The Kremlin Device

SIX

The runway at Balashika was pretty short, and the captain of the aircraft warned us in advance that he'd have to do a tactical landing. In practice that meant that he banged the Here down so hard on the first impact that it bounced and flew on a bit before coming to earth a second time. Down in the back we all had a good grip of the cargo nets, and although we went weightless for a second or two, with legs and bodies flying up in the air, we were none the worse.

When the tailgate opened the night air struck surprisingly cool.

Sasha was there to greet us, and as we shook hands I remarked on how cold it was.

"I told you," he said.

"Summer is feenished."

But the temperature was good for unloading and, in spite of numerous well-meaning offers of help from waiting Russians, we insisted on humping all our own kit ourselves.

"It's kind of you to have kept them up," I told Sasha, 'but we can handle this. Let them go to bed."

We had everything out on the apron within forty minutes, and as the Here took off for home I watched its navigation lights disappearing into the sky with the same feeling I'd had when I'd looked at the head lo adie before we went out on the HALO jump over France: Lucky bastards, I thought. They're off home. A nice, comfortable stop-over in Berlin, and tomorrow they'll be back.

We, meanwhile, were left two thousand miles from base with fearful problems to solve.

As soon as I saw we had everything up together, I insisted that Sasha fall out. I knew he had a room in the officers' mess on the camp, but he'd told me that at weekends he went home to live with his mother in her flat in Ostankino, a northern suburb of Moscow. At that time of night, he said, it was only fifteen minutes by car so off he went, with promises to be back first thing in the morning.

The important stuff was locked inside green boxes, stencilled with white numbers 1 to 27. We never let any of these boxes out of our sight. We lifted them on to hand-trolleys, wheeled them across to our designated block, and carried them up the steps ourselves. I was glad to find that Sasha had got strong hasps and padlocks organised on most of the doors, and I designated two rooms at the end of the corridor as stores, next to the kitchen on one side and the signal office on the other.

By 2:00 a.m. local time we had everything squared away. The cooking equipment was in the kitchen and the edible stores in the room alongside. We designated the best-protected room the armoury, putting the weapons, ammunition and CND components in there. The room next to that had the only telephone, so we made that our office and com ms centre, housing (among other things) the lock able filing cabinets we'd brought to contain the classified CDs. I created an instant rule that all lap-tops were to remain in the office, unless being used for giving lessons, and that no Russian was allowed in there on any pretext.

As for sleeping, we billeted ourselves in twos. Whinger and I shared, with the rest of the team similarly paired off. Coarse sheets and blankets had been dumped on the beds, and the water in the showers was hot. A smell of fresh emulsion paint, not unpleasant, made it clear that some hasty sprucing-up had taken place. Mal nearly went ballistic when he saw a rat disappear down a hole in the corner of the corridor, but I told him to push a Lacon box over the place and we'd deal with it in the morning.

The odd man out was Toad, whom I'd detailed to sleep with his devices in the armoury. In fact I'd told him that as long as the CNDs remained in camp, he was to stay with them day and night, except when relieved by somebody approved by me. I also told him he'd got to screw the nut and knock his running on the head for the time being, even if it meant him going short of exercise. In sum, he was to guard his charges with his life, until such time as we could transfer them to the safety of the Embassy cellar.

For our nefarious purposes, the block was brilliantly placed. It backed directly on to the edge of the training area, with no other buildings behind it, and nobody overlooking its rear entrance.

Our people would be able to slip out that way, straight down a track and into the scrubby forest. Also behind the block was parking space for several cars, so we'd have little bother loading the CND components into vehicles for transport to the Embassy.

When I realised how well sited we were, I almost changed my mind about the need to move the devices: in such favourable circumstances I thought hard about keeping Orange with us.

Then I reckoned, No: I don't fancy being out of the building all day, running the course, with those things sitting here even if Toad is in charge. Better get both of them into the Embassy until we're set up to deploy them. Thus I decided that we wouldn't wait, but would follow my original plan and move them on Sunday evening. For one thing, they'd be gone before Anna came on the scene, at 8:30 on Monday morning; and for another, I already knew from our first visit that the Moscow traffic was far lighter during the weekend than on working days.

