Arkady cut him off. ‘Is incendiary!’
‘It makes no sense…’ Arkady’s fist hit him square on the nose. Tom saw a spark of light in the back of his brain and felt hot blood spurt down his shirt. He attempted to stay on his feet, but a second swinging blow to the temple sent him staggering back against the bridge railings. He stared at the ground, trying to focus, stammering his words until Arkady took him firmly by the arm and flagged down the car he had used to chase Tom and Ekaterina down Nevsky Prospekt.
‘Get in!’ Arkady shouted, pushing Tom onto the backseat. ‘It is too cold to stand outside debating’, he said, slamming the door, signalling Bogdan to move on. All the familiar streets rushed by the windows. Arkady handed Tom a handkerchief. ‘Clean yourself!’ he ordered, ‘I don’t want you to bleed all over the upholstery.’
‘The girl’s got nothing to do with this…’
‘She’s one of you!’
‘No!’
‘Don’t lie!’
‘I’m not.’ Tom spat a loose tooth.
‘We know she attends street speeches by fascists.’
‘She’s just an impressionable student.’
‘Then you people should not be giving dangerous lectures, yes?’
‘I’ll leave if you agree not to harm her.’
‘This is a civil war, you think we care about whether you stay or go?’
‘You firebomb old men!’
‘And Blood and Honour stabs our boys!’
‘I don’t advocate violence!’
‘You are complicit!’ The car swept up to the kerbside outside the Astoria. Arkady brandished a Stechkin pistol fitted with a long silencer before the Englishman’s eyes. ‘You have 24 hours to leave, after that, this goes pop and your body goes swim in the Neva, understand?’ Then he pulled open the door and bundled Tom into the gutter. ‘And I’ll fuck your pretty friend just for fun’, he smirked, as the car drove off into slow, swirling traffic.
When he got to his room, Ekaterina was gone. A handwritten note said, ‘I have an idea!’ Tom stripped and ran a shower. As he stepped into the surging water, the phone began to ring. He ignored it, washing away humiliating memories with soap and bath oils. Later, he swallowed aspirin with a slug of Jack Daniels and massaged his creaking jaw. Arkady’s attack had been so quick, the blows so accurate. He thought of the power of the disorientating strike on the side of his head and the ease with which he had been thrown around. No simple heavy could have handled him with such confidence. He had been served notice.
Meanwhile, Ekaterina’s idea, communicated in garbled fashion via mobile to Alexei and Yuri’s Vulcari, involved a surprise attack on Arkady’s base in Ulitsa Egorova. They were joined by Roman, Tom’s taxi transfer from Pulkovo airport, and their new recruit, Saniya. Ill-timed and ill-equipped, they had rushed into action without waiting for Alyosha, or their new mentor, Peter Janssen. Bald Bogdan was the first to hear them coming. He went silent, waving a large hand, signalling the others to be quiet before picking up his SR-2 and rising from the armchair.
Unclipping the safety, Arkady, still nursing grazed knuckles, had drawn the Stechkin from his shoulder holster. Moving to the door, his head gestured for his sidekick to respond to Yuri’s demanding knock and unconvincing claim that he had a package to deliver. Others were reaching for the AO-63 assault rifles piled against the wall. Barrels were soon pointing, ammo clips strapped together with insulation tape.
When Bogdan’s hand swung the door open, Alexei and Yuri led the knife-wielding charge straight at the guns. The first volley punched holes through their faces, serrating arms and legs, body parts spliced clean off the bone. Saniya’s intestines spiralled like pork sausage onto the carpet.
9.
The future truly is ours.
They stood with crowds of young nationalists amidst a sea of banners in front of the city’s eternal flame, commemorating the lives of French partisans Sabine D’Orlac and Luc Dubois, whose deaths had just been announced on Russia Today. People held cold hands to the rippling red tongues rising out of the charred earth before them, passing beer bottles, strumming guitars.
‘We come here a lot’, Ekaterina was saying as a friend rolled what appeared to be a concoction of Russian and Lebanese blends, wrapped loosely in flapping cigarette papers. ‘It all started with Borovikov’s death in 2006, but now we know we have to do more than just protest.’ Some students stood, hands on hips, singing forlornly at the Moon, thin bodies weaving shadows in the firelight, hypnotic voices trailing off into frosty starlight. Tom recognised the chords of Ian Stuart’s ‘Gone with the Breeze’ and the familiar lyric being pronounced with a Russian accent.
Tom was surprised to see Vladimir, Ekaterina’s would-be suitor, mount the wall, blonde quiff waving in the wind. His slender figure wrapped in a black leather jacket, he cut a dashing figure in the moonshine. ‘Comrades’, he bawled over an ocean of pale faces. ‘I say it is time to serve justice on the mobsters that have robbed us every day of our lives, our parents’ lives, and our grandparents’ lives! They controlled our money, invited invaders to take our women, and they spat on our dignity. I say the counter-revolution has begun. It is time to take back what is ours and hang the bastards by the neck. Rossiiya! Rossiiya! Rossiiya!’
‘Vlad is one who yearns for martyrdom’, Ekaterina confirmed. ‘The example of Luc and Sabine will be strong with him forever.’ Then, after standing in a minute’s silent tribute as the scissor breeze rolled in off the Neva, army trucks pulled up and began handing out weapons to the young revolutionaries.
Tom watched his partner take a matte-black OTs-33 as they stood under the crisping tree branches, her hair silvering with hoarfrost, snowflakes settling on the dome of the Church on the Spilled Blood, looming broodily over the Moika. Tom squeezed her empty hand, but Ekaterina’s eyes were fixed on the machine pistol and its 27-round magazine, red lips folded in defiance.
‘Katja?’
She turned to him, the glow of the eternal flame preserved in her retina.
‘Another time of troubles’, she said, leading him towards the embankment where stone melted away into the icy water. Cars were moving at top speed, ignoring the falling sleet, heading in the direction of the Hermitage, towards the bridges over to the islands.
Tom felt he was wading through shallow water, giddy roofscapes distorted by winter light, merging apartments and government buildings. ‘Do you know’, she said, ‘200,000 White émigrés left Russia during the Revolution? Many of our greatest philosophers, historians, and professors were exiled from here, forced aboard a German ship called the Oberbürgermeister Haken at the Naberezhnaya Leitenanta Shmidta.’
‘Not killed?’
‘Lenin didn’t kill everyone’, she grinned. ‘Stalin, on the other hand!’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Berlin, Prague, Paris… all the usual places.’
• The Karaganov Doctrine of protecting Russian ethnic populations wherever they may be is enacted;
• Despite objections from the UN, Russia restarts its humanitarian aid for those refugees living in Donbass;
• Alexander Dugin returns from exile;
• Naval patrols on the Volga bombard Muslim settlements;
• Russia moves 50,000 troops and fighter aircraft to Sumy, close to the Ukrainian border;
• Spetsnaz operatives fight hand-to-hand with Mujahideen forces and Pakistani special services in Ust-Labinsk;
• Russia withdraws its nuclear and strategic capability to within its newly defined ethno-state borders, defended along the line of the Pechora and Ural rivers in the north and east and the Volga in the west.