City of Ghosts by Ben Creed

Author:Ben Creed [Creed, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing
Published: 2020-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

24

Friday October 26

And so, at last, they came.

A dozen of them or more, yelling orders and waving automatic rifles, pushing and kicking militia officers to the floor. Rossel and Taneyev were on the ground floor with two of the most junior ranks, sorting through missing persons reports. Trying to identify the two remaining victims – the older man who had been castrated and the younger one who had, at least, avoided that fate. Winnowing out the impossibles – ‘too young, too old, too tall, too, no . . .’ They saw the doors burst open. A dozen MGB crack troops, followed by an officer holding a Nagant pistol.

The officer stood in the middle of the station and waited for his men to finish subduing the cops. It did not take long. Rossel stared at him. The man’s face was a sea of scar tissue that flowed over his left eye and up to the temple. The nose a mess, as if it had been held to a fire on one side. His one remaining eye was as grey as Magnitogorsk steel and swept over everything.

Rossel had seen the face before.

It had been a long time – almost a decade – but this was a face he had not forgotten, and never would.

You had to keep still. Motionless. Beside him, he heard Taneyev’s breathing quicken. Rossel put out an arm. It was too late. The older man was leaving the safety of the desk. He approached the leader of the MGB detachment.

‘No,’ said Taneyev. ‘No, please. I have a . . .’

A shot roared and flashed in the dark confines of Station 17 and Taneyev staggered. A hole had opened in his back as the bullet punched its way through his torso. He fell to the floor and lay there, wheezing and alone.

‘Sergeant Pavel Grachev,’ the officer shouted.

No one answered.

‘Find this counter-revolutionary scum Grachev. Get the others into the trucks.’

Amid the sudden movement, Rossel stepped towards Taneyev and dragged him into a chair. He slumped in it like a sandbag, head back, a small bubble of blood and air stuck to his bottom lip. Buoyed by his rasping breath, the bubble rose and fell almost imperceptibly, looking like a tiny but macabre Christmas bauble, of the kind his grandmother hid in a box under the stairs of her old dacha. The Nagan swung towards him and Rossel froze. Taneyev was trying to whisper something. A name – Artyom. That of his boy who played for Zenit.

He said it twice. Then the bubble popped.

Above their heads came a yell and a series of thuds – Lipukhin was prudent enough to submit but Grachev was crazy enough not to.

They, then, might be the next to die.

The MGB officer spoke again. ‘I am notifying all members, without exception, of this department of the People’s Militia, Vosstaniya Street, Station 17, that they are under arrest for harbouring and possibly collaborating with a reactionary fifth-columnist traitor to the Bolshevik cause. Anyone else who resists will be shot. I advise you to prepare your confessions now as they will be required in full and in writing.

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