Mark Blair - Stroika

‘General, you had a commando battalion the last time I looked at your dispositions, five kilometres east of Peredelkino. I have a squad of men on their way to his dacha.’ Yuri looked at the wall clock. ‘ETA ten minutes.’

‘And you want to fight your way in?’

‘No, General. I want you to deploy the battalion around Peredelkino. I’m not expecting your men to fight, General. But I do want you to block anyone coming in or out.’

‘Volkov will consider this a mutiny.’

‘He’s going to be in meeting for the next two hours. Call it a military exercise, General. I just want them there until 8 p.m. You can retire them to barracks after that; three hours, that’s all I ask.’

‘Give me a minute, Marov.’ The line went dead.

The sergeant looked from the lieutenant to Yuri, waiting for further orders. Yuri glanced at his wristwatch. What was Alyabyev doing now? Putting a call through to Volkov? Calling the military police? Maybe he had read the district general wrong all along, and Alyabyev wasn’t a neutral and he had thrown his lot in with the conspirators. A minute passed and then another. Yuri expected the steel door to open at any second and for him to be led away.

There was a click on the line. Yuri looked over at the sergeant, who signalled Alyabyev was back on line.

‘Yes, General?’

‘General Marov, you have until 8 p.m. I hope I don’t live to regret this.’

PEREDELKINO

The freighter took a right off Borovskoye and north onto Chobotovskaya and the wooded outskirts of Peredelkino. Less than a kilometre now, Viktoriya thought. She wondered if Yuri had any success with Alyabyev. If he hadn’t, they were all walking into a trap.

The vehicle lurched to a halt. She heard someone run round to the rear and the creak of the rear doors as before.

‘Okay, everyone out!’ shouted Gaidar.

Viktoriya read the road sign opposite: Lukinskaya. To their right and left, dense woodland stretched in either direction. Around her, soldiers flexed limbs and checked kit as the truck completed a U-turn and headed back in the direction from which they had come. She stared at its retreating vermillion lights, momentarily mesmerised, as it faded into the rapidly descending darkness.

‘Let’s go,’ she heard Gaidar say.

They headed left over a low wire fence and across an open field where a flurry of early winter snow had thawed the earth to soft mud. They stopped at the forest edge – one last check. Gaidar gave the thumbs-up and they melted into the wood.

Fending off branches with her hands, Viktoriya tucked in close behind Terentev. Underfoot she felt the springy softness of pine needles and young saplings. Only the swishing and snapping of branches marked the phantom-like progress of their small column.

Two hundred metres in, they found the railway track they were looking for. They paused to get their bearings. Viktoriya pictured the map they had all memorised back at the yard. Michurinets and Peredelkino stations top and tailed the tiny dacha village. Terentev had made it plain they didn’t want to land up at either. Both would be crawling with KGB troops. Across the open railway track, Viktoriya made out the lane that marked the outer perimeter of old Peredelkino; along its length, fruit trees shed the last of their cinnamon-tinted leaves.

They froze as headlights raced from the right. An army jeep carrying heavily armed KGB soldiers sped by, closely followed by a second. She imagined them turning right into Serafimovicha and left into Pavlenko , and the general secretary’s dacha set back in the woods a hundred metres from Pasternak’s.

Gaidar walked back towards her and Terentev.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Serafimovicha is swarming with KGB; one of the men has been reconnoitring ahead,’ said Gaidar.

‘How about we stick to the west of the village, make our way up through the wood by the river and work our way above Pavlenko before dropping down onto it?’ she said.

‘I should have remembered that logistics is your speciality… yes, that’s exactly what I was going to suggest. We backtrack a hundred metres and cross here.’ Gaidar pointed at the intersection of the railway track stretching east and stream running north. ‘Five hundred metres up, we exit the wood onto this lane and walk up.’ His finger skirted the lane until it intersected with another that led east. Three hundred metres along, it crossed Pavlenko.

A third jeep appeared, headlights on full beam, and disappeared towards Serafimovicha.

Viktoriya wondered whether the general secretary’s captors were becoming twitchy. It was only an hour or so before the Emergency Committee was supposed to go on the air waves.

‘We haven’t got long,’ she said, almost unnecessarily.

Spread out in twos and threes, they moved east as fast as they could until they hit the small stream that ran under the rail track and followed it north into the woodland beyond. A branch plucked Viktoriya’s beanie off her head. A soldier behind her reached up and retrieved it.

‘Let’s stick close together now,’ Gaidar whispered. ‘Night visors, those of you who have them.’ The undergrowth had become dense and impenetrable in places.

A soldier in front waved them forward. She stuck close to Terentev, eager to avoid twisting her ankle in some foxhole or having her eye poked out by a low-hanging branch. Squinting into the darkness, doing her best to shield her eyes, she swam forward, arms flailing.

Relief marked getting to the edge of the wood as the forest canopy evaporated. Viktoriya took a lungful of cool fresh air as she walked down off a low bank onto the narrow lane she remembered from the map. Subdued street lighting illuminated a roughly made track. Opposite, ink-black windows of unoccupied dachas gazed bleakly towards them. Viktoriya shivered. A man grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back out of the light. A jeep crossed the lane two hundred metres below and disappeared. Nobody moved. They stood, silent, straining to hear the whine of an approaching engine or the murmur of distant voices. Viktoriya felt the warm breath of the man standing next to her and wondered if he could hear her pulse pounding in her neck.

A silhouette stepped back into the road. It was Gaidar. He signalled everyone to form a line behind him and murmured something to his sergeant. Viktoriya looked for Terentev and found him towards the end of the file standing next to the dehumanised form of a soldier wearing a monocular night-vision visor. She wondered if he could make anything out behind the blank windows: a resident’s finger on the light switch, arrested by a band of heavily armed men emerging ghostlike from the black wood, or a guard calling the alarm.

MOSCOW

Volkov looked at the assembled. Karzhov had walked into the room five minutes before and was deep in conversation with Dubnikov in the corner of the room; the others had dotted themselves around the long mahogany table with papers spread out in front of them. Opposite, the head of the Peasants’ Union worked his way through a long list of names. Volkov watched him studiously placing ticks and crosses against them, settling old scores, removing opposition. He passed the list to the interior minister, who edited it here and there before bagging it in his portfolio case and zipping it firmly shut.

‘Everything in order, General?’ he asked.

It was, apart from the whereabouts of that idiot Marov, but he did not have time to respond. The large double doors at the end of the room flew open and Gerasim Gerashchenko strode purposefully in. The deputy general secretary took his seat at the head of the table and called the meeting to order. Karzhov and Dubnikov hurried to their places, casting a glance in Volkov’s direction. Gerashchenko looked pale, exhausted. Dark circles pooled under his eyes. How long had it been since they had precipitated this venture?’ Volkov thought. Was it only three days?