by Andy McNab
I took some deep breaths as I went to slow everything down inside my body and my head. I got into the zone. I’d always known that people like Red Ken, Dex and I were lucky to be able to do that. I didn’t know if it was genetic or acquired or a combination of the two, but when everything went to rat shit, thinking clearly just sort of happened. It had nothing to do with being brave or, in Dex’s case, certifiably insane. It had to do with mastering the stress when it would be natural to flap big-time.
Stress improves performance. Your heart-rate is governed by adrenalin levels. That’s all good stuff when you need flight, fight or bluff, but there is an optimum state – when it’s hammering away at between 115 and 145 beats per minute. Anything above that and your body stops being able to control what it’s doing and you get killed because you fuck up. Or in this case it arouses suspicion and encourages the uniformed automaton in the driving seat to check everything about you more closely, starting with your passport.
She finished her call as I reached the counter. She looked up and switched on her brilliant white smile. I tried my best to match it.
‘The seven thirty for Moscow via Astana. I’d like a seat, please.’
She tapped away at her computer keyboard as I flipped Tattoo’s passport out of his jacket pocket and got extra busy looking down and fucking about in my day-sack.
She scanned it and passed it back to me with just a cursory glance at the personal details. She certainly didn’t see anything odd about a guy with a British accent presenting with Russian travel docs. I know people who’ve travelled the world on their wife’s passport. You just have to show a bit of front.
‘How would you like to pay, Mr Sinitsin?’
‘US dollars, please.’
She checked her tariff. ‘That will be ninety.’
She gave the keyboard a really good hammering and a ticket eventually clattered out of the printer beside her. She passed it across the counter, giving me the opportunity to admire her green wristband and immaculate manicure.
‘You are boarding at gate ten. Air Astana do not allocate seats, but that is no problem – the flight is nearly empty. Please hurry. The gate is closing in fifteen minutes.’
Immigration and security were a piece of piss. They were there to tag foreigners coming in and nationals going out, not the other way round. The camera had lost its memory card; it was now in my mouth. My James Manley passport was in Tattoo’s wallet.
A stewardess looked at my boarding pass and waved towards the hundred or so empty seats. As I moved down the aisle I heard the door close behind me. I spat the memory card into my hand.
The aircraft was relatively new, much better than the ropy gear that former Soviet Union countries used to fly. There were three seats either side of the aisle. I spotted Anna about three-quarters of the way back, on the right-hand side, hunched over her netbook. Judging by the expression on her face, she was using the last few minutes before take-off to spit teeth and feathers at her readers about the misdeeds of M3C. She had a silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. I knew she was going to be wearing it for a good few days.
I didn’t know where the Falcon was headed, and Julian wasn’t going to be of any help. I had to get out of the country. So here I was, with the only person who could help me find out what the fuck was going on.
I carried on down the aisle and took the seat next to her.
92
Anna looked up, eyes like saucers. She opened her mouth to speak, but I silenced her with a finger to my lips. My other hand swivelled the netbook towards me. I hit the keys with my two middle fingers.
talk like this
Nowhere is safe from surveillance, especially on an aircraft. Even the toilets can be bugged. State-of-the-art systems can screen out the sound of running water.
falcon left with the 2 players onboard – do you know where?
no
People were still thronging the aisles and waffling away on their mobiles, but the plane had started to taxi.
I slotted in the memory card. Spag’s picture filled the screen.
know him?
She shook her head and typed.
who is he?
dont know
I didn’t need to tell her anything that didn’t help me.
he with the other two?
I nodded.
how did you know about neptun building and the meet?
She smiled.
a source
who?
She smiled again.
go fuck yourself
I tried again.
can you find out where the falcon is going?
There was a commotion behind us. The stewardess had started bollocking people big-time. She spotted the netbook so we got a verbal slapping as well.
Anna turned and nodded.
We touched down in Astana at 12.15 local. Once we’d left the plane, Anna scrabbled around in her day-sack and pulled out a mobile and battery. Good drills: no tracing. Once she’d reunited them and found a signal, she started dialling. It wasn’t long before she was mumbling away, her hand covering her mouth to hide the sound.
It took no more than a minute. As she closed down and removed the battery again, we exchanged our first words since I’d sat down next to her.
‘Well?’
‘He will help us.’ She raised a finger and tugged her scarf far enough down her neck for me to glimpse a bruise that was pretty much the same colour as Tattoo’s prize tattoo. ‘At least until he sees this, you bastard.’
We transited through for the 13.25 flight to Moscow.
93
Astana airport
IKIA had been a palace compared to this dump. The transit lounge was old-school Communism back with a vengeance – drab, dirty, full of cigarette smoke and people lying on top of crushed cardboard boxes because there weren’t any seats.
Anna toyed with her plastic coffee cup and looked at the empty tables all around us. I asked her the question again. ‘Why are you so fixated on just one man?’
She took a big pull on her cigarette.
