December

by James Steel

  Once he was ready, he settled down with a laptop in the rear section. He thought back to his footballing days and planned how he was going to give the greatest team talk of his life.

  Alex slipped forward to see Arkady. ‘OK, we need to get a move on. Any power you can give it, please do. We need to buy every minute of broadcast time at the start of the day so we can to get the revolution rolling.’

  Arkady nodded and shoved the throttles forward.

  The assault team expected that they could well be in action in Moscow as well, so they all settled back and began stripping and cleaning their weapons, removing the cordite dust from the working parts that could cause stoppages and cost their lives. Fresh weapons were also prepped from the crates in the back of the aircraft.

  Magnus pulled Russian army-pattern helmets out of a box and began trying them on for size. Colin looked across at him and shouted, ‘Oi! Magnus, shouldn’t you ’av horns on that, like?’ He gestured with two hands to indicate Viking horns sticking out of the top of his helmet.

  Magnus looked up and nodded quietly. ‘Hmm, yes, you’re right. I had forgotten them; I think maybe I left them on my longship.’

  ‘Yer silly booger, I’ll have to find you another pair now.’

  They ate a heavy meal of field rations and caviar and quails’ eggs, scrounged from Sergey’s fridge, before crashing out asleep on the big chairs. The cabin filled with snores as Arkady sat at the controls, swigged champagne from a bottle and powered them on to Moscow.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Corporal Lermontov was the only radio operator to have survived the attack on the prison camp unscathed, after the main radio mast had been blown up and collapsed on the radio hut.

  The surviving MVD troops had managed to rally themselves and find an auxiliary generator and radio in the wreckage, which they hoped to use to get through to Krasnokamensk airport.

  A squad of six men formed a defensive perimeter in the ruins of the radio hut around Lermontov as he fiddled with the old set. Prisoners armed with assault rifles from the armoury and dead guards were still on the loose, and bursts of automatic gunfire were going off all around them. The main generator was still out of action so the only light came from the orange flames of burning wooden barrack buildings nearby. The fires crackled angrily and the smell of smoke drifted everywhere.

  Lermontov shook his head to clear it as he switched on the set. He couldn’t believe the speed and ferocity of the attack on the camp. Within seconds the whole place had been blown up and set alight.

  He slipped the earphones over his head and the set whined and crackled with static. He twisted the dial, trying to find the right command frequency.

  ‘Krasnokamensk airport, this is Yag 14/10 Penal Colony, come in. Over.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Krasnokamensk air—’ He had to break off as one of the soldiers behind him ripped off a long burst of fire at a prisoner behind a wall.

  He eventually got through to the drowsy officer at the airport.

  ‘We have been attacked by a superior enemy force and they have taken Prisoner Raskolnikov. Over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You need to get a message through to MVD command in Moscow immediately. Understood? Over.’

  There was a pause before an incredulous voice repeated, ‘Understood.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  3 A.M. MOSCOW TIME ZONE, TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER

  Major Batyuk banged on Krymov’s bedroom door at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence west of Moscow, and waited.

  He knew that the President had been up late drinking with Sergey and would be passed out asleep.

  He banged again, louder this time, before walking in and turning the light on.

  Krymov rolled over onto his back and put his hand over his face against the light. When he took it away gingerly he squinted like a bleary-eyed pig. He had passed out naked on top of the bed after his drinking session in the banya. Batyuk tried not to look at his lumpy white body.

  ‘Mr President, I am sorry to wake you up but we have had a report from MVD command that Raskolnikov has been freed from prison and is now being flown to Moscow on a private jet.’

  Krymov stared at him blankly and then suddenly sat up and looked scared. His face went white and his hands cast about the bed covers beside him.

  Batyuk could see that someone needed to take charge of the situation.

  ‘I think we should go to Air Defence Command immediately,’ he suggested.

  ‘Hmm…’ Krymov seemed to have lost the power of speech and stood up to go.

