December

by James Steel

  The name carried weight and had worked so far with the various air-traffic control centres in the six time zones they had travelled across. Sergey and Fyodor Mostovskoy had obviously done their homework: their flight plan and purpose were registered and they were waved through.

  A sleepy voice from the tower came back: ‘Krasnokamensk Tower to Flight GX 3974, you are cleared for landing. Winds are light northerly with some snow drifting on runway, so watch it.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  Arkady shook his head to clear it and settled down to take them in.

  Alex quickly ducked back into the rear cabin.

  ‘OK, everyone, we’re going in. Weapons ready but keep them out of sight and stay away from the windows until we’ve touched base with our contact.’

  Yamba, Colin, Magnus and Pete were all wearing full arctic combat gear, complete now with white body armour under their webbing; they all sat and looked back at him with tense faces. Assault rifles and grenade launchers were checked, put on safety and tucked under seats.

  Alex picked up his standard-issue Russian army AN-94, cocked it and propped it next to him in the co-pilot’s seat. He nodded at Arkady and they sped in towards the runway.

  Touchdown was nervy because of the light dusting of snow on the tarmac since the gritters had cleared it. Arkady slammed the engines hard into reverse thrust and Alex flinched at the extra noise and vibration.

  It died away and they taxied over to the end of the runway, where three large black hangars were. Arkady kept the engines turning over. They were low on fuel but the plan was that if something didn’t look right they would go for a quick take-off and just make it over the border into China, whilst sending out a mayday call saying they had had a navigation failure. They would then have to take their chances with whatever regional airfield they could make it to.

  It was far from perfect and Alex just hoped it didn’t come to that. With the amount of weapons and ammunition they now had onboard it would be patently obvious to whoever stopped them that they were up to no good, and with the region’s most famous resident only fifty miles away it would not be hard to work out what they were doing there.

  As they taxied past the control tower, Alex glanced carefully out of the window. An MVD border guard officer was surveying them through binoculars as they passed, but Sergey’s Gulfstream was a regular sight at the airport and the flight plan was in order so they didn’t get a closer inspection.

  Alex and Arkady breathed out once they passed the tower.

  Alex unbuckled and ducked back into the cabin. ‘OK, everyone, spread out around the aircraft. I want a full three-sixty lookout, report any movement. We should have a single person contact—he’s called Bogdan Goncharov.’

  The team spread out around the portholes; this was the first concrete test of Sergey’s reliability. Arkady taxied forward and swung the aircraft round at the far end of the runway, positioning them for the quick getaway if needed. Everyone waited, eyes flicking around the limited view from their portholes, fingers on the triggers of their weapons.

  After five minutes, Alex called back from the cockpit, ‘Anybody seen anything?’

  A series of, ‘No,’ and, ‘No movement,’ came back.

  Alex began to get twitchy. Should he call Sergey?

  No. There was to be no direct contact. Everything was to be handled through intermediaries until the last possible moment.

  Should he get out and have a look around?

  He wouldn’t be able to see anything that he couldn’t already, and the sight of a man in combat gear really would prompt a delegation from the control tower. As much as he hated inactivity he would just have to sit and wait this one out until something definite happened.

  As usual it was Colin who voiced everyone’s thoughts. ‘You don’t think our Russian friend has fooked us over, do you?’

  Alex wished he could reply with certainty but the best he could do was, ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  The team sat silent and impotent next to the windows, fingers on triggers. No one said anything but they were all thinking the same thing: Have we just walked into a trap?

  Pete shouted: ‘Truck approaching from rear, seven o’clock!’

  Alex was back there in a flash and they all crowded round the portholes. A large GAZ, six-wheeled truck with huge metal-studded snow tyres was parking up next to the chain-link gate on the airfield perimeter. A man in a heavy blue parka and padded trousers got out of the cab, unlocked the gate, swung it open, drove the truck through and headed towards them.

  They watched carefully as the exhausts over the cab belched diesel and the truck picked up speed, swinging across the runway and approaching. Alex couldn’t see what was inside the dark green tarpaulin over the high rear section.

