The Kremlin Device

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 bum 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 shoreline 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."

Screwing 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 bloody great tits."

"Precisely!" Sashsa beamed.

"This is what we would say kak dye siski, like twin tits." 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 boobs 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 piss about. I said hello 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?"

"Nobody 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 damn 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 pass 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 classroom 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 compasses 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 godforsaken 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.

I nodded.

"That'd be fine."

"Good. That'll keep us well clear of Grozny. So…" He stood up and stretched before running through a quick recap.

"We go out on zero-eight-four and hold that heading till we cross the civilian track from Baku. Then we turn left on to two-eight-eight and head up between Grozny and Ordzhonikidze. Our marker point for the turn is this peak here, Dyltydag. It's over four thousand metres and fairly isolated, so we should pick it out all right but if we can't, the computer will hack it."

"What height will we be flying at?"

"Twenty-eight thousand. You'll want plenty of clothes on.

I nodded again, wondering at the sight of all those peaks on the map a range running for two or three hundred miles, northwest to south-east, with numerous 15,000-footers among them.

We were going to fly right over the whole lot. All I asked was, "How long will it take to get there?"

Alec did a few more calculations and came up with, "One hour five to the turn, then twenty-five minutes to the DZ overhead. It should be no problem to get you there. It's not you that's bugging us, though."

"What is it, then?"

"The exfil. Two Chinooks are on their way from Cyprus, and we're trying to work out a way of getting them through this bloody range of mountains. It's a hell of a proposition, I can tell you. Even if we put extra fuel forward, right on the border, it's still a fearsome distance to anyone going in low level."

"What about coming from the other side?" I suggested.

"From Russia?"

"Yeah. Wouldn't that be a better proposition? The intervening terrain doesn't look nearly so high."

"We're working on it. But we don't have clearance from the Russians yet from any direction."

"Call Anna."

"Anna?"

"The woman who's been doing our liaison in Moscow. She's shit-hot. She'll fix anything. Colonel Anna Gerasimova, FSB."

"Sorry, mate what's that?"

"The Federal Security Bureau, part of the old KGB, hived off, I saw the guy giving me an odd look, so I said sharply, "Write her name down, and the number. She may not be in the barracks flow, but she'll be there first thing in the morning. You'll get her on our Satcom link."

"It's bloody horrible being the passenger," I warned Sasha, looking down at the tandem rig laid out on the floor, 'because you've got no control."

"You tell me," he said cheerfiully.

"I do it."

We'd already had some practices during the morning, back at Balashika, but this was a fill-scale dress rehearsal with all our kit on. The two PJIs who were coming with us fitted Sasha into his webbing harness, with hooks at the shoulders and at the waist, linked him to my own harness and pulled him in tight against my front, with both our full berg ens strapped to the front of his legs and a single oxygen cylinder on the outside of my left thigh. Trussed together like this, carrying a lot of weight, we found it almost impossible to walk.

"Let's go through the motions again," I said.

"As the plane approaches the DZ, we move to the edge of the deck. Let's say it's that line on the floor. Go on, then."

Slowly, awkwardly, moving our legs in unison, we shuffled the short distance to the line.

"OK. Now we're waiting for the two green lights on either side of the opening." I pointed outwards at head level, right and left.

"When we get them, and a signal from the head lo adie we just lean forward together and topple out. After that, you don't need to do anything except hold the same position. Keep your hands crossed over your chest, like you've got them now. All right?"

Sasha nodded.

"Once we're under canopy, we can take off our masks and let them hang. Then I'll slacken off the straps so that you slide down, about this much." I held my hands a foot apart.

"That means your feet will be lower than mine, so they'll touch the ground first. Just as we're coming in to land, I'll tell you to start walking. At first you'll be walking in the air, then on the deck.

OK?"

He nodded.

Without changing my voice I went on, "There are two other things you need to know. First, if our chute fails to open, cross your legs and keep them there."

"And why?"

"So they can unscrew you from the ground."

He stared at me, and I went on relentlessly, "The other thing is, keep your right hand up."

"Why that?"

"So you don't break your watch when you go in."

At last he smiled and aimed a gentle punch at me. Outwardly he seemed pretty calm, but perhaps not, because he kept sliding off for sessions in the bog.

