December

by James Steel

  ‘Sergey, don’t!’ Lara shouted. ‘They’ll kill you!’

  She pushed past Alex and ran down the stairs. Sergey walked back towards her, came close, pressed one hand against her cheek and smiled. ‘Look, you’ll see. I’ve solved everything.’ He kissed her on both cheeks. ‘You’re going to be OK now.’

  She looked back at him with tears rolling down her cheeks. She couldn’t understand what he had done but was temporarily silenced by his affection.

  He walked back towards the door.

  ‘Sergey, what have you done?’ she called to him, a strange calm in her voice.

  He turned and smiled back at her. ‘Ah, now you will see my magic.’ He waved his mobile phone at her. ‘Come on! Follow me.’ He opened the door and walked out a few feet into the snowy yard.

  Alex tensed, expecting a burst of gunfire, but none came. He ran forward with Col to cover him, their weapons pointed out from the doorway as Sergey stood out in the open in front of them.

  A door opened to their left, fifty metres away along the north wall of the courtyard, and Major Batyuk stepped out, looking at them warily over the sights of his assault rifle. He kept the gun trained on Sergey as he carefully stepped sideways into the open.

  Sergey turned and gestured back to them to come outside. ‘Come on, come out. We’re all friends now.’

  Three more soldiers followed Batyuk out onto the snow.

  Lara came to the door and looked out. ‘Sergey, what is happening?’

  A horrifying idea was forming in her mind.

  ‘Did you call Krymov?’ she said.

  Sergey just turned and grinned back at her.

  Krymov and Fyodor stepped out of the door across the courtyard, both in long military overcoats. Alex and Col moved out of the doorway and swung their PKMs onto them immediately, but Sergey shouted, ‘No!’ and spread his arms out in front of them.

  He spoke more gently, pleading with them now. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve solved everything. It’s all going to be all right. Just put your guns down and come out here.’

  ‘What!’

  Alex looked at him as if he were mad. After such a vicious firefight he could not accept that they were not going to be shot at.

  Sergey sighed at Alex’s intransigence and spoke to him as if he were explaining to an idiot. ‘I’ve done a deal with Krymov.’ He held his phone up again. ‘Alex, the Blue Revolution is over. You’ve got no choice, Krymov has won and you have lost. I’ve got immunity, but I don’t know what they’ll do to you when they get you into the Lubyanka.’ He jerked his head back at the infamous FSB prison a few blocks to the east of the Kremlin.

  Lara stared at him in disbelief.

  Alex looked at Sergey and raged inside.

  The fucker had betrayed them just as Fyodor had done. He must have seen how easily Krymov had accepted the airforce chief back and guessed that if he would do that for Fyodor he would easily do it for his darling Sergey. All his doubts about Sergey’s sanity when he first met him rushed back. What had seemed amusing eccentricities now stood out as the hallmarks of a traitor.

  His face tightened with rage, ‘You fucking…’ he said quietly, raising his machine gun.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Sergey wagged a contemptuous finger at him as Batyuk and the other three men swung their rifles up to cover him. Alex could see that in his exposed position he would be dead if he laid a finger on Sergey.

  He forced himself not to move and looked back at the Russian, thinking hard. There was no way out. He was under the enemy’s guns and more troops were coming up behind them. He had trusted Sergey and been comprehensively betrayed.

  He felt most responsible for his men. He looked at Col, next to him in the open, and then back at Yamba, who was with Lara in the doorway.

  Sergey had outmanoeuvred them and there was nothing that Alex could do about it now. He slowly bent down, put his machine gun on the floor and motioned the others to do likewise. He stood up feeling weak and defenceless and stared threateningly back at Sergey.

  Col and Yamba put their guns down and Sergey grinned. ‘There, we’re all friends now.’

  He turned his back on them and opened his arms in a bear hug towards Krymov as if the two were going off for a drinking session. Across the courtyard, Krymov returned the gesture. He was feeling victorious and jubilant after Sergey had called him and promised to betray all the members of his team and hand them over to him.

