By Eminent Domain td-124 Page 16

  He trained hard and long. And when his time finally came, Lavrenty Skachkov-the prodigy that everyone said could not lose-lost to an opponent no one expected. History.

  December 25, 1991, brought an end to the Soviet Union. The entire Russian Olympic training program collapsed with the old Communist regime.

  Lavrenty had bought into the promises of the state and of his coaches. When Russia collapsed, Lavrenty Skachkov saw his dreams collapse, as well.

  For years his creature comforts-though few in number-were supplied by the state. But with little money offered by this new democratic government, Lavrenty was forced to find a job to subsidize his own training. The strain on his regimen dashed forever his Olympic dreams.

  It was too humiliating to bear. After twelve years away from home, he returned in defeat to Sevastopol, where he crawled inside a vodka bottle. There he marinated.

  Lavrenty might have followed-albeit belatedly-the pattern established by all preceding Skachkov males if not for one fateful day.

  He was in the squalid apartment he shared with a raunchy Russian techno-punk band. When the pounding started at eight in the morning, Lavrenty, who was still hungover from the night before, assumed it was the band rehearsing. It took several bleary moments to realize that someone was at the door.

  Head spinning, Lavrenty staggered to answer it. The impatient figure standing in the filthy, urine-soaked hallway wore a look of haughty disdain. "You are drunk," his visitor said in introduction. Lavrenry didn't remember much after that. The effort to open the door had been too much for him. As the stranger's face soured, Lavrenty's world spun crazily around his head. Spewing vomit, the former Soviet star athlete passed out.

  When he awoke on his torn sofa it was afternoon.

  The apartment had only one window. Brilliant yellow sunlight streamed in through the torn black shade. Lavrenty tried to blink the pain from his eyes. When he rolled his head to one side, he found he wasn't alone. The threadbare easy chair across from the couch was occupied.

  "You are disgusting," his visitor sneered. "You live like a pig. This apartment is filthy."

  "Who the hell are you?" Lavrenty snarled. Hand pressed to his forehead, he sat up.

  "I am the person who is about to give you an offer that you do not deserve."

  Bloodshot eyes suspicious, Lavrenty pushed to his feet. "It sounds like I'll need a drink for this," he said.

  "Don't bother. I dumped all the liquor down the sink while you were unconscious."

  Already halfway to the tiny kitchen, Lavrenty stopped. The apartment continued to spin.

  "You what?" he demanded.

  "Alcohol is not permitted in your new training regimen," his visitor said calmly.

  With those words it was suddenly all very clear. Lavrenty's shoulders drooped and he fell against the nearby wall for support. "No, not again," he moaned.

  "I am not with the Russian Olympic team. I have nothing to do with your silly running games. I am offering you something new. Something that you might not deserve and that you certainly do not now have. I offer you a life, a future. Both rare commodities in Russia at the present time. You need only say yes and your life changes today."

  Lavrenty was still leaning against the wall. It was greasy. The floor was worse. Moldy and rotted. Rats scurried around it at night.

  "I have heard this promise before," the former athlete said weakly. There was surrender in his voice. His visitor leaned forward. "No, you haven't. Before when they came for you, you could not decline." The truth of his visitor's words hung heavy in the fetid apartment air.

  The stranger stood. "You will have food and shelter. There is no drink, and the training is difficult, but it is a better life than you will ever have here."

  Lavrenty dragged his eyes around the dirty apartment. His gaze finally settled on his guest.

  "What is the name of the person for whom I will be working?" he asked with tired acceptance. There was not a hint of satisfaction on his visitor's pale, chiseled face.

  "My name is Anna Chutesov," she said crisply. And a glimmer of something that might have been regret touched the depths of her blue eyes.

  A BLACK VAN WHISKED Lavrenty Skachkov to the airport that afternoon. By nightfall he was in Moscow. His training at the Institute began the next day.

  Those first two years were a living nightmare. Everything he had learned as an Olympic athlete had to be unlearned. The lessons were endless. The instructors far more demanding than those in the Olympic training facilities.

