The Kremlin Device.
by Chris Ryan.
ONE.
With the tailgate open, the cabin depressurised and five minutes to run, we"d all gone on to individual oxygen. That knackered voice communication: for one thing, we had masks over our mouths, and for another the Here"s four turbo-props were deafening. We were wearing covert radios, with throat mikes on our necks and earpieces under our helmets, but we couldn"t use them until we were in the final stages of our descent, because of the risk that they"d foul up the pilots" con-mis.
Our PJI the Parachute Jump Instructor from Hereford -stepped along the line of bulky figures, giving our kit final checks. The hold was so dark he was doing most of the work with his hands, following lines and straps with his fingers, pulling on rings and clips. Then the red jump-warning lights came on, like half ping pong b.a.l.l.s one either side of the tailgate. Two minutes to go.
Our kit made us c.u.mbersome: GQ-360 chutes on our backs, oxygen tanks on stomachs, 1201b berg ens clipped upside-down on the backs of our legs and tucked high under our chutes, so that they rested against the backs of our thighs from knee to a.r.s.e. Our weapons, 203s or Minimis, were tied with para-cord to our left legs.
With that lot on I had a job to waddle to the rear of the plane.
As leader of the team, I"d be the first to jump.
Stars wheeled across the big, square opening as the pilot put in his final turn. I glanced to my left at Harry Price, known to all as Pavarotti, the hefty Welshman famous for singing in the showers and for the eyes tattooed on the cheeks of his a.r.s.e. He"d had them done one night when he got p.i.s.sed in Cardiff, by a Chinese bloke for a flyer a side, and the eyes were a bit slitty.
Now, under his helmet, goggles and oxygen mask, not much of his face was showing, but I could see the muscles in his jaw wqrking as he swallowed. He was thinking the same as I was: for f.u.c.k"s sake, let"s get out of this d.a.m.ned aircraft and on our way.
Anyone who says he"s not nervous when about to free-fall at night wearing full equipment is bulls.h.i.tting. All eight of us were c.r.a.pping bricks. A night-time HALO a high-alt.i.tude, low-opening drop is no picnic, however many times you"ve done it before.
After two seconds you"re heading for the ground at 125 miles per hour. You roar through the first thousand feet of air in ten seconds, the next in five, and so you keep going.
A clean free-fall is one thing; a drop with full kit something else, because of the risk that your load may move and render you unstable. Tonight we were jumping at 22,000 feet and dropping to 4,000 before we popped our chutes: a free-fall of ninety-five seconds. This way, on this moonless night, we"d come out of the blue or rather, out of the black as far as anyone on the ground was concerned: until our chutes deployed n.o.body would see a thing.
Our target was a clearing among the chestnut forests of the Cevennes where, according to the exercise scenario, partisan forces would be waiting to guide us ii~, meet us and take us to safe houses.
The captain of the aircraft had given the wind as eight knots on 260 degrees just south of west. We were going to jump four ks west of our target and fly ourselves in towards it. The sky was clear but the air was full of turbulence, and the Here kept juddering and twitching so that the guys were being jostled against each other as we huddled on the ramp.
Somebody gripped my right arm. I twisted and saw it was the head lo adie asking with thumb up if I was all set. I nodded and gave him a thumb in return. He raised a single finger. One minute to go. Cushy b.a.s.t.a.r.d: we were going out into the black night while he was safely tethered to his aircraft by a harness and long webbing strop. By the time we hit the deck he"d be well on his way back to Lyneham and a warm night tucked up in bed I caught myself up. Geordie, I told myself, stop p.i.s.sing around. You"re in the SAS, and this is what it"s all about. If you did the crew"s job you"d be bored out of your mind.
I pa.s.sed the signal to Pavarotti and glanced down at my altimeters, one strapped on either forearm: both dials were registering 22,000. I felt the angle of the floor change slightly as the pilot throttled back, dropping speed for his final run-in towards the DZ. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g my head round, I got a glimpse of Whinger Watson, my second-in-command. All I could see was the red light glinting off his goggles, but I could imagine the oath he was muttering to himself: "Firekin ell," again and again.
He and I were the old men of the party: at thirty-six and thirty seven we could almost have been some of the guys" fathers.
Time for last-minute checks: harness straight, b.o.l.l.o.c.ks clear of crutch straps, bergen in position, weapon secure, mask tight, gloves on. I reached round and bent the Cyalume light velcroed on to my bergen, cracking the gla.s.s phial in the middle and setting the chemical reaction going so that everyone would have a marker to steer towards when they followed me out of the plane.
