Grigory had seen the footage on national TV as well. He shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t use that in the middle of a city? I mean, the destruction, the civilian casualties, would be enormous.’
Sergey sighed as he thought about what he knew of Krymov’s
vindictive temperament. ‘He’s not bringing a bomber up for a Christmas firework display,’ he told Grigory.
Lara was shocked by the scale of the violence they faced. ‘Well, can we defend against it?’
Alex shrugged. ‘They have to drop it from eight thousand feet because the parachutes mean it is unguided, so that’s certainly in range of the Tunguskas’ missiles. We just have to hope they stay in action and can keep it off.’
Sergey was looking at him askance. ‘No, Alex, we must have something more than that. Our whole strategy cannot be to simply sit back and hope they don’t blow us to fuck!’
He became more heated. ‘The situation at the moment is very finely balanced and we need to take the initiative.’ He gestured at Major Levin. ‘Look, Alexander, you heard what Levin said, how they are all sitting around watching it all on TV. People are selfish; they are not committed to either side at the moment; their main concern right now is simply to make sure that they are on the winning side.’
Alex nodded. He knew Sergey was right. They needed to keep up the Revolution’s momentum or Krymov would either bomb them or just strangle them slowly.
Sergey was getting more enthusiastic as an idea formed in his mind. ‘No, what we need is a big gesture, a big display of strength. This is a media war and we have to
show
that we hold the symbols of power, even if we don’t hold them in reality.’
Alex had a feeling where this was going.
‘No—we have to go for their jugular!’ Sergey continued. ‘The only way is take the Mil and go for the Kremlin!’
Everybody stared at him, grappling with the audacity of his plan. Sergey was just getting going, though.
‘We know that Krymov is in his office and that all the press are downstairs in the press room. We will land there,
kill Krymov and then do a broadcast from inside the Kremlin! The Senate building is recognised as the seat of power in Russia. If we are broadcasting from there then everyone will know that we have won and that the Krymov government must have fallen.’
He looked round at them, excited by his idea.
Nobody said anything; it was just too much to take in in one go. They realised it would probably be their only hope but no one wanted to take responsibility for condoning it by speaking.
Sergey realised he needed to be more practical to get a response from them. ‘I will go as cameraman. I know how to use one and I know the layout of the Senate building and Krymov’s routines.’
He looked imploringly at Alex. ‘Alexander, I need you and your men to do it. I can’t rely on Russian troops to kill their own commander-in-chief.’
The tall major folded his arms and took a deep breath. He looked at Sergey and then round the circle at his team: Col, Yamba, Pete, Arkady and Magnus. They all looked back at him pensively. When he had offered them the chance to go home earlier that day, they had all said they were willing to stay to the bitter end, and their loyalty to the team meant that they stuck by their word now.
Alex thought through the practical details rapidly. Technically it was possible. The Mil Mi-24 was unique amongst helicopter gunships in that it was both a flying tank and an armoured personnel carrier, with enough room to fit a squad of eight men in the troop bay and with enough power to carry a full weapon load at the same time.
He needed more details, though, before he could answer. He looked at Sergey. ‘What are the defences inside the Senate like?’
Sergey looked uncertain. ‘Well, I don’t know for sure. There’s always Batyuk and quite a lot of Echelon 25 guys around, and the main body of MVD Kremlin guards are stationed just across in the Arsenal building.’
Alex nodded; it didn’t sound good but then neither did the alternatives. And he was a risk-taker at heart.
He looked at Sergey and nodded slowly.
With Sergey, Alex and his whole team onboard, Lara couldn’t stay out of it. She announced defiantly, ‘Right, I will do the broadcast! We can’t afford to let Roman go, so people will need to see the other symbol of the Revolution there, and that’s me! This is
my
Revolution and I’m not going to miss out on it.’ She glared around her, defying anyone to refuse her.
No one did; they needed all the commitment they could get right now.
‘Right, Roman, you stay here,’ Sergey said, ‘and, Grigory, you too. Supervise the broadcast and don’t you fucking lose my feed or I’ll kill you.’
They began to break up but then Sergey thought of something else and clapped his hands to regain their attention. He looked serious. ‘Yes, and one other thing: we don’t tell anyone in the station that they are going to be bombed, otherwise no one will stay and we will all be lost. I will tell Darensky so he knows he has to keep his Tunguskas intact, but otherwise we don’t tell a soul!’
He glared round at them, pointing a warning finger. ‘OK, everybody understand?’
There was a round of silent nods as they absorbed the duplicity they were visiting on their comrades.
