The Kremlin Device

SEVEN

When we next went to the Embassy, we left camp at the same time as on our first run, but this time we took just the black Volga. I hadn't told the Charge we were coming into town: officially, we were going out for a couple of drinks and a bit of a bar-crawl.

Whinger drove, I read the map, and in the back sat Pavarotti, alongside Toad, with his lock-picking kit and two spare padlocks for the cover of the shaft. I'd deliberately nominated Pay as my No. 2 in the tunnel: I'd told him I might well need his height and strength, and that he'd just have to overcome his phobia. We were all wearing civvies, but Pay and I carried thin, dark overalls to wear on top of our other clothes while we were underground.

The weather had turned wet, and rain glistened on the tarmac. We soon realised to our cost that the car's wiper blades were knackered, and created more smears than they removed; but once again the traffic was light and we made rapid progress. On the long, straight run in we turned off the highway a couple of times, waited in a side road then came back out, to make certain we didn't have a tail.

No threat presented itself, and this time my navigation was spot on we reached the embankment without a false turn. There was a chance that the dicker we'd seen before, or some replacement, might still be on station, so we put in one drive past cruising westwards along the gentle, left-hand curve of Sophieskaya Quay, past the pink and-white gateway, then past the Embassy, both on our left. To our right, across the river, the great buildings of the Kremlin were splendidly floodlit, and faint reflections gleamed in the wet tarmac of the embankment. A couple of cars came from the opposite direction, and a man and a woman were walking away from us, but there was nobody loitering.

At the end, before the bridge approach, Whinger pulled into the kerb and stopped in a dark area between street lamps.

"Right, lads," I said.

"Just to confirm. The time now is 2105. Dropoff will be in five minutes, at 2110, near enough. A couple of minutes to reach the stable. We'll assume Toad can manage the locks in five minutes. If he has any trouble, Pay, you have a try. That means we should be in the tunnel by 2120 at the latest. Half an hour to suss it out. Back at the ladder by 2150. Pick-up at 2155 from this street, south side, east of the gateway. OK?"

Everyone nodded.

"I don't think the radios will work underground," I added, 'but everyone stay on listening watch. Pay and I are One, Whinger Two, Toad Three. Our ERV is over there, under the bridge. Right, then let's go."

Whinger swung round and drove back at a moderate pace. Now the gateway was on our side of the road. One car overtook at speed, and we watched its tail-lights draw rapidly away into the distance.

Whinger was slowing.

"Nothing behind," I said.

"Now!"

In seconds the three of us were out and under the gateway. I heard, rather than saw Whinger pull away behind us.

I led us forward into the dark courtyard, keeping to the right-hand wall. Above our heads, lights were showing in a couple of windows; straight ahead the little church sat hunched in shadows, jutting from the left wall of the yard, and the inner road swung past its entrance at the right-hand end into a second yard at the back.

From an intensive study of the plans I had every inch of the layout in my head. Five metres past the door of the church we'd come to the end of the building on our right. Beyond it, set back farther to our right, was a run of smaller structures old stables. The second little building from our end would be open fronted or at least without a door. The head of the shaft was in the back of that shed, behind a wooden partition.

Moving quickly, we came level with the door of the church, which stood slightly open with slivers of light shining through top and bottom. Women were talking inside, their voices rising and falling. We reached the corner of the tall building. There, just visible in the gloom, stood the low range, a few metres farther on. A dozen quick steps brought us to an open doorway.

The wooden lintel was sagging, and I ducked to go under it.

Inside, the darkness was so intense that I had to use my pencil torch. The beam picked out an old wooden partition of horizontal planks, extending half-way out across the stable. Beyond it the earth floor was covered with rough, half-rotten hay. Raking some aside with my fingers, I felt iron: the shaft cover. Quickly I cleared debris away from two padlocks the two we'd been shown in the photo, which were not rusty but coated in dust.

Clearly it was some time since they'd been touched.

"Stay in the doorway," I breathed at Pavarotti, and he faced outwards, on guard, as Toad went to work, opening the barrels of the locks with his levers. I held my torch-beam steady on his hands, wincing at every little click and scrape.

