December

by James Steel

  Bunin brought the conference to a rapid end, sensing that Krymov might be about to go off on one of his rants. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for your time this morning and I would urge you to remain here in the Kremlin press centre, where we will be able to keep you updated with the rapid progress of the President’s reassertion of control. Thank you very much.’

  Krymov and Fyodor stood up and walked out of the door at the back of the room and up the stairs to the President’s office.

  The journalists stood up and either got on the phone to their editors or began doing live broadcasts standing away from the rest of the crowd. The room was full and they were all clearly there to stay.

  Sergey continued to watch the screen in disbelief as Lara hit mute. He shook his head, muttering, ‘Fucking traitor,’ and then looked at her.

  She was furious at Fyodor, but also more aware than Sergey of the irony of what he was saying, having himself just betrayed the government.

  The evil shape of a Mil Mi-24 gunship roared past right outside the window and everyone ducked; its heavy rotors thumped the air in the room.

  ‘Let’s get up top, use the Kords on it!’ Alex shouted to the team.

  They ran for their weapons and lugged the two heavy machine guns upstairs. The Mil Mi-24 was one helicopter he was very afraid of and he wished he had something more serious than just machine guns; its titanium rotors and armoured body were designed to withstand 12.7mm hits.

  As the six members of the team ran up the stairs to the roof, Alex keyed the mike on his headset and called Captain Darensky, who was in charge of the 568th defence ring around the tower, over the local command net they had agreed. He shouted as he ran: ‘Darensky! We have a Mil Mi24 overhead! Can you hit it? Over.’

  What he wanted to say was, ‘How the fuck did you let that get near the tower?’ but it was too late for that.

  Darensky’s voice crackled back to him. ‘Negative! Major Devereux, aircraft is a friendly! Major Oleg Levin has defected from the airforce and flown it from Torzhok.’ Alex knew that was the main Russian airforce helicopter base a hundred miles northwest of Moscow. ‘He requested permission to land on the roof and I gave it.’

  Great, thanks for telling me, Alex thought, but said, ‘OK, we’ll go and see what he wants.’

  ‘Stand down!’ he called to the others, who were lugging the heavy guns ahead of him on the stairs. ‘Apparently, he’s a friendly, defecting to our side.’

  Despite this report, they were still very careful, creeping up the stairs with rifles held ready. The Mil was sideslipping in to land, blowing a gale of snow across the roof. The Russian airforce nicknamed it the Krokodil and Alex could see why: it was a very long aircraft with a green and brown camouflage-speckled body, ending in a snout-like cockpit with a bulging double canopy; the Gatling gun and refuelling probe stuck out under this like jagged canines from a jaw.

  It landed and settled onto its three wheels, winding its rotors down. The fearsome array of armaments, in the nose and on its short wings, was pointing directly at Alex, standing inside the doors at the top of the stairs. As Major Levin moved his head in the cockpit, looking around him to see if anyone else was coming, the 12.7mm, six-barrelled gun under the nose followed sensors in his helmet to stay on his line of sight, making it twitch as if it were alive. As Alex opened the door and walked out it flicked over to point straight at him.

  Well, he’d better be on our side or I am mincemeat, Alex thought as he walked towards the double cockpit.

  Levin saw him and waved, though, popped the cockpit and swung his leg out as it hummed open above him. He held up a hand, uncertain of his reception.

  Alex waved back, walked over and shook hands. The short Russian in a green flightsuit climbed down from the large aircraft and removed his helmet, revealing cropped black hair and a rounded face.

  They shook hands and, despite a naturally serious disposition, Levin couldn’t help smiling with relief that he had made the risky transfer between the two sides.

  Alex led him down to the conference room and Roman, Sergey and the others questioned him.

  ‘Why have you joined us?’ asked Roman, smiling but reserving his judgement on the newcomer.

