Red Storm Rising

"Hello," he said gruffly.

"Lieutenant Commander Toland, please."

Uh-oh. "Speaking."

"This is the CINCLANT intel watch officer," the disembodied voice said. "You are ordered to return to your duty station at once. Please acknowledge the order, Commander."

"Back to Norfolk right away. Understood." Wholly on instinct, Bob rotated himself in the bed to a sitting position, his bare feet on the floor.

"Very well, Commander." The phone clicked off.

"What is it, honey?" Marty asked.

"They need me back at Norfolk."

"When?"

"Now." That woke her up. Martha Toland bolted upright in the bed. The covers spilled off her chest, and the moonlight through the window gave her skin a pale, ethereal glow.

"But you just got here!"

"Don't I know it." Bob stood and walked awkwardly toward the bathroom. He had to shower and drink some coffee if he had any hope of reaching Norfolk alive. When he returned ten minutes later, lathering his face, he saw that his wife had clicked on the bedroom TV to Cable Network News.

"Bob, you better listen to this."

"This is Rich Suddler coming to you live from the Kremlin," said a reporter in a blue blazer. Behind him Toland could see the grim stone walls of the ancient citadel fortified by Ivan the Terrible-now being patrolled by armed soldiers in combat dress. Toland stopped what he was doing and walked toward the TV. Something very strange was going on. A full company of armed troops in the Kremlin could mean many things, all of them bad. "There has been an explosion in the Council of Ministers building here in Moscow. At approximately nine-thirty this morning, Moscow Time, while I was taping a report not half a mile away, we were surprised to hear a sharp sound coming from the new glass-and-steel structure, and-"

"Rich, this is Dio

"Well, Dio

The tape cut off the live picture, filling the entire screen. It was on a pause setting, with Suddler frozen in the middle of a gesture to something or other, probably the part of the wall where they buried important Communists, Toland thought. The tape began to roll.

Simultaneously, Suddler flinched and spun around as a thundering report echoed across the expanse of the square. By professional instinct the cameraman turned at once to the source of the sound, and after a moment's wobble, the lens settled in on a ball of dust and smoke expanding up and away from the strangely modem building in the Kremlin's otherwise Slavic Rococo complex. A second later the zoom lens darted in on the scene. Fully three floors of the building had been stripped of their glass curtain wall, and the camera followed a large conference table as it fell down off one floor slab that seemed to be dangling from a half dozen reinforcing rods. The camera went down to street level, where there was one obvious body, and perhaps another, along with a collection of automobiles crushed by debris.

In seconds, the whole square was filled with ru

"Now, at that point the militia captain who had been escorting us-the militia is the Soviet equivalent of, oh, like a U.S. state police force-he made us stop taping and confiscated our tape cassette. We weren't allowed to tape the fire trucks or the several hundred armed troops who arrived and are now guarding the whole area. But the tape was just returned to us and we are able to give you this live picture of the building, now that the fires have been put out. In fairness I really can't say that I blame him-things were pretty wild there for a few minutes."

"Were you threatened in any way, Rich? I mean, did they act as though they thought you-"

Suddler's head shook emphatically.

"Not at all, Dio

"Dio

"Since the bastards set themselves up," Toland snorted.

"We know for certain-at least we've been told-that a bomb was detonated in the Council of Ministers building. They're certain it was a bomb, not some kind of accident. And we know for sure that three, possibly more people were killed, and perhaps as many as forty or fifty wounded.

"Now the really interesting thing about this is that the Politburo had been scheduled to hold a meeting here at about that time."

"Holy shit!" Toland set the aerosol can on the night table, one hand still covered in shaving cream.

"Can you tell us if any of them were among the dead or wounded?" Dio

"No, Dio

"Rich, can you tell us what the reaction in Moscow has been like?"

"It's still pretty hard for us to gauge, Dio

"So, to summarize what we know to this point, there has been a bombing incident within the Kremlin walls, possibly an attempt to eliminate the Soviet Politburo, though I must emphasize we are not certain of that. We have had it confirmed by police at the scene that at least three people are dead, with forty or so other wounded, those wounded being evacuated to nearby hospitals. We will be reporting throughout the day as more information becomes available. This is Rich Suddler, CNN, coming to you live from the Kremlin." The scene shifted back to the anchor desk.