Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) Read online

  Red Dawn Rising: A Novel

  © 2013 by Sue Duffy

  Published by Kregel Publications, a division of Kregel, Inc., P.O. Box 2607, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

  The persons and events portrayed in this work are the creations of the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

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  To my family

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Acknowledgments

  This second book of the Red Returning trilogy draws from the same rich resources of the first book, which include the technical knowledge and life experiences of Mike Duffy, J. D. Railey, Scott Railey, U.S. Coast Guard boatswain’s mates Brian and Krystyna Duffy, Kim Beasenburg, Laura and Ryan Player, Marc T. Canner, Florance Anderson, and Sandi Hendrickson Esch.

  To that mix I add Edward Lee Pitts, Washington, DC, bureau chief for World magazine, whose capital-insider perspective helped shape certain plot points.

  As always, Kregel editor Dawn Anderson lent an insightful and practiced eye to the manuscript. The whole Kregel team has been an enormous support to me. And my agent, Les Stobbe, remains my faithful friend and advocate.

  My deepest gratitude to you all.

  Chapter 1

  The Moscow night had frozen in place. But at three in the morning, a lone figure hurried along the back streets and alleys of a worn and grizzled neighborhood, leaving tracks in fresh yet impure snow. It was the safest hour for Evgeny Kozlov to surface from his warren. Once a warrior spy for Soviet intelligence, he had fallen to his own conscience and the conviction that everything he’d believed in was a lie. Now, the liars hunted him.

  Where an alley emptied onto a main boulevard, Evgeny stopped and peered cautiously through the brittle light of a streetlamp. He would have to cross the street to reach the bookstore where, in a back room with shades drawn, the only person he could trust waited for him. He resisted the urge to sprint headlong to safety. Instead, he pulled the hood of his coat lower over his face and emerged slowly from the alley onto the sidewalk, nearly colliding with an old woman long past sobriety. Ragged and absent-eyed, she hardly looked his way as she shuffled around him, hunched and rattling in her breath. He watched after her a moment and wondered how many others like her might perish this forbidding night, within reach of the gilded Kremlin, home of the government charged with tending even the least of its people.

  He veered into the street, ambling in the fashion of the old woman, his heavy boots slurring against the pavement, the backpack that never left his side slung over one shoulder. To anyone watching, his boozy charade would make no impression. They wouldn’t see the gun he gripped firmly inside his coat pocket.

  When he reached the front of the bookstore, he was about to turn into the alley running toward the shop’s back door when a face stopped him. In the display window lit by the streetlamp was a rack of CDs. He knew better than to linger in the exposing light, but he couldn’t move. The face on one of those CD covers wouldn’t let him. She was a striking young woman in a shimmering green gown seated at a concert grand piano, her long amber hair cascading over one shoulder. The title read Liesl Bower Plays the Russian Masters.

  He stared into the eyes that couldn’t see him. Eyes that had, on three occasions, flashed with terror for what he might do to her. Now, gazing at her fixed, radiant smile, Evgeny brooded. Liesl, forgive me. I did not know the ones I served then. But now I do.

  He remembered his last words to her. He’d slipped into her dressing room at Avery Fisher Hall just moments before a performance and warned her about those he would serve no more. “Never stop watching them,” he’d told her. Regrettably, though, he had.

  After a quick scan of the street, he darted into the alley. At the back of the shop, he tapped lightly on the door and waited. When it opened, the spidery hand of Viktor Petrov reached to pull him inside. “Hurry! They are near!”

  “They found me?”

  “Yes. You cannot return to the apartment.”

  Evgeny searched the older man’s face, the hollows beneath his fierce eyes, the sagging jowls that belied the ramrod strength that had sustained his double life. The old-guard member of the KGB secret police had transitioned easily into that agency’s post-Soviet successor, the Federal Security Service. Viktor Petrov had served the new Russian Federation with exemplary dedication—while secretly plotting with other revolutionaries to overthrow it.

  But no longer. He and Evgeny had penetrated the heroic, all-for-the-people veneer of Vadim Fedorovsky’s anarchist movement to discover its corroded underside. Fedorovsky and his mounting legion of Kremlin and military recruits had so dazzled themselves with the promise of a powerful new Russian empire that they had cultivated a callous disregard for the everyday plight of their own people.

  “But how?” Evgeny rasped as he slipped inside the store, his joints protesting the cold. “No one ever finds me.” He raked his fingers through his dark, thinning hair. His fifties had pressed hard against him, and he’d felt himself begin to wither.

