December

by James Steel

  However, the two remaining BMP-3s had got into cover behind buildings and now darted forward and launched guided missiles at the top of the tower.

  Magnus spotted the white flash of a launch—‘Missile!’—and they all threw themselves back away from the edge. The Stabber ploughed into the floor below them, exploded on the ceiling and blew a five-foot square chunk out of the roof. Debris sprayed out and splinters of metal pinged off the huge concrete spire.

  Winning firefights was all about getting a heavy weight of suppressive fire in, which forced the enemy to keep their heads down. Alex could see that they were losing this battle and that he had to do something to change the direction of play.

  ‘Right! Everybody off the roof and spread out in the offices below! Pete, Arkady and Yamba, you’re one floor down! Col, me and Magnus, two down! Don’t show yourselves and only fire on my command!’

  They all grabbed their weapons and ran down the stairs, relieved to be away from the lethal metal gale blowing over the edge of the roof.

  By the time they had set up firing positions and radioed in to Alex on their headsets, the attackers had moved through the trees up to the two-storey office block fifty metres across from the entrance to the tower. A couple of Pete’s tripwire mines banged out but officers’ shouts and threats drove the advance on. They set up firing points and a torrent of gunfire poured through the archway and into the plate-glass foyer wall; the whole thing shattered and collapsed like a glass waterfall. Bullets whined off the metal turnstiles and hammered into the concrete back wall, sending sprays of dust out over the whole large space. The furniture barricade began to be shredded, RPGs smashed into it, blowing tables and desks across the foyer.

  When they were all in place, Alex gave the order and they popped up in their new office positions and were able to get a few seconds of fire down on the attackers before the machine-gun onslaught shifted from the roof and blew the windows out in the floors they were on, driving them back inside the station. Alex managed to take out a BTR-80 with another Kornet, but he knew it wasn’t going to change anything. He sprinted back away from the windows, deeper into the building, lugging the heavy launcher with Colin. They stopped in a corridor, breathing hard, and then both got knocked over by the blast of a guided missile hitting the office they had just been in.

  Alex had splinters of glass sticking out of the side of his face so that blood ran down and dripped off his chin. He coughed and choked on the dust whorling around.

  ‘Shit.’ He winced as he moved his hand to check his face and accidentally jabbed a shard further in.

  Col leaned over, carefully pulling all the bits out. He held up a large piece in front of his face. ‘There goes your modelling career, mate.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Alex levered himself onto his feet and tried to think what he was going to do next. Whenever they tried to fire they just attracted a wall of lead. They were running out of options, and soon the attackers would charge the main entrance and get into the tower. There was no way they would fight their way up three hundred metres of stairwells; all they needed to do was to get into the basement and switch off the huge generators down there and the Blue Revolution would be off air and effectively dead. Just as his team would be if they were captured. Alex had no illusions about what Krymov would do to them as foreign mercenaries. He thought about Sergey, the madman who had got him into this whole thing. He was probably dead already. Well, they would be joining him soon.

  Alex poked his head round the corner of a window in the bottom floor of the TV station that hadn’t been shot up yet. He waited for the first troops to break cover from the office building and then yelled into his walkie-talkie to the volunteers stationed above the entrance, ‘Now!’

  The six guys had each prepped two grenades and lobbed them out of the loophole window at the troops. They then ran for their lives along the corridor away from the windows as the twelve grenades went off outside and the full weight of attacking fire came smashing back in where they had been. Two guided missiles slammed into the thick concrete and blew in the wall, sending dust and fragments down the corridor after them.

  After that Colonel Vronsky brought up a BTR to lead the assault into the lobby. It growled up next to the office block as the attackers reloaded and readied themselves for the final push. The smoke grenade launchers on the front of the APC banged and a fan of six grenades shot out. Soldiers lobbed more out into the open. The grenades spun around in the snow, spraying out oily fumes that dispersed into a thick red smoke screen over the open ground leading up to the foyer. Shouts and whistles sounded and a hurricane of gunfire opened up on the entrance, the loopholes over it and any other potential point of return fire.

  Alex peered carefully down through a hole blown by an RPG explosion in the wall of an office. This was it: the final assault, and he had run out of options. There was nothing he could do to stop it now.

  All the attacking soldiers were focused on this final push, firing at points in front of them, and didn’t notice two civilians running along the front of the office block, right across their line of fire. Where streaks of red machine-gun tracers spat out of ground-floor windows they just ducked their heads down and ran under them. They got as close to the tower as they could and then kneeled down between two windows, breathing hard in the swirling red smoke all around them and eyeing the fifty-metre gap to the foyer: it was filled with smoke and machine-gun fire.

  Sergey stood up to run and looked back at Fyodor, his face distorted in desperation.

  ‘Come on, we can make it. Let’s go!’

  Fyodor stared back at him. His eyes narrowed and flicked out to his right, over the hellish no man’s land, and then back to Sergey, calculating the risks. He nodded and Sergey turned to run.

  As he burst out away from the building something made him glance to the right to check that Fyodor was with him. He saw the impassive face standing still by the wall looking at him and then it turned and disappeared back into the swirling red mist.

  Sergey was already out in the open; he was fully committed. He threw his arms out, shouted, ‘Russkaya dusha!’ and ran for his life.

  The attacking soldiers were hunched over their sights, focused on hitting the foyer, the loopholes or the TV station above. The appearance of a single, screaming, unarmed madman running at full speed across in front of them took them by surprise.

  ‘What the fuck…?’

  ‘Is he ours?’

  Fire slackened off as confused faces flicked towards commanders.

  Before they had time to even answer the questions, the figure disappeared into the red fog, charged in through the shattered lobby, vaulted over the furniture barricade and disappeared.

  Colonel Vronsky saw the madman’s dash and ordered renewed effort. ‘Keep going!’

  The eight-wheeled BTR-80 charged forward through the smoke, leaving red whorls in its wake. Its engine roared as it drove up the shallow flight of steps to the foyer and smashed into the remains of the furniture barricade. Files of troops ran forward on either side of it, rifles and RPGs held ready. They flattened themselves against the tower base and prepared to make the final dash through into the basement to get at the generators.

  Having cleared a way through the barricade, the BTR reversed out and the soldiers around it threw a shower of fragmentation grenades into the room, which exploded, sending out bursts of metal splinters.

  The BTR also exploded and blew over onto its side. The deep thumps and shockwaves of more explosions came from the direction of the office block. Tracer rounds started streaking in at the assault troops from the north of the tower. Men about to run into it were dashed against the wall and spun round. The others threw themselves on the ground.

  Shouts came from confused men: ‘What the fuck is going on? Which fucking idiots are firing at us?’

  Soldiers crawled away into cover behind the burning BTR. Engines roared in the red fog around them and more gunfire crashed out. Guided missiles streaked in from the
south of the tower as well. They were taking hits from both directions now. A BMP-3 on the edge of the woods took a missile and exploded with a deep boom.

  A huge metal monster burst through the smoke in front of the foyer, smashed into the back of the burning BTR and spun it out of the way. The big gun traversed round towards the office block and fired with a white flash that swirled the fog violently.

  The assault troops broke and ran as the tanks and BMP-3s of the 568th chased them back into the woods, chainguns spitting out defiance at them.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Alex led the team out of the lift and into the shattered foyer.

  They moved carefully with their weapons held ready. They still couldn’t believe that the 568th had arrived and they were actually alive.

  Like the others, Alex’s face was caked with blood and dust from the missile explosions. Their eyes flicked round the lobby, taking in the devastation. As they stepped slowly forward their boots crackled on a carpet of broken glass. Every wall and surface was pockmarked with bullet and RPG holes and stank of cordite. A red fog swirled around in patches on the floor, stirred by the gentle wind coming in where the glass wall had been shot out.

