Ross stepped out of the accommodation section. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘A ship’s officer – or maybe a Spetsnaz officer,’ Richter replied. ‘He was grabbed by your men on the Mole. I’m hoping I can talk him into unlocking the forward hold for us.’
‘You’re sure it won’t be in the aft hold?’
‘No,’ Richter said. ‘That’s for bulk cargo – it’s got no security at all. The weapon will definitely be in the forward hold, and the hold will certainly be locked.’
They descended three decks before they found it. A steel door labelled, in Cyrillic characters, ‘Forward hold. No unauthorized personnel’. It had concealed hinges, two large padlocks, one top and one bottom, and in the centre a combination lock. ‘Shit,’ Richter said. The padlocks wouldn’t be much of a problem, as long as they could find some bolt-cutters, but the combination lock was a different matter. Richter turned to Ross. ‘Get someone to find some bolt-cutters and a welding kit – try the engine room. And I need my nav-bag. It’s on the Mole behind the crate opposite the gangway.’
While Ross gave the orders, Richter turned his attention back to the Russian, who was watching with a slight smile on his face. Richter opened a door behind him to reveal a small storeroom. ‘In here,’ he told the trooper. The SAS trooper roughly shoved the Russian into the room. Richter followed, switching on the light and closing the door behind him.
‘What’s your name?’ Richter asked.
‘Zavorin,’ the Russian said.
‘Well, Comrade Zavorin. We will get through that door into the hold,’ Richter said. ‘The only thing I don’t know is how long it will take. What I do know is that if we can’t get in before your masters in Moscow decide to press the button, we will die. All of us on board this ship will die. So will most of the population of Gibraltar, and of La Linea and Algeciras in Spain. People you’ve never met, people who know nothing about this, people sleeping peacefully in their beds. Innocent bystanders.’
‘There are no innocent bystanders,’ Zavorin said. At least he was talking.
‘I have only one question. Do you know the combination of that lock?’ Zavorin said nothing, just stared. ‘I’ll ask you again,’ Richter said, ‘but if you don’t know or won’t tell me you’re just going to get in the way.’
He moved the firing selector on the Hockler to single shot, slipped the safety catch off, and levelled it at him. ‘Five seconds, Comrade Zavorin. Do you know the combination?’
Zavorin said nothing for ten seconds. He was probably relying on the fact that English gentlemen don’t shoot unarmed men. Richter had never claimed to be a gentleman, and was more Scots than English, so he lowered the Hockler and fired one round through Zavorin’s right thigh. It probably shattered the femur, because the Russian fell instantly, screaming.
Kutuzovskij prospekt, Moscow
The alarm bell rang softly and persistently in the top-floor apartment, but it was several minutes before Genady Arkenko heard it. He had drunk perhaps a little too much vodka the previous evening, and had been deeply asleep. When the sound finally penetrated, he rolled over in bed, glanced at the bedside clock and got groggily to his feet. Cursing, he walked across the living area and into the small back room of the flat. Arkenko sat down in front of the short-wave radio set, turned off the alarm, put on the headphones and played back the message which had been stored on the automatic tape recorder.
Three minutes later he was back in the main room, notepad in hand, pressing the speed-dial code of Dmitri Trushenko’s mobile telephone. His hands were shaking, and it wasn’t because of the vodka.
Anton Kirov
‘There’s a reasonably good hospital in Gibraltar,’ Richter said, raising his voice above the noise Zavorin was making. ‘You can be out in a few weeks. You’ll be limping, but you will be able to walk.’ He paused. ‘If I put the next round through your knee, you’ll probably never walk again. Let’s try one more time. Do you know the combination of that lock?’
Zavorin stopped screaming and spat at Richter.
‘I’ll take that as a “no”, shall I?’ Richter said. He raised the Hockler again, and pointed it at the Russian’s left knee. ‘This really is your last chance,’ he said.
