The most secure section of the VEKTOR facility was in the lowest level of the old mine, protected not only by electromagnetic shielding, but by a half mile of rock.
Chief Administrator Gorokhov rode the facility’s main wire-cage lift to that level, accompanied only by the lift operator. He needed the latest inventory figures, but he didn’t need his deputy administrator to know that he did.
The antique lift creaked and rattled. The air, growing warmer as Gorokhov descended, reeked of diesel fumes despite the gigantic air blowers up top. The stench of stale cigarette smoke clinging to the operator’s oil-stained coveralls was even stronger. It was a familiar smell. It made him remember.
* * *
It was raining that April morning when Evgeny Gorokhov hurried across Lubyanka Square, rushing for the entrance to the headquarters of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—the Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union—known, and feared, as the KGB.
Gorokhov, then twenty-five, a serzhant—sergeant—in the Soviet Army, knew very well the history of this building, the notorious prison it housed, the thousands tortured and killed here during Stalin’s reign. He knew what occurred within it now in defense of the Motherland. But perhaps alone among the millions of his comrades, he wasn’t troubled by that knowledge, or by the enigmatic orders he had received earlier this morning to report here, smartly.
The USSR, despite the uncertainty of last October when Krushschev had stepped down, remained secure under the leadership of the new premier, Kosygin. That unwavering strength and security arose from the KGB, so how could young Gorokhov think of criticizing its procedures? He was a loyal servant of the State, so why should he be at all concerned about stepping through the narrow door beneath its ornate crest of hammer and sickle that so many never returned from?
As a child, he had felt the searing pain of his burning flesh when his drunken beast of a father had thrown him into the blazing fireplace before killing Gorokhov’s mother. As a child, he had made his father pay for what he had done. That event had shaped Gorokhov as surely as the Revolution had shaped modern Russia, and all for the good. He had no regrets, no remorse, and no fear.
And that, he learned later, is why he had been summoned this day. After what he had already endured, there was nothing left in this world for him to fear.
The hot and smoky conference room was already dark before its overhead lights were switched off. Heavy curtains had been pulled across narrow windows along one wall, isolating the room from the weak sunlight threatening to break through the clouds outside. When Gorokhov saw the equipment set up at the back of the room, he understood at least part of the immediate reason for his presence. He wore the black shoulder boards of a technician specialist, communications. The equipment was a motion picture film projector, an old model, but one Gorokhov had no doubt he could operate. It would be a simple task, more suited to a lowly ryadovoy—a private—but the thought of questioning his orders never crossed the young serzhant’s mind.
As Gorokhov entered the room, a general he had never met and didn’t recognize gave him a curt nod, then glanced at the projector. Gorokhov immediately made his way to it, quickly taking off his drenched overcoat. At the same time, he noted the other individuals in the room, seated around the large conference table. All were smoking, filling the room with slow eddies of thin blue haze.
Among those present, Gorokhov counted two other army generals and seven civilians, all men. All looked stern and dour, and all but one, the eldest, ignored him. That man watched him closely. He was frail, with thin white hair. His hand, holding a black cigarette, trembled.
Gorokhov looked down at the film canister beside the projector. It was dented, scraped, and the largest of several labels on it carried a swastika and writing in what Gorokhov recognized as German, though he couldn’t read it.
The newest, least-worn label was more easily understood: OSOAVIAKHIM. Like KGB, it was an acronym: Society of Assistance to Defense, Aviation and Chemical Industry. In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, the tireless volunteer workers of Operation OSOAVIAKHIM had rescued Nazi Germany’s most brilliant scientists, engineers, and storerooms full of scientific marvels. To a man, and a few women, they had all been spared capture by the so-called Allies’ Operation PAPERCLIP, saved from performing forced labor in support of capitalist oppression.
Knowing that proud history, Gorokhov had a sudden realization. The film in the canister had to be one of the OSOAVIAKHIM’s heroic trophies. If he was right, would the generals make him leave the room once the film began to play? He looked up, wondering, but only the old man met his gaze. He inhaled deeply from his black cigarette, smiled as if he knew a joke known to no one else, and nodded at Gorokhov to proceed.