It wasn't long before I felt sure I'd made the right decision.

With the course not due to start until Monday morning, we had all Sunday to sort ourselves out; but we'd hardly got a scratch breakfast down our necks when Steve, one of the scalies, came up to me with a face of doom and asked if he could have a word. When I asked what the problem was he jerked his head up and back, meaning, Let's go outside. So we walked out the back, into the edge of the forest, and he said, "Geordie, they've put bugs in the power points."

"Where?"

"In the signals room, and in the kitchen."

"Ah, shite! Are you sure?"

"Hundred percent. I was making a routine sweep, and they came up loud and clear. Have a listen for yourself."

Back inside, I borrowed Steve's detector kit and ran the sensor pad along the wall in the signals room. As it passed the dual power-point, a loud brrraannggg sounded in the headphones, then died away as I moved the pad on. I said nothing, but shook my head, went through to the next room, and got the same thing.

What should I do? Report the bugs to Anna in the morning?

Have a quiet word with Sasha? Say nothing?

In the open again, walking up and down, I asked Steve if he could disable the microphones without his interference being apparent.

"I suppose if I knocked one out, they might think it had just broken down. But WI did both they'd be bound to realise."

"OK, then. Knacker the one in the signals office. Break one of the connections or whatever you have to do, but leave the other.

Have you swept the signals room thoroughly?"

He nodded.

"There's only the one in there."

"Better do all the rooms the same.

Now I realised why our hosts had done so much redecorating: they'd painted over any bits of re plastering that had been needed.

The discovery unsettled me.

"I'm really disappointed," I told Whinger.

"I hoped all that was a thing of the past."

"Who are we to talk?" he said.

The truth of his remark kept me in a state of permanent unease. I confirmed to Whinger that I didn't intend to mention the bugs: we'd wait to see what happened if Steve took one out.

The day being Sunday, there were few people about on the camp, and we were left to sort ourselves out which suited us fine. There was more than enough admin and physical work to keep us busy. Sasha was in and out, making sure we had all we wanted.

It was clear that all our lads were going to have to take turns at cooking, and in mid-morning Sasha took Dusty our master chef and Mal off on a conducted tour of Balashika's shops, from which they returned effing and blinding. The so-called

Supermagazin was a disaster, and the only place they found any half-decent vegetables was in an open-air market, where locals were selling produce brought in from the country. In the Supermagazin they'd bought scabby oranges, and at the other place they had got eggs, onions, carrots, cabbages and potatoes; but still it looked as though we were going to be relying heavily on tins, packets and boil-in-the-bag meals designed for use in the field.

After lunch, under Sasha's supervision, drivers delivered two battered-looking Volgas, one mid-grey, one black, with worn tyres and rust showing through the paint where the mudguards joined the body. He explained that they were a slightly later model than his own, but similar. The grey one had 88,000 ks on the clock, the black 13,000 which obviously meant that it had been round the dial once at least When I asked if it was OK to drive around the dirt roads inside the training area, to familia rise ourselves with the vehicles, Sasha exclaimed, "Why not?"

"How about going into town?"

"Whatever you like. You've got your licences OK. But inside camp, no red-and-white bars, please."

He meant that we weren't to go through any of the safety barriers that blocked off the danger areas; but there was plenty of other space, and four of us set out for a spin. Before we left, I got Steve to run his bug-hunter over both vehicles just in case, but the result was negative, and that reassured me a little.

Nevertheless, we didn't propose to run unnecessary risks, so we took covert radios and kept the Volgas a few hundred metres apart, chatting to make sure we weren't being followed.

The cars were sluggish and noisy, with heavy steering; but even though driving them was a pain, at least we had wheels of our own. I hadn't expected such freedom: I'd imagined we would be more closely supervised. The entire training area was ringed by the concrete wall, so we were in fact enclosed. We soon found that a perimeter track skirted the inside of the wall, heading out north-eastwards in the direction of the space complex; and after a couple of ks we began to see, beyond the wall, amazingly large, white dish-aerials pointing skywards in seined ranks. Although I said nothing, I could immediately imagine why the Pentagon fancied taking that lot out.

