December

by James Steel

  A burst of machine-gun fire through the door cut him off.

  Pete’s heavy boot kicked it open and five heavily armed men burst in, clad in helmets and goggles and rapidly flicking the muzzles of their machine guns around the room, searching for targets.

  ‘Everybody on the floor now!’ Alex yelled at them in Russian.

  They swept the room and then exited through an open door leading into a corridor running north.

  Lara and Sergey ran through after them. Sergey was loving it. His plan was working. This was exactly the sort of coverage he wanted going out on all the foreign channels. He pulled a Blue Revolution flag out of his coat and waved it around at the cameras shouting, ‘The Blue Revolution lives! We’ll get that Krymov fucker!’

  He ran out after the rest of the team into a corridor with a closed door at the end and crouched down at the back of the stack that Alex had lined up along the wall. Alex was at the front with Pete across the corridor and Yamba at the back of the line in reserve in case Plan A didn’t work.

  Alex nodded to Pete, who stepped up and gave the door a massive kick. It shook but didn’t open.

  ‘Shit!’

  Pete hit the deck as a burst of fire from inside shredded the door and bullets smashed into the walls over their heads.

  ‘Yamba!’

  The Angolan bent down on one knee and triggered the Shmel launcher held against his shoulder. The fuelair bomb punched through the door, hit the wall on the other side of the room and exploded in a fireball, blowing the windows out into the central courtyard.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Alex had to shout after the deafening explosion.

  This time, Pete’s boot smashed the door off its frame and they charged in. Smashed tables and chairs were blown over against the walls and burning fiercely.

  With the lights blown out, the white beams of their gun torches jerked around in the darkness searching for targets. They scanned over two bodies burning on the floor with stinking smoke billowing out from them.

  Shouts of ‘Clear! Clear!’ came in from all corners.

  Alex wanted to press the advantage and pointed Col at a door opposite: ‘Sustained fire!’

  A long peal of gunfire reverberated in the enclosed space and stitched a hole through the scorched door. Col then moved quickly aside as Magnus stepped forward and pitched a grenade through it.

  There was the heavy crack of an explosion and a scream.

  ‘Again!’

  Another grenade went in and the blast splintered the doorframe.

  ‘Let’s go!’

  Magnus stepped forward and booted it; the hinges came off and it fell in. The stack streamed through.

  The room was full of plaster dust and smoke. The only thing Alex could see was the brightly lit muzzle of his gun through the grey swirl, swinging left and right, seeking some solid form.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No!’

  He was breathing heavily and felt the dust clog in his throat.

  ‘Just stay still! Wait!’

  The dust gradually settled.

  He saw the bodies of two civilian office workers stretched out on the floor. Fuck.

  ‘Come on, let’s go!’ Command gave a harder edge to his voice.

  His breathing was breathing quick and shallow; he swallowed hard to clear the dust from his throat and spat it out.

  They moved on through the rooms and corridors, repeating the clearance procedure in each one.

  ‘Clear! Clear!’

  They were flowing forward smoothly, but Alex knew they were falling further and further behind Krymov as Batyuk hurried him away.

  They reached a dangerous point where the main corridor ran on ahead north, but a door branched off it to the right, east along the other side of the triangle, which formed the northern edge of the central courtyard.

  Sergey stepped forward. ‘Krymov will have gone through there to get to the main entrance. It’s his only way out.’ He nodded to his right at the huge entrance dome across the courtyard at the apex of the triangle.

  The door was an obvious ambush point; Alex eyed it nervously.

  ‘OK, let’s mousehole it! Pete—get a charge!’

  The Australian whipped his rucksack off his back and pulled out the black, dinner-plate-sized mine.

  He quickly ripped the plastic cover off the sticky pad, crept forward to the wall next to the door and pressed it onto the plaster. The others watched from back down the corridor as he crimped the detonator cord to a minute length and then ripped off the red firing tape that set the chemical fuse burning. He dropped the strip of red tape on the floor and ran back towards them.