  Two floors above them in the press room the journalists were all leaning out of the windows now that the firing had stopped, and their cameramen jostled for positions.

  Gerry Kramer was flabbergasted as he stood on a chair looking over the backs of the cameramen, out of the window. He commentated live on the scene in the courtyard.

  ‘We just cannot understand what is going on here. The firing has stopped and now the well-known billionaire, Sergey Shaposhnikov, seems to be about to speak to President Krymov.’

  In Air Command Headquarters, General Korshunov saw the pictures on the big screen, grabbed the desk mike and patched through to Rostov as he lined up on the tower for his final bomb run. ‘Major Rostov, delay the bomb run! I want you to circle the target and await my orders!’

  What the hell was going on in the Kremlin?

  Lara was not feeling so equivocal. She ran out of the doorway and, as Sergey stood with her back to her and his arms open to Krymov, she hit him around the head. She tried to shout at him but was too angry to form words. His words to her had always been so special and now he had betrayed them and thus everything that was dear in existence.

  She screamed at him and kicked him. He doubled up and she clenched her fists in rage and battered him around the head.

  Finally she managed to shriek, ‘You talk…!’ and then her anger cut her off. She hit him again and then opened one hand and slashed him across the face with her nails.

  He clutched his eyes with one hand and she grabbed hold of a handful of his yellow hair, pulled his head down and began kicking him. Words began to form, and she shouted each one out of her like a disease she wanted to expel.

  ‘You traitor! You just talk!’

  Alex stared at her attacking Sergey, shocked by the ferocity of her assault; her sophisticated façade had shattered, making her anger all the more frightening. Alex was mad with Sergey but what he was seeing was too visceral, too raw to watch.

  He stepped towards her from behind, grabbed her elbows and pulled her off Sergey, who was on his knees, blood dripping onto the snow from the three slashes across his eyes and nose.

  Lara shouted but Alex held her firm. Her anger had spent itself and she went limp in his arms.

  Sergey stood up slowly and painfully, wincing from her blows. He stared back at her with a look that combined contradictory emotions: anger smouldered alongside helpless devotion. Alex stared at him and saw the raw pink flesh of his soul exposed and bleeding.

  He took a last lingering look at the woman whom Alex was holding and turned slowly away. He straightened up and put his hands inside the chest pockets of his parka. He fumbled with something and then pulled them out again, looked across at where Krymov was standing waiting for him, shocked but sympathetic after the battering his old friend had just received. Sergey opened his arms again before walking towards him.

  As he dropped his hands back to his sides, Alex saw a piece of red tape fall to the ground. He didn’t recognise it at first; he was so confused and shaken by his anger and the emotion he felt for Lara as she leaned her back against him for support. He looked at the red tape, half his brain saying that it was something that he should take note of and the other half not responding.

  Lara was crying quietly and also took a while to recognise the tape for what it was. She realised she had seen Pete tear a similar one off the MTP-2 time-delay mouseholing charge.

  She stared at it in shock as she registered what Sergey was doing.

  She screamed out at him again, ‘No! Sergey, no!’

  She threw herself down from Alex’s gr
ip onto her knees and begged him, ‘Sergey, please! You’ll kill me, you have my soul!’

  But he was fixed on his task. He had realised in the middle of the firefight that he needed to do something to save her and now that he had committed to it he had passed into a realm of peace. In his mind he had already crossed the void between what he knew, and what he suspected he knew, and now he just needed to walk across the courtyard.

  Sergey turned round in mid-stride and walked backwards for a moment, facing Lara with his arms open. Despite the blood on his face and the pain in his heart, he grinned and held up his index finger to admonish her jokingly, ‘Russia has your soul!’

  He turned back, walked up to Krymov and embraced him.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  The world’s media had a grandstand view of the courtyard from the press room.

  Gerry Kramer was standing on tiptoe on a chair peering over the backs of the camera crews leaning out of the windows: ‘Shaposhnikov is moving across the square to Krymov. He’s embracing the President…’

  His hand went to his mouth.

