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by Frederick Forsyth

  Behind the voice he heard a chattering sound.

  “Who’s that?” he asked. “Is Colonel Demidov there?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” screamed the voice. “I’m lying on the floor dodging bullets. Are you the Defense Ministry?”

  “No.”

  “Well, look, mate, get onto them and tell them to hurry up with that relief force. We can’t hold on much longer.”

  “What relief force?”

  “The Ministry is sending troops from out of town. There’s all hell let loose here.”

  The speaker slammed down the receiver and presumably crawled away.

  General Andreev stood with the dead receiver in his hand. No, they’re not, he thought, they’re not going to send anything.

  His orders were formal and absolute. They came from a four-star general and minister in the government. Confined to base. He could obey them and his career remain clean as a whistle.

  He stared out across the forty yards of snow-choked gravel toward the brightly lit windows of the Officers’ Club, noisy with laughter and good cheer.

  But he saw in the snow a tall, straight-backed figure with a small cadet by his side. Whatever they promise you, the tall man said, whatever money, or promotion, or honors they offer you, I don’t want you ever to betray these men.

  He reached down to the cradle, killed the line, then dialed two figures. His Exec Officer came on the line, backed by roars of laughter.

  “Konni, I don’t care how many T-Eighties are ready to roll, or how many BTRs, I want everything on this base that can move to be ready to go, and every soldier who can stand, fully armed in one hour.”

  There was silence for several seconds.

  “Boss, is that for real?” asked Konni.

  “It’s for real, Konni. The Tamanskaya is going to Moscow.”

  ¯

  AT one minute after midnight in the year of grace 2000, the first tracks of the first tank of the Taman Guards rolled out of Kobyakova Base and turned toward the Minsk Highway and the gates of the Kremlin.

  The narrow country road from the highway to the base was only 3 kilometers long, over which the column of twenty-six T-80 main battle tanks and 41 BTR-80 armored personnel carriers had to proceed in single file and at reduced speed.

  Out on the main road, a divided highway, General Andreev gave the order to occupy all lanes and increase to maximum cruise speed. The clouds of the day had broken up into patches and between them the stars were bright and brittle. On either side of the roaring column of tanks the pine woods crackled in the cold. They were cruising at over 60 kilometers. Somewhere up ahead a single driver approached; his lights picked up the mass of gray steel pounding toward him and he drove straight into the woods.

  Ten kilometers out of Moscow the column came to the police post marking the border. Inside their steel hut, four militiamen peered above the windowsills, saw the column, and crouched back down, holding each other and their vodka bottles as the hut shuddered from the vibrations.

  Andreev was in the leading tank and saw the roadblock trucks first. A number of private cars had approached the roadblocks during the night, waited awhile, then turned and headed back. There was no time for the column to halt.

  “Fire at will,” said Andreev.

  His gunner squinted once and released a single round from the 125mm cannon in the turret. At a range of four hundred yards the shell was still at muzzle velocity when it hit one of the trucks and blew it apart. Beside Andreev’s tank his Exec Officer, riding the tank on the other side of the highway, did the same and demolished the other truck. Just beyond the roadblock there was a smattering of small-arms fire from the ambush positions.

  Inside the steel cupola on the roof of the turret Andreev’s machine gunner raked his side of the road with his 12.7mm heavy machine gun and the firing stopped.

  As the column thundered past, the Young Combatants stared in disbelief at the ruin of their roadblock and ambush site, then began to filter away into the night.

  Six kilometers later Andreev slowed his column to thirty kilometers an hour and ordered two diversions. He sent five tanks and ten APCs to the right to relieve the garrison being besieged in the barracks at Khodinka Airfield, and, on a hunch, another five tanks and ten carriers to the left, to find their way northeast to secure the Ostankino television complex.

  At the Sadovaya Ring Road he ordered his remaining sixteen T-80s and twenty-one APCs to the right as far as Kudrinskaya Square, then left toward the Defense Ministry.

