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  “A minor issue, but I’m sure we’ll clear it up soon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One of our security teams downriver in Surfur Valley didn’t check in at the required time. We’ve sent out another team to find out what the problem is.”

  “Let me know when you find out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Belkin hung up. Then he called the minister of defense in Moscow, Gage Stanislovsky.

  “This is Lenoid Belkin. Put me through to Stanislovsky.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Belkin,” the receptionist said. “He’s out of town.”

  “I need his number!”

  She gave him the number and Belkin called Minister Stanislovsky.

  He said, “Hello, Minister. This is Lenoid Belkin.”

  “Belkin. Now that’s unexpected. Must have been a year since I saw you.”

  “I rarely come to Moscow. I called because I have a problem.”

  “Really? If there’s anything I can do…Go ahead. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Someone very dear to me has been killed. I’ve been told something quite extraordinary. I’ve been told that SMERSH was involved in the death. I thought that SMERSH was discontinued after World War Two. Do you know anything about this?”

  “About SMERSH? You’re right. Like you said, discontinued.”

  “Then why was a SMERSH team seen boarding one of my ships in Petropavlovsk?”

  “How do you know it was a SMERSH team?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “I will look into it.”

  “This is an emergency. I need to know right away.”

  “I’ll get my people right on it, Mr. Belkin.”

  “My brother was killed on that ship. I want to know if someone on this team pulled the trigger. If not, I want to know who did.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Belkin. I really am.”

  “Why? Did you know my brother?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then just get answers to my questions. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get on it. I need answers quickly.” Belkin hung up.

  Finally, in a fit of rage, he yelled and punched a hole in the wall.

  CHAPTER 12

  A man with a knife dove at Chuck from where he’d been hiding behind bushes on the rocky slope, several feet above him.

  Chuck fell backwards on his heels as his hands hit the killer’s chest and deflected him off the trail. The man landed in the boiling mud.

  He screamed, but he sank too quickly for Chuck to save him—if that had even been a possibility.

  Chuck sat there for a moment, listening for any sounds of further trouble. Pain raged in his back. His back had come down hard on a rock and he was hurting badly. It was hard to even stand up. He picked up his bow and his M16 and moved on. He walked slowly to work out the pain.

  He heard only the river. He’d known this would be ugly when he accepted the job. He’d agreed to this for only one reason, to rescue the sailors. No matter how poor his chances, he could not ignore it when good men and women were in trouble.

  The bios he read in the file had stirred his soul. To the rest of the world, these victims were nobodies. They were forgotten men and women, and Chuck was their only hope. He recalled the notes on Brooke Swan. Brooke was quiet and was always reading a booklet of psalms and proverbs during her free time on the ship. She had been clean and sober for five years. She had gone back to school and qualified herself for the merchant marine. She had been working as a ship’s engineer for three months. Chuck wondered if she’d been one of the poor souls in the refrigerated shipping container. He wondered about Boon-Nam Wattana of Thailand. Boon-Nam considered every hour and every moment to be a golden opportunity. He considered every person he met to be a friend.

  “Belkin is not your friend,” Chuck said.

  He hiked slowly with great caution.

  He’d barely gone fifty yards when the steam thinned out, and the narrow canyon spread out into a big canyon, two hundred yards across.

  Chuck gasped. The sight before him was staggering to behold. It was the last thing he could imagine stumbling upon the middle of nowhere.

  CHAPTER 13

  Standing at the glass windows of his remote home, looking down across the hillside of waterfalls spilling down over stone terraces and natural rock formations, Belkin answered his ringing phone.

  “Lenoid, this is Defense Minister Gage Stanislovsky. I can verify that the SMERSH team was ordered onto your boat. But they did not kill your brother. It was an American.”

  Belkin grit his teeth. Agony invaded every cell of his brain. His entire nervous system felt like it was scorched with acid.

