The Kremlin Device (32 page)

Sasha reappeared, scratching his head.

‘Private jet has just made take-off from Vnukovo,' he said. ‘Unofficial departure. No clearance from tower – no lights, nothing. This can only be Mafia.'

‘Can the air force track it?'

He raised both hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I have passed message. But you know, little co-operation between police and armed forces . . .'

‘These criminals,' I said. ‘D'you think they're Chechens? Is this a reprisal for our raid on the apartment?'

He nodded vigorously. ‘I think so. Yes. These Chechens will demand big money for ransom.'

‘When would you expect them to start?'

‘Tomorrow morning.' He looked at his watch. ‘
This
morning – later.'

‘Sasha,' I said. ‘I'm afraid a couple of guys got killed in the contact on the highway.'

‘Only Mafia!' he said, as if they'd been rabbits. ‘No problem.'

I saw him yawn and said, ‘Listen – you've been great. Thanks for coming in.'

‘It is nothing. Zheordie, I am sorry.'

‘Don't start all that again. It's not your fault. Off you go now.'

I ushered him out in a friendly way, and said to the lads, ‘Better get your heads down. There's nothing to be done for the time being.'

‘You too, Geordie,' said Whinger. ‘You look knackered.'

‘I feel it. What I'm going to do is bring a bed in here, in case Tony comes back on the blower.'

Two of us dragged my bed into the room. I took off my boots, but stretched out otherwise fully dressed. Gradually the place quietened down, but I couldn't sleep. Would the kidnappers try to use the bomb themselves? Would they have the technical capability to detonate it?

But my worst worries now were about our two missing men. I shrank from thinking what they might be going through. Much as I disliked Toad, I didn't want him hurt. I had to admit that on this task, so far, he'd pulled his weight and caused no trouble. As for Pav – still less did I want him to get beaten up. I clung to one small straw of hope. Neither of them had been involved in the bust on the apartment, so they could deny all knowledge of that.

But what were they to say about the bomb?

So far as we'd worked it out, our cover story – in the event of getting bumped – was that the device belonged to the Russians, and that we'd been moving it on their behalf. Toad had repeatedly assured me that every part of the device was anonymous and deniable: nowhere on the casing or any of the contents was there a single letter of Western writing. If he and Pav claimed to be ordinary squaddies, and professed complete ignorance about how the thing functioned, they might get away with it for a few hours. As always when someone is captured, their policy would be one of controlled release – letting out as little information as possible, as slowly as possible. The best I could hope was that they'd be able to hold out until we discovered their destination and got after them.

THIRTEEN

It was the telephone that roused me.

Tony's voice sounded incredibly close. Half asleep, I thought he'd flown into Moscow. Then I came round fully and realised he was calling again from New York.

‘I think I woke you,' he said. ‘Sorry.'

‘No sweat. What time is it?'

‘Here, we've got a quarter of nine. I don't know about you.'

‘Still dark. Wait a minute. Quarter to five. What's happening?'

‘We've found your missing Orange.'

‘Fantastic. Where is it?'

‘A nice quiet place called Grozny.'

‘Ah, Jesus! Chechnya. Just what we thought.'

‘That's where it is. It came back on the air ten minutes ago, and it's now proceeding westwards into the mountains.'

‘OK. Can you continue monitoring it?'

‘Sure. How about we update you every quarter-hour?'

‘That'd be brilliant. I'm going to get right on to Hereford, ask them to establish a forward mounting base.'

‘Eastern Turkey's where you want to be looking. Kars – somewhere like that.'

‘I bet they're on to that already.'

They were. It was just before 2.00 a.m. GMT when I got through to the ops room, but the place was up and running. The ops officer and the CO were both there, planning to launch the QRF.

‘Orange has turned up in Grozny,' the boss told me. ‘We'd been talking to the Firm, and we were expecting it. We've also been in touch with the Turks about using an airforce base in the east of the country.'

‘Kars?'

‘Probably. That looks like being our FMB. We should have that confirmed by eleven ths morning.'

