Terminal Run

“I was afraid we would run out of children, but yes. The next day the police entered the house and found a terrible murder-suicide. Sometimes these computer types lose it and kill their families and then themselves.” Krivak smirked.

After dinner, prostitutes were brought up. The girl couldn’t have been older than fourteen, perhaps even younger. She drew a bath in the spa and led him to it, pulling him into the water so that his back was to her, and her fingers went to work massaging his back muscles. His eyes closed and he grew drowsy, knowing that the girl would not stop for over an hour. As always, he saw things in the moments between consciousness and sleep. The images usually came swiftly, but tonight they swam by slowly, some blurred and misty, others clearer than life, images from the time his name had been Novskoyy. He saw his childhood in Moscow, the ribbon-covered Red Army marshal’s uniform belonging to his father hanging in their bedroom. He returned to the day he graduated from the Marshal Grechko Higher Naval School of Underwater Navigation. The crisp cold day he’d reported aboard his first submarine, a Victor-class. The day when he’d taken his first submarine command, an Akula-class, under the polar icecap. He saw his admiral’s epaulets pinned onto his uniform as he assumed command of the Russian Republic Northern Fleet. Then the terrible days of the disarming of the Rodina, the nuclear weapons unloaded from his ships and stockpiled in a U.N. depot.

He saw the massive hull of the submarine he’d designed himself, SSN Kaliningrad, the biggest and most formidable undersea combatant on the globe. Then the freezing night when he looked out over the submarines of the fleet departing on a mission he’d conceived to right the wrong of Russia’s disarmament. He smelled the smells of the Kaliningrad as he stepped inside the hull for her voyage to the polar icecap, where the ship would be his command platform for a mission of revenge. With eighty nuclear-tipped SS-N-X-27 cruise missiles detonating two-megaton warheads over eighty U.S. eastern seaboard targets, America’s fangs would be removed, and she and Russia could coexist in peace. Russia would stretch out her hand to the Americans and help them rebuild, and in the aftermath of this short surgical war the two nations might even become friends and allies. It would have reshaped history, and the world would have been a better place.

But the Americans proved themselves to be even more cunning and dangerous than he’d suspected. As he was transmitting his go-code to the ships of the fleet at their hold positions, his beloved Kaliningrad was engaged by an American hunter killer submarine, sent secretly under the icecap to kill him. The American captain had been a skillful assassin, and after the torpedoes detonated, the control room of his beloved Kaliningrad flooded with the icy black water of the Arctic. Novskoyy’s only comfort was that the mutual torpedo exchange had to have been fatal to the Americans as well. His numb body succumbed to shock, and after the lights went out he lost consciousness.

He must have been evacuated in the control compartment escape pod, because when he opened his eyes he was in a frigid Arctic shelter surrounded by shipwrecked Americans. Their commander was a gaunt, black-haired grimacing fiend who had hauled him up by the collar to beat him, but changed his mind and let go. The man’s nametag read pacing. Novskoyy could remember nothing else but the man’s face and name and the hatred he held for him. But it had been too late for revenge. The diesel generator had died and they had all surrendered to the cold, and for a second time the world faded into darkness.

He woke in a hospital and recovered only long enough to be interrogated. He was led from the hospital to the transport plane back to Russia wearing the handcuffs and leg irons of a war criminal. Forty-nine years old and weakened by the cold of the icepack, he would not last long in the harsh Siberian prison’s torture chamber. But there had been no torture. Without a trial he found himself in a large, warm solitary cell looking out over the pine trees of the Siberian woods. There were books. He was allowed to exercise. Thirteen years passed before the door opened to his cell and the strange large man known only as Rafael came to take him away, his ransom paid.