Four hundred miles to the south of Moscow, on the desolate, windswept steppe, lay Engels airforce base.
The site was enormous, with a three-and-a-half-kilometre-long runway built to take the world’s heaviest bombers. It was covered in snow and a keen wind whipped across the humped outlines of the fifteen huge, reinforced concrete hangars. Inside each hardened nest lay a White Swan.
Deep under the frozen base in a munitions bunker, a winch whirred and a large dull green cylinder rose upwards. Cyrillic stencillings on it designated it as: ‘Russian Airforce, Munition Number 1’.
In a cavernous hangar nearby, Major Rostov and his crew—co-pilot, navigator and weapons system operator—walked in through a side door in their green flightsuits with their white helmets under their arms.
Rostov never got over the excitement of seeing his beautiful white plane, with its variable wings swept back now against the body, a high tail plane and elegant, clean lines. It looked very similar in size and shape to Concorde but with a much more deadly payload.
He walked underneath it and quickly inspected the intakes on the four Kuznetsov NK-321 afterburning, turbofan engines, the most powerful ever fitted to a combat aircraft.
Rostov was an intelligent man and had been concerned by the contradictory orders issued over the course of that morning. Initially, Colonel-General of the Airforce Korshunov had sent orders from Airforce Command that no action was to be taken when the coup had broken out.
Then, later on, they all saw Lieutenant-General Mostovskoy’s press conference on CNN. It seemed very odd that he had been involved in the plot in the first place—it didn’t make sense—but then he was so composed and convincing when he explained that he had been a double agent all along and had exposed the rebels’ foreign backers that they believed him. How else could one explain the fact that he looked so at home sitting next to the President? Rostov then saw that the whole thing was actually a very clever trick on the rebels. Maybe Krymov wasn’t such an idiot as everyone said.
If there were foreigners involved in the coup, then they had to be wiped out, even if that meant blowing up a famous Moscow landmark. They had started the game and they knew the rules.
Rostov was a fiercely cheerful man with a loud laugh. His role as a nuclear bomber pilot involved him being able to follow orders that would cause him to kill a million people and he took a fierce professional pride in not questioning them; he was part of a very efficient machine and he would play his role. He knew what the blast radius of the FOAB was and that it would destroy many of the tower blocks near the TV station that were packed full of civilians. However, just as he didn’t get lily-livered about dropping nukes, so he wasn’t going to about this bombing mission. He had received his orders from the chain of command and that was all he needed.
He finished his pre-flight inspection of the outside of his beautiful aircraft and led his crew proudly up the ladder to the cockpit.
On the Torzhok airforce base, a hundred miles to the northwest of Moscow, more preparations for the final assault on the tower were underway.
Pilots and crew ran out from the crewroom to where their twelve Mil Mi-24 gunships sat in hardened concrete pens.
Colonel Turgenev knew it would be a tough job to locate and destroy the three Tunguska anti-aircraft vehicles around the tower, to allow the White Swan to make its bombing run. With their mixture of cannon and missiles they had a high aircraft kill ratio and a fearsome reputation.
However, he looked with pride at his own deadly machine. The mixed load of rockets and missiles on the wing pylons and the gun under the nose all gave it a jagged, aggressive profile. His ground crew were busy around it, completing fuelling, checking the guided missiles and rocket pods and loading long belts of Gatling gun ammunition.
When he and his co-pilot closed their double armoured glass canopies, he hit the starter and the deafening roar of the twin Isotov turbines began winding up. The five-bladed rotor turned slowly and was then lost in a whirr. The aircraft shifted on its three wheels, straining to get off the ground.
He radio checked with the other eleven machines in the squadron and then, as one, they all rose up out of their pens, like a flock of evil-minded birds, and banked south towards Moscow.
On top of the Ostankino tower, another Mil Mi-24 was preparing for launch.
Major Levin sat in the pilot’s seat with Arkady down in front of him as co-pilot and weapons systems operator.
Alex and the rest of the team were standing next to the aircraft doing last-minute equipment checks. They were all in full FIBUA battle kit: flakjackets, helmets, Wiley-X blast-resistant goggles and webbing filled with grenades. Winning at FIBUA is all about weight of firepower so Alex, Col, Yamba, Magnus and Pete were all armed with 7.62mm PKM light machine guns, with spare 250-round ammo boxes in their rucksacks, plus a Shmel launcher carried by Yamba. Any remaining room was stuffed with MTP-2 mines for mouseholing their way through walls if they needed to.
Alex carried the radio on his back to maintain communications with the helicopter, as well as Grigory and Ilya in the director’s gallery as they waited for the precious satellite dish feed from Sergey with his broadcast of Lara.
