslem or Mongol face among them.