December

by James Steel

  ‘Fucking OMON cunts,’ said Sergeant Platonov, as he sat in the front row of chairs in front of the TV. He chucked his cigarette butt on the floor and ground it out. Apart from the usual reasons for disliking riot police, there was a lot of inter-service rivalry in the Russian army, and the OMON were hated by the regular forces, who saw them as jumped-up policemen who thought they were hard because they could beat up civilians.

  Colonel Melekhov was riding in his command APC at the front of the OMON column and led them west, off the Prospekt Mira dual carriageway, and onto Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova. As he drove down the straight boulevard he could see immediately that it was blocked off by the two yellow buses, overturned cars and a large crowd of people in front of it.

  The BTR-80 he was in was an army-green-coloured vehicle, nearly eight metres long, with four massive, all-terrain tyres along each side and an armoured front that sloped down, under the vehicle. It carried a crew of three—him as commander, a driver and a gunner for the 14.5mm KPVT heavy machine gun in the small turret on the top of it. In the armoured compartment at the back of the vehicle was a squad of seven soldiers, including his two signallers.

  Melekhov was a stern-faced man in his forties with an OMON black beret on his head bearing its badge of a brutal bison head on a Russian tricolour. He stood up out of the commander’s hatch at the front and spoke into his headset mike to the rest of the column on their radio net. ‘Right, halt here!’ They were a hundred metres from the line of barricades.

  As soon as the OMON halted, a chorus of whistling and jeering poured out of the crowd, filling the street in front of the buses; activists had climbed up on top of them and were waving Blue Revolution flags. Some of the teenagers even ran towards the OMON; they rolled snowballs and pitched them into the air but they fell short of the commander.

  Grigory was in the crowd and shouted into his loudhailer, ‘Peaceful protest only!’ but his voice was drowned out by the jeering. Roman had slipped back into the safety of the tower.

  ‘I want the APCs across the road alongside me! All troops debus!’ Melekhov shouted.

  The huge diesel engines of the four other BTR-80s snouted and their gears ground as their drivers manoeuvred them awkwardly back and forth to get out of the convoy and drive up alongside their commander. They all poured twin spouts of grey diesel fumes into the cold morning air as they approached and formed a revving armoured phalanx across the road, three to the south of the central reservation and two on the northern carriageway.

  Officers and NCOs shouted and yelled and got the three hundred men in riot gear formed up into two ranks with long riot shields in front of the vehicles. Walkie-talkie radios crackled and garbled as orders went back and forth from Melekhov in his command APC. Behind the lines of shields came the APCs with squads in between them equipped with tear gas grenade launchers and rifles.

  When they were ready, Melekhov keyed the mike on the powerful loudspeakers mounted on the front of his APC and his metallic-edged voice boomed out over the crowd. ‘You are an illegal gathering against the constitutional order of the Motherland! You must disperse now!’

  A howl of abuse went up from the crowd around the barricade. Groups on different sides of the road started chanting: ‘Shame on you! Shame on you!’

  The noise was deafening.

  ‘Advance!’ Melekhov jabbed his hand forward and the riot shield wall walked slowly towards the crowd, with the APCs advancing behind them.

  Lara was in front of the buses with her cameraman next to her. She was carried away by the chanting and roaring of the crowd; she couldn’t believe, with such a press of people around her, that anything could stop them.

  She was breathless and flushed as she turned to Anton and the red light went on on top of the camera. She was being jostled constantly by people pressing against her and had to shout over the noise. ‘We’re here, in front of the barricade across the street, and you can see the OMON line behind me.’

  Anton raised the camera above his head and focused in on the menacing metal wall of APCs and riot shields coming towards them.

  ‘There’s a lot of people who have come out to defend the revolution here.’ Someone barged into her and she had to stop to get her balance back. ‘I’m sure we’ll succeed!’ she said, almost laughing with the exhilaration of the crowd. A chant of ‘Motherland or death!’ started around her and everyone took it up, shaking their fists at the soldiers in unison and cutting off any further commentary.

