December

by James Steel

  ‘Roger. I have eyes on. Target aircraft is a white Gulfstream G550.’

  There was another pause as Fyodor typed more commands into his system and then said, ‘Roger, engage and destroy target with cannon fire. Over.’

  ‘Engaging now.’

  A harsh buzzing sound cut into the transmission as the cannon fired.

  ‘Target is hit and breaking up. Over.’

  Applause broke out around the room. ‘Good work, Captain Brodsky. You have successfully defended the constitutional order of the Motherland. Over and out!’ Fyodor added this uncharacteristically flamboyant touch as he signed off and walked over to Krymov, who stood up, shook his hand and then embraced him.

  ‘Mostovskoy, you’ve done a great job! We got that bastard at last! Ha, ha!’ he hooted with relief.

  Fyodor smiled his icy grimace. ‘Thank you, Mr President, I will see to the dispatch of helicopters to the crash immediately.’

  ‘Yes, but first we’re going to get pissed, and after we have seen the pictures, you, Mostovskoy, and you,’ he put his arm around Sergey in a gesture that brooked no refusal, ‘are going to come with me to carry on getting pissed at the Kremlin!’

  Chapter Forty-One

  7.15 A.M. MOSCOW TIME ZONE, TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER

  Boris Frolov pulled the dirty VW Transporter pick-up onto the hard shoulder of the A-103 motorway in Moscow and got out. It was snowing and dark.

  He walked calmly round to the back of the van, dropped the tailgate, and hopped up onto it. He pulled off the tarpaulin, picked up a jerry can of petrol, unscrewed its lid and poured it liberally over the stack of old car tyres, leaving a little trail of petrol onto the tailgate.

  Once it was empty, he tossed the can into the grimy snowdrift on the motorway embankment and jumped down from the back.

  A few cars with their headlights blazing hissed passed him through the slush, heading out of town on his, south, side of the road, along the Shchelkovskoye Shosse, A-103, to Balashika. He looked at the heavier flow of traffic on the opposite carriageway from him; he was seven miles to the east of the centre of Moscow and the early morning rush hour was getting going: hundreds of commuters who were rich enough to still drive into work, despite all the petrol rationing. Frolov hated the Krymov regime, which favoured those rich bastards and neglected the poor.

  Well, they’d certainly wish they hadn’t driven into Moscow today.

  He pulled out his mobile phone and sent a text message. He calmly lit a cigarette, took a couple of slow drags and then tossed it into the back of the truck before walking away. The flame whooshed across the tyres and a thick pall of black smoke began to billow over the motorway.

  Two miles further west towards the centre of town, Mikhail Nikitin got the text message and signalled to the men dressed as police officers in the two Lada police cars behind his.

  They took off their caps, ducked inside their vehicles and switched on their sirens. The howl and flashing lights of the three cars allowed them to pull out into the traffic on the motorway and quickly spread across the three lanes. Once in line abreast, they began slowing down gradually until they had brought the traffic to a standstill a mile back from where the van was now burning furiously on the hard shoulder.

  As the traffic ground to a halt behind them, people shouted and banged their steering wheels in frustration at the thought of missed meetings and wasted time.

  ‘What are the fucking police doing stopping the traffic like this?’

  Once the cars were stationary the six men dressed as police officers switched off their sirens and blocked the gaps between the cars.

  A truck’s airbrakes hissed and the cab dipped as it jerked to a halt. The bearded trucker in a checked shirt jumped down and ran over to them.

  ‘Hey, officer, what’s happening?’

  Nikitin looked at him unsympathetically. ‘Got a big pileup ahead,’ he said, and jerked his thumb.

  There was a bright flash and a second later they heard the boom as the van’s diesel tank exploded.

  ‘Look at that, eh?’ He turned round and gestured at the filthy black smoke plume they could see in the orange streetlights, spreading towards them. ‘Really big crash, apparently, it’ll be a while before they—’

  His words cut off as a large white shape smashed through the air over their heads and roared down the motorway. The slipstream ripped off his cap and everyone dived for cover.

