Moscow was colder than Dmitri Papov remembered.
Baltimore's unique, wind-and-rain brand of freezing had deadened his nerves and his skin to devastating effect. General Winter would no doubt be unkind to him. That old ally already skimmed the ground and draped the air in snow. He sat on a bench on a suburban street corner, two sea green tanks big enough for two men to fit inside next to him. Dmitri's disguise that he'd worn to meetings with his spymasters was criminally underprepared to keep out the freezing wind. It was December. Where the hell were they?!
He breathed visibly in the chill air and gnashed his teeth. The commissars traveled at the pace of old dogs. Dmitri glances down at the two tanks, worry in his expressive eyebrows. It was just like them to demand marksman's punctuality out of their agents and not bother to show up on time themselves. Whether they kept him waiting on a concrete block in the rain or a bench in the wind, the process was the same. Dmitri bit back more colorful thoughts. The KGB officials paid him and agents like him well, if they survived. That was more than he could say for many of his countrymen. Sounds emanate from the tank to his right. They were like a beast's, as if the containers held angry whales thrashing and yearning for freedom. He checks his watch again, bedeviled. Where the hell were they?!
Frost has crept into the crevices of the teal metal tanks, which for all their technological grandeur can't do battle with mother nature forever. The see-through ports on the tops had begun to film over, the warmth of their contents and the sub-zero oblivion of Russian winter stalmating on the glass. Baltimore hadn't been cold enough. The package's temperature resistance hadn't ever been properly tested, Dmitri remembers. He bites his nails. If its place of origin is taken into account, it shouldn't be able to last more than a half day out here, tank or no. His wasted years in enemy territory, capitalist territory, away from family and friends with not even his identity to keep him together, would be wasted if they did not get here right now.
Where the hell were they?!
Like a flight of valkyries out of the beyond, they come.
Black cars, five in number, come around the corner in autonomous fashion. The vehicle in the back is larger, with an equally midnight painted trailer tailing it. Dmitri sighs in relief, his shivers momentarily forgotten in the heat of success. Be it by American or Soviet hands, the entities within these tanks will remain alive. A memory flashes in his mind. I don't want an intricate, beautiful thing destroyed! A smirk colder than corpses. Green, oddly scented candy, no doubt produced by proletariat workers slaving away in American factories.
It fades as the last vehicle stops next to him. Clanks from inside the trailer reach Dmitri's ear, and a rough voice barks commands in Russian. The door opens from the top down.
Five Red Army infantrymen, fur coats tight around their bodies and gloved fingers snug on the triggers of their PPSh-41 submachine guns, erupt from the trailer. They cordon the road. Eyes piercing from underneath their shapkas, they beckon Dmitri into the compartment, and two of them haul the mighty green sarcophagi in after him. Dmitri catches a glimpse of their rifles as he is filed into darkness, and suddenly he smells blood and hears cries for mercy in German. The soldiers follow him into the unlit trailer, and close the doors behind him. The car begins to move. Darkness continues to hush the space, and Dmitri ponders his situation. He'd brought them what they wanted, made his country proud, hadn't he? The ride he's on now has all the earmarks of ending with his brains blown all over a snowy Moscow alleyway. Did Mihalkov relay some order from the premier he had forgotten to carry out?
The light snaps on, flickering slightly. As if Lenin himself had ordained it, there he was.
"Ah, Dmitri!" Mihalkov exclaimed in Russian. He clapped his hands together. Behind the old man, his burly accomplice, Arkady, stood resolute. "How was your trip? I am sorry I could not arrange for a few grunts to help you drag these from the airstrip." He taps a hand upon one of the tanks. Unlike its companion, still trembling and noisy, this one is still. Dmitri looks around. His mouth hangs open and his brow contorts in defeat. Eyes beneath glasses trace each of the soldiers around them. They are silent, indefatigable in their impersonations of statues. If Dmitri's expression of you're kidding amused them, they didn't show it. Dmitri's hat is off now, and the heavyset man runs a hand through his stress-ravaged hair.
"Is this the same remorse I was showed when you were too busy taking pleasure in American dining to listen to me?" Dmitri says, and the syllables are strained, the anger inside him too big to sound natural coming from his small mouth.
Mihalkov dodges the question. He brings Dmitri close to him with one arm, too friendly for the other man's comfort. "How is it to be back home? Does the Motherland still drop your jaw with her splendor?"
"It is cold."
Mihalkov smiles and sets his jaw, in the same wholly hostile way that Dmitri remembers Strickland did. Dmitri does the same, more out of quiet rage than whatever hidden things his comrade's heart holds. The car lurches, and he falls upon one of the tanks. His body curves around the cylindrical glass of it, and Dmitri's vision is enveloped by green waters.
