by Nick Cook
‘The Shura? It is to take place in two weeks. On the 15th. On that day, the Sword will deliver his message. He will have quite an audience: Al-Haqim of Black June, Abu Ya’aqub of the Palestine Liberation Front, Al-Ghanem of Fatah, those madmen from Hizbollah, and our own dear Jibril.’
The Arab’s face tensed. ‘I need Aushev’s assurance. He must leave no one alive.’
Sinitsky nodded. ‘He gives it.’
The Arab counted the bundled wads quickly. It was all there.
He hawked some phlegm from the back of his throat and spat it at Sinitsky’s feet.
Sinitsky felt the bile rise. He turned on his heels, his mind already dividing the information he had acquired between the essential and the trivial.
Sinitsky walked on past the lido and the restaurant, turning back only once. His contact had disappeared as stealthily as he had arrived. He prepared himself for a circuitous walk back to the embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. The rain was falling more heavily now and he cursed. His cigarette had gone out.
At least he didn’t have to get back on the metro.
The deputy leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the PFLP-GC, turned north, walking quickly past the bandstand towards the Bayswater Road. He did not have far to go. The safe house in Westbourne Terrace, just around the corner from Paddington Station, suddenly seemed very inviting. His last night in London would pass quickly; there would be much talk with his compatriots, several bottles of araq, a woman, perhaps...
He had much to celebrate.
His ticket, booked under a false name to match the alias carefully prepared for his new Moroccan passport, would be waiting for him. Tomorrow he would stage through Athens on the way to Damascus. He was confident his absence would not have been noticed.
He held the case close by his side. Funds for the cause and the knowledge that in a few weeks he would become the dominant leader in the Holy War against the Israelis had made him a happy man.
The day Ahmed Jibril had shared the information about the Shura had enabled him to hatch his plan. The Soviets were willing accomplices in the achievement of his ambition. General Aushev had long been a man with whom he had been able to do business.
He left the path to take the most direct route across the park towards Albion Gate.
Half-way across the grass, he heard a noise behind him; only slight, but unmistakable. A footstep sinking into the rain-soaked earth. The colonel turned, saw the man twenty yards behind silhouetted against a distant row of street lights. He dropped the case, his hand moving up the lining of his coat, fumbling for the inside pocket where the automatic lay flat against his heart. He saw a light somewhere in the depths of the long, silenced barrel, but his ears never registered the dull sound of the bullet as it left the muzzle, hitting him squarely between the eyes and removing the back of his cranium.
General Viktor Nikitovich Aushev, head of the GRU’s 2nd Chief Directorate, wasn’t given to good moods, but as he slipped his twenty-kopek piece into the change machine in the lobby of the metro station at Ploshchad Sverdlova, he felt a certain excitement. Aushev collected the four five-kopek pieces, tucking three of them into the pocket of his coat. He joined a queue of shuffling Muscovites for the Gorkovsko Zamoskvoretskaya line. After what seemed an eternity, he reached the automatic barrier, pushed the five-kopek piece into the slot and passed through to the head of the escalator. Within minutes he was boarding an underground train that would take him the four stops from the heart of Moscow to Dynamo station.
On that day he had abandoned his Zil for a less ostentatious mode of transport. It was, in fact, the only way of accomplishing his ‘accidental’ meeting with Sinitsky, who had just returned from London.
The rendezvous had gone to plan. Sinitsky and he had met in the north-west entranceway of the old state department store, GUM. They had strolled through the evening air, catching the last rays of light as the sun slid behind the Grand Kremlin Palace, while Sinitsky reeled off the information he had acquired in London.
As the train trundled away from Gorkovskaya station, Aushev reviewed the news. He had all the information he needed; he’d covered his footprints. There was now only the matter of dealing with Sinit-sky before implementing stage two. He was lost still in the details when the carriage doors opened onto the platform at Dynamo.
