"And what"s that?" she asked. When I told her, she immediately came up with, "Well, we"ve got one of them too."
She looked around the benches and pointed to a tall, saturnine fellow with sticking-out ears.
"He"s called Zanuda," she said, "and that means exactly the same thing. He"s always moaning and groaning."
Like us, the Russians were wearing name badges, but I got them to call out their first names all the same. This revealed that we had three men called Nikolai and three called Sergei, as well as two Semyons and two Igors.
"Right," I said, moving along the ranks, "I know that really we should call you by your patronymics, but it"ll be easier for us if we give you numbers. You"re Nikolai Odin, you"re Nikolai Dva, you"re Nikolai Th."
I did the same with the Sergeis and the two doubles. All that, coupled with the discovery of the twin Whingers, caused a good few laughs and broke the ice.
Finding that several of the students were from Spetznaz and some from Omon, I deliberately split the two groups, pairing off each man with one from the other organisation, so that they"d all have to mix and communicate.
"It"s important you all know each other really well," I told them.
"Your lives may depend on knowing how your partner"s going to react in a particular situation. Learn everything you can about each other. Our team have been working together for years, and we"re still finding out."
Altogether the Russians looked a lively bunch, and fit: by the glow on them, I guessed they"d all been running that morning.
They were all aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, but they were noticeably bigger than us taller on average, and well built.
There were a lot of broad, wide-cheekboned Slavic faces, and a couple of broken noses. When I asked how many had fought in Chechnya, nine hands went up, and a similar question about Afghanistan produced four.
"Khorosho!" I said warmly.
"Plenty of combat experience."
When Anna translated, the remark brought out self congratulatory smiles all round, and I could see we were going to get on.
The only two I didn"t much care for were a pair who, I knew, had come from SOBR, the organisation that had once guarded the prisons and gulags. Sasha told me that, when the camps had broken up in 1992, a lot of these guys were thrown on to the market and some bunch they were, too. They had the reputation of being the nastiest of all Russian special forces, with their own line in brutality and torture. Certainly the two we"d got, Oleg and Misha, looked pretty low-brow and uncooperative.
As I handed round the course programme, written in both languages, I said, "OK, we"ll be starting right away, with basic CQB. But first we want to take you on the ranges and make sure we"re all together on our commands. We want to watch you firing, and see how you do things. This is as much for our benefit as for yours: we need to get to know your methods."
So we began, with magazine changes, stoppage drills and zeroing. Their weapon-handling proved to be good, although, as I"d suspected, some of the safety aspects wanted watching. We delivered a few b.o.l.l.o.c.kings on this score, especially after Sergei Two let off an AK47 round vertically into the air after he was supposed to have cleared his rifle.
Over the next few days, with basic range-work satisfactory, we began teaching the theory of house a.s.saults, starting small, with two-man teams, making the students work in their pairs, showing them how to go through a room and clear it. We then moved on to four-man teams, through an a.s.sault on a single room to one on a house with four rooms and a corridor, still using one team. Then we progressed to having several teams operating together: eight or a dozen men entering different rooms at the same instant. Next came multi-floor tactics, with guys bursting in through doors, windows and skylights, all their movements precisely coordinated by radio.
At first we worked in cla.s.srooms, using magnetic boards and coloured counters to demonstrate formations, but soon we started moving men through actual rooms, and finally took them out for live firing practice in their primitive Killing House. The Russians were full of energy and enthusiasm, and they fairly threw themselves into the work. But what they lacked was precision: several times, when left to themselves to make a plan, they managed to have one a.s.sault team come face to face with another in the stair well, and we had to drum into them the vital importance of logical thought in command and control.
All this was interesting and good fun a challenge for both sides, and one that we all enjoyed. But the trouble was that, for me, the days began to slip away at an alarming speed. In no time at all it was Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday. Our first week had almost gone, and we"d had no chance to recce either of our prospective nuclear sites.