  He watched them in action a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand times.

  The two men carried themselves with a grace of movement that was impossible, nearly inhuman. The first few hundred lessons, he couldn't unravel the complexity. When at last he saw the truth, he realized that it was simplicity disguised as complexity. At the same time the opposite was true. And in that paradox was their secret.

  They never spoke. Never said a single word to Lavrenty. Yet they became his greatest teachers. One moved with a skittering grace, the other with a confident glide. They seemed able to appear and disappear at will.

  "May I speak with them?" Lavrenty asked Anna Chutesov one afternoon after his first few months of training.

  Anna glanced at Lavrenty's two teachers. A strange expression settled on her beautiful face. "No, you may not," she said quietly, as if afraid they might overheat.

  "Then you tell me," Lavrenry whispered in awe. "How do they do what they do?"

  "I don't know," Anna admitted. "But if you follow their example properly, you may one day be able to do the same."

  Lavrenty couldn't believe it. Yet he had signed on to the program, called Mactep, and so had no choice. In an underground training chamber, Lavrenty was covered with grease-smeared electrodes. His silent teachers joined him. Technicians were in a sealed booth above the chamber to monitor his progress. Success went unrewarded. Failure was punished with excruciating electric shocks. Lavrenty received many shocks during his first months of training.

  It was frustrating beyond belief. Much harder than the training he had endured in his youth. Most times he was certain that he could never succeed.

  Then one day, when he least expected it, he actually matched a move.

  Lavrenty was shocked. It was a small thing. A mere baby step compared to the abilities of his teachers. But to Lavrenty, it was life-changing. In that moment the impossible became possible.

  A few more arduous years followed, during which Lavrenty eventually matched every move made by his teachers. When he was done, he couldn't believe how easy it had been. There was an obviousness to it all that should have been evident to him on that very first day.

  A handful of others had preceded him in the program. These, he learned, had used their skills to protect the Institute from the mobs at the end of the Communist age. They had christened their skills in blood.

  Lavrenty was better than them all. He surpassed the skills of all who came before or after him in the program. His superior ability inspired awe in the men with whom he shared quarters in that big, ominous building in Kitai Gorod. So revered was he that the others bestowed the program designation on him. Lavrenty became Mactep to them. Master.

  Yet all his awesome skills were for naught. While some of the others had been able to put their lesser talents to use during the prodemocracy uprising, the great Master Lavrenty Skachkov was given no such chance.

  When his training was complete, Lavrenty had gone to see Anna Chutesov.

  She was in her small basement office. The big floor safe in the corner was open. As Lavrenty stood before her desk, he noted the rows of videotapes lined up on the shelves at the back of the safe.

  "What is it, Lavrenty?" Anna had asked.

  "I was wondering, Director Chutesov," he said, "when I would be allowed to test my skills." As he spoke, he rotated his wrists absently.

  "We already test your skills daily," Anna had replied.

  "Not here," he insisted. "I mean in the real
world. Others have been used before me. When will I get my chance?"

  Anna set her hands to her desk, her fingers interlocked.

  "When will I permit you to kill-is that what you want to know?" she asked.

  The twitch of one eye told her that this was his desire.

  "We are agents to be deployed, are we not?"

  "No," Anna answered evenly. "You are something else entirely. And if I have my way, you will never see active duty." Before he could object, she plowed on. "The men you have spoken to were sent by me to disperse the crowds during the days of civil unrest. It was an action not undertaken lightly and done only for the specific purpose of protecting the secrets of the Institute. Once the crowds left us alone, the men were withdrawn."

  "So we are a counterinsurgency force," Lavrenty said, still wrestling with his confusion.

  Anna shook her head. "You are a mistake, Lavrenty," she replied. "One for which I am responsible and one that the idiot men in power have seized upon." Her voice softened as she considered what had brought them to this point. "Before I became director of this agency, there was a plan to bring a pair of American agents over here to work for the Institute. That plan failed. Unwittingly, I offered those in the Kremlin another chance. Over my objections, they seized on it. All you have been through-all the pain, the sweat, the endless training-is the product of a stupid idea."