Thirty seconds to go. Into my mind came a sudden vision of Moscow. For a moment I imagined we were doing a night drop into the heart of the city,. heading down towards all those redbrick towers and golden onion domes. I knew that the dark land below us was France, not Russia, and that we were only on a preliminary exercise; but Moscow was our ultimate destination, and for the past few days we"d heard so much about Spetznaz, Omon, Alfa Force, the Mafia and the break-up of the KGB that I"d started seeing red in my sleep.
Then I felt the head lo adie grip my arm again. I tensed myself and hunched forward.
The two little jump-warning lights were still on. Still on... Still on... Then the bottom half of each ping-pong ball sprang to life. Green on!
GO!.
All I had to do was tumble forward, head-first into the black s.p.a.ce outside. Lean forward gone.
As I cleared the belly of the aircraft upside-down, the slipstream hit my front with a huge thud. Head up, chest out... An instant later I was horizontal and falling in a good position face down, arms and legs spread, chest thrust out, steering with my hands turned up and out. The engine scream had been replaced by the roar of air blasting past my helmet.
So far, so good. Now I needed to get eyes on the other guys, make sure everybody was OK. Pavarotti had jumped a couple of seconds behind me, the others after him. I wanted to slow my descent so they could catch up. Bending in the middle, I de arched myself that is, curled my body into a banana shape to increase resistance to the air.
Staring down, I saw long streaks of haze between ourselves and the ground: a thin layer of cloud. As I hit it, drops of water stung my cheeks and forehead like fire. A second later I was through, and aware of someone coming down on my right, a black shape slanting in at an angle, monochrome, but more solid than the surrounding darkness. Another appeared, then another.
There was no way of telling who was who, but I was glad they were keeping a safe distance from me, facing inwards in a wide ring.
I stuck out my chest again and straightened out to pick up speed and keep pace with them.
Below us the wooded hills were crow black, not a light in sight. Then, at three o"clock to me, I saw a brilliant spark flare up: a Firefly, our reception committee. Now I could count six other guys around me, all more or less level. Good work. But where was the seventh? Maybe behind me, out of my vision.
For a few moments I positively enjoyed myself Hurtling through the night, keeping control, gave a feeling of terrific exhilaration. I was free as a bird, flying; everything seemed easy. Inside the thin gloves my fingers were freezing, but what the h.e.l.l!
Again I thought irrationally, Moscow, here we come!
Against the illuminated faces of my altimeters the hands were unwinding fast. My mind was making continual checks: I"m fine. Eighteen thousand. My position"s stable. Sixteen. Keep that posture. Left hand down a bit. Now you"re OK. It"s fourteen.
You"re good. It"s twelve.
Then wham! Some heavy object flew down from the side and slammed into the back of my right leg with a terrific blow. Jesus, I thought, a meteorite. No a falling human body. The impact knocked me out of the posture I"d been working to hold. Worse, it knocked my bergen from its central position behind my knees and pushed it over to the outside of my left leg. In an instant I was de stabilised still face-down, but spinning.
I knew I was in the s.h.i.t. A spin is the worst thing that can happen to a free-faller, the fate everybody dreads. If one starts on its own it may wind up slowly, and you stand some chance of correcting it. But after an impact of that kind, you"re away. The combination of momentum and air pressure is so ferocious that you"re rotating like a propellor, and that"s you gone.
I struggled with hands, arms and legs to adjust my posture, to regain control. But whatever I did, I just spun faster. For the first few seconds my mind stayed clear. Maybe one of the lads will see what"s happening, I thought. Maybe someone will steer in to give me a hand. Then I realised, No, they can"t. This is too violent. If anyone tried to make contact I"d smash them, or they"d smash me. We"d break limbs, knock each other out. If they"ve got any sense, they"ve pulled off to a safe distance. I"m on my own.
All this went through my mind in a flash. Then I thought, I"m going to have to cut my bergen away. Pull the cord to dump it.
Lose all my kit. But by the time I"d taken that decision it had become physically impossible. The centrifugal force of the spin was so great I couldn"t get my hands anywhere near my body.
No way could I reach my knife, still in its sheath on my right leg.
My arms were locked straight out, hands and fingers throbbing with the pressure of blood forced into them. They felt as if the skin was going to burst. My head seemed to be swelling, too, the skin round my eyes bulging, vision deteriorating. Geordie Sharp, I told my seW this is it. During your career in special forces you"ve got out of plenty of tight corners, but this time, finally, you"re f.u.c.ked.
I wasn"t exactly frightened; everything had happened so fast there was no time to worry. I just seemed to accept that fate had got me by the short-and-cur lies and I was going in at 125mph.
