December (27 page)

In the Metro carriage complete silence reigned as people stared at the screen.

It really was Roman Raskolnikov.

The face was more worn, the voice was older and rougher, but it had the same lilting Volga accent, and he was the same man they had known and respected for so many years, telling them things about themselves that they knew but did not realise that they knew.

All across Moscow, cars had pulled over on the side of the road, mothers on the school run shut their children up to listen, people over the breakfast table were left staring at each other. In shops and factories, workers and customers had looked up as the usual muzak and phone-in chatter had cut out and then they heard this extraordinary blast of rhetoric.

In the 568th Regiment’s huge canteen, the soldiers had been lazing in their chairs over breakfast, when Darensky had jumped up onto the table under the TV set on the wall and shouted, ‘Right, shut up! Listen in! There’s an important announcement on the telly.’

He jumped down and turned the volume up to max with the remote. It was a good time for the broadcast as the CO, Colonel Karenin, and the officers loyal to him had had
another big drinking session last night and weren’t out of their beds yet. He had got the junior officers and NCOs who supported him together and he returned to their table to watch.

Would the men come out in support of the revolution or would he be shot for mutiny?

He would find out soon enough.

‘Fuck off, mate,’ muttered Sergeant Platonov at him under his breath to the younger Private Novikov next to him. He was sick to death of the whole officer corps in the regiment; they were all arseholes, as far as he was concerned, driving the whole unit into the ground with their implementation of Colonel Karenin’s sadistic regime.

Private Novikov nodded. Like most of the men he was depressed and terrified by Karenin’s reign of fear. All he wanted to do was to serve his time and get the fuck out of the army as fast as he could; he was not looking to be a hero.

The show on the TV was a brightly coloured, high-energy, knockabout breakfast programme that the lads used as a sugar-rush to wake them up in the morning. A pop video was playing when, in the middle of it, the shot cut back to the studio; the normally hyper young male and female presenters suddenly looked worried as they listened to instructions in their earpieces.

The lad with spiky hair did the best he could to convey an air of gravitas: ‘Well, folks, we’ve got a bit of a weird one for you here. We’re gonna have to say ciao for now ’cos there’s something really big going on…’

His voice trailed off, he looked in confusion at his floor manager, and then the screen blinked and cut to some graphics.

The men in the canteen frowned and paid more attention.

Lara came on screen and a cheer went up. ‘’Ello, love!’,
‘Awright, darling!’, ‘Fucking love ’er! Look at those tits!’, ‘What’s she looking all posh for?’

Darensky looked on in horror; this was not the reaction that he had hoped for.

The men settled down once Lara mentioned Raskolnikov. He was hugely popular amongst working-class Russians, and his trial and imprisonment had been bitterly resented, but people had just had to shrug and say, ‘What can you do?’

Now he was back on the screen in front of them and the men craned forward to hear him.

Darensky watched the broadcast but also kept flicking his eyes to the men to see how they were taking it. Some of what Roman said about the state of the economy struck home. There were nods about the petrol rationing and a few ‘Yeahs’ about the price rises, but a lot of the more soaring stuff about freedom and the Russian soul just met with blank faces.

As an earnest student of politics, Darensky found it inspiring and was aglow with fervour by the end. He hit the mute button on the remote and jumped up onto the table under the TV. This was his great revolutionary moment and he threw his arms open to the men in front of him.

‘Right, lads. Well, there you go! Wow! That was really Raskolnikov and he really socked it to them, didn’t he? I want us to get the tanks and APCs out and go down to Ostankino right now to support him!’ He punched the air with his fist. ‘We’ve suffered here enough from that bastard Karenin, but if we join with them now we can get rid of him! Really change the country; make it a better place!’

He looked at them expectantly but met with rows of blank faces.

They were ground down and, as Russians, the idea of joyous optimism for a better future just wasn’t part of their
psyche. Nothing that he had said had set light to their imagination and a stunned silence prevailed.

Sergeant Platonov broke it by scraping his chair back on the concrete floor; he was a heavy-set man from a coal mining family in the Donetzk area, who had joined the army as the only way out.

