Prologue

Moscow

May, 1952

The room was rather plain and unimpressive when its initial construction was completed. A simple concrete rectangle, it was rather large, though, about the size of a basketball court. However, this room was carved out of small mountain of solid granite that lay quite out of place in a much larger bed of clay. It was 250 feet underground, and would eventually house the most valuable collection of its kind in the world.
          

       Above ground, the temperature had jumped from a typical mid-afternoon  high of forty-four degrees Fahrenheit to an unusual sixty-one, doubling the number of pedestrians strolling the Alexander Garden bordering the western wall of the Kremlin. A block further west, on Mokhovaya Street, construction work was underway at the State Library station on the Red Line. The city’s first subway line wasn’t yet twenty years old, but it already needed renovation.

         The previous day, four of Mokhovaya’s seven lanes were closed. Below, Metro trains were allowed to pass through, but not stop at, the Library station. The official explanation, as announced on state-run radio, was that the ground beneath the Library Station had settled in the seventeen years since its opening and had to be reinforced. 

          An ‘exploratory’ shaft was dug almost two hundred feet straight down through the clay, until a bed of solid granite was discovered. When the two-dozen-man-strong construction team was ordered the following week to widen the shaft and reinforce it so a freight elevator could be put in, curiosity got the better of some of the workers. Wondering why an elevator needed to go twenty stories below the actual station, they mentioned their concern to their shift leader. An hour later, and without explanation, construction ended early for the day. 

That night, a massive explosion blew open a huge rectangular hole in Mokhovaya and collapsed the ceiling of the subway station. Half the windows in the State Library facing Mokhovaya street were shattered. The whole block was closed off. Debris shot over a hundred feet into the air and rained down in the Alexander Garden. In the Kremlin, a full company of guards from the Special Purpose Regiment was put on alert. 

        The lead story in the next day’s edition of Pravda detailed it all. The construction crew assigned to strengthen the bed of the Red Line beneath Mokhovaya Street was drilling holes to sink steel supports when they encountered an isolated but dense pocket of odorless natural gas. Their equipment struck a large boulder and the resulting spark ignited the gas. This resulted in the tragic, but instant and painless, loss of twenty-four brave Soviet workers, as well as the total destruction of the Library Station. Never mind that the workers weren’t even on site when the disaster struck. An unnamed Ministry of Construction spokesman was quoted saying that Mokhovaya would fully reopen in thirty days.

        Three months later, the busy street was finally but temporarily reopened, with a roadway comprised of large steel plates covering the destroyed metro station. It took almost ten more months before the new station was ready for service and normal traffic above and below ground could resume.

  Pravda further reported that construction had been slowed for the safety of the workers who courageously continued their labors. But those men, now believed by the public to be dead, knew that the rebuilding of the Library Station was merely cover for something completely different, something that went beyond putting in a mere freight elevator. Something that had nothing to do with their safety.

       The project and its secrecy, they were told, were vital to national security, With that knowledge, and promises of honors and rewards upon completion of the project, they readily accepted the stringent conditions imposed upon them.  

    

When not at work, the workers were kept in secluded, locked, and guarded but comfortable quarters in the bowels of the infamous Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters and prison that would soon become home to the Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, known better by its dreaded initials:  the KGB.  

Although the workers were quite comfortably housed and very-well fed, they were a bit hesitant about living at the Lubyanka, since that was the last thing most people who visited its lower floors actually did.  

No communication of any kind was allowed with anyone from the outside, including family and friends. In fact, promises notwithstanding, the workers never again saw the light of day. They were either at the Lubyanka or at work. Wherever they went, they were watched over by the secret police. They even commuted in secret, traveling the three thousand feet between the Lubyanka and the Kremlin on the officially non-existent Metro 2, the ultra-secret subway line constructed and run by the secret police for the privileged equals of the Soviet Union.  Once inside the Kremlin, they were shuttled to the Library Station in a bus with blacked-out windows, exiting only within the confines of the work site, which had been completely covered with a temporary wooden structure. 

        At the bottom of the elevator shaft, the workers began to drill into the granite bed.  They worked for a whole year in grueling eight-hour shifts. Teams of four men drilled straight down, extending the elevator shaft another fifty feet. 

At this point, they moved horizontally, and over the next twelve months, they carved, hacked, jack hammered, drilled, and dynamited the granite for a thousand feet, from the Library Station to the southwest corner of the Kremlin.

The conditions were stringent, but Josef Stalin himself visited the site twice to thank his countrymen for their service, dedication, and sacrifice. He allayed their anxiety from being isolated with reminders of the rich rewards and family reunions that would follow.        

The first phase of the secret construction enterprise was finished just over a year after it began, with only a thirty percent accident mortality rate. These men  of course, had been immediately replaced by selfless volunteers.  

        The basketball-court-sized room was then created at the end of the tunnel, directly below the Kremlin Armory, home to countless priceless artifacts of the motherland, including the throne of Ivan the Terrible and the Imperial Crown of Russia, made for Catherine the Great, granddaughter-in-law of Peter the Great.  

     Another elevator was built up to a secret room within the Armory. The construction crew then built a thick wall of steel-bar-reinforced concrete, thirty feet from the subterranean room, sealing off the tunnel. Then they backfilled the tunnel all the way back to the Library station, effectively erasing all signs of its existence. 

        In an intimate and secret, yet well-catered and well-poured ceremony in the plain and unimpressive room beneath the Armory, Stalin thanked the men for their contribution towards what would be the permanent storage facility for the Diamond Fund of the Motherland. The men thanked the Comrade Secretary for the honor and privilege of having been chosen for this project. 
Then their leader watched as a half-dozen members of the secret police machine gunned down the loyal workers in cold blood. The murdered men were then sealed in the remaining section of the tunnel by others who knew nothing of the project. Those men were then escorted on the Metro 2 to the Lubyanka. Neither them, nor any of the secret police guards who worked on the project, were ever seen or heard from again. Thirty-four people had been murdered so far to ensure the secrecy of  the project.        

  Stalin, who wasn’t even a native Russian, entrusted the remainder of the construction to the Ministers of the Interior and State Construction, and a few trusted aides. For their part in the construction of what would eventually store the largest collection of finished and unfinished diamonds in the world, they were rewarded with a ride they would never forget, a one-way trip on Metro 2.

The top-secret Russian diamond vault had a violent beginning.

It would have an even more violent end.