THREE

For the next few days my most important task was to keep up the momentum of our countdown to departure; but at the same time I had to show Sasha round the base and give him an idea of how we did things. Certain areas of camp were out of bounds to him, notably the SAW and the ops room, but there was plenty else for him to see, not least the Killing House, where the CT team laid on a demonstration of hostage-lifting. At first he was cautious about expressing opinions, but the more time I spent with him the more he became prepared to criticise or compare our methods with his.

For us, Killing House demos were routine, but for Sasha they were an eye-opener. The guys put him and me into the left-hand corner of a special room, corralled with two other visitors behind white tape. As usual, the live hostage-figure was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, with his two guards, in the form of figure-targets, on either side of him. Behind the hostage stood the sergeant in charge, commentating on events.

Just as he seemed to be in the middle of his spiel, giving the principles of close-quarter battle: "Speed, aggression, surpr-' BANG! Loud explosion. Door blown off Two assaulters running in. Ba-ba-born! Ba-ba-born! Short bursts from MP5s. Targets riddled, hostage lifted and gone before anyone else could react.

Nothing left but smoke and dust.

As our ears recovered, Sasha turned to me, beaming, and said, "Vairy good! Vairy prafyessional!"

Before we went out he took a close look at the construction of the building, pulling back the metre-wide sheets of thick red rubber, which overlapped each other by nearly half their width,

so that he could inspect the steel-plated wall some three inches behind them. Seeing all the crumpled bullets lying on the floor, he understood at once how the rubber caught anything which flew back off the wall, killing its energy.

"This we would like," he said wistfully, looking round.

"You don't have it?"

He shook his head.

"Only rubber wheels."

"Tyre houses?" He nodded.

I knew what he meant, because I'd seen them in the States: skeleton buildings with walls made of piled-up motor-tyres filled with concrete, which, in a crude way, performed the same function as the rubber sheets.

In another room a young assaulter dressed in full black kit had his equipment spread out on two tables for Sasha to look at.

The Russian carefully inspected the guy's primary weapon an MP5 with laser marker and torch attached and some of his EMOE devices. His close interest offered an unwelcome opening to the range warden, a retired RSM who'd been given a kind of grace-and-favour job keeping the place tidy and sweeping up empty cartridge cases. The old guy could be a pain in the arse, as he always tried to latch on to our guests, and now I had to prise Sasha away from him before we got any awkward questions about where he came from.

From Sasha I gained a more precise idea of our task. He had already explained that the personnel of the new Tiger Force were being drawn from various sources. Most were from Spetznaz, the elite military special force, controlled by the Ministry of Defence, or from Omon, the civilian militia, which came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior.

Normally, Sasha told me, Omon dealt with problems inside Russia while Spetznaz worked in foreign countries; but the point of Tiger Force was that it should be a highly trained and highly mobile unit, ready to tackle emergencies either at home or abroad. When I remarked that this made it rather like the SAS, Sasha seemed surprised: he had always supposed that we only operated overseas.

He told me that Tiger Force would be directed by the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB, the largest remaining constituent of the old KGB, which had now been broken up into several parts; the bureau was in charge of security and counter-intelligence.

The person in charge of our tour, our liaison officer and interpreter, would be an FSB officer.

"And who will that be?" I asked.

He spread his hands.

"So far, no information. I find out when I am back in Moscow."

As I guided Sasha round camp, his meetings with the CO, the ops officer and the rest of the team all went fine; but where he came into his own was in polishing up the diagrams we were preparing for the course. Technically he was way behind because we were working on computers, aiming to project three dimensional diagrams from our laptops, whereas the Russians apparently were still using blackboards and overhead projectors but he was very quick on the uptake.

Among the diagrams Sasha had brought with him were two of the weapons that Tiger Force personnel would be using: the Stechkin Mark 5 9mm automatic pistol, and the latest creation of the Rex Firearm Company in St. Petersburg, the 9mm Gepard, a modular weapon which can be instantly adapted for use as rifle, sub-machine gun or pistol. I thanked Sasha as gently as possible for bringing them, then let him know that, as well as better diagrams, we had an actual example of the Gepard which we'd acquired via another channel. In fact I'd arranged that Johnny would give the rest of the team a lesson on stripping down and reassembling the weapon, with Sasha present.

