Angel Eyes by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-04-28T17:36:20+00:00

EIGHT

ARKHANGELSKOE/STAR TOWN/MOSCOW/TOKYO

"Comrade, have you heard the latest news? They've done it again."

"Who's done it again?" Valeri said.

"White Star," the young man with the strawberry birthmark said. "Their elite cadres are better armed, more well-trained. White Star is no longer merely a ragtag guerrilla organization made up of disparate dissident minorities. They are a full-fledged army now. And elements of this new army have attacked the Kyshtym Industrial Complex. It is entirely destroyed!"

Valeri Bondasenko was sitting on the bench overlooking the large birch tree, outpost of the forest on the other side of which were the grounds of Arkhangelskoe. On one side of him was the young man with the strawberry birthmark, on the other, his daughter, silent, imperturbable. At their backs, up the sloping incline, bulked the almost Victorian exterior of the insane asylum.

''Is that so?'' Valeri said. ''I had heard the story differently. I had heard that there was a low-level nuclear event at the complex, but that it was under control." Kyshtym, for almost fifty years, had been the site of the Soviet Union's main military atomic reactors. Three years ago, a massive overhaul of the aging units had begun. But only after a series of scrupulously unreported events-leaks, explosions, and the like-had killed one-third of the people who worked at Kyshtym, and who lived in a nearby city so secret it was without a name.

The young man laughed. "Where do you get your information, comrade? Tass?'' He chuckled, shook his head in disbelief. When he spoke he looked ahead, never at Valeri. "Really! The gullibility of some people."

He seemed to have drifted off, and was talking to himself, and Valeri began once again to consider the enormous miscalculation the president made when he began to replace the central Communist party with his own handpicked people. Cults were dangerous. If anything in Russia's recent history had been made manifest it was that.

The president had needed some form of stability to hold the center together while he gathered his cult around him, and he had most unwisely chosen the military to aid him. In return for their help, he had promised-and delivered-more and more money to the generals' annual budget. This had created a serious shortfall in the other national sectors in dire need of money.

Now the president was paying the fearful price of consolidating his power in the form of strikes, local uprisings, the disintegration of the economy, the appalling Western characteristic of the polarization of the classes, and the concomitant rise to power of White Star.

Valeri shivered, trying to free his mind from its turmoil. He slipped his hand into his daughter's, as if this could reassure her that he was here with her. He wanted so much to see even the slightest hint of a reaction, a sense that there was the spark of consciousness in her mind, that she might be thinking, I know you're with me, Daddy, and it makes me feel better.

But then the young man spoke directly to Valeri. "No, no, comrade. It was White Star.

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