  Arkady struggled to get the Gulfstream lined up on the motorway.

  The controls shook in his hands and he fought the rudder hard. He was wrestling with the steering yoke, trying to slot the aircraft into the narrow trench between the row of streetlights in the central reservation to his right and the trees and pylons on the embankment to his left.

  He had calculated that the wingspan could just fit into the narrow three-lane tunnel but he hadn’t counted on the northerly crosswind and they kept sideslipping south in the breeze, towards the roadside.

  He was so low that snow and ice were ripped up off the verge, the road surface and the central reservation by the slipstream and whorled up under each wing in a vortex curl.

  He lowered the flaps to reduce the airspeed.

  An electricity pylon stretched across the road up ahead. Arkady threw the throttles forward again and hauled back on the yoke. They just made it over—the slipstream ripped the cables off their brackets and they cracked and whipped after the plane in showers of blue sparks.

  He settled the plane back down into the trench and then suddenly veered the left wing up over a stand of pine trees on the verge. The Gulfstream burst through the cloud of black smoke from the burning van on the side of the road.

  People in cars driving on the other carriageway gawped up in horror through their windscreens as the struggling jet screamed down past them. The slipstream sucked cars in towards it; they veered across the road and the tarpaulin sides of trucks ripped off.

  Inside the jet, Alex, Pete, Magnus and the others were thrown around like rag dolls by the roaring, slewing and lurching motion.

  Arkady wrestled with a steering yoke, which seemed to be possessed by a demon, trying to veer them off to the side to smash them against the steel streetlights. They had to land soon or a gust would get them eventually.

  In an obstacle-free stretch, Arkady got the flaps down hard and brought the nose up. Airspeed dropped away fast and he managed to get the rear wheels to touch down on the slushy road surface and tried applying the brakes. He was too busy fighting to keep the plane on the straight and narrow, but Alex looked ahead and saw a road bridge coming up. He could see two things at a glance: that the solid cement pillars were narrower than the wingspan of the aircraft and that there wasn’t enough distance to take off again before they reached it.

  Alex knew that they had to just go for the dead centre of the gap under the bridge. If they hit it off-centre then the impact would spin them off to one side and either smash them into the central traffic lights or flip them off up the embankment.

  ‘Go for the centre! Go for the centre!’ he shouted to Arkady over the noise, and stabbed his hand forward.

  The Russian looked up, saw the gap, frowned and then set his face hard. The nose wheel touched down and he threw in maximum reverse thrust; the plane juddered furiously and balked, veering more wildly from side to side.

  Alex glanced at the airspeed indicator: seventy m.p.h.

  Fuck—we’re not going to stop in time.

  The reverse thrust was making them too erratic on the slippery road surface; Arkady darted a hand off the yoke and cut the reverse throttle. The plane stopped veering around as much but accelerated away again towards the bridge.

  To Alex it looked like the most massive structure on earth: two solid chunks of grimy, pebbledash concrete, one in the middle and one on the side of the road.

  Their poor, frail plane was about to smash into it. Arkady fought to get them centred in the channel between the bastions. Alex turned in his seat and shouted into the cabin behind
: ‘Brace!’

  They hit the bridge.

  An explosive screech.

  The wings sheared off.

  The fuel tanks ripped in half and a great cloud of Avtar whipped back down the fuselage.

  It hit the hot jet exhausts.

  A fireball exploded around the aircraft.

  It scorched the paint off, melted the surface of the Perspex cabin windows and whirled behind them in a torrent of fire.

  The shock of the impact jumped through the airframe. Bodies knocked forwards in their seats against straps.

  They had hit dead centre and stayed on the road.

  Their speed cut away in a horrid lurch. Arkady pulled himself back upright from over the yoke and hit the brakes again. With much reduced momentum the crippled aircraft creaked and ground to a standstill.

  The outside aft section was black and smoking, the wings reduced to stubs ending in twisted metal.

  Inside the aircraft, the rear cabin was in disarray, gear strewn everywhere. Champagne bottles, trays and rucksacks had all been flung against the front of the cabin and crashed down in a tangle on the floor.