  They moved forward and took up defensive positions behind the bits of furniture still scattered around. They could hear the 568th troops still out in hot pursuit in the woods. The black hulk of the BTR burned on the steps in front of them and bodies were strewn across the open ground to the office block, which was also now on fire from all the tank rounds and missiles that had hit it.

  ‘Foyer is clear. You can come down,’ Alex said into his walkie-talkie. Another lift shaft hummed as Lara, Roman and Grigory descended. They too walked out in stunned silence as they surveyed the devastation.

  Something rattled across the hall and five assault rifles swung round at it. Sergey pushed the bullet-riddled door from the stairs open and it fell off its hinges.

  Lara shrieked and rushed over to him, throwing her arms around him. ‘Sergey! Sergey!’

  Chaos broke out as everyone forgot their imminent demise and ran over.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ Roman demanded delightedly.

  Sergey was grinning from ear to ear and was only too pleased to tell a good tale. ‘They chucked us off the Metro at Tsvetnoy Bulvar so we decided to walk here, but then someone in the crowd said there was a police cordon. Fyodor wanted to play it safe and take it slowly so we had to stop to buy some new coats and hats.’ He held out his cheap parka; he had lost the hat in his mad dash. ‘Then we hid in a public toilet until I made him carry on. We walked through a back route, around all the housing estates and then over the railway line.’

  ‘Where’s Fyodor?’ Grigory asked with a concerned look.

  Sergey looked confused. ‘Well, he was right here,’ he gestured to his side with both hands, ‘and then I went to run in here. I looked back, but he had stopped.’ He paused and looked shocked. ‘Then he just turned and went…’

  The others looked at him, trying to work out what had happened.

  Lara’s mood turned icy. ‘I think our gallant general probably looked at the situation here and decided that his best interests lay elsewhere.’

  The others looked down at the ground, but from what they knew of Fyodor’s motivation for the coup, they could see that it made sense.

  Sergey, typically, was the least affected by it. ‘Hey, but we are alive!’ he shouted.

  Other staff were coming down out of the lifts now, looking at their smashed building. UCO supporters were less bothered about the damage and ran out of the lifts with blue flags flying, down the steps outside and over to the 568th soldiers, who were returning.

  Tanks, APCs and Tunguska anti-aircraft vehicles rumbled back in from the woods. Captain Darensky stood in the turret of his huge T-90 tank, grinning, and ordered his troops to take up 360-degree defensive positions around the tower.

  Blue Revolution supporters jumped up and down on top of the tanks, waving blue flags for the cameras, and the media girls went mad kissing soldiers. A huge cheer went up from the troops as Lara did a lap of honour round the base, stopping continually to kiss her fans.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  On CNN, General Fyodor Mostovskoy sat next to President Krymov in the Kremlin press office as if they were, and had never been anything but, close allies.

  Sergey was incensed. ‘That fucking son of a bitch traitor! How the fuck can he just sit there next to Krymov! We only just betrayed him!’

  ‘Sergey, darling, will you shut up, please? I’m trying to listen!’ Lara snapped, reached for the remote and turned the volume up louder on the large TV in a conference room.

  The Kremlin press room was buzzing with chatter between correspondents from all the foreign and domestic media as they speculated about what might be said. Journalists moved around in front of Mostovskoy, hunched down on the floor shifting their microphones about amongst the mass of them on the table, like a large flower arrangement, or trying to slot small tape recorders into it. Captain Bunin shepherded them out of the way, trying to get the press conference going as fast as possible.

  The CNN Moscow editor, Gerry Kramer, standing at the back of the room, managed to squeeze in a quick broadcast to his anchor before they got going. ‘Well, Mike, this is the latest in an extraordinary morning here in Moscow. We can hardly believe that it was only a few hours ago that Roman Raskolnikov flew back into the capital in such a dramatic fashion. Since then there has been an alternative government announced at the Ostankino tower, an appalling massacre to rival Bloody Sunday, a huge gun battle and now this. One of the original plotters has realigned himself with the Krymov regime. We have no idea what is going on here, and it’s not often you’ll hear me say that, Mike.’

