The Kremlin Device

by Chris Ryan

  "Listen," I said.

  "I've had an idea about the recce .. ." I explained what I'd been thinking, and added, "I want to volunteer for the job. We can get down to it much quicker from here than you can from there. Why don't we do it?"

  "OK," said Dick cautiously, 'but who's Sasha?"

  "Major Ivanov, commander of Tiger Force, big operational experience in this region."

  "It's possible," Dick agreed.

  "I'll check it out and let you know." Then he added, "We've made one bit of progress. The Turks have cleared us to use Kars as our FMB."

  "Brilliant."

  I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, then went back on the Satcom to Hereford. This time I got the CO, and outlined my scheme.

  "The recce party needs to include a Russian," I emphasised.

  "If we bump into anyone on the ground and can't communicate, we're buggered. The ideal guy's Sasha Ivanov, our contact here. He's a hundred percent on side, and I've got to know him pretty well."

  The CO must have already been discussing my idea with Dick, because he agreed at once.

  "Don't get carried away, though," he warned.

  "Has the squadron left yet?"

  "No they're going in about an hour. You'd better have a word with Pat Newman. He's right here."

  Pat Newman, leader of the HALO team, was an old mate.

  "Hi, Geordie!" he said.

  "Stirring it up again, I hear."

  "Just a bit. Great to hear you, Pat. Listen. I've been looking at the map. The best way to hack this is for me and my Russian colleague Sasha to meet you at Kars. I'm going to need a full patrol kit and a tandem rig. Can you make sure it's all brought out?"

  "Don't worry," he said.

  "I know the score. I've been fully briefed. Your kit'll be on board. Just tell the SQMS what you want."

  "OK, then. Put me over, please."

  The squadron quartermaster sergeant was Larry Tompkins, another good friend.

  "Listen, Larry," I said, 'can you get your finger out?"

  "Might be able to. Why?"

  I ran through a list of what we needed: tandem rig chute, two free-fall suits, two oxygen sets working off one cylinder, harness and clips for attaching Sasha to me, GPS, Satcom phone, camcorder and lap-top computer for videoing the site, kite-sight, binos.. . "And Larry," I ended, 'those suits. Medium will do for me, but the guy I'm taking in's a big lad. Six one at least, and broad with it. We need a large for him."

  "Got it," said Larry.

  "We're pulling the stuff out already."

  "Thanks."

  I went back to Pat and asked, "How about timings?"

  "Depart Lyneham 0530 .. ." I could tell he was doing calculations on a sheet of paper a habit of his.

  "Six hours thirty to Cyprus. Akrotiri at 1200 that's 1500 local. Ninety minutes to change crews and refuel. Take off for Kars 1630 local. Two hours twenty, approx. Into Kars by 1900 local."

  "So if Sasha can get me and him to Kars by then, the recce can go down tonight?"

  "Yes it'll have to."

  "And the squadron assault the night after."

  "Exactly."

  Back in the kitchen, I found the kettle had boiled dry and heated up to a fearsome degree over the gas burner. When I wrapped a cloth round the handle it gave off a smell of singeing, and the first gush of fresh water exploded into steam when it hit the base.

  One or two of the other lads were starting to come round.

  Whinger blundered into the kitchen, scrubbing at his eyes and muttering, "Fucking phone it's never stopped all night."

  As if to back up his complaint the local line rang. It was Anna,

  spitting with rage. She'd only just got the message I'd left the night before. Her people were useless, she said, idle and stupid.

  Now how could she help me?

  The older you get, the more cynical you become. I couldn't help wondering if she was really that furious or was she acting up a bit? Had she got my message hours earlier and deliberately done nothing about it?

  Whatever the truth, she caught up fast. I'd barely finished outlining events when she said, "If it's Samashki, it's certainly one of the Gaidar brothers you're dealing with. You know the big man who was shot in the apartment?"

  "Of course."

