December (34 page)

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 slick 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.

‘Sergey, don’t!’ Lara shouted. ‘They’ll kill you!’

She pushed past Alex and ran down the stairs. Sergey walked back towards her, came close, pressed one hand against her cheek and smiled. ‘Look, you’ll see. I’ve solved everything.’ He kissed her on both cheeks. ‘You’re going to be OK now.’

She looked back at him with tears rolling down her cheeks. She couldn’t understand what he had done but was temporarily silenced by his affection.

He walked back towards the door.

‘Sergey, what have you done?’ she called to him, a strange calm in her voice.

He turned and smiled back at her. ‘Ah, now you will see my magic.’ He waved his mobile phone at her. ‘Come on! Follow me.’ He opened the door and walked out a few feet into the snowy yard.

Alex tensed, expecting a burst of gunfire, but none came. He ran forward with Col to cover him, their weapons pointed out from the doorway as Sergey stood out in the open in front of them.

A door opened to their left, fifty metres away along the north wall of the courtyard, and Major Batyuk stepped out, looking at them warily over the sights of his assault rifle. He kept the gun trained on Sergey as he carefully stepped sideways into the open.

Sergey turned and gestured back to them to come outside. ‘Come on, come out. We’re all friends now.’

Three more soldiers followed Batyuk out onto the snow.

Lara came to the door and looked out. ‘Sergey, what is happening?’

A horrifying idea was forming in her mind.

‘Did you call Krymov?’ she said.

Sergey just turned and grinned back at her.

Krymov and Fyodor stepped out of the door across the courtyard, both in long military overcoats. Alex and Col moved out of the doorway and swung their PKMs onto them immediately, but Sergey shouted, ‘No!’ and spread his arms out in front of them.

He spoke more gently, pleading with them now. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve solved everything. It’s all going to be all right. Just put your guns down and come out here.’

‘What!’

Alex looked at him as if he were mad. After such a vicious firefight he could not accept that they were not going to be shot at.

Sergey sighed at Alex’s intransigence and spoke to him as if he were explaining to an idiot. ‘I’ve done a deal with Krymov.’ He held his phone up again. ‘Alex, the Blue Revolution is over. You’ve got no choice, Krymov has won and you have lost. I’ve got immunity, but I don’t know what they’ll do to you when they get you into the Lubyanka.’ He jerked his head back at the infamous FSB prison a few blocks to the east of the Kremlin.

Lara stared at him in disbelief.

Alex looked at Sergey and raged inside.

The fucker had betrayed them just as Fyodor had done. He must have seen how easily Krymov had accepted the airforce chief back and guessed that if he would do that for Fyodor he would easily do it for his darling Sergey. All his
doubts about Sergey’s sanity when he first met him rushed back. What had seemed amusing eccentricities now stood out as the hallmarks of a traitor.

His face tightened with rage, ‘You fucking…’ he said quietly, raising his machine gun.

‘Uh-uh.’ Sergey wagged a contemptuous finger at him as Batyuk and the other three men swung their rifles up to cover him. Alex could see that in his exposed position he would be dead if he laid a finger on Sergey.

He forced himself not to move and looked back at the Russian, thinking hard. There was no way out. He was under the enemy’s guns and more troops were coming up behind them. He had trusted Sergey and been comprehensively betrayed.

He felt most responsible for his men. He looked at Col, next to him in the open, and then back at Yamba, who was with Lara in the doorway.

Sergey had outmanoeuvred them and there was nothing that Alex could do about it now. He slowly bent down, put his machine gun on the floor and motioned the others to do likewise. He stood up feeling weak and defenceless and stared threateningly back at Sergey.