  As she spoke, Lavrenty could feel his world slowly shrinking. "But what is our purpose?" he asked.

  "To keep our idiot leaders happy," Anna replied. "Perhaps to keep them from making any rash decisions when dealing with America, although I think that time has long passed. We continued to do what we do here now because things were set in motion ten years ago and it is impossible to get a man to stop doing a stupid thing if he believes it to be smart. Ultimately, Lavrenty, you and the others are weapons that will never be used."

  Harsher medicine Lavrenty Skachkov had never taken. All of the years, the electric shocks. All for nothing.

  When he returned to the barracks to tell the others, morale at the Institute collapsed more completely than had the old Soviet system. All the men there had assumed they were being prepared for some higher purpose. The truth was almost too much for them to bear.

  For the next few months, Lavrenty and the others went through the motions. They engaged in their training-much of which was now handled personally by Master Lavrenty-but it was hollow exercise. Life without purpose.

  Lavrenty considered escape. They were meant to be enrolled in the Mactep program for life, but with the skills he now possessed it would be impossible for them to stop him. Yet these men belonged to him and he to them. They were part of a fraternity like no other. And so he stayed.

  His pointless life at the Institute had begun to feel much like his life of drunken despair in Sevastopol, when fate once more intervened to rescue Lavrenty Skachkov.

  He was on summer leave from the Institute. Instead of going home, he remained in Moscow. On the first evening of his vacation he went for a stroll through Gorky Park. Walking along a winding path, Lavrenty came across a small crowd. Men and women formed a circle around a speaker who stood on an upended Absolut crate. The man had wild graying hair, a big bushy mustache and unblinking black eyes that seemed to target every member of his audience like twin rifle scopes.

  Lavrenty listened to Vladimir Zhirinsky rant and rave for over three hours. The sun had long fallen and the last of the crowd dispersed before the ultranationalist finally climbed down from his makeshift stage. By then he had already won over a new convert to his cause.

  Zhirinsky wasn't entirely accepting at first. In fact, when Lavrenty went to introduce himself, the former Russian senator snapped his teeth like an angry dog. Only when the man who had been standing before him vanished and Zhirinsky found that he was not savoring a mouthful of nose did he start to get an inkling that there was something odd about this late-night encounter.

  "Where did you go?" Zhirinsky asked the shadows of the park. His black eyes were slivers. "Trotsky?" he questioned softly. "Kosygin?" His voice grew awed, as if he scarcely dared entertain the notion. "Stalin?"

  A tap on his shoulder. He wheeled.

  He saw the young man again. Short white hair. Delicate features. Like a woman's. This was not one of the great leaders of days long past, come back to aid him in his struggle against the lapdogs of the West now in the Kremlin.

  If he was not going to get help from the heroes of the Revolution, he was at least going to get a meal. His brief moment of hope dashed, Zhirinsky lashed out again. Again the man vanished.

  Only the second time did Zhirinsky realize something large indeed might be going on here. When he reappeared this time, the young man's delicate face was serious.

  "Comrade," Lavrenty said, surprised by how happy it made him to use the old form of address, "we need to talk."

  That night Lavrenty broke the most important rule of the Institute. He told an outsider precisely what was going on in that somber building with the bricked-up windows.

  For his part Vladimir Zhirinsky had a hard time controlling his drool, let alone his joy.

  Together that very night, the two men hatched a scheme that would liberate the others from the Institute. Zhirinsky already had plans for Mother Russia. With the addition of these specially trained forces to the mix, he was more certain than ever that he could achieve his goals.

  The only real problem would be Anna Chutesov. She was never away from the Institute for more than a few hours at a time. While Zhirinsky suggested they kill the pesky woman and leave with their heads held high, Lavrenty could not bring himself to do the deed. Director Chutesov had been the only person in his life who had ever made clear promises to him without ever breaking a single one.