This demo proved a big success. For one thing it gave Sasha a chance to start getting to know our guys, and for another, he hit top form during the talk, acting up and joining in Johnny's commentary.

"Gepard is Russian for cheetah," he told the team.

"Very fast, very light." He made springing, bounding movements with his hands.

"It was developed from the Ryss, which is lynx. Lynx is OK, but cheetah is faster and lighter."

"That's right." Johnny took him up, holding the weapon across his knees as he sat at the front of the classroom.

"It's a beaut. It's got everything bar the spots." He hefted it in one hand.

"Extremely light. Under four and a half pounds without a mag.

As you see, there's a strong resemblance to a sawn-off Kalashnikov AK74U: more than half the parts are interchangeable. But it's a hell of a lot more versatile. From what we've seen on the range so far, it's accurate and nicely balanced.

Handles exceptionally well. Looks like it could be a winner in CQB and law enforcement."

He demonstrated how the tubular steel butt-stock could be flipped out to turn the weapon into a rifle, or downwards to form a grip for sub-machine-gun mode. Then he rapidly stripped it, removing the bolt and bolt-carrier, the return spring, the upper hand-guard and gas chamber. As he brought each component away, Sasha gave us the Russian names.

"Two models of magazine," Johnny went on, having reassembled the pieces.

"This one holds twenty-two rounds, this one forty. The selector switch here has three positions. On safe, the bolt is locked half-way back so you can just see down into the magazine. Second position, 0, as you know, stands for odin one. Odinochmy is single fire. Is that right, Sasha?"

"Konechno." The Russian grinned.

"And next position, AV, is for avtomaticheskiy automatic."

So they went on, back and forth. The Gepard's greatest novelty lay in the fact that it could fire several different types of 9mm round without having to change the barrel. Sasha reeled off eight possibilities, ending with the 9 x 30 hard-alloy-core bullet called the Groin.

"You know what groin means?" he asked jokily.

"It means thunder! Very big impact and penetration. Will pierce body armour at three hundred metres."

Sasha also sat in on a couple of language classes. When he and Valentina found they came from the same city the place the Communists had called Gorki, now back to its original name of Nizhni Novgorod they really hit it off There was one hilarious session when somebody asked Val for a few swear words just to put us in the swim, and she pretended to be greatly shocked.

"Swear-words?" she said.

"In Russia, there are no such things. The Communist system was so pure that after seventy five years of it, all obscenities were eliminated."

Her teasing kept everyone in good spirits. Of course there was no question of her joining the team in the field, but as we broke up from one lesson, to butter her up, I said, "Val, I wish to hell you were coming with us."

"Get me a visa and give me a Gepard," she quipped back, 'and I'll be there."

One little task I set the lads was the creation of lapel badges bearing their names in English and Russian. Obviously we didn't want anything that would flap about, so I told everyone to make up a cream-coloured linen patch, with black writing on it, that could be stitched on the tunic of the Russian DPMs we would be wearing. My own name came out as ZHORDI, Mal was exactly the same MAL and Rick was RIK, pronounced as if he stank.

Johnny became ZHONNI, Dusty DOSTI, and Pete PYOTR.

Even Pavarotti could be easily transliterated. But the one name that knackered everybody was Whinger. His real name was Billy, but he'd been known as Whinger for so long that none of his mates could call him anything else. The trouble was, the Russian alphabet has no W, and the nearest we could get to it was VUINZHA.

Among the lads there was a good deal of talk about money, because this looked like being a lucrative trip. What with allowances for food, accommodation, laundry, arduous conditions and so on, our pay was going to build up to two or three times its normal level. The expenses for the whole trip had been reckoned at 6,000 per head, and four grand of this had been paid up front. Anyone prudent put most of the cash into his bank account, but Pavarotti went straight into Monmouth and put down a deposit on a thirty-five-year-old scarlet XJ12O Jag which he'd been fancying for months. I put three grand into my building society account and changed the rest of the money into dollars, insisting that the paymaster got me new notes from the bank, with no year earlier than 1997 on them and in low denominations, because I'd heard that fifties and older notes wouldn't be accepted in Russia.

