The Russian Read online

  The Russian

  A Lance Spector Thriller

  Saul Herzog

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Grab Book Three

  Author’s Note

  Afterword

  Foreword

  I’d like to take a moment to thank you personally for buying this book. A lot of time and work has gone into it and I truly hope you enjoy the story I’ve come up with.

  If you have any concerns at all about this story, if you spot any typos or errors, or if you’d just like to get in touch to say hello, please feel free to contact me at any time.

  I can always be reached by email at:

  [email protected]

  Alternatively, you can sign up for updates from me at:

  Saul Herzog Notifications

  I am always thrilled to hear from readers so please stop by, say hello, let me know what you think of Lance Spector and the world he inhabits.

  God bless and happy reading,

  Saul Herzog

  1

  On a frigid morning in 1965, the sun shone weakly over the Soviet city of Volgograd. A thin fog hung on the frozen river, making a drab, gray city drabber and grayer.

  In every direction, the buildings spread in a monotonous grid few places in the world could rival. The Soviet state was addicted to concrete, and nowhere was it on show more than here. The streets were treeless, devoid of vegetation of any kind. On the far bank of the river, many buildings had yet to be repaired, and their windowless walls stretched toward the sky like shipwrecked hulls.

  Twenty years of reconstruction hadn’t been enough to erase the scars of the most destructive battle in human history.

  This was the place Hitler and Stalin crashed up against each other.

  It was the place fascism wrote its epitaph, a raging lament etched on the graves of countless dead.

  Stalin knew how to hold a city. He forbade all mention of evacuation, of retreat, of surrender. Even the city’s women, its children and elderly, were ordered to stand and fight.

  If they fled, if they even spoke of escape, they were summarily shot. Children as young as four were executed for cowardice.

  Precious few survived the siege.

  The bombings.

  The snipers.

  The hunger.

  At the battle’s outset, four hundred thousand people were squeezed along a stretch of the Volga’s west bank three miles wide. Six months later, fewer than one in ten still lived. In their place were two million corpses, and the smoldering hulks of six thousand tanks, three thousand aircraft, and fifteen thousand broken artillery pieces.

  And rubble. Endless rubble.

  It was still being cleared, corpses still being found.

  Not the passage of twenty years could erase so much death.

  In 1965, it was four years since Nikita Khrushchev had renamed the city. Volgograd, city on the Volga. Before that, Stalingrad. Before that, it had always been known as Tsaritsyn.

  It meant different things to different people.

  At the very beginning, it was a Tatar fortress.

  Then it was a tsarist garrison.

  Later it was a Cossack cavalry base.

  A stone church to Saint John the Baptist was erected in 1608.

  Slaves were taken by Kuban raiders in the eighteenth century, and again by the Nazis in the twentieth.

  In 1965 the slaves were gone. The priests were gone. The Cossacks and Tatars and Kubans were gone.

  And a new caste had quietly taken their place.

  The orphans.

  Parentless, abandoned, disabled, unwanted.

  They were a scourge. A plague.

  There were thousands of them, and each passing year only brought more.

  The government knew where they came from. All those munitions, toxins, chemicals. Bulldozing couldn’t fix that. Couldn’t fix the water.

  And the people had been savaged. First by the White Army, then the Red, then Hitler. They had seen how easy it was to silence the laws of God. To rewrite the laws of man. To forget the stories of their ancestors.

  They learned how gentleness could be erased.

  How motherhood could be forgotten.

  A team of three nurses in white polyester dresses and the distinctive red neckerchiefs of the Communist Young Pioneers stood on the steps of a squat, concrete building. They smoked cigarettes and rubbed their arms for warmth. Beside them was a wooden wheelbarrow.

  From a distance, they looked like a welcoming committee, ready to care for the new arrivals. The curves beneath their uniforms were feminine, youthful. The oldest of them was eighteen, the youngest, fifteen.

  But a closer look revealed worrying signs.

  They didn’t smile.

  They didn’t speak.

