December

by James Steel

  But the reality of his time as a conscript had battered that idealism.

  He found himself asking: why was it necessary as a recruit to be kicked out of your bed every night and beaten by drunken ‘lords’ from the different platoons: Recce, Tanks, Artillery, Signals? Whose turn was it tonight?

  How much abuse could his frame take?

  The black eyes, split lips, bruised ribs, cuts and grazes, broken bones, concussion—he found himself living with the iron taste of blood in his mouth from busted teeth and gums, exhausted by the permanent state of fear.

  What was the point of being so starved that you ate tubes of toothpaste for nourishment? Of having no equipment issued so you had to wrap your feet in newspaper instead of socks?

  But when he asked those questions, his inner sense of duty had replied that it wasn’t the system that was at fault, it was him. It was his own weakness that was the problem. The challenge of maintaining the constitutional order of the Motherland was a tough one and he just wasn’t up to it. He should try harder, he could not fail.

  This devotion forced him to stay on as a volunteer and propelled him through to the rank of captain. It was at this point, once he was on the inside, he discovered that it was the system that was at fault and not him. He realised that what was happening was not character-building—it was soul-destroying.

  It had to stop.

  The activism in his character that had fired his nationalism now fired a rebellion. Two months ago he had contacted a journalist to try to get a story run on the reign of terror that Karenin was pursuing in the 568th.

  The journalist had told him quietly that there was no way that the story would ever be published with the censorship of the media under Krymov’s regime. However, the man had then put him in touch with Sergey Shaposhnikov, who was only too pleased to hear about a potential rebellion in a powerful military force stationed near the capital. Sergey had encouraged Darensky to organise a group of similarly mutinous NCOs and junior officers and to await his instructions as to when to bring the regiment into action.

  The only problem was that at the moment the rank and file of the 568th, although they hated Colonel Karenin, were too afraid of him and the system to rebel. As Darensky dragged the body past the regiment on parade that morning, he looked at the lines of men and received only averted eyes and sickened expressions in return. They had no stomach for a fight.

  Panin’s body bumped against his feet as they walked along and he shifted his grip on the blanket. He felt sick and weak.

  He didn’t know how he was going to get the regiment to mutiny.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  MONDAY 15 DECEMBER

  President Krymov was sitting at his desk staring out of the window.

  He had taken his glasses off and his thick-set face had a lost expression as he looked across at the other side of the hexagonal courtyard in the middle of the Senate building complex.

  He was back at the grindstone, trying to control every aspect of life in Russia, surrounded by the piles of paperwork that made him feel like he was achieving something. He had paused from his deliberation of what to do with a new pipeline proposal and was now thinking about the business with Shaposhnikov last week.

  Who was this Devereux man and what is Sergey up to with him?

  He was annoyed with Commandant Bolkonsky. Apparently his first attempt to have Raskolnikov killed in an accident had failed and he hadn’t heard anything since then. If the man couldn’t get it sorted out then he would just have him removed and find someone who could.

  Major Batyuk knocked on the huge wood-panelled door and then entered. ‘Message just come in to the ops room, sir. Bolkonsky says Raskolnikov will be killed in the sawmill tomorrow.’

  Krymov stopped looking out of the window and shot a defensive glare across the large room at him. Well, there was his answer: Bolkonsky was getting on with the job after all.

  ‘Hmm, very good,’ he nodded, and Batyuk turned to go.

  Krymov chucked his glasses on his desk and folded his hands as another thought came to mind.

  ‘Batyuk?’ The tough-looking major paused by the door. ‘You know that I care a great deal about Shaposhnikov.’ The major looked back at him respectfully but with a lack of animation that made it transparently obvious that he didn’t care about Sergey. ‘But I want him to learn an important lesson in loyalty.’ Krymov paused. ‘I’m going to call him.’

  He nodded and Batyuk withdrew.

  Krymov picked up the phone on his desk and called Sergey’s mobile number.

