Black Sun Read online

  This is a work of historical fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Owen Matthews

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design and illustration by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Matthews, Owen, author.

  Title: Black sun : a novel / Owen Matthews.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018043265 (print) | LCCN 2018048828 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385543408 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385543415 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—History—1953–1985—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6113.A8914 (ebook) | LCC PR6113.A8914 B53 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018043265

  Ebook ISBN 9780385543415

  v5.4_r1

  ep

  To Xenia,

  Nikita, and

  Teddy

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  THE CITY THAT DOESN’T EXIST

  PART TWO

  BURNED AND BLINDED

  PART THREE

  SCOURED, MELTED, AND BLOWN AWAY

  PART FOUR

  I AM BECOME DEATH

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  The air-raid siren sounded at dawn. Its rising wail was relayed across the sleeping town by loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, in the corridors of dormitories and barracks, and in the entrance halls of laboratories and workshops. It reverberated from the abandoned church belfry that faced Lenin Square, sending flights of startled pigeons up into the gray October morning. The birds wheeled over the rooftops of the old town center, over the new parks and apartment buildings, over guard towers and the three concentric rings of barbed wire. Finally they flapped over the dark forest that encircled the secret city of Arzamas-16 like a sea.

  In the main machine hall, the whining lathes slowed to a whir. Banks of fluorescent lights snapped off, leaving the operators blinking in morning light that filtered through the glass roof. In the parachute workshop, needles nodded to a halt between the seamstresses’ spread fingers. The women straightened stiffly, grateful for the weekly air-raid drill and an early end to their night shift. In the blueprint room, tousled young engineers swept Lucite rulers and set-squares off their drawing tables, rolled plans into long asbestos tubes, and clattered down the stairs toward a row of fireproof safes.

  Fifty meters below their feet, a squad of soldiers ran, crooked with sleep, to their battle stations outside the main warhead vault. White-coated men filed out of the bunker chatting, patting pockets for matches and cigarettes. Behind them they left orderly rows of lead canisters stacked in cubicles, a large steel hemisphere sprouting wires, vessels of dull metal as big as bathtubs. Once the last of the scientists had exited, the soldiers hauled the steel blast door shut behind them. Their commanding officer rolled the bolts home with a soft clang.

  Alone in its secret vault, deep in the bowels of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, the bomb they called RDS-220 stood alone in silence and darkness.

  * * *

  —

  On his blood-soaked sheets, Fyodor Petrov did not stir. He heard the siren’s wail as a rising swell on the furthest edge of his consciousness. All night he had been rafting across a sea of pain, rolled by nausea. Liquid fire was consuming his body.

  Now, Petrov saw light. He remembered that light has mass, and exerts pressure. A physical pressure, tiny but measurable. He seemed to feel its particles as they fell on the skin of his face, streaming toward him from the surface of the sun. He tried to rise against the light, but his young body would not obey him. He willed one hand into motion. It jerked spastically as it crawled up his torso. His face was stuck to his pillow. His fingers scraped at a tacky, fibrous mass under his cheek and raised a pinch to his unfocused eyes. His own blond hair, shed in the night, matted with blood and vomit.

  “But I can’t die,” Petrov heard his own voice argue. “If I die, I will never know.”

  Petrov let his hand drop. Numb darkness spread over him.

  He dreamt of fire, consuming the world in a furious tornado. He saw the proud towers of the Kremlin torn from their foundations, disintegrating into ziggurats of dust. He saw boiling seas and bending forests exploding into flame. The whole earth burning, at his command.

  The faces of his teachers, friends, and comrades rose before him. They were arguing among themselves, but he could not understand what they were saying. Lost deep inside himself, Petrov felt the outside world dissolve. The flesh that had clung to him so tortuously all night finally fell away. He had become a spirit, rising vertiginously into space with a cold wind rushing on his face. Delivered at last into infinite peace, a billion stars inside his head blazed into light.

  The siren stopped. And with it, so did Fyodor Petrov’s weak human heart.

  PART ONE

  THE CITY THAT DOESN’T EXIST

  What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing.

  —RICHARD FEYNMAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  SATURDAY, 21 OCTOBER 1961

  NINE DAYS BEFORE THE TEST

  I

  The train jerked to a halt, jolting Alexander Vasin out of his crumpled doze. In the opposite corner of the compartment, the dough-faced Party man who had traveled with him from Moscow without a word snored softly on, arms folded across his chest.

  Outside, the autumn night was still and moonless. The train had stopped in a no-man’s-land enclosed by two long walls of barbed wire, illuminated by rows of electric lights. A strip of freshly raked sand stretched into the darkness. Somewhere up ahead Vasin could hear the barking of guard dogs.