  “My friend, you are not as invisible as you once were,” Viktor said. “Somehow, you left a trail. And now you must flee. But first, there are things you must know.�
�� He motioned for Evgeny to follow him to a small room in the back of the bookstore where they’d met several times before. Viktor had once saved the store’s owner from arrest and certain imprisonment for his part in a riotous demonstration against the sitting president. The owner had given Viktor a key and unrestricted access.

  Without turning on a light, Viktor set a small flashlight on a shelf and aimed its beam toward the wall, allowing only a dim glow in which to see each other. “Sit,” Viktor instructed. “We do not have long.”

  Evgeny pulled a straight-backed chair beneath him and waited. Viktor eyed him gravely. “It is far worse than we thought. I have just struck the richest vein of intelligence yet. Hear this. For all his authority, Fedorovsky is only a puppet and always has been, even before he went to prison.” When Evgeny’s brow arched, Viktor held up a hand to halt interruption. “Just listen. There is someone else who commands Fedorovsky and his coconspirator Pavel Andreyev. Someone who is the mastermind of it all. He is called the Architect by the few who know he even exists, a man removed from Russia but whose roots are deep in her intelligence network. He has immense wealth and power beyond our own president.”

  Viktor paused long enough for Evgeny to respond, “Do you know this man?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?” Already, Evgeny’s mind calculated the inevitable mission of stopping him.

  “It is believed he operates from the sea, headquartered on one vessel or another within his fleet. He could be anywhere in the world.”

  “Fleet?”

  “This is a man of uncommon means. He—” Viktor quickly raised a quieting hand and looked toward the open door to the room. “Listen,” he whispered.

  Evgeny leaned far enough to peer through the doorway, but he saw and heard nothing. Then a beam of light pierced the front window and arced through the store. He jerked back out of sight and glanced at the flashlight above him. Dousing it would only signal that someone was in the room.

  Already hidden, Viktor remained still, but Evgeny could hear him wheeze. When the light retreated and didn’t return, Evgeny leaned forward in his chair and whispered, “A policeman making rounds.” It was both a statement and a hope. Surely his skills hadn’t failed him so miserably that he’d led others of his own trade to this place and to his trusted compatriot.

  A cautious interval passed before either spoke again. Then, “There is something else,” Viktor said, his shoulders sagging. “Your uncle and cousins.”

  Evgeny stopped breathing. But he already knew, in the way that assassins such as he knew death and those who forced it on others.

  “They are all dead,” Viktor announced bitterly.

  “When?” Evgeny struggled to ask.

  “Last night, as they slept.”

  Through the years, others had met the same fate at Evgeny’s own hand. How dare he mourn now. But how could he not? These innocent peasants had died for no other reason than their tenuous kinship with him. A solitary spy, Evgeny had long since severed the distant and fragile ties to family, to spare himself and them any harmful entanglements.

  Fedorovsky had ordered their execution even from prison, Evgeny was certain. His late mother’s brother and his two sons, the last of his family, had scraped a bare living from the soil with no hope of improving their lot. Evgeny was certain they had never heard of Fedorovsky, never knew of the man’s raging quest to overtake their country. They wouldn’t have cared anyway. Their country could fail them no worse under his reign than at the hands of all the despots past.

  “I am very sorry,” Viktor offered.

  But Evgeny had already shifted from the hateful news to something within his control. Vengeance. “I must go,” he told Viktor as he rose from the chair.

  “Where?”

  “Someplace where Fedorovsky’s people will not look for me.” Evgeny hoisted his backpack to his shoulders. “His house.”

  Chapter 2

  The next night, Evgeny’s SUV slowed at the entrance to Vadim Fedorovsky’s country home, about eighty miles from Moscow. He was grateful to find no fresh blanket of snow as in the city, no untouched canvas for him to imprint with telltale proof of his visit. With headlights extinguished and guided by a waning moon, he shifted to four-wheel drive and turned into the rutted slush of the lane, certain his tracks would be largely indistinguishable from those already laid, some recently, judging from the clear tread marks. The patrols, no doubt.

  He bounced along the lane toward the handsome old dacha, its rock walls and dark timbers visible through a skeletal troop of aspens. Its owner had been confined to a prison cell for just over a year. Evgeny feared prison wouldn’t hold Fedorovsky for long, though.

  Evgeny had been here once before, when he was still a loyal soldier of the anarchy spawned along the back corridors of the Kremlin under the breeding hand of veteran intelligence officers Vadim Fedorovsky and Pavel Andreyev. The home had been the movement’s outpost, a safe house whose secrets were kept in files Evgeny had only glimpsed during that one prior visit to these woods. Surely they had been removed by those who’d arrested Fedorovsky for the attempted assassination of the president and other crimes against the state. But Evgeny would conduct his own search.

