Warren Murphy: The Eleventh Hour

Remo wondered what Sister Mary Margaret would have said if she could see him now.

Reinforcements would be arriving soon, Remo knew. He didn't plan to stick around and tangle with them. He tugged on the parachute shroud lines, spilling air, and tried to land inside the Kremlin Wall fronting Red Square. He didn't make it.

Instead, Remo landed atop a long black Zil limousine that had stopped at Spassky Gate, waiting for the red light to turn green, signifying that the car was cleared to enter the Kremlin. The light turned green just as Remo's feet hit the Zil's roof with a dull thump. Remo cut himself free of the parachute with short slashes of his Sinanju-hardened fingers and jumped from the car just as the huge parachute spilled over the limousine, covering it like a black shroud.

The chauffeur emerged from behind the wheel shouting and swearing. He got tangled up in the silk chute for his trouble. Militiamen and a few plainclothes KGB agents descended on the enshrouded Zil like angry hornets. They pulled and tore at the billowing fabric, uncovering the car. They almost shot the chauffeur before the owner of the Zil, the Indian ambassador to Russia, stepped out, demanding to know what the hell was going on. He was ignored while the KGB searched the car thoroughly.

The senior KGB officer couldn't understand it. Who would parachute into Red Square? And for what diabolical reason? More important, who was this incredible hooligan? No one knew. He should have been under the parachute. But he was not. Was he perhaps hiding under the Zil? They looked. He was not hiding under the Zil.

Then the KGB men and the militsiya noticed the still-open Spassky Gate and they knew they were all in very serious trouble.

Marshal Josef Steranko had the cushiest duty in all of the Red Army. He was marshall in charge of the defense of Moscow. It was a traditional post, very important in times of war, but since Moscow had not been under military attack since World War II, it was now largely ceremonial. A reward for a grizzled old veteran of the Great Patriotic War.

So it came as something of a shock when, watching television in his apartment in the luxury tower of Moscow's Rossiya Hotel, Marshal Josef Steranko received the first reports of a commando raid on the Russian capital city.

"Are you drunk?" demanded Steranko of the KGB chief, who had called him because he knew nowhere else to turn. For some strange reason, the General Secretary was ignoring all incoming calls. There were rumors of his assassination.

"No, Comrade Marshal," the KGB chief said. "It is true. They landed in Red Square itself."

"Hold the line," said Steranko. His apartment overlooked Red Square. He went to a window and looked down. He saw scores of militsiya running to and fro like ants. Chalk outlines where the dead had fallen showed clearly against darker stains. The Kremlin was ablaze with searchlights and armed soldiers crouched along the top of its red brick walls as if expecting a siege.

"My God," said Steranko huskily. It looked like Leningrad just before it fell. He hurried back to the phone, cursing.

"I want details," Steranko barked into the mouthpiece. "Quickly!"

"Yes, Comrade Marshal," the KGB chief stuttered, and then launched into a frightening litany of atrocities the American Rangers had perpetrated on beautiful Moscow. They had parachuted in, bold as cossacks. From Red Square, the Rangers had melted into the night. Unseen, they had removed Lenin's body from his glass coffin and placed him in a window of the great GUM department store, dressed in female clothes. A detachment of the Americans, perhaps thirty in number, had stacked automobiles one atop the other all along Kalinin Prospekt and then proceeded up the Garden Ring to liberate the animals from Moscow Zoo, stopping to pilfer the American flag from in front of the United States embassy. Everywhere one went, windows had been cut free from sashes as if with mechanical glass cutters and crushed into small piles of gritty powder. The prisoners of Lubyanka Prison had been released and were even now roaming the streets shouting "Viva America!" And the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters was now without a head. All over the city, they had spray-painted an untranslatable counterrevolutionary slogan. It was even to be seen, some said, on the Great Kremlin Palace itself.

"This slogan?" demanded Steranko, who knew English. "What is it?"

"One word, comrade: REMO. We think it must be an anagram, possibly meaning 'Ruin Everything in Moscow Overnight.'"

Marshal Josef Steranko could not believe his ears. None of it made sense.

"These are children's pranks," he said. "Tell me of the battles. How many dead on each side?"

"Seven died in the first assault on Red Square. All ours. We have no reports of casualties on either side beyond this."

"No reports!" yelled Steranko. "Moscow is being desecrated and no one fights back. Is that what you are telling me?"

"The Rangers, they are like phantoms," insisted the KGB chief. "They strike and move on. Every time we send a security detachment to the scene of the atrocity, they are gone."

"Confirmed enemy troop sightings," Steranko barked.

"We estimate anywhere from thirty to-"

"I do not want estimates! Confirmed sightings only!"

"Comrade Marshal we have a confirmed sighting of but a single commando. It was he who landed in Red Square and murdered seven brave militsiya."

"One man accounted for seven?" said Steranko, aghast. "With what weapon did he accomplish this miracle?"

The KGB chief hesitated. "Ah, this report must be in error."

"Read it!"

"He was unarmed, by all accounts."

"Then how did the seven die?"

"We do not know. At first, they appeared to be shot, but examinations of the bodies showed only deformed American coins in their wounds."

Josef Steranko's mouth hung open. Was he dreaming? Was this a nightmare from which he would awaken? He hung up on the KGB chief's frightened plea for instructions.

Stenanko walked slowly to his window overlooking Red Square. He could hear the sirens in the night, racing blindly from one scene to another, always too late because they were searching for concentrations of troops. Josef Steranko knew there were no concentrations of troops. The Americans would not have dared land troops on Soviet soil without first immobilizing Soviet missile defenses, and this they had not done. Yet something was roaming the streets of Moscow making a juvenile show of force. Something powerful enough to lift automobiles and crush plate glass into powder. Something that could hurl coins with force enough to massacre armed KGB agents as if they were defenseless children recruited from the Young Pioneers.

Something ... or someone.

But even as the thought ghosted through old Marshal Steranko's mind, he shook his head angrily. It was preposterous. Such a weapon could not exist. And if it did exist, the Americans would not send it to Moscow to stir up such infantile troubles when they had powerful ballistic missiles to throw in a first strike.

Then Marshal Josef Steranko saw the secret weapon with his very own eyes.

It was a man. All in black. Unarmed, except for what appeared to be a long pole. He was inside the very walls of the Kremlin itself, climbing the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, by law the tallest structure permitted in Moscow. The man climbed effortlessly, like a monkey, until he reached the large onionshaped dome with its crucifix, retained for historical reasons.

At the top of the dome, the man in black plunged the pole into the ornate bulb and shook it once. An American flag unfurled proudly, defiantly. The flag, Steranko realized instantly, that had been liberated from the American embassy.

Josef Steranko stood watching the man for a full five minutes.