The first lock gave itself up easily after no more than a couple of minutes, but the second was more stubborn. As Toad fiddled and shook, Pay let out a sudden hiss over his shoulder. Instantly I doused my torch. Peering past our sentry, through the doorway, I saw two women come out of the church and walk towards the big building.

We let them get clear, then started again. At last there was a louder click, and the hasp of the second lock fell back. As I carefully lifted the cover its two hinges groaned. My torch, pointing straight down, lit up a square shaft with brick walls, and I could see at a glance that it was big enough to take the component parts of Apple. To make certain, I'd brought with me a piece of string thirty inches long the maximum dimension we needed and when I stretched it out from one edge it ended nearly a foot short of the other. That was one problem solved.

The disappointment was the ladder or rather the lack of one.

Instead of a succession of built-in steel rungs there were only two, a foot apart, close to the top of the shaft. From the holes and pits in the brickwork lower down, it looked as though the rest had been ripped out.

"We need the ladder," I whispered.

I unrolled the springy bundle from my bergen and made one end fast round both hinges. Then I pulled on my overalls, and I heard Pavarotti rustling as he too kit ted up.

"All set?" I asked.

"Fine."

"Right, then, Toad. We'll see you in half an hour."

I lowered my legs into the shaft and eased my weight down the wire rungs, feeling for them with one foot after the other.

Fourteen changes of grip, and my feet touched bottom. As soon as I stepped off the ladder it went slack. I knew they'd feel the change up top, and that Pay would start down.

I heard him scraping on the brickwork as he descended, then felt him touch down beside me. The moment he let go of the ladder, the end went snaking up as Toad reeled it in. His brief was to seal us down with two spare locks he'd been carrying, then to hide up somewhere close by until the time came to release us. That way, if by any thousand-to-one chance somebody did come along to check the padlocks, he'd see nothing amiss. Toad would be in radio contact with Whinger throughout, and could call him in to lay on a diversion if anything started to go wrong.

When I heard the cover come down with a faint thud, I felt a shudder of claustrophobia run through me. If anything serious befell Toad and Whinger, we'd be sealed down here for the duration. Pay was obviously having the same panic, or worse: I could hear him breathing deeply and effing and blinding under his breath.

The air was row sty and moist, full of a smell of damp decay.

Our head-torches revealed a tunnel with a horse-shoe section,

lined with bricks. The roof was just high enough for me to stand upright, but Pay, who was a couple of inches taller, had to crouch slightly to keep his head clear.

Somehow perhaps because of the colour of the Kremlin walls I'd expected the bricks to be red. In fact they were dirty cream, or had been: much of the surface was black with fungus or slime, and when I touched the wall beside my shoulder my fingertips slid along the wet surface leaving pale streaks. In many places individual bricks had crumbled or fallen out, so that there were frequent piles of rubble on the floor. That gave me encouragement; if the tunnel had been in immaculate condition, any tampering we did would have been that much more obvious.

I bent down and examined the floor. It was evenly covered with damp dust paste, almost the same dull colour as the walls.

There was no sign of any disturbance not even any traces of rats, which I'd expected to find. I saw that we wouldn't be able to help leaving footprints.

We'd measured the distances, and I had them in my head: 160 metres to the river bank, 110 metres across the river, seventy five to the Kremlin wall: 345 metres in all to our preferred site.

When I went forward I was going to count.

"Ready?" I whispered.

Pay didn't answer.

"Eh!" I went.

"Let's go."

"You go!" he gasped in a peculiar voice.

"I'm staying here."

I could tell he was having problems just from the way he sounded. When I put out a hand and touched his arm, I felt him shaking violently. I turned the beam of my head-torch on his face and saw beads of sweat trickling down his cheeks.

"Get hold of yourself!" I snapped.

"We haven't got time to piss about." In my mind I added, A great big feller like you, too!

But I knew his hang-up was getting to him.

A few seconds later he said unsteadily, "I'm all right now.

"Come on, then."

I moved forward, counting. For 102 paces the floor of the tunnel remained level. Then it began to descend.

"Going down under the river," I said.

"Aye," Pavarotti agreed.

"I reckon."

At the start of the slope was a big heap of debris. Such a chunk had fallen out of the upper right-hand wall and roof that the pile of bricks stretched across the tunnel floor to the base of the opposite wall, and we had to scramble over the lowest part of it. When I directed my head-lamp at the raw wall where the bricks had been, I saw that it consisted of moist grey clay.