  The tanks were now in single file again and reduced their speed to 20 kilometers per hour, their tracks chewing chunks out of the tarmac as they swung into line and headed toward the Kremlin.

  In the basement communications room of the Defense Ministry, Deputy Defense Minister Butov heard the rumble above his head and knew there was only one kind of creature in a city at war that can make that kind of thud.

  The column pounded through Arbatskaya Square and passed the ministry, pointing now straight toward Borovitsky Square and, on the other side, the walls of the Kremlin. None of the men in the tanks and APCs noticed a car, parked among others, just off the square, or the figure in quilted jacket and boots who left the car and began to trot after them.

  In Rosy O’Grady’s Pub the Russian capital’s Irish contingent was making sure the New Year had been well and truly celebrated, complete with the constant crackle of fireworks coming from the Kremlin down the street and across the square, when the first T-80 growled past the windows.

  The Irish cultural attaché lifted his head from his Guinness, glanced out, and remarked to the barman, “Jaysus, Pat, was that a fucking tank?”

  In front of the Borovitsky Gate was a parked BTR-80 armored personnel carrier of the Black Guard, its cannon raking the walls on top of which the last of the Presidentials had retreated. For four hours they had fought their way through the grounds of the Kremlin, waiting for reinforcements, unaware that General Korin’s remaining troops had been ambushed on the outskirts of the city.

  By one in the morning the Black Guards occupied everything but the tops of the walls, 2,235 meters of them and wide enough at the top to march five men abreast. Here the last few hundred of the Presidential Guards were huddled, covering the narrow stone steps from below and denying Grishin’s men the final conquest.

  From the western side of Borovitsky Square Andreev’s lead tank emerged into the open and saw the BTR. At point-blank range a single shell blew the carrier to bits. When the tanks ran over the wreckage, the fragments were hardly larger than hub caps and their tracks flicked them aside.

  At four minutes after one, General Andreev’s T-80 plunged down the tree-lined approach to the tower and gate, entered the arch with its shattered door and grille, and rolled into the Kremlin.

  Like his uncle before him, Andreev disdained to squat beneath a closed turret, peering through the periscope. His turret cover was thrown back and his head and torso were out in the cold, padded helmet and goggles masking his face.

  One by one the T-80s rolled past the Great Palace and the pockmarked cathedrals of the Annunciation and the Archangel, pulling past the Czar’s Bell into Ivanovskaya Square where once the city crier announced the emperor’s decrees.

  Two Black Guard carriers tried to take him on. Both were reduced to shards of hot metal.

  Beside him the 7.62mm light machine gun and its heavier sister the 12.7 emitted a continuous chatter as the tank’s searchlight began to pick up the running figures of the putschists.

  There were still over three thousand combat-fit Black Guards investing the Kremlin’s seventy-three acres, and it would have been pointless for Andreev’s dismount squads to have left their vehicles. Barely two hundred of them would have made small difference on equal terms. But inside their armor, they were not on equal terms.

  Grishin had not foreseen armor; he had brought no antitank gunnery. Lighter and nimbler, the Tamanskaya’s APCs could penetrate the narrower alleys where the tanks could not go. Ou
t in the open the tanks were waiting with their machine guns, impervious to counter-fire.

  But the real effect was psychological. To the soldier on foot, the tank is a true monster, its crew peering unseen through armored glass, its machine-gun snouts swiveling to find further helpless targets.

  In fifty minutes the Black Guards cracked, breaking cover to run for the sanctuary of churches, palaces, and cathedrals. Some made it; others were caught in the open by the cannon of the BTRs or the machine guns of the tanks.

  Elsewhere in the city the separate battles were at different stages. The Alpha Group was close to storming the OMON barracks at the Federal Interior Ministry when one of them caught a scream on his radio from the Kremlin. It was a panic-stricken Black Guard calling for help. But he made the mistake of mentioning the intervention of the T-80s. Word of the tanks flashed through the Alpha Group and they decided enough was enough. This had not gone as Grishin had promised them. He had pledged total surprise, superiority of firepower and a helpless enemy. None of these had happened. They pulled back and sought to save themselves.

