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 a.s.sumed was the site of the shelter. A wider shot, of a bigger area, showed the river pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sessment, he came up with the same plan as I had.
"b.u.g.g.e.r 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 gym pis 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 Emba.s.sy, 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, though 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 ga ram 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.
"Mxnmmmm!" 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 G.o.d"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 b.u.m 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 Mghanis.
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 sh.o.r.eline 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 Fibrus!" called Sasha excitedly.
"Highest mountain in Caucasus. Highest mountain in Europe."
s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 b.l.o.o.d.y great t.i.ts."
"Precisely!" Sashsa beamed.
"This is what we would say kak dye siski, like twin t.i.ts." 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 Bibrus. The smooth b.o.o.bs 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 p.i.s.s about. I said h.e.l.lo to a few of the guys, then quickly sought out the OC of the standby 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?"
"n.o.body 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 d.a.m.n 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."
"Three components," I told him.
"Two identical black steel cases, roughly three foot by two foot by one. One box about eighteen inches cubed."
"Weight?"
"The big components eighty kilos each, the small one forty."
"OK, thanks." Bill made some notes.
"Tell you what," I said.
"When Sasha and I go in, WI get eyes on Orange and have to refer to it over the Satcom, I"ll call it "three heavy cases". All right?"
"Thee heavy cases," Bill confirmed.
"The latest satellite imagery suggests that they, or it, are in some outlying building to the east of the house."
"Then that"ll be the summerhouse."
"The summerhouse," he repeated, scribbling again.
"We"re still waiting for confirmation of exfil by Chinook. As soon as we get it we"ll pa.s.s it through." Then he said, "You and your pal had better brief the air crew. The captain wants to be on his way by ten.
The R.A.F had set up a temporary base in what was obviously a training wing a cla.s.sroom of sorts, with a blackboard, tables and chairs of tubular metal, and garish, incomprehensible Turkish posters round the walls. The only member of the crew I"d met was Alec, the co-pilot, who introduced me to his captain, a solid, fair-haired Scot called Dan. They had maps spread out over two of the tables pushed together, and were using rulers and compa.s.ses to mark them up, punching figures into a lap-top.
"OK," said Dan, inviting me into the discussion.
"There"s not much civilian air traffic over this G.o.dforsaken area, but there is the occasional night flight coming up over Grozny from Baku, down here on the Caspian. Therefore our aim is to fly a normal civilian track. Your target"s Sarnashki, right?"
"Yeah we"re aiming for an opening in the forest three ks north-west of the village."
"Roger. The wind"s about five ks on two-four-zero, so if we tip you out ten ks west, you should be able to fly yourselves in.