"At least we can dig into that," I muttered.

"Pity we can't put the bloody thing in right here. Save messing about.

"It's too far from the proper site."

We were still talking in whispers, partly out of habit, partly because we reckoned any sudden noise in a place that had been silent for generations might precipitate a further collapse of roof or wall.

We crept on again, but after a few more steps I stopped. My torch was picking out some difference in the texture of the floor ahead. Instead of light grey, it looked black. I stared for a minute, then said, "Shit! It's water. The fucker's flooded."

"Never," said Pavarotti.

"If part of the tunnel was flooded, the whole thing would be full of water

I saw the logic of what he said but he was wrong. At the point where the water started the floor was still dropping away, so that as we continued forward the flood gradually deepened.

The water was cold and black and stank of decay, and we had no option but to wade into it until we were knee, then thigh, then bollock deep. Only when the surface was above our waists could we see that, a few more yards ahead, it came right to the roof.

"Jesus Christ!" said Pavarotti.

"We're knackered. We can't get through this lot."

We pulled back and started wringing the filthy, black water out of our trousers.

"Pretty obvious, isn't it?" said Pay.

"Of course it's going to be flooded, under the bloody river."

For a minute I sat on the deck, holding my head in my hands, trying to think constructively.

"There's no way we're going to get closer to the Kremlin anywhere else."

"Why not forget this bastard?" Pay suggested.

"Get the other one in first and then see?"

"No, no," I told him.

"This is the one they want. I'm sure of that. We've got to crack it. What we need to get through this lot is breathing gear and dry-suits."

"Yeah. But how do we know what happens the other side of the water? If there is another side. If the rest of the tunnel's flooded we're buggered. Jesus, I hate this!"

"It must be quite a small leak," I said.

"Otherwise, like you said, the whole tunnel would be full. Maybe the pressure's equalised itself somehow or mud's filtered into the fissure."

"Let's get the hell out, anyway.

I'd been planning to sweep away our footprints behind us, but I realised now that, even if we went to that trouble, we'd still leave fresh marks and it would be obvious that somebody had been down here. In any case, the chances of anyone else coming down in the next few days seemed infinitesimal.

We were back under the access shaft just twelve minutes after leaving it. Eighteen minutes to wait. I tried the radio again but got no response. I wasn't going to shout, just in case some Russian was passing the old stable up top. I imagined Toad, on the lurk up there, and Whinger, on standby in the Volga somewhere along the embankment. Maybe they were chatting to each other on the radio.

"Have to wait," I whispered.

"Let's take a stroll in the other direction."

That didn't get us far. This time I wasn't counting the steps, but about a hundred metres to the south the tunnel was blocked by a major fall. The damage to the roof and walls was so extensive that I felt sure they'd been bulldozed in or deliberately dropped by hand. Bricks, rubble and clay were tumbled in an impenetrable mass.

Back under the shaft, we waited. We peeled off our sodden overalls, but still we were soaked to the waist and higher. Soon we were pretty cold. I went over the various levels of our fall back plan in my mind. The first was that if Toad got accosted in the yard, he'd pretend he was drunk and had staggered in there to sleep it off The next level was that if we three didn't reappear, Whinger would park the car out of the way and come looking for us. The final stage laid down that if all four of us weren't back in camp by 6:00 a.m." the rest of the team would come out to search. I knew that in an emergency we could seek sanctuary in the grounds of the Embassy, but that could only be a last resort because it would blow the whole Apple programme.

Spot on 2150 we heard faint metallic noises above our head a clinking and scraping. Then came a slight change of pressure as Toad lifted the cover. A few seconds later the ladder-end flicked down beside us. I sent Pay up first, and heard him grunting with effort as he climbed. When the ladder twitched twice, I started up myself.

In the blackness of the shed I whispered, "OK?" and Toad said, "Fine' as he undid the ladder, closed the hatch and slipped the original padlocks back through the securing rings.

We pulled some of the rotten hay back over the cover and stood listening in the doorway.

"There's still something on in the church," said Toad quietly.

"People keep coming back and forth. They're crossing to that doorway with the light showing.

