by Andy McNab
Anna pointed towards an exit. I was still apprehensive. Being dependent on others gave me the same feeling as knocking on a strange door without knowing who or what was on the other side.
95
We set off across the huge concourse. Judging by the signs, we were either heading for the car-rental desks, the platform for the Moscow express or the car park.
We came out of the terminal and took a left. Definitely the car park. As we rounded the corner of the building and entered the walkway into the multi-storey, we turned left again. We were at the bottom of a stairwell.
A guy in his late sixties was standing waiting, a black woollen coat over his arm. His hair was grey and well-cut, like the suit he was wearing under his open black raincoat and the woollen scarf around his neck.
Anna flew into his arms and it was full-on hugs all round. They kissed each other five or six times on the cheek then drew back and gobbed off to each other in Russian for several seconds. He ignored me and made her put the coat on. I’d started to appreciate her joke. It might have been summer in Moscow, but there was a chill in the air.
She thanked him for his kindness, gave him a beaming smile and fed an arm through his.
I took the chance to look around. I mostly noticed what was missing. There were no CCTV cameras trained where we were standing. This boy was switched on.
They talked some more. He spoke quietly and warmly, his pale grey eyes fixed on hers. They were slightly rheumy with age, and made him look kind, like everyone’s favourite granddad.
She finally turned to me. ‘Semyon was alarmed after my call. He wasn’t expecting me back for another two days.’
‘And Semyon is…?’
She translated for him and he looked at me and smiled. His teeth were yellowing, but at least they were still his. He offered us both a cigarette from a light blue pack. Anna took one. He said something that seemed to have nothing to do with cigarettes and she answered.
‘What’s he saying?’
He sparked up a plastic disposable and she cupped her hands round his as he offered her the flame.
‘He’s asking me about you. I said we can trust you.’
‘Can you?’
‘I’ve spent my working life around bad people. I can smell them. And why would you risk everything to be here with us now?’
‘Risk everything?’
Now it was my turn for the smile. ‘When he sees what you did to my neck, Semyon will probably want to kill you.’
The old boy spoke again and her brow creased. The waffle bounced back and forth a couple of times.
She turned back to me. ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid. The Falcon came back here, to Moscow.’
‘No – that’s good. Tell him that’s good.’
Anna didn’t bother. ‘He says it’s due to go to the proving ground tomorrow. Assuming everyone is still together, that can mean only one thing. They will test fire. There were rumours that it was faulty, but-’
Semyon gobbed off some more.
‘You know about dark flares? You know the importance of them? You know that the SA-16 can defeat-’
I dredged a name out of my briefing notes. ‘Vologda?’
She nodded. ‘It’s in the middle of a military training area.’
‘I know.’ I undid my day-sack and took out the Nikon. ‘How long will it take to get there?’
‘Maybe six hours by road.’
‘There’s no train?’
‘The line goes from St Petersburg only, and the area is north of the city. No internal flights either.’
Semyon said something else.
‘The weather forecast is cloudy until the afternoon. They will want a clear sky.’
With the camera powered up, I opened the side to replace the memory card. There was something I wanted to show Semyon. ‘Does he know where the people in the Falcon are now? They in Moscow?’
They waffled away, but it wasn’t sounding hopeful.
‘Can he try and find out where they are? It’s really important.’ I didn’t give a shit what Anna had in mind for them after she had her photos. ‘Where is the Falcon?’ If I could get to it before they took off tomorrow, maybe I’d be able to get the job done without leaving the city.
She didn’t have to ask Semyon. ‘No good. M3C have their own hangar in a military air base on the other side of the city.’
I passed him the Nikon. ‘Ask if he knows him.’
Semyon pulled a pair of cheap reading glasses from an alloy tube and focused on the back screen.
‘The little fat one, tell him.’
He zoomed in until Spag’s face filled the screen.
The accompanying shrug and shake of his head said it all. As he handed the Nikon back his eyes fixed on mine. He seemed to be apologizing.
‘If he doesn’t know where they are, I need to get into the proving ground. Can he help?’
His eyes bounced between the two of us and he gobbed off some more.
‘OK. We will go to his apartment later tonight and he may have more information.’
I realized I had their relationship all wrong. It wasn’t their apartment. But they’d said a lot more to each other than she was translating. ‘I don’t want to go to his place. I want to meet outside.’
‘No.’ Anna protected him. ‘He may be able to get maps, papers, find out where everyone is in the city. If he is stopped in possession…’ She searched my face. ‘No matter where they are, you will take me.’
Semyon asked something.
Anna turned to me. ‘We do not know your name.’
‘Manley. James Manley.’ I’d always wanted to say that. ‘But you can call me Jim.’
‘Jim, we need to help each other. We get what we want, the pictures that prove the story, then you can do whatever you have been sent to do.’
