by Blake Banner
Inside, the foyer was functional in beige, but clean and comfortable. There was a small lounge with a TV through an arch on the left, and a melamine reception desk on the right with a woman behind it whose forehead sagged under the weight of her single eyebrow.
I handed her my passport. “Anthony Sams,”
She consulted a computer screen, pushed over a document for me to sign and handed me an old-fashioned key with a wooden tag with the number five on it beside a big letter “B,” 5B. Then she pointed up the stairs.
She said, “Tvoya komnata, naverkhu! Naverkhu!” and jabbed her finger up the stairs. “Naverkhu!” Then she opened her palm to display five fingers. “Pyat! Pyat!”
I figured my room was upstairs and it was number five. I pointed at the numeral on the tag and said, “Pyat.” Then I pointed up the stairs. “Naverkhu.”
She nodded, I smiled and she stared at me to see what I would do next. I climbed the stares. She called after me something that sounded like, “Vasha lodka!” I waved in a way that said that was nice, and went to find room 5B.
It was unremarkable. It had an en suite bathroom immediately on the right as you came in. Then there was a spacious room with an ample bed, a desk, a TV and a big window with good views of a pretty town on a pretty bay.
Araminta had explained to me on the way to the airport that the Lady Jane had been moored at the Primorskiy’s own jetty, down on the beach. By presenting my passport at reception and asking for it, they would give me the key and the papers. Maybe that was what “Vasha lodka” meant, “What about your damned boat?”
I unpacked, hung up my stuff, showered and changed my clothes, grabbed the satellite photos of Yushbaev’s palace, and went down to find out. The primal being was still at the desk. I smiled at her and said, “My boat?” I made motions with my hands like a boat going over waves. She stared at me. I grinned and made the outline of a yacht, made the sound of waves with my mouth and finally took out a pen and drew a boat. She said, “Vasha lodka.”
I nodded, still grinning. “Vasha lodka.”
She shook her head. “Net.”
“Net?”
I stared helplessly at her, shrugged and shook my head. She threw her head back and laughed louder than anybody I had ever heard laugh, and pounded the desk with a huge, powerful hand. She turned and reached in a pigeonhole, still shaking her head and laughing, and brought out a manila envelope and a couple of keys on a piece of string. She placed them in front of me repeating, “Ya govoryu, ‘Vasha lodka,’ ti govorish, ‘moya lodka’!”
Something told me it was all about my boat your boat. Family life at Mrs. Primal’s place must have been a barrel of laughs. I said, “Spasibo,” a few times to show I was grateful, and took the keys and the papers out into the midday sun with me.
Across the road there was a gate in a white wooden fence. I went through it and followed a sandy path down to the beach. There were several jetties reaching out into transparent green water. Some had small sailing yachts and rowing boats attached. The farthest on my right had the Apollonis moored at the end, with The Lady Jane stenciled in gold letters either side of her prow.
I climbed on board and went below. The hardware was in the cabin where I had left it. The brigadier’s addition had been a Maxim 9 internally suppressed semiautomatic, a takedown bow with a dozen carbon fiber hunting arrows, and a dart rifle with a couple of boxes of tranquilizer darts. He didn’t like people killing dogs.
There was also an extra ten pounds of C4 which I was happy to see, and he had thoughtfully added a dozen polythene bags of ball bearings. He didn’t like killing dogs, but he had no problem with people. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to get into Yushbaev’s compound, let alone his palace, but it is a sound rule of thumb which the brigadier understood well, when you don’t know what you’re going to do, take a bow and a lot of explosives. With the one you can take out the guards silently, and if all goes wrong you can blow everything up and get the hell out of there.
That is not Regiment policy, it is just my basic approach, and the brigadier shared it.
I went to the galley, made some coffee and spread the photographs on the table. The house was set within a rectangular compound in the middle of a deep forest about three and a half miles by mountain road to the east of Divnomorskoye. The compound was about one hundred yards across and maybe fifty or sixty deep. It was fringed by trees, but most of the compound was lawn, offering great visibility from the house.
The house was, from what I could make out, on three levels, with a gabled roof at the top, a large, south-facing terrace on the second floor, and a sprawling first floor. Gardens at the back didn’t seem to offer much in the way of cover, and at the front of the house there was what looked like a gravel drive that led to a gate and then wound through the forest to the road.
Dots on the terrace and on the lawns suggested people. At least four of them were dressed in dark clothes and seemed to be carrying assault rifles. I was pretty sure there would be more than four of them, but how many more was anybody’s guess.
I rubbed my chin. It would have to be a booby-trapped distraction near the southeast corner of the wall, followed by a second booby-trapped distraction at the southwest corner, while I breached the compound from behind, in the north, and entered the rear of the house using the gardens for what cover they could provide.
I rose and fetched myself a glass of scotch from the galley, then stood looking down at the images. But before the first booby-trapped distraction, I would have to take out the power lines and leave the house without electricity, and disable the electronic security system. I had noticed since I had landed that most of the power cables here were still overhead, not buried. That was a good thing. If I could find the nearest pylons to the house and blow them, I could deprive the compound and the security system of its main power source.
