by Fenek Solère
Russia moves 50,000 troops and fighter aircraft to Sumy, close to the Ukrainian border;
Spetsnaz operatives fight hand-to-hand with Mujahideen forces and Pakistani special services in Ust-Labinsk;
Russia withdraws its nuclear and strategic capability to within its newly defined ethno-state borders, defended along the line of the Pechora and Ural rivers in the north and east and the Volga in the west.
After making love, they fell asleep in each other’s arms. An hour or so after midnight, Tom woke to find her missing. He wrapped himself in a towel and went into the lounge. Ekaterina was turned towards the window, her head in her hands.
‘I sent them there’, she was saying. ‘I am responsible.’ Tom stared at her long, straight back, salt tears running through the cracks in her fingers. She waited a few minutes before turning to look at him. ‘And my grandfather, too?’ A question mark hung like a huge wire coat hanger off her lower lip.
‘That was not you. They did that to get at me.’
‘Then it is both of us!’
‘Yes’, he had to admit. ‘It is both of us.’
‘You know’, she said, ‘in 1945, a famous Russian poet fell in love with a professor from Oxford University who visited her one cold November night, and stayed talking with her until the dawn.’ Tom hunched his shoulders. ‘She called him her “Guest from the future” . . .’
‘Were they happy together?’
‘No, he returned to his dreaming spires, and the Soviets withdrew the writer’s state privileges and banned her poetry.’
There was a long silence as they both looked at the loaded gun on the table. ‘And just like him, you will leave?’ she said, almost accusingly. He felt intimidated. ‘It is said the poet used to stand by the window, waiting for him to return.’
Tom was in front of a firing squad. He moved forward, sweeping her up in his arms, holding her so close that his lonely heart could feel hers beat against his chest.
‘I won’t let you down’, he promised, knowing that he would.
‘Kiss me, you bastard!’ she whispered with that deep, throaty English, barely passing for European, but offering salvation for the West.
Peter Janssen was exasperated by news of the loss of the Vulcari cell. Tossing his trilby on to the bed, he cursed Yuri and Alexei, but having met Ekaterina in the doorway to his apartment block earlier, he fully realised how events had played out. Janssen had already spoken to Alyosha and Grigori, and decided on a course of action. There was no turning back. He moved over to the wardrobe and pulled out a tan leather briefcase, easing the well-oiled zip the full length of the binding so as to lift the lid. Inside was a Tec-9 ‘spray and pay’ machine pistol. Janssen assembled the weapon, twisting on the long graphite sound suppressor with a scratchy, metallic grimace.
Outside, there was a hint of moonglow across the frosted rooftops looking out over the river. Some cloud cover offered the potential for surprise, mostly by smothering the stars to the north with polluted petroleum fumes. Janssen advanced thoughtfully, combing the Nevsky for a taxi ride, wild cats rummaging through garbage, stopping for a moment to scan him with feline eyes that gleamed in car headlights before fading as the motor moved on. It was cold, too cold for love, but just right for killing.
Two Bloc heavies wearing woollen hats pulled down to their eyebrows hovered in the foyer at Ulitsa Egorova. One sat back on a chair, hands in pockets, legs stretched out, ankles crossed, causing his boots to form a V pattern on the uneven tiles. The other was leaning against the wall, slitted eyes flitting all over the hallway. The man in the chair shifted position as a European in a triby and long, black coat entered from off the road, jerking his head lazily at his Tartar companion, who managed an incoherent grunt before pushing himself away from the wall.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked in monosyllabic Russian to a man who spoke no Russian beyond, ‘Da Tovarich, och-en- pree-yat-na?’ The muzzle flash from Janssen’s gun punctured the guard’s forehead like a hammer on a nail. The guy on the chair tried to wrestle an MP-446 pistol out of the folds of his jacket. The executioner stepped forward, kicking his jaw and sending him flying backwards, chair sliding, the man toppling, Janssen finishing him with one bullet square to the back of his head.
