The Kremlin Conspiracy by Joel C. Rosenberg
“No!” Elena cried out when she heard that. Then she dissolved into tears.
Her body was trembling. Her lips were starting to turn blue. Marcus thought he’d seen everything. He’d been in combat. He’d seen friends die. He himself had been shot and nearly burned alive in the wastelands of Kandahar. He thought he’d become impervious to fear. But seeing his wife in such pain and seeing their baby experiencing such trauma was almost more than this Marine could bear.
“Doc, she wants a natural delivery,” Marcus said, his voice nearly faltering midsentence.
“I know,” said the ob-gyn. “But the baby can’t take much more.”
The doctor checked the monitors again. The baby’s heart rate was just 95.
“Mrs. Ryker, I’m going to ask you to push again,” she said. “You’re doing great. You’re doing everything I’m asking, and I want to give you the chance to try again. But if your baby’s heart rate drops too far, I’m going to do what we call a crash C-section. But don’t worry. I can have the baby out in thirty seconds. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Elena said nothing. She couldn’t. Tears were streaming down her face, but she was doing everything she could not to make a sound. Marcus knew why. She wanted to be strong. She didn’t want him to see her falling apart. But her hands were clammy. Her body was getting weaker. The whole thing was taking a terrible toll on both mother and baby, and Marcus was fighting back his own emotions. His bottom lip quivered. His eyes were moist. He was scared. Not for Elena. She was tough. She’d be fine. He was terrified that the baby—his little daughter or son; they still didn’t know which—might not pull through.
“Okay, Mrs. Ryker, take a deep breath and push one more time,” the doctor said.
Elena squeezed Marcus’s hand and did as she was told. Immediately the baby’s heart rate began to drop again: 90. Then 80. Then 70. Then 60. When it dropped under 60, the doctor made the call.
Marcus was pushed away from the table, and the team went to work. He couldn’t see everything that was going on, and it was all happening so fast. But he heard a gurgling sound as the scalpel plunged into his wife’s belly. He saw blood gushing from her, blood mixed with amniotic fluid. It was spraying everywhere. His hand immediately went to his mouth, covered though it was by the surgical mask. He felt light-headed. Tears poured from his eyes, though he dared not make a sound. He took several steps back, then felt the reassuring touch of a nurse’s hand on his arm. He’d seen more blood than this. On that mountainside in Afghanistan and in that cave. But he’d never seen it flowing out of his wife. He hadn’t prepared himself for this. Neither of them had. They’d never seriously considered a cesarean might really be necessary. That was foolish, of course. He’d been trained to not only consider but plan for every eventuality. But he hadn’t, and now he regretted it.
Elena had been given general anesthesia, so she was out cold, and for this he was grateful. Because the baby—covered in blood and mucus—was not crying, was not making a sound of any kind. Everything in him braced for the worst. This baby was dead. He was sure of it now. Elena was giving birth to a stillborn child. He was watching it happen with his own eyes, and when Elena awoke, he would have to be the one to tell her. He didn’t know if he could.
But suddenly he saw the legs begin to flutter, then heard a cry and then wailing.
No sound had ever seemed so precious.
“It’s a boy!” Marcus shouted as he rushed into the waiting room.
Marjorie Ryker burst into tears and flung her arms around him. “I don’t believe it,” she said as she held him tight. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Congratulations, Grandma,” he said. “How long have you waited to hear that?”
“Too long!” she cried. “Is he healthy?”
“Healthy and beautiful and I can’t wait for you to meet him.”
“Me, either,” she said, laughing through her tears, then finally let him go after a moment and fished some tissues out of her purse. “You should call your sisters,” she said as she dabbed her eyes. “They’ll be tickled pink.”
“Blue,” Marcus corrected.
“What?”
“It’s a boy, Mom—they’ll be tickled blue.”
She laughed again and the elevator dinged. When the doors opened, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia and Elena’s sisters—now teenagers—rushed out, flowers in hand. Mrs. Ryker couldn’t contain herself, blurting out the news before Marcus could, and the whole family squealed with delight.
“Congratulations,” Marcus said to the girls. “Today you are both aunts.”
They oohed and aahed, and he answered their questions and gave them all the details he could think of, only omitting for now any mention of fetal distress and the touch-and-go moments.
Mr. Garcia beamed as he shook Marcus’s hand vigorously. “You’re going to make an excellent father, Marcus,” he said in that elegant and distinctive Spanish accent. “You just need to get a job that’s safer than the Marines.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Sorry, son; if Kandahar was your best, you’re going to have to do a lot better.”
They laughed together as Elena’s ob-gyn approached.
“Mr. Ryker?”
“Yes.”
“Your wife is out of surgery now. She did fine. Everything went very well. The C-section was picture-perfect. No complications.”
Marcus breathed a sigh of relief.
“She’s in recovery. She’s awake—a bit groggy still, but awake—and she’s asking for you. Can I take you to her?”
“Yes, please,” he said. He turned to make sure everyone else was okay. They told him they were, especially with this reassuring news, and urged him to go and give Elena their love. They would see her soon enough.