The land was almost dead flat, with only a gentle rise and fall to relieve the monotony. Patches of pine and birch forest alternated with wide-open scrub and grass, crisscrossed by dirt tracks, reminding me of the training areas at Pirbright. Here and there a primitive wooden observation tower stuck up above the trees. Clearly the training area was well used, but two things about it made me feel reasonably secure. One was the sheer size of the landscape. In terrain as open as this it would be very difficult for anyone to watch us without our being aware of the surveillance. The other factor in our favour was the decrepit nature of the fixtures and fittings. On several of the wooden watch-towers the ladders had rungs missing, and the red-and white bafflers which Sasha had mentioned were bent and rusting. All this, we felt certain, reflected the cut-down in the Russian forces: clearly, they had nobody to do the maintenance and were generally short-staffed.

Three ks from base, as we were cruising gently, Rick suddenly pointed to his left. There, at the end of a glade with a shallow ditch running out along its base, was a derelict air-raid shelter or bunker a dome of concrete protruding from a bank of higher ground, with a small rectangular opening in the side that faced us.

I felt my heartbeat speed up. At first glance this looked an incredibly promising candidate for the burial of Orange. The perimeter wall of the training area was only a few yards behind it, the nearest dish aerials a short distance farther off. We'd never get closer than this. I could scarcely believe we'd found one site already.

"Black to Grey," I called over the radio.

"Stopping to have a pee. Hang off and watch my back."

"Grey. Roger," came Whinger' svoice.

In the warm afternoon sun Rick and I strolled towards the bunker while Mal stayed at the wheel. Small birds were singing and the place had a peaceful atmosphere. All the same, I was nagged by a feeling that somebody was watching us.

"We won't go any closer," I said quietly to Rick.

"Turn back."

From fifty yards short of the structure, I could see planks and spars of wood piled up inside the opening. The shelter, whatever it was, appeared to be full of rubbish. All the better for us.

We slowly wheeled round and walked towards the car again.

Facing that way, I realised that there was one watch tower in sight, but it was a long way off, and, as far as we could tell, unmanned. To complete the casual picture, I went over and had a piss against a gorse bush, after which we got back into the car.

"Mobile again," I told Whinger.

"Nothing moving your way?"

"All clear."

We returned to base without incident. Had I imagined the unseen eyes? Rick said he had felt nothing and he normally picked up danger signals before anyone else. Once again I started wavering. My first reaction, as we drove away from the shelter, had been. Right, let's go for it. Let's get the damned CND straight in there and not bugger about taking it into the city centre. Then the feeling of unease returned, making me realise how hasty I was being. Obviously we needed to recce the site properly before we went crashing into it. Even though the building looked as though it had been abandoned for years, it could still be the scene of some training activity. Better keep calm, take time to settle in and get the feel of things.

"Carry on as planned," I told Whinger.

"We'll aim to roll into town after dark."

We had a meal Dusty produced a great corned-beef hash with plenty of onions and fried eggs on top and waited till it was fully dark. Then we backed both Volgas as close as we could to our block's rear entrance. I could tell that everyone was on edge, from the way they were talking in short bursts. We put dickers out to watch either end of the building, and when they confirmed that the coast was clear, we began carrying the kit out.

From measurements taken earlier, we knew that one Lacon box would effectively fill the boot of each car, and that the rear doors were too narrow to take one at all. We'd therefore opened the boxes up and brought out the CNDs in their original packing. The main components, in their black steel cases, were forty inches by thirty by twelve, and the SCR, an incredibly heavy lump, was a twenty-inch cube. The cases had built-in handles at the corners for a four-man carry.

Before we left the building, Toad opened up the small compartment in the base of each SCR and brought out its Rat. I hooked one into my belt and gave the other to Pavarotti. Now those two had to stay within a hundred feet of their devices, otherwise the pagers would go off automatically and start transmitting their alarm signal.

I was shitting bricks as we came down the steps with the first of them. Having a thing like that in your hands is no joke. No matter how often Toad had assured us that an accidental impact couldn't set the bomb off, I kept wondering what would happen if one of us lost his footing.

