The next thing he registered was the muzzle of a silenced pistol levelled at him through the slot. Before the guard could react, there came a sound like a cough, and he fell backwards, shot directly through the heart.
Immediately, the second man jogged over to the main gates and studied them carefully. Even if not electrified, some kind of an alarm system might have been expected, but he saw nothing there to cause him concern. That meant all they had to do now was find the key and get inside.
Typical of military establishments the world over, each gate comprised a ten-foot steel frame with cross-braces, and diamond-pattern wire mesh secured to it. He could have easily cut through this, but it was just as quick to climb over.
Grasping the wire with his gloved hands, he pulled himself up, jamming the toes of his boots periodically into the mesh, feeling for the firmer frame and cross-braces behind it. In less than ten seconds he was astride the gate, and fifteen seconds after that was standing outside the door of the security post, trying the handle.
As expected, the door was locked, so he reached down to his equipment belt and removed a crowbar from one loop. Then he forced the end of it into the gap around the door and pulled hard. The wood splintered, but held, so he changed position slightly and levered again. This time the door creaked loudly, then flew open. He stepped inside.
Ignoring the sprawled body of the dead guard, the intruder strode across to the open key safe bolted to the wall. Inside, there were probably a couple of dozen sets of keys hanging on labelled hooks, but he knew exactly which ones he needed. He chose two sets and headed back to the main gates. Inserting one key in the lock, he pulled the double gates open wide.
The moment he did so, the three trucks started up and drove inside the base. At this point he stepped up to the leading vehicle and handed over the second set of keys to Draco, who’d meanwhile returned to his cab. After that he closed and relocked the main gates. As the threetonners drove away towards the storage buildings, the first intruder started a perfunctory clean-up operation in the security post, by dragging the guard’s corpse out of sight of the window.
Deep inside the Dobric complex, the three trucks stopped outside a likely-looking building while the driver checked the number painted on its wall. He shook his head and they drove to the next one. There he swung the truck in a wide turn so that he could reverse close up to the doors.
Draco climbed down and jogged across to a sliding steel door, the second set of keys ready in one hand. The door was secured by a single lock, but before he tackled this he used another key from the same set to disable an alarm bolted to the adjacent wall. Once the tell-tale light changed from red to green, he inserted the key for the loading door itself. Thirty seconds later the two men were inside the building, the door left wide open and fluorescent lights blazing overhead.
They were joined by another four, all similarly wearing Bulgarian Air Force uniforms. They spread out quickly, systematically scanning the steel racks and piles of boxes for those they wanted. Within a couple of minutes one man called out, and the others gathered round to check that he’d found what they were looking for. In front of them rose a pile of some fifty wooden boxes, each over twenty feet long and bearing the stencilled marking ‘R-40T’.
Draco nodded in satisfaction and began to issue crisp instructions. In one corner he had already noticed a fork-lift truck, specially modified to handle the awkwardly shaped boxes that were neatly piled against the walls or on rows of steel shelving. One of his men drove the forklift over to the boxes they had located and expertly plucked the top one off the pile. He manoeuvred it carefully down the aisle between the racks and deposited it neatly into the back of one of the three-ton trucks.
They’d already loaded ten of these boxes when a challenge rang out. Four Bulgarian Air Force guards stood in the open doorway, Kalashnikovs aimed directly at the intruders.
Sheremetievo Airport, Moscow
‘We meet again, Mr Richter.’
Viktor Bykov looked pretty much the same as Richter remembered – tall and thin with sharp, almost predatory, features. And he looked suspiciously pleased to see him.
‘Hullo, Viktor,’ Richter said, and shook hands.
Bykov snapped his fingers and a junior officer scurried forward to take the Englishman’s suitcase. He extended a hand for the briefcase as well, but Richter shook his head. ‘I’ll carry this, thanks. I’ve had to sign for the laptop inside it, and I’ll be in all sorts of trouble if I lose it.’
