“Are you all right?”
“So far, yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Driving south from Ostankino, trying to avoid Lubyanka Square. Why?”
“One of my men just drove up Tverskaya. There’s a great crowd of those New Russia Movement thugs smashing their way into the mayor’s residence.”
“You know what the NRM think of you and your people?”
“Of course.”
“Why not let some of your lads settle the score? This time no one will interfere with you.”
An hour later three hundred armed Chechens arrived in Tverskaya Street where the NRM street gangs were rampaging through the seat of the government of the city of Moscow. Across the road the stone statue of Yuri Dolgoruki, founder of Moscow, sat astride his horse and stared with contempt. The door of the city hall was smashed and the entrance wide open.
The Chechens drew their long Caucasian knives, pistols, and mini-Uzis and went inside. Every man remembered the destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny in 1995 and the rape of Chechnya over the two succeeding years. After the first ten minutes, it was no contest.
The Duma building, the White House, had fallen to the security firm mercenaries with hardly a struggle, since it was occupied only by a few caretakers and night watchmen. But at Staraya Ploshad the thousand SOBR troops were in room-to-room and street-to-street combat with the rest of the men from the Dolgoruki gang’s two hundred security companies, and the heavier weapons of the rapid reaction force of the anti-gang police of Moscow were a match for their opponents’ greater numbers.
At Khodinka Airfield the Vympel special forces troops were encountering unexpected resistance from the few paratroops and GRU intelligence officers who, warned just in time, had barricaded themselves inside.
Monk swung into Arbatskaya Square and stopped in amazement. On the eastern side of the triangle the gray granite block of the Defense Ministry stood alone and silent. No Black Guards, no firefight, no sign of entry. Of all the installations a planner of a coup d’état in Moscow or any capital would have to possess, and quickly, the Defense Ministry would be high on the list. Five hundred yards away, down Znamenka Street and across Borovitsky Square, he could hear the crackle of gunfire as the battle for the Kremlin raged.
Why was the Defense Ministry not taken or under siege? From the forest of aerials on its roof the messages must be screaming out across Russia to summon help from the army. He consulted his slim address book and punched a number into his car phone.
In his private quarters two hundred yards inside the main gate at Kobyakova Base, Major General Misha Andreev adjusted his tie and prepared to leave. He often wondered why he put on his uniform to preside over New Year’s Eve in the Officers’ Club. By morning it would be so badly stained that the whole thing would have to go to the cleaners. When it came to celebrating New Year’s Eve, the tank men prided themselves on taking lessons from no one.
The phone rang. It would be his Exec Officer urging him to hurry up, complaining that the lads wanted to get started; first the vodka and the endless toasts, then the food and the champagne for the hour of midnight.
“Coming, coming,” he said to the empty room, and reached for the phone.
“General Andreev?” He did not know the voice.
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me. I was a friend, in a way, of your late uncle.”
“Indeed.”
“He was a good man.”
“I thought so.”
“He did what he could. Denouncing Komarov in that interview.”
“What are you getting at, whoever you are?”
“Igor Komarov has mounted a coup in Moscow. Tonight. Commanded by his dog, Colonel Grishin. The Black Guards are taking Moscow, and with it Russia.”
“Okay, joke’s gone on long enough. Get back to your vodka and get off this phone.”
“General, if you don’t believe me, why not ring anyone you know in central Moscow?”
“Why should I?”
“There’s a lot of shooting going on. Half the city can hear it. One last thing. It was the Black Guards who killed