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by Frederick Forsyth

  One of the Black Guards emerged and signaled with his flashlight to the rest of the convoy, which then rolled forward to fill the parking lot and surround the office building in a defensive ring. Hundreds more Guards poured out and jogged inside.

  Though Monk could see only vague shapes in the windows of the upper floors, the Guards according to their plan were fanning out through floor after floor, removing all mobile phones from the terrified night staff and hurling them into canvas carryalls.

  To Monk’s left there was a smaller secondary building, also part of the TV complex, reserved for accountants, planners, executives, all at home celebrating. It was shuttered in darkness.

  Monk reached to the car phone and dialed a number he knew by heart.

  “Petrovsky.”

  “It’s me.’’

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting in a very cold car out at Ostankino.”

  “Well, I’m in a reasonably warm barracks with a thousand young men on the verge of mutiny.”

  “Reassure them. I’m watching the Black Guards take over the entire TV complex.”

  There was silence.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool. You have to be wrong.”

  “All right. So a thousand armed men in black, arriving in thirty trucks with dipped headlights, were supposed to invade Ostankino and hold the staff at gunpoint. That’s what I’m watching from two hundred yards away through my windshield.”

  “Jesus Christ. He’s really doing it!”

  “I told you he was mad. Maybe not so crazy. He might win. Is anybody in Moscow sober enough to defend the state tonight?”

  “Give me your number, American, and get off the phone.”

  Monk gave it to him. The forces of law and order would be too busy to start tracing moving cars.

  “One last thing, General. They won’t interrupt the scheduled programs—not yet. They’ll let the recorded stuff go out as usual until they’re ready.”

  “I can see that. I’m watching Channel One right now. It’s the Cossack Dance Troupe.”

  “A recorded show. They’re all recorded until the main news. Now, I think you should get on the phone.”

  But Major General Petrovsky had just disconnected. Although he did not then know it, his barracks would be under attack within sixty minutes.

  It was too quiet. Whoever had planned the takeover of Ostankino had planned well. Up and down the boulevard there were blocks of apartment houses, mostly with lights lit, their inhabitants down to shirtsleeves glasses in hand, watching the same TV that was being hijacked in silence barely yards away.

  Monk had spent his time studying the road map of the Ostankino district. To emerge onto the main boulevard now would be asking for trouble. But behind him lay a network of back streets between the housing projects that eventually led southward to the center of the city.

  The logical way would have been to cut through to Prospekt Mira, the main road to the center, but he suspected that highway too was no place tonight for Jason Monk. Without putting on his lights, he hung a U-turn in the road, climbed out, crouched, and emptied a magazine of his automatic straight at the trucks and the TV building.

  At two hundred yards a handgun sounds like a firecracker, but the bullets carry that distance. Three windows in the building shattered, a truck windshield broke apart, and a lucky shot caught a Black Guard in the ear. One of his companions lost his nerve and sprayed the night with his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

  Because of the bitter cold, double-glazed windows are vital in Moscow; with them, and with the television blaring, many residents still heard nothing. But the Kalashnikov shattered three apartment windows and panic-stricken heads began to appear. Several then disappeared to run for their telephones and call the police.

  Black Guards were beginning to form up and head toward him. Monk slipped into his car and sped away. He put on no lights, but the guards heard the roar of the engine and fired further bullets after him.

  In the MVD headquarters at Zhitny Square the senior officer on duty was the commander of the OMON regiment, General Ivan Koslovsky, who was in his office in the barracks of his three thousand sullen men whose leave he had earlier that day canceled against his better judgment. The man who had persuaded him to do this, speaking from four hundred yards away in Shabolovka Street, was on the phone again and Koslovsky was shouting at him.

  “Bloody rubbish. I’m watching the fucking TV right now. Well, who says? What do you mean, you have been informed? Hold on, hold on...

  His other phone was blinking. He snatched the receiver and shouted, “Yes?”

  A nervous operator came on the line.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, General, but you seem to be the most senior officer in the building. There’s a man on the phone who says he lives at Ostankino and there is shooting in the streets. A bullet smashed his window.”

  General Koslovsky’s tone changed. He spoke clearly and calmly.

  “Get every detail from him and call me back.”

  To the other phone he said:

  “Valentin, you could be right. A citizen just phoned that there is shooting out there. I’m going to red alert.”

  “Me too. By the way, I phoned General Korin earlier. He agreed to keep some presidentials on standby.”

  “Good thinking. I’ll call him.”

  Eight more calls came through from the Ostankino area concerning firing in the streets, then a more lucid call from an engineer living in a top-floor apartment across the boulevard from the TV center. He was patched through to General Koslovsky.

  “I can see it all from here,” said the engineer, who like every Russian male had done his military service. “About a thousand men, all armed, a convoy of over twenty trucks. Two APCs facing outward from the parking lot in front. BTR Eighty A’s, I think.”

  Thank God, thought Koslovsky, for an ex-military man. If he had any doubts, they were dispelled. The BTR 80 A is an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier mounting a 30mm cannon and carrying a commander, driver, gunner, and six-man dismount squad.