  Anton kept the camera above his head as the wall of shields crashed into the crowd. Pushing and jostling between people at the front of the crowd became scuffling and fighting as riot policemen leaned in around their shields and aimed blows with heavy truncheons. Men hit back with branches, planks from park benches and tyre irons. Heads split, fists flew, blood flowed and men grappled with the edge of shields trying to get at the OMON behind them.

  Chunks of paving slabs flew in from the sides of the road and clattered down on helmets and the metal tops of the APCs. Grigory was still out in front of the buses as well and desperately shouting into his loudhailer, ‘No violence! Just block the way! No violence!’ but he was jostled until he dropped the megaphone.

  A petrol bomb sailed over the crowd and smashed on the front of an APC, spraying burning gobbets over the men next to it, who danced around to avoid them. A volley of tear gas canisters banged out from the squads behind the shield wall. They landed over the other side of the buses, flashed orange as their bursting charges went off and spun around in the snow, spewing out white gas. As soon as they landed, eager hands picked them up and flung them back over so they started causing more problems for the OMON. Riot police gagged and choked, and ran off to get away from the gas.

  A woman next to Lara punched her fist in the air and shouted at them, ‘Shame! Shame! God’s shame on you!’ as the hail of petrol bombs increased and splashes of fire splattered down inside the police lines, which began to waver. The crowd was whipped up into a fury now, and men in the front row ripped into the shield wall, grabbing any baton that came out at them, pulling the man out and punching their way into the line.

  In the 568th Regiment’s canteen the men were absolutely rapt. The three cameras positioned in the crowd gave them an insider’s view on a full-scale riot.

  ‘Go on, give ’em a kicking,’ muttered Sergeant Platonov, and the men sitting hunched forward in the prime seats around him smirked.

  ‘That’s a proper fucking punch-up,’ said one.

  Alex was less pleased. He looked across at Col with pursed lips. ‘This is going to get messy.’

  In the Kremlin communications office, Krymov sat and watched the same pictures with growing horror. There was a battle of wills going on between the regime and the protestors, and he could see the lines of police breaking and men slipping and sliding on the snow as they were forced back.

  ‘Bunin, get me a line to Melekhov now!’

  His communications officer hastily punched into the OMON command net and ran over with a desk mike on a long lead.

  Krymov grabbed it and keyed the mike. ‘Melekhov! Can you hear me?’

  The OMON commander had ducked down behind the metal hatch cover in front of him, away from the shower of stones coming in. He had to press his earpiece to his head to hear Krymov over the noise of the crowd. ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘I want those fuckers dead! Do you hear me? Shoot those bitches! Shoot them all!’ He waved his fist in a repeated stabbing motion to emphasise his words. ‘If I don’t hear gunfire now, I’ll have you shot! D’ya hear, Melekhov?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Melekhov was surrounded by chaos and was losing control. The crowd facing him was too big for the number of men he had, and were buoyed up by a passionate belief in what they were defending. But he had been given a direct order by the head of state and implemented it.

  ‘Rifle squads!’ he shouted into his mike over the open net to the commanders of the squads between the APCs. He stood up in his command hatch and waved his arm indiscr
iminately forward at the crowd.‘Get on the APCs and open fire! Live ammunition! Just kill the fuckers!’

  The squad commanders thought they hadn’t heard the order clearly on their walkie-talkies to start with, but as their commander repeated it and they could see him waving frantically, they got the message.

  ‘Mount up, open fire!’

  Riflemen clambered up the stirrup steps between the huge wheels onto the tops of the five-foot-high APCs, from where they had a clear field of fire down into the crowd. Even then the men paused and looked at their commander again.

  Did he really mean this?

  ‘I said, open fire!’ Melekhov screamed over the net, and waved his fist forward again.