Mihalkov pats him on the back and hoists him back up. "We are descending, comrade! You are not behind enemy lines anymore. No need to shield your projects." Dmitri brushes his hand away, and when he feels his feet slip a fraction of an inch towards the front of the trailer and the blood in his head flow ever so slightly to his right ear, he knows Mihalkov is right. They must be going through some kind of service tunnel. Underground, definitely. The drop in temperature can only be from the concrete boxing them in. Where are they? It cannot be a nuclear bunker. Hostilities of that rapturous magnitude couldn't have started yet. Even had they, why bring him? Dmitri was an asset, a tool to the commissars the same as a hammer or sickle was a tool of the worker. He was unimportant. That conclusion also answered question two in his head. They also cannot be in some kind of classified Party meeting. There was no sound reason for Dmitri to attend such a meeting, any more than it would have been for Strickland or Fleming to be privy to the whims or bureaus of their own John F. Kennedy.
Dmitri also does not feel as though he is no longer behind enemy lines.
The downward angle of the vehicle realigns and becomes horizontal again. After a few minutes of mental cursing and goblin glances at Mihalkov behind his back, the engine dies and Dmitri feels the car slow and stop. Clanking, the doors open and the soldiers march out like centurions of old. Dmitri, by comparison, shuffles like Frankenstein's Monster, turquoise tanks in tow.
The room that delivers him from the Twilight Zone of the car trailer is . . . familiar. He had witnessed its likeness far away, in a rain driven grey forest full of broken people. Clearly, the lab layout notes he had provided to Mihalkov had laid their roots deep and omnipotent in Moscow. It was nearly the same as OCCAM's T - 4 laboratory where Dmitri had learned so much. The tunnel they had been driven through is denied to them by a heavy, mechanized door, no doubt to keep out the cold. Humming of heating fans, rumbling above Dmitri's thin-haired head, confirm his suspicions. Instead of a smaller, treated - water pen in the right corner of the room, a larger one, nearly twice the size of the American model, occupied the center. Greenish chemical supplement littered the surface of the water like chops of garlic. Collared chains hung from the ceiling and the upright, glassed tank he had seen in Baltimore had been doubled. One lay at each end of the room, pedestals at their bases bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle. Other socialist paraphernalia dashed the walls in odd places, posters similar to those Dmitri had seen in OCCAM's women's locker room. When he'd confronted the cleaners.
"Our technicians bore some ripe fruit from your work, Dmitri," Mihalkov says. He gestures an aged hand to the display before them. "You are lucky that Arkady and I were delayed in leaving the States. To hear that there would be two of them . . . doubling a feat of engineering like this takes time, comrade."
"Imagine all of the knowledge we have denied the Americans!" Another door, to what Dmitri assumed was the rest of the buried facility, opened. In walked the youthful and pudgy Chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny. The younger man beamed as he walked in, medals and stripes aglow like stars on his uniform.
"Chairman!" Mihalkov exclaimed, rushing towards Semichastny and clasping his hand. The two shake, and Semichastny offers his hand to Dmitri. He gives the Chairman a firm squeeze, curt and relaxed in the face.
"You ought to lighten up, Papov!" He said, waving a hand to the two tanks and the spectacle of science that was the room. "This was the greatest act of espionage in the history of the Union! The most secretive of American research, the most unassuming of hamlet towns. Stolen from right under their bourgeois noses and all by one man! I wouldn't be shocked if Khrushchev paid us a visit and pinned every medal he had on you! All of this, because of you." Semichastny saluted him in usual Soviet fashion. Dmitri didn't return it and preferred to smile a skin-deep smile at the Chairman.
Semichastny tapped him lightly on his cushioned ribs with his elbow. "You know," the hammer and sickle spangled man said. "We do have a bar the next floor up. They may have birthed the logistics of this place, Dmitri, but the Americans lack one thing we have : class. Come, drink, drink and forget the frightful days away from home!"
Was he serious? Dmitri had drunk the entire voyage from Baltimore to Leningrad. And, in the long train ride from Leningrad to Moscow, Dmitri had drunk still. He'd figured that he would do something stupid in the next few days to warrant his death, most likely from the smoking end of a Makarov. The package was his concern, and the moral directive to safeguard it was coming into conflict with his instinct to remain alive. With a wet breath of vodka in his mouth, the knife of his troubles was blunted into a spoon.
But, another concern plays in Dmitri's head, and it pilots him like a puppeteer. His head shakes no, that same smile he did not feel on the inside plastered on his face.
"I am a man of science, Chairman Semichastny. I'll forget those frightful days most easily with tools in my hands."
"Suit yourself," comes Semichastny's reply. "Come, comrades! I think I hear The Dark Eyes up the stairs!"
The Chairman, Mihalkov, Arkady, and the five soldiers file out of the room. To Semichastny's credit, The Dark Eyes is in fact wafting into the hall outside from above them. Dmitri hated the song.
As the laboratory door shuts, Dmitri strides to the sea-green tanks. They are side by side, like industrial rollers the color of American Cadillacs. He rotates them on the wheeled trolleys they'd come to the Soviet Union in, until the glass portion once again faces him.
He taps both tanks on the glass, three times, gently.
The package - packages - surface like Lovecraft's own Star-Spawn from the murky liquid.
In one tank, Elisa Esposito, signing what Dmitri guesses to be expletives at him while her gills flutter in rage.
In the other, the scaly Hercules that is the Asset, hissing and flaring every spine and fin on his body as the Russian looks upon him.
They both glare at him, silently irate, fuming, seething.
Dmitri wonders what he's changed by going home.