  ‘Mr Raskolnikov, you need to know that the tower is about to be attacked. The other officers in my squadron are meeting to discuss the situation in Torzhok now. Both General Mostovskoy and the commander-in-chief of the airforce, General Korshunov, have ordered us to change sides and support Krymov now.’ He became suddenly angry. ‘But after I saw those fuckers shooting people this morning, I said to myself, “Never! Never will I take an order from this government again!”’

  He paused to control himself and carried on, ‘I don’t know whether they’ll agree but I think that in the end they will follow the chain of command because at least that way their arses will be covered.’ He shrugged. ‘We initially thought you guys were going to win but after Mostovskoy defected, nobody knows what the hell is going on so they’ll just take the safest route for now and say they were obeying orders.’

  Roman looked at Sergey, who pursed his lips but said nothing. He then nodded to Levin, convinced by the sincerity of the anger he showed about the OMON massacre that his defection was genuine.

  ‘OK…and if they do attack? What will happen?’ Roman glanced across at Alex as well, who had been trying to work it out. A Mil Mi-24 was a flying tank with a huge amount of firepower and the idea of a squadron of them attacking worried him greatly.

  Levin continued, ‘Well, the orders were to attack and knock out any anti-aircraft capability that you have, especially the three Tunguskas. I’m not exactly sure why they want to degrade your anti-aircraft defences, presumably because they have something else lined up. I heard from our squadron signals officer that he had been liaising with Engels airforce base and the only unit based there is the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber Regiment. They fly White Swans.’

  He looked round at the group with a regretful expression at having delivered such bad news. The Tu-160 Tupolev bomber was famous in Russia, as both the heaviest and fastest bomber in the world, capable of carrying forty tonnes of bombs at over Mach 2. The huge, swept-wing aircraft got its nickname because it looked as graceful as Concorde and was painted white to reflect the flash of the atomic weapons it drops.

  ‘The base is four hundred miles southeast of Moscow but they could be here in half an hour if their officers agree to back Krymov.’ Levin fell silent.

  The others were looking at him with wary, calculating stares as they tried to figure out what their next move should be.

  Sergey nodded and then spoke with quiet intensity:‘That’s what Krymov meant.’ The others looked round at him. ‘When he said we will be going to meet a real father-figure, in the press conference.’

  Major Levin looked at him with a startled expression.

  Sergey nodded back at him. ‘Yes, I think he would use it. Go on.’ He gestured to Levin to explain.

  The small major looked round at the others and then spoke guardedly. ‘The Father of All Bombs is a fuelair device they developed in response to the American MOAB—the Mother of All Bombs. The Americans used it to blow up the whole Tora Bora mountain in Afghanistan. The Russian version is even more effective. It’s the most powerful subatomic munition in the world; it weighs seven tonnes but yields the equivalent of forty-four tonnes of TNT. It’s dropped by a White Swan and it’s stored at Engels.’

  He fell silent again.

  Sergey continued in a grim voice, ‘Yes, Krymov is capable of using it. He always used to talk about the FOAB. It was his favourite defence project.’

  In his mind’s eye Sergey was replaying the film he had seen of it being tested on the accommodation blocks of an old army base in the desert in Kazakhstan. The enormous bomb was dropped from eight thousand feet and fell slowly on three huge parachutes as sprayers underneath it dispersed a large cloud of liquid explosive into the air. When a volume several hundred feet wide was filled with explos
ive, a simple lighter on the bomb clicked and all the air vaporised. Filmed from a distance of over a mile there had been a huge flash of flame as the explosive cloud had detonated. An instant blast wave showed up as a distortion of the air that flashed out across the plain, but the explosion also caused a vacuum and then overpressure as air rushed in to fill it. Footage of the aftermath had showed whole, six-storey blocks of flats levelled as if by the sweep of an enormous hand.

  Grigory had seen the footage on national TV as well. He shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t use that in the middle of a city? I mean, the destruction, the civilian casualties, would be enormous.’

  Sergey sighed as he thought about what he knew of Krymov’s vindictive temperament. ‘He’s not bringing a bomber up for a Christmas firework display,’ he told Grigory.

