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“Well, if they are peace-loving citizens, all the barracks lights should be on, with everyone inside in the warmth, having a noggin before lunch and preparing for an evening of harmless festivities. Take a look. I’ll call you back in four hours.”

When the callback came, Petrovsky was subdued.

“Four of them appear closed down. His personal camp, northeast of here, is alive like an anthill. Hundreds of trucks being serviced. He seems to have moved the whole force to the one camp.”

“Why would he do that, General?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. But I don’t like it. It smacks of a nocturnal exercise.”

“On New Year’s Eve? Don’t be crazy. Every Russian gets drunk on New Year’s Eve.”

“My point exactly. Every soldier in Moscow will be plastered by midnight. Unless they are ordered to stay sober. Not a popular order, but as I said, there will be other New Year’s Eves. Do you know the commanding officer of the OMON regiment?”

“Of course. General Kozlovsky.”

“And the commander of the Presidential Security Guard?”

“Yes, General Korin.”

“Both now with their families?”

“I suppose so.”

“Look, man to man, if the worst should happen, if Komarov should win after all, what will happen to you, your wife, and Tatiana? Worth a night of vigil? Worth a few phone calls?”

When he had put the phone down Jason Monk took a map of Moscow and the surrounding countryside. His fingers roved over the area northeast of the capital. That was where Petrovsky had said the main UPF and Black Guard base was to be found.

From the northeast the main highway was the Yaroslavskoye Chaussee, becoming Prospekt Mira. It was the principal artery and it ran past the Ostankino television complex. Then he picked up the telephone again.

“Umar, my friend. I need a last favor from you. Yes, I swear it’s the last. A car with a phone and your number through the night. ... No, I don’t need Magomed and the guys. It would spoil their New Year’s Eve party. Just the car and the phone. Oh, and a handgun. If that wouldn’t pose too much of a problem.”

He listened to the laugh down the phone.

“Any particular kind? Well, now …”

He thought back to Castle Forbes.

“You wouldn’t be able to get hold of a Swiss Sig Sauer, would you?”

CHAPTER 20

TWO TIME ZONES TO THE WEST OF MOSCOW THE WEATHER
was quite different, a bright blue sky and the temperature barely two below zero, as the Mechanic moved quietly through the woods toward the manor house.

His preparations for his journey across Europe had been meticulous as always, and he had experienced no problems. He had preferred to drive. Guns and airliners seldom mixed, but a car had many hiding places.

Through Belarus and Poland his Moscow-registered Volvo had attracted no attention and his papers showed he was just a Russian businessman attending a conference in Germany. A search of his car would have revealed nothing further.

In Germany, where the Russian mafia was well established, he exchanged his Volvo for a German-registered Mercedes, and easily acquired the hunting rifle with its hollow-point ammunition and scope sight before pushing further west. Under the new dispensation of the European Community the borders were virtually nonexistent and he passed through in a column of other cars with a bored wave from a single customs officer.

He had acquired a large-scale road map of the area he sought, identified the nearest village to the target and then the manor house itself. Passing through the village he had simply followed the signs to the entrance of the short drive, noted the signboard that confirmed he had the right address, then driven on.

After spending most of the night in a motel fifty miles away, he had driven back before dawn but parked his car two miles away from the manor and walked the rest of the way through the woods, emerging at the edge of the tree line behind the house. As the weak wintry sun rose, he created a lying-up position at the bole of a big beech tree and settled in to wait. From where he sat he could look’ down at the house and its courtyard from three hundred yards while remaining out of sight behind the tree.

As the landscape came alive, a cock pheasant strutted to within a few yards of him, stared at him angrily, and scurried away. Two gray squirrels played in the beech above his head.

At nine a man emerged into the courtyard. The Mechanic raised his binoculars and adjusted the focus slightly until the figure looked to be ten feet away. It was not his target; a manservant fetched a basket of logs from a shed under the courtyard wall and went back inside.

