The Hijack

by Duncan Falconer

  He took a moment to rest and wondered when it had last been serviced, or if indeed it had been at all in the last few years. He remembered clearly from his original briefing that the caches were checked at least once a year by an agent whose sole job it was to maintain them and the equipment inside. Any sign of such a maintenance schedule would be an encouraging indication of the cache’s operational status. If not it meant the option had been abandoned by the FSB some time after the end of the Cold War and, depending on how long ago that last service was, it would be a decisive factor as to whether or not his plan could continue to the next phase or end there and then.

  Zhilev remained optimistic. He took the shovel, jammed it in the rings of the wheel and pulled with all his might. As his head began to shake with the strain, the wheel suddenly moved a little. With renewed vigour he readjusted the spade and took another pull at it. The wheel moved again, this time a little further. He repositioned it again, gave it another firm yank and the wheel turned half a revolution and the friction eased off. He could now turn it with his hands. It moved easily and after several revolutions practically spun, rising as it did so, then stopped suddenly as it reached the end of its thread. Zhilev felt around the threaded shaft beneath the wheel. It was greasy. His expectations rose once again.

  He gripped the wheel and this time pulled it upwards. It moved slightly, with a grinding sound. He repositioned his body, gave it another tug, and a heavy, steel, submarine-like hatch opened sideways on a hinge aided by powerful springs designed to counter its weight. A thick, musky smell rose out of the dark hole like damp, rotten clothing. The hatch was half the diameter of the hole Zhilev had dug and wide enough for a full-grown man to climb down through.

  Zhilev stood to take a breather and admire his work, and to ensure once again that there was no sign of human life anywhere nearby. Another car appeared and followed the road through the wood before carrying on out of sight.

  Zhilev pulled on his coat, removed his scarf from the stick and wrapped it around his neck, then sat on the edge of the hole to search inside with his foot for the ladder he knew was there. He found the first rung, stood upright on it, and lowered himself down through the hatch. As he reached the bottom he took hold of the hatch’s inside handle and pulled it down on top of him. What light there had been from the moon and stars disappeared as he closed and secured it with a half turn of the handle.

  Seconds later, his granite face was bathed in the light from a small torch. He moved the narrow beam around the chamber and it swept over various objects, many he recognised, and he was relieved as well as excited to find the place pretty much as he remembered it. His hopes of finding what he had come for soared but he held himself from searching for it right away and ordered himself to be patient and to do this in an orderly and clinical fashion.

  The first thing he needed to do was find the main power connection. His light scanned the far end of the chamber searching the steel wall but there was no sign of the leads he was expecting to see. Either he had forgotten where it was or it had since been relocated. As he stepped forward to begin a more thorough search, the gods decided to play with him and his torch grew suddenly dim as the battery power faded.

  He cursed and slapped the torch in his palm in a futile effort to revitalise it. Cheap Chinese batteries he mumbled, searching his pockets for spares, then remembered he had left them in the car. He cursed his own lack of professionalism. It was a warning that he was not as proficient as he used to be and that he was going to have to start being doubly cautious and more attentive to detail. He chastised himself. Spetsnaz, the finest Special Forces in the world, and he couldn’t even organise a working torch. Had one of his subordinates done as much he might have punched him to the ground for being so incompetent.

  He blinked as the last drop of energy left his torch and it went completely dead. It was going to be very inconvenient if he had to carry out the rest of his task in complete darkness.

  Stratton grabbed a couple of packs of sandwiches and two bottles of water from a shelf and walked over to the counter of the 24-hour BP garage on the A11 ten miles from the Mildenhall turn off. He paid the cashier, took his receipt and headed outside.

  He walked to the car parked alone across from the pumps and looked inside, expecting to see Gabriel still sprawled across the back seat asleep but he was sitting up and pressing his skull with his hands as if in great pain.

  Stratton opened the rear door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  Gabriel didn’t move as if he had not heard him. Stratton touched his shoulder and Gabriel lowered his hands and looked into his eyes, his own darkly drawn and filled with dread.

  ‘What is it?’ Stratton asked.

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in frustration. ‘I don’t know . . . I can feel him. He’s filled with excitement but at the same time there is guilt, but he’s suppressing it . . . He has no doubts about what he wants to do. He’s committed . . . I’m beginning to wonder if he’s insane.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ Stratton asked getting down to basic tangibles.

  ‘In a dark place. Cramped. Surrounded by things, objects. I can’t make them all out. I saw beds, boxes, containers . . . There was some writing. Quick, give me a pen and paper.’

  Stratton took a pen and notepad from his pocket and handed it to him.

  Gabriel placed the tip of the pen on the page and then went still and closed his eyes. Stratton wondered if Gabriel was summoning up the image from memory or actually remote viewing it.

  Gabriel started to scribble, eyes closed, and after drawing what looked like several squiggly lines he stopped and opened his eyes to see what he had done. Stratton leaned in to look. There were half a dozen separate markings but he could not tell if they were drawings or foreign letters. They looked Greek, or Russian perhaps.

  ‘Is this happening now?’ Stratton asked.

  ‘It’s now,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Is this at the air base or the forest?’