  Lara was shocked by the scale of the violence they faced. ‘Well, can we defend against it?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘They have to drop it from eight thousand feet because the parachutes mean it is unguided, so that’s certainly in range of the Tunguskas’ missiles. We just have to hope they stay in action and can keep it off.’

  Sergey was looking at him askance. ‘No, Alex, we must have something more than that. Our whole strategy cannot be to simply sit back and hope they don’t blow us to fuck!’

  He became more heated. ‘The situation at the moment is very finely balanced and we need to take the initiative.’ He gestured at Major Levin. ‘Look, Alexander, you heard what Levin said, how they are all sitting around watching it all on TV. People are selfish; they are not committed to either side at the moment; their main concern right now is simply to make sure that they are on the winning side.’

  Alex nodded. He knew Sergey was right. They needed to keep up the Revolution’s momentum or Krymov would either bomb them or just strangle them slowly.

  Sergey was getting more enthusiastic as an idea formed in his mind. ‘No, what we need is a big gesture, a big display of strength. This is a media war and we have to show that we hold the symbols of power, even if we don’t hold them in reality.’

  Alex had a feeling where this was going.

  ‘No—we have to go for their jugular!’ Sergey continued. ‘The only way is take the Mil and go for the Kremlin!’

  Everybody stared at him, grappling with the audacity of his plan. Sergey was just getting going, though.

  ‘We know that Krymov is in his office and that all the press are downstairs in the press room. We will land there, kill Krymov and then do a broadcast from inside the Kremlin! The Senate building is recognised as the seat of power in Russia. If we are broadcasting from there then everyone will know that we have won and that the Krymov government must have fallen.’

  He looked round at them, excited by his idea.

  Nobody said anything; it was just too much to take in in one go. They realised it would probably be their only hope but no one wanted to take responsibility for condoning it by speaking.

  Sergey realised he needed to be more practical to get a response from them. ‘I will go as cameraman. I know how to use one and I know the layout of the Senate building and Krymov’s routines.’

  He looked imploringly at Alex. ‘Alexander, I need you and your men to do it. I can’t rely on Russian troops to kill their own commander-in-chief.’

  The tall major folded his arms and took a deep breath. He looked at Sergey and then round the circle at his team: Col, Yamba, Pete, Arkady and Magnus. They all looked back at him pensively. When he had offered them the chance to go home earlier that day, they had all said they were willing to stay to the bitter end, and their loyalty to the team meant that they stuck by their word now.

  Alex thought through the practical details rapidly. Technically it was possible. The Mil Mi-24 was unique amongst helicopter gunships in that it was both a flying tank and an armoured personnel carrier, with enough room to fit a squad of eight men in the troop bay and with enough power to carry a full weapon load at the same time.

  He needed more details, though, before he could answer. He looked at Sergey. ‘What are the defences inside the Senate like?’

  Sergey looked uncertain. ‘Well, I don’t know for sure. There’s always Batyuk and quite a lot of Echelon 25 guys around, and the main body of MVD Kremlin guards are stationed just across in the Arsenal building.’

  Alex nodded; it didn’t sound good but then neither did the alternatives. And he was a risk-taker at heart.

  He looked at Sergey and nodded slowly.

  With Sergey, Alex and his whole team onboard, Lara couldn’t stay out of it. She announced defiantly, ‘Right, I will do the broadcast! We can’t afford to let Roman go, so people will need to see the other symbol of the Revolution there, and that’s me! This is my Revolution and I’m not going to miss out on it.’ She glared around her, defying anyone to refuse her.

  No one did; they needed all the commitment they could get right now.

  ‘Right, Roman, you stay here,’ Sergey said, ‘and, Grigory, you too. Supervise the broadcast and don’t you fucking lose my feed or I’ll kill you.’

