December (33 page)

Crammed in next to him was his co-pilot, with his navigator and weapons system operator behind him. As Rostov pulled the yoke back and took them up off the runway, they were all busy with their jobs. The tactical computer had uploaded all the target information: weather conditions, atmospheric readings from the met centre, the wind speed and direction over target.

The weapons system operator was busy running this data through his computer to calculate the right bomb launch trajectory and detonation height. The FOAB was a difficult
weapon to drop and the whole crew were focused on getting it right.

Rostov ran through the mission timings in his mind. The four hundred miles to the target was just a short hop for his intercontinental bomber, with its full range of eleven thousand miles. Although his maximum speed was Mach 2.05, he needed to wait for the all clear on the anti-aircraft defences before he went in on his final bomb run. This would be sent through by General Korshunov as soon as he got word from the helicopter attack force. In the meantime they would cruise in at just under the speed of sound.

‘Estimated flight time, thirty minutes,’ his navigator called from over his shoulder.

Rostov keyed the mike on his radio and called through to General Korshunov in the command bunker near Moscow.

Korshunov was standing next to a conference table in front of the huge display screen. A group of senior air-force officers were standing around it, watching different screens on the wall that showed feeds from all the main TV channels.

A signals officer called across to him, ‘Major Rostov, sir!’

‘Put him through,’ Korshunov nodded, and the sound came through on speakers set into the desk.

‘General Korshunov, we have just taken off and will be over the target in approximately thirty minutes. We are standing by for your instructions.’

Korshunov leaned forward and pressed the transmit button on the desk mike. ‘Very good, Rostov. I’ll tell you as soon as I get any news.’

He clicked the desk mike off and looked around at the other officers. They nodded and went back to staring at the screens.

Everyone was on edge and Korshunov’s nerves were shot.
He couldn’t believe it when Mostovskoy had called up and said he was switching sides, but then Krymov had come on the phone and assured him that the airforce had made its point and that he had learned the error of his ways and they would get full control of United Aircraft Corporation.

He didn’t quite know what to believe, but when he had seen Mostovskoy’s performance on TV, with his damning accusation of foreign involvement, then he had realised that the balance of events had tipped back towards Krymov and that he had to go with him for now.

He had duly given the orders for the attack helicopters to launch from Torzhok and the Tupolev was now on its way. He hoped that Colonel Turgenev’s squadron would be able to destroy the last of the three Tunguskas, to allow the bomber in to settle the situation once and for all.

He flicked his eyes over the TV feeds in front of him, searching for any new developments. The situation was very fluid and he was prepared to change sides at short notice, but right now it looked like the Blue Revolution was well and truly over.

Colonel Turgenev was certainly doing his best to finish it off. He still had eight helicopters remaining.

‘Go for the tower!’ he shouted over the radio.

With the defenders on the ground hard-pressed, he seized his chance to get in close. A Mil broke cover over the top of an office block and streaked in fast.

‘Helicopter inbound from the east!’

‘Firing!’

The shout went up from one of the missile teams stationed on the roof. A soldier leaned over the railing and fired an Igla missile down at the intruder, but it spat out a burst of defensive flares as it approached. The bright sparks shot out
and hissed in the snow and the missile’s infrared seeker ploughed into one of them instead and blew a large crater in the ground.

The helicopter fired its rocket pod at the satellite dishes on the trunk of the tower. Explosions bloomed from its concrete side and a shower of debris blew out from it. From a distance it seemed to move in slow motion as the heavier pieces travelled out further in a gently arcing downward trajectory. Huge chunks of concrete then smashed down on cars parked near it, caving in their roofs. A twenty-foot satellite dish also sailed down and smashed into the ground.

Darensky’s tank was parked under the trees to the south of the tower and he now spun his turret round to the north to wait for any other attacks. Another Mil swept in over the trees to the west. He couldn’t react fast enough to stop it hitting the tower with another rocket salvo, but he tracked onto it as it swept past the tower and over the clear ground around it.