  "That was Aslan, so-called Keet, the Whale. His second brother, Usman, calls himself Akula, the Shark. He's been building a big house for himself down there near Grozny, a kind of fortified palace, in the mountains. That's the Gaidars' home territory. The three of them are the Chechen Mafia."

  "Who's the third?"

  "The young one, Supyan, calls himself Barrakuda. That hardly needs translating."

  "Are there pictures of this place at Samashki? Any air shots?"

  "The FSB have some, but they're poor quality. The Chechens tend to shoot at any aircraft that comes over. And anyway, the pictures are out of date."

  "You mean the house is still being built?"

  "The house is complete, but there's still work in progress on the perimeter fences and some of the outbuildings."

  "Listen," I said.

  "We're going to hit that place provided we can confirm the hostages have been taken there. Can you bring over any information you've got about it the pictures, exact location?"

  "With pleasure. But I can tell you the location anyway. It's one kilo metre north of the River Sunzha, half-way between Samashki and the next village, Sernovodsk."

  "Say those names again."

  As she spelled them out, I scribbled them down in the notebook tied to the phone for message-taking.

  "Thanks, Anna. How soon can you get here?"

  "In an hour?"

  "Terrific. Do you have any photos of this fellow Shark?"

  "Certainly. There were some on the disk I gave you. But I can bring you prints as well."

  Already the Satcom was ringing again.

  "Geordie," went Tony.

  "It's still there. Hasn't moved."

  "Can you give me the co-ordinates?"

  "Sure. Coming up.

  I took down his figures.

  "I know where that is," I said. Parroting Anna I added, "One kilo metre north of the River Sunzha, half-way between Samashki and Sernovodsk."

  "I'll be damned!" Tony exclaimed.

  "How in hell did you know that?"

  "A little bird called Anna told me. Seriously, any chance of satellite imagery on the site?"

  "I knew you'd want that. I started to check out orbits. It's looking good. We'll have a satellite in the right place two hours from now. Also I got a met report for the Caucasus area, and the weather's fine: frost in the night, clear sky, no wind gonna be a beautiful day. We should get some great pictures for you. I'll fax them just as soon as I can."

  The last person I had to convince was Sasha.

  "Very big search, just for two persons," he said doubtfully when he came into camp.

  "Typical of the Regiment," I told him.

  "They don't like losing people. They'll go to any lengths to get them back."

  As to my suggestion of his own involvement in the recce, he didn't hesitate: as soon as he knew I was going with him, he was delighted to come.

  "The point is," I said, 'can you get us down there for insertion tonight? What I want to do is join up with the squadron at Kars here." I put my finger on the map.

  "Hare!" he exclaimed, aspirating the initial letter.

  "But that is in Turoktsiya."

  "Turkey."

  "Yes, Turkey."

  "We need to be there by five tonight. Earlier if we can."

  "Timing no problem," Sasha said confidently.

  "It is three-hour flight, not more. Plane also no problem. We get small military jet. The difficulty is diplomats. Do they give permission to enter Turkish airspace?" He spread his hands and stuck out his lower lip.

  "Maybe Anna can help on that."

  "No!" He bridled.

  "I arrange it through my own bosses."

 
"Think you can manage it?"

  "Zheordie for you I arrange anything: even to become beautiful!"

  When Anna swept in at 7:30 she brought good mug-shots of Usman Gaidar, aka Akula, the Shark a mean-looking fellow, in his forties, with short, dark hair, heavy eyebrows, lean, hollow cheeks and a prominent jaw. In the photos his teeth and gums seemed to protrude, pushing his lips out hence his name, maybe? Anna said the man was obsessive about protecting himself, and kept a private army of at least a hundred men to guard him.

  She'd also brought telephoto pictures of the house he'd been building a tall, pale building with a steeply pointed roof, set into the side of a hill.

  "It looks Scandinavian," I said.

  "You're right." Anna turned the picture round on the table so that it faced her way.

  "It was designed by Finnish architects. No expense spared. Marble floors at ground level. Fitness room and sauna lined with birch wood in the basement. Whole building airconditioned. Bullet-proof windows. It's not confirmed, but we have heard that he's building a nuclear shelter in the grounds by drilling into rock in the side of the mountain and lining the cavity with concrete and steel."

