December

by James Steel

  ‘In terms of events going forwards, we appeal to both sides in the fighting to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict and the government of the United Kingdom stands ready to lend whatever assistance we can to help resolve the dispute.’

  Alex watched the broadcast in the conference room in the Ostankino tower. Standing in the middle of the shattered battlefield he could not but feel contempt for the cynicism of the man who had sent him out to cause all of this mayhem and Krymov’s death, which he was now so publicly regretting. He glanced round at Yamba, who rolled his eyes.

  Grigory came into the conference room with a smile on his face. ‘OK, so we have good news. They put the fire out,’ he jerked his thumb back east where the 568th soldiers had been labouring with fire hoses, ‘and Raskolnikov has negotiated for you to go home.’

  ‘What about the bodies?’ Alex had stipulated their return.

  Grigory nodded grimly. ‘Levin is going in the Mil to get them now. Then he’s taking you all on to Sheremetyevo and we are going to get you out of the country as fast as we can before the government decides it does actually want to go after you.’

  Alex looked at him and nodded. It was as good a deal as they were going to get. He was exhausted and felt drained and saddened by the deaths of his two men. The team had done the job, but a mortality rate of a third was not something any commander could feel proud of.

  When they heard Levin’s helicopter return from its grim second mission to the Kremlin, they gathered their weapons and packs and headed up the stairs to the roof for the last time. As it landed and wound down its rotors, soldiers from the 568th slid the side door open and stepped out. Alex could see the outlines of Pete and Magnus’s bodies under grey army blankets on two stretchers in the troop bay.

  Arkady climbed out of the co-pilot cockpit and came over to them where they had gathered by the railing looking out over Moscow. He lit up a Prima and offered one to Col. The two of them smoked as they all stood silently along the rail, looking out at the plumes of smoke still rising over the capital from burning buildings.

  Raskolnikov, Grigory and Lara came up the stairs and walked over to them. The four survivors looked battered and grizzled: faces covered in cuts and bruises, clothes in bloodstains and dust, and all stinking of smoke and cordite.

  Raskolnikov stepped forward and embraced Alex, then stood back and looked at him sternly. ‘Alexander Nikolaivich, the Russian people will never know of your sacrifices and those of your men, but we do, and we will never forget them.’

  Alex merely nodded and said, ‘Thank you.’ Saying anything else would just sound pompous, and that wasn’t what Pete and Magnus had been about.

  He found it a lot harder to know what to do when Lara stepped towards him. This was their big goodbye; he doubted he would ever see her again, but there were too many people around to get emotional.

  He stared at her and could see she was trying hard not to cry. Her huge blue eyes looked up at him but he could only glower back. She reached out and touched the lock of her hair still tied to the webbing over his heart. It was clotted with dried blood and dust.

  She forced herself to be brave and said, ‘Keep it. It’s for you, Sashenka.’

  He looked at her straight and nodded.

  That second’s eye contact said everything; words would just have got in the way.

  The line from Dr Zhivago that she had written in her note came back to him. It had puzzled him at the time but now he understood it: ‘human understanding rendered speechless by emotion’.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  TUESDAY 23 DECEMBER

  Alex stepped up to the small gate in the high wall and knocked carefully.

  He looked round at Col, Yamba and Arkady and shrugged. They were standing behind him on the busy street wondering what would happen next. It was a week after they had flown out of Moscow, and they were entering Buckingham Palace via a door at the back of the large palace grounds.

  Alex had no idea what was going to happen inside. He had done several stints of ceremonial duty at BP as a junior Household Cavalry officer in the past, so he knew that the Queen was away at Sandringham in Norfolk, where she traditionally spent the Christmas break, and that the palace shut down in her absence. Harrington had phoned him to say that some recognition would be made of their efforts but he had sounded uncomfortable and had not given any further details.

  The surviving members of the team were all dressed in their best suits and had been bewildered by the news that they were going to the palace. However, any feelings of celebration had been muted by the knowledge of the two other gatherings that were taking place on the same day in different parts of the world.

  Their thoughts were with the small family group huddled together in a dusty cemetery on the outskirts of Dagaragu in Northern Territory. The Bridges family were a tough lot but Pete’s father couldn’t help crying when the shattered body of his son had been returned in its refrigerated steel coffin, with no explanation as to where and why his boy had been killed.

  Magnus’s father had died years ago, so only his sister was there to put her arm around his mother in the tiny Church of Norway graveyard, on the north shore looking out over Sognefjorden. A cold wind whipped snow around them from the mountains behind the white timber church. Mrs Løndahl was a formidable woman, but she had not expected to outlive her son. She cried as Magnus was lowered into a hole cut out of the frozen ground. She too would never know what had happened to him; his body had been returned with a brief government death certificate.

  The group of men who did know their story would never speak about it.

  The garden gate in the palace wall opened. Harrington’s large reddened face peered nervously out as he ushered them through and then hurriedly shut the door.