When we asked Sasha about the black market for money, he said that it had collapsed. He explained that Moscow, like all Russian cities, had become so flooded with US dollars that anyone could get them, and the rate of exchange was the same everywhere about seven roubles to the dollar, ten or eleven to a British pound. In the previous year, he told us, following rampant inflation, the rate had swollen to outrageous proportions: 7,000 roubles to the dollar, 10,000 to the pound. But then on 1 January the Russian government had divided the currency rate by a thousand in an attempt to simplify things and calm the economy down.

More briefings about the Russian Mafia came from another visiting professional from the Firm, this one a smooth, silver haired fellow called Edgar (his surname). Again, Sasha was able to supplement his information, which had been collected from intelligence reports, with first-hand knowledge. The briefings confirmed what Sasha had already told us that the main Mafia activity was extortion, and the worst threat was against people with big money: leading businessmen, heads of companies, bankers. We learnt that over the past few years various branches of the Mafia had risen to prominence and then faded away. The first to show had been the Solntsevo gang, named after the scruffy suburb on the south-western fringes of Moscow where its members lived. Lately, however, that lot had apparently yielded supremacy to the Ismailovskaya Mafia, also based in Moscow and led by a notorious crook called Sergei Askyonov.

This group, with its strong military connections, claimed to have a private army of more than a thousand men.

Edgar, an intelligent guy, quickly appreciated Sasha's worth, and started asking for comments about what he himself was saying.

"One reason for so much crime," he told us, 'is that there's a fantastic amount of paper money actually in circulation. On the one hand, people don't trust the banks. On the other, inflation's moving so fast that they reckon they get a better return by having dollar bills in their possession. So there's cash everywhere, and a big incentive for robbery. Is that right, Major?"

"Certainly!" Sasha gave a vigorous nod.

"More dollars in Russia now than in rest of world."

"Outside the States," Edgar corrected.

"Of course. But that is very much money.

The lectures helped us all to refine the aims of our course.

With kidnappings so common, hostage rescue was obviously of prime importance, and we decided to concentrate on that. EMOE explosive method of entry, or blowing in doors and windows was clearly going to be another key area. A third vital subject was ambush drills, and a fourth, the body guarding of VIPs.

Strictly speaking, BG work fell outside the remit of the Subversive Action Wing, but as all the members of our team had been on specialist close-protection courses it seemed natural to include the subject in our syllabus.

Sasha's tales of the Mafia were so lurid that they acted on the team like shots of adrenalin. All right, we were going in on a training task, but soon every one of the lads was dreaming that we would somehow become directly involved in a Tiger Force hit and get some action ourselves. And it was obvious from the relish with which he described anti-Mafia operations that Sacha was a born killer.

"In Gorki, my home town, is this godfather figure," he told us one evening.

"Real name Borzov. But he calls himself Nepobedinyi — Unvincible."

"Invincible," I suggested.

"Yes Invincible. He thinks nobody can keen him. He is former criminal, many years in gaol. Like I told you, he is true vor v zakone, a criminal in the law. Now his chauffeur drives him in bullet-proof Mercedes. Always four bodyguards with him when he moves around. He lives in a palace like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, almost. At night, in the yard round his house, a Siberian tiger is wandering. Like a guard dog. A guard cat, you say?"

"Some cat," said Pavarotti.

"Two hundred kilos," Sasha said, not joking.

"We heard he feeds this cat on human flesh, his enemies. This Invincible wears a Patek gold watch. His body is covered in pictures…

tattoos. Small Mafia are not allowed such pictures. If some man gets one without authority, he can be keel led But Invincible has on his chest a portrait of Lenin. And why? Because no one would dare to shoot at our great Communist leader. On his knees, he has pictures of stars. And why? That means he never kneels for anyone.

Sasha broke off and gave a quick, rather nasty laugh.

"But one day soon, I think we make him kneel."

When Sasha flew back to Moscow we missed his cheerful company, and I looked forward to seeing him again when he met our recce party at Sheremetyevo Airport.

"What's the weather going to be like?" I asked him before he went.

"In Russia, autumn is one month ahead. Days warm, nights cool. Typical September."

His final instruction as I saw him off was, "Breeng plugs."

"Plugs?"

"For bath and basin. In Russian hotels, such things do not exist."

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