The Kremlin Device

NINE

I thought I was going to have nightmares, but in fact I slept like the dead, and woke up unable to remember where I was. Until I heard Whinger snoring, that is: then everything flooded back.

"All in a day's work," I'd said cheerily to Rick when we came in the night before and a hell of a day we'd had. But it had been exhilarating too, and a sharpening change from the routine of training.

Naturally we'd had a wash-up with our own lads as soon as we had come in: they'd got a brew on, and we'd sat up till after midnight analysing the hit. We had also had a discussion not quite an argument about what had come to be known as the 'diplomatic bag'. A count had shown it to contain 110,000 dollars.

When the lads saw that amount of money tipped out on the kitchen table they uttered, "Firekin ell!" in a kind of chorus.

If there's one thing that makes SAS lads take leave of their senses it's money. Normally they're pretty straight-up, but somehow the sight of cash sends them bananas.

"There's my Jag!" Pavarotti cried with his eyes glazing over.

"Bugger the Jag!" Pete told him.

"What about my kitchen extension?"

"Bet it's all forged," said Dusty, ever the cynic.

"Never," Mal told him.

"Big Mafia players wouldn't be carting fake stuff around. Whose is it, anyway? Geordie's and Whinger's, I suppose."

"No, no," I said.

"If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to the team.~ "Buy a team Mere," said Pavarotti.

"Get a five-hundred or something. Smoked-glass windows. Then we can take on the hoods at their own game. How much did you say they had?"

"Meellions," I said, imitating Sasha.

"Christ knows. It was a big briefcase and it was jam-packed. This lot was only a fraction of what we saw. There could have been stuff we didn't see as well.

We never looked in the other croc briefcase or in drawers or cupboards. The flat could have been full of money. Drugs too, I daresay. God knows what they were at: it looked as though they were carving up their empire."

It was Rick who produced the idea of sending the cash back to the UK.

"Put it in the Diplomatic Bag," he suggested.

"Then at least it'll be safe, and a nice little bonus for when we get home."

"Bollocks to that," said Pay.

"Split it up now. Then we can go out and start spending."

"What on?" demanded Dusty derisively.

"Rotten onions?

Crappy cabbage? You'll get fuck-all else in Balashika."

"Funny," said Mal.

"At Sandhurst it's the other way round. It's the students who have the money. Arabs slip their instructors gold watches to get an early look at exam papers. Here, the students are penniless and the instructors are loaded."

Whinger, who'd been keeping quiet, butted up and said, "They offered Geordie a gold Rolex as well."

"You bastard!" roared Pay.

"Where is it?"

"I told him to keep it."

"Bloody idiot," Pay cried.

"I'd have taken it."

"I know you would," I told him.

"But the person who needs money is Sasha. I bet that mean bugger Ivan didn't give him anything. The poor sod hasn't been paid in months."

I brought up the saga of my having to buy clothes for him in Hereford, which the lads hadn't heard, and finished with, "I vote we slip him a couple of grand, anyway."

Our Chinese parliament passed the suggestion unanimously with the exception of Toad, who, as usual, was lurking at one side of the room, outside the main circle, listening, watching. He said nothing just gave us a sly look so I considered him over-ruled and said, "Right then here's a couple for Sasha," and separated out two of the little bundles.

"What about the rest?"

In the end it was agreed that we keep it all together for the time being, and send it back to UK as Rick had suggested.

"All right, then," I said.

"It's going in a Lacon box for now, and the next time we go in to the Embassy, it heads for home."

Next morning Sasha was on top of the world, beaming at everyone, bringing thanks and congratulations from Omon's highest brass. He also brought a personal invitation.

"My mother," he began, as we stood in the sunshine outside the back of our building.

"She would like so much to meet you.

She asks, please come to supper one evening."

"Sasha! You haven't told her about yesterday?"

"Konechno nyet! She knows nothing about yesterday. She knows nothing about my work. This invitation is from many days old."

"Well thanks. I'd like to meet her."

"Good! Good!"

"When would it be?"

"She suggest Friday. And please, bring one friend."

"Thank you. That's really nice. Now look I've got something for you. Hang on there a minute."

I nipped inside to fetch his dollars. It wasn't the ideal moment, because it looked slightly as if I was trying to pay in advance for a couple of dinners, but I thought it best to get the presentation over with.

"Listen," I said.