  ‘This way, Devereux.’ He sounded resentful, barely acknowledging Alex and not even deigning to look at the rest of his team. He pulled the scarf tighter around his overcoat collar and turned and led them through the snow-covered gardens towards the distant palace.

  The whole place was deserted. Harrington led them along the winding path through the bare trees to the south end of the enormous rear façade and in through a side door. Alex’s mind was whirring, trying to work out where they were going. They paused in an ornate antechamber next to a huge wooden door. It was cold in the room, despite the fact that the energy blockade had been lifted a week ago; with the monarch away, no one had turned the heating on.

  Four sheets of white paper were laid out on a polished desk at one side, each with a pen on it. Alex took in the British Army crest at the top of each page.

  ‘Right, all of you, sign here,’ Harrington said gruffly to them and pointed at the papers. ‘You’ll be discharged immediately afterwards, so don’t get any ideas.’ He glared at Alex, obviously mindful of the last time he had signed an official document in front of him.

  They all dutifully scratched their names on the sheets. Harrington looked on in thinly veiled disgust and then checked each one carefully.

  He grunted, straightened up and looked them each carefully in the eye. ‘You will behave with the highest decorum and never,’ he held up a warning index finger, ‘speak of this!’

  He turned, straightened his shoulders and opened the double doors with a flourish.

  They followed his marching figure into the vast ballroom, towards its far end, where a small woman stood on a dais. She was wrapped up in an overcoat against the cold and flanked by two Gurkha orderly officers, her equerry and the Defence Secretary. As a woman who had stayed in London throughout the Blitz, she understood a thing or two about a national crisis, and she had not hung about when the time came to honour the men who had resolved it.

  Harrington stamped to attention a few feet from the dais and saluted. Alex was startled but forced himself to do likewise. As each of the others realised who was in the room they all came to attention in a line along the steps.

  The equerry was in shooting clothes and pulled a piece of paper out of the
pocket of his Barbour. Despite the necessary precautions to conceal the monarch’s return to the capital, he sounded suitably official as he read out the list: ‘Major Alexander Devereux, The Household Cavalry, for outstanding leadership and bravery under fire, the Victoria Cross.’

  Alex marched forward like an automaton and stood stiffly to attention as she pinned the small grey cross onto his suit breast.

  ‘Regimental Sergeant-Major Yamba Douala, 32 Battalion, South African Defence Force, the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, for outstanding bravery under fire.’

  Yamba towered over her but kept his hard eyes fixed on the red drapes behind, before executing a sharp right turn and marching away as Col stepped forward.

  ‘Regimental Sergeant-Major Colin Thwaites, Second Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, for outstanding bravery under fire.’

  Finally, Arkady stomped forward in an ill-fitting suit, ‘Captain Arkady Voloshin, Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the Distinguished Flying Cross, for courage whilst flying in the face of the enemy.’

  The irony of this last award was not lost on Arkady, but he kept his face rigid.

  When he had returned to the line, the onlookers gave a polite round of applause, and, after a quiet nod of her head, the sovereign withdrew.

  Harrington was obviously relieved that the highly irregular ceremony was over and led them out to the antechamber where an unseen hand had removed the original sheets and laid out four discharge papers that they duly signed.

  He then led them out of the palace and through the snow-covered gardens to the back gate. He unlocked it and then looked at Alex in a grudging way and offered his hand.

  ‘Well done, Devereux, good work. I hope I never see you again.’

  Alex looked straight at him for a moment, then shook his hand and said in a polite voice, ‘Thank you very much. I hope I never see you again either.’

  They walked out and Harrington shut the gate firmly behind them.

  The four men emerged onto the south end of Grosvenor Place and stood awkwardly on the pavement. Crowds of last-minute Christmas shoppers pushed past them and the traffic roared through the slush on the road. After the energy blockade had been lifted the country was rushing to catch up with all the usual mundane aspects of the season.

  The men were bewildered by the sudden change of pace. Alex looked round at them and tried to think what to do next.

  ‘Pub?’

  They nodded and he searched his memories of pubcrawls from his times on ceremonial duty. That felt like a long time ago now. Some forgotten instinct led him across the road, then left into the quiet, residential Lower Belgrave Street and straight to the Plumbers Arms. It was a traditional boozer and, mid-afternoon, was deserted. Alex ordered four pints of bitter and they retreated to an alcove.

  When he had finally sat down and drunk half a pint in one long pull, Colin felt able to speak.

  ‘Flippin’ ’eck,’ he muttered and stared off into the distance along with the others. ‘That were really her, weren’t i’?’

  Yamba nodded thoughtfully. ‘She is very small,’ he said.

  Alex pulled the black case from his pocket and flipped it open to look at the small grey medal with its crimson ribbon.

  The VC.

  He was in a state of shock, but was still aware that sadness also sat next to them in the alcove. He put the medal away again and looked round at the others. He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to them.’

  They nodded and drank, thinking of the other two.

