The Kremlin Device (4 page)

‘Mr Johnson?' I said in a phoney, genteel voice. ‘I saw you, you poncified twit.'

‘Who's that, for fuck's sake?'

‘Geordie. I was behind you at the station.'

‘Never saw you.'

‘No, but I saw you. Who else is there?'

‘Dusty, Mal and Pavarotti.'

‘Four of you! That's everyone accounted for, then.'

‘Where are you, Geordie?'

‘In the torture chamber. They've got Whinger, Pete and Johnny. But listen – I'm going to call it off in a minute. Are they still doing food over there?'

‘Just about.'

‘Ask them to keep four dinners, then. We'll be across in an hour.'

Back in the control room, Pete Pascoe was still on the second screen, but one glance told me he'd got hold of himself and settled down: he was now looking quite comfortable. As for the first screen – there was Whinger, claiming to be an undertaker called Solomon Grice, and bombarding his detective with outrageous remarks. He'd always been a bit of an actor, had Whinger, and in situations like this he could crack an extra edge on to his native Cockney accent, making himself sound almost like a caricature of what he is anyway – a true East Ender. Throw in the horrible rhyming slang, and no interviewer has a chance.

When a second interrogator took over and asked him to confirm his name, he instantly said, ‘Hell of a price.' Only after a few seconds of blank silence did he come up with the second half: ‘Solomon Grice.' In the next minute he said, ‘Give 'em a chance' for ‘South of France', then, when asked where his father lived, he replied, ‘Ask some boffin.' Again he waited before completing the equation: ‘In his coffin.'

‘You mean he's dead?'

‘Course he's fucking dead. Been dead for twenty years, ennie?'

I looked at the nearest controller, who was trying to suppress a laugh, and said, ‘You'll not get anywhere with him. Not a chance. He's done this too often.'

‘You could be right.'

‘Let's pack it in, then. The guys are all doing OK. The rest are at the R.V. We might as well join them there.'

So it was that we piled into the Feathers for big plates of lasagne and a few pints of Shepherd Neame's Spitfire ale, while we shot the shit about how we'd reached the Channel.

TWO

The moment we'd got wind of a team job in Moscow, word had spread through SAW like a charge of electricity. Russia! The very notion had put the wing on an immediate high. The Regiment had never worked there before. In the Communist era, of course, the idea would have been unthinkable. For as long as anyone could remember, Russia had been the arch-enemy, the big, ugly bear on the eastern horizon, threatening the rest of the world with nuclear destruction.

My only personal involvement in the Cold War had been during the early eighties, on stay-behind exercises in which members of the Regiment had literally gone to ground on the West German border, opposite the Soviet and East German troops on the other side of the line. We'd dug ourselves in, camouflaged the shelters, and spent three weeks at a stretch underground. Buried on top of each other, breathing the foul air, shitting into plastic bags . . . It had been a filthy experience which had almost driven several of the lads round the bend. The plan was that, if the Russians launched World War Three, their front units would roll over us, and we could come up behind them, to report troop movements, direct Western air strikes and suchlike. Everyone had known that, if it happened for real, we'd be on a one-way ticket. So, what with that and the discomfort, the whole experience hadn't been very cheerful.

Now things were entirely different. As part of the programme of co-operation between our Prime Minister and their President, the Subversive Action Wing had been tasked to go out and train Tiger Force, a special unit newly formed to fight the ever-increasing menace of the Russian Mafia. With the rupert who normally commanded the SAW away in the Far East on another assignment, it had fallen to me to lead the training team and take it out.

I'd never say it to any of them, but the seven guys under my command were a first-class lot – seasoned all-rounders who'd each done at least five or six years with the Regiment.

The oldest and best known to me was Whinger Watson, whose laid-back attitude concealed his high abilities. We'd worked together in Ulster, Colombia and other hairy places, and understood each other perfectly. His nickname was slightly misleading, in that it referred to his habit of making deliberately stupid remarks, rather than complaining about things. That was one of his best features, in fact: he never complained, but always got on with the job in hand.

