by Chris Ryan
Among the lads there was a good deal of talk about money, because this looked like being a lucrative trip. What with allowances for food, accommodation, laundry, arduous conditions and so on, our pay was going to build up to two or three times its normal level. The expenses for the whole trip had been reckoned at 6,000 per head, and four grand of this had been paid up front. Anyone prudent put most of the cash into his bank account, but Pavarotti went straight into Monmouth and put down a deposit on a thirty-five-year-old scarlet XJ12O Jag which he'd been fancying for months. I put three grand into my building society account and changed the rest of the money into dollars, insisting that the paymaster got me new notes from the bank, with no year earlier than 1997 on them and in low denominations, because I'd heard that fifties and older notes wouldn't be accepted in Russia.
When we asked Sasha about the black market for money, he said that it had collapsed. He explained that Moscow, like all Russian cities, had become so flooded with US dollars that anyone could get them, and the rate of exchange was the same everywhere about seven roubles to the dollar, ten or eleven to a British pound. In the previous year, he told us, following rampant inflation, the rate had swollen to outrageous proportions: 7,000 roubles to the dollar, 10,000 to the pound. But then on 1 January the Russian government had divided the currency rate by a thousand in an attempt to simplify things and calm the economy down.
More briefings about the Russian Mafia came from another visiting professional from the Firm, this one a smooth, silver haired fellow called Edgar (his surname). Again, Sasha was able to supplement his information, which had been collected from intelligence reports, with first-hand knowledge. The briefings confirmed what Sasha had already told us that the main Mafia activity was extortion, and the worst threat was against people with big money: leading businessmen, heads of companies, bankers. We learnt that over the past few years various branches of the Mafia had risen to prominence and then faded away. The first to show had been the Solntsevo gang, named after the scruffy suburb on the south-western fringes of Moscow where its members lived. Lately, however, that lot had apparently yielded supremacy to the Ismailovskaya Mafia, also based in Moscow and led by a notorious crook called Sergei Askyonov.
This group, with its strong military connections, claimed to have a private army of more than a thousand men.
Edgar, an intelligent guy, quickly appreciated Sasha's worth, and started asking for comments about what he himself was saying.
"One reason for so much crime," he told us, 'is that there's a fantastic amount of paper money actually in circulation. On the one hand, people don't trust the banks. On the other, inflation's moving so fast that they reckon they get a better return by having dollar bills in their possession. So there's cash everywhere, and a big incentive for robbery. Is that right, Major?"
"Certainly!" Sasha gave a vigorous nod.
"More dollars in Russia now than in rest of world."
"Outside the States," Edgar corrected.
"Of course. But that is very much money.
The lectures helped us all to refine the aims of our course.
With kidnappings so common, hostage rescue was obviously of prime importance, and we decided to concentrate on that. EMOE explosive method of entry, or blowing in doors and windows was clearly going to be another key area. A third vital subject was ambush drills, and a fourth, the body guarding of VIPs.
Strictly speaking, BG work fell outside the remit of the Subversive Action Wing, but as all the members of our team had been on specialist close-protection courses it seemed natural to include the subject in our syllabus.
Sasha's tales of the Mafia were so lurid that they acted on the team like shots of adrenalin. All right, we were going in on a training task, but soon every one of the lads was dreaming that we would somehow become directly involved in a Tiger Force hit and get some action ourselves. And it was obvious from the relish with which he described anti-Mafia operations that Sacha was a born killer.
"In Gorki, my home town, is this godfather figure," he told us one evening.
"Real name Borzov. But he calls himself Nepobedinyi — Unvincible."
"Invincible," I suggested.
"Yes Invincible. He thinks nobody can keen him. He is former criminal, many years in gaol. Like I told you, he is true vor v zakone, a criminal in the law. Now his chauffeur drives him in bullet-proof Mercedes. Always four bodyguards with him when he moves around. He lives in a palace like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, almost. At night, in the yard round his house, a Siberian tiger is wandering. Like a guard dog. A guard cat, you say?"
"Some cat," said Pavarotti.
"Two hundred kilos," Sasha said, not joking.
"We heard he feeds this cat on human flesh, his enemies. This Invincible wears a Patek gold watch. His body is covered in pictures…
tattoos. Small Mafia are not allowed such pictures. If some man gets one without authority, he can be keel led But Invincible has on his chest a portrait of Lenin. And why? Because no one would dare to shoot at our great Communist leader. On his knees, he has pictures of stars. And why? That means he never kneels for anyone.
Sasha broke off and gave a quick, rather nasty laugh.
"But one day soon, I think we make him kneel."
When Sasha flew back to Moscow we missed his cheerful company, and I looked forward to seeing him again when he met our recce party at Sheremetyevo Airport.
"What's the weather going to be like?" I asked him before he went.
"In Russia, autumn is one month ahead. Days warm, nights cool. Typical September."
His final instruction as I saw him off was, "Breeng plugs."
"Plugs?"
"For bath and basin. In Russian hotels, such things do not exist."
