He rapped his knuckles against the misshapen log he had his arm draped over, but instead of a dull thud she heard a metallic gong.
“What is that?”
“Not sure yet. Part of it—can’t be sure what part until I get down there and get inside.”
“Part of what? Get inside what?”
“This way, come on.”
Taking her by the hand, Sam sidestroked deeper into the inlet and around a corner, where the course narrowed to twenty feet. He stopped and pointed to a vine-covered cypress trunk near the bank. “There. You see it?”
She squinted, tilted her head left, then right. “No. What am I looking for?”
“That branch sticking out of the water, the one that ends in a T shape. . . .”
“Okay, I see it.”
“Look harder. Squint. It helps.”
She did, narrowing her eyes until slowly what she was seeing registered on her brain. She gasped. ?
??Good Lord, is that a . . . It can’t be.”
Grinning from ear to ear, Sam nodded. “Yep. It is. That, my dear, is a submarine’s periscope.”
CHAPTER 2
SEVASTOPOL, UKRAINE
Hadeon Bondaruk stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his study and stared out at the Black Sea. His study was dark, lit only by dimmed ceiling lights that cast soft pools into the corners of the room. Night had fallen over the Crimean Peninsula, but to the west, over the Romanian and Bulgarian coasts, backlit by the last remnants of the setting sun, he could see a line of storm clouds moving north over the water. Every few seconds the clouds would pulse from within, shooting veins of lightning across the horizon. It would be here within the hour, and God help those foolish enough to be caught afloat in the midst of a Black Sea storm.
Or, Bondaruk thought, God not help them. No matter. Storms and disease and yes, even war, were nature’s way of culling the herd. He had little patience for people who didn’t have the sense or strength to protect themselves against the violence of life. It was a lesson he’d learned as a boy, and one that he’d never forgotten.
Bondaruk had been born in 1960 in a village south of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, high in the Kopet Dag Mountains. His mother and father and their parents before them had been farmers and shepherds living in that gray geographic area between Iran and what was then the Soviet Union, and like all natives of the Kopet Dag they were tough, self-reliant, and fiercely independent, claiming neither country as their own. However, the Cold War had other plans for Bondaruk and his family.
With the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the deposition of the Shah, the Soviet Union began to pour more troops into the border area north of Iran, and Bondaruk, then nineteen, saw his village’s independence stripped away as Red Army bases and antiaircraft missile sites began cropping up in their once peaceful mountain home.
The Soviet troops treated the Kopet Dag natives like backward savages, moving through villages like a scourge, taking food and women, shooting livestock for sport, and rounding up “Iranian revolutionary elements” for summary execution. Never mind that Bondaruk and his people knew little of the outside world and world politics. Their Muslim religion and proximity to Iran made them suspect.
A year later a pair of tanks appeared on the outskirts of the village, along with two companies of Red Army soldiers. A squad of soldiers had been ambushed nearby the night before, the commander told Bondaruk and the villagers. Eight men, their throats slit and their clothes, weapons, and personal belongings stripped from them. The village elders had five minutes to produce those responsible, lest the entire community be held responsible.
Bondaruk had heard stories about Turkmen resistance fighters in the countryside being aided by Iranian commandos but to his knowledge none of the villagers were involved. Unable to produce the guilty parties, the village chieftain pleaded with the Soviet commander for mercy and was shot for his trouble. Over the next hour the tanks rained shells down on the village until it was in ruins and burning. In the commotion, Bondaruk was separated from his family and he and a handful of boys and men retreated higher into the mountains, far enough away to be safe from the soldiers, but close enough that they could watch through the night as their home was razed to the ground. The next day they returned to the village and began looking for survivors. More dead than alive were found, including Bondaruk’s family, who had taken shelter in the mosque only to have it collapse and crush them alive.
Something inside him changed, as though God had pulled a dark curtain on his old life. He gathered up the strongest and most eager villagers, men and women alike, and they all took to the mountains as partisans.
Within six months Bondaruk had risen not only to a position of leadership among his fighters, but also to that of a legend among the rural Turkmen people. Bondaruk’s fighters would strike in the night, ambushing Soviet patrols and convoys, then disappear back into the Kopet Dag like ghosts. Within a year of his village’s destruction, Bondaruk had a bounty on his head. He’d come to the attention of the Soviet leadership in Moscow, which was now embroiled in not only a tense standoff with Iran and a full-blown war in Afghanistan but also a guerrilla conflict in Turkmenistan.
Shortly after his twenty-first birthday Bondaruk received word that Iranian intelligence operatives had put out the word that his Kopet Dag fighters had an ally in Tehran, if only he would sit down and listen, which he did in a small café outside Ashgabat.
The man Bondaruk met turned out to be a colonel in the elite Iranian paramilitary organization known as the Pasdaran, or the Guardians of the Revolution. The colonel offered Bondaruk and his fighters weapons, ammunition, training, and essential supplies for his war against the Soviets. Wary, Bondaruk had probed for a loophole in the deal—that one condition that would simply change the heel on their necks from that of the Soviets to the Iranians. There was no condition, he was assured. We are of common ancestry and faith and cause. What more of a bond did they need? Bondaruk accepted the offer and over the next five years Bondaruk and his fighters, under the guidance of the Iranian colonel, slowly wore down the Soviet occupiers.
As satisfying as that was for Bondaruk, it was his relationship with the colonel that had the most effect on him. The colonel, it seemed, had been a teacher of Persian history before he’d been called to serve the revolution. The Persian Empire, he explained, stretched back nearly three thousand years and at its height had encompassed the Caspian and Black Sea basins, Greece, North Africa, and much of the Middle East. In fact, Bondaruk was told, Xerxes I, Xerxes the Great, who had invaded Greece and crushed the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, was born in the very same mountains Bondaruk called home and was said to have fathered dozens of children in the Kopet Dag.
This was a thought that was never far from Bondaruk’s mind as he and his guerrillas continued to harass the Soviets until finally, in 1990, over a decade after they’d entered the Kopet Dag, the Red Army withdrew from the border. Shortly after that the Soviet Union collapsed.
With the fight over and no inclination to go back to being an ordinary shepherd, Bondaruk, aided by his Iranian colonel friend, moved to Sevastopol, which had, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, become the Wild West of the Black Sea Basin. Once there, his natural leadership ability and comfort with brutality and swift violence secured him a place first in the Ukrainian black market and then in the Ukrainian Krasnaya Mafiya, or Red Mafia. By the time he was thirty-five, Hadeon Bondaruk was in control of virtually every organized criminal enterprise in Ukraine and a millionaire many times over.
With his position and power and wealth secure, Bondaruk turned his attention to an idea that had been lingering in the back of his mind for many years: Had Xerxes the Great truly been born and raised in the Kopet Dag Mountains, in his very homeland? Had he and Xerxes, as boys separated by centuries, walked the same paths and marveled at the same mountain vistas? Could he himself be descended from Persian royalty?