  Despite the fine sleet plinking against his windshield, he stopped the vehicle and lowered his window to listen. The night was still. He raised the window and moved on toward the house.

  Because Fedorovsky’s loyals believed Viktor Petrov was still one of them, Evgeny’s old friend had gained limited access to a bank of communications between operatives within the secret movement, enough to determine their watch on the incarcerated leader’s Moscow apartment and his dacha.

  Evgeny hoped the information Viktor had gathered was correct. Patrols checked the house twice a week but according to no discernible schedule. He knew the risk of being here, but there had to be something inside to lead Evgeny to this phantom Architect, the one who killed, not championed, the people—Evgeny’s people, his pitiable fringe of family and all the others who’d toiled under oppression.

  When he finally rolled to a stop behind the house, Evgeny pulled the gun from his pocket and pat-checked the bulk of ammunition still inside. Then he strapped on the critical backpack with its tools, falsified passports and identification, currencies, backup weapons, and trace-secure phones. When he got out, he didn’t close the door, didn’t move, only listened and watched. Then making his way slowly through the trees, he reached the back door of the house.

  He stopped abruptly. Where was his plan of escape? Viktor was right. His wits had dulled during the last year of dormancy. He turned toward the distant logging trail Fedorovsky had once pointed out to him, then headed back to his vehicle.

  Fifteen minutes later, he had moved the SUV a short way down the trail and into an overhang of wild brush, camouflaging it further with branches stripped from young trees. He doubted such a move was necessary, especially on such a brutally cold night when even Fedorovsky’s most devoted security guards would surely prefer to turn over beneath their down comforters and go back to sleep.

  He returned through the ice-crusted field and glanced up at the slope rising behind the house. About fifteen yards up a rocky path was a storm shelter Fedorovsky had built into the bank. He sneered. Imagine, the executioner of innocent peasants afraid of the weather.

  It took little time for the veteran spy to disengage the security and locking systems on the house. When he slipped inside, he was glad to see the drapes drawn and to feel even a minimal discharge of musty heat. He switched to a flashlight capped with red tape to filter the light. The crimson glow was enough to lead him through the house, though he knew already where he would begin his search.

  For what, he didn’t know.

  On his way through the opulently furnished dining and living rooms, he allowed only passing notice of the late Mrs. Fedorovsky’s penchant for ruby glassware, embroidered table scarves, and expensive samovars ringed by porcelain tea cups fit for royalty. But the grand piano b
eside one window made him pause and remember.

  Fedorovsky had been a music professor at the Moscow Conservatory, beloved by students and faculty alike, none of whom knew of his simultaneous, subterranean career as a KGB spy and Kremlin power broker. For many years, Fedorovsky had worked in tandem with his American counterpart, Harvard music professor Schell Devoe.

  Evgeny flashed back to the afternoon when, at Fedorovsky’s orders, he pumped three bullets into Devoe after the CIA had turned him to work for them—an execution witnessed by Liesl Bower. He closed his eyes and saw her face, heard her scream. He would never forget. Now, he gazed at the graceful lines of the instrument that sounded with such beauty and purity. How had Fedorovsky compromised such a thing with the instruments of death?

  Quickly dismissing the troubling muse, he shifted toward the study off the living room and moved to a heavily carved walnut desk. He found its two file drawers empty, as he’d feared, then looked around the room. Only a couple of lounge chairs and a bookcase crammed with little more than pulp fiction filled the cozy room. Just then, Evgeny remembered the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. Fedorovsky had converted it to a workshop for his and his wife’s jigsaw puzzles, a favorite winter pastime. But it also held two more file cabinets, one with a collection of photographs. In that room, Fedorovsky had given Evgeny photos of Liesl Bower, after ordering him to capture and later dispose of her—an assignment Evgeny was grateful he had failed. It was the code Liesl had found hidden in her music, left there by her professor, Schell Devoe, that led to Fedorovsky’s and Andreyev’s arrests.

  Taking the steps two at a time, Evgeny entered the workroom and headed straight for the cabinets. Empty. He closed the drawers and wandered back down the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs. His gaze fell on the piano below, and something sent him bounding down the steps. When he reached the fine ebony instrument, he laid the flashlight down, lifted the heavy curved lid, and affixed the support. Retrieving the light, he searched the stringed cavity beneath. Nothing. He squatted before the low music cabinet alongside. Nothing on top or inside it. The arresting officers had swept the house clean of evidence.