  “Now we think he’s coming after you,” Stanislovsky said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Chuck kept moving because of a hot steam vent, but once he was past that, he got behind a man-size boulder where he had cover and a clear view upriver. What he saw was the last thing in the world he’d have expected to find in the remote reaches of wild Kamachatka. It looked like a fabulous public works project, the kind funded with seized tax dollars and maintained with public debt.

  It was a geothermal water garden, a surreal vision of a terraced hillside with waterfalls, steaming geothermal pools, and manmade fountains.

  The rocky hillside was the size of a steep city block. Several steaming waterfalls spilled down over terraced steps, car-size rocks, and poisonous, sulfuric pools. The water garden descended to and curved around an amphitheatre in the lowest areas of the oasis. It featured tiered benches for an audience to watch a show or speaker on the stage.

  A cement home was built on a shelf that was a hundred yards up the canyon wall, which was a half way to the upper rim and plateau

  All of the waterfalls were spilling down from this shelf.

  From the satellite photos, Chuck had learned that an abandoned Soviet-era airbase was up on that plateau, which was at the base of a once-extinct volcano that was now active.

  Chuck followed a long and shifty stairway up the terraced hillside. The stairs led him between and past numerous sections of the waterfalls. The air was warm and humid, and he was breathing steam.

  At the upper rim, he approached a one-story, flat-roofed cement dwelling. He saw no video cameras, so he picked a lock and entered the structure.

  His boots left a little bit of mud on the tile floors. In the living room, a six-foot-wide black lacquer pearl figure motif China cabinet rested against one of the walls, but what caught his attention was a photograph of a man dressed in black. Chuck looked at it in fascination and disgust. The man in the photo was Anton Fowler, the dark one. Chuck couldn’t believe it. Why would Belkin keep a framed photo of Fowler in his home?

  Chuck moved quickly through the house. There were no video cameras in sight, perhaps because the location was so remote, perhaps because Belkin didn’t spend much time here. In other rooms, the Oriental theme continued. Chuck saw inlaid black mother of pearl antique China cabinets, black lacquer Japanese shrine cabinets, and many other antiques of this theme. The art consisted of framed Japanese lacquer backgrounds inlaid with gold and silver. Others were actual paintings on black lacquer canvases, and they portrayed Oriental scenes. Chuck opened cabinets and rifled through drawers. If they were locked, he either picked the locks or broke them. In one drawer, he found a lone envelope. When he read the handwritten letter inside, he felt sick to his stomach. He shoved the envelope in his pocket.

  It took about fifteen minutes to search the house. Other than a lot of Oriental art and furniture, the house was basically empty. The missing sailors were not here; neither was the dark one or Belkin.

  A few basic necessities showed Belkin was sleeping here, probably on a temporary basis. An old-fashioned rolodex by the phone had many names, and Chuck saw one that surprised him greatly—Carl Seychel.

  CHAPTER 15

  Alexandria, Virginia

  CIA Deputy DCI Carl Seychel
drove slowly into Ivy Hills, his exclusive neighborhood. He was driving a silver Mercedes-Benz CLA200 with tinted windows. He’d just leased the Mercedes an hour ago, and he’d leased it under an assumed name and a false identity he’d set up five years ago—just in case. His regular car, a Porsche 911 GT3, was now in storage—a storage that could not be traced to him.

  Renting the Benz before he came home was a conscious decision because Seychel no longer felt safe—especially in his own neighborhood. He drove slowly to check for any signs that the subdivision was under surveillance. It was a gated community, but the people who were after him would not be stopped by any gate.

  He cruised down streets that he usually enjoyed, but he wasn’t enjoying his drive today. He wiped the sweat from his neck with a silk handkerchief he’d permanently borrowed from an ex-girlfriend. At a stop sign, he wiped his glasses down and then dried the bridge of his nose before he put the glasses back on.