A minute later and he was on the wide prospekt, dodging the rain-filled potholes as he walked back to the offices of the Directorate. It had been decided some years back to locate the nerve-centre of GRU operational planning in this remote area, because it was deemed the last place the CIA might consider looking.
The care that had gone into that detail now seemed little more than a joke.
When the President signed the Romeo Protocol, he might as well have given the Americans his address and telephone number. It was one more sign of his country’s decline.
Aushev recalled his President’s very words. ‘Viktor Nikitovich, you are to be a point of contact between us and the Americans. Under your guidance and with American help, we will eradicate terrorism from world society. The Romeo Protocol is just the beginning of that vision.’
Aushev hated visionaries.
He cut through the wide squares and alleyways of the Frunze Military Academy. A group of laughing officer cadets almost collided with him as he rounded a corner. The sharpness of their salutes gave him deep satisfaction. Aushev was still lean, with none of the fat on his face that distinguished those of his military contemporaries who had sold their birthright for the Yankee dollar.
Aushev’s appearance, combined with his rank, was enough to put fear into the heart of any officer his junior.
Except one. Colonel Roman Makhmadzhanovich Shabanov was different.
Aushev reached the office block on Krasnovodsk Street and sprang up the stairs to the second floor. He punched in the combination on the push-button entry system and opened the door. He greeted the energy of the open-plan office enthusiastically. Few of the twenty-five computer console operators looked up from their work.
The general proceeded straight to his office and shut the door behind him. He picked up the phone and dialled a number that had long been etched in his memory. One advantage of working at the 2nd Chief Directorate was the newly installed digital network, which obviated the need to wait for a line on the ailing national telephone grid. He heard the click as the receiver was lifted.
‘Roman Makhmadzhanovich? Get your arse on a flight to Khodynka. We have things to discuss. The Beirut operation starts today.’
Sinitsky never saw who barged him from behind. In the throng of people lining the platform, the movement went unnoticed by everyone else. He sprawled headlong into the path of the train, his mind too numb to hear the screams of the onlookers, his eyes locked on the wheels that scythed him into three neat parts a moment later.
CHAPTER 2
The juddering had begun as a tremor soon after the Tornado slowed to subsonic speed and descended below the clouds on its final dash to the target. Girling thought it would pass. But as the aircraft left the clouds behind and hugged the con-tours of the ground, so that shaking had intensified. Now it was relentless.
The electronic picture swam in and out of focus. Every jolt of turbulence jarred his bones.
Like a powerboat on a rough sea, the Tornado ploughed on, its nose carving a swath through invisible pockets of air that flexed the wing tips and bucked the fuselage.
Half of him wanted to tear his gaze from the radar screen, but a voice in the back of his head told him not to break concentration.
He had invoked everyone and everything he had ever held dear in a vain plea for the sickness to leave him, but it persisted, a cold ball in the pit of his stomach.
There was always the bag.
He had glanced at it a minute before. The writing had swum before his eyes: ‘Bag, Air Sickness, Nato Stock No 8105-99-130-2180.’
They had given him two in the briefing room. Just in case.
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br /> He would hold on. It had to pass.
He saw the objects grow in the centre of the screen and braced himself. Another hill. A second later and the Tornado pulled up sharply, pushing three gs on his shoulders, then rolled on to its back. Girling opened his eyes and looked up to see a treetop flashing past the canopy at over five hundred knots.
Girling forced his chin onto his chest. He inched his gaze back to the instrument panel and found the radar picture again. The concentration helped.
They were still upside down. Although his attention was seized by the screen, depriving him of spatial awareness, he could feel the sweat dribbling down past his hairline into his helmet.
The pilot burst through over the headset, his voice strangled and distorted from the strike aircraft’s fight with gravity.
‘Terrain-following system. State of the art. Hands optional.’
Girling swore as he heard Rantz laugh.
He forced his gaze ahead. Behind the top of the ejection seat, the pilot was waving his arms about the cockpit.