  They quickly finished their drinks, stood up and walked out onto the street. True to form, they kept it short: smiles, handshakes and muttered goodbyes. They split up and headed off into the Christmas crowds.

  It had started snowing again. Alex turned up the collar of his overcoat and walked away.

  Author’s Note

  December was written as fiction based on real events. However, during the process of writing it, real events began to resemble fiction. When the credit crunch hit, popular protests broke out in Russia alongside the worst energy blockade on Europe yet.

  Most of those financial problems have now passed. However, this also means that we are back to business as usual in terms of Russia’s approach to foreign affairs, after a brief period of trying to be nice to the West during the winter of 2008 and first half of 2009. Some of this was in response to the new Obama administration and its attempt to ‘hit the reset button’. However, it was also because the Russians feared that the rouble might collapse and that they would need all the friends at the IMF and the World Bank that they could get.

  Now that this threat has retreated, and the Russian government is feeling more bullish again, it has returned to its old habits: launching large military exercises near Georgia, breaking off negotiations to join the WTO and entering a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan instead. They have also failed to reach an agreement with Ukraine on gas prices, which means that repeated gas blockades are likely.

  So what are my own views on Putin’s government? Well, they are probably more balanced than the story might suggest. The Kremlin did a much better job at macroeconomic management over the last ten years than the British government, i.e. instead of running up large debts, it fixed the roof while the sun was shining in the boom years and put aside $600 billion worth of foreign currency reserves that were then used to manage the decline of the rouble, preventing another 1998 debt default and insulating the Russian people from a painful economic shock. Putin has also brought political stability to Russia (at a democratic price) and is a lot more competent than his buffoonish predecessor, Yeltsin. In terms of what actually matters to ordinary people in Russia this is very important—you can’t eat votes.

  It is a great tragedy that Russia and the West have often had such hostile relations, especially now when Russia needs Europe as an energy market as much as we need them as a supplier. There are also so many other issues that would benefit from mutual cooperation such as Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.

  In many ways this standoff has been a war of mutual misunderstanding. Part of what I am trying to do in this book is to bridge this gap a little by explaining why Russians are so paranoid—they have been invaded and trashed by every European and Asian power. Apart from this, Russia is a proud nation and its fall from superpower status was painful. The 1990s were a time of utter chaos and collapse in Russia when the West largely thought, ‘Job done,’ and forgot about the country.

  I am not saying that this means that the Russians should be given carte blanche to bully their neighbours but I do think that the US needs to be more cognisant of Russia’s historical spheres of interest before it starts encouraging Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Would they accept Russian tanks stationed on the Mexican or Canadian border? Both countries are defence liabilities rather than defence assets and both are very internally divided about whether they actually want to join NATO. The organisation that should lead European expansion eastwards is the EU not NATO.

  In terms of the veracity of December, the book is fiction and so some of it is obviously exaggerated for effect. However, everything I have written about Russian history is factually accurate, as are most of the arguments I put forward about the current problems of its economy and politics. Petrol rationing has not happened, although it did cause riots in similarly oil-rich Iran when it was introduced. I have also exaggerated the UK’s dependence on direct Russian gas imports but the point still remains that many of our partners in NATO and the EU are heavily dependent on them and that the Russians regularly use gas blockades on Eastern Europe as a foreign policy weapon. What is an issue for our partners will become an issue for us.

  Some of the real-life background to events in the book are given below.

  The Blue Revolution

  This is based on the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and all the other colour revolutions that happened after it: Rose, Tulip, Green etc. The Orange Revolution was Putin’s worst nightmare come true in R
ussia’s backyard—a western-backed uprising against a corrupt government.

  YaG—14/10 penal colony

  This prison exists but is actually in the town of Krasnokamensk rather than outside it. The reason I got the idea for December was that I saw an article in The Times that mentioned that this prison was also used to incarcerate the members of the Decembrist uprising in 1825, which appealed to my sense of historical continuity.

  The conditions described in the prison all come from Solzhenitsyn’s unbeatable classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This in turn was based on his eight years in the camps. Despite having fought through the Eastern Front campaign as an artillery officer, he was sentenced after it for describing Stalin as ‘the man with the moustache’ in a letter home.

  Fighting in Moscow and around the Ostankino TV tower

  A lot of the ideas for the fighting in Moscow come from real events. There was a KGB coup in 1991 against Gorbachev, which Yeltsin was able to break by doing a speech on top of a tank and then managing to get it onto the news.

  The real inspiration for the Moscow battle scenes came from the later conflict in 1993 when several hundred people were killed, much of it around the Ostankino TV tower. Tanks shelled the White House, the presidential palace, and burnt it down.

  For further information on geographical context and literary references within December, please visit www.jamessteel.info.

  JS

  London

  2009

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, I am indebted to my agent Judith Murdoch for all her help and support over the years, without which this book would not have happened.

  Also, a big thank you to my editor, Maxine Hitchcock, for her patience and creative insight, as well as the production and marketing team at HarperCollins, and Camilla Ferrier at the Marsh Agency.