S
omething slammed into the APC with a loud clang, nearly knocking them over, propelling Elizabeth out of her bucket seat and slamming her painfully into the bulkhead next to the hatch.
They were in the middle of a fierce fire fight, the noise utterly deafening, hot shell casings falling all around her from the heavy-caliber machine guns above.
Tarankov was strapped into the command position above and behind the driver and the two weapons officers, calmly issuing orders over his headset.
Elizabeth clawed her way up to her knees so that she could see out the thick glass of the narrow port in the hatch as the lead APCs suddenly turned to the right, directly into the wall of human beings lining the Square and Okhotny Ryad.
The people tried to fall back out of the way, but it was impossible because of the confusion and press of bodies behind them.
Horrified, Elizabeth watched as the first of the people were bowled over or pushed aside, but then the lead APC gave a mighty lurch and climbed up on top of the bodies, blood and gore flying everywhere, spitting out from under the huge tracks. The second APC climbed atop the carnage directly behind the first one, plowing and smashing its way across the broad street toward Ploshchad Revolyutsi.
Elizabeth fell back, unable to do anything else but brace herself from being tossed around as the APC she was in followed the first two, climbing and bucking and heaving over the bodies. She could imagine that she was hearing the screams, hearing the bones crunch, seeing the blood oozing up through the steel plating of the floor. And still it went on.
She looked up at the same moment Tarankov glanced down at her, and she almost screamed in horror, because the look on his face and in his eyes was absolutely devoid of any human emotion. What they were doing, what he had ordered, the people they killed and whose bodies they were driving over, none of it had any effect on him. She had never seen that lack of feeling on any human being's face, not even Chernov's. And until this moment she had not even imagined that such a monster could possibly exist in the real world.
The shooting stopped and then Elizabeth
could
hear the people screaming, and she screwed her eyes shut as if she could block out the inhuman shrieks.
They lurched sharply to the right, came back onto the pavement and accelerated, but still Elizabeth could hear the screaming.
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The shooting had stopped, but pandemonium had broken out as panicked people tried to get away, climbing over each other, pushing, screaming, shoving the Militia and military barricades and soldiers out of the way.
Chernov emerged from the garden gate and flattened himself against the wall at the corner. There was no sign of McGarvey or the French woman, but he knew that he was just seconds behind them, and they could not have gotten very far in this mob.
Something had gone wrong with Tarankov's triumphal entrance. He didn't think that McGarvey had taken his shot, because Tarankov's commandoes would not have fought back if their leader was dead. For some reason General Vashleyev had ordered his troops to surround Red Square and box Tarankov in. But they had not counted on Tarankov fighting back in the middle of the mob. They had made the same mistake sending helicopter gunships to stop the train outside Nizhny Novgorod.
Chernov stepped away from the wall. North or south, they could have gone either way, and once they reached the French or American embassy they would be out of his reach.
On instinct he headed north, pushing people out of his path until he came to an abandoned Militia radio car, its lights flashing. He leaped up on the hood of the car and just caught a glimpse of McGarvey, the woman and a third person as they reached Ilynka Street and disappeared around the corner.
He jumped down and yanked the driver's door open when a dozen men rushed up, pushed him aside and started rocking the squad car on its springs to tip it over.
McGarvey was getting away. It was all Chernov could think of as he fought his way up to Ilynka Street where his own car was parked. Getting across Red Square and inside the Kremlin where the SVR helicopter was waiting for him made the most sense. Once airborne he could direct the pilot to take him out of the city, and head up to St. Petersburg. From there he could catch the train to Helsinki where he could access his Swiss bank account and disappear. But McGarvey had made a fool of him, had made fools of them all. And he had killed Arkady.
Ilynka Street was jammed with people heading away from the Square as fast as they could. The T-80 tanks were gone, and the barricades had been removed or simply shoved aside.
Chernov reached his car in time to see McGarvey and the woman climb into a blue Chrysler van. He got in his car, and swung it around, gently easing his way through the crowd and then moving with it.
He was thirty yards behind the van, and he could see the top of it above the heads of the people, not moving any faster than he was, so for the moment there was little danger that he would lose them. Once they were in the clear he would speed up and run them off the road before they could reach either embassy, and kill McGarvey and the two with him.
Only then would he leave Russia, because his brother was wrong, revenge was everything.
McGarvey looked out the back window, but if Chernov had followed them there was no sign of him. In any event he would be on foot.
“Are you okay?” he asked Jacqueline.
She nodded. “I think so, but what happened to Tarankov? Did you get a shot?”
“No, Liz was with him. I saw her.” He leaned forward to the driver. “As soon as we get clear head out to the Garden Ring Road. I want you to take me up to Leningrad Station as quickly as possible.”
“What?” Jacqueline screeched.
“He's got Lizâ”
“The authorities will stop him! His coup didn't work!”
“I'm not willing to take that chance,” McGarvey said harshly.
“
Merde
,” Jacqueline said. She turned to the driver. “Take us back to the embassy, Nikolai. Right now!”
McGarvey switched to Russian.
“Yeb vas, but if you don't take me to Leningradski Station you're going to get your nine grams.”
It was a Russian euphemism for a 9mm bullet in the base of the skull.
The driver glanced at McGarvey's stern-faced reflection in the rearview mirror, hesitated a moment, but then nodded.
“You can't do this,” Jacqueline cried.
“I missed him, and now he doesn't need her.”
“I know how you feel, my darling. I promise I doâ”
“No you don't,” McGarvey cut her off savagely. “You were sent to spy on me in Paris. You've done your job, now leave.”