  In the crowd, Lara and Anton had managed to work their way to the back next to the narrow gap between the buses, and away from the fighting at the frontline. They found a space against the yellow side of the bus and paused for breath as Anton swung the camera off his shoulder and changed the battery quickly.

  A childish popping sound like a domestic fireworks display in a neighbour’s garden came faintly over the noise of the shouting and fighting. It sounded innocuous and Lara ignored it and continued waiting impatiently for Anton to finish changing the battery so they could film again.

  Anton had spent a lot of time filming in Chechnya and other war zones; he looked up at Lara, his face tense and white.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re firing!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘They’re firing! Fuck, let’s go!’ He slammed the battery in place, shouldered the camera, grabbed Lara’s arm and dragged her through the gap between the buses.

  The crowd stood still at first, not realising what was happening. Then, as people looked up and saw the troops on top of the APCs hunched over their rifles and cracking bursts of fire directly down into the crowd, they understood.

  High-velocity bullets fired at close range smashed into the ranks of people and tore through flesh and bone with dull thumping sounds. Figures jerked and flayed backwards but couldn’t fall because of the press. People screamed and shouted in utter terror at their imminent death. After a confused pause of a few seconds, the crowd now reacted as one, like a shoal of fish. Utter pandemonium now broke out and they fled in panic, leaving bodies flapping in the snow, streaked red with their blood.

  The two camera crews on the sides of the road had turned and fled round the ends of the barricade. Their camera shots just showed a scramble of feet in the snow as the cameramen ran for their lives with their cameras down at their sides.

  Back in the gallery, Ilya fed the scenes out live but couldn’t tell what was happening. At the same time he shouted into his headset, ‘Lara! Lara! Are you there? Are you there? What’s happening? Are they firing over the crowd? What’s happening?’

  Anton dragged her round to the sheltered side of one of the buses. She ran through the open side door and up the steps into it, so that she was now able to stand and look out over the crowd through the side window.

  ‘Anton! Come on!’ she screamed back at him and he followed her up into the bus. ‘Are we getting this? Are we live?’

  ‘Yes! We’re live! We’re live!’ He brought the camera up on his shoulder, got his eye on the screen and focused on her.

  Ilya’s voice shouted into her earpiece again, ‘What’s happening? Are they firing into the air? You’re live now!’

  Millions of people around the world watched in horror as Lara stood up in front of the window in full view of the APCs with her back to them and her strained face looking at the camera. ‘No! They’re not firing in the air! They’re firing into the crowd! Look!’

  She half turned and pointed. Anton’s camera shot steadied and clearly showed the soldiers standing on the APCs firing indiscriminately down onto the crowd.

  The whole bus window went white and shattered as a burst of bullets swept across it. Lara screamed and ducked down, the camera shot went to the floor of the bus as gunfire poured in over their heads.

  The mike still picked up muffled sounds—‘Let’s go!’—followed by the sight of Anton’s feet sprinting and snow spraying up around the lens as he ran with it at his side. They fled for their lives with the rest of the crowd streaming back through the gap between the two buses.

  Krymov was still shouting in Melekhov’s earpiece, ‘That’s it! Get the fuckers! Look at ’em run! Now get through those fucking buses!’

  ‘Clear the way in front!’ Melekhov shouted into the loudspeakers on his APC to the riot troops still in front of the line of army vehicles. They turned, ducked back under the gunfire and ran behind them.

  The crowd had scattered to the sides of the road or crammed back through the gap so that there were now only a pile of bodies in front of the APC.

  ‘Delta Two! Break through the gap! Go over the bodies!’ Melekhov yelled across to the carrier next to him. The troops on top of the carrier stopped firing and dropped down into the hatches as it backed up noisily and then paused as it was aimed at a bus.

  The driver revved as hard as he could, the massive diesel roared and then he let in the clutch and it charged forward, the all-terrain tyres grinding over bodies in its way. The armoured snout, backed by fourteen tons of metal, smashed into the back section of one articulated bus and shovelled it aside, knocking people flying who were sheltering behind it. The driver backed up again and took another charge, which bent the rear section completely aside. Metal shrieked as the carrier broke through the gap and its green snout burst out on the other side.