FOUR
We had the weekend clear for our own preparation, then on Monday morning we set off for Heathrow myself, Whinger and Rick. Obviously the commander and second in command had to go, and we selected Rick as a third partly because he was one of our signallers he and Pete Pascoe were level when it came to radio work but mainly because he was our best linguist. He had an incredible knack of picking up languages informally, learning wherever he went: already he spoke French and German, and Russian seemed to be giving him no problems.
In the event, our flight was delayed for nearly three hours by technical problems one aircraft went tits-up on the runway, and another had to be brought into service with the result that the whole day seemed to disappear, and dusk was already settling on the land by the time British Airways' flight 262 began its descent into Sheremetyevo.
In the distance and far below us on the starboard side of the plane, I saw lights glowing in the dark, and as we came closer I realised I could see the whole of Moscow enclosed within a single ring of illumination.
"Look at that," I said to Whinger.
"Ten million people inside that circle. Can you imagine it?"
"Yeah, and a couple of well-placed nukes would finish most of the bastards."
"Come on," I laughed.
"They're our friends now.
But there wasn't much sign of that when we landed. We were travelling on civilian passports made out in our own names, and so had to go through Immigration along with everyone else. The hall was hot and dimly lit. Everything looked dirty and dilapidated walls, doors, lights, the local staff Worst of all was the ceiling, close over our heads, which looked as if someone had nailed ten thousand copper saucepans to it, rims downward.
"Jesus!" I said quietly.
"This is worse than Africa."
For forty minutes we sweated shoulder-to-shoulder with passengers from other flights, shuffling forward like snails in queues that stretched towards the booths manned by the immigration officials. As we inched closer, I saw that the lady we were heading for could have walked straight off the set of a James Bond movie: grey uniform with lieutenant's bars on the shoulders, a mane of long, straight streaky blonde hair and hal finch false eyelashes.
Finally
reaching her booth, I summoned up my best Russian and said, "Dobriye ve cher
She glared at me, glared at my passport, glared at her video monitor and punched my details into her computer terminal, then shoved my documents back across the shelf without a word. It was definitely the wrong time of the month for her.
"Friendly lot," Whinger observed as he came through behind me.
"Roll on the fucking Customs!"
To our surprise, they gave us no trouble. We took the green channel and nobody even looked in our direction. On the far side of the screen a swarm of taxi-drivers engulfed us, all shouting and trying to snatch our luggage; but through the middle of them came Sasha, dressed in civvies and smiling as he shouldered the mob aside. I recognised his shirt as one of the pair we'd bought in Hereford.
He greeted us warmly and led us out to a battered grey saloon which he'd parked on the pavement. We put our hold-alls into the boot and climbed aboard, myself in the front, the other guys in the back. Because the hinges had worked loose, it took three slams to make my door shut securely.
"I am sorry," Sasha said as he drove off "You are in Intourist Hotel."
"What's wrong with that?"
He let go of the wheel to spread his hands.
"Not nice. We wanted the Moskva, but no rooms.
"Oh, well. It's only two nights." To change the subject I asked, "What sort of a car is this?"
"It is Volga. Old, old. I would like to buy new one, something good. But that would be too dangerous. And why? Because the Mafia would take it. One day, in a traffic jam, my mother is driving it, she sees two gun-machines in her ears, this side and that side.
"Give me the keys." Finish."
"Can't the police do anything?"
"Police!" He shot me a hopeless look.
"They are worst. They are cowards. And anyway, half of them are paid by Mafia."
The highway into town was wide but rough: four lanes in each direction, treacherously pitted with dips and potholes. I realised that when Sasha had described the Russian roads as diabolical he hadn't been exaggerating. We were really getting thrown around and this on one of the main thoroughfares. We were also being overtaken on both sides simultaneously: anybody with a reasonably fast foreign car was weaving in and out of the traffic like a lunatic.
Set back on either side of the road were terrible, drab tower blocks of flats, nine or ten storeys tall. Closer to the road, oldfashioned hoardings carried advertisements, many for Western products. When I spotted some familiar red and yellow colours and slowly picked out the Cyrillic letters for McDonald's I couldn't help grinning at my own linguistic prowess.
It took us fifty minutes to reach the city centre, the traffic thickening all the time. I noticed several good-looking older buildings, mostly pale yellow with green copper roofs, but the general run of architecture was abysmal. Then, as we were crawling downhill along another broad street, Sasha pointed ahead and announced, "There is Kremlin."
I peered out through the relatively clean area of the windscreen and saw in the distance a red star glowing on top of a steeply pointed tower. Only that one corner of the citadel was in sight, but even so my neck prickled. Here was the centre of Russian power, the focal point of a vast country, the power-base that had dominated world politics for all our lifetimes. If ever there was to be a breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, this was where it would start.
A moment later Sasha pulled the car over in front of a tall, faceless, modern high-rise building on the right-hand side of the road, and parked end-on to the kerb.
"Hotel Intourist," he announced.
"I help you check in."
Outside the entrance a few rough-looking young men were standing around, all smoking; they were hard to see clearly, but whenever the glow of a cigarette lit up a face, I didn't like the look of it. They could have been taxi-drivers, yet their presence seemed vaguely threatening.
