civilians wore overcoats or hats despite the cold. They looked frightened.
The mood of the crowd was turning ugly, but al though people shouted curses and taunts at the prisoners, they made no move to go after them. But the air of expectation was even greater now than before. More people streamed in from the city, choking the main boulevard, as if they no longer expected Tarankov to need the route into the city. Whatever was going to happen, they expected it would happen down here by the railway station.
According to what Rencke had pieced together, Tarankov’s usual method was to charge up to a city’s train depot, send several of his commando units ahead into the city to arrest the mayor and other city and federal administrators, and rob the banks. While that was going on, Tarankov and his personal guards and inner cadre made their way slowly into the main square, while he harangued the crowds, inciting them into a fever pitch of bloodlust. At the right time the prisoners were gunned down, the money stolen from the banks was distributed to the people, and in the confusion Tarankov and his commandoes made their way back aboard their train and roared off. So far they’d met no resistance from the Militia or from the military.
But this time something was different. For whatever reason the people knew that Tarankov wouldn’t be going into the city center, so they’d rounded up as many apparatchiks as they could — McGarvey figured that the smart ones had already fled the city or hidden themselves — and brought them down here to be executed.
Perhaps the military had set up an ambush downtown, meaning to trap Tarankov and his forces from returning to the safety of their heavily armed train. But if that were the case they would have to shoot into the people, because Tarankov would certainly not hesitate to use the crowd as a shield. A massacre of innocent civilians would severely damage Moscow’s already tenuous hold on the nation. They would be playing directly into Tarankov’s hand.
The railroad line came from Moscow in the west, and Kazan in the east. McGarvey shaded his eyes and searched the sky in both directions finally picking out a half-dozen tiny specks in the air to the southwest. They were flying low and in formation. Too slow. to be jets, McGarvey figured they were probably helicopter gunships. If they were hunting Tarankov, trying to prevent him from even getting close to Nizhny Novgorod, they would concentrate on the locomotive. Once it was destroyed or derailed, Tarankov and his commandoes could be surrounded and wiped out in the countryside where civilian casualties would be limited.
It was a good tactic, but Tarankov had survived long enough to anticipate something like this happening. The intelligence reports Rencke had pirated warned that Tarankov’s people were not only highly trained and motivated special forces officers, they were equipped with state-of-the-art radar and radar tracking weapons, including close- in weapons systems, rapid-fire cannons, and probably magazine-launched surface-to-air missiles, that Rencke thought might be based on the Russian Navy’s SA-N-6 system, which was good out to a range of seventy-five nautical miles, accurate enough to shoot down helicopter-launched missiles or even cruise missiles, yet compact enough to easily be carried aboard a train.
For the next five minutes nothing happened, although the helicopter formation seemed to be getting closer. If they were Mi-24 Hinds, which McGarvey figured they probably were, he estimated Their distance at three or four miles.
A man in blue coveralls standing nearby, noticed McGarvey watching the sky and the shaded his eyes and looked up. When he spotted the gunships he pointed. “It’s the army!” he shouted.
At that moment the helicopters suddenly broke formation. An instant later three contrails rose up from the ground, and in seconds three of the helicopters exploded in mid-air. The other three turned away from the action.
The man in the blue coveralls got the attention of the people around him, and excited shouts began to spread outward like ripples in a pond as others spotted the battle in the sky to the southwest.
For a minute or two it looked like the three remaining helicopters had broken off for good, but then they swung around in a large arc and headed back.
Now Tarankov’s train came into view between the low hills that swept down to the river. It was moving very fast, and the crowds on the south side of the station who could see the action shouted back what was happening. Tens of thousands of people tried to push their way to the back of the terminal building so that they could see what was unfolding, but they were blocked by the press of bodies.
One of the helicopters fired a pair of missiles that streaked directly toward the locomotive, but at the-last second they exploded in mid-air short of then-target.
An instant later another of the helicopters went up in a ball of flame on the tail of a rocket launched from the train.
A cheer rose up from the crowd.
This time the remaining two Hinds turned tail and headed off. For a full ten seconds it seemed as if they would make good their escape, when a pair of rockets were launched from the train, and blew them out of the sky.
Another huge cheer spread across the vast mob, people hooting and shouting and whistling and clapping. The Tarantula had been tested and he’d proved himself. He was invincible. He had power and justice on his side. He was not only for the people, he was of the people. He was father to the Rodina — to Mother Russia — and the crowd was delirious with excitement.
People were everywhere. On the streets, along the tracks, on the roofs of every building for as far as McGarvey could see. And still more people streamed out of the city to catch a glimpse of the first hero Russia had known since Papa Stalin. But the Tarantula was even better than Stalin, because he was coming from adversity: Moscow and the entire world were against him.
McGarvey continued searching the sky to the west and southwest, but nothing else was up and flying, and within minutes Tarankov’s train would roar into the outskirts of the city. If the military wanted to stop Tarankov they’d either badly underestimated the firepower aboard his train, or overestimated the skill of their helicopter pilots and the effectiveness of the Hind’s weapons. It seemed more likely to him that whoever had ordered and engineered the attack had done so only for show, which placed them on Tarankov’s side. It would have been relatively easy for a pair of MiG-29 Fulcrums to stand well off, illuminate the train with their look-down-shoot down radar systems, and accurately place a half-dozen or more air-to-surface anti-armor missiles on the target before the train’s radar systems had a chance to react to the attack. But the Tarantula had spun his web very well. He had friends in high places.
The people began to fall silent, until in the distance they could hear the distinctive roar of Tarankov’s incoming train, its whistle hooting in triumph.
McGarvey slowly edged his way through the crowd along the south side of the square until he was in position about thirty yards from where the eight prisoners stood shivering in the frigid wind that funneled down the hills and across the broad river. They looked resigned. All the fight had gone out of them. Tarankov was coming, and they were being held captive not only by their armed guards, but by the tens of thousands of people surrounding them, and by their own fear. Nizhny Novgorod had become a model for free enterprise over the past half-dozen years, and within the next half hour or less they were going to pay the price for their successes with their lives, and they knew it.
A broad section of the loading platform about fifty yards west of the terminal had been cleared of people, and McGarvey realized what he’d suspected all along. Tarankov had his front men here. The demonstration was too well organized, the boulevard had been kept clear for too long, and now the loading platform free of people, bespoke good planning. Yet if Tarankov’s people were here they were well blended with the crowd, because McGarvey was unable to spot them, or any unified or directed effort.
The armored train came around the last curve before the depot, and sparks began to shoot off its wheels as it slowed down, its rate of deceleration nothing short of phenomenal, the roaring, squealing noise awesome.
Even before it came to a complete halt, big doors in the sides of some of the armored cars swung open, hinged ramps dropped down in unison with a mind numbing crash and a dozen armored personal carriers shot off the train, their half-tracks squealing in protest as their treads bit into the brick surface of the loading platform.
Within ten seconds the APCs had taken up defensive positions around the depot and the square, leaving a path from the rear car of the train to the prisoners who stood frozen to their places by the sheer spectacle of Tarankov’s arrival. Two hundred well-armed troops, dressed in plain battle fatigues, scrambled out of the troop carriers, and moments later a collective sigh spread across the crowd.
A man of moderate height and build, also dressed in battle fatigues, appeared on the rear platform of the last car. He paused a moment, then raised his right fist in the air. “COMRADES, MY NAME IS YEVGENNI
