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“Ruffians, eh? Well, bollocks. Stuff ‘em all. Never retreated in my life, boy. Too late to start now.”
The phone went dead. Monk sighed and replaced his own. He checked his watch. Twenty-five minutes. Time to go. Back to the warren of rat runs in the Chechen underworld.
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THERE were four killer groups and they struck two nights later, on December 21.
The biggest and best-armed took the private dacha of Leonid Bernstein. There were a dozen guards on duty and four of them died in the firefight. Two Black Guards were also cut down. The main door was blown out with a shaped charge and the men in combat black, their faces hidden by ski masks of the same color, raced through the house.
The surviving guards and staff were rounded up and herded into the kitchen. The guard commander was badly beaten but kept repeating that his employer had flown to Paris two days earlier. The rest of the staff, above the screaming of the women, confirmed this. Finally the men in black retreated to their trucks, taking their two dead with them.
The second assault was on the apartment house in Kutuzovsky Prospekt. A single black Mercedes pulled under the arch and drew up at the barrier. One of the two OMON guards came out of his warm hut to examine papers. Two men crouching behind the car ran forward with silenced automatics and shot him through the base of the neck, just above the body-armor. The second guard was killed before he could emerge.
In the ground floor lobby the man at the reception desk suffered the same fate. Four Black Guards, ru
nning in from the street, secured the lobby while six went up in the elevator. This time there were no men in the corridor at all, though the attackers did not know why.
The door to the apartment, although steel-lined, was taken apart by half a pound of plastic explosive and the six rushed in. The white-jacketed steward winged one in the shoulder before he was cut down. A thorough search of the flat revealed there was no one else there and the squad retreated frustrated.
Back on the ground floor they exchanged fire with two more OMON guards who had appeared from the rest area at the back of the building, killed one, and lost one of their own. Empty-handed, they retreated under fire into the avenue and took off in three waiting GAZ jeeps.
At the Patriarchal Residence the approach was more subtle. A single man knocked at the street door while six more crouched on either side of him out of the line of sight of the peephole.
The Cossack inside peered through the hole and used the street intercom to ask who was there. The man at the door held up a valid militia identification and said: “Police.”
Duped by the ID, the Cossack opened the door. He was shot immediately and his body carried upstairs.
The plan had been to shoot the private secretary with the Cossack’s gun, and kill the primate with the same piece that had been used on the Cossack. This gun would then be placed in the hand of the dead secretary, to be found behind the desk.
Father Maxim would then be forced to swear both Cossack and primate had disturbed the secretary rifling the drawers and in the ensuing interchange of fire all three had died. Apart from a huge ecclesiastical scandal, the militia would close the case.
Instead the killers found a fat priest in a soiled dressing gown at the top of the stairs screaming, “What are you doing?”
“Where’s Alexei?” snarled one of the men in black.
“He left,” babbled the priest. “He’s gone to Zagorsk.”
A search of the private apartments revealed that the Patriarch and the two nuns were not there. Leaving the body of the Cossack, the killer team withdrew.
There were only four men sent to the lonely cottage out along the Minsk Highway. They came out of their car and while one approached the door the other three waited in the darkness of the trees.
It was old Valodya who answered. He was shot in the chest and the four men poured into the house. The wolfhound came at them across the floor of the sitting room and went for the throat of the leading Black Guard. He threw up an arm and the hound’s teeth went deeply into it. A companion blew its head off.
By the embers of the log fire an old man with bristling white whiskers pointed a Makarov at the group in the doorway and fired twice. One bullet lodged in the door-jamb and the other hit the man who had just killed his dog.
Then three bullets in quick succession struck the old general in the chest.
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UMAR Gunayev called shortly after ten in the morning.
“I just drove to my office. There’s all hell going on.”
“In what way?”
“Kutuzovsky Prospekt is blocked off. Militia all over the place.”
“Why?”