‘Br-in…’ She almost choked on the word. ‘Brin was one of those people who found themselves in the right place at the right time the day the Soviet Union ceased to exist – the first of January 1992. He was in his mid-thirties, an ardent Communist and, until Gorbachev and Yeltsin pulled the plug on the old system, a man at the very height of his career – or so he believed. Back then, even he couldn’t have guessed quite how big and successful he would eventually become. None of Russia’s oligarchs could…
‘Brin was extremely ambitious. He came to Moscow from the fourth largest city in Russia – Gorky, which is now known as Nizhny Novgorod. During the Communist era, Gorky was a closed city – the reason many dissidents were sent there. Once you arrived in Gorky, it was almost impossible to leave, such was the ring of security the KGB placed around it. And for good reason: Gorky was a strategic industrial centre for weapons production, something Brin knew a great deal about.’
She paused and gazed into the middle distance for a few moments, watching the smoke she exhaled blending with the grey wall of the cafeteria.
‘Brin was not an engineer. He was an administrator, and he was KGB. He was responsible for the production of a large part of the programme. And by all accounts he was good at it. Russians build weapons differently from the way they are built in the West.
‘In the USSR we had bureaux, as we called them, places where the weapons were conceived, designed and prototyped. The bureaux were usually in Moscow or Leningrad and the production facilities were almost always in areas very far removed from the centre – places like Gorky.
‘Brin did such a brilliant administrative job at the production centre that he was transferred before long to the design bureau in Moscow. He was only thirty-eight and already a KGB colonel, and assigned to one of the most important defence projects in the USSR – a strategic missile system that, when built, would have had the power to wipe America off the map. It never came
to that, thank God, because soon after he arrived in Moscow the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War ended.’
She looked into my eyes. ‘You have to imagine what it was like on that January morning – the day Russians returned to work after the country that they had known and sworn allegiance to for more than seventy years had effectively evaporated. For some, the phones stopped ringing, orders stopped coming in, and they simply went home. Brin was not one of them. With his friends in the KGB – soon to become the FSB – he was able to purchase stock in the company.
‘Within a very short space of time, he had complete control of it. Many Russians who worked in the defence industry thought that it would go into a terminal decline as the Cold War ended. Not Brin. With the liberalization of the Russian economy, he soon started to acquire other missile companies, some for next to nothing. By 2003, with the blessing of Putin’s government, he had built M3C into what it is today: a one-stop shop for anyone needing anything from the smallest handheld weapon to a nuclear missile. The nuclear variety were not on sale outside Russia, of course, but that never stopped Brin selling the technology within them to pariah states that had the money to pay – under-the-table deals that were allowed to proceed because they had the blessing of Putin and his cronies in the FSB.’
‘How did you get involved?’
‘Chechnya…’ She was lost to me again for a few seconds. ‘Chechnya was good for M3C. War has been good for M3C, full stop. The conflict saw the Russian government pour billions of roubles into weapon systems devoted to the systematic eradication of the Chechen people. I was in Chechnya as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta.’ She sighed. ‘At first, it was the humanitarian narrative that pulled me in. Later, I realized that the corruption that sustained it – fuelled it, in fact – was the story I was supposed to tell.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Putin started the Chechen war. It suited his purposes to have a conflict on our doorstep – to get ordinary Russians focused on an external enemy, rather than the real enemy, the corruption that lies at the heart of Russia itself. Corruption in our country is a cancer, fostered by alliances between powerful figures in our government, oligarchs who control our economy and criminals – mafiosi. Having started it, Putin and his government needed to sustain the war in Chechnya.’
‘So why single out Brin?’
‘Chechnya made Brin a billionaire many times over and he, in turn, made sure that the people who were keeping the war going were also very well rewarded. I can’t get them all.’
‘This is the story you want to tell?’
‘It’s the story I’m compelled to tell. The trouble is, ordinary Russians are bored – they think they’ve heard it all before. They have become anaesthetized to scandal. But they haven’t heard this story – not by a long chalk…’
She smiled fleetingly. ‘I am lucky. My source told me about the Tehran meeting. The Cold War may have ended, but there is little affection in the upper echelons of the Russian government for the West. Nor, as you can imagine, do Russian defence companies care particularly about the fate of the average NATO soldier.’
I took a taste of muddy coffee and changed tack. ‘Is Brin normally involved in heroin?’
She smiled again, but bleakly this time. ‘Defence is a declining market. With George Bush gone and Barack Obama in power, the amount of money that the Americans are due to set aside for their defence and intelligence expenditure is declining dramatically. It is the same in Russia. Apart from anything else, few people in the grip of the current economic crisis can afford highly sophisticated weapons. The Russian government certainly can’t. It is raiding any budget it can to pay for the current debt crisis. And that isn’t going to change any time soon.
‘Brin is not a fool. Quite the opposite – he remains a driven, highly ambitious man. He needs to look for new sources of revenue, and yields do not come any bigger than those to be found in the opium and heroin market. The Taliban want highly sophisticated missiles? They pay for them with heroin – and Brin cements another part of his developing trade.