The laser designator on the 125mm gun put a red dot on the side door of the helicopter and banged a high-explosive round through the side armour. It exploded inside and blew the aircraft to pieces twenty feet off the ground. Burning chunks of machinery and a fireball of fuel scattered across the snow, hissing and tumbling over it.

Having seen the Igla missile launch from the tower roof, Colonel Turgenev’s next tactic was to pull a Mil out of the fighting and load it up with troops.

The pilot then swung round to the west of the battlefield and sank down right to ground level so that he could creep in behind the elevated monorail that ran east-west from the Metro line.

With great agility he kept inches away from the massive concrete pylons supporting the twenty-foot-high railway.
The soldiers on the roof heard the rotor noise, though, and fired three Iglas at it, but the aircraft threw out a spray of burning flares that foxed them.

The helicopter pressed on undeterred. It hopped up over the top of the monorail, shot across the open ground to the base of tower, right under the Igla gunners as they frantically tried to reload their launchers.

It then went into a straight vertical climb, rising three hundred and fifty metres in a matter of seconds. It shot past the TV station with its rotors a metre away from the office windows, smashing them in and blasting a gale inside that scattered papers everywhere. Staff sheltering in the offices screamed and ran at the sight of the menacing machine feet away from them.

It then rose up suddenly over the lip of the roof. Some soldiers managed to raise their rifles and crack a few bursts at it but they pinged harmlessly off the armoured glass of the cockpit.

The Mil responded with the withering fiery breath of its Gatling gun that swept all the defenders away; their bodies smashed against the railings or knocked over it to tumble like strange leaves down to the ground. It circled the whole roof until all the defending soldiers were dead.

It then hovered over the roof, the side door slid open and eight heavily armed soldiers jumped down with rifles at the ready. They ran across to the stairwell and quickly pitched grenades down the stairs.

They exploded and staff ran in panic across the open-plan office. The six men with rifles from the morning’s gun battle ran over and took up positions behind desks. They shot the first soldier who came down but others got into cover and a firefight broke out across the room.

The helicopter then took off again from the roof and
dropped down over the windows of the floor below. It began a slow rotation around the offices, smashing the windows with its downdraft and firing into them with its Gatling gun. The torrent of metal poured in, smashed computers to pieces and blew desks and chairs across the room.

Grigory was in a director’s gallery on the floor below. He looked at Ilya and they both glanced nervously at the explosions and gunfire above them and ducked under the control desk.

Grigory’s mobile rang; he pulled it out and checked the caller. It was Sergey; he hit answer. ‘Yes?’

There was a loud rattle of gunfire from the other end with Sergey’s voice shouting, ‘Grigory! Are you getting my feed? Are you getting this? I’ve got the satellite dish going!’

‘Hang on!’ Grigory reached up over the desk and punched the feed through to a screen above him.

A darkened picture of the inside of a corridor showed up, billowing with smoke from an MTP-2 explosion.

‘Yes, I’m getting it!’

Grigory flinched back under the desk as he heard the helicopter drop down and begin to shoot up the floor he was on. It rotated past the studio and bullets smashed through the back of the gallery and hit the videowall in the telethon studio, which exploded in a shower of sparks.

Sergey could hear the firing. ‘What’s going on there?’ he yelled.

‘We’ve got enemy troops landed on the roof. There’s fighting on the floor above me and there’s a gunship shooting us up!’

‘What?’

A bullet went through the control desk in front of Grigory and the screens above it went black.

‘Shit!’ he shouted.

‘What?’ Sergey yelled back over the noise of more gunfire.

‘We just got hit! We’ve lost your feed!’

One of volunteer soldiers on the floor above saw the helicopter drop down and, as the other five men battled against the enemy soldiers, he grabbed an RPG launcher and ran down another set of stairs.

Ducking down behind desks, he scuttled across the office and then sprinted along the central corridor around the concrete tower core. He took up a firing position behind a photocopier, kneeling on one knee and waited for the helicopter to rotate round to him.

He saw the nose of the beast swing into view and squeezed the trigger. The armour-piercing dart leaped away and smashed through the heavy cockpit glass, went through the pilot and exploded against the metal plate behind him, throwing his body forward onto the stick and driving the machine into the building.