‘Follow me. I have a car outside,’ Bykov said, leading the way through the arrivals hall. Outside the terminal building a black Mercedes saloon stood idling beside the kerb, the driver leaning against the door. The number on the boot lid was 630 SEL, which meant nothing to Richter, who’d never been a fan of overpriced, overweight and frankly vulgar German machinery, but he did notice the registration plate: ‘MOC 65’. Those three letters immediately identified it as a Russian diplomatic vehicle.
‘You have diplomatic status?’ he asked Bykov curiously, but the Russian shook his head.
‘Thankfully, no. But having that plate makes things a lot easier, as it saves arguing with those idiots.’ He gestured towards a number of traffic police who were eyeing the Mercedes in a somewhat hostile manner.
The junior officer put Richter’s suitcase in the boot, then went to sit in the front beside the chauffeur. Bykov opened the rear door for their visitor, then slid in beside him.
‘We’ve booked you into the Rossyia,’ he announced, as the Mercedes pulled out into the flow of traffic. ‘You may be interested to know that Muscovites refer to it as “The Box”, so we thought you’d feel at home there.’
‘The Box’ was one of the nicknames of the Security Service, MI5, from its original postal address of ‘Box 500, London’.
‘Kind thought, Viktor, but you know I don’t work for Five. In fact, I don’t even work for Six, except indirectly.’
And that was the truth. Richter worked for the Foreign Operations Executive, a covert – and unacknowledged except when things went wrong – organization subordinate to the Secret Intelligence Service. Basically, FOE performed any dirty little jobs that Six itself didn’t want to get involved with.
‘Yes, we’re aware that your employment arrangements are quite unusual. We did some checking on you through our London rezident before we extended this invitation. Despite what happened in France, I believe we can trust you to do the right thing.’
Richter inclined his head in acknowledgement. It was coming to something, he mused, when a senior Russian military intelligence officer seemed more inclined to trust you than your own boss did.
‘So what’s the story, Viktor?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather wait until we get to the hotel. Then we can talk freely and in comfort.’ As he said these words, Bykov gestured briefly towards the front seats of the Mercedes, and Richter understood perfectly. The GRU officer had borrowed the car only as a matter of convenience, but either its driver or the escort might well be reporting to a different master.
Careless talk could still cost lives, even in today’s relaxed, post-glasnost, pro-capitalist Russia.
Dobric Air Base, Bulgaria
‘Stop what you’re doing right now,’ the senior Bulgarian Air Force guard ordered, and strode into the warehouse. The other three members of his patrol followed him, their Kalashnikov assault rifles held ready. ‘You.’ He gestured with the muzzle of his weapon. ‘Get out of the forklift.’
The man at the vehicle’s controls climbed down and stood alongside his five companions, as they stared silently at the new arrivals.
Looking irritated by the interruption, Draco stepped forward. ‘What’s the problem?’ he snapped.
‘The problem,’ the patrol leader explained, ‘is that we have no collections or deliveries scheduled for today.’
‘I don’t understand. We have our orders.’
‘Let me see them, then.’
Draco strode over towards the pat
rol commander, reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers that he handed over. The Bulgarian guard shouldered his weapon and flicked through them, then looked up, puzzled.
‘These are blank,’ he said.
‘Oh, sorry, I must have given you the wrong ones. Here.’ Draco reached inside his tunic again, pulled out a silenced semi-automatic pistol and fired a single shot. The Bulgarian fell backwards, his forehead sprouting a third eye, as a spray of blood and brains flew towards his companions.
‘Now,’ Draco yelled, jumping to one side, out of the line of fire. He brought his pistol to bear on another of the startled patrol members, fired again and watched the second man fall. To his left, three of his men had now produced their pistols but, despite the shock of the sudden attack, the two remaining patrol members reacted immediately, by splitting up and running outside the warehouse to raise the alarm.
‘Find those two and kill them,’ Draco ordered, and a couple of his men picked up the Kalashnikovs belonging to the two dead men, and followed the escaping Bulgarians out of the door. ‘The rest of you, shift these bodies, then finish the loading.’
