Chapter 1
Prison Colony No. 5, Central
Siberia
February 15
06:45 hours
Peter Ivanovich Rogov expected all hell to break
loose, and he was well aware of the fact that any deviation from the plan
could render him dead. Either way, he regarded it as a gamble worth
taking. No matter what happened he would be free from this frozen abyss.
After six years in this barren scrap of purgatory, the chance of freedom,
no matter how slim, was worth taking.
Few places on Earth were as inhospitable as Prison
Colony No. 5-or, as the prisoners referred to it, "the grave"-on
a winter morning. Little, if anything, ever changed in the grave, except
perhaps the weather, and that was always for the worse. Peter raised his
frayed coat collar, shielding his face from the freezing wind that howled
across the desolate, color-starved valley, pushing clouds of swirling snow
in its wake through the razor wire and electric fences.
The prison colony was perched on a hill overlooking
the nuclear bomb factory known as Tomsk-7. Guard towers rose high on solid
timber stilts and loomed over the rectangular prison compound. Powerful
spotlights and heavy Gurianov machine guns mounted on each tower probed
the grounds day and night. The prison administration building and guards’
barracks were outside the fence, beyond a deep moat surrounding the camp
like an ugly scar. Except for the shrinking food rations and a decline in
the guards’ discipline, which manifested itself in their sloppy attire and
rowdy behavior, the prison was a living monument to a dead regime.
Peter, found guilty of treason for his part in the
failed coup against then-President Mikhail Gorbachev, had been sentenced
to life with hard labor. He found it ironic that he, a devoted guardian of
the revolution, was called a traitor, while those who sold out the
motherland, aiding in the collapse of an empire, were honored. That, he
vowed, he would soon change.
He heard a truck grinding its gears in the distance.
He squinted his pale blue eyes in an attempt to catch a glimpse of it
through the arctic veil of blowing snow. His thin lips twitched in what
the few who knew him would call a smile.
"Lev!" Peter hissed to the frail man
beside him who was busy stomping his feet to keep his meager body from
freezing. "It’s time."
"Yes, sir," the little man muttered, his
breath icing up his sparse mustache.
"Tell the others to get ready!" Peter
commanded.
Lev nodded and headed for the inmates’ quarters.
Drawing one last puff from his yellow, foul-smelling
cigarette, Peter watched Lev hobble across the central yard. As soon as
Lev entered the first in a row of dilapidated barracks, Peter flicked the
smoldering cigarette butt to the ground and headed to the long woodshed at
the other end of the camp, passing a row of prisoners huddled by the
kitchen exhaust shaft, attempting to draw some heat from it. They stood
with their backs to the wind, waiting for what the camp administration
cynically referred to as breakfast. They were too busy keeping themselves
from freezing while protecting their place in line to even notice him.
Although Peter wore the same tattered gray uniform
and coat as the other inmates, he stood out, shoulders pulled back, chin
forward in defiance, unmistakably a general, the kind men fear and admire,
an ex-KGB brigadier general eager to make his comeback.
A guard entered the latrine just as Peter had
approached it. Peter stopped a few feet from the filthy door and made a
futile attempt to light another cigarette against the wind. Precious
moments were being lost, but there was nothing to do but wait. When the
guard finally straddled out, still battling his fly with his heavy mitten,
Peter slipped in. The stench almost overwhelmed him as he headed for the
second stall from the end. He could hear the old truck rumbling in the
distance; his ticket to freedom was making its way down the road. The only
consolation in that dark, foul latrine was the refuge it offered from the
wind, providing an illusion of warmth.
Peter leaned against the outer wall and waited,
listening intensely for sounds as he tried to visualize his plan unfolding
a mile and half down the wind-swept road.
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