Meanwhile, I was sorting the kit they'd brought us and repacking it into my bergen. They'd given us plenty of warm clothes, including two free-fall Goretex suits with Thinsulate linings: when zipped together, the jackets and trousers gave us a perfectly windproof outer layer. There were also a couple of sweaters apiece, thermal silk long johns and long-armed vests, and any amount of boil-in-the-bag meals, which we could eat cold if necessary. If all went well, we'd be on the ground for less than thirty-six hours, so I cut down our load as far as I dared, as the combined weight of our essential kit was already formidable.

I had a 203, with eight spare thirty-round mags and two grenades, plus Sig, spare mags, knife, Satcom, GPS, covert radio, kite-sight, binoculars, fireflies, water bottles sleeping bag, bivvy bag and cam nets. A lot of the heaviest stuff, like the magazines, went into the pouches on my webbing, but there was still enough to fill a bergen. Sasha had his Gepard and spare mags, plus a pistol and ammunition.

At 9:30 p.m. I went for a final briefing with Bill Chandler.

The met forecasts were unchanged. Orange hadn't moved: the satellite was still getting its signal.

"As far as they can tell, it's not in the main house," Bill told me.

"If it was inside a big structure, they probably wouldn't hear it. It seems to be about a hundred metres east of the building."

"OK," I said.

"As soon as we're on site I'll call you and let you know what we can see.

After a sandwich and a cup of tea we were ready to go. At the last minute I bumped into Pat, who looked in rollicking form, his bright brown eyes shining, cheeks ruddy, and his teeth flashing white as ever.

"Taking on Chechnya single-handed, are you, Geordie?" he enquired with a big grin on his face.

"Just the two of us. Pat, this is Sasha, a very good colleague from Moscow. Sasha Pat Newman."

"Hi, Sasha!" Pat shook hands quickly.

"You want to watch this fellow he's a dangerous bastard to be with."

Rising to the banter, Sasha took hold of my webbing and said, "I keep him tied to me.

"Quite right! Otherwise he might dump you in it."

"You look out," I told Pat.

"The Chechens are pretty handy with their guns. Move a bit faster this time or you'll end up a Figure Eleven again."

"We'll see!" Pat grinned and gave me a smack on my sore shoulder.

"Eh," he went, seeing me wince.

"What's the matter?"

"I got nicked there in a bit of a shoot-out."

"Really! We live in dangerous times. Happy landings, anyway."

"Same to you, Pat. We'll see you tomorrow."

As we moved off, Sasha asked, "What is Figure Eleven?"

"One of the targets we shoot at on the range." With both hands I drew the silhouette of a man's torso in the air.

For us, down in the back of the Here, the flight was routine and relatively short. After take-off the pilot climbed hard, under full power, to clear the mountains, and the vibration was enough to loosen your teeth. Then we levelled off, and I went up on the flight deck for a look at the terrain.

Beneath us a sea of snow peaks lay glittering in bright moonlight, with jagged ridges of rock running down from the summits in incredibly complex patterns. I plugged the end of my helmet lead into an intercom socket and said to the pilot, "Glad we're not going out right here."

"Aye," he went.

"You wouldna have much of a chance. Here's our marker summit coming up already. See it?"

Dead on the nose of the aircraft a singk snow-clad peak was rising from the horizon, slender and pointed. We seemed to be approaching it at a snail's pace, then all at once loomed closer.

While I was staring at it the plane tilted steeply to the left as the auto-pilot made our programmed turn.

Back in the hold, the head lo adie signalled us to start getting our tandem rig on, and the two PJIs helped do up the straps,

clips and buckles to the correct tension.

So, for the final few minutes, we stood strapped tight together, unable to sit down, barely able to walk. My pulse rate had shot up and my heart was pounding. I'd peed into the Elsan just a few minutes before, but already I had the feeling I wanted to go again.

I tried to concentrate on controlling my breathing so that I didn't hyperventilate.

On our own oxygen now, with masks in place, it was impossible to communicate any longer. In spite of the discomfort, there was time too much time for my mind to zip back to the fuck-up over France. The big difference now was that Pavarotti, poor bugger, was on the deck, in the hands of the Mafia, and had no chance of flying into me on the way down.

Either side of the tailgate the red warning lights flicked on.

The head lo adie gave me two fingers. I acknowledged them, and saw him hitch his own harness to a strop hanging from the wall.

