Fenek Solère: Rising

‘Seatbelts, please’, announced the pilot as BA879N smashed through a plate glass sky. ‘We’ll be landing at Pulkovo in five minutes.’ Professor Tom Hunter felt a rush of anticipation as the plane glided over the Gulf of Finland, cutting across Krasnoe Selo, bearing down on a city that Hitler once decided ‘to level, make uninhabitable, and relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the population through the winter.’

From his window seat, the much-maligned Thomas Hunter, PhD of London squinted at a chequerboard of flooded fields through electrostatic twilight. A vast empty land, the Ulyanka, slashed by railway lines, stretched tight and taught like bowstrings ready to fire. Highways edged by gas pipes, tall residential blocks, and belching chimney stacks tarnished a beautiful Baltic sunset. Sitting targets, he surmised, for the militant sects now harassing the Motherland.

Ears popped as the 747 went into freefall, wings wafting down through air pockets, drifting on water vapour, wheels locking in place with the gratifying grind of hydraulics. Reports of the Great Migration and the Third Chechen War were still fresh in his mind as the lights of the control tower came into view. They hung like a necklace of septic pustules around the tattered Federation flag, luminous orange circles intersected by the insect silhouettes of ground staff running back and forth, shadow people from an Orwellian novel.

When tyres hit tarmac, the sudden sparking jolt tested his seatbelt. Half-hearted applause rang out. The superstitious Slavs thanked God and the flight-deck for a safe landing. A voice crackled over the intercom, asking restless passengers to remain seated until the ground crew were in position. Predictably, everyone ignored the advice, scrambling for hand luggage, throwing open overhead lockers, blocking the aisle with bulky hips and bulging bags of duty free. The ping of SMS messages sang in breast pockets.

Claustrophobic moments followed, then the doors opened, allowing a ghostly mist to enter the dimly-lit cabin. People shuffled forward, disembarking onto the docked platform. When the Professor descended the rattling steps, a strong gust caught his flapping coat, black moleskin billowing, until he gathered it in and buttoned it under his chin. Tom surveyed the burnt ochre skyline as he crossed the runway’s metalled surface. The airport had suffered rocket attacks by insurgents. Walls were pock-marked from small-arms fire. News of the almost daily terror attacks on Russian civilians angered him. Muslim militia roaming along the banks of the Kamenka River near Suzdal had nailed a ten-year-old virgin, cruciform style, to the golden door of the Cathedral of the Nativity. Rumours that the Tartar population of Sviyazhsk in Ingushetia were drowning Whites in the Kuybyshev reservoir had now been verified by independent sources.

His eyes cruised over the news channels on his hand-held:

• The American President is assassinated when his motorcade comes under sustained attack from an armed resistance group in Denver, Colorado;

• Mass riots continue across the United States with hundreds dying in shootouts in ethnically mixed cities from New Orleans to Baltimore;

• A state of emergency is declared and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is nominated to lead a coalition government in an attempt to unite citizens behind the New America Foundation;

• Russian ground assets deployed around Hama and Homs are over-run by American-backed Syrian rebels supported by Wahhabist forces using TOW anti-tank weapons, firing air-to-ground missiles at low flying Sukhoi SU-30’s operating over Latakia;

• Israeli forces clash with Russian army contingents around Tel al-Harah in the Golan Heights;

• George Soros addresses a NATO-led summit in Bucharest involving leaders from the Baltic and Central European states, including Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaitė, Latvia’s Raimonds Vējonis, Hungary’s Janos Áder, and Poland’s Andrzej Duda, insisting that Russia ceases its aggressive and expansionist behaviour or face the threat of military confrontation;

• The evacuation of Russian military forces from the Bassel al-Assad airbase in Syria coincides with Israeli airstrikes on the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran;

• The EU enforces oil sanctions, and the Swedish-based Preem company, owned by Mohammed H Al-Amoudi and Poland’s PKN Orlen refineries begin purchasing cheap Saudi crude oil;

• President Putin faces a vote of no confidence in the State Duma and is impeached. The Chairman of the Russian Central Bank is placed under arrest;

• A snap election returns the Eurasian Party to power, but the government soon fractures along ethnic lines, with the Asian wing joining the Coalition for Renewal led by Issur Babel;

• A further election results in President Babel’s Coalition movement winning office and the new incumbent taking up residence in Ryad 1, before submitting the following nominations to lead the Federation Council , the Upper House of Parliament, the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Arbitration Court and the post of Prosecutor General of Russia, respectively: Mendel Abelev, Boris Abras, Grinda Azel, Raisa Feldman, and Isak Shapiro;

• Alexander Dugin evades arrest and is safe-housed by the emerging European Resistance in Prague;

• Federal compensation for wrongful prosecution are considered for a range of individuals, including Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Duvdov, and Michail Brodno, all of whom were involved in the Yukos scandal and, with the exception of Khodorkovsky, were thought to be residing in Israel;

• President Babel’s first legislative act is to pass an edict to suspend the State Duma pending its support for his more liberal approach to foreign policy, internal security, and immigration;

• Yeltsin family members publicly endorse President Babel’s reforms from the steps of their Gorki 9 residence;

• Putin is held under house arrest at Novo-Ogaryovo;

• The Pyotr Velikiy battle cruiser is scuppered in Sadya Bay;

• Two new Borei-class SSBN submarines undergoing sea trials near Spitsbergen are surrendered to a NATO flotilla operating out of Bodo.

He felt the wind pull at his hair, eyes registering the cityscape, witnessing scenes reminiscent of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s futuristic fiction Metro 2033. A stewardess appeared like a genie smothered in smog, blue scarf whipping in a rotor’s tail-wind. She was pointing to a ramshackle bus, something the Wehrmacht might have deserted at the end of their nine-hundred-day siege. Insects dotted a mud-splattered chassis. A militia man with a GSh-18 automatic waved the passengers on, climbing aboard, reaching for the leather straps dangling like NKVD ropes from the stained roof. With a clunky churn the engine ground into gear, dragging the potbellied pig one hundred metres across the runway. Gasping and choking, steam spraying from a perforated radiator, the lumbering beast came to a hissing halt just short of the gulag-grey terminal.

Carried by the momentum of the crowd through the arrivals lounge, the dissident academic waited in line behind nursing mothers, snub-nosed businessmen, and self-conscious tourists, his mind computing second thoughts about having made the trip. Flat screens showed live images of a bombing in Ufa, a city in the distant Ural Mountains: eviscerated skin threading bloody snow. It seemed the Wahhabist-inspired International Army of the Mujahideen were claiming responsibility for the attack which had killed thirteen people and injured a further twenty four at a supermarket complex in the Tsyurupy district. Dr Hunter knew the city to be a key industrial and transport hub on the confluence of the Ufa and Belaya rivers. A prime location for rebel Bashkirs to cut the Trans-Siberia railway line and the M5 Ural and M7 Volga motorways. Obsessively checking the entry dates etched into his visa, he rode the escalator towards passport control. His mind focussed on the conference he was due to speak at, only too aware that his arrival may not be welcomed by certain political circles, particularly after the recent elections and the demonstrations that followed the plebiscites. Initially, voters had returned the more nationalist Eurasian Party to power in the State Duma, but within weeks the ideological split between the Rus- and Turkic-centric wings had rendered it dysfunctional. Alexander Dugin became a scapegoat, with the majority of political commentators arguing that ‘realpolitik’ demanded the new President’s acquiescence to the realities of the international situation: