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by Frederick Forsyth

  Monk tried to remember the teaching of Mr. Sims at Castle Forbes. Two-handed, laddie, and hold it steady. Forget the O.K. Corral—that’s fiction.

  Monk raised his Sig Sauer two-handed and drew a bead on a spot four inches above the point of light. A slow breath, hold steady, fire.

  The bullet went through the spokes of the wheel and hit something behind it. As the echoes drifted away and his ears ceased to ring, he heard the sliding thump of a heavy object hitting the floor.

  It could be a ruse. He waited five minutes, then saw that the dim outline on the floor beside the carriage did not move. Slipping from cover to cover behind the antique wooden-framed vehicles, he moved closer until he could see a torso and a head, facedown to the floor. Only then did he approach, gun at the ready, and turn the body over.

  Colonel Anatoli Grishin had taken the single bullet just above the left eye. As Mr. Sims would have said, it slows them up a bit. Jason Monk looked down at the man he hated and felt nothing. It was done because it had to be done.

  Pocketing his gun, he stooped, took the dead man’s left hand, and pulled something from it.

  The small object lay in his palm in the gloom, the raw American silver that had glittered in the moonlight, the luminous turquoise hacked from the hills by a Ute or Navajo. A ring brought from the high country of his own land, given on a park bench to a brave man at Yalta, and torn from the finger of a corpse in a courtyard at Lefortovo Jail.

  He pocketed the ring, turned, and walked back to his car. The Battle of Moscow was over.

  Epilogue

  ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 1 MOSCOW AND ALL Russia awoke to the grim knowledge of what had happened in their capital city. Television cameras carried the images to every corner of the sprawling land. The nation was subdued by what it saw.

  Inside the Kremlin walls there was a scene of devastation. The facades of the cathedrals of the Assumption, the Annunciation, and the Archangel were pitted and scarred by bullets. Broken glass glittered against the snow and ice.

  Black smears from burning vehicles defaced the exteriors of the Terem and Facets Palaces and those of the Senate and the Great Kremlin Palace were torn by machine-gun fire.

  Two huddled bodies lay beneath the Czar’s Cannon, and the removal teams carried others out from the arsenal and the Palace of Congresses where they had taken refuge in the last minutes of life.

  Elsewhere the armored personnel carriers and trucks of the Black Guard smoldered and fumed in the morning light. The flames had melted tracts of tarmac, which had then re-formed in the cold like waves of the sea.

  The acting president, Ivan Markov, flew back at once from his vacation home, arriving shortly after midday. In the late afternoon he received the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias in private audience.

  Alexei II made his first and last intervention in the political arena of Moscow. He urged that to continue with plans for a new presidential election on January 16 would be impossible, and that the date should be consecrated to a national referendum on the issue of the restoration of the monarchy.

  Ironically, Markov was very susceptible to the idea. For one thing he was no fool. He had been appointed four years earlier to the post of premier by the late President Cherkassov as a skilled administrator, a gray suit with a background in the petroleum industry. But with time he had come to enjoy the power of executive office, even in a system where most of the power lay with the president and much less with the premier.

  In the six months since Cherkassov’s fatal heart attack he had come to appreciate the panoply of high office even more.

  With the Union of Patriotic Forces in ruins from an electoral standpoint, he knew the issue would be between himself and the neo-Communists of the Socialist Union. He also knew he would probably come in second. But a constitutional monarch would, as almost his first act, need to call on an experienced politician and administrator to form a government of national unity. Who better, he reasoned, than himself?

  That evening Ivan Markov by presidential decree summoned the deputies of the Duma to return to Moscow for an emergency session.

  During January 3, the deputies streamed back across Russia from the farthest corners of Siberia and the northern wastes of Archangel.

  The emergency session of the Duma on January 4 was held in the largely undamaged White House. The mood was somber, not least among the deputies of the Union of Patriotic Forces, who were each at pains to tell anyone who would listen that they personally had had no inkling of Igor Komarov’s mad act of New Year’s Eve.

