Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  A second Airborne division was deployed on the road between the capital and a base twenty miles to the southwest that was occupied by the Dzerzhinsky Division, the KGB’s private army. Fully motorized, and equipped with tanks and armored cars, the Dzerzhinsky Division posed the most imminent threat to the coup.

  The same planes that had brought the Caucasians to Khodinsk were used to ferry more troops to the capital from Kavrov. The commanders of the ‘court divisions’ — the Kantemirov and Taman Guards — had received orders from the Chief of Staff to maintain their forces on maximum defensive alert.

  Meanwhile, Zaytsev used the Well, inside the Lubyanka, as a rallying point, massing several hundred men in a variety of uniforms and disguises for the most critical phase of the operation.

  *

  Askyerov was halfway through his reading of the document he had described to the Politburo as the General Secretary’s political testament. He paused to pour himself a glass of mineral water, and waded on.

  ‘Militarism is antithetical to the Marxist-Leninist tradition,’ Askyerov read out. ‘Our armed forces have always been dedicated to the cause of world peace and the cause of proletarian internationalism. No conflict is possible between the high command and the Party, which is its guide and mentor.’

  He glanced over the edge of his folder at Marshal Zotov. The Marshal’s attention seemed to be focused on his watch, as if he was counting the minutes until the conclave was over.

  He read on. ‘Bonapartism, however, has been encouraged by foreign special services in their unremitting efforts to divide and weaken the Soviet people.’

  Zotov gave no sign of having absorbed this. The man actually yawned — copiously, insolently — and Askyerov again wished that he had the dossier Topchy had promised. Never mind. He could break the Marshal without it.

  He sped through the rest of the edited text. He relished the surprise and the delight in the face of the youngest man in the room, Galayev, as it dawned on him that he would inherit the title of General Secretary. The title, not the functions. Askyerov was no fool. He wasn’t a Russian, or even a Ukrainian, and he knew that the Marshal wasn’t the only one who called him black-ass or cockroach behind his back. Let someone else bask in the limelight. He would content himself with the real power.

  He had reached the peroration. Predictable, but then you could never fault the General Secretary for being excessively original. In the silence around the table, people cleared their throats, vied for the bottles of mineral water, doodled on their pads. Galayev’s face was pink and bright, like a happy pig. Only the Marshal remained totally impassive.

  I’ve got you now, Askyerov thought. Before Galayev could begin the improvised speech he was obviously itching to deliver, Askyerov took some notes out of his pocket and recalled the meeting to order.

  ‘The General Secretary’s concern about bonarpartist tendencies in the armed forces,’ he resumed, ‘is well placed. With your indulgence, I would like to draw your attention to a number of unfortunate recent occurrences following the sabotage attempt in Togliatti. I am sure that our distinguished Chief of Staff will share our concern.’

  Like a picador, he had placed another shaft, but the bull still refused to be goaded into action.

  He resolved to be more daring. ‘Comrade Marshal, it has been said that you yourself encouraged anti-Soviet elements in the officer corps by your negativism in respect to Party policy over Togliatti and Afghanistan and other critical issues.’ His voice was as sweet as halvah.

  That lance had found its mark. Zotov shifted in his seat. He said in a hoarse voice, barely more than a whisper, ‘Whoever says that is talking through his asshole.’

  Askyerov’s flow was interrupted by the rattle of small-arms fire close at hand. The Prime Minister and several of the others jumped to their feet. The KGB chief, Chetverikov, had his hand on the butt of his pistol. Marshal Zotov looked as bewildered as the others.

  A bulky man, his cap askew, stuck his head through the door. It was General Rostov, the head of the Kremlin Guards, a miner’s son, and an old classmate of the Marshal’s.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Askyerov screamed at him, losing all his composure.

  Rostov seemed as confused as the men around the table. He mumbled something about unidentified ‘traitors’ and ‘mutineers’ who were trying to storm the building. ‘We’ll soon have them sorted out,’ Rostov promised.