The other aggravation was that on only the third night Rick did a runner. After supper he simply disappeared, and there were a few moments" panic before Mal, who was sharing a room with him, suddenly said, "I bet I know where he"s at. He"s gone to screw that woman he met on the recce. I heard him on the phone to her this morning."
"Not Natasha!" I said. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! I knew he"d taken her address but I didn"t realise he"d made contact again.
"Yeah laid himself on a taxi, too."
I wasn"t going to sit up half the night waiting for the randy b.a.s.t.a.r.d to come back, and I never did hear what time he rolled in. But after breakfast I lit into him for taking off without letting me know what he was doing.
"Can"t you see?" I told him.
"It"s plain b.l.o.o.d.y stupid. If anything had happened to you we wouldn"t have had a clue where you were. If you got picked up by the Mafia, for instance, the whole team would be in the s.h.i.t."
He saw the point of that, and apologised, but I still warned him that if he couldn"t control himself, I"d have to send him home.
Friendships quickly formed between the two sides, boosted on one occasion when Pete Pascoe, a great hunter-gatherer, returned from a run with a handful of brown mushrooms he"d collected in the forest. The sight of them brought vigorous protests from our own guys.
"For f.u.c.k"s sake!" cried Whinger.
"Throw "em out. Don"t cook them, Mal, or you"ll poison the lot of us." But when the students saw them they went ballistic.
"Beliye griby!" they shouted.
"Boletus mushrooms!" and rushed out to the spot where Pete had found them in search of more.
These were the best, most sought-after kind of fungus. Pete became a hero, and Anna confirmed that Russians are crazy about mushrooms.
"Weekends, at this time of year, thousands of Muscovites go hunting for them in the woods. They come out by train, car, everything. They"re like locusts, and sweep the place clean. But the training areas are out of bounds to the public, so we"re lucky."
The week also saw an amazingly rapid proliferation of swear words far worse than any Valentina had taught us. The strangest thing was the way each nationality began to curse in the other"s language: very soon the Brits had adopted yob tvoio mat (f.u.c.k your mother) as their basic expression of disgust, and several of the Russians were giving brilliant imitations of Whinger"s fir eking ell". They"d started calling Dusty "Dostoievsky", and Johnny, with his high complexion, had immediately become "Svyokla" Beetroot.
After supper on Friday evening, before the weekend break, the students invited us round to their block for a drink. It was a strictly private affair, as drinking in barracks was totally forbidden even to officers. But somebody had slipped out for a few bottles of vodka and some cans of beer, and camaraderie flowered in an impromptu sing-song.
"I hope to Christ this isn"t home-brewed," I said to Whinger as I downed a slug of vodka.
"Otherwise we may wake up blind."
I turned to Sergei Dva, holding up my gla.s.s, and said, "Not samogon?"
He looked outraged.
"Samogon?" he roared.
"Nyct! Almas! It is Diamond" and he grabbed a bottle to show me that it had a big white diamond, flashing reflected light, on its blue label.
Somebody produced an accordion, and it turned out that a man called Yuri had a phenomenal ba.s.s voice. To look at him you"d never have suspected it, because he was slim and wiry: the voice sounded altogether too big for such a spare frame, and seemed to come right from his boots. After a few pints of Baltika No. 6 - a powerful, dark brew he launched into the "Volga Boatmen"s Song", and his mates joined in the choruses with terrific growls of "Ayee och-nyem, ayee och-nyem". When Pavarotti hit back for the visitors with an impa.s.sioned rendering of "Drink to me Only", he won loud cheers.
As merry shouts shook the windows, I sat there sunk in the blackest thoughts. With a couple of exceptions, these Tiger Force guys were ordinary, lively fellows like ourselves. Too many people in Britain still had a Cold War image of the Russians, and thought of them as sinister, alien beings. Now, after a week in the country at gra.s.s-roots level, I saw that normal people, like us, had remained human in spite of all the horrors heaped on them.
They had their strengths and weaknesses, their good and bad points, the same as us. And an attack on Britain was the last idea that any of them would have entertained.
Nevertheless, the job had to be done and even as Sergei Three handed me another slug of Diamond I was saying to myself, "Right: the city centre recce"s going down tomorrow night..."