"We want to give you this."

When he saw the money he blushed bright red and tried to push it away.

"No, Zheordie. No, please…"

"Take it." I caught his right hand with my left and pushed the notes into it.

"You know where it came from. We got more than we need. We want you to have a share. And change it quickly, before somebody decides it's fake."

For a second or two I thought the silly bugger was going to cry, as he blinked and looked down at the notes. But he soon got hold of himself and said, "Too much. Too much."

"Put it in your pocket and shut up!" I grinned and gave him a clip on the shoulder.

"It's time we got the lads down to the range.

The students were in fine form, and gave an ironic cheer when we appeared. Apparently there'd been a clip about the raid on the morning's TV news, and bush telegraph had whizzed a full account of it round more efficiently than the Internet. Nobody seemed in the least put out by the loss of Misha, least of all his former colleague in SOBR, who appeared to regard him as entirely dispensable.

I'd been intending to play the whole thing down, and I asked Anna to explain that, for political reasons, it was essential that Brit involvement in the bust remained under wraps. But the Russians were so enthusiastic about the hit that I decided to make a virtue of it and called a special seminar at which we took everyone the students who hadn't been there, and our own guys through all the stages of the raid: planning, equipment, preparations, execution.

It proved an inspired idea: everybody was gripped by the analysis and discussion, and learned useful lessons. Of course I said nothing about the handout of dollars, but I did deplore the lack of a formal debriefing session.

"I'm not criticising anyone, I said.

"That isn't my business. But at home we'd have done it a different way and in fact it's what we're doing now. It's always important to talk through what's happened. That's the way you avoid mistakes in future."

"Misha," somebody started.

"Why did he fall? Why no safety rope?"

"He was supposed to have one. I told everyone to rope up, but it seems he hadn't bothered. Your special forces people are like us: you don't take kindly to orders."

I saw two of the Russians exchange glances, and added, "That's not criticism. It's a statement of fact." Finally I said, "I must emphasise that our participation in the raid was completely unofficial, so we can't have any mention of it leaking to the media. Otherwise we'll be in the shit with our own people.

Understood?"

All through that day I felt I was blundering deeper and deeper into a moral maze.

Almost making matters worse was the fact that the course was going really well. Our relationship with the students had never been better. Maybe it was the success of the hit that fired them up; whatever, a lot of jokes were flying about and morale was great. Sasha was all over the place in his desire to be helpful.

At lunchtime Anna and I went for a walk. I'd already had some food when she appeared at the back of the building, yet I offered her lunch God knows what we would have given her if she'd accepted. But she said she'd had an apple, and otherwise didn't intend to eat until the evening.

So it was that we strolled off down one of the tracks into the training area.

I think her intention was just to be friendly, and to thank us again for leading the raid; but gradually her talk turned to the present good relations between East and West, and the contrast with the bad old days of the Cold War, when the KGB was crazily suspicious and went to fantastic lengths to penetrate foreign embassies in Moscow.

"You know what happened in the Japanese Embassy?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"It was an old merchant's house, like your British Embassy. It still had fireplaces and chimneys. So the KGB decided that the way to penetrate it was by sending a man down a chimney to plant microphones. They found a very thin man, trained him to climb, and sent him off' She stopped, looking at me.

"And what happened?"

"Nothing! The man was never seen again. That was the end of him. Did he get stuck? Is he still there, perhaps? Did the Japanese catch him and feed him to their tame fish? Nobody knows. Of course the KGB couldn't ask, so they never found out.

I laughed and said, "When you worked in London, I suppose you were spying too?"

"Naturally! All Russians abroad were spies then. We were running the Intourist office, of course, but every day we were sending in reports to the KGB."

"What about?"

"Oh, prominent people who booked air tickets or tours, foreign visitors to London, economic activity in general… I'm sure most of the information was useless, but we thought we were tremendously important."

"But how did you get into spying in the first place?"

"To see the world. Isn't that what you say about your navy?

"Join the navy and see the world"? That was it with the KGB, exactly. In those days, the only chance you had of getting out of the Soviet Union was by joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the KGB. Those were the two best careers on offer."

Several times during our chat I almost challenged her about the business of our lap-top. But I decided on balance that it was better not to stir things up.

So, on the surface, everything was brilliant; and yet, undermining the cheerful atmosphere, was the presence of Apple and Orange, sitting there in the Embassy lock-up.

