December

by James Steel

  There were slow nods of understanding. The basic payment was a substantial amount of money that would buy them each a large home very easily, but Alex wasn’t going to try to railroad them in any direction. That just wasn’t the way the team worked together on these decisions.

  ‘However, for my part, I will be staying on to see this thing through to the end. What do you think?’ He glanced around them with an expectant look.

  Pete had been hunched over the table with his chin held in one hand and an intense, evaluating look on his face. Some of his long brown locks had escaped and hung down around the black stubble of his heavy jaw line. He leaned back in his chair, pushed it away from the table, folded his arms across his chest and shrugged. ‘Yeah, why not, eh?’ He looked round at the others for their reaction.

  The older men were taking longer to think it over.

  Col was usually the most outspoken amongst them, but he had his lips pressed tight together as he weighed up the factors on his mind. He was thinking about what he knew of the realities of heavy fighting—the injuries and deaths that he had seen many times—and balancing them against the bitty life he led back home, the fact that, when it came down to it, he wasn’t really doing it for the money. He was doing it for the professional pride, which was the main thing that he ended up justifying his life with. Like the others in the group, he detested heroic statements as being antithetical to the grim reality of their trade. They all knew that what counted was what you did, not what fine words you came out with.

  He scowled, looked down and scratched the grey stubble on the back of his balding head. He said unenthusiastically, ‘Yeah, well, suppose it might be a bit of a laff, eh?’

  Alex nodded; he didn’t need any more words than that to guarantee Col’s commitment.

  Yamba’s stern face turned into a frown as he mimicked his friend’s words in a deadpan voice. ‘“A bit of a laff, eh?” What kind of an expression is that to use at a time like this?’ He looked at Col in angry disbelief.

  Col’s expression became surly and he shrugged.

  Yamba appeared exasperated. ‘I mean, we’re in the middle of a bloody revolution, man. Can’t you find something more epic to say than that?’

  Col switched to looking at the ceiling and around the corners of the room, deliberately avoiding his question.

  The Angolan looked at Alex and held his hands out to him, asking for his intervention. ‘I mean, bloody hell, what kind of idiots do you have to employ, Alex?’

  Alex shrugged nonchalantly, contributing to the farce.

  Yamba scoffed. ‘I have to work with these intellectual pygmies.’ He flipped his hand in disgust at Col.

  Col took the bait now and sat forward, pointing a warning finger at Yamba. ‘I’ll give you fooking pygmies!’

  Yamba pointed back at him. ‘Ah! And now you are being racist as well!’

  ‘You’re the one what’s got a problem with pygmies, mate. I fooking love them, me!’ Col pointed at himself laughing.

  Yamba waved a dismissive hand back at him. ‘Buffoon!’

  ‘Sh’up!’

  They both sat back in their chairs with their arms folded and expressions of mock disgust on their faces as they looked up at the ceiling.

  Alex, Arkady and Pete couldn’t help shaking with laughter as the exchange went on. Magnus found it particularly amusing and was quietly crying with suppressed sniggers, as the two became more and more insulting.

  After they all got their breath back and the laughter died away there wasn’t much that the remaining members could say in response to Alex’s questioning look.

  Yamba just shrugged and nodded. Magnus gave it more consideration and then said quietly, in the clipped tones of his mother tongue: ‘Ja, vi må gjøre det,’ and nodded. ‘Yes, we must do that.’

  Arkady had been in a quandary because it was the future of his home country that was at stake here. But given the others’ commitment, he could not back down now so he grinned his gold-toothed smile and said, ‘Yes, for the Motherland, heh?’

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The President of the Motherland lay on his back in the snow, drunk and grinning happily.

  Major Batyuk wished he would get up, but stood at a respectful distance beside the other six guards.

  The President’s Communication Secretary, Captain Bunin, opened a window from the press office, on the second floor of the building opposite them, the floor below the President’s office, and leaned out.

