Tom lay where he fell, bedcovers pushed back, completely naked. The curtains were half drawn, and there, opposite his half-open eyes, beside the window pane, body bleached by the pale white moon, Ekaterina sat cross-legged, staring at him like a manifestation of Priya, the Slavonic goddess of love and spring. A towel hung over her shoulder. Motionless, she gazed at him from under long lashes, mouth pouting, her expression serious.
‘Come to bed or you will catch cold.’ The caring tone in his voice frightened him.
‘Do you mean to stay long?’ She spoke softly, like someone scared of being overheard.
‘We’ll talk in the morning’, he replied. ‘Let’s sleep now.’ The moonlight cast a cold glow over her right cheek, her mouth hung open, a soundless sigh perched on puckering lips. Tom closed his eyelids tightly and tried to sleep. He heard a metallic noise and felt Ekaterina’s weight press down on the mattress. She was sitting beside him, arms outstretched across the pillows. Tom coughed. She leaned into him, nudging his neck with her forehead. They kissed. Tom held onto her for a long time, asking himself if it was possible to feel so strongly so quickly for another person? Any normal male feelings of mere sexual gratification, conquest, and the urge for a quick exit strategy seemed to have vanished. ‘Are you afraid of what is happening?’ he eventually asked.
She did not reply. Ekaterina had drawn back, propping herself against the head of the bed. The towel rose and fell with her breathing. She watched him with quiet interest, something like how he imagined a scientist might study a laboratory rat. Then she took his hand. Her fingers played chase across cotton.
‘No, I am angry.’
‘Angry?’
‘How we Russians have let things come to this.’ Her frail voice was distant and low-pitched.
‘How we Europeans, you mean?’
When he was sure she had fallen asleep, he got up and stood at the window, looking out over bridges and domes glowing under a corona of red light. A gull rose on an updraft of air, wings gliding against the sun, sailing far on the estuary’s wind. He longed to feel the freedom of the breeze carrying him in its ebb and flow, to know that whichever way it took him, he could find his way home.
Over his shoulder, Tom could hear the rise and fall of her chest, sucking and blowing sounds through linen.
‘I’m going to have to leave’, he whispered to himself. ‘Leave this place.’ Then, looking down at Ekaterina, ‘Leave you.’
At that very moment, Peter Janssen received clearance from his commanders in the European underground to proceed with Operation Hydra. He had been fully briefed by his Spetsnaz counterpart on logistics and tactics during the journey back from Pulkovo airport, after dropping Ulrick Hoffman off for his flight to Frankfurt. Janssen’s commander, a man called Geir, headquartered in Norway, told him, ‘The assassination would be the starting pistol, just like the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.’
• ‘Our accommodation of President Babel’s desire to re-populate Russia exemplifies our Eastern alignment with the Islamic world’, says Joshua Meyer, Tel Aviv’s representative to Central and Eastern Europe;
• ‘Our vision for Europe and Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-tiered, and multi-layered commonwealth of partners and associates stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea. We will expand this empire of opportunity, transforming the various communities we reach’, says Nicolas Sarkozy, independent political consultant to the EU;
• In an interview widely circulated among the nationalist underground across Europe and Russia, Alexander Dugin speaks once again of ‘sacred geography’ and the battle for Hyperborea. ‘As I said in my article “The Hand is Stretching for the Holster”, this will be decided by war. The father of all things’;
• Russian nationalist guerrilla units bomb pipelines running across the Caspian Sea’s southern rim.
6.
Moscow has only just woken up, and Russians have only just started to recognise their identity. With every day, Russian nationalists are gaining more and more support across the country.
Four hundred marchers came down Ulitsa Marata, chanting ‘Russkiy! Russkiy! Russia for Russians!’ The columns bore their icons aloft, crowds coming together in the shade of unfurled gonfalons. Their opponents smashed shop windows and raided the Atrium shopping mall. The Bozhaya Volya, or God’s Will Movement, began fighting pitched battles with scattered groups of Leftists hiding behind their black balaclavas, each side beating the other down the whole length of Liteyny Prospekt. Two Blacks with White girlfriends were cornered by the Nekrasov Museum. ‘Blyat!’ the patriots were screaming, dragging them to the nearest bridge and throwing them off into the water below.
Alyosha and Alexei were in the forefront, standing under a banner with an orange snake clenched in a fist, giving orders and directing the action as they charged the Bloc’s lines. Nikita, wearing a black shirt in honour of the Hundred, was in the vanguard, leading students in linking arms and singing with Pamyat flags:
Vehicles were torched on Nevsky. Both sides faced off against the police, who met them in full riot gear, firing Tac 700 Pepperball launchers and chloroance tophenone gas into their massed ranks. Armed officers grabbed protesters in armlocks as they fled down Ulitsa Chaykovsogo. ‘We had tried to reason with both groups’, a spokesman for the police said later, when he was being interviewed on Channel 5. ‘But there was no sense to it, just chaos everywhere. We have a duty to the public to maintain law and order and that is what we did!’ Sporadic skirmishes continued in Zakharyevskaya and Tavricheskaya. Nikita was arrested on the Naberezhnaya Robespyea, trying to flee after the nationalists had successfully stormed the Left’s podium outside the university. Nikki’s head was pushed between spread knees, his hands cuffed from behind.
‘We are all Limonov now!’ he kept shouting as police surrounded the students in Tavrichsky Sad. In Ploschad Iskussy, Alyosha was using homemade Molotov cocktails against a police cordon. The FSB had forced VKontakte to shut down their social network. Rubber bullets whizzed. When the dogs were loosed, everyone scattered, clambering to escape. German Shepherds dragged pony-tailed girls to the ground, and boys beat the animals back with anything that came to hand.
At 3 that afternoon Grigori, accompanied by the Rector Valentine Bondarenko, Dimitri, Alexander, and Svetlana gave a press conference on the university steps.
‘Although we do not condone the violence, today’s events were completely predictable. Extreme Leftist factions, given succour by anti-Russian elements, have been assaulting and harassing both ourselves and our international guests from the start of this event. Many of our young people are being told lies about their country’s past, the reasons for its current political malaise, and the options for a better future. What occurred today was a short, sharp punch in the solar plexus of our globalist masters. Let me remind you of Dmitry Dyomushkin of the Russian’s Movement’s prophetic words: “Speaking about the extinction of the Russians… There will be no changes for the better for you if you cannot grasp this. No chance for you, or for your children.”’