He was feeling drained after all he had been through in the past thirty-six hours: the prison camp raid, the firefight around the tower, and the wounds on the side of his face and his hand hurt like hell. He looked around at the rest of the team. They were equally battered: green combat jackets stained with smoke, blood and dirt, their faces covered in stubble and cuts, and their eyes red-rimmed.
He glanced across at Sergey and Lara, who were standing apart, talking quietly with their heads close together. They were both wearing blue TV flakjackets over their parkas; Sergey held his bulky camera in one hand and had the satellite uplink in a rucksack.
Despite everything that was going on, Alex couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy. He suppressed it angrily. How the hell could he be feeling that at a time like this?
He looked at his watch; it was only just before lunchtime—what else could happen today?
He took one last look out over Moscow before they boarded. Dark snow clouds brooded low over the city. In the distance he could just make out the pointed towers of the Kremlin citadel. He forced himself to look away and get psyched up for the mission.
‘OK, everyone, let’s go!’ he yelled.
They all packed into the back-to-back benches inside the Mil. The troop bay smelled of sweat and machine grease. Alex slid the armoured side door shut and sat back on the bench. Levin increased the revs and the rotors whirred above them.
I am setting off on a mission to attack the Kremlin, what the hell am I doing?
He couldn’t see anything outside because of the armoured cocoon he was now in, but he felt the whole body lift and tilt as they sideslipped off the roof and over the void.
They dropped away sickeningly and swooped down to rooftop level on their run in to the target.
Captain Lev Darensky stood on the TV station roof and watched the helicopter depart.
Alex had taken him aside and explained that the station was going to be targeted with the FOAB and that he had to keep that secret whilst at the same time making sure that his three Tunguska anti-aircraft vehicles were not destroyed.
Even though he was a junior officer he had now become the
Kombat
—the regimental field commander in charge of four hundred men. His signaller was standing next to him with his radio backpack, waiting to relay any commands on to the men of the 568th. Some men might have been daunted by the task but Darensky was a visionary figure and felt that his hour had come.
In a minute, he would take the elevator down to his T-90 command tank on the ground, but he wanted a last look out over the field of the coming battle to review his troops. Next to him on the roof were three two-man teams with shoulder-launched 9K38 Igla surface-to-air missiles. They had only limited range so they wouldn’t be able to reach the White Swan at 8,000 feet, but the tower gave them a great firing platform against low-flying helicopters.
He looked down and watched one of his three
Tunguskas moving north across the open ground around the tower. The vehicle had the tracked body of a tank with a wide turret, painted in a black and green camouflage pattern. However, instead of a single main gun, it had a six-foot-long, 30mm anti-aircraft cannon and four long black tubes for 9M311 surface-to-air missiles mounted on either side of the turret. A small radar dish rotated rapidly on the back of the turret, anxiously scanning for incoming aircraft.
He had allocated positions for the three vehicles at equal distances around a defensive perimeter a kilometre out from the tower. His eleven other T-90 tanks and ten BMP-3 tracked fighting vehicles were also spread out along this defensive line. Unit commanders had picked out the approach routes to the tower, found ambush sites and dug in around them. The troops were dotted between offices and apartment blocks in the surrounding area, and, where possible, were hidden behind buildings or snowdrifts.
Darensky had split the defences into four companies covering four sectors: northern was spread out amongst an area of woodland to the northwest and then across to a housing estate with four huge tower blocks to the northeast. Eastern sector covered the main approach road, where the massacre by the buses had happened this morning, as well as an area of lower-rise flats. Western sector was based in some light industrial and factory blocks and, finally, southern sector, under Sergeant Platonov, was spread out along the main railway embankment.
All the men of the 568th knew that this was their final battle. The Krymov regime wouldn’t let them live if they lost; their backs were well and truly against the wall so they went about their preparations with a grim determination.
Sergeant Platonov looked down the line of his men
digging into the snow along the railway embankment and shouted, ‘Might as well go down fighting, lads! Give ’em a proper fight!’
A mile to the south of Platonov’s men, Colonels Vronsky and Melekhov were meeting in a warehouse, finalising the assault plans for their mixed force of five hundred OMON and MVD troops with BTR-80 APCs in support, the ones that had survived the two routs that morning.
They scrutinised the map on a packing crate in front of them, trying to work out how they could put pressure on the defenders to allow the Mil gunships to single out and destroy the Tunguskas. Given the amount of firepower they had flying in to help them, they might even be able to capture the tower before the White Swan arrived. They would have to see how it went.