  He was highly agitated and shouted across the courtyard, ‘Mr President, there’s a report just come in! A Gulfstream jet has landed on the A-103 motorway on the eastbound carriageway to Balashika. Two helicopters have landed at the site and then taken off from there to Ostankino.’

  Krymov sat up in alarm and twisted round to see Bunin. ‘What?’

  ‘A white Gulfstream jet…’

  Krymov ignored the rest and turned back round to look at Batyuk. His expression of euphoria was replaced by one of astonishment as he tried to grapple with what had happened; he couldn’t make sense of it.

  Batyuk could, though. His face went red with rage and his ear stump flamed angrily. He looked murderously at Krymov and said through gritted teeth, ‘I’ll kill them.’

  Krymov just nodded in his dazed state.

  ‘You and you, go with the President,’ he detailed two guards. ‘Mr President, please move to your office immediately. The rest of you come with me.’ With that he led the four élite soldiers with rifles across the courtyard at a run towards the door where Sergey and Fyodor had disappeared a minute ago.

  He busted open the door and charged down the corridor to where it split. He paused and looked around him to try to work out which way they had gone. He looked down at the floor; there were traces of water. It must have come from the snow stuffed down Sergey’s back and from their shoes.

  ‘Come on! Shoot on sight!’ he shouted to the soldiers, and drew his own pistol. He led off along the servants’ corridor to the south; he had an idea in his mind where they were headed. The soldiers pelted along, their boots reverberating on the stone flags, and then hurtled down the small stairs to the old coal store.

  As head of presidential security, Batyuk knew that the Kremlin was riddled with underground tunnels; the walled citadel covered sixty-eight acres and included four palaces, four cathedrals and numerous barracks and offices of state. Over the centuries numerous tunnels had been dug to allow tsars, bishops, mistresses and ministers to move between them in secret. The one he thought that Fyodor and Sergey would try to escape along now had been built on Stalin’s orders in the Great Patriotic War. It connected the network to the nearest Metro stations, allowing people to be moved in and out in secret and to avoid German bombing raids.

  Batyuk ran down the stairs and then ducked into a small archway at the bottom, which gave into a dimly lit tunnel, just wide enough for a man to fit. It sloped downwards and he had to bend his head to avoid a light on the ceiling.

  He held up his hand to stop the others behind him and paused to listen; he knew that a hundred metres west of the Senate Building, where it was under open ground, the tunnel split into four, three of which went to different areas of the Kremlin and one that linked into the Metro network. He also knew that there was a guard posted at the interchange. He could hear voices ahead. It was them.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted, and ran forward.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Fyodor led Sergey down the stairs and into the tunnel.

  He ran forward, but after fifty metres he stopped and straightened his immaculate blue airforce greatcoat and adjusted his peaked officer’s cap. Sergey brushed the snow out of his hair and off the collar of his rumpled suit and coat.

  The officer turned on Sergey with calculating eyes. With his shaggy thatch and diamond earring he still looked shambolic, but he was a famous person in Russia so that might help.

  He turned and walked off with his hands clasped behind his back, at the steady pace that befitted a ge
neral in command of events.

  After another fifty metres they came to a four-way split in the tunnel. A small circular concrete chamber had been dug out, with a higher ceiling, and a young MVD private sat at a desk in the middle of it under a light reading a book, his AN-94 rifle propped next to him and a sign hanging over the tunnel behind him saying: ‘Metro’.

  Fyodor fixed him with a cold stare as he advanced into the room. The private looked up, saw who it was, sprang to attention and saluted. ‘General Mostovskoy!’

  The general didn’t say anything, but continued his dead-eyed stare as he pulled his official pass out of his breast pocket and proffered it.

  The soldier glanced at it. ‘Thank you, sir!’

  He finally noticed Sergey and recognised him as well. ‘Ah, Mr Shaposhnikov, do you have a pass as well, sir?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Er, I did, but…’ Sergey made a show of tapping the pockets of his jacket and coat ‘…I seem to have left it somewhere. Don’t worry, President Krymov will vouch for me.’ He grinned as if it were a trifling matter.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but regulations state that no one without a pass can use the tunnel network. I’m sorry but you’ll have to return the way you came and use another route.’ He held out an arm to indicate the way back to the Senate Building.

