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 a.s.signment, 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-cla.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 s.h.a.g 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 s.p.a.ces, 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. Pay 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, pa.s.sed, 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 b.a.l.l.s of his feet like a duck.
Doctoring was only one of his skills; apart from anything else, he was a h.e.l.l 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 b.u.mped 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 steelrinimed 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 h.e.l.l laced with s.m.u.tty 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 b.l.o.o.d.y Old b.i.t.c.h.
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 G.o.dfather, 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 my seW 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 5U247 from Moscow had already landed and pa.s.sengers 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 s.h.i.t."
"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 Pa.s.sat, opened the boot and put his bag inside. Automatically he made for the right-hand front door.
"This side." I pointed.
"Excuse me!"
"Ra.s.sat," he said as he ran a finger over the car"s logo.
"It"s a P," I said.
"Pa.s.sat."
"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 pa.s.sed the h.o.a.rdings. I had to stop myself smiling at his accent, which was tremendously Russian. His Hs were very hot: he p.r.o.nounced Os like As, and jacked Y sounds on to the front of Es - prafyessional. He also made "kill" into keen. His L"s were beautifully liquid, as if he were rolling a mouthful of vodka round the back of his tongue.
In a few minutes we were heading west on the M4.
"Your first time in the West?"
"How come you speak English so well?"
"I learn in school. Also from American attached to our unit."
"I see. Can I call you Alexander?"
"Sasha, please. Sasha is small name of Alexander. The diminution. Your name is George?"
"Geordie. That"s a kind of diminutive, as well."
"Khorosho! And second name?"
"Sharp."
"That is family name. I mean patronymic."
"What"s that?"
"Your father name. My father is Va.s.sily. So I am Aleksandr Va.s.silyevitch Ivanov. Your father is.
"Was. Michael, I think."
"You think? You don"t know?"
"I never knew him."
"I am sorry. Well anyway, you are Geordie Mikhaiovitch."
His accent made him p.r.o.nounce my name "Zheordie", but who was I to complain? His English might be fractured, but at least he could get along in it whereas my Russian was limited to about twenty words.
Already I liked his enthusiasm, the keen interest he took in everything he saw for instance, the surface of the motorway.
"This street!" he said.
"He is vary good. Our streets are full of holes. Cars soon break. The suspenders always breaking."
Another thing that fascinated him was the smallness of the suburban houses, and their gardens.
"How many families live in such a house?" he asked, pointing at a row.
"Those are what we call semis semidetached, two joined together. Two front doors, you see. Probably one family in each side."
"In Russia we have all big house. Not like this." He saw me glance across and said, "Apartment blocks. Fifteen, twenty pieces high. These are like izbas."
"What"s that?"
"Izba is old house in the country. Peasant house."
"A cottage?"
"Yes, but very old. And such a house .. ." He gestured at a thirties villa standing in a large garden.
"This belongs to government?"
"No, no. I"m sure it"s private. A private individual. I think I read somewhere that you can buy houses in Russia now.
"Yes it is just starting."
"And land? Could you buy a farm, for instance?"
"By no means. No land can be sold, except for gardens."
The afternoon traffic was light and the fast lane was often clear, but I kept my speed down to eighty and let the BMWs whip past. I explained the system of number-plates: how S indicated the current year, just started in August, that next autumn there"d be a scramble for Ts, and that freaks paid huge sums for special numbers. Just at the right moment to ill.u.s.trate my point, we were overtaken by a h.e.l.l-driven Peugeot 205 with the number PiNTA.
We started to compare British and Russian special forces, and I asked about the base at Balashika.
"It is home of our famous Dzerzhinsky division. That belongs to Ministry of Interior. They have many facilities at Balashika.
Beeg strelbilshze."
"Barracks?"
"Nyet. Barracks is kazarma. Strelbilshze is ranges. Beeg ranges, beeg training area. Between town and forest. Town this side, forest this side. Only thirty kilometres from Moscow, to the east. All behind concrete fences."
"Fences?"
"Walls. Concrete walls, two metres tall. From outside you see nothing."
When I brought up the subject of the Mafia, he instantly became indignant and twisted round in his seat to look at me.
"They keen everybody! Half the population has become what we call vor v zakone. That means "thief in the law". In other words, creeminals.
"They keen businessmen, bank managers, property men anyone. Last year they even kill Larisa Nechayeva!"
"Who?"
"Nechayeva? Boss of Spartak football club. They shoot her in her dacha, her country house. Another woman with her. And why? Beecause she refused to pay them money. Also they kill Valentin Sych, ice hockey president."
"What"s the motive?" I said.
"Why kill all these different kinds of people?"
"Marney!" Sasha held up his right hand, rubbing thumb and forefinger together.
"Marney, marney, marney! Everyone wants more. Always US dollars. Russian money no good. You know how we call it? Deregannye den gi or deregannye rubli. That means wooden money, wooden roubles. Throw it in the stove!"
"But you"ve just had a revaluation. Didn"t they divide by a thousand?"
"Konechno. Of course. Before, it was seven thousand roubles to one dollar. Now it is seven. But what is the difference? Prices are still crazy. No change."
"These murders who"s carrying them out?"