Their soldiers were already advancing cautiously towards the TV station. They were all clad in heavy winter clothing and laden with body armour, webbing, helmets, rifles, grenades, knives, entrenching tools, RPGs and spare rounds, flamethrower packs and radios.
Squads of soldiers advanced, huddled along walls, sensing potential threats in every direction, halting before each corner to peer nervously around it. Each one could be a deathtrap, and when they had to cross open ground they did so frantically, sprinting with arms and legs pumping, equipment banging and flapping around them. As they got nearer the tower they dropped onto their stomachs and wriggled forward into firing positions, peering over snow mounds and around fences.
Colonel Turgenev’s gunships approached the tower with equal caution.
The twelve Mil Mi-24s spread out in a circle around it to
probe the defences. As they got near Ostankino they dropped right down on the deck, using every scrap of cover to shield their approach to within two kilometres.
With their wheels retracted, the huge machines skimmed along roads a few feet off the ground, hopping over terrified car drivers, their powerful downdraft shoving vehicles sideways as they roared over them.
Two of the aircraft approaching from the north slowly slid in amongst the tower blocks like a pair of sharks, and hovered there waiting for the attack to commence. Terrified people looked out of the windows of their flats and saw, twenty feet away, the pilots’ heads turning as they checked the buildings around them and then used their infrared and optical sensors to identify targets on the defensive perimeter.
When they had all picked out heat signatures that seemed to indicate tank engine exhausts or troop concentrations, they radioed in to Colonel Turgenev, who then barked out over the RT net: ‘Launch missiles!’ and all twelve gunships rose up from cover, fired off a volley of 9K114 Shturm air-to-surface anti-tank missiles and then accelerated to attack speed.
Inside the three Tunguska vehicles, the radar operators hunched over their glowing orange screens and watched the line sweeping rapidly round the centre point as the scanner above them turned and tracked the incoming helicopters. It was hard to pick them out amongst all the ground clutter; they appeared and disappeared rapidly behind buildings, popped over the top of them and then sank back behind others.
The operators designated targets on the screen and linked them into the gun and missile guidance computers. Outside each vehicle, on each side of their turrets, the two long black missile launchers raised themselves up from their horizontal
positions and twitched across the sky like the eager snouts of two gundogs following a bird.
When the Mils emerged from cover to launch their salvo, the Tunguskas at last had clear targets as well, and the missile duel began. Their missiles kicked out of their tubes with a bright flash and a cascade of propellant fire before vanishing into the distance with frightening speed.
One of the pilots hovering between the tower blocks glimpsed a black streak coming towards him just before it turned and slammed into the engine exhaust outlet below his helicopter’s rotors. The nine-kilo high-explosive warhead detonated and blew the whole rotor unit off. It spun away and crashed into the flats next to it whilst the body of the aircraft dropped down like a stone.
The other Mils swarmed in regardless, howling along at two hundred k.p.h. At closer range the Tunguskas’ guns came into play. The two long barrels followed their radar guidance and fired out bursts at five thousand rounds per minute with an unearthly roar that sent twin streams of red tracer up into the air, whilst the recoil pushed each thirty-four-ton vehicle back on its tracks. Two enormous gouts of black exhaust smoke poured up from the gun barrels like twin horns and a solid stream of spent shell cases poured out of the side of each gun.
A Mil on the northern front went head to head with a Tunguska, firing its rocket pods at it. A series of explosions on the ground got nearer the vehicle as it sought to knock out the aircraft with a constant barrage of 30mm cannon fire. The guns twitched with computer-guided intensity as they followed every jink and swerve of the helicopter, in a desperate battle to kill or be killed.
A line of five 30mm cannon shells punched through the titanium body armour and hit its fuel tanks, exploding it in
an aerial fireball. But as the Tunguska was occupied with this battle another helicopter targeted it and punched out its remaining Shturm missile.
The radar operator spotted the launch and screamed, ‘Reverse!’ to the driver next to him. He threw the tracks into gear and charged backwards but the missile smashed into the front of the turret and the high-explosive warhead exploded. Bits of the radar scanner, missile tubes, guns and crew blew up in a cloud of debris.
Private Novikov was dug into a pile of salt sand used for gritting roads on the central reservation of the main approach route along the Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova boulevard.
He was lying prone on the ground and his balls were freezing as he squinted along the sights of his Kord heavy machine gun on a bipod mount. His squad were dug into foxholes in the verges, two hundred metres in front of the smashed-up yellow buses from that morning’s massacre. Bodies were still lying around them in the snow.