Semyon stepped forward, his hand extended, but his eyes burnt into mine. There were several messages there, none of them good.
96
Izmailovsky Park, Moscow
1930 hrs
We followed the crowd out of the ornate, almost Victorian-looking metro station. The thirty-minute non-stop express ride from Sheremetyevo had given me time to check out the others in the carriage.
Once up at street level, Anna fumbled about in her day-sack for a pack of cigarettes. It gave me time to study the twenty or so who’d come up with us.
We headed down a tree-lined avenue littered with empty bottles and rusty cans. Anna’s wheelie-case squeaked over the paving-stones. At the end, set in a large park of patchy grass, was a mock-Russian fortress with bell towers and onion domes. We could have been in Disneyland, if it hadn’t been for the slogans and graffiti daubed on the walls and the methers sparked out beneath them.
We manoeuvred round a group that had gathered to watch and applaud a fire-breather and passed through a pillared gateway topped off with balloons. The Izmailovsky flea-market was huge. You could lose yourself in it – and anyone you needed to.
Anna had chosen well. I wanted somewhere we could disappear for a few hours, that had constant movement and faces that changed quickly. She knew the score. She’d been doing it herself for years. Campaigning journalists weren’t exactly in the Good Lads Club in this country.
Her flat was routinely watched. A hotel was out of the question – they’d want to see our passports. So, it was hang-about time until we went to Semyon’s. After that, the plan was for her to go and collect her car. If Semyon didn’t know where the targets were in Moscow, or if he discovered that they’d already left the city, we’d need to get to the proving ground as fast as we could. The area was the size of Wales, the brochure had said. Finding it was one thing; finding out where exactly the test firing was going to happen was quite another.
Straight ahead there was a long run of stalls. The flea-market was a tourist attraction and kept long hours. A group of Japanese camcorded each other buying tat. Cold War chess sets, brass busts of Lenin, and Russian dolls with Putin and Obama painted on them we
re flying off the stall. So was the cheap padded coat I asked her to buy me, the sort any respectable granddad would wear. Del was very happy with the US dollars she handed him.
I steered her down an alley that opened up on our right. As we moved behind a rail of hanging T-shirts, I turned and had a quick browse. Nobody was following or taking the slightest interest. I decided I didn’t want a Putin T-shirt after all and we moved on. If someone’s behind you innocently, they might follow you the first time you take a turn. At a push, they might take the second. But nobody follows you round the third side of a square without a fucking good reason.
Anna caught on fast and didn’t need to ask. She pointed to things, smiled and laughed. Sometimes she took my arm. Worst case, I was a foreigner with a girl I had out on appro from the Russian-brides catalogue.
The third right had brought us into the flea-market’s very own B amp;Q district: rows of stalls covered with all your needs if you were building a house or knocking one down, from second-hand screwdriver sets to petrol-powered Kango hammers. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eight and coming to last light. The first stars were out. The temperature had dipped. We still had three or four hours to kill.
We crossed into a place filled with counterfeit DVDs and CDs and Russian rock memorabilia. Techno thumped from a speaker. A guy with a head-load of stubble-length bleached hair tried to get Anna to buy a Prodigy mug. Instead he got back the short, sharp Stalin daughter’s stare and bollocking. We moved on a bit, but not far. The deafening music was good – it made it impossible for anyone to hear our conversation.
She drew my head down and moved her mouth against my ear. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I could feel her breath. I wasn’t going to complain about that.
I pointed to a cafe at the end of the alleyway instead. Embers glowed in an open fire. A guy was cutting neat slices off something roasting over it. I started to head towards it.
‘No, not there.’ She pulled me in the opposite direction.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Somewhere else. Anywhere but there.’
97
We sat in a bar filled with people, smoke and music. It doubled as a kebab shop, and that was what she bought me to eat. I filled my face and lifted the Pepsi Max can to my mouth. She gunned down Baltika beer from the bottle. I was sure I’d never seen Agnetha do that.
‘Remember, we got a busy time ahead.’
She put down the bottle and picked up her cigarette. She blew the smoke towards the ceiling, as if that was going to stop the nicotine getting anywhere near me. ‘Do not patronize me. If I want a drink I’ll have one. You are not my father.’
‘Is Semyon?’
The cigarette went down and the beer came up. ‘No, he is not. But he is special – perhaps more so, even, than my own father.’
I looked at the ring on her right hand. ‘What about your husband?’
The beer bottle smacked down on the tabletop. ‘Do I ask anything from you? I don’t even know if James Manley is your real name. IranEx is full of people with unreal names. Are you a spy, Jim? I imagine you are.’
I couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t know how much I wished I was. I’d been brought up on old Bond films. ‘No.’
‘I don’t believe you. But that’s OK.’ She nodded at the two remaining kebabs. ‘They will get cold.’
