He left the parking garage with Sasha tucked safely in his knapsack. He set off on foot and made for nearby Albat Street. After ducking into a couple of shops, he then jogged along the sidewalk and up to a small block of flats. Once around the corner and out of sight, he sprinted thirty yards, Sasha banging against his back. She cried out, but he quieted her with a “shoosh!”
He leaped into the first passing bus, rode it for a couple of stops, took a taxi to the traffic police station, went in, came out, made sure no one was behind him, and then dodged block by block to the Leningradsky Station where he bought a reserved fourth-class ticket for a train due to leave Moscow at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow. The ticket was purchased in the name of Mikhail Mashky, the same name that decorated his Border Guards uniform.
He returned to the safe house, all the while dry-cleaning, and fed Sasha again. Then he got down on the floor with her and played hide and seek until she bored of it. Alligator River came next, where he was on all fours, and she climbed onto his back. They crawled throughout the flat, on the lookout for alligators, which they inevitably found with a roar and laughter. Afterward, she climbed up onto the couch, turned onto her side, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and shut her eyes for a nap. Nikolai dropped his jacket over her and pulled her blond hair away from her face. Then he leaned in and kissed her forehead. At that moment, she looked just like Yulia. He sat down beside her and quietly wept.
The rest of that day, they played, talked nonsense words, and watched TV. He made up stories. A new tale starred Benny Belka (Benny the squirrel) but lacked sound effects to hold her attention. She fell asleep listening. He put her beside him on the bed, and they both slept until sometime in the night when she awoke to cry for Mama. He did what he could to soothe her, and, when she’d finally gone back to sleep, he followed.
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It was, after all, the CIA’s ballgame, CIA Moscow station chief, Wendell Ranski, told Roy Longfellow late at night in a parking garage meeting. It was the CIA’s ballgame because the United States and nuclear war hung in the balance. It only made tactical sense that the CIA would meet Longfellow and help expedite the escape of Nikolai Semenov into the West, where he could immediately contact the American President and answer the questions the President needed to be answered in the next forty-eight hours to deal with the Soviet fleet steaming for Cuba. In a word, said Ranski, the CIA had more skin in the game than even the British at this point, more of a vested interest in seeing Semenov successfully escape than its little brother, MI6.
Longfellow couldn’t argue. Rodney Mallard would head north toward Vyborg, along with Captain John Winters, USMC. Winters would be loaned from the American Embassy. This was a diversion trip.
The CIA would then meet Longfellow in Leningrad and try to run interference with the KGB parade of vehicles following the MI6 officer. The CIA would then load onto the Helsinki ferry with him in Tallinn. The CIA officer was a man named Daniel Danbury. Nikolai Semenov had met him at The Flamingo Club in London, and they had exchanged intelligence for a time. The CIA said Nikolai’s talk with the American President was so crucial to national security that two things would happen. One, Danbury would interfere to spring Longfellow from the KGB cars pursuing him. Two, the U-2 spy plane from Ramstein AFB in Germany was going to overfly the Helsinki-Stockholm portion of the trip. CIA would also monitor the journey with a vehicle of its own driving behind the vehicle transporting Nikolai.
In Stockholm, Danbury would facilitate the call between Nikolai Semenov and President Kennedy through the CIA switchboard in Langley. Passcodes were required; Danbury would come prepared to provide them.
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October 20, 1962
4:00 a.m. MI6 Safe House, Moscow
In the morning, they were up at four a.m. Sasha fought the early wakeup call, but he bribed her with pancakes he’d made out of the cupboard mixes, dressed in butter and honey, and cut into small pieces for Sasha’s fingers. While she ate what quickly turned into a lump of sticky goo, he made coffee and thought about the day. It came to him, then, to contemplate what might happen to Sasha if Bucharov killed him. Would he also kill the baby? Sell her into white slavery? Return her to her aunt? Walk away and leave her crying? The process of working it through his mind only made him that much stronger. Those things couldn’t be allowed to happen.
He turned on the TV and sat Sasha on the floor to watch. Then he changed into the Border Troops uniform with the name of the original owner, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Mashky. He put it in the bottom of his knapsack, his favorite anorak, English cap, and essentials for washing and shaving. He had to laugh—he had abandoned his own KGB uniforms at his old flat.
At the bottom of his KGB knapsack, he also placed as much as he could for Sasha: a change of clothes, sippy cup, bottle of milk, diapers, crackers, and a set of pajamas. He dressed her into her winter coat, boots, and mittens.
Before lowering Sasha into the bag, he dropped in a small road atlas covering the Estonia-Finnish crossing area. Knowing that Soviet maps were deliberately falsified in border regions to confuse and mislead runners, he was unsure how much use the MI6 rendering would be, but it was all he had. Everything else he left behind, and when he closed the door, the knapsack securely on his back, he knew that he was closing it not only on his home and his possessions but on his family and his Russian life.
He went down from the eighth floor in the lift. Sure enough, the concierge was at her desk, but he didn’t stop to check if she noticed him. He swept through the lobby and out the door.
Outside on the street, it was still dark. Only 5 a.m. and below freezing, his breath like locomotive smoke billowing out of the funnel. He trudged on, classically dry-cleaning his way to the Leningradsky Station via the early bus, then jogging again, and another couple of busses. It was too early for many shops to be open, but any that were, he popped in and out, one a bakery that smelled like heaven. Even Sasha squawked when he turned away from the pastries. By the time he arrived at the station, he was so nervous that everything appeared highly sinister.
He shivered, shifted Sasha into a better position in the knapsack, and walked inside. Bucharov was either waiting for him with his gun or he wasn’t.
He took a deep breath and plunged ahead.
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5:05 a.m. Kinovov City Park, Moscow
Captain John Winters, USMC, left his flat two blocks from Moscow's British embassy, just before dawn. Dry-cleaning the KGB from his tail was no problem for the Marine whose tactics had been blocked out with Roy Longfellow, MI6, the night before at the embassy.
When the lone KGB officer assigned to follow Winters had been lost in the lobby of the Luxembourg Hotel on Valyaa Prospekt, just off Red Square, Winters then proceeded by taxi to the jogging route used every morning by Nikolai Semenov. The taxi let him out at a wooded area just inside the Kinovov City Park that made up one-half of the jogging route. Winters proceeded into a stand of trees and sat down. He was wearing jogging clothes consisting of sweatpants, running shoes, two heavy undershirts—it was cold that morning—and a hooded sweatshirt with a towel around his neck.
Then, he waited.
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