Gorokhov reacted promptly. He took out the film spool, 35 mm, threaded it onto the old machine. When all was ready, he waited a moment for the generals to order him from the room. No one did. Instead, one of them switched off the overhead lights.
Gorokhov started the projector.
A solid cone of light formed in the smoke-filled room.
On the screen at the room’s opposite end, the unreadable handwritten scrawl on the film leader flashed by as the projector clicked and whirred. Then a title card. More words in German, AHNENERBE INSTITUT, beneath an elaborate insignia, again with a swastika.
Next, the actual filmed footage began, black and white, badly scratched, but steady, definitely shot on a tripod.
The first harshly lit images were of an old chest.
In close up, a hammer and chisel broke the chest’s badly corroded clasp.
A pair of hands opened the chest.
Then the shadows changed as a light source from above moved to reveal what was inside—but just for an instant because the light quickly moved away.
Gorokhov had glimpsed three objects in that instant, but hadn’t been able to register just what they were. Jewels?
The film jumped, no longer in close-up.
Four men now stood around the open chest. Clearly pleased with themselves, they were speaking animatedly, and silently, to others off-screen.
Gorokhov couldn’t be sure where the images had been filmed. In a cave? But two of the men were wearing German naval uniforms.
On-screen, the junior officer moved to reach into the open chest, but the senior officer waved him away, reaching in himself.
Whatever he took out, he held it for the camera, and in the shadow of his hand the disk-like object appeared to glow. The officer waved to the others off-screen, and six men closed in around the cask—by all appearances men who had done hard work and were pleased their efforts had paid off.
And just as Gorokhov was pondering what the point of this exercise was, and how it could possibly be important to the Motherland, everything happened at once.
A hand—an impossible hand—erupted from the chest of one of the civilians, twisted, and tore the man apart!
No one around the table said a word or reacted in any way, except the old man. He laughed. Softly, almost silently, as if amused.
The camera was off its tripod now, its movements jerky, unfocused. Gorokhov could only imagine the panicked photographer trying to escape the carnage he was filming: human limbs ripped off by invisible forces, trailing streamers of blood in strobing flashes of gunfire.
Then nothing but black.
The flapping of the tail end of the film spun around the take-up reel, and a final blast of pure light shot from the projector for just a moment before Gorokhov switched off the lamp.
The general who had summoned him turned the overhead lights back on.
All others in the room turned to the old man.
A death’s head. Grinning.
The old man took a silver object from his jacket pocket. At first glance, it looked to Gorokhov like a flask, or an ornate cigarette case engraved with yet another swastika. No, not a swastika, Gorokhov realized. The symbol on the object was made from three interlocked triangles.
He had no idea what the symbol meant.
The old man spoke then, in halting, German-accented Russian, explaining what they’d just seen, telling them why the work that his institute, the Ahnenerbe, had begun, and the work that Almaznyy Ogon—DIAMOND FIRE—had done since, must continue.
Gorokhov remained motionless and silent throughout, determined to be invisible to the men in the room, to hear every astounding word, to imagine the possibilities.
The old man concluded his performance by placing the silver case on the table. He called what was in it the “einstone.”
He stood then, bowed his head, clicked his heels, laughed softly again, and made his way to the door, where two soldiers waited to escort him somewhere else in Lubyanka.
A young woman wheeled in a cart with a samovar of tea and plates of cakes, and the smoke in the room swirled out in the rush of fresh air from the open door.
One of the generals approached Gorokhov then, saying DIAMOND FIRE needed technicians. Then he added a single word, a question. Zainteresovany?
Interested?
Gorokhov couldn’t believe the general even bothered to ask.
* * *
A half mile underground, the lift clanked to a halt and the operator unlatched the safety door so it split in the center and opened up and down. Gorokhov stepped out onto the damp rock floor, turned to the right where a string of overhead utility lights stretched along a rock corridor to a metal door, painted bright red.
Beyond that was what would save the Motherland, and VEKTOR, and his own career. Because he was beginning to realize that Popovich—his slight, nervous, and traitorous deputy administrator—was correct. With Major Kalnikova’s disappearance and presumed loss, there was nothing more VEKTOR could do to stop Stasik Borodin, whatever it was he was planning. And if Stasik Borodin truly was unstoppable, and in the next hours or days he unleashed the full fury of his shadow warriors in some manner to outrage America and the world, Gorokhov had only one option available.