  At that time Sergey was in a meeting in his offices in Moscow with some partners in a clothing chain that he was trying to turn around. He had to go through the whole thing pretending that he hadn’t just got the email from Alex in Siberia saying that they were launching the raid that night and that therefore he didn’t know that a civil war was about to break out.

  As usual, when he saw the word ‘Vozhd’ light up on his phone, he grabbed it and ran out of the meeting room, back into his private office.

  ‘Hey, Boss, what can I do for you?’ he asked cheerfully.

  ‘Shaposhnikov, what are you doing?’ Krymov sounded suspicious.

  ‘Oh, you know, a bit of this, a bit of that. I’m trying to sort out a company that sells bras and knickers, if you must know.’

  Krymov grunted in amusement. ‘Hmm, well, I think I have a little cause for celebration and I want you to come over tonight to get drunk and help me relax in the banya.’

  ‘Well, you know me; I’m always on for a drink, Boss, but…’ Sergey said as he desperately looked around his office for inspiration to get him out of this.

  Of all the nights to be with Krymov he couldn’t afford to tonight, not when the news of the raid hit Moscow. If they got Raskolnikov at six a.m. Krasnokamensk time that would be one a.m. Moscow time. It would take longer than that for the news to be reported but he just could not risk being anywhere near Krymov tonight.

  He thought fast. ‘I’ve got a big awards dinner that I’m doing the keynote speech at tonight so I’m afraid that you’re going to have to get pissed without me.’

  Krymov stood up at his desk, his face flushed red as he bellowed down the line, ‘Now listen here, Shaposhnikov! If the President of the Russian Federation requests your presence tonight then you’d better get your fucking arse over here! They’re going to kill Raskolnikov tomorrow morning and you need to make sure you raise a glass to it, d’ya hear! Or you may be packing your bags to Siberia as well!’

  There was nothing Sergey could do when Krymov was in that sort of mood.

  ‘Boss, Boss, of course, of course. I’ll be right there.’

  When he hung up, Sergey sat on his desk with his head in his hands.

  He had caused the revolution that would start tonight and now it looked like he would cause his own death as well.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Somehow Lara never quite got over seeing the Ostankino tower.

  When the car from the TV station dropped her off in the car park in front of it, she walked towards the monolith and had the feeling that the Earth was sure to buckle under its fifty-five thousand tons.

  She forced the feeling away, telling herself that she was just terrified because of what was going to happen that night. The raid was all set to take place and she would be playing her key role in events the following morning. In the meantime she had to go through a normal day’s work, doing a lunchtime TV slot, whilst pretending that she didn’t know that the country was about to be plunged into a murderous civil war.

  It wasn’t going to be easy.

  She swallowed and tried to adopt an unconcerned look as she went up the shallow steps onto the two-hundred-metre-wide concrete base of the tower and walked over to the reception.

  The tower was shaped like a vast sceptre; it loomed over the whole of Moscow; you could see it from across the city on a clear day. The sky was overcast and it was snowing lightly now, so the top of the tower was lost in the clouds,
but it was basically just an enormous concrete tube with three wide bands of satellite dishes and radio antennae spaced along its shaft. These transmitted the signals for eleven television stations, twelve radio stations and seventeen satellite TV channels to the Moscow region, and then on to relays across the whole of the rest of Russia.

  As Lara got near, she craned her head back and could see, above the bands of transmitters, just under the cloud base, the five floors of offices for the TV and radio stations, complete with the Seventh Heaven restaurant. They bulged out from the tower like a great jewel near the top of the sceptre. It then narrowed in again to a final two hundred-metre spire but this was lost today in the grey murk overhead.

  The base of the tower splayed out wide like a funnel, it looked like the bottom of a power station cooling tower and had huge curved arches cut into it. She walked through one of them, up to the four-storey wall of plate glass inside it, and went through a sliding door into the ultramodern reception area. Huge video screens were mounted all around it, displaying live feeds from all twenty-eight TV channels.