Outside, the two Bulgarian guards were running for their lives. They might have survived if they’d only used the buildings as cover, but in their panic both of them had decided that they must get back to the guardroom where the telephones were located. So they set off in a more or less straight line.
The first of their pursuers rounded a corner and spotted the two running side by side only about seventy yards in front of him. He knelt down, aimed the Kalashnikov and fired two rapid bursts of perhaps six rounds each. The result was immediate: both his targets fell clumsily to the ground, their weapons spinning uselessly from their hands. He stood up and watched their collapsed figures for a few seconds, then ran towards them.
One was clearly dead – two rounds had ripped through his back, emerging messily near his sternum – but the other was still alive. He’d been hit once in the lower back, the bullet cutting through his spine, and was now trying desperately to drag himself to where his Kalashnikov lay a couple of feet away. His assassin walked calmly across to the writhing figure, kicked the assault rifle well out of reach, then fired two rounds into the man’s skull.
He next picked up the AK47s and slung them over his shoulder – the team being armed only with pistols, the Kalashnikovs might prove useful once they’d left Dobric. After searching the corpses for spare magazines and ammunition, he headed back to the warehouse.
Ninety minutes later, they’d loaded all three trucks with a total of forty-eight of the long, heavy boxes, sixteen to each vehicle. Draco checked their loads carefully to ensure that the weight was evenly distributed and properly lashed down. Finally he gave the order to drive off, but only after they had dragged the dead men out of the warehouse and dumped them out on the roadway near their two companions. That way, there’d be no immediate pointer to the munitions they’d stolen, though the theft was bound to be discovered within days or even hours.
The trucks stopped just outside the main entrance while the seventh member of the group locked the gates behind them. Then he carefully returned both sets of keys to the safe and climbed back over the gates to rejoin his companions. Before they moved off, they all discarded the Air Force uniforms they’d been wearing and replaced them with blue workmen’s overalls.
Draco waved briefly from the cab of the leading truck, whereupon they turned out onto the road and headed south. Varna was only a short drive, about thirty-five miles, and Draco knew a cargo ship with Panamanian registry was waiting there for their precious load. Once they’d delivered it, this group of men would disperse, and probably never see each other again. They’d been recruited individually from the Bulgarian underworld for this single operation, for which they had all been very well paid. None had any idea what was contained in the boxes or of their importance to their recruiter, a middle-aged man of Chinese appearance who spoke their language only haltingly.
As the trucks bounced and rattled on down the road, only the drivers themselves were visible in the cabs. In the back of each vehicle the other men were completing their penultimate task by carefully pasting pre-prepared shipping labels over the stencilled ‘R-40T’ markings.
Rossyia Hotel, Moscow
The Rossyia is vast: twelve floors containing three thousand two hundred rooms; nine restaurants, two of which can each accommodate a thousand diners; six bars; fifteen snack bars, and the world’s biggest ballroom. It also possesses a huge cinema, the Zaryadye, that can hold three thousand people. Publicity material relating to the hotel dubs it ‘The Palace’ but, as the black Mercedes approached the vast structure squatting beside the Moskva river, Richter could see why it had attracted that other, less complimentary, epithet, ‘The Box’.
Bykov had booked him a room on the sixth floor, and the GRU officer suggested they adjourn to a bar, once Richter had deposited his bag there.
‘We checked the room thoroughly for bugs yesterday,’ he explained, ‘but in Moscow you never really know who’s listening to you. That’s why I’d feel more comfortable in the bar. I regret to say that your presence here has not been met with universal approval, and I’ve been instructed that you should not to be allowed to visit my office or any other building used by the GRU or SVR.’
‘Hotels and bars are fine with me,’ Richter assured him.
They found a booth at the back, ordered drinks and waited till they were placed on the table in front of them.
‘Right, Viktor, I’m all ears.’