Operation Scythe.
He thought it a brilliant plan. In terms of destruction, it would have minimal effect. Buildings and monuments would still stand. Hospitals would remain operational. But ten thousand Americans would be killed on the first and only day of the operation, including politicians in their chambers and missile firing teams in their deep, protected bunkers and generals in their Pentagon offices. All torn to pieces with no possible rational explanation.
In a world of billions, a nation of hundreds of millions, ten thousand deaths were a negligible statistical blip. But when the American people woke to realize that those ten thousand lost had left them with no leaders in government, no commanders in their military, no heads of their civil services or judges on their Supreme Court … the country would be paralyzed, the citizens in frenzied shock, because there would be no explanation, no weapon system to point to, and most important, no enemy to identify and unite against in rage.
It would be as if the scythe of God had passed over America and punished it for its wickedness and arrogance.
The Kremlin’s analysts predicted that a civil war would begin within twelve months of the attack, as groups of American states fled their broken union. Even if actual regional fighting didn’t break out, America’s spirit would be crushed and its economy flattened. No more would that sanctimonious nation look beyond its borders and seek to impose itself on the world. Like a beaten dog, it would stay in its kennel, cowering in fear of the unknown as Mother Russia reshaped the century and the world, fulfilling her interrupted destiny.
Gorokhov approached the red door, checked his watch. In three hours, just as the communications staff changed shift, Popovich would hear a knock on the door of his quarters. He would answer, puzzled why Gorokhov’s security guards were troubling him at such an early hour. How they’d subdue him, Gorokhov didn’t know and didn’t care. Their only orders were to leave no marks.
The shock of the quarry lake’s icy water would undoubtedly revive him, but not for long. Twenty minutes should do it, Gorokhov had estimated. If the guards could keep the deputy administrator from climbing out of the lake at least that long, then they’d be able to leave, and the blue corpse could be safely found in the morning—a victim of trying to be like his beloved chief administrator, and the first unheralded victim of Scythe.
Gorokhov allowed himself a smile, appreciating the elegance of his maneuver like a well-played gambit in chess. By moving ahead so boldly, he would not allow Scythe to be taken over and squandered by the army. It would remain in VEKTOR’s hands. He reached for the handle of the red door. Behind it was the storeroom holding the heart of Operation Scythe, the long-sought breakthrough achieved through the brilliant work of the Fond Perspektivnykh Issledovaniy—Russia’s answer to America’s DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
No longer did the shadow warriors have to be limited in number by the handful of pure einstone wafers painstakingly sliced from the only known natural sample discovered so long ago in the ruins of Berlin. Now the crystalline mineral had been synthesized, so that thousands of shadow warriors could be created to—
“Chief Administrator.”
Gorokhov froze. What was that voice doing here? He turned to look back over his broad shoulder.
Popovich stood at the end of the corridor. Gorokhov’s own trusted security guards flanked him, weapons drawn, directed not at the deputy, but at Gorokhov.
“It’s not a smart place to fire guns,” Gorokhov said evenly. “The risk of ricochet…”
“I have contacted the Kremlin.” Popovich was both nervous, and smug. Gorokhov bemoaned the realization that he had let this worm outmaneuver him.
“I have been authorized to take charge of VEKTOR until a new administrator can be selected.”
“You are willing to destroy all we’ve worked for?”
Popovich motioned for the guards to approach Gorokhov. “I’m placing it in better hands. Wiser hands. The generals will control the future of VEKTOR.”
Gorokhov glared at the guards, but accompanied them back to the main lift, head high, bested for now perhaps, but unbowed. “You still don’t understand, you little man,” he said. “Only one general controls the future of our work now—and when Borodin unleashes his shadow warriors in America, the Kremlin will have no choice but to do what I’m prepared to do now.”
Gorokhov was gratified when Popovich stepped back from his path, clearly still afraid of his former superior, even with armed guards to protect him.
“Unleashing Operation Scythe would be the end of everything,” Popovich said.
“Quite the contrary,” Gorokhov replied. He looked at the guards, the lift, thought of the lake, and began to plan the new moves that would allow him to be vindicated, and see Popovich shot.