  The truck swung round and parked alongside them. The high cab door opened and the man jumped down and ran over, his head covered by his hood. He didn’t look threatening.

  ‘OK, everyone, stand down. Doesn’t look like the border police. I think this might be Bogdan. I’ll go and see what he wants. Pete and Magnus, stay inside the door and cover me. Slot him if he tries anything funny.’

  The other two nodded and followed Alex with their assault rifles ready; he yanked the large door lever open and swung the steps out and down.

  After the long, air-conditioned flight, a warm fug had developed inside the aircraft that was very different from conditions outside. As soon as Alex broke the seal on the door, a freezing blast of air at minus thirty-five degrees C rushed into the cabin.

  With such a differential, the first breath Alex took felt like a cold razor slash down his throat. Involuntarily he put his hand over his mouth to try to stop the pain and had to struggle to control his breathing.

  A thick-set Russian face peered up at him with ice around the rim of his parka hood.

  ‘You Grekov?’ he asked, with an aggressive upwards flick of the chin. He frowned unsympathetically at Alex’s reaction to the cold.

  ‘Yes.’ Alex forced the words out: ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Bogdan. You’d better follow me,’ he replied gracelessly. ‘We’re going over there.’ He grunted and jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the hangar. With that he turned round and climbed back into his cab.

  Alex nodded his assent, unimpressed by the reception but with no choice but to co-operate. Bogdan seemed to be on their side—why would the MVD border police go through this façade? If they knew about the plot and wanted to get them now they could just have shot the plane full of holes there and then.

  He retracted the steps and Arkady wound up the engines and taxied over to the large hangar with Sergey’s mining company logo across the huge sliding doors.

  Bogdan stopped alongside it, got out and unlocked a small side entrance. A minute later the doors began to creak open; when the gap was big enough Arkady increased power and eased them through. Once they were inside he shut down the engines and the doors rolled shut behind them.

  Bogdan drove over to them on a small, yellow airport tractor and, with Arkady’s help, hooked it up to the front wheel and manoeuvred the plane round to face the doors.

  He came back over to Alex and grunted, ‘When we come back here, we might be leaving in a hurry, yes?’

  Alex nodded. They certainly would be.

  Arkady switched on the fuel pumps, dragged the heavy hose over and with Yamba’s help connected it up to the wing fuel tanks. The huge long-range pods took a long time to fill and again they wanted them to be ready to go straight away when they blasted off on their return leg to Moscow.

  As Arkady refuelled, everyone else busied themselves unloading the cargo from the luggage bay under the aircraft. Arkady’s arms dealer had surpassed himself—they had enough munitions to fight a small war. Alex hoped it wouldn’t come to that but he wanted to be prepared if it did.

  The heavy weapons were in large crates: four B8V20 rocket pods with 80mm S-8 rockets and an AGS-30 30mm automatic grenade launcher for t
he helicopter. Others contained 9M133 Kornet anti-tank guided missiles and RPO Shmel launchers and missiles for taking out the watchtowers. There were also boxes of fragmentation, smoke and phosphorous grenades.

  The team’s individual AN-94 assault rifles were all fitted with GP-30 underslung grenade launchers. They already had their individual rifles on their backs and magazine bandoliers under their snow smocks, but smaller metal boxes contained thousands of rounds of 5.45mm ammunition as well. Three Kord, 12.7mm heavy machine guns, three PKM 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns with 250 round ammunition boxes and NSPU night sights had also been included, along with command—and squad-level radios.

  Pete’s special requests for FIBUA equipment had not been ignored. These included two Benelli M4 Super 90, 12 gauge, semi-automatic combat shotguns for blowing the hinges off doors and general close-quarters fighting. A variety of scopes, laser illuminators, night-vision sights, and flashlights had been included for fitting onto these and the other individual weapons.

  His prize request were mouseholing charges: MTP-2 delayed-action mines used for blowing holes in walls.