On one side of the courtyard was a row of stables. Two of the stalls were occupied. The heads of two large horses, a bay and a chestnut, peered over the tops of the half doors. At ten they were rewarded when a girl came out and brought them fresh hay. Then she went back inside.

Just before midday an older man emerged, crossed the courtyard, and patted the horses’ muzzles. The Mechanic studied the face in his binoculars and glanced down at the photo in the frosty grass by his side. No mistake.

He raised the hunting rifle and peered through the sight. The tweed jacket filled the circle. The man was facing the horses, back to the hillside. Safety catch off. Hold steady, a slow squeeze.

The crack of the shot echoed across the valley. In the courtyard the man in tweed seemed to be pushed into the stable door. The hole in his back, at the level of the heart, was lost in the pattern of the tweed, and the exit wound was pressed against the white stable door. The knees buckled and the figure slid downward, leaving a smear on the paint. A second shot took away half the head.

The Mechanic rose, slipped the rifle into its sheepskin-lined sleeve, slung it over his shoulder, and began to jog. He moved fast, having memorized the way he had come six hours before, the way back to his car.

Two shots on a winter’s morning in the countryside would not be so odd. A farmer shooting rabbit or crow. Then someone would look out of the windows and run across the courtyard. There would be screams, disbelief, attempts to revive; all a waste of time. Then the run back to the house, the phone call to the police, the garbled explanation, the ponderous official inquiries. Eventually a police car would come, eventually roadblocks might be set up.

All too late. In fifteen minutes he was at his car, in twenty minutes moving. Thirty-five minutes after the shots he was on the nearest highway, one car among hundreds. By that time the country policeman had taken a statement and was radioing the nearest city for detectives to be sent.

Sixty minutes after the shots the Mechanic had hefted the gun in its case over the parapet of the bridge he had selected earlier and watched it vanish in the black water. Then he began the long drive home.

¯

THE first headlights came just after seven, moving slowly through the dark toward the brightly lit complex of buildings that made up the Ostankino TV center. Jason Monk sat at the wheel of his car, the engine running to charge the heater against the cold.

He was parked just off the Boulevard Akademika Koroleva, on a side road, with the principal office building straight ahead of his windshield across the boulevard and the spire of the transmitting tower behind him. When he saw that this time the lights were not from a single car but a column of trucks, he killed the engine and the telltale plume of exhaust died away.

There were about thirty trucks, but only three drove straight into the parking area of the main building. It was a huge structure, the base five stories high and three hundred yards wide, with two main entrances; an upper superstructure a hundred yards wide with eighteen stories. Normally eight thousand people would work in it, but on New Year’s Eve there were fewer than five hundred to ensure the service continued through the night.

Armed men clad in black jumped out of the three parked trucks and ran straight into the two reception areas. Within seconds the frightened lobby staff were lined up against the back wall at gunpoint, clearly visible from the outer darkness. Then Monk watched them ushered away out of sight.

Inside the main building, guided by a terrified porter, ;the point unit made straight for the switchboard room, surprising the operators while one of their number a former Telekom technician, disconnected all lines in and out.

One of the Black Guards emerged and signaled with his flashlight to the rest of the convoy, which then rolled forward to fill the parking lot and surround the office building in a defensive ring. Hundreds more Guards poured out and jogged inside.

Though Monk could see only vague shapes in the windows of the upper floors, the Guards according to their plan were fanning out through floor after floor, removing all mobile phones from the terrified night staff and hurling them into canvas carryalls.

To Monk’s left there was a smaller secondary building, also part of the TV complex, reserved for accountants, planners, executives, all at home celebrating. It was shuttered in darkness.

Monk reached to the car phone and dialed a number he knew by heart.

“Petrovsky.”

“It’s me.’’

“Where are you?”

“Sitting in a very cold car out at Ostankino.”

“Well, I’m in a reasonably warm barracks with a thousand young men on the verge of mutiny.”

“Reassure them. I’m watching the Black Guards take over the entire TV complex.”

There was silence.

“Don’t be a bloody fool. You have to be wrong.”