  The entire press corps stared in silence.

  There was a long pause before Kramer began to articulate again. ‘Oh my God,’ he mumbled through his hand, ‘Oh shit. Oh shit.

  ‘Mike, I’m sorry, this is terrible. There’s been an explosion. There are bodies—I can see at least four bodies—I can’t see who they are but one of the bodies must be the President. The President must be dead; no one could have survived that.

  ‘There’s a woman running over to them. It’s Lara Maslova! She’s a TV personality here; she was doing the broadcasts this morning. She is crying and screaming, she’s on her knees. There are three soldiers coming up behind her—we don’t know who they are.’

  Alex stood behind her, staring, his machine gun hung from his right hand with its muzzle pointing down, while Lara looked at the mess of her lover, red on the white snow.

  She stood up and turned away from it, blindly seeking anything to take the pain away, crying out and throwing herself onto Alex.

  He held her with his left arm as she sobbed into him. He looked at the carnage over her shoulder: there was hardly anything left of either Sergey or Krymov. Batyuk had been standing behind the President and had lost most of one side of his body. Fyodor had also been too near and had taken a large piece of shrapnel in the middle of his forehead; he was still just alive, twitching and bleeding heavily on the snow.

  The other Echelon 25 men were either injured or too concussed by the blast to do anything. Alex stared at the horrific scene in front of him, the anger he had felt a minute ago against Sergey draining into an uncomprehending horror.

  His instinct for command kept him going through it. He keyed the mike on his headset and said wearily: ‘Arkady, we need extraction. Central courtyard. Now.’

  ‘Roger, coming over now.’

  The huge Mil thudded up into sight and loomed across the courtyard, blowing a storm of snow over him. He stood with his eyes closed, welcoming its cold blast—wishing it would wipe away the horror in front of him.

  He felt he ought to return for the dead bodies of his two comrades but he knew that an enemy force was approaching from behind. They wouldn’t know what had just happened in the courtyard, so he didn’t want to go back into the building and add to the body count.

  Lara had gone into shock, clutching Alex tightly. He handed his weapon to Colin and scooped her up in his arms, cradling her to his chest and ducking down as they ran in through the snowstorm towards the helicopter. Yamba dragged the troop bay door open, Alex stepped up inside and sat down on the hard midline bench with the girl still held against him. Yamba slammed the door and there was finally something between him and the awfulness outside.

  Major Levin went through transition quickly, lifting them up abruptly, spinning round and then powering away from the Kremlin in a tight turn, heading out north over Red Square. Col and Yamba sank back into the bench, exhausted as they came down off the huge adrenalin high.

  Alex undid the straps on his helmet and pushed it off his head, it clanged on the floor. He ran his hand through his hair and looked down at Lara. She was crying quietly against him still.

  ‘I were sure we was fooking gone then,’ Col said in a shaky voice as he clutched the barrel of his machine gun between his legs. Yamba nodded wearily in acknowledgement. Alex nodded as well; he couldn’t believe they had got out of that insane firefight alive.

  ‘Hey, it’s all fucked up out here! You should see it!’ Arkady shouted in English on the intercom.

  Yamba looked at Alex, who flicked his head towards the door; he stood up and hauled it open. They were flying at five hundred feet and as they squinted against the blast of cold air they could see that northern Moscow had been turned into an apocalypse by the battle around the tower.

  Blocks of flats were on fire from missile strikes, sending up huge plumes of smoke visible from miles away. Streets were littered with the debris of war—rubble and glass blown out of buildings, smashed and burning cars, bodies spread-eagled in the snow, knocked-out tanks burning with their gun barrels twisted up at the sky. The trees along the middle of the main approach boulevard were on fire from a flamethrower hit.

  A helicopter had crashed into an apartment block and exploded, splitting the building open, so that its innards spewed out: girders, sofas, kitchen units and bathrooms all hung out of the wreckage. Everywhere there were smashed windows and buildings spattered with shrapnel from explosions.

