Chapter Seventeen

One mile below, the firestorm had already moved on from the Fifth Avenue and Forty-Eigth Street area, where the four main military buildings of the Okupatsi had stood less than twenty minutes before.

There were piles of smoldering debris ten feet high and lots of smoke overhead. The 30 Rock skyscraper was still on fire, the flames slowly making their way to the top, as were many smaller buildings around it. But what had been the dead center of the MMZ was now four hot, smoky patches in the ground.

The industrious MOP crew who’d managed to position one of the old, broken-down fire trucks up against the NKVD headquarters was finally forced to surrender to the inevitable and get away from the seventy-story skyscraper before it collapsed. They’d gotten the fire truck’s engine turned on and just as slowly as they’d appeared, they began making their way back down Fifth Avenue, dirty, wet, and beaten.

But suddenly, one of the erstwhile firemen saw something moving in the rubble on the corner of East Forty-Ninth and Fifth, what had once been the old Simon & Schuster Building, and more recently, the Russian Military’s Joint Ops Building.

The fireman yelled for the driver to halt, and several of the MOP soldiers jumped off the truck and waded into the still-sizzling debris.

Incredibly, there was a man in the middle of it all, digging himself out. He was about halfway to freedom when the firemen reached him. They pulled him out the rest of the way.

He was covered with white ash and powder, but somehow he’d survived the firebombing and the collapse of the building. Even with a few burns and some cuts here and there, he was in surprisingly good shape—and this included his eyepatch.

“Thank you, my friends,” he said to his rescuers. “Though I believe I would have made it out in another day or two. …”

It was Colonel Sergei Gagarin, the man who ran the joint operations daily briefings.

The man who knew everything.