The others were all in their late twenties, although Rick Ellis, our best linguist, looked younger, being fresh faced, with curly light-brown hair already receding from his forehead. He had a very good brain, and had worked closely with the Det – the intelligence-gathering unit – in Northern Ireland. Maybe it was his appearance that caused him so much trouble with women. The thing about Rick was that he could never burn his bridges: as each affair petered out, rather than simply saying goodbye he'd keep phoning the woman or sending flowers, in case he became desperate for a shag at any time in the future.

Pavarotti Price's speciality, apart from singing in the bath, was explosives. He took great delight in dropping anything, from a bridge to an obsolete cooling tower – the bigger the better. A hulking six-footer, he came from a mining family in the Rhondda valley, and was probably the strongest man in the party. Sometimes, after a few pints, he could be persuaded to perform his party trick of bending six-inch nails with his bare hands. Yet he had one failing which he tried to keep under wraps: a fear of confined spaces, which seemed to stem from his background. For generations his ancestors had worked in the mines, but his elder brother had been killed in an old shaft; they'd been playing with some other boys when part of the roof had collapsed. Pav had escaped unhurt, but the disaster had left him with a horror of mine-workings and tunnels in general.

Another big fellow was Mal Garrard, a dark and rather quiet man who had originally came to the UK on a two-year secondment from the New Zealand SAS, then did Selection at Hereford, passed, and served for six years as a fully fledged member of the Regiment. For a few weeks after his arrival people had given him stick about his accent, pretending they couldn't understand what he was saying; but he'd taken it in good part, and had made himself well liked, not least because he was brilliant on computers.

The team medic was Dusty Miller, son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, much addicted to horses, racing and betting particularly: a compact, dark-haired fellow with a very powerful upper body, heavily into weight-lifting. You could see him coming a mile away, because he had a peculiar walk: he moved with his toes turned out, and rose on to the balls of his feet like a duck. Doctoring was only one of his skills; apart from anything else, he was a hell of a pistol shot, and often went out on unofficial rabbit-shoots around one of the training areas, blowing the heads off his quarry with some grossly over-powered weapon like a Colt .45.

Johnny Pearce, as I said, was as tough as they come: a fearsome kick-boxer and an ace mountaineer. No doubt his physical nature, and the many hours he spent in the open air, contributed to his ruddy complexion.

Last, but of equal calibre, was Pete Pascoe, the carrot-headed Cornishman, whose special skill was signalling. He, too, was an excellent all-rounder, his one defect being his volatile temper. In his first years with the Regiment this had been a real handicap, and he'd almost been RTU'd after he rammed a civilian car in the outskirts of Hereford. He claimed his brakes had locked and he'd skidded on a wet surface, but he only just escaped prosecution. Afterwards he had admitted that the fellow he bumped had been knocking off his girlfriend while he was away on a Squadron trip. Now though, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, he was calming down a bit and had become more reliable.

Our first action, when we heard about the Russian job, had been to put the team on an intensive language course, so that by the time we went across we'd at least be able to exchange courtesies with our opposite numbers and read Cyrillic script. Personally I found the language a pain, because so many of the characters were similar, which made words hard to read, let alone understand. But the lessons were enlivened by our Russian teacher, Valentina, a big, dark woman in her fifties, with steel-rimmed spectacles, a lot of teeth, and hair pulled back into a short pony-tail. Three times a week she swept in from London, gave us hell laced with smutty jokes, and swept out again, a whirlwind of energy. The only person who didn't like her was Pete: she teased him once too often when he forgot something basic, and although he didn't actually flare up at the time, for ever after he referred to her as BOB: the Bloody Old Bitch.