  I came within a micro-second of making some stupid joke about getting a nuclear device for his nuclear shelter, but pulled myself up just in time and said instead, "The satellite imagery should show that, if the site's still fairly raw.

  When the pictures came over from the States, through the Satcom and our secure computer, they proved brilliantly sharp, and a perfect supplement to the telephoto shots. What the satellite revealed most clearly was the layout of the house and its de fences The building stood on a forested hillside inside a perimeter fence, roughly square, with sides some 400 metres long. The line of the fence showed as a pale gash through the trees, as did the single road running up to the house from a cluster of other buildings on the bottom edge of the compound.

  The villa was slightly off-centre closer to the top fence than the bottom and above it, towards the north-western corner, was a circular helipad. There was also another cleared area, nearer the house, which we assumed was the site of the shelter. A wider shot, of a bigger area, showed the river passing to the south of the site and, away to the right of it, the outskirts of Samashki village.

  What caught my eye was an oblong open space in the forest, about two ks to the north-west. From its regular shape, it looked like a man-made field.

  "Here!" I said to Sasha.

  "This looks ideal as a place to drop into. A good opening in the trees, and far enough from the target.

  "We land there?"

  "That's right and walk in."

  So much was visible on the satellite shots. The telephoto picture showed that the pine-covered hillside was steep, with outcrops of rock among the trees.

  When I invited Whinger to make an independent assessment, he came up with the same plan as I had.

  "Bugger the fence," he said.

  "They'd have a job to electrify something that long and where's the power coming from, anyway? It doesn't even look as if it's finished. You could cut throught that, or climb it, no bother. Drop on this football field, or whatever it is, and tab it in. Piece of cake. There may be a patrol on the fence, but I doubt it. The defenders are going to be here, at the bottom, guarding the approach road. There's no other way any vehicle can get near the house."

  "I reckon you're right," I agreed.

  "And when the time comes,

  the same drill for the QRF: drop on the field, walk in, surround the house and cut it off from its defence force. A couple of guys with gym pis and a 66 should be enough to suppress anyone trying to come up the road. Look at these bends in the track -it's quite some climb."

  With the basic plan in place, I was naturally on fire to get going.

  Whinger and the rest of the lads went off to run the course.

  Sasha had disappeared to organise our flight, so Anna went with the guys, to interpret, and I was left manning the phones with Terry, the signaller. The sensible thing would have been to get a couple of hours' kip, but although I lay on the bed, my adrenalin was pumping too fast for me to drop off At 11:00 a.m. Allway came through from the Embassy, asking if there was anything he could do. I thanked him but said that we were fine, and I gave him an outline of the plan, keeping details of places and timings deliberately vague. When I asked about the international situation, he described it as 'stabilising'.

  The next time he called, half an hour later, it was a different story. He said that the Chechens had surfaced, though their representative in London. They claimed they were holding two SAS men hostage, and in return for handing them over, they were demanding not only a ransom of ten million dollars, but also the release of the Mafia players arrested in Britain.

  The news made my stomach churn. In making their demand, had the Chechens said anything about Orange? I couldn't ask directly, but had to fence round the subject.

  "What did they say about releasing our guys? Where's the exchange supposed to take place?"

  "We have no information on that."

  "Who did they make the offer to?"

  "The FCO."

  "Who's their representative in Britain?"

  "He calls himself the Consul."

  My questions brought me no nearer the subject of the bomb.

  But surely, if the ransom demand had mentioned it, Allway would have told me.

  Once again I had to contain my impatience and anxiety.

  Around 11:30 I suddenly realised I was starving. I'd been up most of the night and had no breakfast, so I routed out some onions, fried them up, threw in a load of ga ram masala and turned a tin of beef stew into a power curry. We still had plenty of the rice we'd brought out from UK, so I boiled up some of that, and gave myself a solid meal.

  I was in the middle of eating it when Sasha reappeared, all smiles.

