December
James Steel
Firstly for my family, and secondly for all Russian writers.
Alex Devereux knew something was wrong.
The man, on the other side of the street, was following him through the crowd of refugees streaming down the darkened King’s Road. It was snowing and the streetlights had already been switched off.
He looked like a drug-dealer: cheap anorak, unshaven, long black curly hair. But there was something about his features that made Alex think there was more to him than that; a lean, athletic face with watchful eyes.
Alex stared at the man’s reflection in the window of an expensive antiques dealer. He showed up in the headlights of the stationary traffic—the Tube was now shut as well, and the roads were gridlocked. One reason he stood out was that this was such an exclusive neighbourhood. Alex could still see the clear difference between him and the crowds struggling along the pavement and weaving in and out of the traffic.
They were all wealthy commuters, well dressed in tailored coats, expensive fur hats, pashminas round their necks—the unlucky ones who had stayed at work whilst the power was still on and then missed the five o’clock Tube curfew.
The drug-dealer had been tailing Alex ever since he had left his job interview with the private defence contractor in Victoria. He hadn’t been a mercenary for many years not to
do some basic fieldcraft checks, especially when he left one of those firms, and he had now seen him reflected in the windows of three shops when he had stopped to check.
Alex thought through his options as he pretended to take an interest in a chaise longue. Either the guy was an amateur or someone was in a big hurry to put a tail on him. Usually professionals would work with a team of three or four on a target if they didn’t want to be seen.
Whatever the case, the question now was, what the hell was he going to do about him?
His immediate fear was that this was some sort of hit. He had been mixed up with enough unpleasant people since he’d left the army for that to be possible. His first instinct was to head for his house and get the illegal Glock 9mm pistol that he kept taped under his desk; out here on the street he felt exposed. He turned and set off again into the crowds; the man detached himself from the wall opposite and followed.
The freezing wind blew heavy flakes into Alex’s eyes; they nestled in his black hair, making it curl. He hunched his shoulders and stuck his chin down into the collar of his overcoat; he was broad-shouldered and stood out by a head over most of the crowd around him. He had a strong, masculine face with fine cheekbones. His expression was habitually thoughtful, but now it was distinctly dangerous.
Apart from his current personal threat, the country was also in crisis. It was only early December but this was already the worst winter since 1947: deep snowdrifts, railway lines frozen, coal trucks stuck in sidings and then, to top it all, the Russians had turned off the gas.
Such political trouble was bound to follow the global recession. Oil and gas prices had tanked, taking the Russian economy with them. With the instability, faction fighting
had erupted in the Kremlin. Putin had tried to return to his old post of President but Medvedev had opposed him. The Kremlin had been split and then Medvedev had been deposed in a palace coup. His replacement as President, Viktor Krymov, was supposed to be a bureaucratic nonentity acceptable to both sides but had become increasingly unstable and aggressive. He had suspended the constitution, declared himself President for life and banned opposition groups.
Other events had heightened the international conflict. Russia’s annual energy blockade on Ukraine had backfired, uniting opposition to it within the country. Both Ukraine and Georgia had been fast-tracked into NATO, Krymov threatened military action and withdrew from the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty. He then launched punitive bombing raids against Georgia, to punish it for joining NATO, destroying buildings and infrastructure in Tbilisi.
The EU reacted with outrage, imposing immediate economic sanctions on Russia. In response, Krymov called them fascist aggressors and cut off all gas supplies to Europe.
Around half of Europe’s gas supply came from Russian fields, and so power rationing had had to be implemented. The UK was badly hit because it had the most deregulated energy market in Europe; it had only a few days’ reserve storage.
No one could believe it was happening; it was like the 1979 Winter of Discontent all over again. Power was switched on from nine until five for business purposes but after that it was emergency services only. Petrol supplies were also running low as tankers struggled in the snow to get out from depots.
Predictably there had been a huge public outcry and angry scenes in Parliament. The PM was under a lot of pressure to do something: schools were shut and pensioners were freezing to death.