  Romanov, with his folder under his arm, started sliding along the wall toward the General Secretary’s inner sanctum.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Askyerov shrieked at him, glad to have someone to bully. ‘Get back to your place!’

  The artificial tan no longer concealed Romanov’s pallor, especially around the eyes, where his skin looked like crumbling parchment. Rostov reappeared at the door.

  ‘Yes, General,’ Askyerov greeted him. The shooting seemed louder, and nearer.

  ‘I don’t know who they are,’ Rostov fambled. ‘But they’re professionals, and they’ve got automatic weapons. I’ve been trying to call up reinforcements.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I can’t get through to MVD headquarters, or the Dzerzhinsky Division. The lines are dead.’

  Askyerov remembered the break in the Kremlevka line. It hadn’t been a false alarm after all. He fiddled with the knot of his tie, already tight against his throat.

  ‘Call Moscow District,’ he ordered.

  ‘I tried that too,’ General Rostov reported. ‘They won’t send troops without a confirmatory directive from the Chief of Staff.’

  Both men stared at Marshal Zotov. ‘Is this your doing?’ Askyerov yelled at him.

  Zotov remained impassive, arms folded across his chest.

  ‘I have to get back to my men,’ the commander of the Kremlin Guards excused himself. As he opened the double doors, the acrid smell of burning fabric filtered through. There was a fire somewhere in the building. There was a muffled explosion, and the dreadful sound of a man spitting his lungs out.

  Askyerov ordered Serdyuk, the Defense Minister, to get on the phone to the commander of Moscow Military District.

  ‘You know what’s going to happen to you,’ he threatened Zotov, toying with the small pistol in his pocket. ‘I know this is your doing.’

  The Marshal paid no attention. He had taken to doodling on his pad, a very realistic impression of a gallows.

  Serdyuk was still bellowing at an unresponsive telephone operator when the tall bay windows exploded into a thousand knives.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m shot!’ the Defense Minister exclaimed, inaccurately, as a splinter of glass stabbed his temple, gushing blood into his eyes. He dropped the phone and tried to staunch the bleeding with a handkerchief.

  Then they were all coughing and choking as a stinging yellow gas billowed into the room. Tears streaming down his cheeks, bent double by a racking cough, Askyerov saw several dim figures swing feet first through the broken windows, suspended from ropes. They were a nightmarish apparition, dressed all in black, with black ski masks over their heads that revealed only their eyes and mouths. They jumped lightly to the floor with the rolling ease of parachutists and began to fan out around the room, their automatic rifles at the ready.

  ‘Spetsnaz,’ someone muttered.

  Conscious of his status, Askyerov puffed himself up and stammered, ‘What is the meaning of this?’

  ‘Shut your face!’ This came from a compact, muscular man who had begun to circle the table with a slightly bowlegged gait. ‘All of you: hands up!’

  Only Chetverikov failed to obey. He pulled out his pistol. But before he could use it, the Spetsnaz leader dropped him with a single shot.

  Somebody was hammering on the door to the conference room. At a nod from their leader, two of the men in black positioned themselves on either side, their machine guns at the ready.

  The Spetsnaz commander continued to circle the table, peering into each man’s face. He stared at Askyerov for a long time, and it see
med to the Prime Minister that his eyes were unnaturally bright against the black mask, the pupils elongated like a jungle cat’s.

  Finally, the man in the mask came to Zotov. The Marshal had his hands raised, like everyone else. Across the table, he could see Chetverikov’s corpse, thrown back against the wall, where his chair had fallen. Zotov was breathing deeply and evenly, showing no emotion.

  Two paces away from him, the Spetsnaz leader snapped smartly to attention, saluted, then grabbed the bottom of the ski mask and wrenched it over his chin and his nose.

  ‘General Zaytsev.’ He announced himself as stiffly as if he were on a parade-ground. ‘Commanding officer of the Spetsnaz brigade. I am awaiting your orders, Comrade Marshal.’

  ‘Zotov! It’s you!’

  This outburst came from Askyerov. Purple-faced, the Prime Minister was wagging his finger at the Marshal.