  "Mxnmmmm!" He gave an exaggerated sniff.

  "Smells good!"

  "Have some.

  "No you need it. We have long journey to make."

  The Turks had come on side, he said, and we had permission to fly. Better still, he'd fixed an aircraft a P33, a ten-seat executive jet used by senior military commanders. Take-off would be from the military side of Vnukovo airport at 2:30 Moscow time. We couldn't fly direct, but were to stage through Krasnodar, in the north of the Caucasus, so that the plane could refuel before the final hop of the flight and not have to take on Turkish fuel at the far end.

  That meant leaving Balashika at 1:00 and suddenly time for planning, which had seemed endless, had almost run out.

  At 12:30 I put in one last call to Tony, even though I knew it was 4:30 a.m. in the States. He was asleep, but his stand-in, Cyrus, was fully briefed. He confirmed that Orange was stationary on the same site, and that the weather in the region was likely to remain unchanged for the next thirty-six hours.

  "You got a big high centred over the west coast of the Caspian, extending all the way to the Black Sea," he said.

  "Predicted wind speeds, three to five knots on 260 degrees.

  Moon's three-quarter full. Moonrise 1900 local, moonset 0600.

  Looks like you'll have God's own view of the Caucasus range as you drop in there."

  "Thanks for your help," I went.

  "Tell Tony I'll call him from Kars."

  "OK. And take some warm clothes with you. That place is six thousand feet above sea level."

  FOURTEEN.

  The P33 was noisy and cramped, with little headroom and hard, uncomfortable seats, but it did the job. There were two regular army officers on board, hitching a lift to Krasnodar, but otherwise Sasha and I had the cabin to ourselves. The seats were arranged in pairs facing each other, and for much of the flight we kept a map of the Grozny area open on our knees, discussing the terrain.

  When Sasha started talking about the war he grew animated, cursing the brutality and incompetence of the whole operation.

  He'd been in charge of one of the Omon special units, and had done what he
could to keep his own men under control, but Kulikov, the overall commander of Russian troops in the south, had gone round inciting officers and men to kill every Chechen they could get their hands on.

  "Not only Chechen people," he told me.

  "One Omon unit attacked farm. They shoot fifty cows, kill them all. They set fire to cows' food hay bum down barns, destroy machines. It was all crazy, mad. What had the cows done to annoy them?"

  "Did you get to hate Chechens?" I asked.

  "Not hate them. Chechens ordinary people. Not like Mghanis.

  Afghanis fanaticals. Some Chechens good, some bad."

  As we flew down over the Ukraine there wasn't a great deal to see. The rolling wheatlands had been harvested and most of the stubble had already gone under the plough, so that vast tracts of black earth were showing.

  The second leg was a different matter, however.

  "We go on the left side," said Sasha as we re-boarded.

  "Then we see mountains."

  As we lifted out of Krasnodar, lying beside a lake in the plain, the pilot climbed slowly on a southerly heading, and soon the Black Sea came in sight, away to our right. Over the coast the plane made a slight left turn and started following the shoreline down, just inland of the water.

  "Famous health resorts," Sasha said, pointing at spots on the map.

  "Sochi, Sukhumi, Batumi many sanatoriums.

  By then the sun was setting over the sea, and on the other side of the aircraft our left it threw fantastic light over the forested hills which piled ever higher into the distance until we began to see snow on the peaks.

  "Soon we see Fibrus!" called Sasha excitedly.

  "Highest mountain in Caucasus. Highest mountain in Europe."

  Screwing round my head to look, I spotted two rounded, snow-covered humps, so high above everything else that they were still catching the last of the sun.

  "They're pink!" I exclaimed.

  "Like a pair of bloody great tits."

  "Precisely!" Sashsa beamed.

  "This is what we would say kak dye siski, like twin tits." Then he pointed left ahead: "Grozny over there, behind." He started in about the war again how the Russians hadn't been able to make headway against the guerrillas, and had no proper military objectives, so that the soldiers took it out on anyone who got in their way.