We were so wet and filthy we looked like a couple of drunks who'd fallen in the river, so even if we did meet someone there was a chance they'd pay no attention.

"Let's go," I said.

We hustled along the edge of the yard, past the church door, back to the entrance gate. We'd hardly crossed the road on to the pavement beside the river when we saw a car coming in our direction.

In my earpiece Whinger's voice went, "I have you visual," and I knew it was him. Ten seconds later he pulled up beside us, and we were safely on board.

"All quiet up top?" I asked.

"Beautiful. But, Christ, what have you been doing?" He turned and glared at me.

"Eating caviar and drinking vodka," I told him.

"What's the matter?"

"You stink like the arse hole of the universe."

"Thanks, mate. That's what it's like down there. Stinking. The bastard tunnel's lined with shit and what's more, it's full of water.

"Could you get through it?"

"Not this time. We waded as far as we could, but we need breathing kit and dry-suits. Head for base, Whinge. We're soaked to the bloody skin."

Back at Balashika I called straight through to the duty officer in Hereford on the secure Satcom link. We'd set up our equipment in the office-cum-ops room, with the dish aerial on the roof of the building. Daily sweeps for bugs showed that the microphone in the kitchen was still live, so nobody talked any kind of shop in there; but there'd been no reaction to Steve's disabling of the bug in the office, and we reckoned that room was secure.

We were back at 10:40 Moscow time; England was three hours behind, and I knew the duty officer would be around in the ops room in Stirling Lines. Technically, the connection was perfect; if it hadn't been for the half-second lag in transmission as the message went up to the satellite and down again, I might have been in the next room rather than 2,000 miles away.

I recognised the voice at the other end as that of Bill Bravington: I'd spoken to him a couple of times already since our deployment, and had no need to fill him in on background.

"Bill," I said, 'we've hit a problem. The Apple site. The approach is blocked by water.

"Wait one."

I imagined him reaching for a notepad.

"All right," he went.

"Carry on."

"We can't tell if the site itself is flooded. If it is, we'll need an alternative. But even to recce it we need breathing kits, dry-suits and half-hour tanks. Plus some of those Boat Troop rubber bags for the components. And two big underwater torches. Can you organise all that soonest?"

"No problem. How many suits?"

"Two. Correction: three suits and three tanks. Plus rubber bags."

"Number?"

"For three pieces. You know two big, one small. But we'd better have spare small bags as well. Say half a dozen small."

"Got it. Fins?"

"Sorry?"

"Will you want fins?"

"No, thanks. The distance isn't great enough."

"OK'."

"And Bill listen. We need this stuff right away."

"We'll get it all to London tonight, for the next Diplomatic Bag."

People must have pulled their fingers out all along the line, because the kit reached the Embassy on Monday afternoon, less than forty-eight hours after we'd found the water. On Tuesday night Pavarotti and I were back in the tunnel, with the same back-up team on watch above. On a weekday evening there was more traffic along the quay and more pedestrians about, but we made it into the stable undetected, and down below everything was precisely as we'd left it: the marks I'd scraped in the dirt on the floor were still fresh, the surface of the water still one inch below a horizontal line I'd scratched in the slime on the wall.

The discovery of water and the sight of the various falls had led me to change our plan. I reckoned that if we managed to reach our destination on this second recce, we might as well start opening up the site for the CND. My reasons were: first, that the chances of any inspection team coming through the water within the next few days were zero, and second, that even if somebody did come snooping, a hole in the wall wouldn't in itself excite suspicion as there were plenty of other natural cavities already.

So it was that this time we had jemmies and small picks in a bergen. Having zipped each other into dry-suits over our clothes, we fitted our tanks and breathing kits and waded into the inky water. On our outward trip the water was fairly clear, and our torch beams reached a few feet ahead enough for us to spot two submerged heaps of rubble before we blundered into them.

We'd been through all the measurements again, and I'd calculated that the fully flooded section of the tunnel couldn't be more than fifty or sixty metres long. So I wasn't surprised when, after two minutes half-walking, half-swimming, my head broke the surface again. As we continued to advance, an upward slope lifted us steadily clear of the water. Soon we were back on dry land.