‘Wait, wait,’ Zavorin shouted.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know the combination,’ Zavorin lied. ‘It was sealed when we left Varna.’
‘Was that where they loaded the device?’
The Russian nodded. ‘The crate was supposed to be off-loaded here, tomorrow.’
‘This is your last chance. You really don’t know the combination?’ Zavorin shook his head. ‘Then I’m sorry,’ Richter said, shot him twice in the chest, opened the door and stepped back into the passageway.
‘Any luck?’ Ross asked.
‘No,’ Richter replied. ‘He said he didn’t know, though I’m not certain I believed him.’
The noise of firing from above stopped abruptly, and Ross used his radio to find out what had happened. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The last of the Russian crew have been secured.’
‘That’s secured as in shot, right?’ Richter asked.
Ross nodded. ‘What we call nine-millimetre handcuffs,’ he said.
Three minutes later an SAS man severed the hasp of the second padlock, while another dragged an oxy-acetylene kit down the passage. ‘Cut around the lock,’ Richter said. ‘If we can punch it out, we can probably lever the bolt out.’
Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)
The sound of a telephone ringing was skilfully woven into Dmitri Trushenko’s dream, and only gradually impinged on his conscious mind. Then he woke rapidly. Only Genady Arkenko knew the number of his mobile telephone, and he had strict orders to ring him only in an emergency. Trushenko reached out, picked up the mobile and pressed a button. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Genady, Dmitri. I’ve had a message from the Anton Kirov. They claim—’ Arkenko swallowed ‘—they claim that the ship is under attack.’
‘What?’
‘Under attack, Dmitri. They said the ship was under attack. But,’ Arkenko added, ‘I thought that the Anton Kirov was at Gibraltar, so that can’t be right.’
Trushenko didn’t reply for a moment, then responded abruptly. ‘Thank you, Genady,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry about it. Good night, my old friend.’ His voice was calm and controlled, but his mind was racing. If the Anton Kirov was under attack, that meant that someone, somewhere, must have found out almost everything about Podstava.
Trushenko ended the call, got out of the bed and stood up, his clenched fists the only outward sign of his inner rage and turmoil. Four years of planning, of scheming, of concealment, and at the eleventh hour somebody – some Western intelligence service, he supposed – had discovered what was going on. There had to be a leak, Trushenko knew that without a doubt. Knowledge of the Anton Kirov’s special cargo was confined to four people only, apart from Trushenko himself, Hassan Abbas and the Spetsnaz personnel actually aboard the ship: Genady Arkenko, and the three principal military officers involved in Podstava.
The leak wasn’t Genady, of that Trushenko was quite certain, so it had to be one of the three soldiers – SVR Generals Nicolai Modin and Grigori Sokolov, and GRU Lieutenant General Viktor Bykov. When this is all over, Trushenko promised himself, I’ll see all three of those bastards on the table at the Lubyanka. Then Trushenko smiled to himself, because despite this unwanted interference in his plans, it still wasn’t too late. The American weapons were already in place and the strategic neutron bombs were positioned all over Europe, except for the London weapon, but that didn’t matter. Implementation, Trushenko decided, would just take place a little sooner than he had originally planned, that was all.
Anton Kirov
It was a warm night, and it got a lot hotter in the narrow passageway with the oxy-acetylene torch running. Like all watertight doors, the hold access was solid steel, about half a centimetre thick, and the torch made slow progres
s. It took nearly fourteen minutes to cut a rough circle round the lock. Wearing heavy gloves, because the cut edges of the metal were still red hot, the trooper tried pushing the lock through the hole, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Try a kick,’ Richter suggested. The trooper kicked hard, hitting the combination dial with his heel. This time, the lock moved. A second kick, and the lock went straight through the hole, the bolt pulling out of the bulkhead recess. They opened the door and stepped inside. Richter looked round the hold, a seemingly cavernous structure, three decks high. There wasn’t by any means a full load of cargo, but there was enough to make the immediate location of the weapon impossible. He found a switch and flooded the hold with light.