  Alex threw off his shoulder straps and dived back through the galley.

  ‘Out, out, out!’

  He had no idea if a secondary fire was going to break out.

  The rest of the team were struggling out of their seats.

  Roman was hard hit, slumped forward in his straps, gasping for air. Yamba pulled him upright, unstrapped him and got him on his feet.

  Seeing everyone was moving, Alex turned back, ripped open the door exit lever and shoved it out with his shoulder. The steps unfolded and banged down hard on the concrete.

  He staggered down them and it was good to reach the bottom and feel the hard concrete under his boots and the cold wind fresh on his face.

  Across the road, the traffic had slowed to a crawl as people stared out of their windows at the extraordinary sight of a half-burned jet sitting in the middle of the road. Behind it was a long scorched streak on the concrete that steamed from the melted snow.

  Alex waved at a good-looking woman in a Mercedes and then ran back up the steps. Inside he could hear Colin in Tasmanian Devil mode shouting: ‘Get yer kit! Let’s go!’

  The others needed little prompting. Yamba and Magnus were quickly down the steps after him and formed a human chain to ferry their gear out onto the road: rucksacks, crates of equipment, weapons and ammunition all passed down and then more came as the luggage bay under the aircraft was unloaded.

  Alex got his Moscow map out and walked back behind the aircraft to look at the burned road signs on the bridge to try to work out where they were. As he walked back he smiled at the thought of how they had got through the Moscow air defences.

  The two Suk-MiG-41s had caught them over the forests a couple of hours east from Moscow. The pilot of the lead one had flown up close to get a visual ID on the Gulfstream.

  Alex looked out of the side window of the cockpit and saw the enormous fighter suddenly loom up out of the night. As their jet laboured along on full throttle, the Berkut seemed to hang effortlessly in midair. Alex could see the canard wings just under the cockpit fluttering slightly, as quick as a bird’s wing, constantly adjusting to keep the fighter stable. The cockpit canopy was black and as sleek as a hawk’s head. He couldn’t see what the pilot inside was doing.

  Captain Brodsky had his thumb on the 30mm cannon button. He was looking forward to blowing these terrorists out of the air. Moscow Command was being pedantic as usual and insisted on him getting in close and doing a visual ID. He pulled alongside and looked to his right; the lights were on in the Gulfstream cockpit.

  What was inside surprised him. The man in the co-pilot seat wore a blue Russian Airforce uniform jacket and an airforce officer’s peaked cap.

  The guy seemed relaxed, not in the least bit perturbed at having a state-of-the-art fighter about to blow him out of the night sky. He smiled and waved across at Brodsky and mouthed: ‘Priyvet!’ in greeting.

  Brodsky ignored him and kept station as he talked to Central Air Command in Moscow on his radio.

  As he was doing this, a message flashed across the display screen on the inside of his helmet visor. The red text was preceded by the correct command codes and could only have come from the Head of Air Defence Command. The message read:

  TRAINING EXERCISE ONLY.

  REPEAT.

  TRAINING EXERCISE ONLY FOR

  MOSCOW CENTRAL COMMAND.

  DO NOT ATTACK GULFSTREAM.

  FIRE BURST NEXT TO AIRCRAFT AND

  REPORT THAT IT HAS BEEN HIT.

  ACKNOWLEDGE ORDER NOW.

  Brodsky looked at it indignantly and read it again.

  A fucking training exercise! Unbelievable, just when he was getting hyped up for his first kill.

  His commander was obviously getting very agitated. Another message flashed up: ‘ACKNOWLEDGE ORDER NOW!’

  Reluctantly, Brodsky hit the acknowledge key and then, with a sour expression on his face, said, ‘Firing now,’ and fired a long burst from his cannon past the nose of the Gulfstream. The airframe juddered and the deadly red tracers streamed harmlessly off into the night.

  The man in the cockpit clenched his fist and pumped it and then grinned and gave him a thumbs up.

  Cocky bastard.