But there wasn’t much he
could
do. Krymov had been
rearming Russia, and his campaign of suppression against the media and the few remaining pro-democracy organisations in the country meant that there was no internal opposition. Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal meant that open war was just not an option.
Alex wasn’t sure what to make of it all. Like most people, he thought Krymov was a lunatic but equally he didn’t want the government to provoke a nuclear conflict over the issue. In the meantime a very Cold War had returned to Europe.
All Alex was focused on now, though, was getting his hands on the reassuring black grip of his Glock. He hurried past Wandsworth Bridge Road, casting a glance over his shoulder; the man was still following him on the opposite side of the street.
He carried on into well-heeled Fulham and finally turned left into Bradbourne Road, the quiet street where the Devereux family maintained their London residence when they were not in Herefordshire.
Well, that was how it was in the old days, anyway. Alex’s alcoholic father had died recently and he had been having sporadic conversations with lawyers—when the phones worked—about whether he could pay the death duties and keep the old hulk of Akerly, where his ancestors had been in residence for nearly a thousand years.
He increased his stride, eager to get home. He scanned the tree-lined avenue ahead, with its smart Victorian houses. Nobody was visible on the pavements but there was a new Range Rover, with blacked-out windows, parked over the road from his house.
There wasn’t anything unusual about that—it could just be a neighbour who had brought it up from the country to get about in the snow, but Alex hadn’t seen it before and the tinted glass was worrying. He grasped his keys inside his coat pocket in readiness for a quick entry and eyed the vehicle
warily as he came up to his front gate; he was now trapped between it and the threat behind him.
Two doors on the car popped open and two men moved out fast.
Fuck, it
is
a hit
!
He frantically shoved open the gate and ran to his front door. The key seemed too big for the lock; he fumbled with it, his back exposed to the danger.
‘Major Devereux!’ The bark cut across the street like a shot.
Alex froze; he hadn’t been in the army for years not to recognise the unmistakably commanding tones of Sandhurst English.
He stopped fumbling with the key and turned round.
A young man walked across the road. He was tall, his blond hair scraped into a short back and sides, and he had a beaky, aristocratic nose. He was wearing a full officer’s uniform: green jacket, tie, Sam Browne belt and all.
‘Lieutenant Grieve-Smith, sir, H Cav!’
The Household Cavalry—Alex’s old division.
If he really was army, then that meant the guy who had been tailing him was as well. It clicked now—he knew where he had seen that sort of face before: Special Forces blokes, scruffy but highly disciplined at the same time.
He glanced back along the road. Yes, there he was, standing side on to them now and scanning the street, one hand inside the opening of his anorak. The other guy who had got out of the car looked equally dodgy, in a leather jacket, Millwall football shirt and ripped jeans, and had taken up a position on the far side of street.
If the SAS were involved in this, then that meant someone high up wanted a word.
The Establishment.
What the hell did they want with him?
Alex had parted company from his regiment, the Blues and Royals, on bitter terms. Equally, his years of combat in African wars hadn’t increased his respect for the fresh-faced officer in front of him now. Someone wanted to be in touch with him rapidly and presumably they had pulled in this duty officer from Hyde Park barracks to make him feel reassured.
Alex recovered his composure and moved slowly back up the garden path towards him. Grieve-Smith walked across the road and they stood facing each other on the pavement. Alex’s dark brows drew together, fixing him with a level stare.
‘If you’d come with me, please, sir…’ The young officer seemed to think he had a right to command.
‘And why would I want to do that?’ Alex kept his voice calm.
Grieve-Smith looked uncomfortable. ‘You’ve got to go and have “a chat” with someone.’ He emphasised the word to indicate that it would be anything but pleasant social banter.
‘And who would that be?’
The lieutenant looked even more pained. ‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
The lieutenant dropped his gaze apologetically.
‘Look, what the hell is going on?’ Alex snapped.