The tail opened, letting in a blast of searingly cold air. As the ramp settled into its horizontal position the guy motioned us forward, and with another well-anchored lo adie steadying us from behind, we waddled to the edge of the abyss, a few inches at each step, stiff-legged as ducks.

One finger from the head lo adie One minute to go. Sixty seconds of sheer terror.

Sasha seemed totally cool, not trembling or shifting about. I could only think, He must have nerves of fucking steel. I found it impossible to think rationally. All I could do was try to keep my breathing rate down and will the seconds to pass faster.

Then suddenly both red lights turned to green.

"Green on!" I yelled.

"GO!"

I gave Sasha a tap on the right arm and as one we leant forward and toppled into a blasting, icy hurricane.

Immediately we were in a face-down attitude, Sasha beneath me. Freezing air ripped past my cheeks, scouring like crystals of ice. Far below and away to our right the snow-peaks shin-unered and glinted. I felt the drogue-chute tug at the centre of my back as it deployed behind us, slowing our descent slightly and keeping us stable.

Then, steering with hands and feet, I turned us round until our heads were pointing north. I was still aware of the moonlit snow summits, now out on our left, but there was no time to enjoy the view. Our urgent need was to pinpoint the LZ. It should be showing up as a lighter patch in the black of the forests.

At first I couldn't pick it out and panic threatened. Every second I kept glancing back at the altimeters on my forearms.

The hands were unwinding like clocks gone berserk.

At last I got it: a little grey oblong, father to our right than I'd expected, but well within reach. By dropping my right arm and raising my left, I tilted us in that direction. At the change of attitude I found myself dreading the possibility of going into another spin; but Sasha played his role perfectly, remaining passive beneath me, not trying to influence our flight-path, relying on me to steer.

Down, down, down we went. Sixteen thousand, fourteen, twelve. The forested hills were gloriously black below us. Far off to our right, beyond the LZ, was a small cluster of lights, which I reckoned was Samasliki, too far off for anyone there to spot one little dot falling from the sky. Otherwise the wooded hills were magnificently dark, denoting a total absence of houses. No bright windows, no roads, no moving vehicles.

Ten, eight, six… Our target was growing rapidy into a fair-sized field.

Five… I tugged the release toggle. Away went the drogue with a snap, pulling out the big chute, and with a heavy snatch we were jerked upright, swinging beneath the main canopy. Immediately I unhooked one side of my mask so I could talk again, and released the tension on the harness buckles, so that Sasha sank down until the top of his helmet was level with my chest, giving me a better view of where we were heading.

The pale opening in the forest was well within reach, ahead and slightly to our right.

"See it down there?" I said quietly, pointing.

"Fantastic!" Sasha breathed, on a high. Now I could hear him hyperventilating.

"Breelliant!" he went.

"Otlich no!"

"OK," I said, 'take it easy, and don't make too much noise."

I steered for the open patch, glad of the bright moonlight for the view it gave us, but feeling altogether too conspicuous. At least the LZ looked fairly level.

The black trees came up rapidly to meet us. We were over the southern edge of the clearing, sliding towards the centre. As we came in I pulled on both risers, staffing our descent.

"Get ready," I told Sasha.

"Start walking now."

Then I flared again: the chute came up and stalled, and a moment later we landed softly on short, frosty grass.

For a few seconds we crouched, motionless, listening. Not a murmur. The breeze carried a thin, clean scent of pines. The opening we'd landed in looked to be about two hundred metres by one hundred, with trees on all sides. Then it was out of the harness, weapons out of their ties and at the ready, and down in a defensive position, facing outwards. Sasha needed no instruction: he moved fast and instinctively.

My hands were lumps of ice. My fingers started to throb and burn as I worked them furiously, open and shut, to get the circulation going while I waited for my GPS to get a fix and confirm we were on the correct location.

As soon as the figures came up, and I saw they were right, we rolled our jumping kit into a bundle, shouldered our berg ens and set off towards the edge of the field in search of a place to hide or bury the evidence.

"Big experience for me," Sasha panted, still breathless with excitement as we hurried forward.

A sudden outburst of noise made me drop flat again. The commotion came from a distance, higher up the mountain to our left: an explosion of high wailing and howling in which several distinct voices rose and fell.

Sasha gave a chucide.

"Volki," he said.