Gingerly we lowered the first case into one boot. That just left room for the SCR box alongside. The second big case had to go on the back seat, and the combined weight put the Volga down on its springs. With two guys up front, the rear mudguards were almost on the tyres.

Sasha had told the guardroom we'd be going out, so we had no problem there. We flashed some big smiles along with our passes, and the sentry raised the baffler, waving us through.

Then, on the main road, it was just a question of turning left and heading down the big highway into town.

The traffic was incredibly light. I thought of Sunday night on the M4, with a million cars all trying to pour back into London at the same time. Here, I realised, most of the poor bastards who lived in the city centre had nowhere to go at weekends.

Whinger drove the lead car, the black one, with me beside him, map in hand. Rick kept the grey Volga four or five hundred yards behind, so that the two vehicles didn't seem to be associated. With him was Pavarotti, and, squeezed into the back seat beside half of Orange, Toad. There was really no need for him to come with us, but at the back of my mind lurked the worry that while we were moving the devices around, something might happen to them. I could hardly imagine what the problem might be, but if one of them started ticking or heating up we might suddenly need Toad to deal with it.

The two cars were in radio contact, in case anyone saw trouble looming. The plan was for Rick to close up in the final stages of the trip, so that he could follow us and not have to worry about navigation. We also had pistols in underarm holsters, concealed beneath our jackets.

When we joined the thin stream of traffic, I realised what good cars the Volgas were to have. Never mind that they had zero acceleration and roared and wallowed like ten-ton trucks: they were anonymous, and scruffy enough not to arouse anyone's interest. As we kept to the right-hand lane at about sixty ks, any number of identical vehicles surged past on the outside.

That first run-in could hardly have been easier. The only threat was from the potholes which, with the huge load we had on board, could have done serious damage. Whinger often had to swerve to avoid a chasm ahead.

To help with the map-reading in the city centre, I'd made a list of the streets we needed to take. In fact, for most of the way all we had to do was follow the same highway right through, almost until we reached the Moscow River.

Once over the river it was plain sailing along the south bank.

Ahead of us and to the right, the red stars on the towers of the Kremlin glowed in the sky familiar landmarks already, giving me the comfortable feeling that I was back on ground I knew. In a few seconds we passed under the bridge we'd walked across that first night. Having glanced in the mirror to make sure there was only one car behind, I called Rick to say, "Slowing now, and Whinger dropped our speed to twenty ks so that we could get a look at the pink-and-white gateway and the churchyard.

The drive-past didn't yield much. As Rick had predicted, the tall, elaborate wrought-iron gates were open, and through them we caught a glimpse of a small, low church, set back maybe seventy metres from the road. The light inside the courtyard was exceedingly dim, and we couldn't see details, but I got an impression of ramshackle buildings round the sides, and even some bushes.

"Nice and dark," commented Whinger.

"Not too tidy, either. Look out, though. Here we are.

The security guards on the Embassy gate had been briefed to expect us, and let us through without bother. There was a short delay while the Brit guy phoned the duty officer to say we'd arrived: then a message came for us to drive round into the compound. There, an outside light had been switched on, and under it was standing a young-looking fellow with fair hair.

As I jumped out, he came forward.

"Sergeant Major Sharp?

Richard Henshaw."

We shook hands. I introduced Whinger properly, and the others more sketchily.

"Got some stuff for us, have you?" asked Henshaw.

"Well, it's for ourselves really. I'd just like to be sure it's in safe hands."

"Of course. Well, here are your keys. You know where to go.

There are two locks on the cellar door. This key's for the central lock, this one for a padlock that goes through a hasp at the bottom corner. But in any case, the compound's fully secure, so I imagine your equipment will be all right. D'you need any help to unload?"

"No, no. We'll be fine, thanks. Is this the only set of keys you have?"

"No, there's a duplicate set as well."

"Do you mind if I have them too? I'd rather we didn't have anyone else poking around in there."

"Oh all right." He looked a bit sniffy, but disappeared briefly inside and came back with another set.