‘When are you launching?'

‘If all goes well, later tonight. The stand-by squadron's squaring everything away right now.'

At the risk of stating the obvious, I said, ‘We're not certain where the target's going to end up. The last I heard, Orange was still moving.'

‘Yes. But we can only assume it's the Chechens who lifted our guys, and that the hostages are with the device. There's no point in hanging about. We're going to stage through Cyprus, so we'll get the squadron on its way. If the Turks play ball about Kars, the Here can change crews at Akrotiri, refuel and fly straight on.'

From that moment the Satcom phone was in continual use. At 5.30 Tony came back on to say that Orange had stopped at a point just north of a village called Samashki, fifty kilometres west of Grozny.

‘There's a river running east and west,' he said. ‘The terrain is hilly – looks like the foothills of the main Caucasus range. The site's one kilometre north of the river.'

‘Samashki,' I said. Somewhere, sometime, I'd seen that name before. ‘Thanks, Tony. Tell me if the target moves again.'

An idea had developed rapidly in my mind. The site was going to need recceing. The Russians were stipulating that Sasha should co-ordinate the hostage recovery. He'd told me earlier in the night that they didn't want foreigners crashing around unsupervised in their territory, and I reckoned the same would apply, although more so, in Chechnya. What better plan than that I and he should drop in together? A HALO descent.

He was a trained parachutist, but had never done free-falling. Therefore we'd have to go in tandem, strapped together under one canopy. As it happened, at that time I was one of only three tandem masters in the Regiment. Where the other two were, I didn't know, but I decided to try it on the head-shed, anyway.

They remembered Samashki in Hereford, all right. ‘Jesus!' said Dick Trafford, the ops officer. ‘That's where the Russian army murdered more than a hundred people. Burnt the houses. It was tactically pointless – just a show of strength. It became one of the most notorious incidents in the war.'

‘Listen,' I said. ‘I've had an idea about the recce . . .' I explained what I'd been thinking, and added, ‘I want to volunteer for the job. We can get down to it much quicker from here than you can from there. Why don't we do it?'

‘OK,' said Dick cautiously, ‘but who's Sasha?'

‘Major Ivanov, commander of Tiger Force, big operational experience in this region.'

‘It's possible,' Dick agreed. ‘I'll check it out and let you know.' Then he added, ‘We've made one bit of progress. The Turks have cleared us to use Kars as our FMB.'

‘Brilliant.'

I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, then went back on the Satcom to Hereford. This time I got the CO, and outlined my scheme. ‘The recce party needs to include a Russian,' I emphasised. ‘If we bump into anyone on the ground and can't communicate, we're buggered. The ideal guy's Sasha Ivanov, our contact here. He's a hundred per cent on side, and I've got to know him pretty well.'

The CO must have already been discussing my idea with Dick, because he agreed at once. ‘Don't get carried away, though,' he warned.

‘Has the squadron left yet?'

‘No – they're going in about an hour. You'd better have a word with Pat Newman. He's right here.'

Pat Newman, leader of the HALO team, was an old mate. ‘Hi, Geordie!' he said. ‘Stirring it up again, I hear.'

‘Just a bit. Great to hear you, Pat. Listen. I've been looking at the map. The best way to hack this is for me and my Russian colleague Sasha to meet you at Kars. I'm going to need a full patrol kit and a tandem rig. Can you make sure it's all brought out?'

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘I know the score. I've been fully briefed. Your kit'll be on board. Just tell the SQMS what you want.'

‘OK, then. Put me over, please.'

The squadron quartermaster sergeant was Larry Tompkins, another good friend. ‘Listen, Larry,' I said, ‘can you get your finger out?'

‘Might be able to. Why?'

I ran through a list of what we needed: tandem rig chute, two free-fall suits, two oxygen sets working off one cylinder, harness and clips for attaching Sasha to me, GPS, Satcom phone, camcorder and lap-top computer for videoing the site, kite-sight, binos . . . ‘And Larry,' I ended, ‘those suits. Medium will do for me, but the guy I'm taking in's a big lad. Six one at least, and broad with it. We need a large for him.'