Stepping around jetting blood, Peter pushed the button in front of him. The lift rose slowly to the floor where Janssen knew Arkady and Bogdan to be hiding. The ping of the elevator’s arrival echoed in the corridor. As the doors slid open, Janssen stepped out just in time to meet a Bloc member coming to check who was there. The Antifa man’s face fell open as the first bullet took off his testicles and the second burst his Adam’s apple like a failed William Tell re-enactment.
Heaving the corpse aside, Janssen shouldered his way through the door frame, subliminally clocking the chipped woodwork where his protégés had met their end. ‘Dobre Vechyre’, he announced to the assembled crowd before easing the Tec-9 into auto and letting off like a threshing machine. Two died instantly. A third, Bogdan, collapsed with a leg wound, whimpering and begging for mercy.
Arkady’s huge body slid across the wooden table, his Stechkin blowing mouse holes in the ceiling. Janssen grinned, inserting a second magazine. He enjoyed killing with impunity. Striding over to where the bald Bloc fanatic lay clutching his shattered knee-cap, he placed the gun barrel to Bogdan’s juddering skull. His opponent’s tears flowed freely, Then he tugged at the trigger triumphantly.
10.
In Petersburg I am a tourist, an observer, not an inhabitant.—Andrei Bely
Tom walked alone in the heart of the city. Moonlight played on granite. He was caught up in a world-changing event. His eyes darted wildly from the mosque burning in the distance to the Bakhcha-U parked at the side of the road. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he was a man of letters, not action, his world inhabited by characters like Stavrogin and Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky’s political villains, rather than the muscle-bound reality of Bogdan and Arkady. The vision of Ekaterina lying asleep and the metallic click of the door latch dropping made his conscience itch.
He strode on, not knowing or caring where. He circled the canal bridges, lost in thought, up and down, past the Anichkovsky Palace and the sleek horse statues harnessed by straps of bitter starlight. Strings of white globes stretched away down Nevsky, their light casting neon nets over the muddy water flowing to the sea. Carved gargoyles looked down accusingly. Tom kept asking himself what he should do. Should he stay or should he go? He was sweating despite the cold. The ghoulish grandeur rolled out either side of the river before him. Corruption and glamour were covered by a twinkle of silver. He remembered she had told him that in the Russian language, St Petersburg is male whilst Moscow is female. Little sentences and sayings, the sound of her voice reverberated constantly in his head. He leaned against a parapet, steadying himself against the maelstrom loosed about him.
The city was in a hurry. It was as if the residents were recovering from collective amnesia. Granules of snow flittered through car headlights, ice crunched like baby powder underfoot. He knew he had to get back to the hotel. He was so tired that he began to stagger. His moleskin coat was speckled with flakes, and kiss-curls were stuck to his forehead. The lines from Dugin’s alias Hans Zivers came to mind: ‘In a buttoned coat, buttoned frock coat, solemnly kefir he drinks, and the dogs bark, and move black cancers, in the darkness of Soviet apartments’.
Her Majesty’s Consulate in St Petersburg advises all British citizens to leave Russia as a consequence of the deteriorating political situation;
Russian nationalists re-capture the radar base at Gabala and launch sporadic attacks amidst the rusting derricks dotted along the Caspian shore, shelling the Bibi Heyat mosque and the new fortress housing Israel’s Kohanim Council of the East;
‘Our new challenge’, states General Hosiah Webb, Commander of the US 4th Army in Afghanistan, ‘is to secure the energy corridor between the Caspian and the Balkans, those like Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan and Nabucco, supplying our
allies in Western Europe’;
Petro Poroshenko demands direct military intervention to save Jews from persecution in Russia;
Wall Street financial houses redouble their efforts to undermine the rouble by hiking interest rates yet again;
Firms trading in global equity markets start a frenzy of selling on what they deem to be contaminated funds on the instruction of the Zew Research Group based in Strasbourg, New York, and Tel Aviv;
Food processing plants in Belarus are sabotaged by NATO special forces.
Tom’s eyes reluctantly welcomed the first rays of dawn light playing like pellucid fingers over the bedsheets. He lay still for a minute, his head on the soft pillow, his penis hard as rock. He had been dreaming of a woman walking through cornfields, tresses flowing from a crown of spring flowers, bearing an apple in open hands.
