by James Steel
Darensky traversed the turret of his tank as he led the way out of the vehicle park and the long barrel of the 125mm main armament swung round.
‘Load HE-FRAG!’ he barked on his headset to his gunner, on the right-hand side of the turret next to him.
‘HE-FRAG, loaded!’ the gunner called back as he selected the correct ammunition on the auto-loader carousel and it rammed the high-explosive fragmentation round into the breech.
Forty-seven tonnes of heavy metal thundered forward, kicking two arcs of snow out from behind its tracks, and then jerked right, round the corner of a barrack block onto the parade square. On the way out to the main gate, the tank passed the grey concrete administration block, where Karenin and his remaining loyal officers watched them from the first-floor windows.
Darensky spotted them. ‘One hundred metres, our nine o’clock, first-floor window to right of main entrance, one round HE-FRAG. Fire now!’
‘Firing!’
The gun muzzle boomed a tongue of propellant fire and smoke and the breech clanged back next to him as the autoloader spat the cartridge out. He felt the tank rock back on its suspension under him and then flow on again.
The round smashed into the old concrete building and exploded inside in a flash of orange and a burst of dust.
The tanks behind him all swung their guns round as they followed his example and round after round crashed into the side of the building as the regiment delivered its contemptuous farewell salute to its former commanding officer.
Tanks and APCs tore past the burning building and out of the gates of the base onto the A-104 Dmitrovskoye Shosse. Cars and trucks swerved into the middle lane as the long stream of armoured vehicles poured out and headed south to Ostankino.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Lara cringed behind the bench, looking at Anton’s dead body stretched out in the snow in front of her.
She could hear the heavy growl of the APC approaching and feel the vibrations of its engine through the ground. Any second now it would pass the bench and she would then be exposed, targeted and shot dead by the soldiers standing on top of it.
She was too terrified to move, though. She had made her appeal to the regiment but it was too late now for them to do anything. This was it: she really was about to die. She hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed as she stared at Anton’s body.
All sound stopped.
The colour orange moved across her vision.
A heavy blow hit the side of her head, making it ring.
Pieces of metal spun over her head and some hit Anton’s body, jerking it obscenely.
She couldn’t breathe.
She fell forward on her hands and knees, trying to make sense of what was happening.
‘She’s moving. I think she’s OK.’
‘Fuck, that was close,’ Alex said with relief and then shouted, ‘Reload!’
Col heaved another three-foot-long green Kornet missile tube into place on top of its tripod launcher. They were on the top of the TV station with the launcher set up on a table that they had dragged over to the guardrail.
When they had first seen Lara’s footage of the soldiers firing at her on the bus Alex had shouted, ‘Let’s go!’ and they had run up onto the roof, pulled their weapons out of the second helicopter that was still parked there and quickly set them up.
Alex continued the missile bombardment now.
He hunched over the table, pressed up against the eyepiece at the bottom of the tripod. He spun the two small dials and the baleful glass eye of the optical tracking unit, under the missile, rotated round until another APC was in the crosshairs of his sights.
‘Firing now!’
Col stood clear of the backblast.
The thick tube flashed and spat out a missile almost too fast to see. The semi-automatic command-to-line-of-sight laser beamriding guidance kept the dart on target. It slammed into the thin top armour of the carrier with an instant bright orange flash followed by a slower burst cloud of diesel flames, snow and debris. Gravity filtered the pieces so that the heavier bits of metal crashed down first in a large circle around the vehicle. The explosion of the two shaped-charge warheads in the missile made the fourteen tonne carrier bounce off the ground and then stop dead.
Pete and Yamba had each set up a Kord 12.7mm heavy machine gun with its muzzle poking through the railings and its bipod mount resting on the floor so they could depress the gun far enough to hit the targets below them. Accurate five-round bursts banged out at the other three carriers, knocking men off the top and forcing the others back down into the hatches.
Under this onslaught, the APC drivers increased speed and spun round in a wide circle heading back for the trees and then the road. Alex slotted another Kornet missile into the engine compartment of a third carrier as it ran away. It burned fiercely with the other two.
Colonel Melekhov had survived, though, and decided that his force needed to get out of the area; he pulled his trucks back down the boulevard and then south along Prospekt Mira.
Alex looked down on the carnage on the white field below him. The three burning wrecks of the carriers sent ugly black drifts of smoke over it but he could still see fifty or sixty bodies strewn on the ground in a fan shape starting back at the road block. He didn’t know how many other dead were piled up there.
Lara stood up from behind the bench, her ears still ringing from the nearby explosion of the Kornet that had taken out the carrier. She looked at its blackened, burning hulk and stumbled away through the snow, along with Grigory and the crowd of other shocked survivors, towards the tower.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
In the Kremlin press office, Krymov also looked at the TV screen in shock. The camera crew on the roof had the perfect vantage point to film the rout of the OMON forces.
Major Batyuk, Captain Bunin and the other press aides looked on with worried expressions. The whole thing looked awful from a media point of view. There had certainly been violence from the demonstrators but the cold-blooded hunting down of them in broad daylight had been filmed in detail and transmitted around the world.
