The Charm School

the log cabin about a hundred yards off. Hollis looked at the cabin as they drove by and guessed it was probably once a woodsman’s
izba,
a relic from a time when such a thing as a lone woodsman existed in this communal nation. But now it sprouted two antennas and was probably the radio shack for the helipad.
    The Zil entered the narrow track that cut through the dark pine forest. Lisa took Hollis’ hand and said into his ear, “I’m going to be brave.”
    “You
are
brave.”
    The Zil came to the end of the track and turned left onto the main blacktop road. Hollis noticed that the pine trees on either side of the road were huge, rising forty to fifty feet into the air, and the spreading bough canopy was so heavy that little light reached the ground. Now and then he saw log-paved lanes, what the military called corduroy roads, leading off the main road. Down some of these lanes he saw houses that he hadn’t seen from the air. He was surprised but not shocked to catch sight of an American ranch house, then a white clapboard bungalow. They were most probably residences, he thought, for the Charm School students and their American instructors, set in the Russian
bor
to enhance the illusions that made this place so unique.
    Lisa spotted one and said to him, “Look!”
    “I see them.”
    “This is
bizarre.
What is—?”
    “No questions.”
    She nodded. “All right.”
    Marchenko, too, was staring out the window. He said to Hollis, “This is very odd indeed. Do you know what this place is?”
    Hollis had assumed that Marchenko didn’t know much beyond his kidnapping assignment. Hollis replied, “It’s a secret CIA base camp. You’re under arrest, Marchenko.”
    Marchenko turned around in his seat and looked at Hollis in a way that led Hollis to think the man almost believed him.
What a country.
Marchenko finally smiled. “You joke. Tell me, what kind of structures are those in the woods?”
    “They’re called houses.”
    “Yes? I saw American houses in a movie once. Those are American houses.”
    “Very good.”
    Marchenko turned back to the front and peered out the windows. “I don’t understand this place.”
    Hollis noticed that the light snow was mostly on the pine branches and little of it had reached the moss-covered ground. This was a place, he thought, of perpetual darkness, a place where even at high noon in the summer there would be little light.
    Lisa said, “I haven’t seen a single person.”
    Hollis nodded. Neither had he, and the unsettling thought came to him that they were all gone, moved to another location as had happened when the American rescue force had raided Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam. But as he peered through the forest he saw lit windows in some of the houses, and smoke rose from the chimneys.
No,
he thought,
they are still here.
The KGB had not properly evaluated the situation and had not broken camp yet.
    The Zil continued slowly along the road, and coming up on the right was the long green-roofed building Hollis had spotted from the air. It was a single-story building of white clapboard with a very homey-looking front porch. There were rockers on the porch and a red-and-white Coke machine against the wall near the double front doors. Through a large picture window Hollis got a glimpse of some men and women, and on a wall hung a large American flag. Hollis had the impression of a small-town Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, and as the Zil passed by, he saw a black-and-white sign over the double doors that said just that: VFW , POST 000.
    The Zil moved on, then came to a halt in front of the headquarters building, a grey two-story hulk of precast concrete slabs, most of which had the familiar cracks that were a trademark of the prefab industry in these parts. Steel reinforcing rods protruded here and there and bled orange rust over the deteriorating concrete. A KGB Border Guard stood in a plywood booth, and to the right of the booth was the headquarters’ entrance. Standing in front, wearing the long green greatcoat with red shoulder boards of the KGB, was Colonel Petr Burov.
    Marchenko got out and said, “Come, come. You don’t keep a colonel waiting.”
    Vadim opened the rear door and got out, followed by Hollis and Lisa.
    Burov looked at them a long time, then said, “Well, this is what you wanted to see, wasn’t it, Hollis?”
    Hollis didn’t reply.
    Burov said to Marchenko, “Why is he handcuffed?”
    “He tried to hijack the helicopter.” Marchenko