  ‘Doorways—fucking hate ’em,’ he had explained. ‘When you go through you’re on your own, unsupported, silhouetted, enemy knows where you’re gonna come in, easy target—bang. Fucking death funnels. Much better to make your own door and take the bastards by surprise.’

  The dinner-plate-sized devices had two kilos of plastic explosive each, and sticky pads that allowed them to adhere to any surface. They were detonated by a simple, red tear-off chemical fuse that could be crimped up to a three-minute delay. Radio detonated versions were also included.

  Most of this specialist urban warfare equipment was left onboard the aircraft for use once they got to Moscow.

  When the truck was fully loaded, they mounted up and Bogdan got back into the cab. They swung out of the hangar, waited for Arkady to close the doors behind them, and then drove off the airfield to their forward operating base and the next stage of the preparations for the big assault.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Captain Lev Darensky’s shoulder muscles were filling up with acid. They seared as if they were cutting their way out of his skin.

  He had been in the ‘dried crocodile’ position for nearly half an hour now—his arms locked in press-up position holding onto the rail at the head of the bed and his feet apart pressed against the rail at its foot.

  The individual vertebrae of his neck and back were each made of red-hot iron that had now fused together into a single burning rod. Each tendon stood out on his neck and a fit of trembling ran through his shoulders. He fought against it but the tremors were becoming more and more insistent.

  I can’t keep this up for much longer but I know what they will do if I fall.

  A fresh current of fear pumped through his blood system and steadied the tremor for a minute more. He tried moving his head from side to side to ease the pain. His vision was reduced by the sweat dripping from his fair hair into his eyes, but he could see two of his fellow officers and sergeants either side of him in the same position on the beds in the barrack room, their heads down and teeth clenched against the pain.

  ‘Hey, Darensky! You’re a dried crocodile, not a live one! Keep your fucking head down or I’ll thrash you so hard you’ll forget your name!’

  Colonel Karenin’s voice sounded like a bull’s bellow from the other end of the barrack room. A heavy-set man with a chubby, vodka-ravaged face, he was drunk and looking forward to punishing the first man to drop from his stress position. He sucked his gut in under his combat jacket and squared his shoulders. This was the sort of thing that they had done in the army in his days as a conscript—when the Soviet Union was great.

  It was what his old friend Krymov had appointed him to do—to restore the dignity of the armed forces from the snivelling wreck that it had become under Gorbachev and Yeltsin: forced to accept advances by NATO on all fronts, into the Baltic States for God’s sake! To sell off its flagship aircraft carrier to the Chinese to become a floating casino. To be reduced under Yeltsin to infighting on the streets of Moscow like a rabble of hooligans. Never would they accept such humiliations again. Never!

  And the fight back began here! That was why it was important that these junior officers and NCOs suffered, to make sure that they did the same to the men under them, who would do it to the privates and conscripts under them, who would then do it to the enemies of the Motherland that they were sent against.

  This remorseless logic drove him on in his campaign of sadism against the 568th Regiment. He would make them strong, if it killed them.

  He felt that his work was all the more important because the 568th had such a vital role in the defence of Moscow. Based twenty miles north of the capital, near Sheremetyevo airport, it was ready for immediate deployment there in case of terrorist attack. Krymov’s paranoia also meant that he feared a full-scale foreign airborne assault on the capital, so the regiment was a powerful force equipped with T-90 tanks, anti-aircraft artillery and armoured personnel carriers, all of which were kept at a high state of alert, with a full fuel and weapons load.

  That evening, Karenin had got drunk with his three company majors and some sergeants and they had hauled the youngest officers into a barrack away from where the main body of the 568th Regiment was based. He was happy for this to go on all night, as far as he was concerned.

  This practice of dedovschina, or bullying, was institutionalised in the Russian armed forces. At its worst the process culminated in opusteet—‘taking someone down’.

  Male rape.

  The thought of it excited Colonel Karenin now.