  The session was addressed by acting president Markov, who proposed that the entire nation still be consulted on January 16, but concerning the issue of restoration. As he was not a member of the Duma, he could not formally propose the motion. This was done by the Speaker, a member of Markov’s Democratic Alliance Party.

  The neo-Communists, seeing presidential power slipping from their grasp, opposed it with their entire voting bloc. But Markov had done his preparatory work well. The members of the UPF, fearful for their own safety, had been interviewed privately, one by one, on the same morning. The strong impression given to each one of them was that if they supported the acting president, the whole question of the lifting of their parliamentary immunity from arrest could well be dropped. Such a step would mean they could keep their seats.

  The Democratic Alliance votes added to those of the Union of Patriotic Forces outweighed the neo-Communists. The motion was carried.

  Technically the change was not so difficult to administer. Polling booths were already in place. The sole task was to print and issue a further 105 million ballot papers bearing the simple question and two boxes, one for “Yes” and one for “No.”

  ¯

  ON January 5, in the small northern Russian port of Vyborg a dock security policeman called Pyotr Gromov made his small mark on the footnote of history. Just after dawn he was watching the Swedish freighter Ingrid B prepare to leave for Gothenburg.

  He was about to turn away and return to his cabin for breakfast when two figures in blue donkey jackets emerged from behind a pile of crates and made for the gangway just as it was to be hauled up. On a hunch he called on them to stop.

  The two men had a brief, muttered conversation and then ran for the gangway. Gromov pulled his gun and fired a warning shot in the air. It was the first time he had used it in three years on the docks, and it pleased him mightily to do so. The two seamen stopped.

  Their papers revealed both were Swedes. The younger man spoke English, of which Gromov had a few words. But he had worked long enough on the docks to have a better grasp of Swedish. To the older man he snapped: “So what was the hurry?”

  The man said not a word. Neither of them had understood him. He reached out and tore off the older man’s round fur hat. Something familiar about the face. He had seen it before. The policeman and the fleeing Russian stared at each other. That face ... on television ... a podium ... shouting at the cheering crowd.

  “I know you,” he said. “You’re Igor Komarov.”

  Komarov and Kuznetsov were arrested and flown back to Moscow. The former leader of the UPF was immediately indicted for high treason and remanded in custody pending trial. He was lodged, ironically, in Lefortovo Jail.

  ¯

  FOR ten days the national debate occupied the newspapers, magazines, airwaves, and TV channels as pundit after pundit intoned his or her opinion.

  On the afternoon of Friday, January 14, Father Gregor Rusakov held a revivalist rally in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. As with Komarov when he had spoken there, his address was carried across the nation, reaching, so the pollsters later estimated, eighty million Russians.

  His theme was simple and clear. For seventy years the Russian people had worshiped the twin gods of dialectical materialism and Communism and had been betrayed by both. For fifteen years they had attended at the temple of republican capitalism and seen their hopes traduced. He urged his listeners on the morrow to go back to the God of their f
athers, to go to church and pray for guidance.

  Foreign observers have long gained the impression that after seventy years of Communist industrialization the Russians must be a mainly city-dwelling people. It is a mistaken assumption. Even by the winter of 1999 over fifty percent of Russians still lived largely unseen and unrecorded in the small towns, villages, and countryside, that vast spread of land from Belarus to Vladivostok, running across six thousand miles and nine time zones.

  Within that unseen land are the one hundred thousand parishes that comprise the hundred bishoprics of the Orthodox Church, each with its large or small onion-domed parish church.

  It was to these churches that seventy percent of the Russians streamed through the bitter cold on the morning of Sunday, January 16, and from each pulpit the parish priest read out the Patriarchal Letter. Later known as the Great Encyclical, it was probably the most powerful and moving missive Alexei II ever uttered. It had been adopted the previous week in a closed conclave of the Metropolitan bishops, where the voting, though not unanimous, was convincing.