"There you are. I'll leave you to it. As it happens, I'm quite busy."

"Thanks again, then."

As soon as he was indoors we opened the up-and-over steel door of the cellar and backed the black Volga to the head of the ramp. There was no point in taking the car down the slope, because the approach, between concrete walls, was too narrow for the rear doors to open more than a few inches and we wouldn't have got the boxes out of the back seat. That meant a short carry, and before we began it I scanned round to make certain we weren't being overlooked. No problems on that score: the high wall of the compound blanked off the view from outside. Reassured, I said, "OK, lads. Here we go," and we set about dumping our lethal load.

When all six cases were stacked, Toad brought out the two Rats, switched them off and slipped them back into their compartments in the SCRs. To put the final touch on our security, we replaced the padlock on the foot of the door with one of our own.

Toad was obviously impressed by the size of the Embassy buildings, and from the way he started dry-washing his hands I knew he was coming up with some new idea.

"Now we've got the devices here," he said, 'hadn't I better stay with them? There must be a spare room I could live in."

"Not a chance," I told him.

"The kit'll be fine here. Nobody can touch it. You're coming back with us."

The relief of getting the devices off my hands even for the time being made me feel reckless, and I almost went straight into a recce of the churchyard.

"After all," I said before we reboarded the cars in the embassy compound, 'we're on the spot.

Why not have a look round?"

It was the ever-observant Rick who stopped me.

"When we drove in, there was a guy hanging around out there on the embankment," he warned.

"Where?"

"About a hundred metres beyond the entrance. He looked everything like a dicker, from the FSB or somewhere."

"In that case we'll not piss about in the area," I agreed.

"Especially if he's still there when we pull out."

He was a figure in dark clothes, wearing a cap, leaning out over the river wall as if watching boats go by.

"He's moved this way a bit," said Rick over the radio.

"But it's the same guy."

"Right then," I replied.

"That's it. Next stop Balashit-heap."

I found it a pleasure to start the course the next morning. Our team had all slept well, and the weather was still fine. Whinger and I had gone for a four-mile run at first light, and after a shower and breakfast I felt in good shape. But above all I was chuffed to get back to our proper role of soldiering, and passing some of our skills on to others.

The sight of Anna in her DPMs was enough to put a smile even on Toad's face. I'd arranged with Sasha that all our guys would get an issue of Russian combat kit, so that we blended into the local scenery. Naturally, the garments didn't fit too well; we could disguise short or long sleeves by rolling them up, but the blouses hung away from our waists and the trousers tended to be bulky. Anna's kit, in contrast, was immaculately cut to flatter her slender figure, and looked as though it had been styled by some Western couturier. She wore elegant black boots, a black leather belt that emphasised her narrow waist, and a jaunty peaked cap. Even though she wore no insignia you felt instinctively that she was the senior officer present.

"You got your cars all right?" she asked.

"Yes, thanks. They'll do well."

"Nothing special, I'm afraid. Not like a couple of BMWs."

"Oh well they're fine for getting in and out of town."

I wasn't sure if she knew that we'd already been in to the Embassy, but I wasn't going to bring the matter up unless she did, so I said nothing on that score and switched to matters about the course.

To open proceedings we got the twenty-four students into the main lecture room and sat them down, while our team lined up across the stage, Sasha hovering at one side. Anna introduced herself to the course, and to the Brits who hadn't met her, with a brief explanation that she came from the FSB and that she had been appointed our liaison officer. I then introduced our lads one by one, using the names they'd chosen to sport on their chest badges. I felt a right prick saying, "J7of Rik, vot Dosti..

This is Rick, this is Dusty," followed by a couple of words about what each man would be teaching weapons, unarmed combat, explosive entry, house assaults, vehicle drills and so on. When I came to Whinger last, because he was last in the line I asked Anna to explain that Vuinzha was not his proper name but the best approximation we could make of his nickname.

"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 bollockings 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 assaults, 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 assault 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 classrooms, 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 assault 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. Bloody hell! 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 bastard 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 bloody 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 shit."

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 fuck'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 (fuck 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 glass, 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 bass 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 impassioned 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 grass-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…"