Krymov wasn’t thinking about that, though, he was thinking of the military situation; that had been a disaster as well.
He spoke quietly: ‘Batyuk, I want regular forces up there now. Whatever we’ve got in town, I want it up there now: tanks, artillery, whatever.’
Batyuk’s shaved head nodded. ‘I’ll see what we’ve got.’
Some quick communications work assembled a force of MVD and regular army troops in trucks, BTR-80s and BMP3 tracked carriers. Krymov appointed Colonel Vronsky in command.
Vronsky had seen what the Kornet missile launcher had done to the first attack and so led his forces up a back road to the tower, staying in built-up areas to keep them out of line of sight of its lethal gaze. As the column of vehicles crossed a railway a kilometre south of the tower, the troops debussed and the APCs rumbled off the road and along the side of the railway so that they were sheltered by the steep embankment. After a few hundred metres the line of them growled their way up it, through an industrial estate with gravel bunkers for railway ballast, and then on to an area of woodland. This ran north to the back of an office block that was just fifty metres directly across the side road from the main entrance to the tower.
The squads debussed from their carriers and crept in slowly towards it.
Chapter Sixty
Alex, Lara, Grigory and Roman were all hunched round a table in the telethon room in Ostankino, looking at the huge videowall on the side of the studio. It showed a map of Moscow that was being used by the graphics technicians to plot the movement of government troops coming towards them as supporters reported them in on their mobiles.
Lara had quickly grabbed a plastic cup of sweet tea from a vending machine and hugged it to her with one hand as she bolstered herself with a chocolate bar with the other. Both she and Grigory still looked shaken after their experience outside the tower. The snowfield was now covered in am
bulance crews and medics carrying the wounded off to hospital. The bodies of the dead had to be left.
Grigory felt he had to say something to Alex. ‘Well, we tried the peaceful route.’ He gave a grim shrug.
Alex nodded. ‘We had to. But from the reports coming in it looks like they want a real war this time.’ He indicated the screen and the symbols of troops and carriers approaching them.
Roman said slowly, ‘I think they mean to kill us. Krymov isn’t messing around. This really is a fight to the death for him and we have to play by his rules now. Alex, you’re the one with the military experience—can you defend us?’
Alex rubbed his mouth ruefully and thought about the situation in the tower, the men and weapons at his disposal and his own chances of getting out alive. They didn’t look good.
‘Well, I’d better bloody well try, hadn’t I?’ he said, and raised an eyebrow.
Lara looked at him thoughtfully across the table. They hadn’t heard anything from Sergey since the broadcast and she presumed he was under arrest or dead. In the absence of his huge personality, and in her shaken-up state, she found herself gravitating back to the Englishman.
Everybody was conscious of Sergey’s absence but there was nothing they could do about it. Lara had called his mobile but it was switched off, and there was so much else going on around them that they tried to force it from their minds.
‘Let’s get on with it then!’ Grigory said.
He and Alex quickly set about organising what defences they could muster against the new threat. A lot of the crowd had fled in terror but several hundred diehards had stayed on and were packed into the huge foyer downstairs and around the steps leading up to it.
Grigory got them and his staff organised into gangs to carry desks and sofas out of the TV offices, into the lifts and down to the foyer where they piled up the furniture as a barricade across the doors.
They had been able to collect six functioning assault rifles and some spare magazines off the dead OMON soldiers, and these were handed out to six volunteers who had done military service. Alex looked at them warily. They weren’t going to tip the balance in his favour but, given their desperate situation, he was open to all offers.
After a quick consultation with the team he decided to put most of their heavy weaponry up on the top of the TV station, partly because of the all-round view it gave of the approaches to the tower but also because at such a height it was hard for attacking forces to elevate their weapons enough to fire at them. Infantry could raise their rifles but it would be difficult for vehicle or tripod-mounted heavy weapons to get that high.
Despite their much smaller numbers—Alex estimated the attackers, from the reports of the numbers of vehicles, at about three hundred—they might have some chance of holding them off until…he wasn’t sure. They just didn’t have any alternative at the moment.
Lara and the other TV crews would be at large as before, but the massacre had deterred any more people from coming out and there was nothing that the international community could do for them now. Consequently, they got all their supporters up from the lifts to the TV station and sheltered them in the offices on the north side of the tower, away from the troops approaching from the south.
Alex also took his newly raised force of six volunteers and set up firing positions for them in two huge loop windows near the base of the tower. These were directly above the massive arch over the main entrance, on the equivalent of the fifth floor. He put three men in each window along with a supply of fragmentation grenades. Their rifle fire would be of limited accuracy and use when the enemy were approaching so he told them to keep their heads down and out of sight until he called them on the walkie-talkie from the roof.
The team grimly set about preparing for the coming battle. They moved the Kornet launcher round to the west of the tower where it overlooked the direction of the enemy approach. They had only four missiles left, which weren’t going to win the war on their own though they could certainly help.