  If the attackers were dressed in black, they were not army. His OMON teams dressed in black, but they were downstairs. He called his own unit commanders down below.

  “Truck up and move out,” he ordered. “I want two thousand men out on the streets and a thousand to stay and defend this place.”

  If any coup d’état was taking place, the attackers would have to neutralize the Interior Ministry and its barracks. Happily the latter was built like a fortress.

  Outside, other troops were already on the move, but they were not commanded by Koslovsky. The Alpha Group strike force was closing on the ministry.

  Grishin’s problem had been timing. Without breaking radio silence until the last minute, he needed to coordinate his attacks. To attack too early could mean the defenders were not well enough into their celebrations; too late and he would lose some of the hours of darkness. He had ordered the Alpha Group to strike at 9:00 P.M.

  At 8:30 two thousand OMON commandos left their barracks in trucks and APCs. As soon as they were gone the remainder sealed their fortress and took up defensive positions. At nine they came under fire but for the attackers all element of surprise was gone.

  Counter-fire raked the streets around the ministry and ripped across Zhitny Square. The Alpha Group soldiers had to take cover and wish they had artillery. But they did not.

  “American?”

  “Here.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Trying to stay alive. Heading south from the TV center, avoiding Prospekt Mira.”

  “There are troops on their way. A thousand of mine and two thousand OMONs.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “If you must.”

  “Ostankino is only part of it. If you were Grishin, what would you target?”

  “MVD, Lubyanka.”

  “MVD, yes. Lubyanka, no. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble from his old mates in the Second Chief Directorate.�
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  “You could be right. What else?”

  “Surely government headquarters at Staraya Ploshad, and the Duma. For the appearance of legitimacy. And places where resistance might come from. You at the GUVD, the paratroopers at Khodinka Field. And the Defense Ministry. But most of all the Kremlin. He must have the Kremlin.”

  “That’s defended. General Korin has been informed and he is on alert. We don’t know how many Grishin has.”

  “About thirty, maybe forty thousand.”

  “Christ, we have less than half.”

  “But better quality. And he has lost fifty percent.”

  “Which fifty percent?”

  “The element of surprise. What about reinforcements?”

  “General Korin will be on to the Defense people by now.”

  Colonel General Sergei Korin, commander of the Presidential Security Force, had reached the barracks inside the Kremlin walls and barred the multi-defense Kutafya Gate behind him just before Grishin’s main column entered Manege Square. Just past the Kutafya is the bigger Trinity Tower, and inside that, on the right, the barracks of the Presidential Security Guard. General Korin was in his office and on the phone to the Defense Ministry.

  “Give me the senior officer on duty,” he shouted. There was a pause and a voice he knew came on the line.

  “Deputy Defense Minister Butov here.”

  “Thank God you’re there. We have a crisis. There’s some kind of a coup going on. Ostankino has gone. The MVD is under attack. There’s a column of armored cars and trucks outside the Kremlin. We need help.”

  “You’ll get it. What do you need?”

  “Anything. What about the Dzerzhinski?”

  He referred to a Special Operations Mechanized Infantry Division, created specifically as an anti-coup d’état defense unit after the putsch of 1991.

  “It’s at Ryazan. I can have it rolling in an hour, with you in three.”

  “As soon as possible. What about VDVs?”

  He knew there was an elite parachute brigade barely an hour away by plane which could drop onto Khodinka Field if the drop zone could be marked out for them.

  “You’ll get everything I can lay on for you General. Just hang on.”

  A team of Black Guards ran forward under covering fire from their own heavy machine guns and reached the shelter of the covered Borovitsky Gate. A shaped charge of plastic explosive was placed on each of the four hinges. As the team ran back, two were cut down by fire from the tops of the walls. Seconds later the charges went off. The twenty-ton wooden doors shuddered as their hinges were torn apart, then teetered and crashed to the ground.

  Impervious to the small arms fire, an APC ran up the approach road and into the shelter of the arch. Beyond the wooden doors was a great steel grille. Beyond it, in the parking area where tourists were wont to stroll, a Presidential Guard came into view and tried to aim an antitank at the APC through the bars. Before he could fire, the cannon on the APC took him apart.

  Black Guards jumped out of the belly of the carrier and attached further charges to the steel grille. With the attackers back inside, the APC moved out of range until the charges went off and the grille hung drunkenly on a single hinge, then ran forward and knocked it flat.

  Despite the fire, the Black Guards began to race into the fortress, outnumbering the Presidentials four to one. The defenders retreated into the various bastions and redoubts that make up the walls of the Kremlin. Others scattered through the seventy-three acres of palaces, armories, cathedrals, gardens, and squares of the Kremlin, and in some places fighting became hand-to-hand. Slowly the Black Guards began to take the upper hand.

  ¯

  “JASON, what the hell’s going on?”

  It was Umar Gunayev on the car phone.

  “Grishin is trying to take over Moscow and indeed Russia, my friend.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “So far, yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Driving south from Ostankino, trying to avoid Lubyanka Square. Why?”

  “One of my men just drove up Tverskaya. There’s a great crowd of those New Russia Movement thugs smashing their way into the mayor’s residence.”