  It was full of media types coming in and out: the older, grey-haired guys sporting ‘liberal dissident chic’ with black polo necks and scruffy suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up. The younger, trendier men wore ‘media cool’: ragged-bottomed jeans and smart blazers, with gelled-up hair and goatee beards. More than half the crowd were sharp-styled media girls with either spiky, asymmetric haircuts and heavy kitsch clothing or just slobby jeans and T-shirts.

  Quite a lot of the TV station staff knew that a rebellion was in the offing but none had been told that it would all start that night. Grigory Bezukhov, as director of the station, was in charge of organising everyone when the coup happened. As Lara walked through the turnstiles, she managed to make herself mutter ‘Hi’ to a few people and exchanged more significant nods with others that she knew were in on the plot.

  Somehow she couldn’t manage her usual smile to the uniformed porters but scurried past them with her head down instead. The two men exchanged glances and shrugged, as she walked across to the bank of huge lifts. She squeezed into one, careful to keep her eyes averted from anyone else, next to a make-up artist with short, blonde hair scraped down over one eye and a lime-green pashmina draped over her shoulders. The door closed and the express lift catapulted them up 347 metres in less than a minute. She felt her knees buckle slightly under the Gs.

  She walked out of the lifts in the central shaft of the tower and into a huge double-height space that spread out like a ninety-degree slice of a pie looking south over the whole of Moscow. The curve of the outside of the slice was one large glass wall; sections of it were closed off to form studios but otherwise the rest of the room was open plan, with a huge newsroom with rows of journalists sitting at desks covered in computers and all the usual paraphernalia of office junk: calendars, family photos, coffee cups. On her right, a glass wall ran along the side of the slice; on the other side of it was a studio that housed the phone bank for the big charity telethons she hosted, with a massive videowall to display the results.

  Today, though, she was going to be doing a much more modest lunchtime TV interview with a well-known soap star who had recently come out of rehab and was trying to make a go of things again. The thought of such trivia at a time of crisis irritated her intensely but she forced herself to put her fear on one side and concentrate on the task in hand.

  As she walked out of the lift she turned right and glanced up at the rear wall of the director’s gallery that overlooked the big telethon studio. She stiffened slightly and then forced herself to relax again. Behind the glass wall she could see that Sergey was up there talking with Grigory. They were standing close to each other with their heads down and arms folded, talking urgently. Grigory wore his trademark rumpled, black Armani suit with his curly black hair splaying out over his heavy-set shoulders. He stroked his stubble nervously and glanced sideways over the newsroom.

  Seeing Lara, he touched Sergey’s arm to interrupt him and then mouthed, ‘See you later,’ to her. He tried to smile reassuringly but it didn’t work. He looked terrified. Sergey also looked unhappy as he waved to her.

  What is Sergey doing here? He isn’t supposed to get here until everything starts tomorrow.

  Her stomach clenched in anxiety but she did her best to smile back. She had to go on air shortly so there was no time to stop.

  She walked round the central lift shaft to the rooms at the other side of the tower, where the make-up studios were located; she felt like asking her make-up artist to slap a wall of it on her so that she could hide her nerves.

  Lara smiled as the camera pulled back from her and her guest and the studio lights went down.

  She then yanked her earpiece out, quickly unplugged herself from the desk mike and ran out of the studio before she had to make any more small talk with the soap star.

  In her anxiety to find Sergey, she busted open doors and pushed past people in corridors. They looked back at the normally poised TV star with astonishment. She hurried up into the gallery where she had last seen him with Grigory. The big director was sitting hunched over a control desk, watching a show go out on the bank of screens in front of him.

  When she burst in, he quickly put his headphones on the desk, stood up and ushered her out with a warning finger pressed over his mouth.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘He’s upstairs. He’s gone outside to think.’ Grigory pointed up to the roof terrace over their heads.

  Grigory and Lara hurried down the stairs, back into the newsroom and past the coat racks to collect their heavy parkas. Although it was mid-afternoon it was still minus eight outside and snowing.

