Frol Panin watched the heavy rain across the empty runway. The weather had broken and brooding, angry clouds had replaced blue sky and a blazing sun. At the side of the runway the soil had cracked in the weeks of heat, grass turned yellow, so dry that the rain ran off the surface. As the weather deteriorated air-traffic control considered diverting the incoming flight. They were being overly cautious and Panin had pushed back against the idea. Extensive preparations for the passengers had been made. Unless there was an emergency, they would land here.

The returning students couldn’t know the extent to which the murder of Jesse Austin had become news in the Soviet Union and abroad. Internationally the story was a sensation. At home, a less hysterical and more measured approach had been taken, with Pravda casting doubt over the official version of events without actually stating them to be false. All the same, these young men and women needed careful briefing and help adjusting after the shock of the past few days. The airport was busy with KGB agents, psychologists and propaganda officers. Unlike the joyous departure ceremony, there were to be no celebrations for their return, no band, no colourful ribbons, no alcohol and only a very limited number of journalists. Family and friends had not been allowed to come despite their requests. The airport was sealed off.

At sixty-one years old Frol Panin’s hair had turned imperial silver-white, like a well-barbered wizard. His frame was trim. The lines in his face were less like wrinkles and more like victory notches, each carved after one of his many grand career triumphs. His most recent had been acquired after working closely with Chairman Brezhnev to oust the ageing and increasingly erratic Khrushchev. In the end it had proved a quiet accomplishment since Khrushchev had gone without a fight, depressed at his demotion. The former farmer had not lost his life but wisely retired into rural obscurity, an appropriate end since that had been his beginning. Panin was a political kingmaker, one of the most important men in the Kremlin. Even so, he was here, on a seemingly trivial errand, prepared to sit and wait for the return of a airliner and its passengers, becoming personally involved in an operation that he’d had no hand in, or awareness of. As he waited, he made a note to review all the protocols of SERVICE.A, an intelligence department he’d overlooked. Clearly their ability to provoke had been underestimated.