  He breathed in the fragrant silence. This train was like no other he had ever traveled on. The compartment was brand-new soft-class rolling stock. It was redolent of the future: leatherette and Formica and rubber sealant. An automatic ventilator blew warm air gently onto his ankles. Vasin stepped gingerly over the apparatchik’s outstretched legs and pulled open the sliding door.

  The trains of his childhood had been like mobile villages, full of chatter, crying, arguments. Lurching theaters of humanity, cluttered with suitcases and leaking bedrolls. But this one was silent, smooth-running, and as hermetic as a spaceship. Only at the vestibule at the end of the carriage did the chilly night air reach in, bringing the familiar train smell of coal smoke and damp grass. V
asin shivered and buttoned his prickly new uniform tunic, retrieving a packet of Orbita cigarettes from the pocket. Orbita: fashionable, hard to find, strong. An apparatchik’s cigarette. Better than he’d been used to.

  Vasin straightened his uniform in the glass of the door. He had his father’s high forehead, dark blond hair just starting to recede. He tucked his new spectacles into his top pocket and squinted again, smoothing his hair and flexing his shoulders to fill out the tunic. Bars of rank on his collar, a sword-and-shield emblem on his right breast. Major Vasin, KGB.

  From the corridor came a low murmur of voices in another compartment. A muffled dance tune began, midsong, from a radio in the conductress’s cubbyhole. There was a shush of escaping steam and the screech of spinning wheels as the train resumed its motion. It trundled through a floodlit checkpoint into a long barbed-wire cage supported by a timber frame. A pair of barking Alsatians choked on their leads as they stood on their back legs, almost pulling their handlers off their feet.

  In the distance the lights of a city appeared, the hard urban crenellations of tower blocks. A single-platform station slid into view.

  Vasin hurried back to the compartment, disturbing his companion in the middle of a mighty yawn. He waited in the doorway for the older man to pull on a thick mackintosh and slip a plastic suitcase from the shelf. He gave a curt parting nod as the train slowed to a halt.

  Up and down the carriage, compartment doors were sliding open. Vasin wrestled down his large prewar Bakelite case, a prized family possession. He waited for his fellow passengers to pass before he hauled it onto the platform. The young conductress stood by the door smiling, pert and pretty in her uniform coat, her fore-and-aft cap perched on a pile of peroxided hair.

  At the stationmaster’s whistle the locomotive reversed away from the platform, the red star emblazoned on the front of its boiler disappearing into the night. The new arrivals were momentarily blanketed in a cloud of hot, oil-scented steam.

  The guards saluted every passenger and requested papers, corralling them to a pair of clerks, who sat checking and stamping in a bright pool of lamplight. To Vasin’s surprise they made no attempt to search any luggage.

  In the empty waiting room a stocky, bearded man sat hunched on a bench, holding a book close to his face. He wore a creased trilby hat, and his winter boots were half-laced and unpolished. Vasin stood before him in slightly bemused silence.

  “Ah! Comrade Major Vasin?” The man stood quickly, snapping the book shut and scooping it into his coat pocket. “Greetings. Vadim Kuznetsov. Major. Arzamas State Security.”

  He was a head shorter than Vasin, but nonetheless contrived to look down his long nose at him, squinting through black-rimmed glasses. His shirt was buttoned tightly round a thick neck, and his pointed beard jutted forward.

  “Welcome to Arzamas-16. The city that does not exist.”

  Outside the station, the last of Vasin’s fellow passengers were boarding a small bus. The only other vehicle standing on the forecourt was a UAZ military jeep.

  “This is us.”

  Kuznetsov jerked down the stiff door handle and tossed Vasin’s suitcase unceremoniously onto the backseat.

  “Jump in.”

  “You don’t lock the car?”

  “Ha! No thieves in Arzamas! This is the most honest city in the Soviet Union.”

  Kuznetsov bounced into the driver’s seat, pumped the accelerator, and held up a finger, demanding reverential silence. The engine shuddered into life.

  “Miracles!”

  He ground the jeep into first gear.

  “She’s not broken in yet. You know, new cars.”

  Vasin glanced sharply at his companion for any sign of mockery. But Kuznetsov was oblivious, wrestling the UAZ’s gear stick. His was evidently a world where new cars were an everyday annoyance. They accelerated alarmingly along a broad, freshly tarmaced boulevard.

  “Our beautiful town.” Kuznetsov waved a hand airily as he zoomed through a crossroads without slowing down or looking for crossing traffic. “We’ll have the scenic tour tomorrow.”

  They saw no other people or cars as the city thinned from stucco pre-Revolutionary facades around the station into uniform rows of the modern five-story concrete blocks known as Khrushchevki.

  “Here we are. You’ll be staying with me for your visit.”

  The engine shuddered to a halt. The night was still except for the croaking of frogs. A row of young apple trees gave off a strong odor of rotting fruit.