  In the time he had been doing this, Sergey had quickly pulled the folding satellite dish out of his rucksack, pointed it out of a window and called Grigory on his phone. He was speaking to him as the two kilos of C4 blew a cloud of red sparks and dust back down the corridor and more gunfire broke out as Alex led the team on.

  ‘Go!’

  The stack moved forward to the hole in the wall, large enough for a man to duck through. They poured into the room next to the door and then lobbed grenades down the corridor from there.

  The different angle of attack worked and the two soldiers waiting down the corridor were caught by their blasts.

  The delay was still too much, though, and Alex could envisage Krymov getting to the end of the long side of the building and slipping out of the main entrance whilst the Mil was flying around the other side of the building. He needed something to stop him getting away.

  ‘Wait!’ He held up a hand and the team paused in the corridor, each soldier taking a knee facing out in all-round defence. Alex pulled the receiver from the radio on his back.

  ‘Arkady!’

  ‘Yes?’ His voice sounded calm and precise against the whirr of the rotor blades as he flew along the side of the Arsenal over the bodies of three MVD men who had tried to get between the two buildings. He was taking hits from a hail of rifle fire but it pinged off the canopy next to his head.

  ‘I need an airstrike on the east end of the north side of the courtyard. We’ve got to stop Krymov getting out!’

  ‘Roger that, airstrike, east end of north side of central courtyard.’

  Arkady glanced quickly at the Arsenal building; the Gatling gun in the nose twitched over and fired a long suppressive burst at it to make them keep their heads down. Then Levin eased back on the stick and they rose up and swung back over the Senate building to come in at the courtyard from the south.

  They hovered low over the roof again and Arkady sighted the heads-up display targeting ring on the end of the building before pressing the fire button and repeating the ripple fire process with the pod of rockets on the other wing.

  Again he carefully blew the outer wall open and then shot out the inner walls. The whole building collapsed with a similarly spectacular explosion of debris across the courtyard. Windows smashed all around it, fire broke out from a punctured gas main and flames began pouring up into the sky, sending a pall of smoke out over the Kremlin.

  Sergey peered out of a window across the courtyard at the destruction and nodded approvingly. He turned to Alex and shouted to him over the racket of the helicopter.

  ‘They’ll have to go down to the servants’ corridor on the ground floor and try to run across the courtyard; it’s their only way out now. You’ve got to pin them in there and get me time to do the broadcast with Lara.’

  Alex knew that trying to win a head-on firefight to kill Krymov would be tough; the broadcast was equally important. If they could just pen Krymov in, that would have to do for now.

  ‘OK!’ he shouted in agreement, and they ran back into the west side of the building. From there they could fire at the whole façade of the northern side of the courtyard and keep Krymov pinned down. The far end of the façade was burning fiercely from the airstrike. He moved the team down into an office on the first floor and they took up firing positions at the windows.

  Major Batyuk realised
he was now trapped and needed to fight his way across the open courtyard to get out of the main door and escape, but in order to do that he had to win the firefight against Alex’s men. He had been able to get to an internal armoury and gather ten men from around the building. Their machine guns appeared from the windows along the façade and bursts of fire began spitting across at the office where Alex was positioned, the sound echoing off the high sides of the buildings. Under this covering fire, two men tried running out across the snow to the other side. Long bursts from the assault team’s PKMs cut both of them down.

  A static firefight developed with both sides trying to get in a superior weight of fire to force the enemy’s head down. Alex, Yamba, Colin, Magnus and Pete were all on their PKMs, crouching at the windows, looking out at the enemy firing positions and trying to hit them when they stuck their heads out of the windows.

  An insane cacophony of gunfire developed, with the solid roar of the machine guns pouring rounds out and the cracking and banging of bullets coming in through the windows, smashing into the walls opposite and blowing chunks of plaster and dust everywhere. A carpet of spent brass cartridges piled up on the floor next to each man as their guns spewed hot cases from their ejection ports. They smoked in the cold air and blue-grey smoke drifted up from them.

