Black Ghosts

Table of Contents

 

 

“Eagle One! Eagle One!” The two helicopters were trying to establish communication, their radios screeching. Moving toward the midpoint of the bridge from either end, they drew close to the scene of battle.

Facing away from the bridge, two more of Yazarinsky's men emerged from the shadows, each carrying a sleek, dark green cylinder containing a deadly Stinger surface-to-air missile. There was a
thud
and a cloud of smoke as each was fired, and a gray streak pointed upward.

“Look out! Something's coming at you!” squawked the helicopter radio. But it was too late. The infrared heat-seeking missiles locked onto the choppers' exhaust pipes, both Stingers found their marks, and simultaneously the helicopters were blown out of the sky in a flash and a thunder, leaving only a shower of debris.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

BLACK GHOSTS

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Wilshire Press trade paperback edition / April 2001
Berkley premium edition / May 2011

Copyright © 2001 by Victor Ostrovsky. Cover photos: Helicopter by Wikimedia Commons; Russian buildings by stock.xchng; Russian coat of arms by Wikimedia Commons. Cover design and photo illustration by Jae Song. Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

 

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ISBN : 978-1-101-51430-6

 

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In memory of Adash Silverberg, Bella's uncle.
A wonderful young man who didn't survive the
Holocaust.

 

Peter Ivanovich Rogov expected all hell to break loose, and he was well aware of the fact that any deviation from the plan could render him dead. Either way, he regarded it as a gamble worth taking. No matter what happened he would be free from this frozen abyss. After six years in this barren scrap of purgatory, the chance of freedom, no matter how slim, was worth taking.

Few places on Earth were as inhospitable as Prison Colony No. 5—or, as the prisoners referred to it, “the grave”—on a winter morning. Little, if anything, ever changed in the grave, except perhaps the weather, and that was always for the worse. Peter raised his frayed coat collar, shielding his face from the freezing wind that howled across the desolate, color-starved valley, pushing clouds of swirling snow in its wake through the razor wire and electric fences.

The prison colony was perched on a hill overlooking the nuclear bomb factory known as Tomsk-7. Guard towers rose high on solid timber stilts and loomed over the rectangular prison compound. Powerful spotlights and heavy Gurianov machine guns mounted on each tower probed the grounds day and night. The prison administration building and guards' barracks were outside the fence, beyond a deep moat surrounding the camp like an ugly scar. Except for the shrinking food rations and a decline in the guards' discipline, which manifested itself in their sloppy attire and rowdy behavior, the prison was a living monument to a dead regime.

Peter, found guilty of treason for his part in the failed coup against then-President Mikhail Gorbachev, had been sentenced to life with hard labor. He found it ironic that he, a devoted guardian of the revolution, was called a traitor, while those who sold out the motherland, aiding in the collapse of an empire, were honored. That, he vowed, he would soon change.

He heard a truck grinding its gears in the distance. He squinted his pale blue eyes in an attempt to catch a glimpse of it through the arctic veil of blowing snow. His thin lips twitched in what the few who knew him would call a smile.

“Lev!” Peter hissed to the frail man beside him who was busy stomping his feet to keep his meager body from freezing. “It's time.”

“Yes, sir,” the little man muttered, his breath icing up his sparse mustache.

“Tell the others to get ready!” Peter commanded.

Lev nodded and headed for the inmates' quarters.

Drawing one last puff from his yellow, foul-smelling cigarette, Peter watched Lev hobble across the central yard. As soon as Lev entered the first in a row of dilapidated barracks, Peter flicked the smoldering cigarette butt to the ground and headed to the long woodshed at the other end of the camp, passing a row of prisoners huddled by the kitchen exhaust shaft, attempting to draw some heat from it. They stood with their backs to the wind, waiting for what the camp administration cynically referred to as breakfast. They were too busy keeping themselves from freezing while protecting their place in line to even notice him.

Although Peter wore the same tattered gray uniform and coat as the other inmates, he stood out, shoulders pulled back, chin forward in defiance, unmistakably a general, the kind men fear and admire, an ex-KGB brigadier general eager to make his comeback.

A guard entered the latrine just as Peter had approached it. Peter stopped a few feet from the filthy door and made a futile attempt to light another cigarette against the wind. Precious moments were being lost, but there was nothing to do but wait. When the guard finally straddled out, still battling his fly with his heavy mitten, Peter slipped in. The stench almost overwhelmed him as he headed for the second stall from the end. He could hear the old truck rumbling in the distance; his ticket to freedom was making its way down the road. The only consolation in that dark, foul latrine was the refuge it offered from the wind, providing an illusion of warmth.

Peter leaned against the outer wall and waited, listening intensely for sounds as he tried to visualize his plan unfolding a mile and a half down the windswept road.

The old ten-wheel Zeel truck stopped at the gate cut in the high wall surrounding the nuclear complex. The sleepy guard in a glass booth put down his cup of hot tea and leaned forward, wiping the condensation off the glass to get a better view of the truck and its driver. He recognized the new deliveryman, two weeks on the job. His predecessor had a close encounter with a military truck in Omsk, they said. Poor man, the guard thought, but then that's life: One moment you're here, the next you're under a truck.

According to regulations, he was required to check the truck before letting it in, but as Peter had predicted, he didn't want to leave the warmth of his booth. Instead, he glanced back into the yard to make sure the duty officer wasn't on rounds. Then he pressed the green button and waved the truck in as the loud screeching gate slowly moved along its track.

The gate log would read:
6:50—delivery truck arrived, checked and found clean. Entry permitted.

The old diesel engine revved and the truck slowly gained speed, making its way into the calm of the inner courtyard, moving down a narrow winding path wedged between the wall and a row of concrete silos that extended into the murky sky. Once out of the guard's sight, the truck made a brief stop.

“Now!” the driver shouted through the window separating the cabin from the back. Three men, two in guards' uniforms and one in a black diver's wet suit, jumped out the back as the truck continued on its way to the kitchen.

Within seconds, the three men had cut the lock on a metal hatch at the bottom of the third silo. For months, they had practiced this on a mock-up. Moving quickly, they entered what was probably the most dangerous and unstable environment in the world. A reinforced steel tank, forty feet wide and thirty feet high, occupied the interior of the concrete silo, leaving a narrow corridor around it. The tank was filled to the brim with water. An electric grid along its inner wall kept the contents at 34 degrees F.

The two uniformed men carried a large black duffel bag. Their mission had to be completed before the truck returned. They had come to release Lucifer from his steel bottle.

The diver climbed a rusting ladder bolted to the tank wall. Once at the top he opened a round hatch and slipped into the water. Descending, he turned on a powerful flashlight strapped to the side of his head. A series of shiny cylinders made of a titanium alloy were neatly stacked on the tank floor, each with a red valve at its end. They contained radioactive acid, a lethal and volatile byproduct of the bomb factory. The water kept their temperature steady, as a fluctuation of more than three degrees could prove lethal.