  ‘You need to get dressed first, Mr President.’

  Batyuk stood aside as the major-domo scuttled into the room and dressed Krymov. As he became more conscious, he suddenly turned to Batyuk.

  ‘What about Shaposhnikov?’

  Batyuk didn’t know about the SVR report from London that Sergey had been linked to Alex’s journey to Krasnokamensk, so he just looked back questioningly.

  Krymov continued angrily, ‘Bring him with us! I want him with us. Go and wake him up now!’

  Batyuk nodded and ten minutes later the President and Sergey stumbled down the front steps to Krymov’s limo. The squads of Echelon 25 troops hurried around them and into their waiting vehicles.

  The convoy drivers gunned their engines and swept out down the long driveway. Sergey sat opposite Krymov in the back of the Zil limo; both of them looked ill as the car lurched around the corners.

  Krymov was in a state of shock; he had never really been a leader and liked to hide behind bureaucracy to cover it up. Now that he was presented with a shock he had lost his wits. All he felt was scared and he could not formulate a coherent plan of action. Somewhere in his mind he knew that Sergey might have something to do with all this but, at the same time, he regarded the man as his greatest source of comfort and understanding, and this emotion refused to let him see the man clearly for what he might be: a traitor.

  Sergey felt sick with alcohol poisoning and fear. He had had to throw himself into his usual clownish routine last night and had drunk more than usual to cover up his worries.

  The convoy roared on through the night round the deserted MKAD ring road to the junction with the A-101 southwest of the capital. They turned off left and shortly afterwards drove through the barriers into ‘Moscow Military District Depot 5’ and got out inside the deserted factory shed. The guards all snapped to attention as the President’s entourage marched past them and they plunged eight floors down into the command centre.

  It was 3.45 a.m., but luckily Lieutenant-General Mostovskoy was on duty. He walked calmly over to them as they came in, looking smart in his airforce uniform jacket and tie. He was surprised to see Sergey there as well, looking shambolic in his crumpled suit, diamond earring and messed-up hair, but his face betrayed no sign of it.

  ‘Mr President, the situation is under control, we are tracking the terrorists’ plane on the radar and we will shoot them down as soon as you give the order.’

  Krymov still looked dazed and was relieved to see that someone had got a grip on the situation. He began to recover some of his normal bravado. ‘Very good, Mostovskoy. D’ya hear that, Shaposhnikov?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Sergey shrugged.

  Krymov turned back to Fyodor. ‘Well, Mostovskoy, get this sorted out and maybe we can see if we can find a bit more control on the board of UAC for you, eh?’

  For once, Fyodor’s face flickered slightly.

  ‘Yes, go ahead and blow them out of the sky.’ Krymov turned to Sergey.‘Looks like that Raskolnikov bastard’s going to kill himself even before Bolkonsky could, eh?’ He laughed heartily.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The red alarm on the wall flashed and the buzzer blared.

  Captain Anton Brodsky and his wingman, Lieutenant Denis Chernov, were slumped in armchairs in the crewroom watching a rerun of their favourite Russian cops and robbers show, The Specials.

  Brodsky was one of the top fighter pilots in the Russia
n Federation; his reactions were like lightning.

  Within a second, he had leaped up, chucked his coffee cup in the bin, grabbed his helmet and was out of the door and running down the corridor, Chernov a couple of yards behind him.

  Brodsky slammed open the heavy doors into the huge, underground hangar, and ran over to his large interceptor with Russian Airforce red star markings. The alarm buzzer was going, lights flashed and ground crew hurried across the chamber.

  The pilots both bounded up the ladders and jumped into the cockpits of their aircraft. Brodsky didn’t like what the Krymov regime had done to the economy and freedom, but, as a pilot, he was able to offset this with the sheer pleasure at the new toy that the increased military spending had given him. Since Krymov had forced the merger of all Russian aircraft manufacturers into the United Aircraft Corporation, the famous fighter aircraft design bureaus of Sukhoi and Mikoyan had come together and, with the extra money, had produced their most radical design ever.