  After morning service the Russians went from the churches to the polls. Because of the size of the land and the lack of electronic technology in the rural districts, it took two days to count the votes. Of valid votes cast, the outcome was sixty-five percent in favor, thirty-five percent against.

  On January 20 the Duma accepted and endorsed the result, and passed two further motions. One was to extend the interregnum of Ivan Markov for a further period, until March 31. The second was to institute a Constitutional Committee to pass the referendum verdict into law.

  On February 20 the acting president and the Duma of All the Russias extended an invitation to a prince resident outside Russia to accept the title and the functions, within a constitutional monarchy, of Czar of All the Russias.

  Ten days later a Russian airliner landed after a long flight at Vnukovo Airport, Moscow.

  Winter was retreating. The temperature had risen several degrees above zero and the sun shone. From the birch and pine woods behind the small airport reserved for special flights came an odor of damp earth and new beginning.

  In front of the terminal Markov led a large delegation containing the Speaker of the Duma, the leaders of all the main parties, the combined Chiefs of Staff, and the Patriarch Alexei.

  From the aircraft stepped the man the Duma had invited, the fifty-seven-year-old prince of the English House of Windsor.

  ¯

  FAR away in the west, in a former coach house outside the village of Langton Matravers, Sir Nigel Irvine watched the ceremony on television.

  In the kitchen Lady Irvine was washing the breakfast dishes, something she always did before Mrs. Moir came in to clean.

  “What are you watching, Nigel?” she called as she let the soapy water out of the sink. “You never look at television in the mornings.”

  “Something going on in Russia, my dear.”

  It had been, he thought, a close-run thing. He had followed his own principles for the destruction of a richer, stronger, and more numerous adversary by the use of minimum forces, a destruction that could only be accomplished by guile and deception.

  His first stage had been to require Jason Monk to create a loose alliance of those liable to fear or despise Igor Komarov after seeing the Black Manifesto. In the first category came those destined for destruction by the Russian Nazi—the Chechens, Jews, and police who had persecuted Komarov’s ally, the Dolgoruki mafia. In the second came the church and the army, represented by the Patriarch and the most prestigious living general, Nikolai Nikolayev.

  The next task had been to insert an informer into the enemy camp, not to bring out reliable information but to insert disinformation.

  While Monk was still training at Castle Forbes, the spymaster had made his first unnoticed visit to Moscow to reactivate two long-time low-level sleeper agents he had recruited years earlier. One was the former Moscow University professor whose homing pigeons had proved useful in the past.

  But when the professor had lost his job for proposing democratic reforms under the Communists, his son had also lost his high school place and any chance of going to a university. The young man had drifted into the church, and after undistinguished sojourns in various parishes had finally been taken on as valet and butler to Patriarch Alexei.

  Father Maxim Klimovsky had been authorized to accomplish four separate betrayals of Irvine and Monk to Colonel Grishin. This was simply to establish his reliability as an informer for the Black Guard commander in the heart of the enemy camp.

  Twice Irvine and Monk had been allowed to escape before Grishin appeared, but on the last two occasions that had not been possible, and they had had to fight their way out.

  Irvine’s third precept was not to try to persuade his enemy there was no campaign against him, which would have been impossible, but to convince him the danger lay somewhere else and, having been coped with, had therefore ceased to exist.

  Following his second visit to the residence, Irvine had been forced to stay on to give Grishin and his thugs time to raid his room in his absence, discover his briefcase, and photograph the incriminating letter.

  The letter was a forgery, created in London on real Patriarchate writing paper and with calligraphy samples of the Patriarch’s own hand, obtained by Father Maxim and handed to Irvine on the previous visit.

  In the letter, the Patriarch apparently told his correspondent that he warmly supported the idea of a restoration of the monarch of Russia (which was not true, since he was only considering it), and would urge that the receiver of the letter be the man chosen for the post.

