General Andreev stood with the dead receiver in his hand. No, they’re not, he thought, they’re not going to send anything.
His orders were formal and absolute. They came from a four-star general and minister in the government. Confined to base. He could obey them and his career remain clean as a whistle.
He stared out across the forty yards of snow-choked gravel toward the brightly lit windows of the Officers’ Club, noisy with laughter and good cheer.
But he saw in the snow a tall, straight-backed figure with a small cadet by his side. Whatever they promise you, the tall man said, whatever money, or promotion, or honors they offer you, I don’t want you ever to betray these men.
He reached down to the cradle, killed the line, then dialed two figures. His Exec Officer came on the line, backed by roars of laughter.
“Konni, I don’t care how many T-Eighties are ready to roll, or how many BTRs, I want everything on this base that can move to be ready to go, and every soldier who can stand, fully armed in one hour.”
There was silence for several seconds.
“Boss, is that for real?” asked Konni.
“It’s for real, Konni. The Tamanskaya is going to Moscow.”
¯
AT one minute after midnight in the year of grace 2000, the first tracks of the first tank of the Taman Guards rolled out of Kobyakova Base and turned toward the Minsk Highway and the gates of the Kremlin.
The narrow country road from the highway to the base was only 3 kilometers long, over which the column of twenty-six T-80 main battle tanks and 41 BTR-80 armored personnel carriers had to proceed in single file and at reduced speed.
Out on the main road, a divided highway, General Andreev gave the order to occupy all lanes and increase to maximum cruise speed. The clouds of the day had broken up into patches and between them the stars were bright and brittle. On either side of the roaring column of tanks the pine woods crackled in the cold. They were cruising at over 60 kilometers. Somewhere up ahead a single driver approached; his lights picked up the mass of gray steel pounding toward him and he drove straight into the woods.
Ten kilometers out of Moscow the column came to the police post marking the border. Inside their steel hut, four militiamen peered above the windowsills, saw the column, and crouched back down, holding each other and their vodka bottles as the hut shuddered from the vibrations.
Andreev was in the leading tank and saw the roadblock trucks first. A number of private cars had approached the roadblocks during the night, waited awhile, then turned and headed back. There was no time for the column to halt.
“Fire at will,” said Andreev.
His gunner squinted once and released a single round from the 125mm cannon in the turret. At a range of four hundred yards the shell was still at muzzle velocity when it hit one of the trucks and blew it apart. Beside Andreev’s tank his Exec Officer, riding the tank on the other side of the highway, did the same and demolished the other truck. Just beyond the roadblock there was a smattering of small-arms fire from the ambush positions.
Inside the steel cupola on the roof of the turret Andreev’s machine gunner raked his side of the road with his 12.7mm heavy machine gun and the firing stopped.
As the column thundered past, the Young Combatants stared in disbelief at the ruin of their roadblock and ambush site, then began to filter away into the night.
Six kilometers later Andreev slowed his column to thirty kilometers an hour and ordered two diversions. He sent five tanks and ten APCs to the right to relieve the garrison being besieged in the barracks at Khodinka Airfield, and, on a hunch, another five tanks and ten carriers to the left, to find their way northeast to secure the Ostankino television complex.
At the Sadovaya Ring Road he ordered his remaining sixteen T-80s and twenty-one APCs to the right as far as Kudrinskaya Square, then left toward the Defense Ministry.
The tanks were now in single file again and reduced their speed to 20 kilometers per hour, their tracks chewing chunks out of the tarmac as they swung into line and headed toward the Kremlin.
In the basement communications room of the Defense Ministry, Deputy Defense Minister Butov heard the rumble above his head and knew there was only one kind of creature in a city at war that can make that kind of thud.
The column pounded through Arbatskaya Square and passed the ministry, pointing now straight toward Borovitsky Square and, on the other side, the walls of the Kremlin. None of the men in the tanks and APCs noticed a car, parked among others, just off the square, or the figure in quilted jacket and boots who left the car and began to trot after them.
In Rosy O’Grady’s Pub the Russian capital’s Irish contingent was making sure the New Year had been well and truly celebrated, complete with the constant crackle of fireworks coming from the Kremlin down the street and across the square, when the first T-80 growled past the windows.
The Irish cultural attaché lifted his head from his Guinness, glanced out, and remarked to the barman, “Jaysus, Pat, was that a fucking tank?”
In front of the Borovitsky Gate was a parked BTR-80 armored personnel carrier of the Black Guard, its cannon raking the walls on top of which the last of the Presidentials had retreated. For four hours they had fought their way through the grounds of the Kremlin, waiting for reinforcements, unaware that General Korin’s remaining troops had been ambushed on the outskirts of the city.
By one in the morning the Black Guards occupied everything but the tops of the walls, 2,235 meters of them and wide enough at the top to march five men abreast. Here the last few hundred of the Presidential Guards were huddled, covering the narrow stone steps from below and denying Grishin’s men the final conquest.
From the western side of Borovitsky Square Andreev’s lead tank emerged into the open and saw the BTR. At point-blank range a single shell blew the carrier to bits. When the tanks ran over the wreckage, the fragments were hardly larger than hub caps and their tracks flicked them aside.
At four minutes after one, General Andreev’s T-80 plunged down the tree-lined approach to the tower and gate, entered the arch with its shattered door and grille, and rolled into the Kremlin.