Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (8 page)

 
          
Kazakov
smiled and nodded approvingly. “My condolences for your loss,
Tovarisch
Fursenko/’

 
          
“And
to you, sir.” Fursenko turned and quickly strode away, feeling very
uncomfortable with that man knowing his name or even standing behind him.

 
          
Kazakov
stood by himself on the ramp, reflecting on this very strange evening. First
the death and return of his father in ^hame, without any honors; his mother’s
outburst and her rejection; and then this chance meeting with one of the Cold
War’s most famous and brilliant weapons designers. Pavel Gre- gorievich Kazakov
didn’t believe in fate—he wielded too much power to believe that anyone else
decided your future— but there had to be a reason, some definite path, that
this chain of events signaled.

 
          
At
one time, Doctor Pyotr Viktorievich Fursenko had been considered the finest and
most imaginative aerospace and electromagnetodynamics engineer in all of
Europe
. Since the age of thirty, he had been the
director of several Soviet aircraft and weapon design bureaus, building the
most advanced military aircraft, missiles, bombs, avionics, and components
imaginable . ..

 
          
At
least, they had
thought
it was the best. Fursenko’s word had been
considered physics law until Ivan Ozerov had shown up at Fisikous. When Ozerov
had started working at Fisikous, completely shattering the old beliefs and
understandings, the Soviet scientists had realized exactly how far behind the
United States they were on advanced warplane technology, especially low
observable airframe, devices, systems, and counter-stealth technology.

 
          
This
had only spurred Fursenko to even greater heights of genius. Even though the
collapse of the
Soviet
Union
meant the
collapse of big, super-secret, well-funded agencies like Fisikous, it had also
meant that Fursenko could travel and attend classes and seminars all over the
world to learn more about modem warplane technology. When Ozerov had
disappeared, probably back to whatever planetoid or genetic-engineering
incubation tank had spawned him, Fursenko had again taken the lead in Russian
aircraft and weapons design.

 
          
And
now Kazakov knew where he was, had met him, and could even be called his
boss—because Kazakov owned over sixty percent of Metyor Industrial Investment
Group. The genius Fursenko had been at his disposal all this time, and he
hadn’t even known it! But how to take advantage of this development? His mind
began racing....

 
          
Only
when the cargo ramp was finally raised and the transport plane made ready to be
towed back to its hangar did Kazakov finally turn toward the three government
vehicles behind him, which had also remained.

 
          
The
middle and left side cars suddenly started up and drove off, leaving one car
behind. A guard in a dark suit, wearing a machine pistoi on a strap, emerged
from the remaining vehicle, a stretch limousine, and opened a door for the
young man. Kazakov brushed snow off his shoulders, then removed and brushed
snow off his hat, revealing a shaved head, and stepped inside. The door closed
behind the young man with a heavy
CHUNK!
that revealed its heavily
armored doors and windows. The limousine drove off.

 
          
Inside
was one man, a military officer in his early sixties, seated on a side-facing
seat. Before him was a communications console, complete with satellite
transceivers and television and computer monitors. A very pretty uniformed
female aide sat in the forward aft-facing seat, with a similar console before
her. She glanced at the young man, gave him an approving half-smile, and
returned to her work.

 
          
“You
did not even try to pay your respects to my mother, General," the young
man said acidly, without any sort of formal greeting.

 
          
“I
did not think it would have been wise to try to console her in her obvious
hysterical grief.”

 
          
“So,
who were in the other cars?” the young man asked. “The president? The defense
minister?”

 
          
“The
national security advisor, representing President Sen'kov, and the assistant
minister of defense for European affairs, representing the government. I
represent the military.”

           
“I had hoped the president would be
courageous enough to attend,” the young man said bitterly. “Not only does the
commander-in-chief not attend, but he schedules the return flight for the dead
of night in the middle of a snowstorm! What happened to your compassion, your
responsibility to thank the families for their sacrifice?”

 
          
“We
may have extended that courtesy, if your mother did not desecrate the flag so,”
the old officer said. “That was a most disappointing display. Most
regrettable,”

 
          
“She
is the widow of a man who died in the line of duty, doing a job few officers
wanted,” the younger man said. “She has given her life for the army. She is
entitled to her grief— however she wishes to express it.” The young man looked
over, but the officer did not respond. He took a breath, then reached behind
the seat, lifted a crystal glass, and sniffed it, while at the same time
checking out the aide over the rim of the glass. “I see you still prefer
American whiskey and attractive aides, Colonel-General,” the young man said .

 
          
“Observant
as always, Pavel Gregorievich,” Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko replied, with
a smile. He reached into a compartment under the desk and withdrew a bottle of
Jim Beam and two shot glasses. He poured, gave a glass to the young man, raised
his own glass, then said, “To Gregor Mikhailevich, the bravest and finest
officer—no, the finest
man
—I have ever known. My best friend, my
confidant, a soldier’s soldier, and a hero to mother
Russia
.”

 
          
“To
my father,” Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov said, raising his glass. As the general
raised his glass, he quickly added. “Who was killed because of the gutless,
cowardly, inept members of the Army of the
Russian Federation
and the Central Military Committee.”

 
          
Colonel-General
Zhurbenko, deputy minister of defense and chief of staff of the Armed Forces of
the
Russian Federation
, paused with his glass a centimeter from
his lips. He considered Kazakov’s words, shrugged, and downed his whiskey.