  They ran up the stairs to the roof of the TV centre. Sergey was alone, leaning against the guardrail, looking at the fading view over Moscow and smoking thoughtfully. From up here the whole of the city was spread out in front of them: the streets of the suburbs and then, in the distance, the floodlit, golden domes of the many churches and cathedrals, and the sinister Gothic skyscrapers of Stalin’s Seven Sisters. He looked down at the thousand-foot drop to the car parks in front of him and let go of his cigarette butt. The red dot spun into the void and vanished.

  Lara ran over to him and clutched the arm of his coat. ‘What’s happening? Why are you here now?’

  Sergey turned round and grinned nonchalantly. ‘I have to go to drink with Krymov tonight. We are celebrating Raskolnikov’s death tomorrow.’ He said it as if he were just going to a pub that night.

  Lara’s eyes widened. ‘Well, you can’t go,’ she said simply, as if he were trying to defy a law of nature. ‘The raid’s happening. You’ll be with him when he finds out and he’ll kill you. You can’t go!’ She held out her hands in exasperation.

  Sergey gave a comic grimace and shrugged. Then he held up an index finger and declaimed with mock seriousness, ‘Yes, and as Gogol says in “St John’s Eve”, we are not going to a wedding: “a black raven will croak over me instead of a priest; the open plain will be my dwelling, the grey storm clouds will be my roof; an eagle will peck out my eyes; the rains will wash my Cossack bones and the whirlwind will dry them.”’

  He grinned and started singing an old folk song: ‘“Black raven hovering over me, You won’t eat my flesh…”’

  Lara shrieked in frustration and clenched her fists but he ignored her and carried on singing.

  She looked around her and then hit him with her open palm on the side of his head, then grabbed a fistful of his hair and bent his head down. Her voice was a horribly shrill shriek as she jabbed a finger at him and screamed as if she were admonishing a disobedient child.

  ‘Sergey! You stupid bastard! You’re not going mushroom picking! He will kill you! Do you want to kill yourself ? Do you want that?’

  Sergey went limp under her attack and kept his head down. Eventually she let go of his hair and stepped back, breathing hard, her face flushed red with anger.

  Sergey straightene
d up slowly, the side of his face was red from her blow and his hair was askew, but he accepted her violence as a sign of vitality and did not object to it. His earlier bravado had gone, though, and he looked at her meekly, pushing the hair out of his face.

  ‘Lara,’ he began imploringly.

  She stood back, breathing out into the cold air from her exertion and glowering at him with dangerous eyes. Some of the fear that had built up in her over the last few weeks had been released, though, and she was more able to listen. Grigory stood back from it all, he knew what the two of them were like.

  Sergey realised that he had to be more practical. He held the palms of his hands out to her and began in a pacifying tone, ‘Krymov has given me a direct order. He already suspects something is up and if I don’t appear he’ll know it is and take action. The whole revolution will be prevented from happening—I have to go. If I have to make a blood sacrifice to the Russian nation then I will.’

  Lara looked back at him, not giving any sign of acceptance.

  ‘Lara, what is the purpose of living?’ He looked at her with an earnest, quizzical expression on his face.

  She was caught off guard and frowned. ‘What?’

  Sergey stretched out a hand. ‘Why are we doing all of this?’

  ‘Why are you asking me that now?’ Lara was exasperated.

  ‘No, I’m not questioning it. I have been thinking about this for a long time—and this quarrel has crystallised it for me.’

  Lara knew there was no point interrupting him until this was over so she watched him warily.

  He gained confidence. ‘The purpose of living is to go from what we know—’ he swept a hand to his right to take in the whole view of Moscow—‘this stuff, this material world—to go from what we know to what we suspect we know.’ His index finger sprang up alongside his head to indicate an inkling. ‘You see, that is the issue. The question is not what is out there—the truth is always out there—it is just a question of: do we have the courage, the faith, to believe in it?’