  They began to break up but then Sergey thought of something else and clapped his hands to regain their attention. He looked serious. ‘Yes, and one other thing: we don’t tell anyone in the station that they are going to be bombed, otherwise no one will stay and we will all be lost. I will tell Darensky so he knows he has to keep his Tunguskas intact, but otherwise we don’t tell a soul!’

  He glared round at them, pointing a warning finger. ‘OK, everybody understand?’

  There was a round of silent nods as they absorbed the duplicity they were visiting on their comrades.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Four hundred miles to the south of Moscow, on the desolate, windswept steppe, lay Engels airforce base.

  The site was enormous, with a three-and-a-half-kilometre-long runway built to take the world’s heaviest bombers. It was covered in snow and a keen wind whipped across the humped outlines of the fifteen huge, reinforced concrete hangars. Inside each hardened nest lay a White Swan.

  Deep under the frozen base in a munitions bunker, a winch whirred and a large dull green cylinder rose upwards. Cyrillic stencillings on it designated it as: ‘Russian Airforce, Munition Number 1’.

  In a cavernous hangar nearby, Major Rostov and his crew—co-pilot, navigator and weapons system operator—walked in through a side door in their green flightsuits with their white helmets under their arms.

  Rostov never got over the excitement of seeing his beautiful white plane, with its variable wings swept back now against the body, a high tail plane and elegant, clean lines. It looked very similar in size and shape to Concorde but with a much more deadly payload.

  He walked underneath it and quickly inspected the intakes on the four Kuznetsov NK-321 afterburning, turbofan engines, the most powerful ever fitted to a combat aircraft.

  Rostov was an intelligent man and had been concerned by the contradictory orders issued over the course of that morning. Initially, Colonel-General of the Airforce Korshunov had sent orders from Airforce Command that no action was to be taken when the coup had broken out.

  Then, later on, they all saw Lieutenant-General Mostovskoy’s press conference on CNN. It seemed very odd that he had been involved in the plot in the first place—it didn’t make sense—but then he was so composed and convincing when he explained that he had been a double agent all along and had exposed the rebels’ foreign backers that they believed him. How else could one explain the fact that he looked so at home sitting next to the President? Rostov then saw that the whole thing was actually a very clever trick on the rebels. Maybe Krymov wasn’t such an idiot as everyone said.

  If there were foreigners involved in the coup, then they had to be wiped out, even if that meant blowing up a famous Moscow landmark. They had started the game and they knew the rules.

  Rostov was a fiercely cheerful man with a loud laugh. His role as a nuclear bomber pilot involved him being able to follow orders that would cause him
to kill a million people and he took a fierce professional pride in not questioning them; he was part of a very efficient machine and he would play his role. He knew what the blast radius of the FOAB was and that it would destroy many of the tower blocks near the TV station that were packed full of civilians. However, just as he didn’t get lily-livered about dropping nukes, so he wasn’t going to about this bombing mission. He had received his orders from the chain of command and that was all he needed.

  He finished his pre-flight inspection of the outside of his beautiful aircraft and led his crew proudly up the ladder to the cockpit.

  On the Torzhok airforce base, a hundred miles to the northwest of Moscow, more preparations for the final assault on the tower were underway.

  Pilots and crew ran out from the crewroom to where their twelve Mil Mi-24 gunships sat in hardened concrete pens.

  Colonel Turgenev knew it would be a tough job to locate and destroy the three Tunguska anti-aircraft vehicles around the tower, to allow the White Swan to make its bombing run. With their mixture of cannon and missiles they had a high aircraft kill ratio and a fearsome reputation.

  However, he looked with pride at his own deadly machine. The mixed load of rockets and missiles on the wing pylons and the gun under the nose all gave it a jagged, aggressive profile. His ground crew were busy around it, completing fuelling, checking the guided missiles and rocket pods and loading long belts of Gatling gun ammunition.

  When he and his co-pilot closed their double armoured glass canopies, he hit the starter and the deafening roar of the twin Isotov turbines began winding up. The five-bladed rotor turned slowly and was then lost in a whirr. The aircraft shifted on its three wheels, straining to get off the ground.