  ‘How can I know that?’ Gabriel snapped. ‘I told you it’s in a small room . . . or perhaps it wasn’t a room,’ he said tiredly as he dropped his head into his hands again.

  Stratton was beginning to see why this was such a low percentage success-rate intelligence-gathering programme. He wondered how many visions Gabriel had had that were never proven. It seemed too easy to say something was happening and expect to be taken seriously. The phrase ‘con man’ came to mind. Perhaps these characters had sucked everyone in. The CIA said the skill was real, put millions into it and, since they were committed, who could doubt them. It might be feasible and viewers might actually exist in the world, but who could tell if this guy was a fraud? Maybe the tanker was just a coincidence?

  Stratton checked his watch. He decided that since they were here he would humour Gabriel a while longer before heading back to London.

  ‘The ceiling was low and arched,’ Gabriel then said.‘It was made of metal, steel, not brick or concrete. Like a submarine.’

  Stratton gazed at the petrol station which was now empty. ‘Now we’re in a submarine,’ he mumbled to himself. He wondered if he could lure him into a pub for last orders. A drink might help make this easier to deal with.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Stratton asked.

  ‘I want to find him, of course. That’s why we’re here.’

  Stratton rubbed his face as if to push away the tiredness he was suddenly feeling, then closed Gabriel’s door, opened the driver’s door, climbed in and started the engine. He drove out of the garage and on to the highway, passing a sign to Thetford Forest.

  Zhilev searched in the blackness under one of the bunk beds, his hands becoming his eyes as he felt around for what he knew had to be somewhere in the room. If it took him all night and the next day, searching every inch of the steel tube, he would find it. Zhilev was a patient man but his growing frustration was being fuelled by his own feeling of incompetence. The issue of the failed torch would never leave hi
m, not for as long as he had a memory. As he cursed himself out loud, his hand brushed against what felt like a cable hanging below the mattress.

  He pulled it through his fingers until it divided into two thinner cables and then he found the ends, both of which had crocodile clips attached. He followed the cable back in the opposite direction to where it disappeared inside what felt like a junction box. This was what he was looking for. Taking hold of the crocodile clips he stretched under the bed, fanning out his arm in search of the power source that had to be within the length of the cable, and hit a solid, heavy box. He felt the top and what seemed to be battery terminals, attached the crocodile clips to the nodules, and light from several bulbs in the ceiling and on the walls instantly glowed, illuminating the chamber.

  Zhilev crawled out from under the bed, covered in dust, and as he stood he had to hold his head for a moment and support it as his neck began aching fiercely. He massaged the vertebrae, bringing his head back and then dropping it forward down on to his chest hoping for the click that usually brought some relief, but it did not come this time. He moaned loudly as he forced his head down, increasing the pain, and then it suddenly cracked. He released it slowly, enjoying the comparative relief, dropped his shoulders and exhaled to relax, then took a look around at the long, narrow, sombre, metal chamber. In shape and size it was similiar to the inside of a road-haulage fuel tanker. It was just high enough for Zhilev to stand up in although he had to lean forward to prevent his head scraping on the ceiling. The memories came flooding back and the cache grew more familiar to him by the second.

  A military communication system sat on its own metal shelf welded to the wall beside the bunk bed. Zhilev turned the radio on and as soon as a series of LED lights glowed, he turned it off.

  The length of one side of the cylinder was crammed tightly with shelving packed with durable moulded, black plastic boxes of various shapes and sizes. Two pairs of bunk beds took up most of the other side with a narrow walkway separating them from the shelves. At one end of the bunks was a toilet with no privacy panel or curtain, and a sump in the ground beneath it large enough to take care of four men’s evacuations. Beside the toilet was the ladder welded to the wall directly below the entrance hatch. At the other end of the cylinder, beyond the beds, was a small table with an electric kettle on it as well as neatly stacked plates, mugs and cutlery. Beneath the table were several oxygen bottles. Everything was covered in a thin film of white dust which came from the air-scrubbers, a carbon-dioxide-absorbent powder which increased the life of the air inside the chamber in case it was unsafe to open the hatch for a long period. Like the submarines of old, if the percentage of oxygen dropped below a partial pressure of point two bars absolute, which affected most people’s brains, causing an initial drunken-like state before unconsciousness, the oxygen bottles could be activated and a trickle flow of the live-saving gas would maintain the correct percentage.

  On the floor beside the toilet was a camouflage disk the size of a car tyre, designed to fit snugly inside the entrance hole; it was secured in place from beneath prior to closing the hatch and intended to hide the hole from the outside. It would not sustain a close inspection or an adult standing on it, but then it would only ever be used in the event of a real operation and the odds on someone walking through that precise part of the forest during the short period it would be in use were calculated as acceptable.There were also contingency plans in the event the cache was discovered. If the alarm was not immediately raised by the discoverers and they could be captured before they escaped, they were to be killed and their bodies buried. If it was the British military that made the find, and the inhabitants of the cache had no chance of escaping to continue their task, then the final option, which involved explosives and the total destruction of the cache, was none too pleasant for anyone in the immediate vicinity. This was the only kind of operation Zhilev had ever been involved in that called for suicide in the event of the threat of capture, and he remembered his team accepting the order wholeheartedly, understanding the logic and necessity of it.

