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Page 317
He moved to take from his pocket a silver case containing Cuban cigarillos. With dazzling swiftness, the soldiers responded by assuming a firing position with their weapons leveled at his head and chest.
Kalinin very cautiously placed his hands on his thighs, in plain view. Time appeared to have slowed down to a painful crawl. His bladder was full and there was no chance that he could convince these outland brutes to let him find a toilet. He looked at his expensive Japanese watch, a gift from Igor Ligachev in the old days, when Ligachev was Party Chief of Ideology, and there had been some hope that Mikhail Gorbachev was going to become an unmourned memory.
The time was twenty minutes after two in the morning. A time for ghosts, he thought. A time for executions of the old Stalinist stylea walk through the concrete tunnels below the Lubyanka and a pistol round in the back of the neck, the dyevyat gram so beloved of Dzershinsky's and Beria's thugs.
One of his guards was eyeing his watch covetously. Could I bribe him with it? But to what end? If he and his friend are not impressed with the fact that I am the Moscow Air Defense Commander and a general of the Russian air force, they are unlikely to let me wander out of the Spassky Tower like some itinerant tourist. They are more likely to take the watch and have done with it.
Provost Colonel Zenobiev reappeared. "Follow me," he said.
"I need to piss," Kalinin said.
"Later. Follow me."
Kalinin was close to weeping with discomfort and frustration, but he had enough sense to do as he was told. He again pridefully kept pace with Zenobiev, breathing hard, the pain from his full bladder increasing. What a perfect way to demean a general of the Russian air force, summoning him into Cherny's royal presence with his trousers wet. Kalinin had a rebellious urge to pull out his penis and hose away at the parquet floor. But he was prevented by the degrading thought that his

 
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