  ‘Follow them through! Follow them through!’ Melekhov yelled, and the other carriers grunted forward and through the gap.

  Krymov was now ecstatic and jumped out of his chair in the press office.

  He keyed the mike again. ‘That’s it, teach those fuckers a lesson! I want you to make an example of them that they won’t forget! Keep firing!’

  ‘Keep firing!’ Melekhov relayed on to his men.

  Lara and Anton had fled with the crowd and were running back in terror through the screen of trees to the open ground around the tower. The five carriers broke out and charged through the trees after them, their huge tyres churning up the snow and their exhausts bellowing enthusiastically. Troops stood up in the hatches and shot randomly at people running around them. Bodies twisted and spun as rounds slammed into them, injured people cried out to those running past, red streaks spattered on the snow.

  Ilya quickly cut to the crew filming on the top of the TV tower. From above, the crowd could be seen fanning out from the northeast corner of the square of flat land, running back to the tower with the five carriers now driving slowly amongst them to allow their crews better aimed shots.

  People around the world continued to watch, transfixed with horror, as he cut back to the shaky camera shot of Anton’s feet, accompanied by the sound of his puffing breathing. Twice he stepped over dead bodies, then carried on running.

  ‘Here! Here!’ He grabbed Lara and they dived into cover behind a solid concrete park bench. They huddled up against the back of it, sheltering from the slaughter going on all around them.

  ‘We’ve got to do this. Come on!’ Anton lay on his side a few feet away from the bench and twisted the camera round so he could get a shot of Lara with her head down behind the bench. She was breathing hard and was scared out of her wits.

  ‘We’re live!’

  She looked straight at the camera, tears in her eyes and her face contorted in desperation. ‘Please! Please! I appeal to you, men of the 568th Regiment! Please, in the name of God!’

  Her voice rose to a shriek as a burst of gunfire blew chunks of concrete off the back of the bench and showered her in dust and splinters, she was sobbing hysterically now and ducked her head, tears pouring down her face. ‘Please help us!’

  The microphone picked up the growling sound of a carrier’s engine as it approached out of shot behind the bench. As the men on top got a better angle over the bench they first saw Anton lyi
ng on the ground and poured fire at him. The shot of Lara shook and the mike picked up the thumps as the rounds raked across his chest. Lara screamed, the camera dropped out of his lifeless hands into the snow and the screen went black.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  The men of the 568th Regiment couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Their favourite feminine icon was being shot to pieces in front of their eyes.

  Sergeant Platonov muttered in disbelief, ‘Those cunts are gonna to kill ’er.’

  Standing behind his chair, Private Novikov had tears in his eyes and said in a small voice, ‘They can’t do that…’

  The men were also overcome, not with revolutionary fervour this time, but with simple protective anger. Where Darensky’s previous rhetoric had failed to connect with their Russian psyche, this footage now exploded it.

  The doors of the canteen burst open and the solid mass of the regiment poured out and ran across the parade ground to the vehicle park.

  Colonel Karenin looked at them groggily through the windows of the administration block as he was getting up and wondered what the hell was going on.

  The men scrambled up onto their green, camouflage-painted T-90 main battle tanks, Tunguska anti-aircraft vehicles and BMP-3 armoured personnel carriers. Hatches flipped open and they wriggled down into cramped driving and command positions. Infantry squads grabbed rifles, flakjackets and helmets, and, buckling them on, ran over to the back of the APCs as the two armoured doors at the back swung open and they crammed into their seats inside. Engines burst into life and roared.

  Darensky strapped his padded commander’s helmet on and punched through to the regiment radio net. ‘All units, follow my lead!’

  Crisp barks of ‘Roger that!’ came in from the commanders of the eleven other T-90 tanks, three Tunguskas and the ten BMP-3s.