  ‘Private.’ Fyodor’s voice was cold enough to lower the temperature ten degrees. ‘Come here.’ He beckoned the man out from behind his desk so that he was standing in front of them and was about to give him a lengthy dressing-down when the noise of footsteps came down the tunnel from the Senate Building.

  The steps paused and then clattered towards them.

  Sergey butted in between the two of them. ‘Look, son.’ He winked, put an arm around the soldier’s back and turned him away from Fyodor. ‘I know what army pay is like. I’ll make it worth your while.’ He leaned his head conspiratorially towards him and then brought his knee up hard into the man’s groin. The soldier collapsed on the floor, writhing for breath.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Sergey shouted, and ran round the desk.

  Fyodor followed, grabbing the rifle from behind it and, with expert precision, clicked off the safety, flicked it on to auto, and fired the whole thirty-round mag back down the tunnel at Batyuk. The gunfire was explosive in the confined space and red tracers snapped out in the dim light.

  There were shouts and cries from their pursuers, and a second later a torrent of gunfire poured back out at them. Bullets blew chunks of concrete off the walls as they ricocheted around the circular chamber, but Fyodor had already dropped the rifle and run after Sergey.

  They pelted along the narrow tunnel. It sloped steeply downhill three hundred metres west until it had run under both the citadel walls and the deep outer moat. A long burst of automatic gunfire came from behind them and the bullets cracked and pinged off the walls but the downhill slope kept them out of a direct line of fire.

  Batyuk and the remaining uninjured guard inched their way into the tunnel, and then, hearing rapid footsteps, ran after their quarry with rifles held in front of them.

  Sergey hit the heavy metal door at the end of the tunnel and heaved at the lever to open it. It moved up and unbolted the door; he swung it open and stepped out into a small closet with brooms and mops lining its walls. Fyodor rushed into it after him and swung the door closed; they couldn’t lock it from their side.

  ‘Come on!’ he panted, and opened the normal wooden door out of the cleaners’ closet. He and Sergey stepped out into a wide, brightly lit Metro hallway packed with morning rush-hour commuters hurrying in different directions. They were in the middle of the huge Metro interchange near the Kremlin where the four stations of Arbatskaya, Borovitskaya, Aleksandrovskiy Sad and Bibliotheca imeni Lenina all intersected.

  ‘This way!’ Fyodor pointed up at a grey Line 9 sign, the way north to Ostankino. Nobody gave them a second glance as they were swallowed up in the crowd.

  Ten seconds later, when Major Batyuk and the remaining soldier burst out of the door with their rifles raised, people stopped and stared in alarm. Batyuk looked back at them angrily but he knew that he had lost his quarry. He pushed the soldier back through the door and slammed it behind him.

  Chapter Fifty

  Grigory quickly slid into his chair at the mixing desk in the dimly lit director’s gallery overlooking Studio 2 and put his headset on. The team around him were right in the middle of the final preparations for Roman’s broadcast.

  The room hummed with activity and with terse instructions going back and forth from controllers to technicians in Studio 2 and in the production rooms of all the different TV and radio stations on the five floors of the tower.

  Assistants darted behind the line of controllers sitting at the long mixing desk. It was covered in dials and sliders, and in front of it was a bank of screens showing all the different shots from the studio cameras and from the five camera crews spread out around Moscow, ready to catch the public’s reaction to the speech.

  Next to Grigory was Ilya Witte, who would be directing the cameras on the actual live show. He was busy moving the two joysticks in front of him for the remote-controlled cameras they had set up in Studio 2, checking that they all moved correctly and that he would get the shots he wanted. Further along from him the sound engineer was talking to the technician on the studio floor as he fitted Roman and Lara’s mikes and tested them. Grigory glanced through the window under the bank of screens and could see them now standing at the front of the studio, looking tense. The floor manager was bustling around them checking his clipboard and directing people. In his headset Grigory could hear Ilya calmly counting back to everyone: ‘On air in one minute.’