Lectures from a member of the Firm introduced us to the Russian Mafia. The main point seemed to be that it wasn't a single organisation like its namesake in Sicily, under the control of one godfather, but comprised a whole lot of criminal gangs battling each other for supremacy. Since Russia had converted to a free-market system, our informant told us, every kind of racketeering had broken out: by sheer power of money the Mafia had risen above the law and made themselves impervious to normal justice. The police couldn't control them, and corruption was spreading through every kind of business. ‘Once the disease had taken a hold,' the guy from the Firm had told us, ‘there was no stopping it. Now it's even eaten its way into government. Leading politicians are being bribed and pressured and threatened. If they don't play ball, they're eliminated. There's a real fear in Western capitals that the whole of Russia is soon going to be ungovernable.'

Within a week of the request for a training team, we'd set a timetable. A recce party – consisting of myself, Whinger and Rick – would fly to Moscow on 15 September and spend a day checking the facilities of the camp and training area. We'd return on the seventeenth and have three weeks in which to make final preparations. The whole team, with all our kit, would go out early in October.

Before any of that, though, the Russian course leader, Major Ivanov, was due to spend a couple of days seeing how we did things in Hereford – and as his opposite number I went to meet him off the plane at Heathrow.

I cut it a bit fine. By the time I'd put my car in the stack and walked over the bridge into the Terminal Two arrival area, Aeroflot's flight SU247 from Moscow had already landed and passengers with hand luggage only were coming through the Customs screen. By arrangement, I was carrying a white square of cardboard bearing the word
ACTIVE
in big black capitals, and I stood by the barrier holding it in front of my stomach.

In the end it wasn't needed, because I spotted my guest before he saw me: a big fellow, a good six feet, and broad with it, walking very upright. He had a wide forehead with mid-brown hair swept across it, a rather flat face, and a quick, alert look as his gaze swept back and forth across the waiting crowd. I also noticed a fuzzy vertical scar on his left temple. As he came towards me I had time to think that in the old days you would have expected a Russian officer to carry duelling scars, but this one was clearly the result of a burn.

The guy was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket that looked rather expensive, and was carrying a hold-all slung over one shoulder. As he drew level with me I raised my right hand to attract his attention, and said, ‘Major Ivanov?
Zdravstvuite
.'

He stopped, focused on me and said, ‘Sergeant Major?
Zdravstvuite
.' His face broke into a smile, revealing that his two front teeth were made of metal, and he said, ‘
Vui gavarete pa Russki?
'

The words slipped out so fast that I took a second to recognise them. Then I managed, ‘
Nemnogo
.'

‘
Khorosho!
' He looked delighted. We shook hands over the barrier and I motioned him towards the exit. As he came through, he fired off something else in Russian, and my bluff was called.

‘Sorry,' I went. ‘When I said
nemnogo
, I meant it. Only a very little.'

He smiled again and said, ‘Doesn't matter. I speak English OK.'

I tried to take his hold-all off him but he wouldn't let me, and we set off for the car. He walked fast, with a springy gait, and I could see straight away that he was fit.

‘Good flight?'

He shrugged. ‘The pilot – he landed it like a ton of shit.'

‘But you survived.'

He smiled. ‘It remind me of when I get these teeth. Hard landing in Siberia. Into seat before.'

He was all eyes as we walked out on to the third floor of the stack, past ranks of shiny new vehicles.

‘Cars!' he exclaimed. ‘Such types of cars!'

‘This is ours.' I unlocked the Passat, opened the boot and put his bag inside. Automatically he made for the right-hand front door.

‘This side.' I pointed.

‘Excuse me!'

‘Rassat,' he said as he ran a finger over the car's logo.

‘It's a P,' I said. ‘Passat.'

‘Of course! He is English?'

‘German.'

Soon I realised that, although he spoke English with fair fluency, he had trouble recognising letters, as if he'd picked up the language by ear, rather than by reading. I could see him mouthing words to himself as we passed the hoardings. I had to stop myself smiling at his accent, which was tremendously Russian. His Hs were very hot: he pronounced Os like As, and jacked Y sounds on to the front of Es –
profyessional
. He also made ‘kill' into
keell
. His L's were beautifully liquid, as if he were rolling a mouthful of vodka round the back of his tongue.