December

by James Steel

  He knocked and then opened it.

  Inside was a windowless rectangular meeting room as bare and functional as the rest of the building, dimly lit by a battery-powered camping lantern on a brown veneer table. The lamp lit the table but the corners of the room were shadowy. A laptop lay open on the far side of it.

  A tall man in a smart coat, worn over a dark pinstriped suit, was pacing back and forth across the far end of the room with his hands clasped behind him, his white hair scraped into a severe short-back-and-sides.

  He flicked a tense look round as Alex came in.

  Alex recognised his large, red, leathery face instantly: General Sir Nigel Harrington was a well-known military figure. Alex had served under him when the Blues and Royals had been in 5 Airborne Brigade, based at Aldershot. A former paratrooper and ex-head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he had retired three years ago. He was now in his late sixties but still kept his back ramrod straight and had a characteristic combative jut to his jaw.

  A tough, no-bullshit commander, he had been respected by his men but definitely not liked. All officers understood that command meant taking unpopular decisions, but Harrington had implemented them with an abrasive delight that bordered on the sadistic. ‘Wanker’ was his most frequent moniker amongst his HQ staff.

  Alex realised the fact that the general was in the room raised the significance of what was going on by another order of magnitude. The government didn’t drag major figures like him out of retirement for nothing. Alex involuntarily straightened his back.

  ‘Ah, Devereux, glad you could make it. Take a seat.’ The words were barked out as an instruction.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex muttered, and sat down at the opposite end of the table. He managed to stop himself adding ‘sir’; he wasn’t in the army any more and neither was Harrington, at least officially.

  ‘Now obviously you’re wondering what the hell is going on.’ Harrington was never one for subtlety and launched straight in; he grinned as if this was all a big joke, but there was definitely a nervousness about him as well.

  ‘Well, first things first. This meeting is completely secret and deniable from Her Majesty’s Government’s point of view. The chaps who brought you don’t know I’m here and I am retired and in no way a serving member of HMG. So, before I go any further, you’re going to have to do your bit as well and sign the Official Secrets Act.’ He nodded at some papers and a pen laid out on Alex’s end of the table.

  Alex was fed up with being railroaded, but managed to ask calmly: ‘And what if I don’t want to?’

  ‘Don’t be an arse, Devereux!’ The bonhomie dropped away instantly. ‘After your last operational activities in Central African Republic, HMG has got enough dirt on you to prevent you ever working in the security industry again if it so chooses.’

  ‘I seem to think HMG had reason to be grateful at the time,’ Alex replied with heavy irony.

  ‘Grateful! What do you want—a bloody medal?’ Harrington glared at him. ‘Look, Devereux, you haven’t got any work at the moment and this could be very lucrative for you. But if you don’t sign the Act you’re never going to find out what it is all about, so just sign it and stop playing silly buggers!’

  Alex’s jaw tightened as he stared back at the other man with a calculating gaze.

  There was a pause before he slowly picked up the pen and carefully wrote ‘Bollocks’ on the bottom of the document.

  Harrington couldn’t see what he had written in the darkened room and breathed out in relief. He tried to get going again in a more positive tone.

  ‘Right. Now, so that we’re clear, I am representing HMG in an entirely unofficial capacity here—you have never discussed this issue with a serving member of the government—and this building is as near as you will come to any part of it. However, I have been authorised to communicate with you on their behalf, and obviously nothing we say goes outside these four walls or you will be in jug in no short order.’ He nodded menacingly at the documents in front of Alex.

  ‘Now, as you well know, the country is up shit creek at the moment with the Russian energy blockade. But what you don’t know is just how worried HMG is about Krymov—and this is crucial to the whole operation.’ He adopted a lecturing tone, jabbing his finger at Alex to emphasise points.

