The Kremlin Device (33 page)

The last person I had to convince was Sasha. ‘Very big search, just for two persons,' he said doubtfully when he came into camp.

‘Typical of the Regiment,' I told him. ‘They don't like losing people. They'll go to any lengths to get them back.'

As to my suggestion of his own involvement in the recce, he didn't hesitate: as soon as he knew I was going with him, he was delighted to come.

‘The point is,' I said, ‘can you get us down there for insertion tonight? What I want to do is join up with the squadron at Kars – here.' I put my finger on the map.

‘Hars!' he exclaimed, aspirating the initial letter. ‘But that is in Turoktsiya.'

‘Turkey.'

‘Yes, Turkey.'

‘We need to be there by five tonight. Earlier if we can.'

‘Timing no problem,' Sasha said confidently. ‘It is three-hour flight, not more. Plane also no problem. We get small military jet. The difficulty is diplomats. Do they give permission to enter Turkish airspace?' He spread his hands and stuck out his lower lip.

‘Maybe Anna can help on that.'

‘No!' He bridled. ‘I arrange it through my own bosses.'

‘Think you can manage it?'

‘Zheordie – for you I arrange
anything
: even to become beautiful!'

When Anna swept in at 7.30 she brought good mug-shots of Usman Gaidar, aka Akula, the Shark – a mean-looking fellow, in his forties, with short, dark hair, heavy eyebrows, lean, hollow cheeks and a prominent jaw. In the photos his teeth and gums seemed to protrude, pushing his lips out – hence his name, maybe? Anna said the man was obsessive about protecting himself, and kept a private army of at least a hundred men to guard him.

She'd also brought telephoto pictures of the house he'd been building – a tall, pale building with a steeply pointed roof, set into the side of a hill.

‘It looks Scandinavian,' I said.

‘You're right.' Anna turned the picture round on the table so that it faced her way. ‘It was designed by Finnish architects. No expense spared. Marble floors at ground level. Fitness room and sauna lined with birch wood in the basement. Whole building air-conditioned. Bullet-proof windows. It's not confirmed, but we have heard that he's building a nuclear shelter in the grounds by drilling into rock in the side of the mountain and lining the cavity with concrete and steel.'

I came within a micro-second of making some stupid joke about getting a nuclear device for his nuclear shelter, but pulled myself up just in time and said instead, ‘The satellite imagery should show that, if the site's still fairly raw.'

When the pictures came over from the States, through the Satcom and our secure computer, they proved brilliantly sharp, and a perfect supplement to the telephoto shots. What the satellite revealed most clearly was the layout of the house and its defences. The building stood on a forested hillside inside a perimeter fence, roughly square, with sides some 400 metres long. The line of the fence showed as a pale gash through the trees, as did the single road running up to the house from a cluster of other buildings on the bottom edge of the compound. The villa was slightly off-centre – closer to the top fence than the bottom – and above it, towards the north-western corner, was a circular helipad. There was also another cleared area, nearer the house, which we assumed was the site of the shelter. A wider shot, of a bigger area, showed the river passing to the south of the site and, away to the right of it, the outskirts of Samashki village.

What caught my eye was an oblong open space in the forest, about two ks to the north-west. From its regular shape, it looked like a man-made field. ‘Here!' I said to Sasha. ‘This looks ideal as a place to drop into. A good opening in the trees, and far enough from the target.'

‘We land there?'

‘That's right – and walk in.'

So much was visible on the satellite shots. The telephoto picture showed that the pine-covered hillside was steep, with outcrops of rock among the trees.

When I invited Whinger to make an independent assessment, he came up with the same plan as I had.

‘Bugger the fence,' he said. ‘They'd have a job to electrify something that long – and where's the power coming from, anyway? It doesn't even look as if it's finished. You could cut throught that, or climb it, no bother. Drop on this football field, or whatever it is, and tab it in. Piece of cake. There may be a patrol on the fence, but I doubt it. The defenders are going to be here, at the bottom, guarding the approach road. There's no other way any vehicle can get near the house.'

