One of them leaned over him. “I’m Dr. Dan Evans,” he said. “I’ll be doing the operation, Mr. President. Hang on, we’re going to get you through this, sir.”
Carlucci smiled. “Dr. Evans, I hope you’re a member of the American Party.”
The surgeon looked seriously at the president. “Mr. President, today we are
Deputy Chairman of the FSB, Colonel General Avdey Ozols, glumly surveyed the large crowd in the courtyard of the Kremlin, the afternoon shadows of the Annunciation Cathedral and the Cathedral of the Archangel growing across the sand-colored bricks. Against Ozols’ emphatic warning, and the warning of the SBP security detail chief, President Vostov insisted on giving his traditional state of the union speech outside. Vostov insisted that the danger was gone now that the traitorous SBP sniper had been dispatched to the next world, and he desperately wanted to show his strength to the Russian people. What better way, he’d asked, than to give the speech outside in a large supportive crowd? Of course, the members of that crowd were vetted, a large number of them working for FSB and SBP, some of them armed, others not, but all wearing discreet communications gear with tiny, flesh-colored earpieces and microphones on their collars with battery packs worn in the small of their backs.
Suddenly there was a loud chopping and buzzing sound.
Ozols lunged his right hand into his jacket to expose the holster of his MP-443 Grach, the weapon small enough to avoid bulging out of his jacket, but in 9 mm caliber for stopping power. His fingers closed on the grip.
Ozols pulled the weapon out of its holster and cleared the fabric of his suit coat and began to bring it to point upward.
Ozols brought his left hand to the grip to meet the right, his right index finger inside the trigger guard. He aimed.
Ozols pulled the trigger once, then a second time, the weapon recoil making it jump in his hands.
As he began to pull the trigger on his third round, the SBP sniper rifles joined his attack, their bullets slamming into the thing.
It fell to the bricks, its rotors smashing into fragments, its right-side gun still firing. Ozols ran toward it, continuing to shoot at it until his magazine was empty, and the thing lay there on the courtyard bricks, smoking, its right-side gun finally stopping.
Ozols reached the helicopter drone, the unit’s bulbous front end two meters long and a meter tall. It had a tail rotor and tail boom like a normal helicopter, but was miniaturized and robotically driven. Where a helicopter would have skids to land on, this had struts that held the right-side and left-side rifles. The right-side weapon was a 9 mm automatic rifle, fed by a large magazine. The left-side unit lay under the wreckage, but Ozols could see it was a belt-fed machine gun. By the look of it, it must have jammed before it could get any rounds off.
The helicopter drone’s self-destruct explosives lit off, scattering pieces of the drone in an orange ball of flames that turned to billowing black smoke. Ozols had been blown backward into the crowd, several bodies breaking his fall. He regained his feet, checking that he had no broken bones, but there was a piece of shrapnel that had penetrated his left cheek and he was pouring blood onto his suit and shirt.
He turned toward President Vostov’s lectern to see what damage the drone had managed to do. A crowd was bending over a place a few meters away from the lectern. It had to be Vostov, Ozols thought. He made his way through the crowd and got to Vostov just as the sirens of the ambulances wailed from their staging area at the Ivanovskaya Square. The president had been hit, what looked like twice in the chest, but he was still alive, grimacing and putting his hands to his bloody chest’s right side. Three of Vostov’s aides were hit as well, one of them taking a bullet in the forehead.
Ozols looked back at the wreckage of the helicopter drone. It must have flown in from the Moskva River side and hidden itself in the glare of the sun, obscured by Taymitskaya Tower until the last second of its flight. He shook his head. It was damned lucky only the magazine-fed rifle had functioned. If the belt-fed machine gun had fired, it would likely have torn Vostov’s body in half.
The rest of the afternoon seemed to pass in slow motion, then blur to a fast-forwarded film, then slow to a crawl again. Ozols found himself in the prime minister’s conference room, his cheek bandaged and stitched, a new suit and shirt replacing the bloody garments. He was seated with the council of ministers and other senior members of Vostov’s staff.