  At the City Hall the street gangs of the New Russia Movement had already been taken apart by the Chechens.

  In Staraya Ploshad, the OMON troops, supported by General Petrovsky’s SOBR men, were beginning to flush the mercenaries from the Dolgoruki mafia’s security companies out of the government headquarters.

  At Khodinka Airfield the tide was turning. Five tanks and ten BTRs had taken the Vympel Special Assault Group in flank, and the more lightly armed commandos were being pursued through the maze of hangars and warehouses that made up the base.

  The Duma was still occupied by the remainder of the privateers from the security firms, but they had nowhere to go and nothing to do but monitor by radio the news from elsewhere. They too heard the scream for help from the Kremlin, recognized the power of the tanks, and began to quit, each man persuading himself that with luck he would never be identified.

  Ostankino still belonged to Grishin, but the triumphal announcement destined for the morning news was on hold as the two thousand Black Guards, watching from the windows, saw the tanks move slowly up the boulevard and their own trucks flaming one after another.

  The Kremlin is built on a bluff above the river, the slopes of the bluff are studded with trees and shrubs, many of them evergreen. Beneath the western wall lie the Alexandrovsky Gardens. Paths through both sets of trees lead toward the Borovitsky Gate. None of the fighters inside the walls saw the single moving figure coming through the trees toward the open gate, nor did they see him climb the last slope to the ramp and slip inside.

  As he emerged from the arch the passing flashlight of one of Andreev’s tanks washed across him, but the crew mistook him for one of their own. His quilted jacket resembled their own padded jerkins and his round fur hat looked more like their own headgear than the black steel helmets of Grishin’s Guards. Whoever was behind the flashlight presumed he was a tank man from a crippled APC seeking shelter under the arch.

  The light flickered over him and went away. As it did so Jason Monk left the arch and ran under the cover of the pine trees to the right of the gate. From the cover of his darkness he watched and waited.

  There are nineteen perimeter towers to the Kremlin, but only three have suitable gates. Tourists enter and leave by the Borovitsky or the Trinity, troops by the Spassky. Of the three, only one was wide open and he was beside it.

  A man deciding to save himself would have to leave the walled enclosure. Come the dawn, the forces of the state would flush out the defeated in hiding, pulling them from every last doorway and vestry, pantry, and cupboard, even down to the secret rooms of the command post beneath the Spassky Gardens. Anyone wishing to stay alive and out of prison would deduce he should leave soon via the only open gate.

  Across from where he stood Monk could see the door of the armory, treasure house of a thousand years of Russian history, hanging in splinters where the rear of a turning tank had crushed it. The flickering flames from a burning Black Guard personnel carrier cast a glow over the facade.

  The tide of battle moved away from the gate toward the Senate and the arsenal at the northeastern sector of the fortress. The burning vehicle crackled.

  Just after two he caught a movement by the wall of the Great Palace, then a man in black came running, doubled over to keep low but moving fast down the facade of the armory. By the burning APC he paused to look back, checking for pursuit. A tire caught fire and flamed, causing the fleeing man to turn quickly around. By the yellow light Monk saw the face. He had only seen it once before. In a photograph, on a beach at Sapodilla Bay in the Caicos Islands. He stepped from behind his tree.

  “Grishin.”

  The man looked up, peered into the gloom beneath the pines. Then he saw who had called. He was carrying a Kalashnikov, the folded-stock AK-74. Monk saw the barrel come up and stepped behind the fir. There was a chattering burst of fire. Chunks of living wood were torn from the trunk. Then it stopped.

  Monk peered round the bole. Grishin had gone. There had been fifty yards between him and the gate, but only ten for Monk. He had not passed.

  Just in time Monk saw the muzzle of the AK-74 jutting out of the broken doorway. He stepped back again as bullets tore the tree in front of him. The firing stopped again. Two halves of a magazine, he estimated, and left the tree and ran across the road to flatten himself against the ocher wall of the museum. He had his Sig Sauer against his chest.