The original distances given us by the Firm turned out to be spot-on. A total of 340 metres from the old stable, we came to a circular hole in the roof- the ventilation shaft. When I stood upright with my head in the bottom of it, my helmet lamp revealed that it did not rise vertically, but turned at an angle to my right. I could feel cool air flowing down, so I knew it was open at the top.

"Shit hot," I told Pay. I brought out my tape and held it across.

"Twenty-eight inches. That's easily big enough to accept the SCR and anyone making visual checks down the manhole won't be able to see round this corner. Made to measure.

Five metres beyond it, the tunnel had been sealed with a wall of concrete blocks. Yet providentially, just on our side of the barrier was another big fall.

"Look at that," I said to Pay.

"Made to measure again."

"Yeah and we won't even need to move any spoil. We can just add whatever we bring out to the heap that's here already."

We'd prearranged with Toad that we would stay down for ninety minutes. That gave us an hour of work-time, so we stripped off our dry-suits and took turns to put in concentrated attacks on the clay subsoil. Soon we were both in a muck sweat and having problems with our breathing, perhaps because the air was so damp. None the less, before our hour ran out we had enlarged the cavity to about half the size we needed. We kept the overhanging roof and edges rough, and left a pile of rubble on the base of the hole so that, when we returned to install Apple, all we'd have to do would be to enlarge the hole, clear the bed and lift the components about two feet from the floor before pushing them sideways into their final resting place.

Our return to the surface posed no problems, and once again the pick-up went without a hitch.

"So it's a foot on the brake, is it?" Whinger asked as we drew away.

"What's that?"

"Piece of cake."

"I wouldn't call it that. But it's possible wouldn't you say, Pay?"

"Oh, yeah," he agreed.

"It's definitely on."

So we drove back, feeling quite chuffed.

But as we arrived in camp, the shit hit the fan. We hadn't even drawn up at the back of the accommodation block when Mal came running down the steps to meet us.

"Geordie," he said, "I need to have a word."

"Walk this way, then."

We went a few yards down the track into the woods, and as soon as we were out of earshot Mal said, "Somebody's been tampering with number two lap-top."

"How d'you know?"

"They've killed the disk with the plans on it."

"Killed it?"

"The contents have been wiped. Somebody must have tried to get into it without using the password."

I stopped walking and turned to stare at Mal, who was barely visible in the dark.

"Is it possible the person could have read the contents and then deliberately destroyed them?"

"Not a chance." He sounded fairly confident.

"They tried a wrong password, and that did it."

Jesus, I was thinking. Are we compromised, or what?

"If they'd got into the disk they wouldn't have wiped it," Mal added.

"They'd have left it intact to cover their traces."

"True. But who the hell was messing about in the office?"

My first instinct was to blame Toad, whose duty it was to maintain security. But of course he'd been with us in the city. In his absence, the two scalies, Steve and Terry, should have been in occupation.

"When did this happen?"

"It must have been some time this evening, while everyone was out working."

"So who was in the block?"

"Only the scalies."

"What do they say about it?"

"I haven't asked them yet. I only just discovered it. I tried to boot up the lap-top and found the floppy was still in the slot."

"Grip them, then."

I was enraged. Trust those arse holes of signallers to foul up our entire enterprise.

I rushed into the building and dragged Terry off his pit.

"Dozy wanker!" I yelled.

"Get into the ops room, NOW!"

No. 2 lap-top, a Toshiba, stood open on the ops room table with its screen raised and the floppy disk still in the port on the right-hand side.

"There's been a major breach of security," I started.

"Who used that computer last?"

I glared round, but one by one the lads shook their heads.

None of them had been on the lap-top that day, they declared.

They'd been out of doors, on the ranges, then on a night movement exercise.

"Well then, how the fuck did that programme disk come to be in the port? It should be locked inside the filing cabinet.

Everyone here knows that."

Still there was silence.

Suddenly Rick said, "Wait a minute. There was the Colonel."

"The Colonel?"

"Anna!"

"Jesus!" I said.

"You mean she came in here? What did she want?"

"She said something about her phone having gone down. She asked if she could use ours."

"And you let her in here?"

"Well, yeah she being a colonel and everything. I didn't think I could tell her to fuck off."

"So what happened?"

"She dialled a number and started talking in Russian.~ "What was she saying?"