  The vision mixer next to him was running through the graphics package they had made to front the programme. It had to be eye-catching but also authoritative. After many changes, he was finally happy with it and now had his finger over the play button, ready for when the presenters of the morning TV shows cut off their usual performances and handed over to him.

  All eleven terrestrial stations and the seventeen satellite channels that broadcast from the Ostankino tower would carry the programme live, and further along the desk the sound engineer was checking his connections to the twelve radio stations that also transmitted from there.

  Grigory quickly brought the microphone on his headset down to his mouth and punched in the dial numbers to Captain Lev Darensky’s mobile in the 568th barracks, twenty miles north of him. They had spoken earlier that day and Darensky had been briefed to get the regiment into the canteen and get the TV turned up loud.

  Those soldiers were the key to the whole revolution. If they didn’t come out in support and bring their tanks down to defend the tower then it was open to a counterattack from Krymov. The one big advantage they had over the President was control of the airwaves, but if they lost the tower, then they lost that, and the revolution would be finished.

  Darensky’s voice sounded nervous as he answered his mobile. ‘Grigory?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me. We’re on in one minute. Are your guys watching?’

  ‘Yes, they’re all here.’ Darensky sounded nervous. ‘I told them there was an important announcement this morning.’

  ‘Good, well, there certainly will be! Good luck!’

  Grigory hung up and punched in another speed dial to Gerry Kramer, the newsdesk editor at CNN in Moscow. They were old friends but he hadn’t said anything to him about the coup yet.

  ‘Hey, buddy?’ The American sounded as chipper as ever.

  ‘Gerry, whatever you’re showing now, stop it, get a translator on line and take this feed from me.’

  ‘Say what?’

  Grigory paused; he couldn’t believe he was actually going to say this. ‘There’s going to be a revolution.’

  There was silence on the other end.

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  Grigory hit the button and then dialled his counterparts at BBC World News, France 24 and Al Jazeera.


  Ilya continued his countback to the floor manager standing in front of Lara: ‘Forty seconds to on air.’

  She was standing on a dais at the front of the studio in the full glare of the lights. A large crowd stood around in front of her, waiting to play their part.

  Studio 2 was the biggest the station had, and the back wall of it was double-height plate glass that followed the curve of the outside of the tower. They had decided that it was important to be able to show people that Roman really was out of prison and back in Moscow, broadcasting live from Ostankino, and that the best way of doing this was with a huge panoramic view of the city behind him. A thin dawn light was filtering through the snow clouds now, but the floodlights on the cathedrals and landmarks were still on and anyone could see that it was the capital.

  The sound technician finished clipping the talkback earpiece onto her collar and then quickly stood back to see that the wire behind her ear didn’t show. He did one more check on the radio mike and handed it to her.

  Lara was glad she had something to clutch onto. She felt sick with fear about Sergey, knowing that in doing what she was about to do right now she would be contributing to his death. Half of her wanted to just run off stage, burst into tears and switch off the whole of the world.

  The other half of her knew that she had to do this for Sergey. It was his whole vision of Russkaya dusha—insanely maddening as she found it—that had propelled her to love him so much in the first place. This broadcast for her then would be both an ode of love and a funeral oration in one.

  She quickly smoothed the jacket of her blue skirt suit down. She wasn’t used to looking so formal and felt constrained by it. The jacket felt tight across her shoulders, but she had decided after discussion with Grigory that she needed to try to look more authoritative than she usually did.

  She smiled nervously at Roman across the studio from her and he nodded calmly back. He was standing behind a podium in his dark suit and tie, smoothing the pages of his speech in front of him and gathering himself for his big moment. He flexed his shoulders and thought about all the other spotlight occasions he had been in, the big international matches when he had been the centre of attention and about to play his heart out on the pitch. The fear he felt now was just the same, he just had to make it work for him. He ran through his first lines in his head again and then cleared his mind and waited for Lara’s handover.