He shrugged and said, ‘I agree with Raskolnikov. Krymov has done a shit job with the economy. It’s stupid that people don’t have jobs. But Krymov will never fall—he’s too strong. You can’t overthrow the government. Besides, Karenin would kill us.’

He shrugged again and sat down; there were nods of agreement around the tables as a consensus was reached. The men quietly began picking up their bowls and walking over to the food counter.

The temporary spell from Raskolnikov’s broadcast was broken and, as the soldiers moved past Darensky, they avoided his gaze. He felt suddenly ridiculous, standing up there on the table. He climbed down and walked back over to the group of junior officers, who looked at him equally disconsolately.

In a short while, Karenin would get out of bed, his orderly would tell him what had happened and they would be arrested, beaten and shot for mutiny.

But worst of all, Darensky knew he had failed. He had let the revolution down. The key to it, the Ostankino tower and the control of the airwaves that went with it, was now wide open to attack from troops loyal to Krymov. No matter how many ordinary people came out onto the streets, without regular army support, they wouldn’t be able to stop the OMON and the MVD.

As the crowd’s rapturous applause rang out, Lara walked across the stage to Roman, kissed him on the cheek and then embraced him. An even louder cheer went up and the crowd started chanting: ‘Our last hope! Our last hope!’

The pair of them then held hands and walked down the steps into the sea of blue flags and applauding supporters; UCO party activists struggled to clear a path for them as they were mobbed.

In the gallery Grigory smiled as he looked on. From a media point of view it was stunning. Lara looked amazing; the flipside of her inner sadness was that when she did turn on her smile it was dazzling. Her star quality shone a light around her and the combination of this beautiful national icon holding hands with the grizzled national hero was irresistible.

Grigory looked at Ilya standing next to him in the gallery, smiled, punched his fists in the air and then embraced him; they both knew they had done a great job.

After a round of whooping and hugs amongst the production team, Grigory quickly slotted back into the desk and checked the feeds from the five news crews they had out around Moscow to catch public reactions.

He punched the connection to his reporter on Ulitsa
Arbat, the big pedestrianised shopping street a few blocks west of the Kremlin.

‘Stepan, get me some reactions! I need interviews.’

The camera feed showed huddles of people beginning to form in front of a TV shop where the owner had turned up the sound on all the sets in the window and opened the doors. A crowd of people were gathering around it to watch the coverage from Ostankino and begin to discuss what had happened.

‘OK, OK,’ Stepan shouted back, and hurried over to the crowd with his cameraman. He grabbed the elbow of a middle-aged businessman at the back of the crowd and turned him round to face the camera. ‘Sir, can I just have a quick word with you, please, for your reaction to what has happened this morning?’

The man didn’t look straight at the camera but stared around at the street behind it. He looked nervous and confused.

‘Er, well, I…you know, it’s good, I suppose. Yes, I think these things need to be said.’

‘What do you think you’ll do now, sir?’

‘Er, I don’t know. I have to think, but maybe…I have to call my wife,’ he said, and walked away.

Ilya cut away as more reactions came in from across the city in Pushinskaya Ploshchad. A middle-aged woman shopper was more forthright, jabbing her finger at the camera: ‘Yes, those bastards needed to hear that.’ She jerked her head south towards the Kremlin, then pushed past the interviewer towards the Metro station but then turned back and waved her fist at the camera. ‘I’m off to Ostankino to support Raskolnikov,’ she shouted. ‘He needs our support!’

Two grinning youths jumped up and down behind her
and started chanting and pointing at the camera, ‘Ras-kol-
ni
-kov! Ras-kol-
ni
-kov!’

All over the city the cameras showed groups of people forming on the snowy streets and then crowds gathering in squares and at intersections. UCO supporters had been secretly supplied with Blue Revolution flags and were walking around, handing them out to people. The fluttering blue banners began to sprout like a strange crop of winter flowers across Moscow.

The police were completely uncertain what to do about it all. The political command structure was paralysed by the broadcast. Everyone in authority was sitting on the fence, stunned and waiting to see which way things would go.