Alex asked Grigory for something to cut away the metal railing around the edge of the roof and his maintenance man came up with an angle grinder from his workshop. He quickly cut four sections out of the fence. As the last section gave way, Alex watched the metal bend out over the three-hundred-and-fifty-metre drop and finally tumble away into the air. They all stood and watched it slowly somersaulting down until it smashed abruptly into the ground. Alex didn’t like having to stand in front of the abyss without the rail but it did mean that Pete and Yamba could set up their two Kord heavy machine guns with their bipods resting right on the edge so that they could kneel and point the barrels down at targets approaching the base of the tower. Arkady also dragged the AGS-30 grenade launcher out of the helicopter; even though he wasn’t flying he was determined to play his part.
Magnus readied his sniper rifle to pick off commanders and other high-value targets that showed themselves. He stood next to the parapet and his lined face looked out over Moscow to the south.
During all this, Pete ran out of the foyer and set up some MTP-2 mines on tripwires in places the enemy was likely to use around the office block across the road from the main entrance.
Their three Shmel launchers and two PKM light machine guns were also loaded and would do against trucks and groups of infantry. After that it would be down to their assault rifles, and after that they would probably all be dead.
‘There they are.’ Col looked down from the parapet with his binoculars into the gravel yard along the side of the railway line, a kilometre south. They could just see the top of a BTR-80 moving behind a pile of gravel and then glimpsed it as it passed by a gap between two large conveyor belt machines.
He watched it go by but then shouted to Alex, ‘Hey, BMP-3 coming up!’ He had seen the distinctive small turret moving behind the gravel and it would pass the narrow gap in a moment.
‘Let’s get it!’ Alex had the Kornet set up ready and quickly twirled the dials to zero his sight in on the five-foot gap between the machines. He could see Interior Ministry troops filing past it in their blue-grey parkas, green flak jackets, helmets and rifles. One of them glanced nervously up at the tower, not realising that he was being watched by such a deadly gaze.
What worried Alex most about the attacking force were the three BMP-3s that had been reported. These were shaped like large tanks and carried a squad of seven infantry, but also had a small turret on them, which, despite its size, contained a horrific amount of weaponry. He couldn’t work out how the Russian engineers had packed it all in. Apart from a 30mm cannon and a 7.62mm machine gun, there was also the main armament of a 100mm gun. This could fire normal high-explosive rounds but, most crucially, could also spit out Stabber 9M117 anti-tank guided missiles, and he knew that these certainly could hit the top of the tower. They needed to get the three machines before they brought their weapons into action.
He saw the green bow of the vehicle emerge from behind one of the conveyor belts; it was moving at walking pace, keeping step with the infantry around it. He centred the crosshairs of the laser guidance device on it and called, ‘Firing now!’ so that no one got caught by the backblast.
The fat tube above his head on the tripod boomed. The missile kicked out straight ahead but then quickly angled sharply down to follow its guidance beam as Alex kept the laser on the side of the carrier. A soldier behind the BMP looked round and saw it coming, his eyes widening in horror as the dart hurtled down at him.
The missile hit the thin side armour. The first warhead blew a hole in it, allowing the second charge to pass through into the interior of the vehicle and explode.
Alex looked up from the launcher at the large cloud of debris rippling up from the industrial estate. His gaze met Col’s gimlet eyes and they both nodded grimly. This was not going to be pretty.
After that, Colonel Vronsky ordered red smoke grenades thrown out to cover the gap from the missile launcher’s sight. He quickened the pace of his advance, spreading his infantry screen o
ut through the wood. They used the cover of the trees to set up machine-gun firing points, angling the muzzles up by resting them on low branches or the shoulders of other men. Other soldiers tilted their heads back and aimed through the sights of rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Five of the BTR-80 APCs were detailed to find points under trees several hundred metres back from the tower so that they could bring their 14.5mm main armament into play. Their turrets allowed the gun to elevate sixty degrees and from that far back they could hit the top of the tower. The range was quite long—about seven hundred metres—so the fire wasn’t accurate, but none the less a wall of lead blasted up at the defenders. The burning tracer rounds in it made it look like a dense red spider’s web stretched out of the wood up to the TV station.
Alex and the others winced as the bullets cracked over their heads and blew chunks off the concrete spire that soared up behind them in the middle of the roof terrace. Other bullets went low and smashed the windows out on the offices below them; panes of glass slipped out and spun off into the void before crashing down around the entrance. RPGs screamed overhead, exploding on the spire and spraying out metal shards.
The southern and western sides of the station were being plastered with fire. Pete and Yamba banged a few rounds out in response with their heavy machine guns but there were just too many firing points to aim at: more than twenty flashes of light spread out amongst the trees, jabbering lead up at them. The weight of incoming fire meant that they had to duck down to minimise their exposure over the edge of the roof. However, a few heavy-calibre rounds then smashed through the ceiling below them and punched out some of the roof by their feet as well.
‘Shit!’ Alex yelped and jumped further back from the edge as a big 14.5mm bullet blew a hole the size of a fist in the floor by his right knee.
Col and Magnus managed to crawl up to the lip of the roof, despite the bullets slamming in around them, with their Shmel launchers, and put two rounds into the trees that exploded with large fireballs and snuffed out a couple of machine-gun squads each.