  There was a loud cough from the front and Captain Bunin spoke to quieten down the feverish journalistic babble. Lara and everyone were watching CNN on a satellite feed—they weren’t relaying it on from Ostankino on the terrestrial network for obvious reasons. That meant that Russians without a satellite dish couldn’t see it but enough had dishes that the coverage could still deal a serious blow to the support for the revolution, depending on what Fyodor said. They all waited anxiously to hear.

  ‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, Lieutenant-General of the Airforce Mostovskoy will now address the press conference.’

  Fyodor didn’t bat an eyelid. He was sitting behind a desk dressed once again in his full airforce uniform and acted as if he had never had any notion of disloyalty to the regime. Krymov sat next to him with his arms folded across his chest and his chin in the air, with the look of a man who was master in his own house again.

  ‘Mr President, people of Russia, ladies and gentlemen of the press, I have called this press conference because I wish to make plain to you what I have learned from my penetration of the foreign coup attempt this morning. It was important for an agent of the Russian government to shadow the plotters in order to determine the full extent of their connections with foreign governments.’

  ‘Head-fucker!’ shouted Sergey in outrage, before Lara slapped him to shut him up again.

  ‘This “Blue Revolution”,’ he uttered the words with icy contempt, ‘is exactly the same as the Orange Revolution, the Rose Revolution, the Tulip Revolution and all the other criminal movements inspired by fascist governments. As Russians we must be on our guard against these foreign saboteurs. We have been infiltrated!’ Fyodor let slip a rare flash of anger.

  Next to him Krymov shifted in his seat, nodded and muttered, ‘Fascists.’

  ‘Through my work inside the coup, I have been able to confirm to our air units, who had been misled by them, that the real reason for the plot is to allow the fascist agent Shaposhnikov to take over control of all areas of the United Aircraft Corporation whilst extending his grasp of the media that has distorted and misrepresented so much freedom in Russia.

  ‘If anyone questions this information then I am happy to provide them with the name of a well-known British
mercenary commander hired by the British government to organise this coup in retaliation for Russia’s entirely justified withdrawal of its energy services to that country, following their unjustified aggression against the peace-loving people of Russia.’

  Alex froze. He could imagine Harrington, the PM and the Cobra committee watching this in their bunker under Downing Street.

  Oh fuck, this is heading towards World War Three. We have just started a fight with a nuclear-tipped psychopath who now has concrete proof that Brits are involved.

  Alex knew that no matter how ‘deniable’ Harrington claimed he was, at the end of the day he and Colin were former British army officers and that was enough in any ordinary Russian’s mind, let alone Krymov’s, to label the whole coup a foreign-backed plot.

  He had to hand it to Mostovskoy, though; his volte-face was unbelievable, performed without a hint of irony. It was vintage Soviet era stuff—claim that black is white and just stonewall any naysayers.

  After Fyodor had finished reading his prepared statement, Krymov took over the mike, and leaned forward, jabbing his finger at the journalists.

  ‘You lot need a lesson in journalism! You see, now you have clear evidence of everything I have been saying to you for years. I wasn’t making it up! These foreign bastards have strangled our economy. I call on all free Russian people to refute the efforts of Shaposhnikov, who has been behind this campaign of corruption and gangsterisation. Through his greed he has been responsible for driving out our valued foreign partners in the petrol refineries. I say to TNK-BP, Total and ExxonMobil and all other foreign investors that once we have crushed this unacceptable face of Russian capitalism then they will be able to operate in Russia again, free from the scourge of the harassment that Shaposhnikov has led. And we will crush them! Now that the airforce has been set right about the truth of this foreign plot they are once again in their true role of defenders of the Motherland. Yes, now they have learned who their boss is, and I have already issued tactical orders to them, so those sons of bitches in Ostankino will also be learning a lesson today.’ He couldn’t help grinning here. ‘Yes, they’re going to be meeting a real father-figure.’ He gave an odd laugh.