  ‘Firstly, he gets appointed as a bureaucratic nonentity who is supposed to calm the faction fight. However, as Churchill said,’ and here a note of deference crept into his voice at the mention of the master statesman, ‘“Trying to understand Kremlin factions is like watching bulldogs fight under a carpet.” He outmanoeuvres everyone in the faction fighting, kicks Medvedev out and then becomes increasingly paranoid and aggressive.’

  Harrington dropped the lecturing tone and became more candid. ‘Our analysis of him is basically that he is just not up to coping with the pressure of the job. He’s a working-class lad who made it to factory boss under the Soviets and then got promoted through the Party hierarchy mainly because he was so boring he wouldn’t ever rock the boat.’

  Alex’s hostility eased. He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair to listen.

  ‘Anyway, whatever the reason, we find ourselves dealing with a very aggressive operator who,’ Harrington began ticking points off on his fingers, ‘cuts off gas supplies to Ukraine when they get the NATO Membership Action Plan, starts harassing joint-venture oil companies until they all pull out, renews nuclear bomber flights into our airspace and ramps up arms spending from $35 billion to over $100 billion a year using up all his remaining Stabilisation Fund. He also starts moving troops up through Belarus to the Polish border over the missile shield, and finally we have the bombing raids on Georgia!

  ‘Now, to put all this in context, you have to remember that Russians have a major persecution complex, so initially we thought that this was all just the usual manufactured hysterics, talking tough, playing to the domestic gallery and throwing his weight around to make the country feel good about itself.

  ‘However, we now have good reason to think that Krymov actually believes his own propaganda. He genuinely thinks that the West is involved in a secret plot to undermine Russia,’ he paused to consider the irony of his next point, ‘so that has now become a reality.’

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. Harrington blinked self-consciously, disturbed by hearing himself actually admit the purpose of the meeting.

  ‘Let me show you what I mean.’ He twisted the laptop round so that Alex could see the screen. ‘This footage was shot a couple of months ago by a journalist we have connections with. He was on a tour with Krymov in the town of Tver in the provinces. It was a sort of “meet the people” exercise. Krymov is a secretive, remote figure and some media adviser told him he needed to get out more and get some footage with the man in the street. So the local boss set up a tour of a street market with just a few hand-picked journalists covering it. That’s why this footage hasn’t ever been seen in public—if we revealed it they would guess our source and he’d be a goner. Anyway, see what you think.’

  He peered at the laptop and tapped at the keys awkwardly.

  An image flicked up on the screen, shot in daylight with a shoulder-held camera; it jostled about above the crowd but the scene was clear. In front of it was the familiar profile of Krymov, a nondescript, short man with a podgy grey face and glasses, wearing a fur hat and overcoat. He could have been a bank clerk but for the crowd of tall security agents and policemen in a protective ring around him. At the edge of the shot Alex caught glimpses of a daytime street market: red plastic buckets and cheap toys hung off the top frame of a market stall. It was snowing lightly and people’s breath clouded around them.

  The crowd moved down between the lines of stalls, and shoppers looked up nervously as the presidential entourage approached them. The camera managed to push slightly ahead of Krymov so that you could see he had a fixed smile on his face, as if he had been told to look friendly by his aides but wasn’t sure how. A blonde PR lady in a white, fur-trimmed parka w
ent in front, grabbed a woman shopper and dragged her over to meet him.

  There was an awkward greeting with the terrified woman bowing her head in deference, not daring to look at Krymov, who continued looking around him, smiling inanely. The PR lady then stepped in and hosted an embarrassingly stilted exchange of questions: ‘Tell the President how good your life is in Tver.’ English subtitles had been added but Alex could follow the Russian without them. He had learned it on an army course, in search of an intellectual challenge to make up for the fact that he hadn’t gone to university.

  As the woman was mumbling about being very grateful for her government flat, Krymov paid no attention to her at all but continued to beam around him with a lack of engagement that was painful to watch. In the course of this an old man suddenly appeared at the woman’s side and stared at Krymov. He was unshaven, gap-toothed, wearing a tattered old overcoat and carrying a walking stick. The PR lady looked at him in disgust.