The doctor led Marcus through a set of secure doors and down several hallways until they reached the recovery room. Marcus poked his head between the curtains. Elena was holding their baby, and when she saw Marcus, her eyes lit up.
“Hey, madre,” he said with a smile, coming over to her side and giving her a kiss on the forehead.
“Hey, padre.” She smiled back.
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired, but good.”
“Pain?”
“Not yet.”
“Keep those drugs comin’!”
“Amen.”
“Your folks are outside, and your sisters,” he said.
“That’s fun. And your mom?”
“Right there with them. I just gave them a briefing. They all send their love and can’t wait to see you.”
Marcus leaned down and looked into his son’s eyes, milk-chocolate brown like Elena’s. “Pretty cute, huh?” he said.
“Adorable, just like his father.”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “He looks a lot like your side.”
“True, I was just trying to be nice,” Elena teased, punching him playfully in the arm. “So what are we going to call him?”
“I don’t know. You don’t like any of the names on my list.”
“That’s because all of your names are ridiculous,” she teased. “Zadok? Really?”
“Zadok is a great name,” he protested. “Right out of the Bible. He was a priest, for crying out loud.”
“It’s never going to happen.”
They went through several other names, rejecting each for various reasons.
“What if we name him after your father?” Elena said after a long pause.
“Lars?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s always been your hero. It’s a great name. Strong. Masculine. Dutch. And it certainly goes with Ryker.”
He smiled again. He loved this girl and never ceased to be amazed by her.
“What if we give him your father’s name, too?” he asked.
“Lars Javier Ryker?” she asked.
“In a country of 300 million people, I seriously doubt there’s another one like it.”
They kissed to seal the d
“So listen,” Marcus said, easing into the pool, “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I’ve decided not to re-up.”
“What?” Elena asked. “I thought you wanted to be an NCO.”
“I did, but this changes everything.”
“But the Marines love you, and you love being a Marine.”
“What about your father?”
“Once you became a hero, he seems to have made his peace with it.”
“Still, I don’t want to be an absentee dad. I want to get a little house with a white picket fence and a big backyard where Lars can play—here, on the Front Range, if God lets us. I want to teach him to ride a bike and throw a football and go fishing and hiking and white-water rafting, and I can’t do that in the Marines, not the way I want.”
“So what would you do?” she asked.
“I think I could find a decent job of some kind in law enforcement—and if not here, then somewhere farther out west. How does San Diego sound?”
“Lovely.”
“What about Seattle?”
“Rainy, but great coffee.”
“Exactly, or Santa Fe or Salt Lake City . . .”
“Any place that starts with an S,” she quipped.
“Anywhere we can be together,” he replied. “Deal?”
“Deal,” she said with a smile and another kiss. “You can’t shake me, Ryker.”
“And I don’t want to, Ryker. I’ll stick to you like glue.”
MOSCOW—2 JULY 2008
After two bitter miscarriages, Marina delivered their first child.
It was a healthy baby boy, and Oleg was ecstatic, as were the rest of his and Marina’s extended families. Yet no one was more pleased than his father-in-law, who promptly insisted that the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church himself—the one who had originally married the young couple—come to the hospital and pray for the baby and his parents.
Luganov further insisted the bishop also perform the dedication. In the tradition of the church, the ceremony would be performed on the eighth day. This was also the day the baby would be named. In the times of the czars, before the Communist Revolution of 1917, it was tradition that the local priest—not the parents—would name the baby. This is precisely what Luganov wanted. Privately, Oleg strenuously protested to Marina. His heart was set on naming his firstborn son after his own father, Stefan Mikhailovich Kraskin, but Marina pleaded with Oleg to let her father have his way.
“I love you more than life itself, Oleg Stefanovich—you know I do,” she said as the two headed to their bedroom and undressed for the night. “But my father is not merely the patriarch of my family; he is by all rights the patriarch of Mother Russia, and thus our shepherd, guiding us as a family and as a nation down the path he knows is best. Everyone is watching us because everyone is watching him. Please, my love—do not deny my father the honor of following tradition or the right to uphold the heritage of our people.”
“But they are not our traditions,” Oleg pushed back, rooting through every drawer for a cigarette but finding none. “We are not religious people. This is nonsense. We’d be doing it just for show.”
“That’s not true, darling,” Marina argued. “We may not believe in God, but certainly we believe in honoring our parents, do we not? Even more, we believe in upholding the glory of Mother Russia.”
“Of course, but—”
“Then I beg of you,” Marina interjected, “let us not concern ourselves with these myths and legends. They are not important to us. I don’t even think my mother cares. Your parents certainly aren’t pious. But my father is.”
“Pious?” Oleg asked, his voice tinged with cynicism.
“Well, religious,” Marina replied. “The point is: this matters to him. So why not give him this gift, this very simple but precious gift?”
“The name of our child? The very name he will bear for eternity?”
“Eternity? Why must you be so melodramatic, Oleg Stefanovich?” Marina said. “In the grand scheme of things, this is so trifling a gift for so great a leader, no?”