The little glass-walled lobby was full of security men half a dozen overweight, slovenly guys with pistols in holsters. The women staffing the reception desk were wearing bright red tunics pin-striped with white a cheerful touch which wasn't matched by any warmth of greeting. One of them gave us forms to complete and moved off towards her office without a word, carrying our passports.
"When do we get them back?" I asked.
"Tomorrow."
Her lack of common civility pissed me off I can't believe all the women in Moscow are having their periods right now, I thought. Then I heard Sasha saying, "Programme for tomorrow: eight-thirty, I collect you and drive to Balashika for inspection of camp. OK?"
I nodded.
"Four o'clock, visit to British Embassy. Meeting with Charge d'Affaires. Also meet your interpreter and liaison officer. At Embassy, same time."
"Fine."
I thanked him for collecting us, and he was gone.
Our rooms were on the fifteenth floor 1512, 1513 and 1514.
We went up in the lift, sharing it with a couple of overweight Yanks, a man and a woman, obviously on vacation.
"Been to the Kremlin yet?" the man asked in a southern accent.
I shook my head.
"Only just arrived."
"One helluva monument, that place. Sure is. How long are you guys here for?"
"Couple of days."
A quick inspection revealed that all our rooms were the same: small, hot and stuffy, without air-conditioning, and with only the small upper section of the windows op enable In the tiny bathrooms the tiles were cracked and yellowing, the grout between them black with grime. As Sasha had warned us, there were no plugs in the baths or basins… and suddenly fuck it — I realised I'd left mine behind. I took a quick look round the bedroom for signs of hidden microphones, and although I couldn't see anything I felt sure they were there. We'd already agreed that there'd be no shop talk in the hotel.
"Grotsville," exclaimed Rick as he emerged into the passage.
"You said it. Have you got your money on you? Don't leave it in there, whatever you do."
"Got it." He slapped his bum-bag which he had pulled round to the front, over his stomach.
"You look like that fat git we came up with."
"Spasibo, mate."
"Let's stretch our legs," Whinger suggested.
"Eyeball the Kremlin."
That seemed like a good plan. It was already 9:45 local time, but only 6:45 by our biological clocks, and since we'd eaten on the plane we didn't feel any need for food. Besides, I knew that the British Embassy was somewhere close by, just across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, and I reckoned we might as well suss it out, as I was going to have to report there regularly during our operation.
On our way down in the lift Rick suddenly started shitting himself with laughter.
"What's so bloody amusing?" Whinger said irritably.
"Some cunt left a menu from one of the restaurants in my room. The stuff on offer is incredible."
"Like what?"
'"Needles in meat sauce", for one. Then there was "frog's paws in paste"."
"That's frog's legs in batter," Whinger told him.
"I know but think of it…"
It was a fine evening for a stroll: the sky was clear and the air cool. Out on the pavement, we elbowed through the sc rum of taxi drivers and walked down the slope towards Red Square. The street was so wide and the traffic was moving so fast that the subway seemed the best way to cross. We went down some steps into a concrete tunnel, past young people bus king and old women begging, and up the other side. A minute later we were walking uphill on another short, broad thoroughfare and emerging on to the huge open expanse of Red Square.
"Never realised it was cobbled," said Whinger.
"Nor that it was so big."
It gave me a strange feeling to be looking at buildings I'd seen a thousand times in pictures. As a young soldier, during my early years in the army, I'd spent hours in classrooms doing recognition training, staring at black-and-white slides of Soviet tanks and missiles unti
l we could pick out T54s, T64s and T72s in our sleep and name all the main types of ICBM. The place all these weapons were photographed most often was Red Square, during big parades on the anniversary of the 1917 revolution and suchlike so now the buildings in the background were like echoes from the past.
Rick's mind was moving on the same lines.
"Think of all the military hardware that's rolled along here," he said.
On our right the low, squat hulk of Lenin's mausoleum sat hunched against the wall of the Kremlin. Wherever a light was shining on the wall, we could see it was made of dark red brick.
"Funny there aren't any guards on the mausoleum," said Whinger.
"You'd expect there to be some official presence. Isn't it a national shrine?"
"Not any more," Rick told him.
"I read on the Internet that they're arguing about what to do with the old bugger. The diehards are all for keeping him, but a lot of people want him out."
"Burning'd be too good for that bastard," said Whinger bitterly, surprising me with the anger in his voice.
"If anyone sent the Russian government a bill demanding compensation for all the misery he and his bloody ideas have caused, this country'd be bankrupt for the next thousand years.
"That's why they're not paying the Regiment anything for our job here," I said.
"All the funds are coming from the States or the
UK."
Ahead of us in the distance rose the multi-coloured onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, some striped horizontally, some vertically, some segmented like the skins of pineapples. Even I, ignorant as I am about church architecture, sensed that there was something wild and barbaric in those amazing shapes and colours.
"What about that German kid who landed a light plane here?" said Whinger.
"Some feat, that. I bet it made them cut about a bit. The Russkies must have been fairly shitting themselves when they found out how easily he'd got through their de fences without the aircraft even being called."