The battle between the helicopters and the Tunguskas was going on over his head; missiles streaked in over him and streams of 30mm tracers roared back out; the air was heavy with the smell of their burning.
He was concentrating on the troops and APCs advancing down the road in front of him. He could see soldiers running between buildings laden with equipment. Two had just lugged a heavy machine gun on a tripod behind a bus shelter, and others scurried forward, bent double with Shmel tubes strapped on their backs that waggled as they ran.
The corporal in charge of the squad judged they were now in range, stuck his head out of his foxhole and yelled, ‘Right, that’s about far enough for them! Open fire!’
Novikov squinted along his gun, and squeezed the trigger. The Kord jumped with a heavy thock-thock-thock of
propellant explosions, accompanied by the jangling of the metal cartridge belt as it fed through the breech. Long .50 bullets spat out down the boulevard, smashed through the bus shelter and hit the machine-gun team behind it. A stream of hot cartridge cases spewed out of the ejection port on the right-hand side and melted into the snow with a faint hiss. All around Novikov, firing broke out as his squad targeted the enemy. Fire soon came back in at them as well, with bullets cracking just overhead.
Enemy troops began pushing in on all four sectors. To the north, the sound of firing echoed off the high-rise blocks of flats, as defenders poured fire down and a guided missile slammed back into the buildings in return. Debris and glass blasted out and rained down in an umbrella pattern over the street below, smashing car roofs and windscreens, and setting off their alarms.
On the southern sector, Sergeant Platonov was kneeling on one knee in the middle of his men, as they fired their machine guns around him. He had the radio receiver pressed hard against his head and was shouting over the racket of chattering and banging guns.
‘Darensky! Darensky! I need armour support here! Enemy helicopters and APCs have pushed us off the embankment. They’ve crossed the bridge and are advancing up Novomoskovskaya Ulitsa.’ He glanced to his side down the small street running north between blocks of flats. It was packed with cars abandoned by the people who had flooded up to the TV station that morning. He could see a BMP-3 manoeuvring on the other side of the cars, firing its 30mm cannon over the top of them at his position.
In the commander’s hatch of his tank near the tower, Darensky shouted back, ‘OK, I’ll send armour!’
He called in his last remaining mobile reserve of two T-90
tanks. They pulled out of their hides in the woods and roared south over the snowfield and down the narrow street, using old-fashioned cavalry shock tactics. Despite being completely blocked with cars, parked nose to tail, the two forty-seven-ton monsters simply increased speed and their tracks effortlessly rose up over the first cars and then flowed over the rest, crushing them into a splintering mass of glass and metal. They both advanced on top of this carpet, their tracks tearing chunks off the roofs and spewing them behind, as their gun barrels swung and belched out rounds, blowing up the BMP-3. Their machine guns chattered, scattering the enemy troops.
The noise of battle engulfed the whole of northern Moscow. The crackle of small-arms fire, the boom and thump of tank guns, exploding shells and the scream of missiles overhead, mixed with the constant clatter of helicopter rotors reverberating off buildings, made it impossible for the defenders to tell where the next gunship would pop up from to unleash its deadly load. Their constant attacks began to get the upper hand and enemy troops pushed in all around the perimeter.
In the middle of it all, the young Darensky sat in his tank with his radio helmet on his head, listening to the increasingly desperate voices coming in over the net.
He was trying to follow the rapid flow of the battle, directing reserves to where the enemy threatened to break through the perimeter.
Platonov, on the southern sector, was taking the brunt of it all. Darensky managed to get through to him again.
‘Platonov, give me a sitrep now!’
The radio hissed and then Platonov’s shout came back to him, edged with hysteria and with the roar of gunfire in the background.
‘We’ve got three gunships on us now! They’ve hit the tanks! They’ve just hit the Tunguska. It’s on fire! We’re taking hits!’
A loud explosion cut him off and then there was just an empty hiss.
‘Platonov! Platonov!’
Darensky’s head sank down and he rested his forehead against the top of the armoured hatch flipped open in front of him.
He had only one Tunguska left and the White Swan was on its way.
Major Rostov pushed the throttles forward and felt himself shoved back into his seat of the Tupolev bomber as the four huge turbofans roared behind him.
He was sitting in the tiny cockpit perched on top of the fully fuelled and armed plane. He had personally supervised the winching of the huge bomb up into the bomb bay with powerful hydraulic jacks. The weapon was an ugly, eleven-foot-long, fat cylinder, a bit like an old-fashioned diving bell. It had been raised slowly into place until the clamps clicked and locked it in. Technicians armed the firing bolts and it was now hanging ready for him to press the release button.