come to Kirov and the crowd was drunk with the thrill of it.
And Tarankov too was drunk on their passion, as he turned to address his people.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, red faced and sweating, stumbled on the stairs into the old Soviet Presidium building, and one of his bodyguards had to reach out to stop him from falling. Lunch with Prime Minister Yuri Kabjatov and his staff of old women had been nothing short of grueling. Only with vodka could he keep his sanity, although on days like this he wondered why he bothered.
His chief of staff, Alexi Zhigalin, and his military liaison, Colonel Igor Lykov, were waiting for him upstairs in his outer office, and their faces fell when they saw what condition he was in.
Zhigalin handed him a glass of tea. “Generals Yuryn and Mazayev are on their way over, Mr. President. Are you up to seeing them?”
Yeltsin flung the glass across the room, and brushed the impertinent pissant aside. “Unless NATO’s tanks are knocking at our back door, the generals will have to wait. Two hours,” he thundered as he entered his office.
Zhigalin and Lykov exchanged a glance. “It’s the Tarantula. He’s struck again, this time in Kirov,” Zhigalin said, his long, narrow face even more pale than usual.
Yeltsin pulled up short and turned back, shooting the two men an ugly glance. “The madman’s name is Yevgenni Tarankov. You will not utter that other name in my presence again.”
“There was a massacre in the city square,” Lykov said, the heels of his highly polished boots firmly together.
Yeltsin thought he looked like a drugstore cowboy. A fairy. But what he was saying was finally beginning to penetrate the fog. “In Kirov?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Lykov said. “The mayor and his staff along with all the district judges, and some others were gunned down. Tarankov himself apparently shot Mayor Bakursky and a couple of others to death.”
“Where was the Militia, the army?”
“General Kirpichko was apparently on joint army-air force maneuvers a hundred kilometers north of the city. By the time he could return, Tarankov was gone.”
“But they didn’t chase after his train?”
Zhigalin shook his head. “It wouldn’t have done much good, Mr. President. The people of Kirov support him. Now that our officials are dead it would take a full military intervention to bring order—”
“Do it,” Yeltsin said.
“Sir?” Lykov asked.
“Find out where he’s going, get there before him, and either arrest him or kill him.”
“It wouldn’t be so easy as that, Mr. President,” Lykov said. “He has many supporters in the military and the Militia. Even in the Security Service. And his commandoes are better than the best of our troops.”
Yeltsin walked back to Lykov and looked him up and down as if he were a raw recruit at parade inspection. “He has two hundred men with him. The best troops in all of Russia. Each one better than any ten of ours.”
“Yes, sir.” “Then send ten thousand soldiers to arrest him. Send tanks, rocket launchers. Send helicopter gun ships. If he’s near water, send ballistic missile submarines. But arrest him!”
“The people are with him,” Zhigalin said.
Yeltsin turned his now steady gaze to his chief of staff.
“Then arrest them as well—”
“Quite impossible, Mr. President,” FSK Director General Nikolai Yuryn said coming in. “We would have the healthy beginnings of a full scale armed insurrection. It’s exactly what he wants.” The FSK, or Federal Service for Counterintelligence, with its headquarters at the Lubyanka, was the internal security arm of the old KGB.
Militia Director Captain-General Mikhail Mazayev came in behind him. Both men were in uniform.
“Nikolai is correct, of course, Mr. President,” Mazayev said. “By playing into his hands we’d be making matters worse.”
“What do you suggest?” Yeltsin asked. He was at a slow boil and his generals knew it. The tension in the room was electric.
“I suggest that we bide our time,” Yuryn answered. “He will make a mistake sooner or later. He will go to excess — all men of his ilk do at some point. It’s inevitable. When that happens the people he claims to champion will desert him. Probably his own people will kill him.”
“Are all of you agreed on this course of action?” Yeltsin asked reasonably.
“Da,” Yuryn said. He was a large man, even bigger than Yeltsin, and he towered over everyone else in the room, especially the diminutive Zhigalin.
The others nodded.
Yeltsin let his shoulders sag as if he were defeated, started to turn back to his office, but then stopped, his face even redder than before. “Find out where Tarankov is going. Get there before him with as many troops and as much equipment and ordnance as you think you’ll need … no, twice that much … and either arrest him or kill him. Have I made myself clear, Comrades?”
“Perfectly,” General Yuryn said indifferently. “I’ll have the order drawn up and on your desk for signature by morning.”
“Do you feel you need such a document?”
“Yes, Mr. President, respectfully I do.”
“Then have it here within the hour,” Yeltsin said, and he went into his office and slammed the door.
TWO
Yevgenni Tarankov replaced the telephone on its cradle, sat alone staring at a map for a full five minutes, then left the train. They were stopped on an unused siding about three hundred kilometers east of Moscow. Camouflage netting was draped over the entire train even though it was the middle of the night, they were still under a thick overcast and the sideboards had been lowered, making them appear to be a freight train with markings for Volgograd.
The nearer they got to their prime objective the more Chernov and Colonel Drankov insisted on such stringent security measures.
In four days they would hit Nizhny Novgorod, which would be their most ambitious, and therefore most difficult and dangerous target. After this morning’s success at Kirov he’d felt that they were gaining a momentum that soon would be unstoppable. But all that was changed. He lit a cigarette, then stepped away from the tracks out from under the netting suddenly feeling confined, claustrophobic.
Two of his commandoes appeared out of the darkness. “Comrade, may we be of assistance?” one of them asked in a respectful but firm voice. They were armed with Kalashnikovs.
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Yes, sir. Would you please extinguish your cigarette?”
Tarankov looked sharply at the trooper. He wasn’t over thirty, none of Drankov’s commandoes were. But he looked like he ate barbed wire for breakfast, and wrestled black bears for sport. In the dim light reflected from the snow cover the man’s face seemed as if it were carved from granite. He towered nearly two meters and easily weighed one hundred kilos, but standing nearly motionless it seemed as if he had the moves of a ballet dancer. He didn’t flinch under Tarankov’s hard gaze.
Tarankov dropped the cigarette into the snow, and when he looked up the second commando had disappeared without a sound.
“What is your name, soldier?”
“Lieutenant Ablakov, sir.”
“Gennadi?”
The man cracked a smile, pleased. “Yes, sir.”
“Are you married?”