However, they were sure to have a backup system. So while they were responding to the second booby-trapped distraction, I would have to strike at the emergency generator, before entering the house. I scanned the photographs, trying to figure out where the emergency generator was most likely to be. I decided it had to be either a large shed at the back of the house, which seemed too big to be just a tool shed, or in the basement of the house, in which case there would have to be some kind of ventilation system. But the satellite images were neither clear enough nor close enough to give that much detail.
I made my way back to the hotel, climbed back in the Land Rover and cruised my way gently back up Ulitsa Mira, past all the gift shops selling inflatable rings, flippers and airbeds, past all the cool terraced restaurants and cafés, set in the cool shade of the ubiquitous trees, until I came again to the Revolyutsionnaya Ulitsa. There I turned right and followed it out of town, past a suburban district of cute villas on the left and rolling woodland on the right.
There the Revolyutsionnaya Ulitsa connected with the M4 and I hit the gas, climbing steadily into the forested foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. After four miles I passed the costal town of Gelendzhik, perched on the shore around the natural harbor of Gelendzhik Bay. I kept going and after another four miles, just before the small village of Svetlyy, I turned right onto a road that was as hard to pronounce as it was to read, but I knew it would lead me to Divnomorskoye, the town above which Yushbaev had his so-called palace.
After another three miles of winding, tree-lined road I broke out into a spectacular, sunlit view of the small seaside town, with small clouds riding in a perfect blue sky above the expanse of the Black Sea beyond. Past the town I began to climb again and the view of the sea was hidden by dense forest that spread out all around me, obscuring every bend in the road so that I had to drop down to no more than forty miles an hour.
I wound through the woods for about three and a half miles, then slowed right down, scanning the far side of the road for a track through the woods that would lead to Yushbaev’s place, his palace, his center of operations.
It wasn’t hard to spot an
d for a moment I was tempted to cut across the road and follow the track to the gates of his compound. But I figured there was not much point, and the risk of alerting them to my presence was too great. Instead I kept on driving and three hundred yards down the road I came to an intersection which I had seen in the satellite pictures.
Straight ahead the road wound on into the forest. To left and right it was more of a broad track of beaten earth. I turned left and followed it in among the tall trees. Another four hundred yards brought me to a spot where the road widened and formed a clearing. There I pulled into the left and found a spot where I could leave the car and it would be invisible from the road. I killed the engine and swung down from the cab, mentally checked the photographs and began to push through the thick undergrowth of bushes and tall ferns that grew among tall pines and wild oaks. It was very quiet in the deep green shade.
After a quarter of a mile, and about fifteen minutes of moving with great care not to leave tracks, I came to a tall, redbrick wall, ten or twelve feet high. It looked surreal in that setting, in that vaulted, green silence. The pines were tall enough and close enough, if you could climb them, to get you onto the wall, except that the top of the wall was covered in razor wire, which, by the way it was hooked up, was also electrified. And every fifty feet or so there was a camera looking along the wall. That was the first line of defense. Breaching the wall was the first problem.
Once over, as Yushbaev had said about his yacht, that would be when the real trouble began. If I knew anything about Yushbaev, that wall was not to keep people out so much as it was to keep people in. So he could deal with them without the interference of the cops.
I pulled back a bit into the cover of the trees and found a suitable pine tree to climb. I hauled myself up and scrambled and heaved my way along until the tree started to bend and creak. Then I lay on my belly on a branch that looked like it would hold my weight, pulled the binoculars from my pocket and started to inch my way forward.
I saw what I had expected to see from the photographs, only a little more of it. On the other side of the wall there was a lot of well-tended lawn stretching for a long way. There was virtually no cover and there were men, I could see two of them, in black uniforms patrolling with assault rifles and Rottweilers.
About two hundred feet away I could see the side of the house. It was hard to make out any detail except that there was an ample, balustraded terrace on the second floor, which I had seen from the photographs, and a garden at the back which was extensive and pretty elaborate, and did seem to offer more cover than I had expected. That surprised me.
I smiled and began to snake my way down the tree again. A plan was forming in my mind that might just work. I needed to get another couple of angles on the house, and then I would go back, get a few hours’ sleep, and return with the hardware. Tonight Yushbaev would die, and tonight I would take the colonel back to New York.
That, at least, was the plan; and you know what Joseph Heller said about plans.
Nineteen
I had slept through the afternoon and as the sun was setting over the Black Sea, and the sunburned holiday makers were starting to spill into the evening streets, I had taken the Range Rover down to the jetty. There I had packed the waterproof bag with all the kit the brigadier had provided, and slung the bag in the rear of the truck. After that, at a leisurely pace, I had retraced my steps and driven back up Ulitsa Mira, along the Revolutionary Way and out into the darkness of the forests toward Gelendzhik, Divnomorskoye, and Yushbaev’s palace in the woods.
The roads were deserted, and if anybody bothered to notice me leave Kabardinka, they didn’t bother to follow me.
I found the track that led through the woods to Yushbaev’s place, and then the intersection, where I turned left as I had that afternoon. I turned in, killed the lights and followed the track to the clearing. There I pulled into the gap behind the trees and the ferns, where I had hidden the Range Rover earlier that day.