  With Anna there, they could not just up and leave, for she apparently had ties to the highest level of government. She would alert the army were they to defect.

  And even his men might have difficulty against the entire Russian army.

  The solution came as a surprise nine months after Lavrenty's first chance meeting with Vladimir Zhirinsky.

  Anna Chutesov had summoned Lavrenty to her office to tell him she was going away. An assignment had come up, and she had been ordered to leave at once. Since the other men looked up to Lavrenry as their leader, she put him in charge of them during her absence. The way she spoke that day, it sounded almost as if she expected not to return.

  She was gone no more than an hour when Vladimir Zhirinsky's rusted-out Zil pulled to a coughing stop before the Institute building.

  Lavrenty met the ultranationalist at the curb. With a simple downward stroke of his hand, the Institute's reigning Master broke the chain on the driveway fence and led the former senator down into the heart of modern Russia's most closely guarded secret.

  The others didn't know of his betrayal. They were shocked when he walked into their barracks with an outsider.

  They all recognized Vladimir Zhirinsky. Many there agreed with his political views. Jaws dropped. Eyes looked to Lavrenty for an explanation while the ultranationaiist silently toured the rows of worn beds and battered bureaus.

  At the far end of the barracks, Zhirinsky had stopped, turning slowly. His black eyes were dully accusing.

  "Is this a kennel?" Zhirinsky had asked quietly. No one said a word. Initial confusion was slowly giving away to a sense of creeping hope. Zhirinsky's bushy eyebrows formed an angry V. "Have they removed your tongues as well as your will to fight for Mother Russia?" he exploded.

  Fire lit in his dark eyes, igniting sparks in their own. Without even realizing it, they snapped to attention. "No, sir!"

  The fire in his eyes grew cold.

  "I am not a 'sir,'" he spit in contempt. "I am your comrade. Your equal. And together we comrades will make them all fear once more the might of a united Russia!"

  When they saw Master Lavrenty cheer, the others knew they had finally found their special purpose. In the person of Vladimir Zhirinsky, they had the
ir savior.

  A cheer rose up from the buried basement of the Institute building, like a chorus of lost souls, muffled by dirt and concrete and the hum of passing cars.

  And through it all, a smile remained plastered to the delicate face of Lavrenty Skachkov. He was finally going to be able to fulfill his purpose in life. The Mactep program had bestowed on him the powers of a god. With them, Lavrenty Skachkov was at long last going to be allowed to kill.

  THEY WERE GHOSTS. Shadows upon shadows, slipping silently through the streets of Fairbanks.

  Master Lavrenty led the Institute army. Here a lonely car moved. There a streetlamp sliced the night. The Russians avoided it all. Of the world, but not. According to Zhirinsky, the city of forty thousand would be an easy target. By the standards of the contiguous United States, it was a small town. But it was along the pipeline route, and so served a strategic purpose.

  They had abandoned their trucks and helicopters well outside of town, coming in from the north.

  Fort Wainwright lay sleeping beyond the Chena River on the east side of town. The Russians steered clear of the Army base. The clock had long struck midnight by the time they made their cautious way along First Avenue.

  Lavrenty found the flatbed trailer precisely where it was supposed to be. Parked along the side of the road. Smuggled in so easily. Like all of their equipment.

  Comrade Zhirinsky was right. Openness fed weakness. The Americans were too trusting. And for that, Master Lavrenty thought, they would pay dearly.

  Huge tarpaulins-lashed down with heavy rope and chains-hid the vehicle's cargo from view. Even so, the long cylindrical outline was visible beneath the dirty tarps.

  Lavrenty and the others stayed to the shadows. On cautious, gliding feet they approached the truck. The street was empty. Other than the rattling of the tarpaulins, the only sound came from a tiny scrap of paper that flapped in the wind under the windshield wiper of the truck's flat-nosed cab.

  Lavrenty wore his goggles and white mask. He pulled them off now as he crept up the side of the truck. Cold wind stirred his short hair.