  He was now sitting in the cockpit of a brand-new, sixth-generation fighter, the Suk-MiG-41 Berkut, ‘Golden Eagle’, NATO designation ‘Fury’.

  It was an improbable-looking aircraft, as if a model aeroplane kit had been wrongly put together by a child. The main wings were mounted right at the tail, instead of in the middle of the fuselage, and pointed forward towards the cockpit instead of sweeping backwards in the usual way. Two small triangular wings, called canards, had then been stuck just under cockpit. They could be tilted quickly back and forth to a maximum angle at which they were flat against the airflow past the aircraft.

  The whole thing was totally unstable in flight and would simply fall out of the air if it were not for the eighty onboard computers and automatic flight control system that made constant changes to the wing surfaces. This apparently illogical setup meant that Golden Eagle could achieve mind-bending agility in flight, from lightning-quick turns in any direction to almost being able to hover in midair. Brodsky’s favourite trick was pulling a snap loop and then allowing the jet to actually drift backwards through the air for a second before powering it forward again.

  The huge, twin AL-41F engines generated twenty-five tons of thrust, a massive amount for a single-seater aircraft, and powered it through its instability by thrust vectoring, using nozzles on the jets that could twist up to thirty degrees in any direction, rather like a duck waggling its tail feathers.

  Brodsky wasn’t sure what he was going to be shooting down today but he was looking forward to putting all this new technology into action. Sitting in his narrow cockpit, he held his arms up as the ground crew leaned in, connecting up his life-support, comms and G-systems. The suit began pressuring up ready for the massive Gs of take-off.

  As he did so, the large covers over the exit ramps from the underground airbase were sliding smoothly back on their hydraulic rams. It was another Krymov regime money-no-object innovation: burying an airbase so it was impervious to first-strike missile attacks from the US. It was built in the wastes near Vologda as part of Northern Air Defence Command, against incursions from over the North Pole.

  The planes were launched along underground tunnels with the same catapult turbines used on aircraft carriers. As Brodsky glanced forward through his windscreen now, he still couldn’t get over the alarming feeling that he had the same view as a bullet had sitting in the barrel of a gun, except that the barrel looked as if it was blocked by a concrete wall. In fact, what he was looking at was a narrow underground corridor that gradually angled up, like the ski ramps used on carriers, so that it would fling him up into the air.

  During his flight, a short runway on the surface, with arrestor wires, would be cleared with a jet engine, to allow the planes to land and then taxi down a ramp back into their subterranean lairs again.

  As the technicians continued clipping in his parachute and ejector seat around him, Brodsky leaned forward and ran through his pre-flight checks. He flipped down the visor of his helmet so that he now looked like a bug-eyed alien with his oxygen mask sticking out of it like a proboscis. Inside the visor was a full-colour display that allowed him to see in all weather and at night using remote sensors all around the aircraft. As he moved his head around he could even ‘see’ through the floor of the cockpit.

  Data was already being fed through to the display imposed on this view from the air controllers at Central Air Defence Command in Moscow. He read the details of what he was going to be hunting that day:

  Target: Gulfstream G550

  Max speed: 0.8 Mach

  Offensive systems: None

  Defensive systems: None

  The display flicked to a map showing that the target was coming in towards Moscow from the east; it had just passed Perm, so the projected intercept point was marked over the forests leading up to Nizhniy Novgorod. The map showed that once Brodsky was airborne he would accelerate to attack speed of Mach 2.9, 3552 km/h and use his new-generation, forward-looking, pulse-Doppler radar with a phased antenna array to seek out the target. Moscow command would track it and feed him updates all the way into the target.

  He wondered briefly who was on the plane—terrorists? At the end of the day, he didn’t know and he didn’t care, he was just going to obey orders and get a huge kick out of doing it.