  Zotov did nothing without deliberation. Slowly he got to his feet, acknowledged Zaytsev’s salute, and plodded around the table to Askyerov’s place.

  The Prime Minister wriggled in fear and indignation as the Marshal clamped a huge paw on his shoulder, dragged him from his seat, and propelled him toward the door, beyond which the clatter of automatic fire and the cottony thud of distant explosions could be heard.

  Using Askyerov as a human screen, Zotov advanced toward the main doors.

  ‘Open them,’ he commanded the Spetsnaz troopers who were standing guard.

  The doors opened outward. As they were flung back, a KGB sentry was thrown off balance and was catapulted over the shoulders of one of his comrades who was squatting at his feet, returning the fire of the attackers who were advancing room by room, corridor by corridor, toward the Politburo’s retreat. There were a dozen or more KGB men outside. They didn’t know how to respond to the spectacle of the Chief of Staff clutching the Prime Minister like a rag doll so that his toes barely scraped the floor.

  Zotov roared over their heads, in his sergeant-major’s voice, ‘Rostov!’

  His uniform in rags, his face blackened as if he had been crawling down a mineshaft, the commander of the Kremlin Guards came staggering toward the door.

  ‘General Rostov,’ the Marshal said formally to his old classmate, ‘everything is under control. Order your men to cease fire immediately.’

  Rostov was an army man, after all, even if he was in charge of a KGB unit. He hesitated for only a moment.

  When the shooting had subsided, the Marshal said, ‘As Chief of Staff, I relieve you of your responsibility to protect these people.’ He shook Askyerov as if to demonstrate who ‘these people’ were. ‘Order your men to lay down their arms. No harm will come to any one of them. You have my personal guarantee.’

  Rostov confirmed the order.

  ‘Zaytsev?’ The Marshal looked over his shoulder, and the Spetsnaz general came hurrying up. ‘You will place yourself under General Zaytsev’s orders,’ he instructed Rostov.

  The Prime Minister, whose chin was now supported by the Marshal’s massive forearm, was in no position to object.

  ‘Whatever you say, Alexei Ivanich,’ Rostov said. He sounded slightly dazed. ‘But are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ The Marshal responded by dropping Askyerov like a sack of flour.

  *

  They had not forgotten the man on his deathbed in the clinic among the birch woods. At the same moment that Zaytsev’s men were surrounding the Central Committee building, two five-man teams commanded by a young major called Metkov were speeding south through the Moscow suburbs toward Stalin’s former dacha at Kuntsevo. They had borrowed their cars and their uniforms from the Lubyanka. They crossed the bridge over the Serun River and followed a twisting road through forests that swallowed up the light. The lead car came to a halt in front of a pair of high metal gates, electronically controlled. A discreet plaque announced the Cardiac Hospital of the Fourth Medical Directorate of the Ministry of Health.

  The duty officer wasn’t sufficiently impressed with the cars and the uniforms to open the gates right off. After all, the guests of the clinic included the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He came swaggering out and yelled through the metal bars, ‘Show me your written authorization.’

  Major Metkov jumped out of his car, obviously delighted to oblige. He came right up to the gates, but was speaking so softly that the duty officer had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. In that instant, Metkov got hold of the man’s right ear and jabbed his knife up into his belly, just far enough for him to feel the sharpness of the point.

  ‘Open the gates,’ Metkov said between his teeth. ‘Tell them.’

  As the gates swung back, the duty officer broke free and began running up the drive. Metkov flicked the switch on his knife, next to the guard, and the blade flew straight as a bullet and sank deep into the duty officer’s back.

  Two of Metkov’s men took charge of the guardhouse. The rest proceeded in the cars past a two-story hunting lodge, fashioned from Karelian birch, toward the modern glass-and-metal hospital wing hidden in the woods behind it. Metkov saw a very old man in a wheelchair being taken on his morning outing by a male nurse. He looked crumpled and disjointed, like a bird that had struck a windshield in midflight.