‘I reckon you're right,' I agreed. ‘And when the time comes, the same drill for the QRF: drop on the field, walk in, surround the house and cut it off from its defence force. A couple of guys with gympis and a 66 should be enough to suppress anyone trying to come up the road. Look at these bends in the track – it's quite some climb.'

With the basic plan in place, I was naturally on fire to get going. Whinger and the rest of the lads went off to run the course. Sasha had disappeared to organise our flight, so Anna went with the guys, to interpret, and I was left manning the phones with Terry, the signaller. The sensible thing would have been to get a couple of hours' kip, but although I lay on the bed, my adrenalin was pumping too fast for me to drop off.

At 11.00 a.m. Allway came through from the Embassy, asking if there was anything he could do. I thanked him but said that we were fine, and I gave him an outline of the plan, keeping details of places and timings deliberately vague. When I asked about the international situation, he described it as ‘stabilising'.

The next time he called, half an hour later, it was a different story. He said that the Chechens had surfaced, through their representative in London. They claimed they were holding two SAS men hostage, and in return for handing them over, they were demanding not only a ransom of ten million dollars, but also the release of the Mafia players arrested in Britain.

The news made my stomach churn. In making their demand, had the Chechens said anything about Orange? I couldn't ask directly, but had to fence round the subject.

‘What did they say about releasing our guys? Where's the exchange supposed to take place?'

‘We have no information on that.'

‘Who did they make the offer to?'

‘The FCO.'

‘Who's their representative in Britain?'

‘He calls himself the Consul.'

My questions brought me no nearer the subject of the bomb. But surely, if the ransom demand had mentioned it, Allway would have told me.

Once again I had to contain my impatience and anxiety.

Around 11.30 I suddenly realised I was starving. I'd been up most of the night and had no breakfast, so I routed out some onions, fried them up, threw in a load of garam masala and turned a tin of beef stew into a power curry. We still had plenty of the rice we'd brought out from UK, so I boiled up some of that, and gave myself a solid meal.

I was in the middle of eating it when Sasha reappeared, all smiles.

‘Mmmmmm!' He gave an exaggerated sniff ‘Smells good!'

‘Have some.'

‘No – you need it. We have long journey to make.'

The Turks had come on side, he said, and we had permission to fly. Better still, he'd fixed an aircraft – a P33, a ten-seat executive jet used by senior military commanders. Take-off would be from the military side of Vnukovo airport at 2.30 Moscow time. We couldn't fly direct, but were to stage through Krasnodar, in the north of the Caucasus, so that the plane could refuel before the final hop of the flight and not have to take on Turkish fuel at the far end.

That meant leaving Balashika at 1.00 – and suddenly time for planning, which had seemed endless, had almost run out.

At 12.30 I put in one last call to Tony, even though I knew it was 4.30 a.m. in the States. He was asleep, but his stand-in, Cyrus, was fully briefed. He confirmed that Orange was stationary on the same site, and that the weather in the region was likely to remain unchanged for the next thirty-six hours.

‘You got a big high centred over the west coast of the Caspian, extending all the way to the Black Sea,' he said. ‘Predicted wind speeds, three to five knots on 260 degrees. Moon's three-quarter full. Moonrise 1900 local, moonset 0600. Looks like you'll have God's own view of the Caucasus range as you drop in there.'

‘Thanks for your help,' I went. ‘Tell Tony I'll call him from Kars.'

‘OK. And take some warm clothes with you. That place is six thousand feet above sea level.'

FOURTEEN

The P33 was noisy and cramped, with little headroom and hard, uncomfortable seats, but it did the job. There were two regular army officers on board, hitching a lift to Krasnodar, but otherwise Sasha and I had the cabin to ourselves. The seats were arranged in pairs facing each other, and for much of the flight we kept a map of the Grozny area open on our knees, discussing the terrain.