He wanted the strength to record the surreal scene before him. The aircraft was upside down, the ground rushing past less than a hundred feet from his head with his pilot suspended from his straps shaking his hands around like a lunatic.
The sickness paralysed him. Finding the camera was out of the question.
The Tornado rolled back to the horizontal. The nausea washed over him.
Girling unclipped his oxygen mask, remembering to turn the intercom switch on its snout to the off position. He did not want Rantz to hear him retch.
Girling sucked in ambient air from the cockpit, not caring that it was thick and rancid with sweat. It was good to get the rubber mask off, good to feel the swish of recycled air from the conditioning system on his face. He couldn’t give a fuck for Rantz and his orders about keeping his helmet visor down at all times. A bird strike, right then, the bones, feathers and mashed flesh exploding into the cockpit with the force of a high-velocity projectile, would be the least of his problems.
Throwing up was easy. It was what Rantz wanted him to do.
He pictured himself descending the ladder from the cockpit holding the full blue and white bag, and Rantz smiling. Another puking hack to chalk on the side of the fuselage.
He gritted his teeth and thrust the bag into the thigh pocket of his flight suit. A small point of honour, perhaps, but he wasn’t going to give the arsehole the satisfaction.
He took a glove off, pulled a biro from his top pocket, and pushed the point into the open palm of his left hand.
Girling clamped the mask back to his face, locked the catch down over the snout and felt it seal against his sweat-soaked cheeks. He breathed in and waited for the pervading smell of rubber to bring the bile to the back of his throat.
Instead, he felt the sickness ebb, replaced by a dull ache in his hand. He looked down to see the point of the biro lost in his torn flesh.
Girling pocketed the pen, slid the gloves back on, and concentrated on the pain until the sickness became a memory.
His hand moved up to the intercom switch. ‘How far to the target?’
‘You’re supposed to tell me.’
‘Give me a break,’ Girling muttered. The words were lost in the relentless battering of the slipstream. He knew that most of his instruments were duplicated in the front cockpit.
‘Five minutes, fifteen seconds to the IP,’ Rantz said. ‘Switch TF radar to stand-by.’
Girling moved the dial on the radar console. The Tornado was out of its automatic terrain-following mode now. Another jagged Highland peak loomed beyond the nose of the fighter-bomber. This time Rantz saw a gap and pushed the aircraft towards it.
The grey, scree-strewn slopes of the mountain whistled past the right-hand wing-tip. He pressed himself back into his seat and flexed his feet. His straps had been pulled so tight he could barely feel his legs any more.
The Tornado belted out from behind the mountain and a screech, like a fingernail pulled across a black-board, filled his headset.
‘What’s that?’
Rantz’s voice came calmly back to him.
‘Search radar. Probably from a SAM battery at the target. Sky Shadow should take care of it.’
Girling knew from the pre-mission briefing that the Sky Shadow pod beneath the Tornado would be classifying the nature of the threat and jamming it.
The screech wavered for a second, then steadied. The ‘enemy’ was either employing electronic counter-counter-measures, ECCM, or the pod didn’t work.
Rantz came through over the electronic howl. ‘Get a fix on it from the threat-warner.’
Girling’s mind raced. Threat-warner. He thought back to the simulator at Marham. A whole afternoon spent in the damned thing and he couldn’t remember where the threat-warner was. If he was going to participate in Exercise Stalwart Divider sitting in a navigator’s seat of one of Her Majesty’s twenty-million-pound aircraft, then he was going to have to learn a navigator’s duties, Rantz had said.
The screech was piercing his head. The turbulence blowing off the Highland mountain ridges was making the Tornado buck like a stallion. The whole instrument panel was still little more than a blur.
‘Come on, he’s about to lock us up and you’re just pissing about back there.’ The crackle on the intercom made it difficult to hear. ‘Try the right-hand side of the panel.’
A red box containing threat data was blinking in the top quadrant.
Girling screwed his eyes against the glare on the screen.
‘E-band surveillance radar,’ he said. ‘Dead ahead.’