  “You know what the NRM think of you and your people?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why not let some of your lads settle the score? This time no one will interfere with you.”

  An hour later three hundred armed Chechens arrived in Tverskaya Street where the NRM street gangs were rampaging through the seat of the government of the city of Moscow. Across the road the stone statue of Yuri Dolgoruki, founder of Moscow, sat astride his horse and stared with contempt. The door of the city hall was smashed and the entrance wide open.

  The Chechens drew their long Caucasian knives, pistols, and mini-Uzis and went inside. Every man remembered the destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny in 1995 and the rape of Chechnya over the two succeeding years. After the first ten minutes, it was no contest.

  The Duma building, the White House, had fallen to the security firm mercenaries with hardly a struggle, since it was occupied only by a few caretakers and night watchmen. But at Staraya Ploshad the thousand SOBR troops were in room-to-room and street-to-street combat with the rest of the men from the Dolgoruki gang’s two hundred security companies, and the heavier weapons of the rapid reaction force of the anti-gang police of Moscow were a match for their opponents’ greater numbers.

  At Khodinka Airfield the Vympel special forces troops were encountering unexpected resistance from the few paratroops and GRU intelligence officers who, warned just in time, had barricaded themselves inside.

  Monk swung into Arbatskaya Square and stopped in amazement. On the eastern side of the triangle the gray granite block of the Defense Ministry stood alone and silent. No Black Guards, no firefight, no sign of entry. Of all the installations a planner of a coup d’état in Moscow or any capital would have to possess, and quickly, the Defense Ministry would be high on the list. Five hundred yards away, down Znamenka Street and across Borovitsky Square, he could hear the crackle of gunfire as the battle for the Kremlin raged.

  Why was the Defense Ministry not taken or under siege? From the forest of aerials on its roof the messages must be screaming out across Russia to summon help from the army. He consulted his slim address book and punched a number into his car phone.

  In his private quarters two hundred yards inside the main gate at Kobyakova Base, Major General Misha Andreev adjusted his tie and prepared to leave. He often wondered why he put on his uniform to preside over New Year’s Eve in the Officers’ Club. By morning it would be so badly stained that the whole thing would have to go to the cleaners. When it came to celebrating New Year’s Eve, the tank men prided themselves on taking lessons from no one.

  The phone rang. It would be his Exec Officer urging him to hurry up, complaining that the lads wanted to get started; first the vodka and the endless toasts, then the food and the champagne for the hour of midnight.

  “Coming, coming,” he said to the empty room, and reached for the phone.

  “General Andreev?” He did not know the voice.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know me. I was a friend, in a way, of your late uncle.”

  “Indeed.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I thought so.”

  “He did what he could. Denouncing Komarov in that interview.”

  “What are you getting at, whoever you are?”

  “Igor Komarov has mounted a coup in Moscow. Tonight. Commanded by his dog, Colonel Grishin. The Black Guards are taking Moscow, and with it Russia.”

  “Okay, joke’s gone on long enough. Get back to your vodka and get off this phone.”

  “General, if you don’t believe me, why not ring anyone you know in central Moscow?”

  “Why should I?”

  “There’s a lot of shooting going on. Half the city can hear it. One last thing. It was the Black Guards who killed
Uncle Kolya. On the orders of Colonel Grishin.”

  Misha Andreev found himself staring at the phone and listening to the buzz from the disconnected line. He was angry. Angry at the intrusion of his privacy on his private line, angry at the insult to his uncle. If anything grave were happening in Moscow, the Defense Ministry would immediately alert army units within a 100-kilometer radius of the capital.

  The 200-acre base of Kobyakovo was just 46 kilometers from the Kremlin; he knew because he had once timed it on his car. It was also the home of the unit he was proud to command, the Tamanskaya Division, the elite tank men known as the Taman Guards.

  He put the phone back. It rang immediately.

  “Come on, Misha, we’re waiting to start.”

  His Exec Officer from the Club.

  “Coming, Konni. Just a couple of phone calls to make.”

  “Well, don’t be long or we’ll start without you.”

  He dialed another number.

  “Ministry of Defense,” said a voice.

  “Get me the night-duty officer.”

  With considerable speed another voice came on the line.

  “Who is that?”

  “Major General Andreev, Commander Tamanskaya.”

  “This is Deputy Defense Minister Butov.”

  “Ah, yes, sorry to disturb you, sir. Is everything all right in Moscow?”

  “Certainly. Why not?”

  “No reason, Minister. I just heard something … odd. I could mobilize in …”

  “Stay on your base, General. That is an order. All units are confined to base. Get back to the Officers’ Club.”

  “Yes, sir.’’

  He put the phone down again. Deputy Defense Minister? In the switchboard room, at ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve? Why the hell wasn’t he with his family, or screwing his mistress at some place in the country? He racked his brains for a name, somewhere at the back of his mind, a mate from staff college who had gone on to the intelligence people, the spooks in the GRU. Finally he checked a classified military phone directory and rang.

  He heard the buzz for a long time and checked his watch. Ten to eleven. All drunk, of course. The phone at Khodinka Field was answered. Before he could say anything a voice screamed: “Yeah? Hello!”