I climbed out of the truck. There was no moon yet and what little light there was from the stars was filtered out by the trees, infusing the forest with an impenetrable darkness. I slipped on the night-vision goggles, slung the bag over my shoulder and started to pick my way through the woods, now a deep green and black, using always an irregular, broken rhythm, and pausing often to listen.
After fifteen minutes I came to the eerie, monolithic wall that towered among the trees, hunkered down behind the ferns and spent ten minutes watching and listening. Beneath the mantle of quiet the woods were alive with small rustles and scuttles, the small sounds of nature’s predators, where killing and devouring another life is no big deal.
I identified the cameras up among the barbed wire, satisfied myself that I was not in their scope and crouch-ran up to the wall. Then I inched my way along to the corner. There I packed two one-pound blocks of C4 against the wall beside one of the mines I had originally intended for the Bucephalus, taking care to focus the center of each blast some distance from the corner of the wall itself, where the explosion would not be absorbed by the perpendicular wall. I set the detonators to the number nine on my cell, then took another pound of explosive, packed another detonator and couple of bags of ball bearings into it and buried it in a shallow grave eight feet from the wall. I set that detonator to eight on my phone.
A five-minute loop through the forest took me to the far end of the wall, about a hundred yards away. There I placed another two packs of C4 on the wall with another mine. I set those detonators to the number seven.
This time I placed the booby-trap concealed against the trunk of a large pine tree about fifteen feet from the wall. This one contained three bags of ball bearings. The resistance of the tree would direct the blast, and the three hundred scalding steel balls, in an infernal funnel of death upon anyone standing within twenty or thirty feet of the damaged wall. That detonator I set to the number six.
I had no idea how many men Yushbaev had at the palace, but by the time they had investigated these blasts, he’d have a good few less. That was a cert.
The next part of the operation was more difficult and took longer. I made my way to the rear of the compound. There I moved along the length of the wall, staring up at the eerie, black and green trees, identifying the ones that either overhung, or came close to the top of the wall. None of them was perfect, but there were a couple near the center of the wall that might do the job. I picked one, scrambled up to about twelve or fifteen feet, where the thick, lower branches sprawled up and out, and snaked my way along one of the thicker ones until I was suspended some three or four feet over the razor wire which topped the wall. Fifty paces across a floodlit lawn I could see the elaborate gardens that were at the rear of the house, and the tiered structure of the palatial building, with its ample terraces and glowing amber windows.
There, with great care I reached down and dropped four burgers of C4, each with a detonator set, like the first charge on the front wall, to the number nine on my cell. They would go off at precisely the same time as the first explosion, remove the razor wire and, with a little luck, they would go unnoticed.
I had just one thing left to do. I left the bag in the tree and scrambled down with four magnetic mines stuffed into a canvas bag.
The power lines entered from the intersection where I had turned onto the dirt track, on wooden pylons, and from there fed a handful of villas to the east of the track. At roughly the point where I had hidden the Range Rover, the cables were taken up by taller, steel pylons that stood at about twenty-five feet and carried the wires above the treetops and over the redbrick wall, into the grounds of the house.
I had counted a total of three pylons: one where I had left the car, one a little less than halfway and the third about fifteen or twenty paces from the wall, on the east side where I had first arrived. This was my first target.
I scrambled up the steel tower until I was about a foot from where the power cables connected to the pylon. There I placed two of the magnetic mines. I
scrambled back down to the base and there I placed another two against two of the uprights, with the detonators set to one on my cell.
Finally I returned to my tree, scaled it again and slung the two Heckler and Koch rifles over my shoulder, one with its grenade launcher attached. I hooked some spare magazines to my belt and slipped a belt of grenades around my shoulder. The Maxim was under my right arm and my Sig P226 under my left. The Fairbairn and Sykes was in my boot and all I needed was the bow, with a dozen hunting arrows, which I left in the bag with the remaining C4.
I sat a moment reviewing what there was of my plan, decided I had left nothing undone and dialed one on my phone.
Explosions don’t roar unless there is a lot of flammable material involved. An explosion is most often a violent expansion of gasses that sounds and feels like a hard smack in the air. These four were practically simultaneous, like a vast door slamming above the forest. It was followed almost instantly by a huge shower of sparks above the treetops and then the screeching of tortured metal as the pylon keeled over and crashed among the trees. On the far side of the wall all the lights went out. The spots that flooded the lawns died and the house was plunged into darkness. Male voices started to roar and shout, dogs barked wildly. I smiled, and for the first time in a long while I started to have fun. I pressed nine on my cell and the air was smashed in half by an almighty explosion at the southeastern corner of the compound, and at the same time four small explosions among the barbed wire on the wall below me.
For a few seconds there was utter silence. Then dogs started wailing and howling. They were joined by men shouting in alarm. Some were crying out in pain. I waited and after a minute there was the roar and whine of diesel engines and I saw headlamps glowing green in the black ocean that was the lawn: two pairs moving in the direction of the gate, a third set cutting diagonally across the night toward the inside corner of the compound, where the explosion had taken place.