  Someone opposite them had found some heavier weaponry. Alex saw the distinctive square flash-suppressor on the muzzle of a Kord poke out of a window and then the heavy rounds banged out, smashing into the stone outer wall and beginning to chew holes through it.

  On the floor above them, in the press office, the braver cameramen had crawled from under their tables and pointed their cameras out of the windows to film the streams of tracer zipping back and forth across the courtyard.

  Sergey crawled across the floor of the office and set up the satellite dish pointing back out of the window. He pulled his phone out and got through to Grigory. He had to yell at the top of his voice.

  ‘Are you getting this?’

  Grigory was in similar dire straits, crouched under the desk as Ilya and the technicians ripped out circuits and tried patching wires across it.

  ‘No—we’re still not live on you! We’ve taken hits! We’ve got enemy soldiers upstairs! And Sergey,’ he paused before giving him the really bad news, ‘we’ve just lost our last Tunguska! Sergey, you’ve got to do something fast or we are all going to get bombed to fuck!’

  Sergey was shocked to hear his normally calm station chief sounding hysterical.

  He thought fast. ‘Look, never mind my feed, can you just relay the foreign channels? They’re all here—are they filming?’

  Grigory reached up and punched the right buttons on the console. CNN’s feed of the firefight suddenly cut in over the looped tape that he had been broadcasting.

  ‘OK, we’re relaying CNN live now! You’re on air.’ He looked at the pictures of the gun battle. ‘What the fuck is happening there? Are you winning?’

  Sergey paused as he tried to sound confident. ‘Look, don’t worry, I’ll sort something out here. We’ll win, don’t worry! Just stick with the CNN relay for the moment.’

  He pressed the end button on his phone and tried to think what he was going to do.

  In the Air Command bunker, General Korshunov looked up in alarm as the new pictures from CNN came through on the big wall screen in front of him.

  The White Swan was four minutes from its final bombing run.

  What the hell was going on in the Kremlin? Which side was winning? Was he supposed to abort the bomb run or let Ostankino have it, as Krymov had made him swear he would do?

  His hand hovered over the desk mike as he wondered whether to patch through to Major Rostov and call off his mission.

  In the Senate building, Alex could tell they were losing the balance of the firefight. The volume of incoming was beginning to dominate their outgoing fire; his men had to pull away from their firing positions at the windows for longer as bullets ripped through them.

  He heard Arkady shouting in his earpiece from the helicopter,‘Alex! Alex, I can’t hold these guys back for much longer; I’m getting low on ammunition. Several large groups are trying to cross over to you from the Arsenal! There’s a squad just got in through the south end of the building. You definitely have four enemy approaching from behind your position.’

  Sergey was up against the wall next to Alex and saw him press the earpiece against his head and then acknowledge grimly. Alex looked at him with a worried expression and then shouted, ‘There’s a squad just got in the south end, coming from behind us.’ He jerked his thumb back the way they had come.

  Sergey nodded blankly. He could feel the momentum draining away. The position was deteriorating rapidly: they were running low on ammunition, there was an enemy squad behind them and they were losing the firefight. He looked around the shattered room. Lara was crouched down along the far wall with her hands over her head from the blasts of plaster and ricochets over her.

  Magnus moved back to fire out of the window again, was hit in the head and snapped back away from the wall.

  Yamba looked down at him lying on the floor with blood pouring from under the rim of his holed helmet.

  ‘He’s hit, he’s hit!’

  Lara crawled on hands and knees to Magnus’s body as it convulsed on the floor. She pulled his helmet off; there was a large hole in the back of his head with white skull and brain showing amidst a mess of blood and hair.

  She cried out and tried pressing the bone back in place. Alex scrambled over next to her, took one look at the gaping hole and shouted to her, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone! Leave him!’