  Again the barrel of the assault rifle came out of the doorway as the holder sought a target across the road. Unable to see anything, Grishin advanced another foot.

  Monk’s bullet hit the stock of the AK with enough force to tear it from the colonel’s hands. It fell and skittered out onto the pavement, beyond reach. Monk heard running footsteps on the stone floor inside. Seconds later he had left the glow of the burning APC and was crouched in the pitch darkness of the hallway of the Armory.

  The museum is on two floors, with nine great halls containing fifty-five showcases. In these are literally billions of dollars’ worth of historic artifacts, for such was once the wealth and the power of Russia that everything possessed by the czars, their crowns, thrones, weapons, clothes, right down to horse bridles, were studded with silver, gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls.

  As his eyes adapted to the darkness, Monk could make out ahead of him the dim shape of the stairs to the upper floor. To his left was the vaulted arch leading to the four halls of the ground floor. From inside he heard a slight bump, as of someone nudging one of the showcases.

  Taking a deep breath, Monk threw himself through the arch in a parachute roll, continuing to turn over and over in the darkness until he came up against a wall. As he came through the doorway he half-glimpsed the blue-white flash of muzzle flame and was covered in fragments of glass as a case above his head took the bullet.

  The hall was long and narrow, though he could not see it, with long glass cases along both sides and a single display area, also enclosed in glass, in the center. Inside these, waiting again for the bright electric lights and the gawking tourists, were the priceless coronation robes, Russian, Turkish, and Persian, of all the Rurik and Romanov czars. A few square inches of any of them, and the jewels stitched to them, would keep a working man for years.

  As the last shard of glass tinkled down, Monk strained his ears and heard at length a gasp as of someone trying not to pant letting out his breath. Taking a triangle of broken plate glass, he lobbed it through the blackness toward the sound.

  Glass landed on glass case, there was another wild shot, and the sound of running feet between the echoes of the detonation. Monk rose to a crouch and ran forward, sheltering behind the center display until he realized Grishin had retreated into the next hall and was waiting for him.

  Monk advanced to the communicating arch, a second slice of glass in his hand. When he was ready he tossed it far down the hall, then stepped through the arch and immediately sideways behi
nd a cabinet. This time there was no bullet.

  With his night vision returned he realized he was in a smaller hall containing jewel- and ivory-studded thrones. Though he did not know it, the coronation throne of Ivan the Terrible was a few feet to his left and that of Boris Godunov just beyond it.

  The man ahead of him had clearly been running, for while Monk’s breathing after his rest in the trees was measured and even, he could hear somewhere up ahead of him the rasp of the air entering Grishin’s lungs.

  Reaching up, he tapped the barrel of his automatic high on the glass above him, then pulled his hand down. He saw the flash of a gun muzzle in the darkness and fired quickly back. Above his head more glass broke and Grishin’s bullet clipped a shower of brilliants off the diamond throne of Czar Alexei.

  Monk’s bullet must have been close, for Grishin turned and ran into the next hall which, though Monk did not know it and Grishin must have forgotten, was the last: a cul-de-sac, the hall of the antique carriages.

  Hearing the scuttle of feet ahead of him, Monk followed fast, before Grishin could find a new sniping position. He reached the last hall and ducked behind an ornate seventeenth-century four-wheeled carriage embossed with golden fruit. At least the carriages gave shelter, but they also hid Grishin. Each carriage was on a raised dais, cordoned from the public not by glass cases but ropes on vertical stanchions.

  He peered out from behind the state coach presented in 1600 by Elizabeth the First of England to Boris Godunov and tried to spot his enemy, but the blackness of the hall was complete and the coaches were only discernible as vague shapes.

  As he watched, the clouds outside the tall narrow windows parted, and a single moonbeam filtered through. The windows were burglarproof and double-glazed; it was very dim light.

  Yet something gleamed. A tiny point in all that darkness somewhere behind the ornate gilded wheel of the coach of Czaritsa Elizabeta.