  The Gulfstream certainly wasn’t going to be much of a challenge, though.

  ‘Weapons targeting check,’ he barked out to Nadya, the onboard voice-control system, and the computer quickly overlaid various screens on his helmet display: radar, laser range finder and infrared imager.

  Once in range, he could either use one of his latest air-to-air Vympel R-45 missiles with passive IR guidance, or just get close and give it a burst with the 30mm cannon. Even in the era of advanced missiles, he still carried an old-fashioned gun, because once you got into the swirling mess of a dogfight, where targets came and went in microseconds, there just wasn’t time to prep, target and fire missiles. He would just get in close from behind and see what the air controller told him to do.

  Brodsky finished his checks and glanced fifty yards to his left, where Lieutenant Chernov sat in the firing chamber of the other barrel of the underground base. He waved to his wingman, who acknowledged just before the black canopy automatically slid shut over his head, followed by a hiss as it pressured up.

  The whole aircraft jolted and Brodsky rocked in his seat as the catapult clamped onto the hardpoints and then dragged him backwards. A shot of adrenalin went into his bloodstream—he never got over this bit.

  He eased his throttles forward, building up engine thrust. The jets behind him roared red, flaming anger against the heat shield at the end of the chamber. The aircraft shook as the catapult wire pulled back to its furthest extent and wheels locked into their final slots. The whole machine was now trembling and twitching all around him like a greyhound held tight on its leash. As the forces built up, he felt it must surely snap like a twig bent too hard.

  Above him, it was still pitch-black, with a strong north wind blowing snow across the flat arctic wasteland. The two huge covers had pulled back to their fullest extent, exposing the twin muzzles of Krymov’s latest air defence toy.

  Two flaming bullets spat out of the ground a second after the other. Already doing 300 k.p.h., they kicked in their afterburners and went vertical at a climb rate of 350 metres per second. The enormous thunder of the jets shook the ground but faded rapidly as they disappeared into the howling snowstorm on their deadly mission.

  The covers slid silently back into place.

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Mr President, you can see the enemy aircraft here in red.’

  Fyodor pointed above him at the huge screen that the semi-circular room was focused on. Krymov and Sergey were sitting at the large desk right in front of the screen with all the other banks of computers and technicians radiating out behind them.

  ‘Our two Berkut aircraft are about to intercept the enemy just east of Nizhniy Novgorod up here.’

  Krymov stared dully at the t
win blue tracks making their way south to intercept the Gulfstream on its way to Moscow.

  ‘I will have Captain Brodsky establish visual identification of the target before we shoot it down, and you can listen in to the radio traffic. I will now take personal command of the intercept process.’ With that Fyodor gave a curt nod and walked back behind them to his large desk with an array of computer screens in front of him.

  He hit several switches and then, when he spoke into the desk mike, the transmission played over loudspeakers around the room. Krymov grinned and nudged Sergey.

  ‘Captain Brodsky, this is Lieutenant-General Mostovskoy at Air Defence Command. Do you have eyes on the aircraft yet? Over.’

  A crackle of static filled the large room.

  In the cockpit of his interceptor, Brodsky was howling through the night at 30,000 feet. He clicked the transmit button and his voice boomed out near Moscow. ‘Yes, I have a twin-engined jet flare at my twelve o’clock.’

  He had approached the Gulfstream from behind so as not to show up on its radar, which wouldn’t have been able to make out much of his stealth-engineered profile, anyway. He could see the twin red stabs of the Rolls-Royce jet exhausts above him.

  ‘I have decelerated and am keeping station with the target until further orders. Over.’

  ‘Roger that, Berkut One. That’s good, close up now and identify target as white Gulfstream G550. Over.’ Fyodor was typing something on his keyboard as he said this.

  ‘Roger. Closing now.’

  There was a pause and crackle of static as the huge fighter powered up alongside the slow-moving Gulfstream.