The five main rotors clipped the window frames and then shredded off in a horrid grating crash against a steel girder. The last one bent round it and for a second the whole eleven-tonne weight hung on the side of the building. The rotor then snapped and the machine dropped silently down the side of the tower, smashed into the sloped base and exploded. Wreckage and a cloud of burning fuel scattered out over the ground.

Darensky watched the explosion from his tank to the south of the tower.

The situation was now desperate. They were under pressure on all fronts, the tower had enemy soldiers inside it and he only had one Tunguska left.

He decided to pull his troops back to reduce the length of the defensive perimeter.

He keyed the mike on his command radio. ‘All stations fall back! Fall back to the tower!’

Units began disengaging and running to the main entrance. Some took up positions around it; others packed into the elevators and shot up to the floors above. They spread out around the office windows, whilst a squad took on the government soldiers on the top floor.

As Krymov’s forces closed in they began firing at the tower, lobbing shells and missiles in at it, aiming for the satellite dishes. A BMP-3 got in range and fired its 100mm main armament. The round smashed into a dish and blew it off the side. It whirled down with a tangle of wires attached to the back of it.

The 568th troops fired back from the tower with RPGs and machine guns, sending streams of bright tracer out over the surrounding area.

The whole tower was lit up by the flashes of explosions against the grim December sky like a strange Christmas tree looming over Moscow, with red ribbons of tracer draping out from it like tinsel.

The incoming fire was getting more and more intense. Grigory took a decision and keyed the mike on the internal Tannoy. ‘All staff evacuate the offices! Everyone into the stairwells!’

Two hundred staff and supporters ran into the emergency stairs on the inside of the concrete tube of the tower, protected by its thick outer walls.

So many people packed into the narrow wells made for a claustrophobic scene. Air quality deteriorated rapidly as they huddled together and listened to the explosions and gunfire outside. Occasionally the whole building shook as a missile hit. Dust scattered over them and people coughed and screamed.

Grigory remained in the gallery with Ilya, as he struggled to fix the desk with two technicians. He was desperate to get
it ready for when Sergey finally managed to set up his big broadcast. If it was still out of action then the whole Kremlin raid would have been in vain. He thought about the gunfire in the background of Sergey’s phone call and wondered what the hell was going on down there. It couldn’t be any worse than what was happening here but at least they were still just in the game.

He heard a heavy explosion from somewhere outside the tower.

The radio connection on the desk speaker barked: ‘Grigory, Grigory!’ It was Darensky.

Grigory punched the transmit button. ‘Yes!’

‘They just got the last Tunguska!’

‘Fuck!’

Grigory banged the desk and Ilya looked up at him in surprise.

The tower was now defenceless against the White Swan.

The Blue Revolution really was over.

Arkady and Major Levin flew the Mil in low over Red Square.

The multi-coloured domes of St Basil’s Cathedral flashed past on the left, then Lenin’s Mausoleum and they were over the high, red brick wall between the Senate Tower and St Nicholas Tower. They immediately dropped down and skimmed along the ground in the fifty-metre-wide gap between the long neo-classical façade of the Arsenal building and the side of the Senate. The whole Senate building was a triangle pointing east, and this western side was its long base running north-south.

The Mil drew level with the southern end of the building a hundred yards along from the President’s office and went into a hover. The body then spun rapidly and pointed the full array of its armament at the south end of the Senate building’s long façade.

Arkady centred the electronic targeting ring, on his heads-up display, on the ground floor and triggered one of the 80mm rocket pods. The airframe juddered as they roared away one after the other, on ripple fire, and crashed into the ground floor. The repeated onslaught blew out the wall so that the rest continued exploding inside, knocking out structural walls and bringing the three upper floors of that part of the complex crashing down.

Major Levin had to pull back rapidly on the stick as he saw the upper floors begin to go, to avoid the bursting landslide of dust and stone blocks that exploded out from the building and across to the Arsenal fifty metres away, smashing the windows.

The tunnel that Fyodor and Sergey had used to escape from the Senate that morning was now buried under tons of rubble.

No one could escape from the building now.