"Wolves. We hear them often during the war. They sing to moon."

"Jesus!" I gasped.

"They gave me a fright. Do they attack humans?"

Sasha laughed again.

"Never! Wolf very shy animal keep away.

The chorus rose and fell for nearly a minute, then stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

By now the moon was on its way down, but still so bright that I hardly needed the kite-sight: the binos did just as good a job.

I swept them round, hoping to see some of the ghostly howlers, but they must have been half a mile away.

At the far end of the field, in the direction we wanted to go, there was some object in a corner. The kite-sight revealed it as an old wooden farm wagon, with a primitive hay-rake beside it.

"That thing must have come up a track through the forest to reach where it is," I whispered.

"Let's take a shufti."

We moved into the deep shadow at the edge of the trees, then advanced slowly to the corner. There was no fence round the edge of the grass, so I reckoned that herdsmen or boys must look after any animals that came to graze there. As there were wolves about, that made sense.

The wagon had wooden wheels, the back pair twice the size of the front, which were mounted on a swivelling yoke, and it took me straight back thirty years to my boyhood in the north of England.

"Vairy preemitive people, Chechens," Sasha whispered.

"Yes," I said, 'but look at this."

Beyond the cart was a drinking trough for cattle, carved out of a single tree-trunk. I reached down and felt a skim of ice in the bottom. Beside it was a broken-down hand pump for raising water from a well. Staring at it, I reckoned this was a summer pasture, on which some farmer made hay, but that now it had been abandoned for the winter. A moment later I'd found the well cover, made of planks, and lifted it. In went the para bundle, and that was one problem solved.

A rutted track led away through the wood, twisting downhill towards the east. For twenty minutes we followed it, but then the path turned right into the valley, no doubt heading down towards the village, and we had to continue as best we could through the trees, holding our height along the contour.

Our navigation proved spot-on. Seventy minutes out from the LZ, we saw something light-coloured through the screen of tree-trunks ahead, and with the kite-sight made out the perimeter fence of the compound: weidmesh on steel posts, all glowing coldly in the moonlight.

We came to the edge of the trees and stopped. I whispered to Sasha, "We'll give it an hour," and we settled ourselves on the top of a bank which commanded a close view of the baffler at a point where it turned a corner and ran away down the slope.

Lying on our stomachs on a bed of old pine-needles, we looked straight on the fence, which was two metres high and topped by four strands of razor wire on overhang arms canted outwards.

Scanning past it with the kite-sight, I saw that the trees cut down to make way for the barrier hadn't yet been cleared. The trunks had been sawn into lengths, but the tops had simply been dragged out of the way and left in heaps. Perfect, I thought. Ideal for an OP. We can just burrow into one of them and become invisible. No digging or nets needed. We can pick the best spots for observing the villa and checking on patrols.

The more I scanned, the more evidence I saw that the fence was still being worked on. Lengths of metal and odd pieces of wire lay scattered on either side of it, and frirther up the hill, on the outside, was what looked like a small trailer which I assumed the builders had been using to bring up material. I'd been planning to cut our way through the bottom of the weidmesh, but with this amount of construction still in progress that seemed a dangerous idea. Instead, I decided to take a look at the stretch near the trailer, in the hope that it wasn't yet complete.

For the time being we were out of the wind, in deep shadow, on dry ground, and as comfortable as could be so I wasn't surprised when Sasha began to snore gently beside me. I turned to look at him, and saw that his head was resting on one arm. Let him sleep, I thought. One pair of eyes is enough here.

Forty minutes later, I gripped him by the arm. He came to silently and was immediately alert. I pointed downhill, along the wire, where I'd seen the glow of a cigarette being drawn on.

Then it came again, closer. A patrol was on its way round the perimeter.

I got the kite-sight aligned and saw the smoker immediately: a single man with a weapon slung on his shoulder. At his heel a German Shepherd was ambling, apparently loose.

"Get ready!" I whispered.

"He's got a bloody dog."

I felt for my knife, down my right leg. I hate guard dogs. You never know whether to shoot them and give away your presence by making a noise, or risk serious injury by trying to get a knife into the bastards.

We lay on the bank like logs. I felt we were going to be all right, because the drift of the wind was from the fence to us, and we hadn't put any scent on the ground by going to the wire itself.

Besides, the sentry was an idle sod: he was ambling along, not looking to right and left, but humming to himself between drags.