  ‘I’ve got the antiseptic cream, boys!’ he laughed as he paced up and down along the row of beds behind them and waved a tube of the lubricant.

  Equally the thought of it revolted Darensky and he pushed his arms out and clenched his vertebrae.

  They won’t do that to me! No—not that!

  Darensky knew he couldn’t last much longer. He had fought against the final collapse so long that it had overwhelmed him. The only thing in his consciousness now was pain and he was getting tired of it.

  He just wanted it to stop.

  Never mind what Karenin did to him, it couldn’t be worse than this. His right arm juddered and he didn’t try to stop it.

  This was it. He was going to fall onto the bed, be dragged away, sodomised and beaten to a pulp.

  So what? Here I go.

  ‘Ah!’ There was a brief cry and thud from down the room as Lieutenant Panin collapsed onto the bed.

  ‘Ha ha!’ Karenin shouted, and ran down the line of beds to see his victim. ‘Well, we have a volunteer after all for special duties!’ He signalled to the sergeants to drag the man out.

  ‘The rest of you, stand easy!’ he laughed, and followed the inert, moaning form as it was dragged past Darensky with its feet trailing on the floor.

  Darensky and the other men collapsed on their beds and screamed and writhed as the cramp overcame them.

  The morning after, Captain Darensky was summoned to the administration block where they had dragged Panin.

  Darensky was a young and lively officer but he moved now like an old man; his neck and shoulders were stiff from the ordeal and he hunched himself up with fear as he walked slowly around the edge of the snowy parade ground to the old, four-storey, concrete building. The square was bounded by several Soviet-era blocks on each side, their grey cement sides streaked a darker grey by rainwater, and hung with icicles now. The shouts and curses of the regimental duty officer echoed off them as he got the men lined up for morning parade.

  What have they done to Lieutenant Panin and what will they do to me?

  His brother officer hadn’t come back last night. Darensky walked reluctantly up the steps from the main parade ground to the glass-panelled door and pressed the buzzer. There was a long pause and then he heard footsteps dragging inside the door and it was yanked open.

  Colonel Karenin looke
d awful after a night’s heavy drinking. His grey hair stuck up on one side of his head and his face was creased from where he had passed out asleep on the floor.

  ‘Darensky,’ he growled, ‘get some men…’ He paused ‘There’s been an accident.’ With that, he shuffled off, leaving the door open.

  Darensky stood on the threshold for a moment, staring ahead before he returned to the main mess hall, picked three men and came back.

  They went inside.

  The body of Lieutenant Panin was lying in the hallway against the wall, wrapped in a grey army blanket like an old carpet that was being thrown out. Darensky stumbled in shock but directed the men so that they each took a corner of the blanket and picked him up.

  They could then clearly see what had happened.

  He was naked and had been beaten until his face was unrecognisable; an entrenching tool handle stuck out from between his buttocks, stained with dried blood.

  Colonel Karenin appeared at the end of the corridor and swayed, glowering at them.

  ‘Get it out of here,’ he grunted, and gestured to the door.

  The four-man squad stumbled down the steps of the command block, trying not to let the body bump against their legs or to look down at the face swollen with purple bruises.

  Darensky was stunned. He had joined the army as a young volunteer because he was filled with ideas of doing his duty to the Rodina, the Motherland.

  Not for this.

  Not for sodomy and murder.

  Darensky was from a middle-class family and his parents wanted to buy him the usual doctor’s certificate that kept nice boys like him out of the draft. However, the young Lev had craved a challenge and looked forward to the hardships of conscription as a rite of passage into manhood.

  He had been a member of Nashi—‘Ours’—the pro-Putin youth movement founded to promote the resurgence in Russian national pride.

  Nashi had pumped him full of ideas and he believed the old Orthodox mantra that Moscow was the Third Rome, the seat of faith on Earth and therefore of all righteousness. He knew that Russia was the special nation on earth, neither European nor Asian but Russian. He wasn’t exactly sure what Russia’s message to the world was, only that it had one and that it demanded respect.