When Sasha started talking about the war he grew animated, cursing the brutality and incompetence of the whole operation. He'd been in charge of one of the Omon special units, and had done what he could to keep his own men under control, but Kulikov, the overall commander of Russian troops in the south, had gone round inciting officers and men to kill every Chechen they could get their hands on.

‘Not only Chechen people,' he told me. ‘One Omon unit attacked farm. They shoot fifty cows, kill them all. They set fire to cows' food – hay – burn down barns, destroy machines. It was all crazy, mad. What had the cows done to annoy them?'

‘Did you get to hate Chechens?' I asked.

‘Not hate them. Chechens ordinary people. Not like Afghanis. Afghanis fanaticals. Some Chechens good, some bad.'

As we flew down over the Ukraine there wasn't a great deal to see. The rolling wheatlands had been harvested and most of the stubble had already gone under the plough, so that vast tracts of black earth were showing.

The second leg was a different matter, however. ‘We go on the left side,' said Sasha as we re-boarded. ‘Then we see mountains.'

As we lifted out of Krasnodar, lying beside a lake in the plain, the pilot climbed slowly on a southerly heading, and soon the Black Sea came in sight, away to our right. Over the coast the plane made a slight left turn and started following the shoreline down, just inland of the water. ‘Famous health resorts,' Sasha said, pointing at spots on the map. ‘Sochi, Sukhumi, Batumi – many sanatoriums.'

By then the sun was setting over the sea, and on the other side of the aircraft – our left – it threw fantastic light over the forested hills which piled ever higher into the distance until we began to see snow on the peaks.

‘Soon we see Elbrus!' called Sasha excitedly. ‘Highest mountain in Caucasus. Highest mountain in Europe.'

Screwing round my head to look, I spotted two rounded, snow-covered humps, so high above everything else that they were still catching the last of the sun.

‘They're pink!' I exclaimed. ‘Like a pair of bloody great tits.'

‘Precisely!' Sashsa beamed. ‘This is what we would say –
kak dve siski
, like twin tits.' Then he pointed left ahead: ‘Grozny over there, behind.' He started in about the war again – how the Russians hadn't been able to make headway against the guerrillas, and had no proper military objectives, so that the soldiers took it out on anyone who got in their way.

He was still talking as the sun's rays at last left Elbrus. The smooth boobs quickly turned a dirty white, stars began to show in the clear sky, and night settled over the Caucasus range.

On our descent into Kars I wondered how the pilots would communicate with the tower. Did someone down there speak Russian, or did both sides talk in English? I never discovered – but we landed safely, to find that the Here from Cyprus was already in.

Tony's stand-in had been right about the temperature too. As we stepped out of our little aircraft, the cold bit. On that high plateau our breath condensed in the air, and frozen mud crunched under foot. All round the horizon frosty-looking mountains showed faintly in the starlight. Great was my delight when I found mates from the squadron, settling themselves into an empty warehouse with big blower heaters blasting from the corners.

There was no time to socialise or piss about. I said hello to a few of the guys, then quickly sought out the OC of the stand-by squadron, Bill Chandler, who'd got himself an office of sorts in a cabin at one end of the big shed. A scalie had already got his Satcom set up, and Bill was talking to Hereford.

As I approached, he looked up at me, gave a grin and said into the phone, ‘Yes. He's here. He's made it.'

When he came off the air, my first question was, ‘How do we stand on security inside the squadron? I mean, how many of the lads know about Orange?'

‘Nobody yet,' was his answer. ‘It's on a need-to-know basis. Obviously the HALO team are going to have to know. It's them and the Chinook crews who'll have to exfil the damn thing. I'm going to tell them at their final briefing. As far as everyone else is concerned, it's purely a hostage rescue mission.'

‘That's fine.' I nodded. ‘Just remember that Sasha, my Russian partner, doesn't know about Orange either.'

‘Christ! This is getting complicated. He's going to find out sooner or later.'

‘Not necessarily. If he does, I'll square him. But I'm doing my best to keep him in the dark.'

‘That's your problem,' said Bill. ‘Meanwhile, can you tell
me
what Orange looks like? You're the only person here who's seen it.'