As he passed beneath us, within fifteen feet of our heads, the smell of cheap tobacco smoke filled the air around us. It wasn't surprising that the dog never deviated from its track.

We gave the pair a couple of minutes to get clear, then went for the fence. Close inspection revealed that none of the wire was insulated, and that there was no alarm system that I could see. We moved cautiously uphill towards the trailer, and found it contained drums of more razor wire. Fifty metres beyond it we found what I'd been hoping for: a section of fence not yet fitted with the overhang. In twenty seconds we'd both climbed the weidmesh and gained the cover of the heaped tree-tops.

I reckoned that by the time the sentry came round again if he made it at all our scent would have left the frosty surface. With the ground so soundly frozen, our boots hadn't left any traces on the fence itself.

We slipped out from our heap of pine-tops, back into the standing trees, and crept left-handed round the outcrops of rock, following the contour, the hill falling to our right. According to the map, which I'd tried to imprint on my brain from the satellite data, the villa would be below us.

From his station a pace behind me Sasha put a hand on my arm. I stopped to listen. He was pointing downhill. When I turned my head in that direction I heard what he'd detected: a faint hum, something like an air-conditioning unit. We moved on a few yards, looked over a rocky ridge, and saw the house rising tall from a levelled-out plateau below.

"Hell of a place," I whispered.

From Anna's photographs I recognised the steep roof and high walls, glowing pale in the moonlight, but the whole place looked more formidable than I'd reckoned. There were three main floors above ground level, a fourth with dormer-windows sticking out of the roof, and some kind of a basement. At the front, on our right, five cars were parked, and on the side facing us a ramp led down to a sunken garage.

"Jesus!" I whispered.

"It's just like the cellar at the Embassy."

"The Embassy?" I heard Sasha turn his head to look at me.

Suddenly I realised what I was saying.

"You know in the courtyard.." Christ!

"Oh no. Sorry. I was thinking you'd been with us. We stored some kit at the back of the British Embassy in Moscow. There was a garage entrance a bit like this."

Thank God, he didn't show the least curiosity.

"Beeg house," was all he said.

"Where are your men?"

He meant that it might be one hell of a job to locate them — and he was right. For the moment I concentrated on the layout of the place.

Akula had good com ms obviously: we could see a couple of dish aerials bolted on to the wall beneath the eaves. There were video cameras mounted on the corners of the building, and what looked like an infra-red device covering the driveway. But half an hour's observation convinced me that there was no patrol immediately round the house: Akula was relying on the fence to keep intruders at a distance.

From where we lay we could see the approach road snaking off down the mountainside to our right, and once I was confident that nobody was moving inside the compound, I decided to recce the track, right down to the barrack huts, or whatever they were, at the bottom entrance.

"Stay here and watch the house," I whispered.

"I'm going to recce the road. Back in an hour. If there's any development, call me on the radio. If there's a big drama, rendezvous back on the bank outside the wire. OK?"

Sasha nodded, and I slipped away down the slope, keeping off the road but following its line in and out through half a dozen hairpin bends. There'd be no problem about blocking it: in at least three places it came through narrow defiles where the rock had been blasted away; a single vehicle brought to a halt would stop everything coming up. A couple of guys with gym pis on the high ground nearby would be able to sort any number of defenders.

At the bottom I came across the guardroom and barrack block that the satellite had seen: low, solid-looking, single-storey structures either side of the weidmesh entrance gates, with several cars and small trucks parked outside. As I watched from above, I saw the guy who'd come past us along the fence return to base, shut his dog into a kennel beside the guardroom and disappear into the building. I checked the time: 4:20. That looked like the end of the night patrol. As I watched, I began to suspect that the reports we'd heard about Akula's private army being a couple of hundred strong must be grossly exaggerated. I reckoned the accommodation below me might house a couple of dozen men at most so, unless more were billeted somewhere off-site, we were up against a pretty small force.

I climbed back a bit, crossed the road and made my way up the eastern side of the compound. There was nothing of interest until, through the trees, I saw the line of a roof above me. This had to be the separate structure identified from satellite imagery, the building in which the trackers reckoned Orange had been housed, maybe a hundred metres east of the villa.

