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

political favor with those in charge. He then spent seven years at military school, studying Marxism, Leninism, the Communist party, philosophy, and economics. He changed from a wild, impulsive, somewhat arrogant boy who never accepted a mistake into a smart, patient, and determined man. As Lenin had said, “Give us your child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”
    During his final year at school a colonel in the GRU recommended him for the military intelligence agency. He took the entrance exams and passed, eventually gaining admittance to the KGB’s Red Banner Institute in Moscow, equal parts boot camp, university, and spy school. Only three hundred candidates a year were taken. Graduating meant becoming a foreign intelligence operative with possible assignment overseas. The institute taught him about the West and how to speak perfect English. He studied banking, credit cards, mortgages, taxes, all things nonexistent in the USSR but vital to someone living on the outside. He’d also been taught first aid, reconnaissance, Morse code, survival skills, and how to navigate by the sun and stars. He’d learned nuclear, biological, and chemical defense techniques. Parachuting, scuba diving, and flight training, too. He’d first driven a car there and mastered the rules of the road, as few inside the old regime had owned vehicles.
    Most students never earned a passing grade, relegated to searching for spies within the Soviet Union, the homeland becoming their safe, warm womb. He earned a passing grade, was commissioned a lieutenant, and assigned to the coveted North American desk. As a further reward he’d been given an apartment near the Kremlin with a private bath, which signified the hopes his superiors held for him. Within three years he was posted overseas. First to Western Europe, then North America. And where many of his colleagues succumbed to the lure—that startling contrast between the image of capitalism pressed back home and the reality of living in the West—he resisted and remained loyal.
    The Ministry of Fear.
    That was how many once referred to the KGB.
    Its twenty directorates had been all-encompassing, yet none of that mattered on December 26, 1991, when Declaration 142-H acknowledged the independence of the twelve republics of the Soviet Union, creating the Commonwealth of Independent States and ending the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev declared the office of general secretary extinct and handed over all power to the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.
    His stomach turned simply at the thought of Yeltsin.
    A drunk—incompetent and corrupt—surrounded by men who stole the country so they could become billionaires. Himself and millions of others felt betrayed by both Yeltsin and the oligarchs who emerged from the ashes, most either relatives or friends of Yeltsin who skimmed off the cream and left sour milk for the rest. At least in the Soviet system there’d been order. None existed in the Russian Federation. Contract killings became big business. The mobsters controlled everything of value, including the banks and many corporations, far more feared than the KGB had ever been. From the first socialist nation in the world emerged a criminal state. Authoritarianism, but without authority. Two failed revolts, one in 1991, the other in 1993, soured the people on communism forever.
    He still recalled that December night when the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, replaced with the Russian tricolor.
    And the Cold War ended.
    Then the horror started.
    Inflation rose 250%. The national economy shrank 15%. Pensions went unpaid, salaries were deferred, money became nearly nonexistent. The end for him came one day when he’d ventured out to buy some bread. At the store he encountered an old man wearing his World War II medals, asking the clerk if he could buy but a quarter loaf, as that was all he could afford. The clerk refused, so he’d stepped forward and offered to buy