"Yep. I"ve got it on a computerised map screen. Heading south-west. It"s already five miles out from the location I gave you. You want to stay on the air till we see what"s happening?"
"Sure. I"ve got the map in front of me."
"OK. It"s coming up to a place called Vnukovo. Hey wait a minute. That"s marked as an airfield."
"Vnukovo," I said to Sasha.
"What is it?"
"Main airport for southern departures."
"Tony," I said.
"It"s Moscow"s airport for the south."
"Then I guess they"re putting it on a plane. Target now stationary. Can you organise an intercept?"
"What in the air?"
"No, on the ground."
"I"ll ask."
I put the question to Sasha. He frowned at the size of the problem, but headed back to the local phone.
"How far are you from that field?" Tony was asking.
"At least an hour. Our Russian contact"s phoning the police down there."
"Target still stationary. If it is Mafia, they"ll have a big armed escort round it."
"Precisely."
"There"s a major highway heading out of the city due southwest. Which side of that is the airfield?"
"Immediately to the north."
"That"s it, then. They"re on the field."
He went quiet for a few moments, then added sharply, "Signal lost. Wait a minute... no. Confirm signal lost."
"What does that mean?"
"Most likely they"ve loaded Orange into a plane. That would mask the transmission. Yep. It"s gone dead. I"ll come back if we get it again."
"Thanks, Tony."
I found Sasha glued to the other phone, talking hard, as if he was having to galv anise the police into action against their inclination. I left him at it, returned to the mess room and called Hereford again.
"Boss," I said.
"It looks like they"re being taken south."
He already knew that the moving signal had given out at Vnukovo, and had come to the same conclusion.
"What destinations does that place serve?"
"Rostov-on-Don, Sochi, other Black Sea resorts." I reeled off names that Sasha had told me, and added, "Word here is that the villains could be Chechens."
"Who says that?"
"I don"t know.. ." I hesitated, suddenly aware that I was on the point of dropping myself in the s.h.i.t by revealing our partic.i.p.ation in the bust on the flat.
"The idea came from Sasha, our main contact here."
"Chechnya!" went the CO.
"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. If that"s where they"re heading, we"d better scrub Berlin and start looking for jumping-off points further south."
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 pa.s.sed 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 Pay 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 b.u.mped was that the device belonged to the Russians, and that we"d been moving it on their behalf. Toad had repeatedly a.s.sured 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 Pay claimed to be ordinary squad dies 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 tight 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 this 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 a.s.sume 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 kilo metre 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.