Ross had followed Richter inside. ‘What are we looking for?’ he asked.
‘A steel chest,’ Richter said. ‘It’s about ten feet long by four feet high and five feet wide. But it’ll probably be inside some sort of a crate, so look for something with slightly larger dimensions than that.’
Four minutes later one of the troopers called out. ‘Here.’ They moved over to the corner, picking their route through the other hold cargo.
‘That’s probably it,’ Richter said. Predictably enough, the wooden chest was locked, but the bolt-cutters swiftly disposed of the padlock, and the trooper swung back the lid, dropped the side panel and they all peered inside. The steel chest looked exactly like the one that had housed the London weapon. The trooper used the bolt-cutters to sever the hasp of the padlock, and Richter lifted the lid of the chest cautiously. Another trooper brought Richter’s nav-bag over, while he read through Professor Dewar’s instructions one more time.
‘I suppose there’s no point in taking shelter anywhere?’ Ross asked.
‘Not,’ Richter said, ‘unless you’re a sodding fast swimmer and can make it around to the other side of the Punta de Europa in about ten minutes. Even then I wouldn’t want to guarantee you wouldn’t fry. This baby—’ he pointed into the chest ‘—was designed to turn the Rock into the sort of stuff you put in egg-timers.’
‘Ah,’ Ross said.
Richter referred again to Dewar’s notes and picked up the wire-cutters. He took his gloves off, checked the wire colour coding, identified and located each of the seven wires that controlled the anti-handling device, and took a deep breath. ‘Here we go,’ he said.
Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)
Trushenko walked briskly out of the bedroom and into the lounge where the dying embers of the fire still glowed. He snapped on the light, sat down at the table and opened up his laptop computer. He plugged in the data cable, and attached the other end to his mobile telephone, then switched on the computer and waited patiently while the start-up programs loaded.
Anton Kirov
Richter’s hands were sweating. He wiped them on a napkin, and picked up the wire-cutters again. ‘Would you read out the sequence of wires for me?’ he asked. ‘And hold the paper so I can see the list as well.’
‘Right,’ said Ross. ‘First – yellow with a green stripe.’ The cutters were sharp, and the wire parted easily. ‘Second – plain blue.’ The last wire was red, and when Richter cut it, Ross heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Sorry,’ Richter said. ‘That didn’t disarm the weapon. That just made sure I wouldn’t get blown to pieces trying.’
‘What?’
‘That was only the anti-handling device,’ Richter said, undoing the butterfly nuts. He lifted off the aluminium plate and put it to one side, where hopefully nobody would tread on it. Ross and the two troopers peered into the box. ‘This,’ Richter said, pointing, ‘is the bomb.’
Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)
‘That’s it,’ Dmitri Trushenko muttered, watching the screen. Through his mobile telephone, the laptop had logged into the mainframe computer nearly fifteen hundred miles away. His identity and password had been accepted, and it only remained to select the weapon and initiate the firing sequence.
Anton Kirov
Richter traced the wires attached to the trigger, and carefully snipped off all the ties securing them, taking extreme care not to damage the wires themselves. Freeing the wire ties would mean he could place the trigger on the floor outside the bomb chest. Assuming he got it out, of course. He took out the socket set and assembled the ratchet handle with the Allen key in the end, and carefully inserted it in the head of the first of the six bolts holding the trigger assembly in place. He steadied the ratchet with one hand and started to pull with the other.
‘Stop!’ Ross shouted. ‘You’re turning it the wrong way.’
Richter stopped and looked at him over the open chest. ‘They’re left-hand threads.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
Dewar hadn’t been exaggerating about the torque needed to undo them. Richter could feel his chest tightening with the effort, and stopped. ‘Here,’ he said to one of the troopers. ‘You’re a bloody sight stronger than I am. You do it.’
‘Me?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell you exactly what you have to do.’
The trooper took the ratchet, pulled apparently quite gently, and the first bolt began to turn.