As I kept eating she drank and smoked, deep in her own world. She ordered more drinks and tapped another stick from the pack.
‘What about you? Are you a spy?’ I wiped grease from my mouth. ‘Your Arabic’s good. And your English is better than mine.’
‘I am what I say I am. I like languages, that’s all. Besides, Arabic pretty much came with the territory.’
‘Chechnya?’
‘Yes, and Bosnia, and Afghanistan…’
‘I thought your thing was anti-corruption.’
‘It is. Where do you think M3C sells its weaponry?’
‘Does your source work for them?’
‘Semyon… Semyon is a very trusted friend.’ She spoke the words slowly to emphasize just how much she meant them.
I picked up a piece of pitta bread and got stuck into the last kebab. ‘How do you know him? I mean, M3C are the enemy, aren’t they?’
She didn’t answer. Neither did she fire up another cigarette as I ate. She just stared at me, her mind buzzing. ‘OK, Jim, we’ll talk…’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not married.’ She lifted her right hand. ‘I wear it to keep men out of my way. This is Russia, after all. But it is also there to remind me that I was going to marry once, years ago. Semyon was going to be my father-in-law. I love him deeply. He is the only family I have now.’
Her hand came down and played with the cigarette packet.
‘My boyfriend was older than me. My father didn’t approve.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Grisha. We used to go to that place you were aiming for, to escape the eyes of my family. It’s a young person’s hang-out – always has been. He always said it served the best shashlik in Moscow.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was 1987. We were young. We were in love. And then he went to Afghanistan. I waved goodbye to him at the station… and the next time I saw him he was in a coffin. Now Semyon and I have only pictures of Grisha to remind us of what he was like.’
I watched a tear form and trickle down her cheek. She fumbled to get another cigarette out of the pack. I took it from her and helped.
She sniffed. ‘I still go there sometimes when I want to remember him.’
The firebrand who’d gobbed off at the press conference didn’t square with the person I was with now. In Tehran she’d seemed utterly driven. The girl in front of me was vulnerable. But if you’d lost the love of your life in a war? The picture was steadying a little. ‘Grisha’s death still drives you.’
She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. But not, I suspect, for the reasons you think.’
I passed her the cigarette and she took it and lit up. ‘Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. Then, one day, February ’eighty-nine, the letters stopped. They told us he was missing, presumed dead. We wrote requesting further information, but the army never replied. It was like he’d never existed.’
In the wake of the Chechen war, I’d helped a number of families who’d tried to find out what had happened to their dead or missing sons. But during the Soviet era it would have been dangerous even asking the question.
‘It must have been – must still be – difficult.’
‘What?’
‘Not knowing what happened.’
‘But we do.’
98
Anna toyed awkwardly with her Baltika. ‘Almost a year after we lost the war, Semyon got a call from a man who claimed to be the colonel of the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on Grisha’s body.’
She saw something in my face. ‘You’re thinking the army didn’t carry out autopsies on ordinary soldiers? Sometimes they did. In certain circumstances.’
I didn’t need to ask her what they were. I knew she was going to tell me soon enough.
She took a swig. ‘The colonel told Semyon that he wanted to meet, that there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was scared to meet him.’
‘Why?’
‘This was Soviet Russia.’
‘So you said you’d go.’
‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man – this colonel – at a cafe. He told me about himself – told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. It was then that he showed me the pictures.
‘The autopsy had been carried out at a military medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: he was face up,
eyes closed, like he was sleeping.’
The tears were really flowing now. She didn’t even bother wiping them away.
‘I asked the colonel what had happened and he told me Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier had been hit by an antitank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled, removing the back of his skull. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head – just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’
She steadied herself.
‘The fragment that had killed Grisha had come from an antitank missile that had only just entered service with the Soviet Army. It was effectively brand new. Someone had sold it to the mujahideen. Never mind that it would kill Russians. To the people who’d done the deal, the only thing that was important was the money.’
‘So why did this pathologist approach Semyon?’
‘Oh, that bit was easy. In exchange for the information, he wanted a job.’
Caught in the pool of light cast by the street-lamp outside, a couple of peaked caps and heavy trench coats walked past the window. They stopped to look through the glass. She watched and waited until they moved on.
The stub of her cigarette joined the others in the ashtray. ‘Jim, we should go.’
99
We were on a main drag – a long prospect heading westwards, the direction we needed to go. Traffic streamed in both directions. I turned to Anna as she took my arm. ‘Tell me about Grisha.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘As much as you want to tell.’
She wrapped her coat more tightly around her against the wind that was blowing along the prospekt. With it came a few spots of rain.
‘Grisha was an idealist. He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening, when I came back from school, I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I loved Pushkin. We got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him – in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. That’s why he joined the army.