  ‘Ah! It’s you!’ he blurted out in a wheezy voice, jabbing a finger at Krymov. ‘Yes, it’s about time you came up here to answer some questions! Where’s my pension?’

  He waved his walking stick at the President and started shouting, ‘We don’t care what’s happening in Moscow, give us our pensions! And what about all the corruption? Those sons of bitches in the town hall, they…’

  Throughout the tirade Krymov’s entourage stood paralysed with shock. It had the opposite effect on Krymov, though. From being frozen in the pose of a grinning idiot, he was suddenly galvanised into action by the presence of an enemy.

  The false smile vanished and his face flamed red with anger. He jabbed a finger back at the man. ‘Look here, Granddad! Fuck yer mother, you son of a bitch!’ He yanked the old man’s wooden stick from his hand. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’m the master here! Do you get it? I’m the master here!’

  Holding the stick halfway along the shaft, he struck the old man across the bridge of his nose. He threw his hands up in defence but Krymov began beating him over the head and then grabbed his hair and struck him repeatedly across the face with the handle of the stick. Blood spattered over both of them as they continued to tussle.

  The President’s minders finally sprang out of their paralysis and dragged the man away from Krymov, who was now shouting at them: ‘We’ve been infiltrated! He’s a foreign saboteur! Shoot that son of a bitch! Shoot him!’

  A large hand reached up towards the camera lens and covered it. The screen went black and the film cut off.

  Alex sat back in his chair. He shook his head in disbelief, shocked to see a major world statesman behave in such a savage way. He now saw Krymov as completely off the scale of normal behaviour, in the same way he thought about Idi Amin or Hitler.

  ‘He’s lost it,’ he muttered.

  He realised that the country had a major problem on its hands and it wasn’t something he could easily stand by and allow to continue. The Devereux family had been loyal servants of the Crown since Guy d’Evereux had fought for the Conqueror at Hastings. Alex’s school, Wellington, had continued to drill the service ethic into him and there had been a family member in the Household Division every year since Waterloo until Alex had left it.

  Despite his grievances against his regiment for passing him over for promotion, Alex still had much of this patriotic, patrician attitude; a sense of duty to the nation was woven into his being. Harrington had clearly been counting on that, he realised.

  The general nodded now in rueful agreement with Alex’s comment.

  ‘Hmm, well, apparently the psychologists’ analysis of that,’ he nodded at the laptop, ‘is that Krymov displays paranoid psychotic tendencies that are getting worse. We have already moved from a state of cold peace with Russia towards what is now cold war, and we fear that he may push us into hot war soon. Frankly he could start a war with himself, he’s so paranoid. So…this is where you come in.’

  He looked pointedly at Alex, who gazed back at him, trying to think how he could be involved.

  ‘We have been approached by a contact within the Russian élite with a plan to overthrow Krymov. Although he is ostensibly a dictator, as I said, the Kremlin is in fact a hotbed of factional conflict—we saw that in action when Putin and Medvedev were deposed. The problem is that Krymov lacks the political skills to balance competing factions, so various people are not happy with the way he is leading the country. A lot of that is to do with the fact that they are not getting the slice of the financial pie that they wanted, but we can’t help their motives.’ He grimaced.

  ‘Now, our faction’s problem is that they are not strong enough to depose him outright and therefore need to repeat the sort of popular uprising that happened in 1991 when Yeltsin stood on that tank and was able to face down the KGB coup against Gorbachev. But in order to do that they need two things: one is control of the TV network to broadcast the revolt—and we are sure they can deliver that. The second is a popular figurehead to lead the rebellion. The guy running the faction is an oligarch who is resented by most people because of his money, so he couldn’t do it and will therefore stay very much in the background.