  Alex had then seen the huge fighter simply flip over onto its left-hand side and disappear in an instant.

  Arkady followed the plan and took the Gulfstream down in a steep dive to a prearranged site in the forest where a white airforce Sukhoi training jet had just been crashed, the pilot having safely ejected.

  The whole thing had worked very smoothly. When the airforce search-and-rescue helicopter had located the site half an hour later it was able to film and beam back images of a crash site complete with broken-off trees, a still burning white jet fuselage and wreckage scattered over a wide area.

  The Gulfstream had swooped down low until it was under the radar and then levelled off and continued on its way to Moscow; Fyodor had arranged safe passage for it through the remaining air defences with his supporters in the airforce.

  All in all, Alex was very pleased with the way it had gone. Trying to land at one of the conventional airports in Moscow would have been suicide for them. He had got the idea of the motorway landing from Switzerland, where he knew that, in the absence of much flat land, in time of war they requisitioned motorways for use by the airforce.

  Planning the landing zone had taken a long time. Fyodor’s experienced pilots had scoured the maps of Moscow motorways to find a suitable runway and then driven up and down the A-103 with a mental picture of the stopping distance of a Gulfstream in their heads, trying to find the necessary straight piece of road. That bit hadn’t worked so well, but at least they were here in one piece.

  ‘Alex, get back here!’ Colin shouted at him from the plane and he ran back over to it. ‘We’ve got company up ahead!’

  Alex saw two helicopters skimming in low over the motorway towards them.

  The two small aircraft flared hard and dropped onto the motorway in front of the crashed jet.

  Alex waved to them as they landed. The pilots worked for Sergey.

  He turned to his right-hand man. ‘Right, Col, get the weapons and the rest of the gear in that one, I’ll take Roman now.’

  He glanced at his watch anxiously: 7.35 a.m.

  They had only ten minutes to get Roman across town and on air.

  Roman had been shaken up by the crash but Pete manhandled him firmly down the steps and then, with Alex, bundled him over to the first helicopter, opened the door and pushed him inside.

  Alex and Pete both had their assault rifles across their chests as they settled into their seats, the aircraft’s engines roared and it tilted and quickly swooped away east towards Ostankino.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  7.25 A.M. MOSCOW TIME ZONE, TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER

  Grigory stood up in front of the assembled journalists and
technical staff in the Ostankino tower to break the news of the coming revolution.

  They had all gathered together in the big newsroom, standing and sitting amongst the rows of desks. Grigory and Lara climbed up onto a table in front of them. The room buzzed with anxious chatter and people looked around with worried expressions.

  ‘OK, people!’ Grigory clapped his hands together and held his arms up for silence. He had on his black suit and a white button-down shirt, and was unshaven as usual. Lara stood next to him, looking uncharacteristically formal in a fitted, dark blue skirt suit. She had her arms crossed over her stomach and stared down at her feet. She was sick with tension and thinking about Sergey.

  ‘Right, I have a big announcement for you. Some of you may have guessed what is going to happen.’

  Those in the know swallowed hard: the revolution that they had thought about for so long was really happening. No longer would it just be fighting talk over a glass of wine at home—they were really going to go head to head with the might of the Russian state and try to do what no one had achieved since the Bolsheviks in 1917.

  Grigory was a popular MD at work and he in turn cared about his staff. He looked out over them now and wondered—Could they really do this?

  They didn’t look like a band of crack revolutionaries. Scruffy, intellectual and cool—yes, but definitely not hardened fighters. He looked down in front of him and saw Nikolai, an anaemic script editor, staring up at him expectantly through his large black-rimmed glasses.

  He was going to have to make this good.

  ‘Now, you all know what the Krymov regime has done to human rights in this country—the reopening of the Gulags and the disappearances. You know how many journalists have been harassed and murdered over the years.’

  There were nods around the room; their profession had been heavily targeted by the regime. In addition to notorious cases like Anna Politkovskaya, over sixty others had been murdered.

  ‘You know also how the regime has damaged the economy with inflation and petrol rationing in a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world.’