‘Good,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll unscrew it the rest of the way. Now undo the bolt diagonally opposite to that one.’ With the full force of the trooper’s impressive shoulders behind the ratchet, the first four bolts shifted easily. ‘Now,’ Richter said, ‘we come to the tricky bit.’
‘Yes?’
‘There are now only two bolts holding the trigger in place. We have to remove those, but we must hold the trigger steady. If it moves sideways, it could detonate the weapon.’
‘Understood.’
The trooper inserted the Allen key in the fifth bolt head. Richter wrapped his hands around the trigger and nodded. The trooper pulled, and the bolt gave. ‘Don’t unscrew it yet,’ Richter said. ‘First loosen the last one.’
The trooper repeated the process, then unscrewed each bolt a half-turn at a time, until they were only finger-tight. ‘Right,’ Richter said, and took a firm grip on the trigger. ‘Take both of them out, all the way.’ The trooper bent forward and began to unscrew the last bolts.
Razdolnoye, Krym (Crimea)
Trushenko’s face was set with concentration as he identified the device he wished to trigger and entered the first authorization code. As a fail-safe, two authorization codes had to be entered before any weapon could be activated, and the mainframe computer requested the second immediately after acceptance of the first.
Trushenko looked at the screen and paused for a few seconds. He thought about Gibraltar – a place he had never visited – and of the unsuspecting thousands of people there, sleeping, working, making love or whatever. People he had never known, and now would never know. Then he thought about Podstava, and the triumph that would inevitably follow its implementation.
‘You can’t,’ he muttered, ‘make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Trushenko referred back to his book and carefully entered the second authorization code. Then he logged off and switched off his laptop computer. The system had been exhaustively tested, and Trushenko knew that detonation of the weapon would take place in less than ninety seconds.
Anton Kirov
The trooper pulled the last bolt clear, and Richter rotated the trigger assembly very slightly, just to ensure that it hadn’t got stuck in position. ‘Nobody say anything, nobody move.’ As Richter began, millimetre by millimetre, to ease the trigger out of the bomb casing, Ross pointed silently at the back of the assembly. An orange light had just illuminated. Richter glanced at the Cyrillic script below it. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘That’s the start of the detonation sequence. Someone’s activated the weapon.’
The trigger unit seemed longer and heavier than the one in the London weapon, but Richter knew it wasn’t. He moved faster, and the unit was almost halfway out when the red light illuminated.
‘What’s that?’ Ross asked, his voice hoarse with
fear.
‘Preparation for firing,’ Richter said. The green light came on the instant Richter pulled the trigger clear of the casing, and with a metallic clang the four recessed bolts slammed into the fully extended position. The force was so great that he dropped the trigger, but it fell harmlessly beside the bomb casing.
‘If anyone,’ Richter said, slumping down beside the bomb, ‘wants to change their trousers now, that’s fine by me.’
Gibraltar Harbour
On the Mole, chaos reigned. The noise of the small arms’ fire and stun grenades had echoed round the harbour, and the Ministry of Defence police, two fire engines and an ambulance were in attendance. So, too, were the crews of most of the other vessels moored along the North Mole. Three of Ross’s troopers were standing in line abreast, a silent threat, their sub-machineguns pointed in the general direction of the crowd. An MoD police inspector was standing in front of one of the troopers, making a lot of noise and demanding to see identity cards, weapon permits and authorizations, but nobody was actually listening to him.
Ross and Richter walked down the gangway. Colin Dekker was waiting for them at the bottom, sitting on a bollard.
‘SITREP?’ Ross asked.
‘We lost Carter,’ Dekker said, standing up. ‘He took a head shot from the Russian on the bow when we boarded. Flemming was hit at the same time, but his vest saved him – he’s walking wounded. We’ve got five other injured troopers, all minor.’
Colin Dekker looked at Richter. ‘Is it done?’
‘Yes,’ Richter said. ‘It’s done.’
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