  They sucked their cigarettes absently, their eyes flat and still, staring into the distance as if watching an approaching storm.

  Their uniforms were stained, the insides of the collars brown with sweat.

  Their fingernails were dirty.

  These girls were a breed apart. They were people who’d been, from the earliest moments of their lives, treated with cruelty.

  They’d been whipped for bed-wetting.

  They’d been beaten unconscious for stealing food.

  They’d be
en abused in all the ways a girl in the custody of the state might be abused.

  All knew what it was like to wake up in a hospital bed and not know how she got there. A broken limb. Blood between the legs. A concussion so severe she would suffer migraines the rest of her life.

  They’d been powerless, and they’d suffered, and now that they were the ones in uniforms, they were going to inflict that same suffering.

  On the cart was a small stack of neatly folded burlap sacks about the size of pillowcases. The sacks bore the stenciled logo of the state coffee importer and the words, Five Kilos Net Weight.

  In front of them, stretching away from the building toward the feeble sun, was a new, concrete street, straight as a politburo draftsman’s ruler. It had smooth, wide sidewalks and the metal posts that would soon hold electric street lights. To the right was a new children’s hospital, and to the left, inauspiciously, a crematorium.

  The neighborhood was new, laid out in advance with intersections that led nowhere and traffic lights yet to be wired up.

  The girls watched the approach of a vehicle, a new transport van, freshly delivered from the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant, as it emerged from the gate of the children’s hospital, turned left, and then entered the grounds of their own building.

  It was a journey of a hundred yards.

  And every one of them knew a hundred yards could well make the difference between heaven, or at least a life with some semblance of normalcy, and utter hell.

  The van was more gray than blue, and the driver had his hat so low it hid his eyes.

  He pulled up in front of the nurses and cranked the handbrake. The van rose on its suspension when he stepped out. Without acknowledging them, he went to the back and opened the door.

  Immediately, a sound like the mewling of a litter of kittens filled the air. He stepped aside, and as the girls began their work, lit a cigarette. He turned his back on them.

  He couldn’t watch.

  The girls moved efficiently, stubbing out their cigarettes and wheeling the cart into position. They unfolded the burlap sacks and peered into the van. Its seats had been removed and replaced with wooden crates, lined with layers of cotton swaddling from the hospital. In the crates, wrapped in more swaddling, were newborn babies.

  A batch of seven.

  The van was very warm.

  The heater was on full blast and the controls had been removed. The driver couldn’t turn it down. He couldn’t open the windows. It had been learned the hard way how susceptible these newborns were to winter air.

  A hundred yards away, in the hospital’s Department of Defectology, these babies had been officially classified by the Soviet State as unsalvageable.

  One had a cleft lip. One was anemic. One was cross-eyed. One had fetal alcohol syndrome.

  “Look at this one,” a girl said, pulling one of the crates across the floor and picking up a boy by the ankles.

  The other girls burst out laughing.

  He was enormous, fully twice the size of the others. On his head was a thin tuft of white hair, his eyes were the palest blue, almost white, and on his gums were white, sharp little protrusions.

  “Is he a child or a polar bear?” the girl shrieked.

  “He’s an albino,” the older girl said.

  He wriggled and belted his feeble cries into the cold air.

  “Put him down before he bites you.”

  “He can’t be a newborn.”

  The older girl checked the tag on his ankle. “Born in the night. The mother died.”

  “I’m not surprised,” the girl said, holding him up like a carp pulled from a lake.

  “He has teeth,” the older girl said. And added, “Disgusting.”

  They put him in one of the burlap sacks, pulling the drawstrings around his neck so that his four limbs were enclosed and only the head could peer out.

  Packing them like this was less work than changing diapers, and the babies might be kept that way for days, or even weeks, at a time.

  The girls called them shit bags.

  They loaded all seven into the cart and wheeled them into the building.

  If the orphanage records were accurate, only one would live long enough to be discharged. He would be eight years old by then, already the size of a grown man, with fists like hams and eyes so pale they appeared blood-red in the sun.