I circled out to the right and came in above it: a rectangular storage shed with no windows and a corrugated roof of what looked like asbestos. I felt my heart speed up. Radio signals would pass straight through that roof. Without any real evidence, I became convinced that the bomb was there.

"The Mafiosi are nervous of the device," I told myself.

"They don't want it inside the house, so they've put it here."

Behind the shed was a big heap of what looked like freshly excavated rock. Maybe that was spoil from the nuclear shelter they were digging out of the mountainside. Maybe the shed covered the entrance to the bunker.

To complete my anti-clockwise circuit I had to cross the mountainside above the villa, and it was up there, a couple of hundred feet higher than the house, that I came across the helicopter pad a circle of concrete in the middle of a shallow natural bowl, from which the trees had been cleared. I could see at once that it was big enough to accommodate a Chinook, but not until I was moving away from the centre did I realise what was positioned on one side. From a distance the object looked like a crumpled garden hut. Creeping up to it, I saw that a tarpaulin was lashed down to rings set in the ground. Close inspection revealed a .50 machine gun, set up on a heavy tripod so it could engage targets in the air as well as on the ground. I felt under the cover and ran a hand down the barrel, thinking that the bastards probably had hand-held SAM systems as well.

Sasha had no action to report, so together we pulled off to a safe distance from the villa and settled in a hollow surrounded by rocks from which I could transmit without fear of anyone hearing.

By now the moon was down, and the night had become much darker. As I assembled the Satcom aerial I said, "Sasha — I'm working on the plan for tomorrow. I'm going to call for the HALO troop to drop in as soon as it's dark. But during the day I reckon we'll want to watch both the house and another building I've seen on the far side, over there. That means we need to man two separate OPs. You all right on that one?"

"No problem. Many times I do such observation."

"Good. We'll have radio com his with each other, anyway.

Now let's get this thing working."

I had the Satcom set up on a flat rock, and now turned it a couple of times until I got a strong satellite signal. Then I draped my sleeping bag over my head to muffle the sound of my voice, and seconds later I was through to the squadron base in Kars.

"Blue," said a voice I didn't recognise.

"Red here," I went.

"Can I speak to Bill Chandler?"

"Roger. Wait one."

I waited, imagining the hangar, guys in sleeping bags around the perimeter, and the squadron GO with his head down in some reasonably secluded corner.

"Geordie?" He sounded lively enough.

"How goes it?"

"Fine. No problems."

"Where are you?"

"Inside the compound. We've got eyes on the villa. We're maybe a hundred and fifty metres above it."

"Any sign of our guys?"

"Not yet."

"Or of the three heavy cases?"

"No, but I think I know where they are.

"Can you identif~j the site?"

"Not now.

"In the summerhouse?"

"Yes. Listen, the drop was spot-on. We've recced as much as we can in the dark. As soon as it's light I'll shoot some footage with the video, get pictures back to you. But basically the plan holds."

"So…" He paused, evidently looking at his notes.

"The same

DZ?"

"Yep. It's an ideal place. Looks like a summer pasture.

Nobody within miles. I'll get myself up there with a Firefly to guide the lads in."

"OK, then. We're aiming to drop at 1900 your time. That's half an hour after full dark."

"Can you make that 1930? I'll need time to get up to the DZ, and I don't want to move in daylight."

"OK. 1930 it is. That's confirmed."

"Great. Obviously Pat will want to work out his own plan.

But as I see it there are three objectives: first is to cut the road coming up from the barracks at the bottom; second is to secure the summerhouse, third to hit the villa."

"Roger. How many in the garrison?"

"Very few. Could be twenty. Nothing like the rumours. But they've got a fucking great machine gun set up beside the helipad, and I'm sure there are guys we haven't seen yet inside the house."

"OK. How's the rest of the garrison deployed?"

"By the time we got here they were all in their pits, bar one. I told Bill about the sentry patrolling the perimeter, but said we hadn't seen anyone inside the wire.

"Is the helipad big enough for a Chinook to land?"

"Definitely. But we'll have to take out that five-oh first. What's the position on the exfil?"

"I think it's going to be possible from the north. Your Russian friends are playing ball. It looks as though we'll be able to get the choppers up to a place called Nalchik. Then they can hop over the mountain when they're needed, and come back out the same way.

They'll be in and out of Chechnya air-space in a few minutes. The only thing is, the met looks a bit dodgy. There's a depression moving up from the south."