Despite his fairly fluent English, for a moment Bykov looked confused – he hadn’t heard that expression before – but then his face cleared. ‘Very well. Let me start at the beginning. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union our armed forces have remained in a state of flux. For a long time it wasn’t always clear exactly what weapons or aircraft were located at what bases, nor who had control of those assets. Salaries weren’t being paid, officers and men weren’t getting relieved at the ends of their tours of duty, all that kind of thing. It was a total mess, an administrative nightmare.’
Richter nodded. ‘The West was very concerned about what was going on. But now you seem to have got everything sorted out, yes?’
‘Yes, we have – or most of it, anyway. But as Moscow re-established positive control of all branches of the armed forces, and as a matter of routine began comparing listed inventories with the assets that could actually be located and identified, some accounting discrepancies were discovered.’
‘“Accounting discrepancies”?’
‘That’s what Moscow called them, yes. At some of the more remote, less well-supervised military bases, it became apparent that some officers had been supplementing their salaries by disposing of certain equipment they decided was surplus to requirements. Basically, they would write off a few cases of AK47s, say, on the grounds that they had been damaged by immersion in water, and then sell them to anyone who wanted them. Once this came to light, Moscow finally understood why the Chechen rebels seemed so well-armed – they’d obtained most of their weapons and ammunition direct from Russian regular forces.’
‘You didn’t bring me all the way out here to talk about a few black-market Kalashnikovs, Viktor. What else went missing?’
A look of embarrassment flitted across Bykov’s face. ‘You’re quite right. Missing small arms are a matter of concern, obviously, but we soon discovered that some larger and more expensive pieces of military equipment also couldn’t be accounted for. In particular, we seemed to be missing a few aircraft.’
‘What aircraft, precisely?’
‘The Russian Air Force reported that it couldn’t locate fourteen of its Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 interceptors: the aircraft NATO has codenamed the Foxbat.’
Richter stared at him. ‘Jesus, Viktor, you can’t misplace something that size, and certainly not fourteen of them.’
‘I agree. Yesterday,’ Bykov added, looking even more unhappy, ‘that number went up to sixteen.
An inspection team sent to the Letneozerskiy interceptor base – you might know it as Obozerskiy Southeast – in Karelia, near the Finnish border, couldn’t account for two MiG-25s that were supposed to be on the strength of 524 IAP. What’s even more disturbing is that all the members of the inspection team were killed outright when their aircraft crashed shortly after leaving the same base. An initial inspection of the wreckage suggests that it exploded in midair. We only know about the missing MiGs because the team leader telephoned Moscow two days earlier to explain that he’d have to go in person and check if they were currently at a maintenance facility in the Ukraine before he rendered his final report. I’ve since checked with Zaporizhia, the facility in question, and the MiGs definitely aren’t there.’
For a few moments Richter was silent, then he spoke slowly. ‘I can see your problem, Viktor. What I’m not sure about is how you think I can help you solve it.’
Bykov raised a hand to the waiter and requested another round.
‘As you well know, we have adequate technical intelligence resources – satellites, phased-array radars and the like. Our problem is that our satellites carry out surveillance only of countries we consider to be hostile or potentially hostile to Russia. Likewise, our radars look outwards, across our borders, into China, Scandinavia and all the other countries that surround us. What we don’t have is much satellite coverage of activity here inside Russia, and before we can work our where the MiG-25s have gone, we need to get access to the take from whatever satellites the Americans had within range when those aircraft went missing. So I supplied whatever dates and locations I could deduce to your section, and requested that you brought the images with you.’
‘I’ve got them right here,’ Richter said, touching his briefcase, ‘together with our analysts’ best guesses about the aircraft they’ve spotted on the films. I’ve also got JARIC and N-PIC analysts standing by to talk to your people if necessary.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But first I have a question. In fact, I’ve got two. If somebody’s buying or stealing Foxbats, that’s only half the equation. Without munitions, spares, maintenance people and, obviously, pilots, the aircraft’s just a thirty-ton paperweight. Are you missing any pilots or maintainers as well?’
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