  When the girls were gone, the driver stubbed out his cigarette and turned back to the van. The springs creaked as he got into his seat. He tried to open the window before remembering it was locked, then looked around to make sure no one was watching him.

  When he was satisfied he was alone, he looked to the sky and crossed himself.

  2

  Present Day

  Genadi Surkov woke with a start. The beeper next to his bed was going off like an alarm clock, its red light blinking urgently. He picked it up and pressed the plastic button on its side, illuminating the small digital screen.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  It was a code seven. One target. Three asterisks, indicating a level-three threat, the most dangerous.

  He got up and flipped open his laptop. The target’s name was Tatyana Aleksandrova. A Russian female with GRU training. He lingered on the picture. She was very attractive. Just his type, with dark hair and eyes that smoldered like coal in a fire.

  It was a shame they wanted her dead.

  There was an address to a small hotel in Kapotnya, an industrial district southeast of the city. Genadi knew it well. Not a bad place for picking up women. It was poor, and contained one of the largest oil processing plants in the country.

  Targets inside Moscow weren’t unheard of. There was a time when they’d been common. Those had been easy years for men like Genadi. The president was still consolidating power and paid good money to get rid of any number of fat, unsuspecting politicians. Maybe there’d be a private security guard, sometimes just a dog.

  This was different. A poor neighborhood. A cheap hotel. GRU training.

  This had defection written all over it.

  And that meant danger. The target was on the run. She’d be on edge. On the lookout.

  Genadi looked at his watch. It was just after two. He took a cold shower and dressed in a pair of black civilian pants and a crew neck. He tied a cloth handkerchief around his neck that could be used as a mask if necessary.

  He lived in Kubinka, twenty miles west of the city, in the Special Purpose Center, a secret military facility for Spetsnaz elite units. It was surrounded by a high concrete wall, topped with barbed wire. He used to live in the barracks, but since being made a special operative, had been given his own apartment in the officers’ block. It was on the top floor, which had seemed like a perk until he learned the elevator didn’t work.

  He put on his boots, a pair of black leather gloves, and a leather jacket, and grabbed his wallet and cell phone before leaving the apartment. His car was parked outside, an old BMW M3 coupé, and he fired up the engine and put the heat on full to melt the ice on the windshield. Then he got back out of the car and walked across the lot to the armory.

  Inside, he had access to a vast array of weapons, including everything generally available to Spetsnaz GRU units, as well as a few custom items that had been developed for one-off missions. He showed his credentials and picked up a large canvas bag from the supply desk.

  The first thing he grabbed was a PSS silent pistol, a Soviet-era gun with a sealed cartridge system that had been specifically designed for KGB assassinations. It was an ugly little gun with a six-round detachable box and an effective firing range of just eighty feet. He had the newer model, which used the custom SP-16 cartridge that at least packed somewhat of a punch. When the gun fired, the piston sealed the cartridge neck, preventing noise and smoke escaping the barrel.

  He wasn’t fond of it but put two in the bag, along with ammo.

  As a backup, he took the far more reliable Glock 17.

  He also grabbed a Vityaz-SN, the standard-issue submachine gun
for all branches of the Russian military. It was a lot louder than the PSS, but wouldn’t be traceable back to the GRU.

  He looked at a GM-94 pump-action grenade launcher but decided against it. The target was level three, which meant he was cleared to use any weaponry he deemed necessary, but a grenade launcher in the city would attract too much attention. If his bosses wanted to put on a show, they’d have called in the regular troops, not an assassin.

  He did grab an AK-105 carbine, as well as a Ratnik ballistic vest. The heavy metal plates had already been removed, which was against protocol but made the armor about ten pounds lighter.

  As he pulled his car out of the compound, he tuned his radio to an AM sports radio station and let his mind wander. He lit a cigarette as he got on the highway. Twenty minutes later, he was taking the Kapotnya exit.

  Even at night, the place was ugly, with the enormous cooling towers of the Tets-22 power plant rising above the interchange. As he entered the district, an oil pipeline crossed overhead before running along the side of the road.