UCO supporters sensed this and took advantage. One TV crew filmed a police car as it drove slowly past a crowd that had gathered outside a shopping centre in the north of the city near Ostankino. The officers deliberately ignored the people and a UCO supporter ran up behind the car and stuck a blue flag into the lights and siren bar on its roof. The crowd cheered and flashed victory signs as it unwittingly drove off flying the flag down the street.

Grigory smiled as he watched all this. He stood up and thumped Ilya on the shoulder. ‘Well, it looks like we’ve got popular support, anyway. I’ll give Darensky a call; see how he got on. Ilya, take control, will you?’ He walked back to his seat and punched the speed dial on the desk to the 568th.

Lara and Roman were still on the floor of the studio. The catering department had laid out a large banquet at the back of it, and bottles of champagne popped open. Everybody wanted to talk to Roman and he smiled and waved around him, a glass of champagne in his hand.

Ilya kept the mix of positive images flowing, cutting backwards and forwards from the studio party to street scenes,
to highlights from the speech. Roman would be doing a serious interview with a heavyweight political commentator shortly and then a press conference was being arranged for domestic and foreign correspondents after that.

He was happily directing these shots when Grigory tapped him on the shoulder and jerked a thumb towards the small director’s office just off the main gallery. They squeezed into it. As Grigory shut the door, he looked tense.

‘The 568th aren’t coming. We’re on our own; it’s just us against Krymov now.’

Major Batyuk ran back into the press office, breathing hard, just as Roman’s broadcast was ending.

Krymov was sitting at one end of the large open-plan office in the Senate Building, in front of a huge TV screen that was now on mute, showing scenes of Lara and Roman celebrating with their supporters.

Captain Bunin and other nervous press aides and guards stood in a semi-circle behind him, tensed in anticipation of a presidential rage.

‘Mr President, are you OK?’ Batyuk was the only one who dared approach him.

Krymov seemed to have lost the power of speech and just sat and stared out of the window at the courtyard where he had been play-fighting with Sergey a few minutes ago. He was still drunk.

‘He betrayed me like Prince Kurbsky,’ he said in a small voice.

After that thought his emotions reached a critical mass and he exploded, standing up and shouting, ‘That motherfucker betrayed me! They both betrayed me! The Russian state will not accept such disrespect!
I
am the master here!’

People shrank further away from him with each outburst.

‘Get on the phone to the OMON, the MVD, the airforce.
I want that fucking tower wiped off the map! We’re going to bomb those fucking bastards into dust!’

Aides began scuttling around him.

‘Mr President, I must request that we move to the strategic command bunker immediately,’ insisted Batyuk.

Krymov was instantly emphatic, his face blotched red and his jowls shaking with fury. ‘No! This is not a nuclear war, Batyuk, if you hadn’t noticed; it’s a civil war! The Russian head of state has been in the Kremlin for nine hundred years. If I leave the Kremlin, I leave office. We will fight this war from my press office here. We’re in the Kremlin, for God’s sake—who is going to get us here? Now stop fucking nannying me!’

Batyuk had to accept his reasoning; the Kremlin was about as safe a place as the President could be in a time of crisis.

His mind flicked on and he looked at Krymov sharply. ‘Mr President, do you have the mobile numbers for Shaposhnikov and Mostovskoy?’

Krymov looked taken aback but then patted his jacket pockets and pulled his mobile out; he liked to be in direct contact with all his important men so he could harangue them at any moment.

‘Yes?’ He looked questioningly at Batyuk.

‘Good. Let me have them and I will get a trace on their location through the network providers. We also need to get Line 9 stopped before they get up to Ostankino. I’ll see to that and get a police blockade on the main roads there.’

Krymov looked pleased at his dynamism; it was why he trusted his security chief so much.

An aide approached him timidly and he spun round, glaring at the man. ‘Sir, I’m sorry but Airforce Headquarters are not responding to my calls. I can’t understand it, we just can’t get through at all.’

‘That son of a bitch Mostovskoy! He’s got the whole lot of them in with him!’

‘OMON commander, sir!’ Bunin proffered a phone to the President.

Krymov grabbed it and barked, ‘Yes, Melekhov! Now look, I can’t bomb these fuckers off the planet but I want you to get all your men up to Ostankino and do the next best thing! I want no mercy for them!’