  He drove past his house twice. Everything looked normal, so on the third pass, he drove into the driveway and opened the garage door with his handheld remote. He drove in and closed the door behind him. Getting out of the car, he walked straight over to his luggage, which he always kept in a shelf in the garage. It was already packed. It was pre-packed because he’d known for a while now that things were going downhill and he might have to make some fast moves. He put the luggage in the trunk of the car. He opened the carry-on bag and pulled out a handgun, which he shoved under his belt.

  Seychel entered the house and deactivated the alarm. He walked slowly down the hall, careful to make no noise with his feet. He was carrying his handgun now because he had been threatened by Maxim Cress, and there was no more credible threat anywhere.

  In his bedroom, Seychel grabbed four phones from the cabinet by his bed. He threw these in his carry-on bag. Then he hurried to the dining room. He opened the armoire. The entire eight-foot-high cabinet was full of silver. There was a beautiful silver-gilt coffee pot with Turkish motifs, made by Sazykov, in Moscow, 1864. There was a silver cup, richly engraved with repoussé busts of Peter the Great and his daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, dated 1725. There were stacks of plates made for Empress Maria Temrukovna of Russia. The entire armoire was full of silver. He also had closets full of silver, all of it bought with money he’d rolled in through influence peddling and supplying intel and protection to Belkin. He would bring none of it with him today. There was no time.

  He opened a silver jewel box and removed three passports. From a silver snuff box he retrieved a key. Then he unlocked the bottom drawer and removed a briefcase. He opened it and for a moment inspected the cash. It was a quarter million dollars in Benjamin Franklin $100 bills.

  A sound sent a shock wave through his spine. His whole body startled and went rigid. He stood there on his knees with the open briefcase, barely moving, hardly breathing. He listened.

  What was the sound? Was it just normal creaking sounds? Or was someone in the house?

  Seychel slowly closed the briefcase. He stood up and drew his handgun. He walked slowly through the living room. He froze by the kitchen door for thirty seconds.

  He loathed the day that he ever got a loan from Cress. He’d thought it would be a fast profit and he’d hit the big leagues. But his oil wells had failed in Colombia. He bought into all the hype and blew ten million dollars because he’d expected to make ten times that much in the first year alone. Now the collector was prowling for him. Except there was nothing to collect other than what he had in his briefcase.

  He was a dead man!

  No, he reminded himself. He would be alright. He must not let fear get the best of him. Belkin had promised to come through. The only problem was that he could not get in contact with his partner in Kamchatka. He’d been trying, but Belkin was in a remote location with limited connectivity. All Seychel had to do was survive two or three days and his problems would be over.

  He rushed to the garage and opened the door. Wheels chirped as he backed the Benz out of the garage. He sped out of the subdivision.

  Now he just had to survive forty-eight hours. He drove toward CIA headquarters.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kamchatka, Valley of the Geysers

  From Belkin’s cement dwelling, Chuck climbed the zigzagging stairs up to what he thought was the rim of the canyon, but it turned out to be a sort of optical illusion. It was a rim below the upper rim, a last step before top, a bench in the mountain side with a helicopter pad. Cut back into the side of the canyon, about seventy yards back from the ridge, was a massive gaping tunnel entrance. The tunnel entrance was a huge cement arch, fifty-feet tall and forty wide. Chuck could see a hundred yards down the tunnel. He saw a long cement floor and curved ceiling. Massive concrete arches were spaced at intervals, every ten yards, all the way back, into the throat of the mountain.

  He surveyed the surrounding area carefully. A road ran up to the high ridge two hundred feet up, but it was blocked with a chain-link fence topped with curling barbed-wire. The fences ran all along the ridge and danger signs in Russian warned of high voltage. The fence, the barbed-wire, and the signs all looked new. For Chuck to go over the ridge was going to take some time and effort. Before he did that, he would check out the tunnel and see if there was another way up to the airbase.

  The walk down the tunnel was gloomy. Skylight slats in the roof let some natural light in, but the underground section of the old airbase was dim. Racks for lighting were bolted into the ceiling but the lights weren’t working. There were also speakers attached to these racks.