Grieve-Smith shook his head, dropped his voice and leaned forward. ‘Look, to be honest with you, sir, I have no idea what this is about. I was just pulled off the duty desk to come down and tell you to go with these men here.’ He flicked his head to indicate the other two soldiers, then looked at Alex nervously, trying to share his disdain of the modern thugs behind him with another member of the old officer class.
Alex avoided his eye. He didn’t belong to that tribe any more.
He glanced again at the shifty-looking men. He obviously wasn’t going to get anything else from Grieve-Smith and he didn’t fancy having to outrun two SAS blokes. He took a deep breath and sighed slowly as he thought what to do.
‘OK.’ He nodded. ‘Maybe I’ll get a nice hot cup of tea,’ he added without humour.
Grieve-Smith looked relieved. ‘This is as far as I go, sir. I’m afraid you’re with that other lot now.’ He glanced at the men anxiously and then quickly walked away down the road.
The drug-dealer walked past him towards Alex without saying a word.
‘Bac’a the car, please, sir,’ he said in a terse Geordie accent. It was an instruction, not a request.
Alex crossed the road and got into the back of the Range Rover with the trooper. The other man got in the front seat and muttered into a radio in his coat collar.
‘Alpha, this is Charlie. ETA three minutes.’
The car drove slowly down the quiet road and then turned right and started winding its way around the backstreets of Fulham. Alex was thinking that they wouldn’t be able to go far in the mass of traffic jamming the main roads, but then he saw that they were driving down the lane approaching the back gates of the Hurlingham Club.
What the hell are we doing here?
The Hurlingham was an exclusive sports club with huge grounds: cricket pitch, croquet lawns, tennis courts and pools. It was an old Victorian place with beautiful colonnaded buildings; Alex’s family had been members for generations, but he hadn’t actually paid his fees for a year now.
A security guard saw them approaching and muttered into his radio. The large back gate swung open. They were expected. Someone had obviously been pulling a lot of strings. They drove into the area used by the groundsmen, past the snow-covered rubbish bins and mowing machines, under the boughs of a huge cedar tree and round the back of the main club buildings to the cricket pitch.
A Sikorsky S-76 executive helicopter was winding up its
rotors, blowing a cloud of snow out towards them. It was painted an anonymous white with no company markings.
‘Follow me, please, sir,’ growled the Millwall fan in the front seat. He and the other trooper got out of the car with Alex and, bent double against the rotor-wash, ran over to the helicopter.
They clambered in, slammed the door shut and instantly lifted off in a cloud of snow.
They rose up across the river, southwest from the Hurlingham. Alex tried to work out where they were going. After a couple of minutes he couldn’t tell anything as all power had been shut off so there were no lights on the ground and everything disappeared in the pitch-black and swirling snow outside.
The pilot muttered a few times into his headset, getting course alterations from someone, but over the noise of the engines Alex couldn’t hear where to. He checked his watch to track their flight time; after fifteen minutes they began to descend.
The beam of the landing light showed glimpses of snow-clad pinewoods as they swung round to land. The aircraft veered and tilted in the wind but the pilot rode out the gusts expertly and brought them down with a slight bump on a football pitch, Alex could see some sagging wooden goalposts in front of them with a high chain-link perimeter fence behind it, topped by razor wire.
‘OK, sir, this way.’ The drug-dealer opened the door. They both pulled their coat collars around their faces, huddled against the white fury whipped up by the rotors, and stumbled through the knee-deep snow. The snow got into Alex’s black Oxfords and melted into his insteps.
Once he was able to stop squinting against the blizzard, he looked up and saw from the aircraft lights that the field was surrounded by dark trees on three sides but that they were heading towards a cluster of low buildings.
The man pulled a large yellow torch from his coat pocket and shone it along the side of the building: brick single-storey offices of the cheapest possible construction. The windows were dark, the place looked completely deserted.
He headed towards a door. Alex glanced at a plastic plaque screwed into the brick next to it: ‘MoD Training Centre RG—8894’.
The man unlocked the door and shone the powerful beam inside, illuminating a corridor with cheap brown pine doors leading off it, each with a little Civil Service number plate. The musty smell of bureaucracy filled the place.