‘Got it,' said Larry. ‘We're pulling the stuff out already.'

‘Thanks.'

I went back to Pat and asked, ‘How about timings?'

‘Depart Lyneham 0530 . . .' I could tell he was doing calculations on a sheet of paper – a habit of his. ‘Six hours thirty to Cyprus. Akrotiri at 1200 – that's 1500 local. Ninety minutes to change crews and refuel. Take off for Kars 1630 local. Two hours twenty, approx. Into Kars by 1900 local.'

‘So if Sasha can get me and him to Kars by then, the recce can go down tonight?'

‘Yes – it'll have to.'

‘And the squadron assault the night after.'

‘Exactly.'

Back in the kitchen, I found the kettle had boiled dry and heated up to a fearsome degree over the gas burner. When I wrapped a cloth round the handle it gave off a smell of singeing, and the first gush of fresh water exploded into steam when it hit the base.

One or two of the other lads were starting to come round. Whinger blundered into the kitchen, scrubbing at his eyes and muttering, ‘Fucking phone – it's never stopped all night.'

As if to back up his complaint the local line rang. It was Anna, spitting with rage. She'd only just got the message I'd left the night before. Her people were useless, she said, idle and stupid. Now – how could she help me?

The older you get, the more cynical you become. I couldn't help wondering if she was really that furious – or was she acting up a bit? Had she got my message hours earlier and deliberately done nothing about it?

Whatever the truth, she caught up fast. I'd barely finished outlining events when she said, ‘If it's Samashki, it's certainly one of the Gaidar brothers you're dealing with. You know the big man who was shot in the apartment?'

‘Of course.'

‘That was Aslan, so-called Keet, the Whale. His second brother, Usman, calls himself Akula, the Shark. He's been building a big house for himself down there near Grozny, a kind of fortified palace, in the mountains. That's the Gaidars' home territory. The three of them
are
the Chechen Mafia.'

‘Who's the third?'

‘The young one, Supyan, calls himself Barrakuda. That hardly needs translating.'

‘Are there pictures of this place at Samashki? Any air shots?'

‘The FSB have some, but they're poor quality. The Chechens tend to shoot at any aircraft that comes over. And anyway, the pictures are out of date.'

‘You mean the house is still being built?'

‘The house is complete, but there's still work in progress on the perimeter fences and some of the outbuildings.'

‘Listen,' I said. ‘We're going to hit that place – provided we can confirm the hostages have been taken there. Can you bring over any information you've got about it – the pictures, exact location?'

‘With pleasure. But I can tell you the location anyway. It's one kilometre north of the River Sunzha, half-way between Samashki and the next village, Sernovodsk.'

‘Say those names again.'

As she spelled them out, I scribbled them down in the notebook tied to the phone for message-taking.

‘Thanks, Anna. How soon can you get here?'

‘In an hour?'

‘Terrific. Do you have any photos of this fellow Shark?'

‘Certainly. There were some on the disk I gave you. But I can bring you prints as well.'

Already the Satcom was ringing again.

‘Geordie,' went Tony. ‘It's still there. Hasn't moved.'

‘Can you give me the co-ordinates?'

‘Sure. Coming up.'

I took down his figures.

‘I know where that is,' I said. Parroting Anna I added, ‘One kilometre north of the River Sunzha, half-way between Samashki and Sernovodsk.'

‘I'll be damned!' Tony exclaimed. ‘How in hell did you know that?'

‘A little bird called Anna told me. Seriously, any chance of satellite imagery on the site?'

‘I knew you'd want that. I started to check out orbits. It's looking good. We'll have a satellite in the right place two hours from now. Also I got a met report for the Caucasus area, and the weather's fine: frost in the night, clear sky, no wind – gonna be a beautiful day. We should get some great pictures for you. I'll fax them just as soon as I can.'