The senior Post correspondent was over at the Kremlin today buttonholing Yeltsin lieutenants, so Yocke was stuck covering this rally of nationalistic Commie retrogrades, people who thought that the Stalin era was Russia’s finest hour. Yes, there were still live human beings on this planet who believed that, and here were some of them, waving red flags and posters with slogans. Some of them even wore red armbands, but the red flags were the grabber: to Yocke’s American eye the blood red flags looked like an image straight from a museum exhibit. That there were still people who firmly believed in the gospel of Marx, Engels, and Lenin was a fact that he knew intellectually, yet seeing it in the flesh was a jolt.
These people were obviously committed. Just below the platform four older men were arranged in a circle, shouting at one another. No, it was three against one. Yocke couldn’t understand a word of it and thought about asking the stringer what it was all about, then decided against it. He thought he already knew the answer.
Yegor Kolokoltsev was their guru, a man who could rant anti-Semitic filth that would have been too raw for Joseph Goebbels and in the next breath extol the glories of Mother Russia. As Yocke understood Kolokoltsev’s message, the Communists never had a chance to purify the Soviet Union and make her great because the Jews had subverted them, stolen the fruit of the proletariat’s labor, betrayed the revolution, sucked blood from the veins of honest Communists, etc., etc.
So now he stood sweating as the motorcade drew to a halt and burly guards jumped from the cars and began opening a pathway to the platform. Idly Yocke looked around for soldiers or uniformed policemen. There were none in sight. Not a one.
The bodyguards in civilian clothes had no trouble clearing a path. The crowd parted courteously, as befitted old Communists. And these were mostly old Communists, workers and retired grandmothers. Here and there the mix was leavened by better-dressed younger men, probably bureaucrats or apparatchiks who had lost or were losing their jobs under the new order. Some of the waving signs and red flags partially obscured Yocke’s vision of the arriving dignitaries.
The lack of policemen and soldiers bothered Jack Yocke slightly, and he turned to his translator to ask a question about their absence when he heard the noise, a sharp popping audible even above the sounds of traffic from the street.
An automatic weapon!
There was no mistaking the sound.
The crowd panicked. People turned their backs on Yegor Kolokoltsev and his guards and tried to flee. The urge to leave hastily seemed to enter the head of every living soul there at precisely the same instant.
More weapons. The sharp popping was now the staccato buzzing of numerous weapons, but it was strangely muffled by screams and shouts.
Yocke grabbed a handhold on the rail of the speaker’s platform and pulled himself up a couple feet so he could see better.
Four people with automatic weapons were shooting at the guards, most of whom were now on the ground. One or two gunmen were pouring lead into the middle limousine.
With all the guards down, two of the gunmen walked toward the car. They were dressed in the usual dark gray suits and wore hats. The crowd was dispersing rapidly now, everyone fleeing for their lives. Several of the elderly were sprawled on the pavement. One or two of them were struggling to rise.
One of the gunmen opened the car door and the other emptied a magazine through the opening from a distance of three feet.
Yocke looked around wildly. The stragglers from the retreating crowd were rounding the corners, probably running down the streets that led away from the square.
The gunmen dropped their weapons and walked away without haste.
No sirens. No more screams.
Silence.
Yocke looked around for the other reporters and their Russian stringers. Gone. He was alone, still clinging to the side of the speaker’s platform.
He released his grip and dropped to the pavement. The whole thing had been like a slow-motion film — he had seen everything, felt everything, the fear, the horror, the sense of doom descending inexorably, controlled by an unseen, godlike hand. Now if he could only get it down!
How much time had elapsed? Minutes? No — no more than forty or fifty seconds. Maybe a minute.
He looked at the backs of the fleeing people. The last of the crowd was hobbling around the corners. Some people had apparently been trampled in the panic; six or eight bodies lay around the square.
Yocke stood and watched the last of the gunmen disappear around the corner where the motorcade had entered the square. A half mile or so down that street was Red Square. The entrance to the metro, the subway that would take them anywhere in Moscow, was only a hundred yards away.
He was alone with the dead and dying. He walked toward the cars. The guards — he counted the bodies…seven, eight, nine. He walked from one to the other, looking. All dead, each of them shot at least six or eight times. Blood, one’s man’s brains, intestines oozing into congealing piles on the stones of the square.
The middle limo was splattered with holes, the door still standing open. Yocke looked in.
The big man was Yegor Kolokoltsev, or had been just a few minutes ago. Now he was as dead as dead can be. Two of the bullets had struck him in the head, one just under the left eye and the other high up in the forehead. His eyes were still open, as was his mouth. Somehow his face still seemed to register surprise. A dozen or more bullets had punched through his chest and throat. There was little blood.
Facing Kolokoltsev was another corpse. The driver of the limo sat slumped over the wheel.
The other two cars were empty. Empty shell casings lay scattered on the street.
Alone in the midst of the vast silence Jack Yocke bent and picked up a shiny shell casing. 9mm.
One of the weapons lay not five feet from him. He merely looked. He couldn’t tell one automatic weapon from another.
He turned and looked again at Kolokoltsev. Then he gagged.
He staggered away.
His mouth was watering copiously and his eyes were tearing up. He paused and placed his hands on his knees and spit repeatedly. He had to write this too, capture all of it.
Now the sensation was passing.
He walked, working hard at walking without staggering, without succumbing to the urge to run, which was building.
The urge to run became dire. He began to trot. Faster, faster…
He saw a narrow street leading away from the square and ran for it. People were standing on the sidewalks looking into the square, but he ran by them without slowing down.
Telephone! He must find a telephone.
“Mike Gatler.” Mike was the foreign editor. He sounded sleepy, and no doubt he was. It was one-thirty in the afternoon here, but five-thirty in the morning in Washington.
“Mike, Jack Yocke. I just witnessed an assassination.”
“Terrific. Send me a story and I’ll read it.”
“Right in Soviet Square, Mike. Right in front of Moscow City Hall. They gunned a big Commie weenie when he arrived for a political rally. Crowd there and everything.”
“You woke me up for this?”
“Gee, Mike. It’s front page, for sure.”
Gatler sighed audibly. “What happened?”
“They killed Yegor Kolokoltsev and eleven of his guards. Five gunmen with automatic weapons mowed them down.” The words came faster now, tumbling out: “It was the goddamnest thing I ever saw, Mike, a cold-blooded execution. First the guards, then the politician. I’m sure some of the bystanders in the crowd were shot too. Just their tough fucking luck. Like something from a movie. That was my first thought, like something from a movie. Something staged, unreal. But it was real all right.”