Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [146]
"If you go to Zhanin, you can request protection."
"Against Shovich?" Dogin snickered. "In a country where one hundred American dollars can buy an assassin? No, Sergei. My fortunes burned with the train. It's ironic, though. I hated the gangster and everything he stood for."
"Then why, Minister, did you ever get involved with him? Why did so many people have to suffer?"
"I don't know," Dogin replied. "Honestly, I don't. General Kosigan convinced me we could move him aside later, and I wanted to believe that-- though I never did, I suppose." His eyes ranged over the old maps on his walls. "I wanted this so very much to bring back what we've lost. To return to the time when the Soviet Union acted and other nations reacted, when our science and culture and military might was the envy of the world. I suppose, in retrospect, this was not the way to do it."
"Minister Dogin," said Orlov, "it could not have been done. Had you built this new union, it would have fallen. When I returned to the space center in Kazakhstan last month, I saw the bird droppings and feathers on the staircases, and the boosters covered with plastic that was covered with dust. And I ached for a return to the past as well, to the era of Gagarin and the time when our space shuttles, the Burans, were going to allow us to colonize space. We cannot prevent evolution and extinction, Minister. And once it has occurred, we cannot reverse it."
"Perhaps," said Dogin. "But it is in our nature to fight. When a man is dying, you do not ask if a treatment is too expensive or too dangerous. You do what you feel must be done. Only when the patient has died, and reason has replaced emotion, do you see how impossible the task was." He smiled. "And yet, Sergei-- yet I must admit that for a time I thought I was going to succeed."
"If not for the Americans--"
"No," said Dogin, "not the Americans. It was just one American, an FBI agent in Tokyo who fired at the jet and forced us to transfer the money. Think of it, Sergei. It's humbling to think that one unassuming soul changed the world where the mighty failed."
Dogin was breathing easier now. He felt oddly at peace as he reached to the right and opened his top desk drawer.
"I hope you will stay on at the Center, Sergei. Russia needs people like you. And your son, when you see him-- don't be too rough with him. We wanted to recapture what we once had and he wanted to see it for the first time, outside the history books. Though the methods may have been questionable, there was no shame in the dream."
Replacing the receiver, Dogin looked at the map of the Soviet Union in 1945, and continued to look at it through clear eyes as he put the barrel of the Makarov against his temple and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Tuesday, 4:22 P.M., St. Petersburg
It seemed strange to General Orlov that the three men who had had such key roles in the day's events-- Dogin, Paul Hood, and himself-- had conducted their business from desks, had not seen daylight since the crisis began.
Devils in the dark we are, conducting the affairs of men
There was only one thing Orlov had to do, and he couldn't do it, not yet. Having called General Dhaka's office to request news of his son and the rest of Nikita's command, all he could do was sit and think and wait.
He let his body sink back into the chair, his arms on the rests, hands hanging over the front and seeming to weigh so very much. Orlov had been forced to fight his own countrymen, all of whom loved Russia in their own way, and now the tragedy of what had happened, and his part in it, began to weigh on him.
He bent his head toward his watch, promptly forgot what time it was. Why hasn't anyone called? he wondered. Surely the pilots had been able to ascertain how many soldiers were on the ground.
The beep of the phone startled him, like the hiss