from the center a district at a time. Concentrate our forces. Use tank desant tactics to get our troops where they need to be quickly.” He took a breath. “If you can handle all that.”
[By your command.]
“Hah.” He reattached the camera and judged the distance back down to the street. A tank, huge and low and green, was chewing up the tarmac toward the junction from the north.
Petrovitch skipped over the railings and slid down them so that his feet dangled over the road. Two, two and a half meters to drop. He sprang his hands and bent his knees, and when he felt the first shock, he rolled.
He dusted himself down, and the tank commander ordered his beast of a machine to a halt. Unburned diesel drifted by in a blue cloud.
“Doctor Petrovitch.”
“Major?”
“I am supposed to disengage and withdraw to the airport,” he shouted down.
“I know.”
They both looked down the Strand. The helicopters had broken off and were heading east, but they left behind them a seething, shifting mass of semi-working cars and burning wrecks. Figures, dressed in blue, moved amongst them, and the occasional shot rang out.
Valentina, an AK in her hand, stepped out onto the street from Somerset House on the opposite corner. She strode across the road, stepping over the twisted bodies punctuating her walk, and stood in front of Petrovitch.
She took his chin in her hand and moved his head this way, then that.
“Is not improvement,” she said, and let go. “We won, yes?”
“After a fashion.”
“When cars started to move, I assumed it was you. We kept our nerve.” She was the very picture of a Soviet-era poster.
“Thank you. I would’ve warned you, but I pretty much made it up as I went along.” He looked up at the major. “Shouldn’t you be running along?”
“I stand by my commanding officer. My men stand by me.”
“Don’t you go saluting me again.” He inspected the tank’s vast metal side, and started to climb up the armor near the rear of the tracks.
“Where are we going?” asked Valentina.
“Finally, we’re going to find my wife.”
She slung the rifle over her shoulder and stuck out her hand; Petrovitch helped her up the same way. They hunkered down on top of the turret, behind the commander’s hatch.
“You never did say what happened to Marchenkho.”
Valentina looked back toward the shattered bridge and pursed her lips. “I shot him.”
29
The effect on him was one of reverent fear, and he knew they weren’t gunning for him.
The Jihad-controlled cars were everywhere, cunningly extricated from the massive jams they’d ended up abandoned in near the central districts. As an accidental consequence, it was one of the better ones that day. It meant he could leverage massive force just where he wanted it most urgently. It was still important, though, that the route he wanted to travel by was clear. A tank rolling over a late-model Merc was an impressive sight, but it was a waste of resources, and despite the visceral joy to be had, there was a chance that the tank would shed a track or become immobilized.
So they crawled along toward St. Paul’s, the rearmost of seven growling behemoths, and cars drove quickly ahead or pulled aside to let them pass.
The gunner behind the co-axial machine gun panned his weapon on the buildings either side of them, but no shots, stray or intended, headed their way. Valentina stood up on the turret, holding on to the aerial with one hand and Petrovitch’s shoulder with the other. Her face glowed with fierce, deep pride.
“We did good thing, Petrovitch. Great thing, yes? Heroes of Union—they will name schools after us.”
“Yeah. Don’t know about the school thing, though. You do realize that, depending on what Sonja Oshicora says, we might be at war with both the EU and the U.S.A.”
“We can take them.” She laughed, but he felt her tightening grip.
“We could try, but I have better plans for the future rather than starring in my very own Nuremberg trial.” He stared ahead of him, adjusting his focus by hand. “We should be able to stop fights before they start. We could have stopped this one.”
“How?” She looked skeptical.
“Saturation bombing with mobile phones, trainers and fast food.” He shrugged. “Seemed to work for us.”
“Outzone are aggressors, violent and savage, and you say we could have bought them off?”
“Pretty much. Those first few months of Armageddon, when the whole world looked like it was going to catch fire. Radioactive rain. Breakdown in law. Everyone fleeing abroad—much good that did—or trying to get into one of two places that said they could protect people. London had enough of its own crazies, but didn’t want to import any more. So: what do you do if you’re too stupid or slow or dangerous or useless to be let in the gates?”
“You have to wait outside.”
“And they waited for twenty years. Ignored. Abandoned. But they remembered. You know what happened to the London prisons, don’t you?”
“What?”
“That they bussed all the inmates to a motorway service station and left them there. That’s who’ve been making little Outies for two decades. They’ve seen the towers go up, the planes fly overhead, the helicopters go here and there, but it may as well have been on another planet.” He pursed his lips. “If I’d been in charge, things would have been done differently.”
“You are in charge,” said Valentina. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill as many of them as I can. Drive the rest back beyond the M25. Seal the barrier. Then we’ll see. Hopefully, the ones that are left will be the smart ones who ran first.”
“You are not going to cut off their retreat, then? Surround them and smash them?” She looked like she might enjoy that. “It is the Russian way.”
Petrovitch looked for a moment at his own burned, bloodied hands. “I think we need to do something different.”
The dome of St. Paul’s, wreathed in smoke for the second time in its history, passed on the right as they traveled down Cheapside. The dead were everywhere. The sound the tracks made as they rolled over them was not something Petrovitch had anticipated, and it made him grimmer still.
Bank was a mess. He shut down his camera and viewed their progress from above, at a distance so that he could see the pattern of streets, but not the tiny bodies that littered them.
“I did this,” he said. “I should look. I should be made to look.”
[You consider every life as sacred as your wife does?]
“No. And I still think Just War theory is a big sack of
[And that would be?]
“Homicide.”