“All right. So a thousand armed men in black, arriving in thirty trucks with dipped headlights, were supposed to invade Ostankino and hold the staff at gunpoint. That’s what I’m watching from two hundred yards away through my windshield.”

“Jesus Christ. He’s really doing it!”

“I told you he was mad. Maybe not so crazy. He might win. Is anybody in Moscow sober enough to defend the state tonight?”

“Give me your number, American, and get off the phone.”

Monk gave it to him. The forces of law and order would be too busy to start tracing moving cars.

“One last thing, General. They won’t interrupt the scheduled programs—not yet. They’ll let the recorded stuff go out as usual until they’re ready.”

“I can see that. I’m watching Channel One right now. It’s the Cossack Dance Troupe.”

“A recorded show. They’re all recorded until the main news. Now, I think you should get on the phone.”

But Major General Petrovsky had just disconnected. Although he did not then know it, his barracks would be under attack within sixty minutes.

It was too quiet. Whoever had planned the takeover of Ostankino had planned well. Up and down the boulevard there were blocks of apartment houses, mostly with lights lit, their inhabitants down to shirtsleeves glasses in hand, watching the same TV that was being hijacked in silence barely yards away.

Monk had spent his time studying the road map of the Ostankino district. To emerge onto the main boulevard now would be asking for trouble. But behind him lay a network of back streets between the housing projects that eventually led southward to the center of the city.

The logical way would have been to cut through to Prospekt Mira, the main road to the center, but he suspected that highway too was no place tonight for Jason Monk. Without putting on his lights, he hung a U-turn in the road, climbed out, crouched, and emptied a magazine of his automatic straight at the trucks and the TV building.

At two hundred yards a handgun sounds like a firecracker, but the bullets carry that distance. Three windows in the building shattered, a truck windshield broke apart, and a lucky shot caught a Black Guard in the ear. One of his companions lost his nerve and sprayed the night with his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Because of the bitter cold, double-glazed windows are vital in Moscow; with them, and with the television blaring, many residents still heard nothing. But the Kalashnikov shattered three apartment windows and panic-stricken heads began to appear. Several then disappeared to run for their telephones and call the police.

Black Guards were beginning to form up and head toward him. Monk slipped into his car and sped away. He put on no lights, but the guards heard the roar of the engine and fired further bullets after him.

In the MVD headquarters at Zhitny Square the senior officer on duty was the commander of the OMON regiment, General Ivan Koslovsky, who was in his office in the barracks of his three thousand sullen men whose leave he had earlier that day canceled against his better judgment. The man who had persuaded him to do this, speaking from four hundred yards away in Shabolovka Street, was on the phone again and Koslovsky was shouting at him.

“Bloody rubbish. I’m watching the fucking TV right now. Well, who says? What do you mean, you have been informed? Hold on, hold on...

His other phone was blinking. He snatched the receiver and shouted, “Yes?”

A nervous operator came on the line.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, General, but you seem to be the most senior officer in the building. There’s a man on the phone who says he lives at Ostankino and there is shooting in the streets. A bullet smashed his window.”

General Koslovsky’s tone changed. He spoke clearly and calmly.

“Get every detail from him and call me back.”

To the other phone he said:

“Valentin, you could be right. A citizen just phoned that there is shooting out there. I’m going to red alert.”

“Me too. By the way, I phoned General Korin earlier. He agreed to keep some presidentials on standby.”

“Good thinking. I’ll call him.”

Eight more calls came through from the Ostankino area concerning firing in the streets, then a more lucid call from an engineer living in a top-floor apartment across the boulevard from the TV center. He was patched through to General Koslovsky.

“I can see it all from here,” said the engineer, who like every Russian male had done his military service. “About a thousand men, all armed, a convoy of over twenty trucks. Two APCs facing outward from the parking lot in front. BTR Eighty A’s, I think.”

Thank God, thought Koslovsky, for an ex-military man. If he had any doubts, they were dispelled. The BTR 80 A is an eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier mounting a 30mm cannon and carrying a commander, driver, gunner, and six-man dismount squad.