Obliteration, I thought. Fair enough.
In fact I must have been losing consciousness. Then an almighty jolt brought me back to my senses. It was as if a huge hand had arrested me in mid air. The thump knocked the breath out of my lungs, and I was still spinning, but much more slowly.
It took me a few seconds to realise that the auto-release had fired my main chute, and that I was descending more slowly, in a sitting position.
Instinctively I reached up and pulled on the webbing strops to test the reaction. Something wrong: a rough, grating feeling, too much resistance. Glancing up, I saw from the outline of the chute against the stars that the canopy was lopsided. Instead of being rectangular, it was all sharp angles. The rigging lines had tangled round each other in the spin. Instead of working down to a position just above my head, the spreader bar had become jammed in the twisted ropes.
Because it wasn"t properly deployed, the chute started spinning as well, winding me around like a fairground ride. But by then, thank G.o.d, my mind was back to normal. I saw my options clearly. I was descending much too fast. If I couldn"t free the main chute in the next few seconds I"d have to cut it away and deploy my reserve. Also I"d have to ditch my bergen, because its weight was too great for the reserve chute to support.
I held the strops and started giving violent twists, turning my body hard to the left. The third jolt did the trick. Above me there was a hefty smack as the chute deployed fully, then a twitch came down the lines. When I next looked up, the spreader bar had slid down to its proper place and everything was back to normal. I took a few deep breaths, thanked my lucky stars and turned my attention to the ground.
As far as I could tell, I was little the worse. My eyes felt funny and my face was glowing red hot, but nothing was broken. My breathing was OK, vision fair. There was the Firefly, away to my left. Because of the spin I"d drifted several hundred metres off my heading.
I"d just started steering back towards the DZ when I became aware of someone else flying in dangerously close to me. What the h.e.l.l was he doing?
"p.i.s.s off, you stupid git!" I shouted. Still he came at me, slanting in.
Belatedly I realised that, now that we were under canopy, the others should already be on com ms I switched on my set and immediately heard guys coming up to check in: "Seven, roger Eight, roger." Then Whinger was saying, "Come in, One.
One, are you OK?"
With a jab on my press el switch I said sharply, "One, roger.
I"m all right. And I"d be even better if some c.u.n.t hadn"t flown into me. Now get off the air."
After that close call, the rest of the exercise seemed pretty tame.
Our reception committee met us in the forest clearing. They"d seen nothing wrong, and didn"t realise we"d almost had a fatality; when they heard, there were a good few mon Dieus flying about, but I"d recovered my composure, and we let down the tension by having a laugh. We quickly established that it was Pavarotti who"d nearly written me off. I couldn"t hold it against him, because it turned out that he himself had gone unstable when clearing the aircraft, and he"d had a load of trouble of his own. The result was that he"d got separated from the rest of the group. He"d been flying back in to re-establish contact when the collision occurred, and he"d never seen me until the impact.
"Christ, Pay," said Whinger.
"With eyes in your a.r.s.e like you"ve got, you ought to be able to see in every f.u.c.king direction at once.
As we gathered up our chutes, Pay and I felt our legs stiffening from the bruises we"d sustained, and knew we were going to be pretty sore in the morning. But our French colleagues spirited us past the opposing forces and put us in position to take out the power station that was doing duty as the enemy"s com ms centre.
No snags there and after a wash-up next morning, we moved into the civilian phase of our exercise, which required us to make our way back into England under a.s.sumed ident.i.ties.
Use of the tunnel was banned, so we had to travel by sea, using either Dover or Folkestone. The rules laid down that we had to land between midday and midnight and we knew that the immigration authorities had been briefed by the Int Corps guys from Hereford. In other words, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were poised to intercept us.
We travelled up to the Channel individually, and by the time I reached Calais at about 6:30, after two nights with no proper sleep, I was knackered.
One of the first people I saw on board the ferry was Whinger, easing his nerves with a quick pint of lager in one of the bars. It wasn"t beyond the bounds of possibility that someone had put d.i.c.kers on the ship, trying to eyeball us before we"d even landed; so I went past without giving any sign of recognition.
With his Mexican moustache, Whinger looked every inch a veteran SAS operator, and I had myself a private bet that the watchers would pick him up. His face was deeply lined, with telltale furrows up his cheeks and across his forehead, giving it that strained, prematurely aged appearance brought on by years of pushing yourself to the limit.
If I was being honest, I"d have to say I looked much the same, with the odd grey hair appearing. Worse, my eyes were so bloodshot from the centrifugal force of the spin that I looked like Count Dracula after a satisfactory attachment to some young lady"s jugular.
One thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to get caught in the net and have to submit to prolonged interrogation.
I"d been through all that six years earlier, during my first tour with the Subversive Action Wing, the most secret unit within the SAS. That first time I"d been pulled in and put through the mill. Now, as then, everyone a.s.signed to the SAW had to be able to maintain a cover ident.i.ty for up to thirty-six hours: it was an essential part of our training, especially when a delicate task like our trip to Moscow was in prospect. It wasn"t that, as commander of the team, I felt I should be exempt from such indignities: just that I was tired, and the thought of answering endless questions gave me a pain in the a.r.s.e.
I"d toyed with the idea of wearing shades when I came to Immigration, but I dropped it, because all they do is attract attention. Instead, I"d gone for a white baseball cap with a long peak, green on the underside, that came well forward over my face. What with that, a blue T-shirt, jeans and trainers, and a scruffy little civilian haversack on my back, I hoped I could pa.s.s for the self-employed carpenter I was claiming to be. I"d also taken the precaution of loading up with booze, like all the genuine tourists and day-trippers around me.
I found myself a seat in the forward upper lounge and settled down. All round me people were laughing and chatting, kids screaming; but I pulled the peak of my cap down and closed my eyes, which were itching and aching, and the next thing I knew a voice on the tannoy was blaring out that we would dock in five minutes" time. I"d managed to sleep the two-hour trip away.
I had time for a wash and the hundredth run-through of my own cover ident.i.ty, just in case I was pulled. According to my pa.s.sport I was Malcolm Barrow, aged thirty-six, from Ainwick in Northumberland. I"d been to France to visit friends who"d bought an old pub in Normandy and wanted some restoration done. I had the name of the place in my head L"Auberge all Vieux Puits but, conveniently for me, it was very primitive and had no telephone, so no quick checks could be made.
Our cover stories had been created by the Firm our name for MI6 and were adapted from our own real backgrounds.
Because I"m obviously a Geordie, by my accent, my phoney address was in the correct part of the country: Castle Row, Alnwick. The first names of my parents were Derek and Mabel.
The telephone number I"d use a real one was that of my brother, who"d been primed to tell anyone calling that Malcolm was on a job in France. Often the lads got muddled when they gave the names of imaginary parents, and, under cross questioning confused them with the real ones. But for me it"s easier: being an orphan brought up by my Uncle Phil, I never knew any real parents, and so had no trouble remembering Derek and Mabel.
We were off the ship in short order. Normally these days there"s practically no pa.s.sport control at the Channel ports; but that evening immigration staff manned all the desks, probably for their own training, and certainly as part of our exercise. But as the crowd was lining up to go past the desks I got a lucky break. Immediately ahead of me was a stunning black girl in a lime-green top and skin-tight, lemon-yellow satin pants, lugging two bags of bottles in one hand and dragging a small, coffee coloured kid along with the other. I didn"t deliberately position myself behind her, you understand: she just happened to be there. The point about her was that one of her carrier bags was splitting.
"Eh," I went, "watch yourself. You"re about to lose a few bottles."
I bent down, picked up the child and held it on my hip a boy, by the look of him.
"What"s the matter?" she said sharply.
"I"m OK."
Probably she thought I was trying to pick her up. Maybe she didn"t fancy my fiery eyeb.a.l.l.s.
"No, really," I said, "it"s no bother."
A second later we were side-by-side in the immigration queue, looking like any other couple coming back from a holiday. She smelt of lemon, too: lemon pants, lemon scent.
Nice.
She was glaring at me and I saw that she was really very pretty, with a wide mouth and big hazel eyes. She looked so suspicious that I couldn"t help smiling.
"I"ve got a kid of my own," I said.
"Older than him, but much the same. It"s quite a way to carry him. Maybe you can take my pa.s.sport and hand it over. How"s that?"
"It"s a deal." She relented and gave a dazzlingly white smile: "What"s your name?"
"Malcolm. Mal."
"OK. I"mJane."
We closed on the cubicle as a pair, and the short, sandyhaired guy in occupation was so riveted by her cleavage that he scarely got his eyes on our doc.u.ments or on me. In a couple of seconds we were through and waltzing through the Customs hall.
Glancing back, I saw Whinger in another of the queues, still on the wrong side of the barrier.
As soon as we were clear, I said, "Thanks. Where would you like him taken?"
"We"re on the train."
"OK. This way."
When I sneaked another glance behind me I saw that Whinger had been rumbled: the man on the desk had stopped him, poor b.u.g.g.e.r, and called in a superior.
We started walking again and I said, "Where are you going?"
"London. Don"t tell me you"re coming as well?"