  ‘However, they do have the perfect candidate for the job: Roman Raskolnikov.’ The general looked at Alex for a sign of recognition. ‘Former national football captain, got involved in politics when he left sport and set up an opposition party, fell out with the government after protesting about human rights abuses. Has impeccable populist credentials: is widely trusted as an honourable man and has a lot of popular sympathy. The only problem is,’ Harrington shrugged ruefully, ‘the government got so pissed off with him that they sent him to prison in Siberia for fifteen years on trumped-up tax evasion charges.

  ‘So, this is where we come in.’ He paused, looking intently at Alex. ‘We are going to indulge in what Sir Francis Walsingham used to refer to as “lighting fires in other men’s houses”. It’s going to be your job to attack the prison camp, free Raskolnikov and then take him to Moscow to launch a coup against the government.’

  Alex didn’t blink but looked straight back at Harrington as he tried to take in the enormity of this task.

  Harrington took his silence as assent.

  ‘If you’re wondering why we picked you, it’s because you’re ex-army and therefore trusted and have a proven track record of being able to pull off this sort of small-scale raid.’ He gave a rare smile. ‘You have the network of contacts that you can call on at short notice to do this, apart from which you apparently speak good Russian. However, you have been out of the Forces for a few years now and are well known on the international circuit as a mercenary, so I’m afraid that, if this does all go tits up, you will be completely deniable. As you can guess by the secretive nature of this meeting, the government is going to have no more contact with the op after this briefing. It will be over to you.

  ‘Our contact can’t organise the raid himself because he’s a businessman, not a soldier. He approached us for help because he’s based in London a lot and has links here, and it’s more secure for you to organise it than anyone inside Russia—it would run the risk of leaks.

  ‘Now, there is one final point. The oligarch has actually been talking to us about this for some time now but we ignored the idea as being too risky until this current energy crisis blew up. The reason this whole contact with you has been,’ he paused apologetically, ‘a bit rushed, is because our man now has intelligence from inside the regime that they may be making moves to kill Raskolnikov in a prison “accident” soon. If that happens then our last chance of bringing down this regime from inside will have gone and we could well be looking at a World War Three situation as Krymov goes increasingly crackers.’

  Harrington looked at Alex grimly, but with the confidence that he would now have grasped the importance of the mission and do as he was ordered.

  Alex unfolded his arms, leaned forward in his chair, looked straight at Harrington and said calmly, ‘That is the maddest plan I have ever heard in my entire l
ife. No way.’ He shook his head and sat back.

  He was not in a forgiving mood after his abrupt pick-up and the railroading at the start of the briefing. Quite apart from that, he was a sharp-minded, independent field commander, used to analysing the feasibility of operations and giving direct opinions on them.

  He held out a hand in exasperation. ‘It’s as mad as…’ he fished in his memory for a comparably risky venture, ‘…Suez!’

  The word visibly stung Harrington. He was well aware of the risky nature of the operation and hated being reminded of the similarly secretive and half-baked foreign policy disaster that had brought about the end of the British Empire.

  Alex pushed his chair back, stood up and leaned over the table, extending a hand again towards Harrington. ‘This will start World War Three! I mean, we don’t know that Krymov will start it himself but we sure know it will happen if we do this.’

  Harrington wasn’t used to having to persuade people to do things.

  He jabbed a finger back at Alex, his face red. ‘Look, Devereux!’ he shouted. ‘If you don’t do what we say, you’re fucked! We’ve got enough charges on you for launching illegal wars in your African adventures that you will never work again as a mercenary and will spend a long time at Her Majesty’s pleasure if we really decide to kick you in the balls. And I don’t give a fuck if you think you deserve a medal for saving the world! Do I make myself clear!’

  The two were eyeball to eyeball over the table.

  Alex was enraged but his mind was working fast. He knew that what Harrington said was true: if the government really wanted to get him they could; and from what he knew of Harrington he would enjoy grinding Alex into the dust. At the same time he could see that the country was in trouble and that this would be the opportunity to serve that he felt he had been denied.