SEVEN.
When we next went to the Emba.s.sy, we left camp at the same time as on our first run, but this time we took just the black Volga. I hadn"t told the Charge we were coming into town: officially, we were going out for a couple of drinks and a bit of a bar-crawl.
Whinger drove, I read the map, and in the back sat Pavarotti, alongside Toad, with his lock-picking kit and two spare padlocks for the cover of the shaft. I"d deliberately nominated Pay as my No. 2 in the tunnel: I"d told him I might well need his height and strength, and that he"d just have to overcome his phobia. We were all wearing civvies, but Pay and I carried thin, dark overalls to wear on top of our other clothes while we were underground.
The weather had turned wet, and rain glistened on the tarmac. We soon realised to our cost that the car"s wiper blades were knackered, and created more smears than they removed; but once again the traffic was light and we made rapid progress. On the long, straight run in we turned off the highway a couple of times, waited in a side road then came back out, to make certain we didn"t have a tail.
No threat presented itself, and this time my navigation was spot on we reached the embankment without a false turn. There was a chance that the d.i.c.ker we"d seen before, or some replacement, might still be on station, so we put in one drive past cruising westwards along the gentle, left-hand curve of Sophieskaya Quay, past the pink and-white gateway, then past the Emba.s.sy, both on our left. To our right, across the river, the great buildings of the Kremlin were splendidly floodlit, and faint reflections gleamed in the wet tarmac of the embankment. A couple of cars came from the opposite direction, and a man and a woman were walking away from us, but there was n.o.body loitering.
At the end, before the bridge approach, Whinger pulled into the kerb and stopped in a dark area between street lamps.
"Right, lads," I said.
"Just to confirm. The time now is 2105. Dropoff will be in five minutes, at 2110, near enough. A couple of minutes to reach the stable. We"ll a.s.sume Toad can manage the locks in five minutes. If he has any trouble, Pay, you have a try. That means we should be in the tunnel by 2120 at the latest. Half an hour to suss it out. Back at the ladder by 2150. Pick-up at 2155 from this street, south side, east of the gateway.
OK?".
Everyone nodded.
"I don"t think the radios will work underground," I added, "but everyone stay on listening watch. Pay and I are One, Whinger Two, Toad Three. Our ERV is over there, under the bridge. Right, then let"s go."
Whinger swung round and drove back at a moderate pace. Now the gateway was on our side of the road. One car overtook at speed, and we watched its tail-lights draw rapidly away into the distance.
Whinger was slowing.
"Nothing behind," I said.
"Now!"
In seconds the three of us were out and under the gateway. I heard, rather than saw Whinger pull away behind us.
I led us forward into the dark courtyard, keeping to the right-hand wall. Above our heads, lights were showing in a couple of windows; straight ahead the little church sat hunched in shadows, jutting from the left wall of the yard, and the inner road swung past its entrance at the right-hand end into a second yard at the back.
From an intensive study of the plans I had every inch of the layout in my head. Five metres past the door of the church we"d come to the end of the building on our right. Beyond it, set back farther to our right, was a run of smaller structures old stables. The second little building from our end would be open fronted or at least without a door. The head of the shaft was in the back of that shed, behind a wooden part.i.tion.
Moving quickly, we came level with the door of the church, which stood slightly open with slivers of light shining through top and bottom. Women were talking inside, their voices rising and falling. We reached the corner of the tall building. There, just visible in the gloom, stood the low range, a few metres farther on. A dozen quick steps brought us to an open doorway.
The wooden lintel was sagging, and I ducked to go under it.
Inside, the darkness was so intense that I had to use my pencil torch. The beam picked out an old wooden part.i.tion of horizontal planks, extending half-way out across the stable. Beyond it the earth floor was covered with rough, half-rotten hay. Raking some aside with my fingers, I felt iron: the shaft cover. Quickly I cleared debris away from two padlocks the two we"d been shown in the photo, which were not rusty but coated in dust.
Clearly it was some time since they"d been touched.