Rantz’s voice crackled in his headphones. ‘Let’s stick an ALARM down his throat and see how he likes it.’
More jargon. Girling racked his brains, trying to remember what the acronym stood for. Air-Launched Anti-Radiation Missile. Designed to knock out enemy radars by homing on a pre-assigned signal, shooting hypersonically down the line of the offending beam until impacting the antenna, or exploding close enough to put the system out of action. It had received its combat baptism in the Gulf.
Beneath the wings, a facsimile missile, rigged with an ALARM seeker head and processor, squawked its attack signal to the nearest ground tracking station. If the missile could lock on to the simulated enemy radar and register a hit, the radar would be marked out of the game by the examiners on the ground.
Unlike a live firing, there was no plume of flame, no streak across his vision as the missile homed in on its target. All that, he had to imagine.
The screeching stopped. Simultaneously, the red box on the threat-warner winked out.
Six days before, a Tornado from Rantz’s squadron had ploughed through a Devon village, leaving twenty-seven dead, almost all of them school children. They never found the pilot, but it was presumed he had had a heart attack. The navigator wasn’t testifying either. He’d ejected at the last moment, but as the Tornado was three-quarters inverted at the time, his seat had fired him straight into the ground.
The press had had a field day.
Parliament resounded to the cries of back-benchers, from both sides of the House, demanding an immediate moratorium on low flying. It was a time to put constituency interests before Party loyalty. Time, if you were an MP, to get your face on the TV and convince the electorate that you were doing everything to protect its safety.
Demonstrators, activists mostly, had hurled abuse and bricks at the unrelenting walls of the Ministry of Defence, and were probably still doing so.
It made good copy, of course. Kelso, Girling’s editor, told him to go out and get some words, find some new angle. The public had been treated to five days of torrid abuse against the RAF from the tabloids. Even some of the weightier nationals had joined the outcry.
As Dispatches’ science and technology correspondent, Girling went to try and see the story from where the pilot sat.
So they had arranged for him to fly back-seat in a Tornado, principal all-weather, twenty-four-hour strike asset
of the Royal Air Force. Its primary task, the mission for which it had been designed, precision delivery of nuclear or conventional ordnance against the Warsaw Pact.
Girling smiled. Warsaw Pact. What was that?
The Royal Air Force, anxious to put across a good case for low-flying, had been happy to oblige Girling’s request. Kelso’s enthusiasm for the story soared when he learned that Girling had been granted exclusive access to Exercise Stalwart Divider, a war game to test Britain’s air defences.
They’d given him a crash course in navigation and weapons system operation, and finally introduced him to Squadron Leader John Rantz. Rantz, twenty years in the service, combat tested in the Gulf, and terminally pissed off because he was heading for a desk job in Whitehall in two weeks and had better things to do with his time.
Their Tornado, hurtling towards the target at five hundred and sixty knots, or the length of three and a half soccer pitches a second, was the lead element in Red Force, a strike package composed of British and American fighter-bombers. Their target was a railway bridge, a left-over from the days when steam trains thundered across the great Scottish rivers on their way to and from London, now a rusting relic on the weapons range.
Girling had been on base, waiting to scramble for three days, banned from so much as placing a phone call to the office, or even his daughter. Exercise rules. No communication with the outside world. No radio, no TV, no tabloids.
Even the manner of his mobilization had been carried out without concession to his civilian status. Just one call from the MOD’s PR men to report to Marham at 0900 the next morning. There had been barely time to dispatch Alia to his parents before making the trip to East Anglia.
Rantz’s voice came over the intercom.
‘Arm the bombs.’
Girling leant over and found the switches. ‘Bombs armed.’
‘Switch on the radar.’
Girling moved the dial on one click from ‘stand-by’. ‘Radar on.’
‘See the IP?’
Girling peered into the radar picture. It took almost two million pounds of taxpayers’ money to train a professional to interpret the thing and he was being asked to ‘read’ it after two hours in the simulator.