  Unfortunately it was addressed to the wrong prince. It bore the name of Prince Semyon, living in his stone farmhouse with his horses and girlfriend in Normandy. Of necessity, he had been deemed expendable.

  It was Jason Monk’s second visit to the Patriarch that had unleashed stage four—the encouragement to the enemy to overreact violently to a perceived but nonexistent threat. This had been achieved by the tape recording of the supposed conversation between Monk and Alexei II.

  Genuine voice samples of the Patriarch had been obtained during Irvine’s first visit, because his interpreter Brian Vincent had been wired for sound. Monk had recorded hours of tape in his own voice while at Castle Forbes.

  In London a Russian mimic and actor had provided the words that Alexei II apparently spoke on the tape. With computerized sound technology the tape had been created, right down to the stirring of coffee cups. Father Maxim, to whom Irvine had palmed the tape as he passed in the hall, had simply played it from one recorder into the one given him by Grishin.

  Everything on the tape was a lie. Major General Petrovsky could not have continued his raids on the Dolgoruki gang because all the knowledge Monk had gleaned from the Chechens about the rival mafia had already been passed to him. Moreover the papers from beneath the casino contained no evidence of Dolgoruki funding of the UPF election campaign.

  General Nikolayev had no intention of continuing to denounce Komarov in a series of interviews after New Year’s Day. He had said his piece, and once was enough.

  Most important, the Patriarch had not the slightest intention of intervening with the acting president to urge that Komarov be declared an unfit person. He had made it quite clear that he would not intervene in politics.

  But neither Grishin nor Komarov knew this. Believing they had the opponents’ intentions in their grasp and faced a fearful danger, they overreacted badly and launched four assassination attempts. Suspecting they were coming, Monk could warn all four targets. Only one refused to heed the warning. Until the night of December 21, and possibly even later, Komarov could still have won the election with a handsome majority.

  After December 21 came stage five. The overreaction was exploited by Monk to broaden the hostility against Komarov from the tiny few who had seen the Black Manifesto into a raging torrent of criticism from the media. Into this exploitation Monk filtered disinformation to the effect
that the source for all Komarov’s growing discreditation was a senior officer of the Black Guard.

  In politics as in so many affairs of men, success breeds success, but failure also generates further failure. As the criticism of Komarov increased, so did the paranoia dormant in all tyrants. Nigel Irvine’s final gambit was to play upon that paranoia and hope against hope that the somewhat inadequate vessel of Father Maxim would not let him down.

  When the Patriarch returned from Zagorsk, he never went near the acting president. Four days before the New Year, the organs of the Russian state had not a shred of intent to fall upon the Black Guard on New Year’s Day and arrest Komarov.

  Through Father Maxim, Irvine used the old precept of persuading the enemy that his opponents are far more numerous, powerful, and determined than they really are. Convinced by this second “sting,” Komarov decided to strike first. Forewarned by Monk, the Russian state defended itself.

  Though not much of a churchgoer, Sir Nigel Irvine had long been an assiduous reader of the Bible, and of all its characters his favorite was the Hebrew warrior Gideon.

  As he explained it to Jason Monk in the Highlands of Scotland, Gideon was the first commander of special forces and the first proponent of surprise night attack.

  Presented with ten thousand volunteers, Gideon chose only three hundred, the toughest and the best. In his night attack on the Midianites camped in the Valley of Jezreel he used the triple tactics of violent awakening, bright lights, and shattering noise to disorient and panic the larger force.

  “What he did, m’dear chap, was to persuade the half-awake Midianites that they were up against an enormous and very dangerous attack. So they lost their nerve and ran.”

  Not only did they run, but in the darkness they began hacking at each other. By another kind of disinformation, Grishin was persuaded to arrest his own entire high command.

  Lady Irvine came in and switched off the TV.

  “Come along, Nigel, it’s a lovely day and we have to dig in the early potatoes.”