‘Where am I?’ he said to himself. ‘What have I done?’
He got up to use the toilet and saw the brown suitcase in the hall. Then he remembered everything. The League’s request for him to attend an emergency council. His promise. Her smiling through tears and Arkady’s threat. Could he stay and fight? Could he cut and run?
Tom fell heavily onto the toilet seat. His sweaty face reflected in the mirror between the chrome taps. He could already hear the sound of cracking bones and see his blood smeared on a wall. He was not going to die here like Yesenin. Poets die romantically, but political dissidents like him bleed painfully in shootouts with the police, like that young French duo in Arles. Neither did he care to end his days like that Trotsky acolyte John Reed, author of the book he had just cast into the wastepaper basket, squirming in agony on a hospital bed with spotted typhus.
He swallowed some aspirin and took a long swig from a bottle. His eyes were sore. He could not be sure if it was from the drink or the tears he remembered coming suddenly in the early hours.
His hand reached for the phone. ‘I need a taxi’, he heard himself say, and then in response to the voice on the other end, ‘To the airport.’ He got dressed, brushed his hair, and checked his wallet. Picking up his bags, he walked out the door without looking back. Behind him, the phone began to ring.
Downstairs, the lobby was full of cleaners pushing mops and empty-handed doormen looking for something to do. Life went on. One anaemic youngster with bad skin offered to take his luggage. Tom waved him away, then gestured to the girl at the desk, who in turn pointed to a black-suited driver walking towards him across the foamy floor.
‘Oh, excuse me, sir, but I have a letter for you’, the receptionist remembered, coming out from behind the counter to hand him a sealed envelope. Tom took it, but before he could peel it open, his driver was guiding his arm.
‘Your car, sir!’ Tom pushed the blue envelope into his coat pocket and followed the chauffeur out onto the street. A gypsy woman was passing, carrying a sprig of flowers.
‘Would you like to buy one for your sweetheart?’ she asked in broken English. Tom chose some, paid her, and tossed it onto the back seat. The driver slammed the trunk on his baggage.
‘Pulkovo, spasibo’, the Englishman said. The engine started and they pulled off into the square.
He looked up at St Isaacs as they circled, watching a young family walking their brown water spaniel under the sparse trees. Peter Janssen was strolling, bag in hand, towards the Astoria. Alyosha was at his side. A column of armed Vulcari trailed in their wake. They went over the Blue Bridge and up Voznesenkiy Prospect. Glass shop fronts winked with cracked smiles. They stopped only to cut right back across the Fontanka embankment to make Moskovskiy Prospekt, then went onwards past the Technology Institute and the Olympic Gardens. For a moment, his attention was drawn once again to the ubiquitous Lenin statue, this time pointing towards the airport. Iron railings rushed past. He could see the dusty towers of the Baltic railway station in the distance and endless rows of Stalinist housing blocks. Alex Tiuniaev’s heart-rending symphony I Knew Her played on the radio.
30 minutes and 5 checkpoints later, the car pulled up at Pulkovo. ‘Take the flowers to this address.’ He handed the driver a hastily scribbled note. ‘It is very important that you do not say where I am, horosho?’ Tom turned up his collar and walked across the tarmac between two Chosta self-propelled howitzers which were entering the departure terminal. Passing security, he set off a metal detector and had to empty his pockets, allowing the hands of a stripling security guard to run over his body. Two pin-sharp eyes stared him out. Tom returned the look with interest, regretting his insolence when he was pulled unceremoniously aside.
‘Papers, please?’ A flat, outstretched hand commanded an instant response. When he saw the British passport, the Slav’s face split open. ‘James Bond, right?’
‘Yeah, 007!’
The young man slapped his shoulder with genuine warmth, then continued, stumbling over his words, ‘Null, null sem, your mission is over, God save the Queen!’ Tom laughed, pocketing his passport and moving away, anxious not to draw any further attention to himself. His flight was still hours away, so he took the escalator up to the first floor. There were a few newsstands and gift shops still operating along the mezzanine. A husband and wife bought a map of London marked with Cyrillic script. The couple were pointing out Big Ben and the London Eye to their kids. It was obvious they were the first of many refugees anticipating Armageddon, pretending to leave for a short vacation, but in reality planning never to return. He recognised the words ‘Madame Tussauds’ and went off to buy a coffee.