"Stay in the doorway," I breathed at Pavarotti, and he faced outwards, on guard, as Toad went to work, opening the barrels of the locks with his levers. I held my torch-beam steady on his hands, wincing at every little click and sc.r.a.pe.
The first lock gave itself up easily after no more than a couple of minutes, but the second was more stubborn. As Toad fiddled and shook, Pay let out a sudden hiss over his shoulder. Instantly I doused my torch. Peering past our sentry, through the doorway, I saw two women come out of the church and walk towards the big building.
We let them get clear, then started again. At last there was a louder click, and the hasp of the second lock fell back. As I carefully lifted the cover its two hinges groaned. My torch, pointing straight down, lit up a square shaft with brick walls, and I could see at a glance that it was big enough to take the component parts of Apple. To make certain, I"d brought with me a piece of string thirty inches long the maximum dimension we needed and when I stretched it out from one edge it ended nearly a foot short of the other. That was one problem solved.
The disappointment was the ladder or rather the lack of one.
Instead of a succession of built-in steel rungs there were only two, a foot apart, close to the top of the shaft. From the holes and pits in the brickwork lower down, it looked as though the rest had been ripped out.
"We need the ladder," I whispered.
I unrolled the springy bundle from my bergen and made one end fast round both hinges. Then I pulled on my overalls, and I heard Pavarotti rustling as he too kit ted up.
"All set?" I asked.
"Fine."
"Right, then, Toad. We"ll see you in half an hour."
I lowered my legs into the shaft and eased my weight down the wire rungs, feeling for them with one foot after the other.
Fourteen changes of grip, and my feet touched bottom. As soon as I stepped off the ladder it went slack. I knew they"d feel the change up top, and that Pay would start down.
I heard him sc.r.a.ping on the brickwork as he descended, then felt him touch down beside me. The moment he let go of the ladder, the end went snaking up as Toad reeled it in. His brief was to seal us down with two spare locks he"d been carrying, then to hide up somewhere close by until the time came to release us. That way, if by any thousand-to-one chance somebody did come along to check the padlocks, he"d see nothing amiss. Toad would be in radio contact with Whinger throughout, and could call him in to lay on a diversion if anything started to go wrong.
When I heard the cover come down with a faint thud, I felt a shudder of claustrophobia run through me. If anything serious befell Toad and Whinger, we"d be sealed down here for the duration. Pay was obviously having the same panic, or worse: I could hear him breathing deeply and effing and blinding under his breath.
The air was row sty and moist, full of a smell of damp decay.
Our head-torches revealed a tunnel with a horse-shoe section, lined with bricks. The roof was just high enough for me to stand upright, but Pay, who was a couple of inches taller, had to crouch slightly to keep his head clear.
Somehow perhaps because of the colour of the Kremlin walls I"d expected the bricks to be red. In fact they were dirty cream, or had been: much of the surface was black with fungus or slime, and when I touched the wall beside my shoulder my fingertips slid along the wet surface leaving pale streaks. In many places individual bricks had crumbled or fallen out, so that there were frequent piles of rubble on the floor. That gave me encouragement; if the tunnel had been in immaculate condition, any tampering we did would have been that much more obvious.
I bent down and examined the floor. It was evenly covered with damp dust paste, almost the same dull colour as the walls.
There was no sign of any disturbance not even any traces of rats, which I"d expected to find. I saw that we wouldn"t be able to help leaving footprints.
We"d measured the distances, and I had them in my head: 160 metres to the river bank, 110 metres across the river, seventy five to the Kremlin wall: 345 metres in all to our preferred site.
When I went forward I was going to count.
"Ready?" I whispered.
Pay didn"t answer.
"Eh!" I went.
"Let"s go."
"You go!" he gasped in a peculiar voice.
"I"m staying here."
I could tell he was having problems just from the way he sounded. When I put out a hand and touched his arm, I felt him shaking violently. I turned the beam of my head-torch on his face and saw beads of sweat trickling down his cheeks.
"Get hold of yourself!" I snapped.