The 14th Colony: A Novel by Steve Berry Read Free Book Online Page A

Nearly every person they ever knew or respected was dead, in hiding, or disgraced. Where they all once proudly called themselves Soviets, now that word bordered on obscene. In 1917 the Bolsheviks had cried with pride All power to the Soviets, but the phrase today would be regarded as treason. How the world had changed since 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved. What a magnificent state it had been. The world’s largest, covering a sixth of the planet. Over 10,000 kilometers from east to west across eleven time zones. Seven thousand kilometers north to south. In between lay tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, mountains, rivers, and lakes. Tartars, tsars, and communists had ruled there for 800 years. Fifteen nationalities, a hundred ethnic groups, 127 languages. All ruled by the Communist party, the army, and the KGB. Now it was the Russian Federation—which had evolved into barely a shadow of what had once existed. And instead of trying to reverse the inevitable and fight a battle that could not be won, in 1992 he and a hundred others had retreated east to Baikal, where they’d lived beside the lake ever since. An old Soviet dacha served as their headquarters and a cluster of homes and shops not far away became Chayaniye.
    Hope.
    Which seemed all that remained.
    “What of the plane?” Belchenko asked.
    “I ordered it shot down.”
    The old man chuckled. “With what? British Javelins? MANPADs? Or some of those ancient Redeyes?”
    Impressive how the old mind remained sharp for details. “I used what’s available. But you’re right, what we fired was defective. It still managed to accomplish the task.”
    He bent down to a pail of cold water and tossed a ladleful onto the hot stones. They hissed like a locomotive, tossing off welcomed steam. The candle across the room burned bluer through a deeper halo. Temperatures rose and his muscles relaxed. Steam burned his eyes, which he closed.
    “Is the pilot alive?” Belchenko asked.
    “He survived the landing. An American.”
    “Now, that is interesting.”
    In decades past they would have spread their bodies out on the lowest of the pine benches while attendants doused them with hot water. Then they would have then been scrubbed, rolled, pounded, and drenched with cold water, then more hot, their muscles pelted with bundles of birch twigs and washed with wads of hemp. More long douses of cold water would have ended the experience, leaving them cleansed and feeling disembodied.
    The black baths had been a wonderful thing.
    “You know what I want to know,” he said to Belchenko. “It’s time you tell me. You can’t allow that knowledge to die with you.”
    “Should this not be left alone?”
    He’d asked himself that question many times, the answer always the same, so he voiced it. “No.”
    “It still matters to you?”
    He nodded.
    The older man sat with his arms extended outward up to the next level of bench. “My muscles feel so alive in here.”
    “You’re dying, Vadim. We both know that.”
    He’d already noticed the painful breathing, deep and irregular. The emaciated frame, the rattling in the throat, and the trembling hands.
    “I kept so many secrets,” Belchenko said, barely in a whisper. “They trusted me with everything. Archivists were once so important. And I knew America. I studied the United States. I knew its strengths and weaknesses. History taught me a great deal.” The old man’s eyes stayed closed as he ranted. “History matters, Aleksandr. Never forget that.”
    As if he had to be told. “Which is why I cannot let this go. The time has come. The moment is right. I, too, have studied the United States. I know its current strengths and weakness. There is a way for us to extract a measure of satisfaction, one we both have craved for a long time. We owe that to our Soviet brothers.”
    And he told his old friend exactly what he had in mind.
    “So you have solved Fool’s Mate?” Belchenko asked when he