  Cracks splintered across the cement floor, releasing sulfuric steam. Although the volcano nearby had previously been dormant for decades, it was now considered to be active. Also, it appeared that there had been at least one major earthquake since the fall of the Soviet Union. Chuck stepped over a few two-foot wide cracks in the stone floor. Even with his tactical flashlight, he couldn’t see the bottom of these deadfalls.

  Watching for sign, he soon realized that someone had been down here. Boot scuffs on the dusty stone floor gave the impression that many soldiers had been here recently.

  Debris was scattered around. He walked past old tires, probably from troop carrier trucks. He passed rusted-out airplane parts, wheels, propellers, and engines. He even passed abandoned Cold War era missiles stacked along the walls. He walked slowly, always alert for trip wires. He passed three corroded forklifts and endless wooden crates along the walls. It was as if the airbase had been abandoned suddenly amid the political turmoil of the early 1990’s and much of the supplies and hardware had been left to rot through the years. Chuck looked in a few of the crates, finding weapons and spare aircraft parts. The boxes in one stack were full of Finnish, Russian Mosin Nagant Infantry rifles, Model M/91. Others were packed with Russian PPsH 1941 Machine Guns.

  He walked slowly, watching for infrared trip wires or thermal sensors. There was always the possibility that the underground base had been booby trapped. He watched for irregularities in the floor and for thin wires at ankle level. He was careful to give wide berth to any junk on the ground. IEDs were unlikely, but anything was possible. Plus, anything he touched could be rigged. His flashlight beam roved across the floor. Then he came to a huge, gaping crack in the structure of the mountain, no doubt the product of an earthquake. The floor of the tunnel had opened up, leaving a five-foot wide crevice. A section of the ceiling had collapsed. Hundreds of cracks filled the floor. The whole area looked unstable—as if the edges of the crevice might give way and plunge into the depths. Steam rose from the crack in the earth. To go on any further would be dangerous. There were only two choices—to go back and deal with electric fences and possibly modern security equipment—or gamble his life and try to cross the crevice, which looked like a fool’s errand. Chuck studied the situation before his eyes.

  He took off his knapsack and heaved it over the crevice. Now he was committed.

  Carrying his M16 in his right hand and his compound bow in his left, he backed up. />
  He ran.

  And he leapt.

  CHAPTER 17

  Slava Airforce Base

  In the Security Room of Slava Air Force Base, tech security expert Markov Vinogradov narrowed his eyes as a red flashing banner appeared at the top of his computer screen. He clicked on the link and read the security alert:

  “Laser trip wires activated in the underground base. Send armed security team immediately.”

  Markov leaned back in his chair then leaned forward. He felt his adrenaline rush. They had just been briefed about a raid on their new ship in Petrapavlosk and were on high alert. Still though, Slava Airforce Base was in the middle of nowhere. The electronic tripwires had never been activated either by thieves, Mafia, or by any outsiders.

  They were simply in too remote of a location.

  This would not be the first time they’d had a false alarm. They’d had one just a few months ago.

  Still, it was not for him to pre-judge the situation—not when they’d been warned to be extra vigilant. If he didn’t follow protocol, he would face a severe reprimand.

  Everyone knew that Ushakov had disappeared when his loyalty came into question. Marko was not going to be the next idiot who second-guessed security measures that Belkin had approved.

  Marko made a call.

  “It’s me…We’ve got a breach alert in the underground base. Get a hunter-killer team down there to clear the tunnels…I don’t know any more. Just do your job!”

  Marko hung up.

  He doubted that anyone was down there. If there was someone, they were dead meat.

  CHAPTER 18

  Chuck moved slowly through the underground base. In metal storage tubs, he found vintage Russian Soviet Military Army Officer Uniforms. Other metal tubs contained thousands of passports and identification papers of inmates in the vast gulag system. Most of the people in the black-and-white pictures were long dead by now.