‘That is the picture that I went to Tehran to capture. I needed to see an employee of Brin dealing directly with the Taliban. I needed a photograph of the meeting that would make those responsible for that transaction completely transparent. The evidence would be published and it would lead to Brin. The story is ninety per cent written, I just need that picture. Then you can do whatever you have to do…’
Anna didn’t have quite as much of the story as she thought. She didn’t have the bit I had – and that bit was Altun. I suddenly saw a whole lot more – more, even, than I’d tumbled to in the past twenty-four hours. The only thing I didn’t understand was where Spag fitted in.
Did I care about Brin? He was Anna’s demon, not mine. My attention remained fixed on Altun and Spag – and it would stay there until I’d got payback for Red Ken and Dex. No – that wasn’t true. I wanted every fucker on the trail to get what was coming to them for what had happened in Dubai. Brin had just been added to the list.
‘Anna, why are you telling me all this?’
She looked at her watch and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Because you need to understand.’
94
Moscow Sheremetyevo
1730 hrs
The seatbelts sign was still illuminated, but the engines were winding down. That was good enough for most of the locals. They were up and out of their seats as if the first to the exit got a free bottle of vodka.
Anna and I let the initial wave scramble for the door.
If I’d been able to speak the language, we’d have disembarked separately, but my Russian didn’t stretch any further than da, niet, spasibo and dasvidaniya, and that wasn’t going to get me to the bottom of the steps. I needed Anna. Only with her help could I remain the grey man.
She zipped her camera and laptop into her day-sack and looked out of the window. ‘In Moscow we have only two seasons, summer and winter. The snow has melted and the sun is out. It must be summer.’ She smiled, waiting. It must have been a joke.
All the same, it wasn’t going to be as hot as Tehran. I wished Tattoo’s jacket was a little thicker.
We eventually joined the scrum – I didn’t want us to be the last off. We reached the galley area, turned left and shuffled towards the door. I’d slung my day-sack over my shoulder. On the ramp there were three guys in fluorescent jackets – normal airport staff manning the air-bridge. No men in black leather waiting to push us back onto the plane until the real people had gone.
We walked up the ramp and joined the spur that led to the main terminal. People milled about at gates or drifted in and out of shops that seemed to sell nothing apart from chunky watches and bottles of vodka shaped like AK-47s. I finally spotted a pharmacy.
I’d briefed Anna. She went in, and came out again with a pack of tissues and a jar of stuff that stank of eucalyptus. I looked at her with obvious gratitude and rubbed a handful round my throat. It made my eyes water. I opened the tissues and had a good blow. The airport was bound to be crawling with CCTV. Untold pairs of eyes would already be watching us. This was no time to look furtive or guilty, or anything other than a passenger with two days’ growth and a bad cold.
We came to the end of the walkway and took a down escalator, following the signs for Passport Control and Baggage Reclaim. I could see the Immigration hall straight ahead of us when we were only halfway down the escalator. This was where Igor Sinitsin would stand or fall. It all depended on whether the body had been found. Unlikely until it started to smell. Then it would need to be identified, and the only ID was the Merc’s number-plate. It should give me a few days, but you never knew.
There were four or five people queuing at each of the desks. I blew my nose to give myself something to do. At the same time I reddened my face by holding my nose and trying to breathe out.
We waited in line. I still had my day-sack on my right shoulder. Anna had hers on with both straps fastened, and a small blue plastic
wheelie-case by her side. She was a pro: no hold luggage to lose control of or delay you. We exchanged a smile, but there was no excessive eye contact. For those watching on monitors and from behind two-way mirrors, that would add up to suspicious behaviour.
The suit in front of us went through with not much more than a nod and a wave to the official. It was Anna’s turn to approach the booth. She looked back and pointed. I saw her gripping her throat and miming a cough.
The Immigration guy signalled me to join them. He was mid-thirties and looked as if he spent every hour he wasn’t in his booth pumping iron, shaving his head and taking misery pills. He also looked much more interested in her than me, that was for sure.
I handed over my passport. He asked me something.
I made a sound as if to speak, then brought a fistful of tissues up to my face and croaked. My throat was agony.
Anna answered for me.
His eyes flicked up and down as he studied first the picture, then my face. He put the passport down below the level of the desk and I saw the tell-tale glow of ultraviolet light. Something troubled him. He looked back into my eyes and muttered another question. I guessed it wasn’t to ask me why I was so much more handsome in the flesh than on camera.
I gave a weak smile and Anna gobbed off. He grunted something but he didn’t hand back the passport. There was a bit of a lull, like he was waiting for me to fill the silence with a confession.
Then Anna made another comment and he smiled. He put the document back on the desktop. As I took it, his attention had already returned to the line.
I started to walk. We were nearly there.
The sliding doors opened into the arrivals hall and we ran the gauntlet of taxi drivers holding up bits of cardboard and people clutching bunches of flowers. Nobody gave us a second glance.