  He moved back to the window, gripped the stock of his PKM harder, drilling his anger out with a long burst at the enemy.

  Sergey dragged Lara away from Magnus. He hugged her as she shuddered against him, each movement jolting his soul. He had got her into this and now she was in pain and probably going to die a violent death. He pulled her hurriedly out of the room into the corridor behind it.

  Away from the noise of the firing he could hear a roaring sound overhead as if the fabric of the sky was being torn slowly open. Rostov had dropped the White Swan down to a lower altitude. To increase the psychological terror of any defenders left around the tower, he kicked in his afterburners. Each of his four Kuznetsov turbofans shot huge red streaks of burning jet fuel out behind and pushed the aircraft through Mach 1. As he broke the sound barrier, an enormous sonic boom crashed out over Moscow, like a thunderclap heralding Götterdämmerung. Despite its large size, the Swan was a very manoeuvrable aircraft and he flicked it over on its side to bank away and circle the tower.

  Sergey heard the boom and realised what it meant. He knew from his earlier conversation with Grigory that they had lost the last Tunguska and that the tower was defenceless, the bombing run with the FOAB was about to begin and hundreds of people in and around the tower were about to die.

  His bold plan to attack the Kremlin was collapsing around him. He looked down at Lara, hunched up in his arms. In the middle of all the mayhem around him, he had a sudden moment of clarity and felt again how much he loved her. What a ridiculous man he had been not to see that before.

  She was going to die soon if he didn’t do something fast. He looked out over her head, thinking hard.

  A moment later, Alex ducked back from the window to reload and glimpsed Sergey run back into the room to where his camera and rucksack with the mines and grenades in it were piled.

  Alex ignored him, fitted the new magazine in with a satisfying snick and stood up to fire another burst. When he looked back, Sergey wasn’t there.

  Where the fuck has he gone?

  ‘RPG!’ Yamba yelled as a man stepped quickly out into the courtyard, sighted his launcher and fired.

  The wall along from Alex exploded inwards. Pete took the brunt of the blast at waist height, just under the line of his flakjacket. He was blown back across the room, his stomach and pelvis ripped open by shrapnel. Guts and a blood sl
ick spilled out around him on the floor.

  Col shouted, ‘Oh fook! No!’

  He put his gun down and kneeled over Pete with his hands raised, looking helplessly at the mess of blood, guts and smashed bone.

  Alex glanced out of the corner of the window; more men were appearing in the courtyard as their fire slackened off. With Col off his weapon, they were down to two guns from five. The enemy were getting a better angle on them and Krymov would soon be able to slip across when they were completely pinned down.

  ‘Col! I need you!’

  Alex looked at Pete; he had seen enough battle damage in African wars and knew he was gone. He switched into command mode. ‘Col! Get on that gun now! Leave him!’

  Col stood up slowly, forcing himself away from his comrade.

  Alex turned back to the window and then Sergey reappeared, scuttled over to him and shouted, ‘Cease fire!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cease fire!’

  The weight of incoming fire from the enemy slackened off, and Col and Yamba both looked out from their windows to see what was going on.

  Sergey shouted at them as well: ‘Cease fire! Cease fire!’

  Alex looked at him, startled by the sudden silence. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I have the solution to all your problems!’ Sergey gave one of his manic grins. ‘Just follow me, come on!’

  He waved them towards the door back to the corridor.

  Alex knew that their situation was desperate. Two of his men now lay dead on the floor and they were going to be overwhelmed soon. The cessation of incoming fire, however Sergey had achieved it, was an enormous relief. In the end he didn’t have any choice but to go along with him. He waved Col and Yamba over.

  They all carried their machine guns and followed Sergey and Lara as he led them out of the room. They followed him out and down a backstairs to the ground floor, from where a narrow passageway ran along to a small door opening onto the courtyard.

  Sergey paused at the bottom of the stairs and pulled the flakjacket off that he had been wearing over his parka. He then began to walk towards the door to the outside.