The Edge of Madness by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

what they might do to him. Then, with a nod of the bonnet, they had regained the roadway at a point beyond the cement truck and were speeding away. Before long they had left the city behind and were out into the greener suburbs of Khimki, yet even here they found disruption. Huge billboards were scattered along the roadside like pine cones on the forest floor, screaming the merits of everything from Starbucks to IKEA, while the open fields that had once protected the approaches to Moscow were disappearing beneath a sprawl of ugly shopping malls.
    ‘Ah, the Wild West,’ Shunin quipped sardonically.
    Everywhere was being ripped apart and once more they were forced to slow as they squeezed into a road tunnel being cut beneath a development that would soon be a new mega-mall. One day the road on which they were travelling would be an eight-lane expressway that would stretch all the way to Sheremetyevo, but for the moment it was just another construction site and soon the presidential cavalcade found itself on a diversion that reduced its speed to less than thirty. The FSB guard was once more glancing nervously around him as the police motorcycle outriders pulled over all other traffic in the tunnel to give the convoy free passage. Amongst those vehicles was an airport shuttle bus covered in so much summer dust that the sign announcing it was out of service was all but obliterated; it sat glowering in the tunnel as the motorcade approached, its exhaust belching dark, impatient smoke. The first vehicles of the convoy snaked past, waved on by the outriders, but as the rest began to follow the long yellow vehicle lurched forward, as though the clutch had slipped, and veered towards the path of the presidential limousine, forcing Shunin’s driver to hit his brakes. Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of car horns and security sirens bouncing off the tunnel walls. From the front seat, the guard shouted in alarm.
    The breath was still leaving the guard’s lungs when the driver of the shuttle bus flicked a switch on hisdashboard. It wasn’t a standard switch but one that had been specially installed and led via a wriggling length of wire to the luggage compartment beneath the seats. There it met a shaped armour-piercing charge in the form of an anti-tank shell, the sort of thing that slices through armour plate to a depth of seven or eight times its own diameter. And that was the moment the shell detonated.

CHAPTER THREE
    Thursday afternoon. Outside Moscow.
    The presidential limousine had been supplied by a specialist subsidiary of BMW and was equipped with many kinds of protective armour. It was also fitted with electronic counter-measures that blocked radio signals in the vicinity and prevented any bomb being detonated by remote control. But the armour couldn’t withstand a direct hit by a shaped charge, and even the finest ECM on earth was worthless in a suicide attack. As the blast wave from the explosion began to force its way down the tunnel, a jet of metal penetrated the limousine, creating an overpressure that instantly killed everyone inside. Even if one or more of the passengers had miraculously survived the initial blast, it would have served no purpose. When the fuel tanks ruptured, what was left of the BMW turned into a metal-melting inferno. Not even the fillings in their teeth survived.
    Yet Shunin had. He’d not been in the presidential limousine, but instead had been riding alongsideLavrenti in one of the lead cars of the convoy. In recent years those who wished to see the President dead–and there were many–had grown bolder, particularly the Chechens, and there were several small armies of other separatists, too. Shunin’s life was constantly at risk yet he was not a man to cower behind the thick walls of the Kremlin. He refused to hide, so those who were responsible for his security made a habit of trying to throw his pursuers off the scent, disseminating false information about his whereabouts and