The helicopter swung round to face the next potential problem. The Arsenal building was where the MVD Kremlin guards were housed. Sergey wasn’t sure how many there were but guessed it would be a couple of hundred troops.

Levin pivoted the nose across the whole two-hundred-metre-long frontage as Arkady strafed it with the Gatling gun, smashing out the windows, and then put a rocket through the main door in the middle of it.

When the Mil had first arrived, Krymov had been raising another toast of vodka to Fyodor.

‘And here’s to your aplomb!’

He was still light-headed and excited at how well the press conference had gone, how his peasant cunning had skilfully been able to turn all his enemy’s strengths to his own advantage: their use of foreign support, the way he had blamed the economic problems on Sergey, how he had ended up lecturing all those foreign press bastards and getting the last word on them! It really had been a very satisfying experience.

The sudden roar of the Mil outside cut roughly across these celebrations. Major Batyuk ran in through the double doors with three Echelon 25 men with rifles.

He nodded cursorily to the President, strode across to the windows and looked out just as Arkady unleashed his rocket volley into the Senate.

The whole building shook as the series of explosions hammered home and the floors then collapsed with the rumble of an earthquake.

Batyuk didn’t hesitate. ‘Mr President, we need to leave immediately.’

Krymov was shaken by the blasts but was still full enough of himself to demur. ‘Ah, Batyuk! Calm down, just get out there with a squad and sort them out. They’re not coming in here.’

The large body of the Mil moved over the dome on top of his office and the heavy rotors shook plaster dust out of the ceiling and then smashed the skylights in above them.

The helicopter landed on the Senate roof and the side door slid open. The assault team jumped out onto the flat surface, followed by Lara and Sergey with the bulky TV camera on his shoulder.

Alex and Col ran over to one of the skylights down into the President’s office as the other three soldiers each dropped to one knee and took up security positions. They both pulled frag grenades out, slipped the tape off the spoons, pulled the pins out and dropped four down through the skylights.

They exploded, smashing the windows out, knocking over chairs and setting fire to the long curtains and carpet with burning fragments. A rope dropped down, along with a long burst of suppressive PKM fire angled at the wooden door, but Batyuk had already evacuated Krymov and Mostovskoy.

Arkady took off as soon as he saw the team disappear down into the skylight. His job now was to fly around the triangular Senate building, preventing any reinforcements from getting across the open ground to it. The helicopter was titanium-armoured and easily capable of withstanding any small-arms fire aimed at it, and it was unlikely that
anyone had any heavy weapons; no one expected to be using them right in the seat of government.

Smoke began billowing in the President’s office, but the men dropping rapidly down the rope had SureFire torches on rails on top of their PKM light machine guns, and the intense beams of light flicked around in the murk, sweeping all angles of the room.

Alex’s Wiley-X eyeguards meant he was unaffected by the smoke and could glance round at the smashed portraits and pictures on the wall.

They had got into the Kremlin, but now he needed to keep the momentum going and find and kill Krymov. He got the team lined up in a stack ready to go through the door; each one was a potential deathtrap. He nodded to Magnus, who put a long burst through it and then yanked it open and the stack scuttled through fast, torches out and probing the landing outside. Lara and Sergey followed behind.

Alex peered over the banister, down the richly decorated stairwell, trying to see if someone was down there.

Col was next to him. ‘How many doors?’

‘Two.’

‘I’ll watch right, you watch left, got it?’

‘Got it.’

They crept down the stairs in silence except for the occasional scrape of broken glass underfoot from a smashed skylight above them. The team flowed smoothly after them, using the hand signals and drills they had practised in Akerly, covering all the angles, each member leapfrogging forward under cover from the next.

Downstairs in the press office carnage reigned. People were shouting and screaming after the huge explosions at the end of the building and then the roar of the helicopter
and grenades exploding over their heads. Correspondents huddled under tables as they broadcast live.

Gerry Kramer on CNN was talking in an urgent whisper to his anchorman: ‘Mike, we just don’t know what the hell is going on here now. The President and General Mostovskoy just ran through here with some guards and now—’

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.