Snow Wolf (17 page)

Stanski waved over at him, the merest of
gestures, and when Massey glanced back the old man had disappeared into the
woods.

Suddenly it started to rain, a heavy,
drenching downpour, and a squall of wind threw freezing water in their faces.

Stanski smiled. "How about we go up
to the house? I've got a bottle of bourbon put by that'll warm that old Russian
heart of yours.

They sat at the pinewood table and
Stanski opened the bottle and poured bourbon into two shot glasses.

He was lean but well built, and he moved
stealthily. A strange combination of restless energy and measured control, as
if he was in command of every muscle in his body. As Stanski sat, Massey
noticed the man's eyes. Deep, slate blue. There was more than a hint of torment
in them, but the strange smile hardly left his face.

Stanski raised his glass. "Za
zdorovye."

"Za zdorovye." Massey sipped
his drink, stood and crossed to the bookshelf in the corner and picked up a
book.

"Dostoevsky. Last time it was
Tolstoy. Whatever are we going to do with you, Alex? An assassin as well as a
scholar. Quite a dangerous combination."

Stanski smiled. "He appeals to the
darker side of my Russian nature."

:"Where's Vassily disappeared
to?"

"He's in the woods someplace. Don't
worry about him."

Massey swallowed the bourbon and pushed
forward the glass. As Stanski refilled it he said, "You want to
talk?" Massey said, "What did Branigan tell you exactly?"

" Enough to get me interested. But
seeing as you're going to be running the show, I want to hear it from the
horse's mouth."

Massey undid the security lock on the
briefcase he had taken from the car, removed the file marked "For
President's Eyes Only" and handed it across.

"Inside you'll see two reports. One
is the result of almost two years' work. Highly secret intelligence work
carried out for the CIA by the Moscow contacts of some of the antistalinist
immigrant groups. It gives details of the old Tsarist escape tunnels in the
Kremlin that date back hundreds of years. One tunnel in particular is
interesting. It leads from the basement of the Bolshoi Theater to the third
floor of the Kremlin and comes out in a room next to Stalin's quarters. We also
learned there's a secret underground train line that runs from the Kremlin to
Stalin's villa at kuntsevo, just outside Moscow. Stalin's got several villas;
however, that's the one he uses most often. But the underground line is only
ever used when he needs to travel in haste or in an emergency. We discovered it
can be easily breached two blocks from the Kremlin, and leads right under the
Kuntsevo villa. Both tunnels, like all the others, are checked at weekly
intervals by the Guards Directorate, visual checks and using mine detection
equipment and dogs, but normally they're not guarded, except at the entrances
and exits, as you'd expect. But you wouldn't be going in through a regular
entrance. And a man of your abilities would find a way of getting past the
guards. The Kremlin and the Kuntsevo villa are the most likely places Stalin is
going to be. Those are your ways in and out of both, whichever should be
necessary to use."

It took Massey several minutes more to
outline the exact details of the operation, and when he had finished Stanski
looked through several pages of the file and said, "I'm impressed,
Jake."

He picked up the bottle poured himself a
shot and downed it on one gulp. Then he fixed Massey with a stare. "But
I've got some questions."

"Ask away. You're the one this
depends on."

"Why wait until now to kill Stalin?
It should have been done a long time ago."

"Look at the file again. There's a
second report I told you about, at the back. it ought to explain."

Stanski took the file and read. When he
finished he looked up and smiled. "Interesting. But I don't need a report
to tell me Stalin is crazy. He should have been put in a rubber room long
ago."

"Maybe, but this time we're in deep
enough trouble to have to put the man down for the dangerous beast that he is.
Do you remember Max Simon?"

"Sure. He was a friend of yours, as
I recall."

Massey explained about the deaths of Max
and his daughter, and why they had been killed. A look of utter distaste
crossed Stanski's face. He lit a cigarette and stood.

"There's something I don't
like."

"What?"

"Bloody the waters in a pool full of
sharks and it's difficult to get out with all those teeth chopping. Assuming I
do the job, the KGB and militia are going to be swarming all over Moscow
afterwards, if there is an afterwards. There are five hundred Kremlin Guards
behind those red walls, another three thousand a stone's throw away. That's a
lot of angry comrades."

"I was coming to that."

Stanski grinned. "I kind of hoped
you were."

" You leave the Kremlin or the dacha
the same way you enter. But there'll also be alternative exits just in case you
need them. As soon as I have everything organized, I'll tell you the details.
But assuming it all goes according to plan, after that you lie low in a safe
house I'll set up in Moscow. A week later, if things work out the way I intend,
I take you out."

"How?"

Massey smiled. "I'm working on it.
But either way you don't go in without the safe house and exit being in place.
Otherwise it's a suicide mission."

"I figured it was that already . Who
else knows about the plan?"

"Only Branigan and the brass who
approved it, but the exact details are up to me. And that's the way it stays.
The fewer people who know the better." :"Branigan said there's going
to be a woman?"

"She'll be with you as far as
Moscow, then we take her out of the picture."

Stanski shook his head. "You know I
always operate alone, Jake. Taking a woman along will only slow things
up."

" Not this time. It's for your own
good. Traveling alone to Moscow might make you a target for suspicion. Besides,
she's part of the plan. She'll accompany you acting as your wife but for the
obvious security reasons she won't know the target."

Stanski crushed his cigarette in an
ashtray on the table. "You'd better tell me about her."