The CNDs were a lead weight on my mind, and Sasha's invitation to supper made everything worse. How could I chat up his old mother with this in the back of my brain?

All afternoon my mind kept wandering as I tried to think up ways of wriggling out of our commitment. What if we dropped both devices, un primed off one of the bridges into the Moscow River, and told Hereford there'd been an unfortunate accident — a crash which had flung the cases out of the back of the van an dover the parapet? Even if they believed it they'd probably react by simply getting two more CNDs sent post-haste from America, and we'd be back in the shit, neck deep, with even less time to extricate ourselves.

What if we dumped the cases in the river but reported that we'd installed them correctly at the two sites? Obviously the satellite wouldn't pick up the right signals but maybe we could attribute this to faults in the systems. I needed to consult Toad on that one.

What if I posted Anna an anonymous typewritten note about the contents of the Embassy lock-up? A quick raid by Omon, an almighty diplomatic row, Embassy staff expelled, SAS sent packing, international stand-off, countdown to World War Three..

When I confided my anxiety to Whinger that evening, his reaction was typical.

"For fuck's sake, Geordie," he went.

"You're getting old. The only thing to do's to get the bastards in place and forget about them. It's a thousand to one they'll never get used. So let's bury them, have done with it and don't get caught, 'cause life's too short."

I stared at the deep lines in his face and the curls of grey in the light-brown fuzz of his hair.

"You always were a mean bastard," I told him, 'but I reckon you're right. We'll go for it."

Our next decision was to shift our early-morning run in the direction of the potential Orange site, to clear that one down.

During the past few days we'd made a couple more passes along the track that went by the old air-raid shelter, but we'd still not looked inside, and now we needed to suss it out properly.

The nights were growing steadily longer, so the next morning we set off in the dark, and we'd covered the three kilometres to the site before the light was at all strong. This meant we had to hang around a while before we could see, but at least we felt confident that no one else was about.

The shelter proved to be not much more than a tunnel driven horizontally into a piece of sloping ground a primitive structure with an arched roof of corrugated iron which was about ten feet high in the middle and dropped down to ground level on either side. From the front we could see that the tin was only the inner lining: on top of it was a layer of concrete maybe a foot thick, and then earth. In the front wall, made of concrete blocks, was a small opening at shoulder height, designed to let in light and air, and the entrance was to one side. Since the only illumination came through those two apertures, the inside was dark as a cave and we had to feel our way past the edge of the heap of old planks dumped in there.

"Should have brought a torch," Whinger muttered.

"Yeah but we can hack it enough for now."

The shelter ran about thirty feet into the side of the hill and was all one space no divisions. When our eyes had adjusted to the gloom we could see that the wall at the back was like the one at the front concrete blocks but in less good nick: damp had worked its way through, cracking the mortar and producing dark stains. Pressure from the earth behind had pushed two or three of the blocks forward so that they stood proud of their neighbours.

When I ran my fingers down the wall they came away wet and smelling faintly of iron.

"What we should do is get behind the blocks and dig out a hollow," said Whinger.

"Then put the wall back up. With the blocks loose like that, it's a piece of cake."

"It would be if we didn't have to dispose of the spoil." I bent down and scuffed my hand over the floor.

"Feels like bare earth.

But the stuff coming out of the bank's bound to be a different colour."

"Yeah but who's coming in here to see it?"

"A hundred to one, nobody. But if somebody did we'd be buggered. Better to get rid of it. Let's recce a dump site outside."

Back in the open, we found an ideal place within thirty metres of the entrance: pushing through scrub, well away from the track, we nearly fell into a deep pit with gorse bushes growing over it. Sand or earth dumped through the branches would vanish into the hole, which would have taken tons and was far bigger than we needed.

"That's it, then," I said.

"When we come, it's going to be all hands to the pumps. We've got to do the whole job in one night: drop the wall, dig the recess, place the device, rebuild the wall, skim it with mud to mask the new joints, and away."

The simplicity of the task seemed to steel my resolve. As we trotted back towards the camp I realised that for the past few days I'd been postponing the insertion of Apple on the grounds that there was no hurry. Now I'd swung round to Whinger's point of view: the sooner we got both devices squared away, the better.

"You're right," I panted.

"There's no reason to hang about.

We'll go for the Kremlin tomorrow night."