“I love youâ”
“Not now!” McGarvey shouted her down.
The van shot across the normally busy broad boulevard Staraya Ploshchad in Kitay-Gorod, the bulk of the crowds now behind them. What traffic there was all seemed to be heading away from Red Square, but Moscow suddenly seemed deserted, as if everyone had either left or was hiding behind locked doors waiting to see what was going to happen. It lent a strange war-zone feel to the city.
Liz had fought back. She had tried to get away, even in the middle of Tarankov's commandoes, even in the face of the hundreds of thousands of people and soldiers crammed into Red Square. And Tarankov had swatted her aside like he might swat an irritating insect.
McGarvey's jaw tightened, and his muscles bunched up, his face tightening in pain. He forced himself to calm down. To act rationally. To think out his options.
Five minutes later the van turned north on the Garden Ring Road just past the Ural Hotel, and traffic picked up though most of it was going in the opposite direction. In the distance they could see the twenty-six-story Hotel Leningradskaya west of Komsomolskaya Square which contained the Yaroslavl, Kazan and Leningrad Stations.
“It doesn't have to be this way, Kirk,” Jacqueline said. “I want to save her life as badly as you do.”
“As soon as you get back to your embassy have your people try to find out who's in charge of the government. Call my embassy and tell them that I'm not going to kill Tarankov. I'm just going to get my daughter out of there. Whoever is in charge in the Kremlin will have to understand that I want nothing more.”
“You magnificent fool,” Jacqueline said quietly. “You're going to get yourself killed, aren't you?”
“I can't leave her. She's all I've got. All I've ever really had.”
“I know,
mon cher
. I know.”
“There's a roadblock up ahead,” the driver called back.
A T-80 tank and several army trucks were parked across the road a quarter-mile ahead. Barricades had been put up, and soldiers were turning cars away.
“Take a side street, I have to get closer than this,” McGarvey ordered.
The driver turned at the huge Agriculture Ministry Building, but the street was barricaded just behind the Kazan Station two hundred yards from the square, across which they could see Leningrad Station. Thousands of people were milling around in the square, but it was impossible to see if Tarankov's train was still there. The driver made a left turn, then right again toward the Hotel Leningradskaya.
This time the barricades had been shoved aside by people streaming away. The street was littered with tarantula banners, and in front of the hotel something was going on in the middle of a huge crowd.
The driver was forced to stop fifty yards away.
“For God's sake don't go, Kirk,” Jacqueline pleaded one last time.
“Go back to your embassy and get the word out,” McGarvey said.
He jumped out of the van, and took off in a dead run.
Up on the square there was a broad path of bodies and blood, as if something had mowed its way through the crowd. Some people were helping the wounded, but for the most part everyone was trying to get away.
McGarvey entered the station, and raced across the vaulted arrivals hall filled with people who seemed to be in a daze. Trackside he pulled up short. There were three trains, none of which was Tarankov's.
But in Nizhny Novgorod he'd not pulled into the station. The train had stopped outside where the APCs could be off-loaded and make their way up to the streets.
McGarvey rushed to the end of the loading platform, jumped down to the tracks and emerged from the station in time to see the last of the APCs being loaded into the train fifty yards away.
He could see where the APCs had come down from the street, across the tracks to the west. Only a few stragglers were up there now, but the trail of blood led directly across, pointing a damning finger at what had been done.
A skirmish line of a dozen commandoes had taken up a rear guard position, but their attention was directed back the way they had come.
Keeping his eye on the rear guard, he pulled out his pistol, and staying low, raced for the right side of the armored train.
An Army truck screeched to a halt up on the road, and Tarankov's commandoes opened fire, cutting the troops down as they hit the street.
McGarvey reached the lee of the diesel-electric locomotive as its huge engines roared into life. Almost immediately it began moving backward.
Holstering his gun, he sprinted the last fifty feet to the first armored car, grabbed the access ladder and clambered to the roof.
Captain Anatoli Trofimo touched off his forward looking radar as he swung his MiG-29 Fulcrum around in a tight loop at the southern edge of Moscow's inner defense ring. His wingman Captain Aleksandr Lopatin was ten meters off his port wing tip, and gave him the thumbs up sign.
Nothing was in view yet, but after the debacle up at Nizhny Novgorod nobody was taking any chances, though shooting down a few slow moving helicopters was a different proposition than shooting down a pair of high performance fighter/interceptors. Still, Tarankov was a wily old bastard, his troops were the best in all of Russia, and the defense systems aboard his son-of-a-bitch train were state-of-the-art.
The original plan was to make a surgical strike against Tarankov as he stood on the reviewing platform atop Lenin's Mausoleum. They'd been told that Lenin's body had been removed to a safe place underground, but that didn't matter as much to Trofimo as getting his shot right the first time. If they missed they'd be firing into a crowd estimated above one million people.
They'd turned inbound, armed their R85 air-to-surface missiles, and started their attack run when they were ordered to stand down less than forty seconds to target because Tarankov was on the move. Trofimo was damned glad for the reprieve. He and his wingman were ordered to keep station at the southern inner defense ring, where they had remained for the past fifteen minutes, mushing at ten thousand feet to conserve fuel.
His air controller's voice came over his comms.
“Orlov units, prime time has reached his secondary objective. You are authorized to go hot, and take out the target. Repeat, you have weapons release authorization.”
“Roger, we're inbound now,” Trofimo radioed. “Do you have vectors to target?”
“Roger. Relative bearing zero-four-seven, changing slowly to the north. The target is on the move and accelerating.”