  Colonels Vronsky and Melekhov had called off their assault on the tower when they heard the news from the Kremlin. With their commander-in-chief dead they were waiting to hear what happened next. General Korshunov had also ordered the White Swan to return to its nest far to the south. It had roared away with a final contemptuous sonic boom that had shaken the capital again.

  Arkady radioed ahead. ‘Darensky, you still alive?’

  ‘Yes, still alive,’ came the exhausted reply.

  ‘OK, we’re coming back in. Don’t shoot us down!’

  ‘Roger, all units are stood down.’

  As they drew nearer they could see that the Ostankino tower looked a mess. It was cratered with shell and missile strikes, satellite dishes dangled down from cables and the offices at the top were on fire on the east side, sending out a thick stream of black smoke.

  Levin took them in low over the open ground around the tower. As they skimmed in, they could see it was littered with dead bodies, crashed helicopters and knocked-out armoured vehicles. Machine-gun ammunition crackled as it cooked off inside a burning tank.

  They rose up past the offices; Alex craned his neck and could see all the windows smashed or shot out, and the bodies of dead defenders inside.

  They touched down on the roof terrace and Raskolnikov and Grigory ran out from the stairs towards them. Levin shut the motors down as Alex and the others stepped out gingerly and looked at the bodies strewn across the roof.

  They ducked through the rotor wash. Grigory ran over to Lara and clutched her to him, rocking her gently as they both mourned the loss of Sergey.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Later that afternoon the crowds came back out onto the streets of Moscow.

  Young men, housewives and office workers chanted and waved victory signs at the camera crews roving amongst them. Blue Revolution flags, which had been hidden after the morning’s massacre, came out again and jubilantly thrashed back and forth overhead.

  The openness was possible because Raskolnikov had been in phone contact with General Korshunov and other leading members of the Krymov regime and agreed a truce to allow time for negotiations on forming a new government.

  When the news of this went out on all channels, world leaders began giving their reactions to the day’s extraordinary events. Moscow was three hours ahead of London, so the Prime Minister had been dragged out of bed in the very early morning when the fighting started and rushed to the underground COBRA committee room for an emergency
session. The other senior members of the intelligence services, army, air force and navy had all straggled in, looking dishevelled. They had gone straight into a secure videoconference with the American President, who was sitting in his pyjamas at his desk in the White House.

  Ever since Harrington had been instructed to brief Alex on the mission, the government had not known what he was doing and had tried to maintain the pretence that they had nothing to do with him. During those two weeks, the energy crisis in the UK had got worse and worse, with more deaths and more misery, and the pressure had mounted on the Prime Minister to do something. So, when the news had come through that Alex had got Raskolnikov out and he then did his TV broadcast, the PM was ecstatic, punching the air and slapping backs in the COBRA room. The plan had been an incredible risk to take and it had looked like it was going to pay off smoothly.

  However, when Krymov had then mounted his counterattack and the terrible battles had begun around Ostankino, the PM had looked very grave indeed. Maybe he was going to be responsible for the biggest-ever foreign policy disaster in the UK’s history. The committee had sat in utter silence, glued to the coverage of the events as the battle had swung back and forth. Alex bursting into the press room in the Kremlin and shouting at the journalists to get down had been a very tense moment. Harrington had sat bolt upright on the sofa in his house in Hampshire and gone white.

  Finally, it had all ended in the appalling scene in the courtyard. They had won but no one felt able to celebrate the terrible and very public demise of their opponent.

  The PM then gave a hastily convened press conference at Number Ten. None of the previous dramas showed on his face as he stood up in front of the cameras. He always was the consummate politician. Instead he put on his most sombre expression, leaned forward over the lectern to the microphone and said in a very grave tone, ‘The government of the United Kingdom is very saddened by the tragic events that we have all witnessed unfolding in Moscow this morning. Obviously, we had our differences with President Krymov, but I and my Cabinet would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to the government and people of Russia for the violent death of their President.’ He glanced around at the Defence Minister and Home Secretary standing on either side of him, who nodded soberly.