Tom took an empty table and sat alone, wondering if flights would be cancelled or if he would be stopped from boarding. He was not taking the calls or texts that Grigori was sending every 10 minutes. The coffee tasted like river silt. He drank it anyway, grains and all. It was something to do. People moved around him, talking, shouting, smoking cigarettes. There was an endless babble of excitement and confusion about the unfolding situation. The travellers’ eyes were drawn to the black electronic screens with rolling green lettering, telling them when they could board their flights. Helsinki, Oslo, and Milan came up early. A hijack in Kaliningrad meant the outbound to London was delayed. His anxiety began to mount. He sat staring down the clock, willing time to disappear. Eventually, they announced his flight, and he moved through passport control, first heading for a bar where three Mediterranean-looking girls were parked uncomfortably on stools before using a hand basin in the restroom to freshen his face. The obligatory duty free shop was not especially inspiring. He hovered for a little while over the perfumes and lingerie, wondering who to buy them for. There was no one left. No one at home.
Around 17.00, he stepped onto the escalator to the departure gate, queueing for the final security check, shuffling off his shoes, getting frisked once again. His fellow passengers were already passing through the sliding doors to the West. For a moment, the Englishman hesitated, still pondering his options. A stewardess asked for his boarding card. Her eyes flitted over the incomprehensible markings. A red nail pointed him in the direction of the airplane.
Once aboard, he threw his jacket into the overhead compartment, and the blue envelope handed to him by the hotel receptionist floated down into the aisle. Picking it up, he took his seat by the window. Engines cranked into operation and roared as they powered the plane along the runway, lifting the undercarriage. Then there was that sudden, gut-churning moment when they left the ground. The plane banked to the west, flying out over the Gulf of Finland. From his seat, Tom watched as a cold winter Sun burst through the misty sky, shooting dirty clouds with rocket fire. To the east, frozen rain crystals sparkled like wet diamonds showering down over the city’s fading skyline. He could just make out St Isaac’s golden dome and the smoking factory towers shrinking as they climbed.
The Professor removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. Swallowing hard, his fingers nervously handled the letter. He smelled it and recognised the delicate handwriting. It was dated for that day. Sliding the white sheet out, he read:
. . . absence
is the best medicine
for forgetting . . . but the best way
to forget forever is to see daily . . .
—Anna Akhmatova
Below him, he could see the rugged land turn to frozen sea. Black cranes lurched drunkenly on the derelict docks, warehouses falling off the shore. A criss-cross of clear blue sword-slashes ran between endless plates of ice. Their pure, flat surfaces scraped by the wind, forming a stiff, white crust over the Baltic. Every now and then, a rusting red ship would cut a channel through the sheets en route to Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. He imagined some seasoned captain at their helm, steering cargo westwards, guided as much by his nose as the 1950s navigation equipment that bleeped on the oil-splattered screen in his cabin. There he stood, the pilot, riding the waves, pushing on through the gulf towards a point where the sea met the sky in a rapture of crushed turquoise.
Further out at sea, the sky became thick and overcast. Tom’s gaze followed the plane’s wingtip as it passed over one small island after another, until at last these isolated rock outcrops, stretching toward Scandinavia, were swallowed by the crash of hungry waves. The aircraft pierced the mocha meniscus of the cloud line. Engines accelerated at full throttle. With the jet’s roar throbbing in his ears, he twisted his neck one last time to see the lights of St Petersburg slowly disappear in a warm glow over the eastern horizon. Leaning back in his seat, he felt thankful to have been present at the birth of Russia’s new revolution. ‘And now to liberate the West’, he swore to himself.
Konets
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fenek Solère writes novels in the tradition of the New Right. Following his critically acclaimed debut novel The Partisan (2014), he has published articles at Counter-Currents/North American New Right and the New European Conservative websites and has been interviewed at Radix.