PROLOGUE
TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 1989 • THE HINDU KUSH, AFGHANISTAN
The air smelled of ozone, tasted metallic and felt like the edge of a knife. Somewhere behind the pilot’s eyes, a memory ignited, jolting him back into consciousness. He heard no sound of life in the aft cabin, nothing but a violent wind scouring a fractured canopy somewhere above him, until his own voice began to play back like a damaged tape recording in his ears.
Yuriy… pozhaluysta…skazhite mne…
He could neither feel nor move his crushed legs beneath the gunship’s instrument panel. Hands shaking, the pilot lifted his helmet’s sun visor and saw the drying blood spattered across his flight suit. It belonged to Alyushin, his weapons system officer, who had been decapitated by his own gun sight on impact.
He closed his eyes, drifted and waited to die.
…please…tell me…these are not…
Images teased his brain. He could remember gliding over the jagged peaks east of ancient Kapisa and a golden dawn breaking above the snow-choked passes of Nuristan as he banked his helicopter gunship northward toward the distant border of the USSR. Was it just a dream? No. He remembered now. After ten bloody years, after 15,000 comrades zipped into body bags, the Limited Contingent Soviet 40th Army was finally withdrawing from Afghanistan. He was going home. To Leningrad. To his family.
But something had gone terribly wrong.
Sounds and images flashed like tracer rounds across the pilot’s closed eyes: the warm sodium glow of Bagram’s hangar, Alyushin’s crisp salute, Stas’ prescient warning, Yuriy’s duplicity as the eight commandos of Spetsgruppa Alfa loaded a dozen meter-long cases, each stenciled with a blatant lie, into his gunship’s cabin.
He remembered a strange key. Six latches. A bullet-shaped cylinder bearing a red star. An urgent plea to his commander…
Yuriy, please tell me these are not what I think they are.
…and Yuriy’s astonishing response…
Just get them to a safe place, Dmitry Mikhailovitch. For God’s sake!
The pilot heard himself praying now to that God in which he never believed. He prayed the Sukhoi Fencer flying high-altitude support would quickly follow protocol and destroy his d
Please, sir! Take it for your daughter.
The burnished silver heirloom calmed him like morphine as he watched himself from above, walking with a light, happy gait along Dekabristov, his long legs warming with the brisk movement. He could hear snow crunching beneath his civilian shoes, his footsteps tapping lightly on the granite stairway up to his flat and Maryna’s cry of anguished relief as the front door cracked open. He could feel the warmth within radiating toward him, inviting him into his wife’s welcoming embrace, her tears of joy wet on his cheek. He could almost taste her mouth as they kissed for the first time in over a year.
Pápa!
An excited voice warmed his ears as the little girl pattered barefoot across the polished wooden floor and flew into his open arms. How tall she had grown. He could feel his hand clutching Stas’ still-frozen gift in the pocket of his overcoat, the silver broach engraved with calligraphy that formed the shape of a proud lion looking back over its shoulder. He watched himself display the heirloom in his open palm like a glittering sweet as his daughter’s amber eyes widened with excitement.
The last thing the pilot’s imagination heard was Sonya’s delighted laughter in the wind as his dream of Leningrad faded into a lace of ice crystals on the shattered canopy above him.