"You know the rules, Alex. Whenever
we drop two or more people onto Soviet territory we don't reveal their
backgrounds to one another. No real names, no real identities. That way there's
less trouble for either of you if one gets caught."

Stanski shook his head firmly. "The
rules don't apply. if I'm going into the lion's den I want to know who I'm
going in with. Especially if it's with a woman I know nothing about."

Massey spread his hands on the table and
sighed. "OK. I'll give you the basics. Her name's Anna Khorev. Age
twenty-six.

She escaped from a Soviet Gulag near the
Finnish border three months ago and we gave her asylum."

Massey saw the look on Stanski's face as
he put down his glass.

"Jake, you must be crazy picking
someone with that background. How can you trust her?" .

"She wasn't my choice. And if I had
my way I'd leave her out of it. But not for the reasons you might think. She
can definitely be trusted, Alex, take it from me. And she's the best we're
going to get at short notice. It would take months to train another woman, even
just so that she wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb on a Moscow street or
turn white with fear every time she was asked for her papers by a
militiaman."

"Can she handle herself?"

"She can use a gun, if that's what
you mean. But all she's really got to do is play the part of being your wife
and make your cover seem plausible until you reach Moscow. We can use Popov for
a week or so to put you both through your paces. But I'll be relying on you to
look after her. The girl's already had some basic military training with the
Red Army."

There was a flash of anger or doubt on
Stanski's face, Massey couldn't tell which.

"Branigan never said she was Red
Army."

"She was a conscript during the war.
She didn't volunteer out of ideology. And I would have thought her military
background, however brief, was an advantage."

"What about the rest of her
background?" Massey explained briefly about her parents but said nothing
about Anna Khorev's personal experience before her imprisonment in the Gulag.

Stanski shook his head in disbelief.
"This gets crazier by the minute."

:"What does?"

"Her father a Red Army
officer."

"Past tense, and hardly in the Red
Army mold. And it doesn't taint the girl. I told you, you can trust her."

"Then why was she in a Gulag?"

"You know the way the system works.
There doesn't have to be a reason. She was an innocent victim. She did nothing
wrong."

Stanski frowned. "So why has she
agreed to go back into Russia?"

"She hasn't agreed to anything yet,
because I haven't told her. But her reasons will be personal and nothing to do
with you."

Stanski crossed to the window and looked
out. "Another question. Why did your people come to me?"

Massey glanced over toward the photograph
on the wall before looking back. "You know the reasons. I don't have to
tell you."

"Tell me anyhow."

Massey pushed away his empty glass.
"You were the best man OSS ever trained. You speak fluent Russian. You've
been behind the curtain before. And the best two reasons of all. I figure you
want to kill the son-of-a-bitch and you're bold enough to try."

Stanski smiled. "Thanks for the vote
of confidence. You really have it all worked out, don't you, Jake?"

"You're just about perfect for the
part. You've got no family ties, no wife and children. No emotional baggage to
tie you down."

"Getting into Moscow is going to be
difficult enough despite the plan. It's probably going to be a close hit, not
one done with a rifle from a safe distance. And going in with a woman I don't
know from Judas doesn't help,"

"I never said it would be easy.
That's a risk you take. But you stick to the plan and you both stand some
chance of getting out of this alive. But trust the girl, Alex. Me, I'd stake my
life on her."

"This is going to be no ordinary
walk in the woods, Jake. You think it's fair that she doesn't know how deep and
dangerous she's getting in?"

"I don't have any choice. That's the
way Branigan wants it. And maybe it's best. If she knew she probably wouldn't
go."

Stanski thought for a moment. "Where
have you got in mind for training?"

Massey shook his head. "Not the
regular base we use in Maryland. It's too much of a security risk." He
smiled and nodded over toward the window. "I kind of thought maybe here.
The terrain is pretty similar to what you'll be crossing. If that's OK with
you?"

"I guess Vassily won't object. I'll
tell him we need to do some training. He won't ask why and he'll keep out of
the way."

"There's another reason why I'd like
to use her maybe you ought to know about. After Anna Khorev escaped, the
Russians wanted her sent back. They claimed she was a common criminal. I figure
that's a load of crap, but she did kill a camp guard and a border guard during
her escape. Maybe I'm wrong, but I figure the KGB just might try to find her
and take her back illegally. God knows, they've done it before with other
escapees and defectors. Up here I'm pretty sure she'll be safely out of harm's
way. And if and when she makes it back after the mission, I'll make sure she'll
have deep enough cover so that she'll never be found."

"Interesting. You never told me
about her killing the guards."

"If you're still unsure about her,
I'll let you have the relevant details about her escape from her file."

:"Do that."

"Any more questions?"

"Just tell me the odds on the plan
working."

Massey shook his head. "I can't
answer that. Nobody can. At best you succeed, at worst you die. There's going
to be no radio contact once you go in and you'll both be on your own, apart
from the safe houses I'll set up. Your chances depend on yourselves and lady
luck. And let's just hope she smiles on you i both, my friend."

He saw a sudden look of doubt on
Stanski's face and said, "You're still in?"

Stanski was silent for several moments.
He looked out of the window. Without turning back he said, "On one
condition. I have the final say on whether the woman's in. You let me meet her
as soon as she's made up her mind."

Massey thought for a moment. "Let's
cross that bridge when we come to it." He picked up the file he had shown
Stanski. "We've got a code name for the operation-Snow Wolf. But I keep
the file, I'm afraid. It's eyes only. No one but you, me, and the folks at the
top get to see it. We'll both go through all the details again later, so there
won't be any mistakes, but the file stays with me."