  The placing of the chamber in the ground sometime in the early sixties had been an impressive operation, taking several years to plan and many months to execute. The bare cylinder, or habitat, was purchased from a company in Hull which made it to spec believing it was to be used as an underground fuel reservoir for a factory outside Glasgow. The ground preparation and digging of the hole was carried out by a small group of KGB agents masquerading as geologists, archaeologists and students. Their cover story was that they were on a joint archaeological and soil-sampling project for Exeter and Munich Universities and they had genuine documentation giving them formal written permission to carry out limited earthwork in the area, which was more than enough to satisfy any curious passing police patrol or forest official. The hole itself was dug in a few hours late one afternoon using a rented digger and the cylinder delivered by truck early the next morning, lowered into the ground by crane and buried the same day. This took place far enough away from the road to be shielded from view by the young forest, which was part of the reason for selecting the location. The young pine trees that had been removed to dig the hole were replanted once the cylinder had been buried. The displaced soil which was not redistributed around the area was taken away on the truck that delivered the cylinder. None of the KGB involved in this phase of the operation had any idea what the cylinder was to be used for. The rumour deliberately circulated suggested it was to contain electronic eavesdropping equipment to monitor aircraft movements in and out of various airfields in the region.

  Several months later, after the empty habitat had settled, the Spetsnaz took over the next phase, which was filling it with its various pieces of equipment and making it operational.The first stage was putting in the basic survival and living requirements such as toilet, beds, air-scrubbers, food and water. After that came the communications systems, and then finally the weaponry.

  Buried cylinders were only one of the inventive ways the KGB used to provide operational war caches for the Spetsnaz. Some were in the sealed basements of town houses or farms owned by sleeper agents, others were in cleverly concealed caves. Their locations were limited only by the imagination, their main requirement that they could remain in situ without discovery for fifty years.

  The last time Zhilev had been in this cache he had spent a week locked beneath the ground, the hatch sealed, with three of his comrades. It was classed as an exercise but deep inside his enemy’s territory. The cache was not a surveillance post and never intended to be one. It was specifically designed as a saboteurs’ hide, to keep four men in the most basic of comforts while they waited for the order to climb out and head for pre-designated targets where they would carry out their directives. That order would come via a one-way communication system, the signal received by pushing up an antenna through the soil using a specially designed telescopic system in the roof. If sensors under the ground around the cache detected movement by anything as large as a human, the antenna would be lowered. Twice a day, for half an hour each time, it was raised and the radio operative listened on three specific frequencies, each for ten minutes duration, for the Morse sequence that would precede the coded message that contained the vital signal to commence operations. It was a passive receiver device since the ever-watchful electronic ears of the British army intelligence corps might pick up a transmission and come sniffing in the woods for the source of the signal, for the British were well aware these caches existed, although as far as Zhilev knew they had only ever found one in England. He thought there were over two dozen in the British Isles, twice that number in Germany and several dozen more throughout the rest of Europe including Scandinavia. America had the largest number, understandably so, with over a hundred between the two coasts.The only other cache Zhilev had been to was in America, situated beneath a small lake in North Carolina a mile from a series of long-range nuclear-missile silos, and accessed by duck-diving down to a sump, like the U-bend in a toilet. />
  Zhilev turned to the shelving and looked at the numerous and varied cases spread in front of him, deciding where to start. He was looking for something specific, but also for anything that might be useful on his mission and therefore he decided he might as well search all the containers now that he was here. He moved to one end of the shelves and studied the catch on the front of the first container which consisted of a butterfly screw system that pulled the lid closed as it was turned. He unwound the first pair of latches and forced the halves apart. The hermetically sealed container popped as it opened. Zhilev raised the lid to find it filled with a variety of canned foods, powdered soup, tea and coffee, hard tack biscuits, dried milk and sugar, chewing gum, chocolate and boiled sweets. There were six of these containers, enough food to last four men a month if they kept their calorific intake down to two thousand per day.

  Zhilev took out one of the tins to read the label: Meat and Cabbage Stew. He smiled to himself as he remembered the jokes that always accompanied this infamous meal and the fear of being in the confined space after it was consumed, especially with such an exposed toilet. In practice there never was an inordinate amount of noxious methane produced and everyone suspected that was the work of the great National Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Defence Ministry who had toiled relentlessly and no doubt spent millions of roubles to find a way to reduce the foul gaseous odour. It was with much comic relief the men whiled away the time adlibbing the likely conversations between the scientists on the subject of fart reduction in the Russian military, on account of its multitude of tactical disadvantages including noise, smell and flammability.

  Zhilev replaced the tin and examined the next and largest container which was filled with water. On top, neatly stacked, were boxes of sterilising tablets and filtration tubes. In the event the team was required to stay longer than two weeks, water could be collected, even from dirty puddles and ditches, and made fit for drinking. The instructions assured one that the filtration system would make their own raw sewage drinkable simply by pouring it in one end, and pumping it out the other, but no one was prepared to try it unless absolutely necessary.