Delta Green - [12]

“Listen up, Captain. I’ll interrupt anyone I want to interrupt.”

“Uh… yes, sir,” Abrams said.

This general didn’t yet understand that Merlin Air Base, Jack Andrews Air Base, and the detachment at Peterson Air Base in the Springs were operated solely to support USSC-1, which was the space station Themis, and the 1st Aerospace Squadron, which for all purposes was Kevin McKenna.

They stood aside to let the base commander pass, then went outside.

“Let him learn the hard way,” Abrams said.

QUARTERS COMPOUND,

GENERAL ANATOLY SHELEPIN

Anatoly Guryanovich Shelepin had once been a colonel general in the Soviet Ground Forces. His record was impeccable. He had done what the Army and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had asked of him, from field command in Afghanistan to training commands to staff positions at Stavka. In his last assignment with the General Staff, he had been responsible for managing and doling out to clandestine projects the Army’s foreign hard currency reserves.

From his earliest memory, Shelepin had shared the goals and the ideology of the CPSU, assisted in those tenets by a father who had known both extreme deprivation and ardent heroism in the Great Patriotic War.

And now the foundation of his existence had slipped from under him. The CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) was gone, and the disappearance — so quickly accomplished! — had left him reeling like a Vodka-soaked drunk for weeks. The newest Soviet Mem was one he did not recognize and could not fathom.

Fortunately for him, Shelepin was intelligent. He had foreseen the end, and though he had sympathized with the coup plotters, he had not participated with them in the attempt to overthrow the leadership. By virtue of his reputation, however, he knew that he would have been automatically grouped with the conspirators, and so he chose the only course open to him. On the night that the President was placed under house arrest, Shelepin took his wife of thirty-five years, Yelena, and five loyal subordinates, commandeered an Antonov An-72 transport, and flew south out of Moscow.

Under cover of a military inspection trip, and sufficiently preceding the days of tension, his credentials and his flight had not been contested. Nor had the flights of other aircraft he had ordered into the air been contested.

They had escaped through Afghanistan, and they had not been pursued. Whether out of embarrassment or out of relief, the defections of Shelepin and his associates — and of many others — had not been publicly recorded or reported. He could be certain that the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the party and the military intelligence organizations, were quietly searching for a number of airplanes that had disappeared from inventories all over the Union. In the hectic days of the coup attempt, many things and many people had evaporated, but the economic and political chaos that now existed had diverted high-level authorities toward more pressing crises.

Anatoly Guryanovich Shelepin felt comfortable where he was.

He was comfortably lost in a city of a half-million people where he had purchased a block-square, walled compound and renovated it to meet his needs. Accessible through two wrought-iron gates on the northern and southern ends of the block, the center of the compound was spacious, gravelled, and overgrown with sugar palm and shrubs. Surrounding the center courtyard were modest-sized two-story residences, favoring French architectural design. Railed balconies overlooked the courtyard, and wide, red-tiled eaves shaded the balconies. In almost every room of every residence, lazily moving ceiling fans kept the air in motion. Khmer servants glided quietly about.

From the window of his second-floor office overlooking the street, Shelepin could see, a half-mile away, the convergence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers.

His associates were comfortable also. He had assigned them to quarters in the compound, and he provided them with monthly stipends from the nest eggs of German Deutschemarks, French francs, British pound sterling, Spanish pesos, and American dollars he had secreted in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. Since it was he that had managed the secret funds, Shelepin did not think that the Soviet government, or whatever government that survived, would ever miss the hard currencies he had transferred over a span of years into his own accounts.

Depending upon the day’s exchange rates, his nest eggs amounted to about seven billion American dollars.

Shelepin was not the only one to provide for his future, of course. He had not been surprised after his arrival in Phnom Penh to find that Sergei Pavel, once a general and a KGB directorate secretary, and who now resided in the compound, also had access to over four-and-a-half billion dollars.

Between the two of them, Shelepin and Pavel were certain they could overcome the ennui that was rapidly consuming their ex-patriot countrymen.

It seemed a shame, however, that their new world must originate from Kampuchea rather than the