"I couldn't understand a lot of it. Something about transport cars.

"And you stayed in the room with her?"

Rick shook his head.

"No I let her carry on. I was working in the kitchen and I went back in there."

"Ah, Jesus! How long for?"

"Five minutes?"

"Cunt!" I was almost on the point of whacking him, so angry did I feel.

Obviously he realised it, because he blurted out, "I mean, with her being our OC, more or less, I thought everything was above board."

"Rick," I said, 'that's the second time you've dropped a bollock. And this one's serious. This is your last chance. Any more cock-ups and you're going home."

I took a deep breath. It was too late. The damage had been done. But how the hell had Anna got her hands on the disk so fast? She must have had a duplicate set of keys for the filing cabinet. But how far had she managed to get? Had she been dictating stuff straight off the computer screen to some FSB colleague? Or was the conversation Rick had heard just cover for her attempt to get into the program?

"What happened at the end, when she left?" I demanded.

"I came back in here. I was going to offer her a cup of tea."

"Bloody hell! What was she doing?"

"She was sitting there at the table."

"With the lap-top in front of her?"

Rick frowned.

"I never noticed. She was still talking on the phone."

"And then?"

"She rang off, put the phone back on the hook. Then she said thanks and went out.

Now what? It was the same dilemma as when we'd found the bug. Should we reveal our suspicions, or should we keep quiet?

Even if I didn't accuse Anna of trying to break into our computer programs, should I drop some casual remark about her having used our phone, just to show that her visit hadn't gone unreported? Should I confide in Sasha and see what he thought?

"Wait," was Whinger's advice.

"Let it develop. Say nothing.

See what happens. If she has managed to bust into the program, the next thing we can expect is a massive search. If they suspect we've got a couple of suitcase bombs about the place, they're going to go mad trying to find them. On some pretext or other, they'll turn everything upside-down tomorrow."

"What about Hereford?" asked Pavarotti.

"Are we going to report this to base?"

"Wait out on that one too," I said.

"They'd shit themselves if they heard about it, and they've no means of assessing the position from that end. No point in stirring things up unnecessarily."

Mal our best computer buff but always a worrier said, "Yeah, and I for one wouldn't blame them."

"Who?"

"The Russkies. If they made a search. It pisses me off that we're doing what we are, anyway.

"Me too," I agreed.

Most of the guys, Mal in particular, were confident that it was technically impossible for Anna to have accessed the program.

They reckoned that her visit was nothing more sinister than a repercussion from her past a return to her old KGB habits of snooping and that she couldn't have discovered anything damaging. So, after a bit of a Chinese parliament, we decided to keep quiet.

Until that moment I'd had no cause to suspect the woman of duplicity. Quite the opposite: she'd seemed fully on side, and had been a terrific asset. She'd thrown herself into the training with real zip, and had never shown the slightest irritation when people kept calling on her for translations. Her physical presence had been enough to give everyone a lift: she was very fit and energetic, and went up ropes or over the assault course as fast as any man, often joining in for the fun of it when there was no real need. And the students liked her as much as we did. They were slightly in awe of her, and referred to her as Polkovnik the Colonel in a way that was partly sarcastic but had an edge of respect as well. Several times she'd reinforced my impression that she was right behind us visitors by telling indiscreet stories about her days in the old-style KGB. She'd joke about how clumsy and stupid and suspicious all her Communist comrades had been with the implication that nowadays everything was sweetness and light.

Her private life, though, had remained mysterious. Like Sasha, she had a room in the officers' mess at the other side of the camp, and she'd dropped hints about a flat somewhere in town. Beyond that I knew nothing about her. On a personal level I was still fancying her in a cool sort of way, and I was planning to ask her out to dinner one evening when the time seemed ripe, suggest a meal at a place of her choice and see what developed.

So far, though, I'd been so busy and had so much on my mind that I hadn't got round to issuing an invitation.

For a long time that night I couldn't go to sleep. My mind kept returning to the tunnel, to the hollow we'd made in the brickwork, right under the wall of the Kremlin, and to the chaos that would follow if we'd been rumbled. Arrest? Gaol?

Deportation? International incident? Should the whole team do a runner while the going was good?

No matter which way my thoughts turned, they were anything but soothing.