  Metkov strode decisively across the lobby of the hospital wing toward the elevators, while four of his men headed for the stairs.

  A flustered receptionist came rushing over, but didn’t dare question Metkov’s curt explanation: ‘Orders of the Central Committee.’

  There were more guards on the floor reserved for the General Secretary, but they were men of the Ninth Directorate, and they didn’t interfere with a man wearing the uniform of a KGB colonel.

  Metkov burst into the General Secretary’s suite. There was a group of haggard men in white coats, a woman sobbing.

  ‘What the hell —’ a startled doctor began.

  ‘I have a message for the General Secretary, on a vital matter of state security.’

  ‘You’re too late, Colonel,’ the Kremlin doctor said wearily. ‘The General Secretary is no longer at this address.’

  Metkov looked past him. The General Secretary’s loose, familiar features were eggshell white. The sheet had been pulled down to his chin.

  Chapter Ten – Nalivay!

  ‘I have to harvest grain, but I have no mill; and there is not enough water close by to build a water mill; but there is water at a distance; only I shall have no time to make a canal for the length of my life is uncertain. And therefore I am building the mill first and have only given orders for the canal to be begun, which will the better force my successors to bring water to the completed mill.’

  Peter the Great

  There were times when Marshal Zotov reminded Sasha of the general in Gogol’s Dead Souls, a man ‘who, though he could be led by the nose (without his knowledge, of course), if he got an idea in his head, it stuck there like an iron nail: there was no pulling it out again.’

  It was impossible for the Marshal to conceive of a clean break with the past. He was the reverse of a revolutionary; he could only understand the present in terms of what had happened before. With a little help from his son-in-law, he had identified Askyerov as an enemy who had to be crushed, because he saw him as a second Beria. Now that supreme power had suddenly been handed to him — by a Spetsnaz general in a black ski mask — he could only imagine what to do with it by establishing precedents, even though it was doubtful whether there were any that could provide a solid handhold in the maelstrom that had started to shake Russia.

  But the Marshal made a brisk beginning. Back in his own office on Gogol Boulevard, he received generals and admirals and issued a stream of orders that Sasha had drafted for him. The very first decree that he signed declared that because of ‘extraordinary threats to state security,’ full powers had been assumed, on a temporary basis, by the Chief of Staff. Any instruction emanating from Moscow would be valid only if it bore the Marshal’s personal seal. The members of the Politburo were being held in pr
otective custody pending a thorough investigation of a plot against the Party and the state.

  Another directive ordered the release of General Leybutin from the Serbsky Institute. Sasha sent a special team to collect him and bring him direct to headquarters.

  Leybutin looked better than he had feared — paler than normal, perhaps, with his uniform hanging a bit loose, but his eyes were steady and alert.

  ‘How far did they go?’ Sasha came straight to the point.

  ‘Not far. They gave me the usual things, to loosen my tongue. The serious treatment was supposed to begin a few days ago. For some reason, the bitches postponed it.’

  ‘Are you up to handling something really important?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Pavlik, I watched you in Afghanistan, then at Togliatti. You were never afraid to take a stand. We need you with us.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on? I’ve been in the loony bin, don’t forget.’

  ‘We’re making a revolution,’ Sasha said quietly. ‘It’s only taken us nearly seventy years since the last one.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to finish with the Party?’ Leybutin said with a mixture of excitement and incredulity.

  ‘It may come to that. There’s still a lot to be decided. For now, we’ve got our work cut out just ensuring that our orders are obeyed in Moscow. Are you with me, Pavlik?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘All right. I don’t trust Gukhov. He had too many friends in the Central Committee and he likes the fat life too much. I want you to assume command of the Moscow Military District straight away. It’s all arranged. You will report to me personally. You’ll need these.’ He handed Leybutin a document, stamped with the Marshal’s seal, confirming his promotion, and copies of several directives that were being sent to all the army district commanders.

  Leybutin’s narrow face cracked into a grin as he scanned a decree instructing the district commanders to place all KGB offices throughout the Soviet republics under military control, and to arrest all Third Directorate personnel.