“No, that’s just it—it’s an enormous gift for a man who already has everything,” Oleg shot back, increasingly desperate for a smoke. “Marina, my darling, we finally have a son of our own, an heir, someone to carry on our name and our values. This baby is everything to us, especially after losing two others. Should we not be free to name him as we wish?”
Love is a stubborn thing. In the end, Oleg relented to his beloved wife, if not her father. Not only would he allow the bishop to name their son, but he also agreed to ask Marina’s parents, not his own, to be the child’s godparents.
Thus it was that on the eighth day after his birth, their baby was dedicated by the patriarch at the Church of the Twelve Apostles, on the grounds of the Kremlin. The bishop gave him the name Vasily. Neither Oleg nor Marina could remember a branch in either family tree bearing anyone with this name. But Oleg knew exactly where the name had come from. It was the Slavic version of the name Basil, which came from the Greek name Basileus, meaning “king.” There had been at least four or five Russian czars and princes named Vasily. The name hadn’t come from the archbishop at all. It had come from the president himself.
On the fortieth day after their baby’s birth, Oleg and Marina met again with their two families, not inside the Kremlin’s walls but in St. Basil’s Cathedral, the iconic onion-domed church planted in the heart of Red Square. The occasion was the baptism of little Vasily Olegovich Kraskin. Once again the president had chosen the venue. He had insisted that the archbishop and several priests be in attendance along with every member of his cabinet and dozens of other VIPs. As with his daughter’s marriage, Luganov wanted a national spectacle. The press was there, and the brief ceremony was the lead on the evening news.
This time Oleg did not resist, even in private. This was important to Marina because it was important to her father. He was willing to swallow his pride and go along. But he remained deeply uncomfortable with the religious commitments he was being asked to make in front of the entire country.
As the service began and incense wafted through the darkened sanctuary, Oleg stood beside the altar. He held a single lit candle in his hand. At his side, Marina—wearing a traditional headscarf—held their crying baby in her arms as the bishop, wizened and gray, led them through the liturgy.
“Oleg Stefanovich, do you renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride?”
“I do,” Oleg said. “I renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride.”
Marina was asked the same, and she responded in kind.
“Oleg Stefanovich, do you unite yourself to Christ?” the bishop asked.
Oleg took a deep breath. “I do,” he said through gritted teeth. “I unite myself to Christ.”
Marina answered in the same manner. Then came more prayers, more incense, readings from Scripture and from various Orthodox prayer books Oleg had never heard of. Eventually, after nearly an hour, though it seemed much longer, the bishop took their baby, held him over a large silver urn, and poured a silver pot of lukewarm water over his head. Vasily did not cry, but Oleg nearly did.
Oleg was surprised by how emotional he felt as a final prayer was said and Marina wrapped their son in a towel and held him to her breast. Marina was crying. So were Oleg’s parents, even as they beamed with pride.
Oddly, Yulia Luganova neither cried nor smiled. Indeed, she showed little emotion at all. The president, however, seemed genuinely and deeply touched, especially when Marina turned and put her son in her father’s arms. For only the second time Oleg could recall—the first being at their wedding—the hardness in his father-in-law’s fierce and forbidding features visibly softened. His eyes were red and moist. He struck Oleg as uncharacteristically vulnerable, even a bit self-conscious in that vulnerability. In that moment he was not the sovereign ruler of a great pe
Oleg stood in the great and shadowy cathedral, the flickering light of candles and the intoxicating aroma of incense enveloping him, and pondered a thought that he had never dared consider before. Was there now, perhaps, a pathway to the kind of relationship with his father-in-law Oleg had always longed for? Were the cold steel barriers between him and this man he both feared and admired finally coming down?
Nine days later, Russian forces invaded the Republic of Georgia.
Oleg never saw it coming. He was not even in Moscow at the time. Rather, he had been sent to Beijing as part of the official Russian delegation to observe the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympic Games. He learned the news the same way every other world leader at the games did, first from the BBC and then via every other news service on the planet. Three hundred fifty Russian tanks, hundreds of armored personnel carriers, and more than nine thousand ground forces—including elite Spetsnaz units—were blasting their way into South Ossetia. Under cover from Russian fighter bombers and heavy artillery fire, they were taking the main roads in South Ossetia and pushing toward Georgia proper. Another thirty thousand Russian troops were massing in Abkhazia, the Russian territory directly adjoining the Georgian Republic, and a sizable Russian armada was steaming across the Black Sea, headed for Georgia’s western coast.
Oleg was not simply stunned. He felt betrayed. While he had participated in meetings where snap military exercises in Abkhazia had been discussed at length, he hadn’t been in a single meeting or on a single call or seen a single document or email or cable in which an invasion had even been hinted at or alluded to, much less stated outright. Aside from the feeling of utter embarrassment at being so far from home and having to represent and defend his nation and his president among dozens upon dozens of world leaders who were condemning the invasion in no uncertain terms, a flood of painful questions rushed through Oleg’s thoughts.
Why had the president invaded Georgia? Why would he invade any former Soviet republic? Was he really intent on capturing and occupying the entire nation, even Tbilisi, the capital? What in the world for? What was the upside? Wouldn’t this seriously damage Russia’s reputation, not to mention harm her economy in volatile and uncertain times?