  Kuznetsov’s apartment was large and empty. A broad corridor ended in a deep bookshelf, on which a few books were haphazardly stacked. On the right were two spacious rooms; on the left was a sitting room and, beyond it, a kitchen and bathroom.

  “I’m in here. You’re next door.”

  Kuznetsov gestured casually into the first of the bedrooms, where a mulch of shirts and coat hangers covered the bed and spilled onto the floor and a small desk stood covered in notes and printed papers.

  In the sitting room, polished glass-fronted cupboards entirely filled one wall. It looked like the House of the Future exhibition Vasin had visited with his son, Nikita, at the start of the summer holiday: boxy armchairs and a square sofa, upholstered in bright-striped fabric. Not a sofa bed, but a compact two-person sofa which could not be used for sleeping on. Vasin had never seen such a thing. Before his marriage, he and his mother had lived in two adjacent rooms in a rambling, high-ceilinged communal apartment off Metrostroyevskaya Street in Moscow. They shared the kitchen and bathroom with two other families, seven people in all. With his transfer to the KGB, Vasin had moved with Vera and their son into a two-room apartment of their own near Gorky Park, a sign of giddying privilege. Yet here he stood in a room in which no one lived at all. A room just for sitting in. In the corner stood a large radio and record player, the latest model from Rigonda, in an oak case. And on the shelf a meter-long row of records.

  “From Czechoslovakia,” Kuznetsov called from the kitchen. “The furniture, I mean. They brought a trainload of it last year. Nice, no?”

  Vasin’s agreement was drowned out by a clatter of pans.

  “Got some food from the canteen. Borscht. Meatballs. Mashed potatoes.”

  In the kitchen a new refrigerator, not a rumbling monster from the Stalin Factory, purred in the corner. Kuznetsov tossed Army-style aluminum mess tins onto the Formica kitchen table.

  “We’ll have everything, I guess? I’m hungry too.”

  Kuznetsov set enameled pots onto the electric cooker with a clatter and unscrewed the mess tin lids.

  “Go wash if you like. I’m an excellent cook. Look!”

  He took a mess tin in each hand and splashed their contents into the pots.

  By the time Vasin returned from his shower Kuznetsov was hunched over the table, slurping soup. A portion for Vasin steamed in a large Uzbek bowl.

  “So. Has someone briefed you on what happened?” Kuznetsov pointed his beard quizzically at his new roommate.

  “The case summary says that Fyodor Petrov was poisoned. Accidentally.”

  “Right. Bright young physicist. Sad business.”

  “It says a lot about what happened. Nothing about why.”

  Kuznetsov pushed away his empty bowl, stood to open the window a crack, and lit a cigarette.

  “Why, indeed. That is the question, Comrade Vasin.” He spun a steel ashtray onto the table. “We are not very used to outsiders here in Arzamas. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Vasin slowly dipped his spoon in the soup, tasting it in silence. Then: “Good soup.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to starve, Comrade.”

  Vasin ate on in silence.

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t have come, Comrade Kuznetsov?”

  “Forgive me. Personnel tells us that you h
ave recently joined State Security—”

  “From the Moscow Police Criminal Investigation Department. Homicide Department. That is correct.”

  “Homicide?”

  “Does that bother you, Comrade?”

  “Well. You know about Arzamas. Something about the word ‘homicide’ makes us nervous. And the Lubyanka usually lets us take care of our own business.”

  “Actually, I don’t know about Arzamas.”

  “They didn’t tell you anything in Moscow?”

  “Let’s say they didn’t.”

  Kuznetsov exhaled smoke.

  “Consider Arzamas a separate planet. Some of the greatest minds of the Soviet Union are here, doing vital work for the defense of the Motherland. Social deviants to a man, in the opinion of some of our colleagues.” Kuznetsov leaned forward, his breath strong on Vasin’s face. “But here’s the thing—no one cares about what they do. What they think. What they read. Who they sleep with. Nothing matters, as long as they do the job they’re here to do. So take all the rules you know, and add a new rule at the top: Nothing interferes with the project.”

  “What project?”

  Kuznetsov snorted and loudly clattered his bowl into the sink.

  “Kuznetsov.” Vasin softened his tone. “Really. What project?”

  “Nothing interferes with RDS-220.”

  Vasin digested this for a moment.

  “Which is a kind of bomb?”

  Kuznetsov flinched at the word.

  “It is a device. A new device.”

  “Isn’t that what they do here? Why this is a secret city? Make new devices?”

  “Not like this one. It is bigger. Much bigger. And urgent. Top-level Politburo order.”

  “Our Soviet way. Always the biggest. Always the best.”

  Kuznetsov’s mouth contracted into a thin line. His nostrils flared as though sniffing for a hint of mockery. Vasin sensed that he had bumped into a hard edge in his hitherto amiable companion. Kuznetsov waited a long moment before replying, his eyes traveling over Vasin’s face.