 
          
“At
least you have the guts not to argue w ith me,” Kazakov said bitterly.

 
          
“Your
words hurt and offend me. Pavel,” Zhurbenko said resignedly, as his aide
refilled their glasses. “If they were said by anyone else, regardless of their
rank or title, I would have him imprisoned, or executed.”

 
          
“My
mother as well. General?” Kazakov asked.

 
          
Zhurbenko
gave no response. He was accustomed to threatening political and military
rivals—but Kazakov wasn’t a rival, he was a superior. Even if he didn’t carry
the name of
Russia
’s most famous and beloved soldier, he would quite possibly be the most
powerful man in
Russia
.

 
          
Pavel
Gregorievich Kazakov had started out wanting nothing more than to be the
privileged son of a dedicated, fastrising officer of the Red Army. Thanks to
his parents, he had enrolled in the Russian Military Academy in St. Petersburg,
known then as Leningrad, but found he had no love of the military—only for
partying, smoking, drinking, and hell-raising, the wilder the better. To avoid
embarrassment, his father had had him quietly transferred to
Odessa
Polytechnic
University
in the
Ukraine
Soviet
Socialist
Republic
, near their winter home. In a place where
he was just another one of many spoiled sons of high-ranking Communist Party
members attending school in the “Russian Riviera,” he had had to transform
himself in order to stand out and start to build a future for himself.

           
Pavel couldn't do it. Being
comfortable and taking it easy was his style, not doing what others thought he
should be doing. Free from the confines of
Leningrad
and his father's watchful eye. he'd partied
harder than ever. He’d experimented with every imaginable adventure: ice
sailing on the
Black
Sea
, parachuting,
rock climbing, extreme sports like road luge and boulder biking, and pursuing
the most beautiful women, single or married, on the
Crimean
Peninsula
.

 
          
Drugs
were everywhere, and Pavel tried them all. It was whispered that Pavel had
burned all of the hair off his head and face while freebasing cocaine, which
was why he kept his head shaved now, to remind him of how low he had once sunk.
But before that time, nothing had been out of bounds. He’d quickly gained a
reputation as a man's man, and his fame and notoriety had grown in inverse
exponential proportion to his grade point average. One day, Pavel had
disappeared from the nightclub scene in
Odessa
. Most everyone had assumed he was dead,
from either an accident during one of his daredevil extreme sports, an
overdose, or a shoot-out with rival drug dealers.

 
          
When
Pavel Kazakov had returned to
Odessa
years later, he had been a changed man. The
head was still bald—he no longer needed to shave it—but everything else was
different. He was off drugs, wealthy, and sophisticated. He'd bought one of the
nicest homes on the
Black
Sea
, began
contributing to many cultural events, and became a respected financier,
internationally known market-maker, and venture capitalist long before
industrial investment groups and conglomerates were common in
Russia
. Of course, the rumors surfaced—he had KGB
agents in his pocket, he transported thousands of kilos of drugs in diplomatic
pouches, and he killed his competitors and adversaries with cold, ruthless
detachment.

 
          
His
biggest and most dramatic acquisition had been a nearly bankrupt oil and gas
company in
Odessa
. The company had gone into a steep tailspin
after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the drop in world oil prices, as had
many oil companies, and Kazakov had acquired the company weeks before it folded
completely. Many had speculated that Pavel Kazakov’s drug connections had led
him to develop a legitimate, Soviet- sponsored and Soviet-secured company; some
said that it was an attempt by Pavel’s father to use his status and influence
to try to get his son cleaned up and into a legitimate line of work, but far
enough in the hinterlands of the Soviet empire so that even if he did screw up,
he wouldn’t be an embarrassment. In any case, Pavel had dropped out of school
in
Odessa
and become the president and largest
individual shareholder, owning just slightly less stock than the company’s largest
shareholder, the Russian government itself.

 
          
Pavel’s
strategy to make the company, which he called Metyorgaz, profitable, despite
the downturn in the oil industry had been simple: find oil where no one else
would even think or dare to go, and pump and transport it as cheaply as
possible. His first choice had been to go to
Kazakhstan
, the second- largest of the former Soviet
republics but one of the most sparsely populated and capitalized. The reason:
the former Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic had been and still was the dumping
ground of the Soviet Ufiion.

 
          
The
Communists had begun denuding the republic with the forced collectivization and
relocation of millions of Kazakhs in the 1930s. They’d wasted billions of
dollars and many years trying to grow wheat, cotton, and rice in one of the
harshest climates in the world. Nuclear waste dumped throughout the republic,
along with thousands of above-ground nuclear tests and accidents, had killed
millions of persons over thirty years. Leaking radiation, pesticides,
herbicides, raw sewage, and livestock waste had contaminated well water,
livestock, and food, killing or injuring millions more. Spent ballistic missile
and orbital rocket stages crashing downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome,
Russia
’s main space launch facility, had poisoned
and killed thousands more. Local communist authorities, without consulting one
expert, had built or enlarged several irrigation canals to plant cotton,
completely draining the already heavily polluted Aral Sea, and creating one of
the worst ecological disasters of the 1980s. The forty thousand square mile
inland sea, the fourth largest in the world, had shrunk to more than sixty
percent of its size, scattering contaminated and polluted salt across the
once-fertile Kazakh plains.