The Kremlin Device (16 page)

I found it a pleasure to start the course the next morning. Our team had all slept well, and the weather was still fine. Whinger and I had gone for a four-mile run at first light, and after a shower and breakfast I felt in good shape. But above all I was chuffed to get back to our proper role of soldiering, and passing some of our skills on to others.

The sight of Anna in her DPMs was enough to put a smile even on Toad's face. I'd arranged with Sasha that all our guys would get an issue of Russian combat kit, so that we blended into the local scenery. Naturally, the garments didn't fit too well; we could disguise short or long sleeves by rolling them up, but the blouses hung away from our waists and the trousers tended to be bulky. Anna's kit, in contrast, was immaculately cut to flatter her slender figure, and looked as though it had been styled by some Western couturier. She wore elegant black boots, a black leather belt that emphasised her narrow waist, and a jaunty peaked cap. Even though she wore no insignia you felt instinctively that she was the senior officer present.

‘You got your cars all right?' she asked.

‘Yes, thanks. They'll do well.'

‘Nothing special, I'm afraid. Not like a couple of BMWs.'

‘Oh well – they're fine for getting in and out of town.'

I wasn't sure if she knew that we'd already been in to the Embassy, but I wasn't going to bring the matter up unless she did, so I said nothing on that score and switched to matters about the course.

To open proceedings we got the twenty-four students into the main lecture room and sat them down, while our team lined up across the stage, Sasha hovering at one side. Anna introduced herself to the course, and to the Brits who hadn't met her, with a brief explanation that she came from the FSB and that she had been appointed our liaison officer. I then introduced our lads one by one, using the names they'd chosen to sport on their chest badges. I felt a right prick saying, ‘
Vot Rik, vot Dosti
 . . . This is Rick, this is Dusty,' followed by a couple of words about what each man would be teaching – weapons, unarmed combat, explosive entry, house assaults, vehicle drills and so on. When I came to Whinger – last, because he was last in the line – I asked Anna to explain that Vuinzha was not his proper name but the best approximation we could make of his nickname.

‘And what's that?' she asked. When I told her, she immediately came up with, ‘Well, we've got one of them too.' She looked around the benches and pointed to a tall, saturnine fellow with sticking-out ears. ‘He's called Zanuda,' she said, ‘and that means exactly the same thing. He's always moaning and groaning.'

Like us, the Russians were wearing name badges, but I got them to call out their first names all the same. This revealed that we had three men called Nikolai and three called Sergei, as well as two Semyons and two Igors.

‘Right,' I said, moving along the ranks, ‘I know that really we should call you by your patronymics, but it'll be easier for us if we give you numbers. You're Nikolai
Odin
, you're Nikolai
Dva
, you're Nikolai
Tri
.'

I did the same with the Sergeis and the two doubles. All that, coupled with the discovery of the twin Whingers, caused a good few laughs and broke the ice.

Finding that several of the students were from Spetznaz and some from Omon, I deliberately split the two groups, pairing off each man with one from the other organisation, so that they'd all have to mix and communicate. ‘It's important you all know each other really well,' I told them. ‘Your lives may depend on knowing how your partner's going to react in a particular situation. Learn everything you can about each other. Our team have been working together for years, and we're still finding out.'

Altogether the Russians looked a lively bunch, and fit: by the glow on them, I guessed they'd all been running that morning. They were all aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, but they were noticeably bigger than us – taller on average, and well built. There were a lot of broad, wide-cheekboned Slavic faces, and a couple of broken noses. When I asked how many had fought in Chechnya, nine hands went up, and a similar question about Afghanistan produced four.

‘
Khorosho!
' I said warmly. ‘Plenty of combat experience.'

When Anna translated, the remark brought out self-congratulatory smiles all round, and I could see we were going to get on.

The only two I didn't much care for were a pair who, I knew, had come from SOBR, the organisation that had once guarded the prisons and gulags. Sasha told me that, when the camps had broken up in 1992, a lot of these guys were thrown on to the market – and some bunch they were, too. They had the reputation of being the nastiest of all Russian special forces, with their own line in brutality and torture. Certainly the two we'd got, Oleg and Misha, looked pretty low-brow and uncooperative.

As I handed round the course programme, written in both languages, I said, ‘OK, we'll be starting right away, with basic CQB. But first we want to take you on the ranges and make sure we're all together on our commands. We want to watch you firing, and see how you do things. This is as much for our benefit as for yours: we need to get to know your methods.'

So we began, with magazine changes, stoppage drills and zeroing. Their weapon-handling proved to be good, although, as I'd suspected, some of the safety aspects wanted watching. We delivered a few bollockings on this score, especially after Sergei Two let off an AK47 round vertically into the air after he was supposed to have cleared his rifle.

Over the next few days, with basic range-work satisfactory, we began teaching the theory of house assaults, starting small, with two-man teams, making the students work in their pairs, showing them how to go through a room and clear it. We then moved on to four-man teams, through an assault on a single room to one on a house with four rooms and a corridor, still using one team. Then we progressed to having several teams operating together: eight or a dozen men entering different rooms at the same instant. Next came multi-floor tactics, with guys bursting in through doors, windows and skylights, all their movements precisely co-ordinated by radio.

At first we worked in classrooms, using magnetic boards and coloured counters to demonstrate formations, but soon we started moving men through actual rooms, and finally took them out for live firing practice in their primitive Killing House. The Russians were full of energy and enthusiasm, and they fairly threw themselves into the work. But what they lacked was precision: several times, when left to themselves to make a plan, they managed to have one assault team come face to face with another in the stair well, and we had to drum into them the vital importance of logical thought in command and control.

All this was interesting and good fun – a challenge for both sides, and one that we all enjoyed. But the trouble was that, for me, the days began to slip away at an alarming speed. In no time at all it was Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday. Our first week had almost gone, and we'd had no chance to recce either of our prospective nuclear sites.

The other aggravation was that on only the third night Rick did a runner. After supper he simply disappeared, and there were a few moments' panic before Mal, who was sharing a room with him, suddenly said, ‘I bet I know where he's at. He's gone to screw that woman he met on the recce. I heard him on the phone to her this morning.'

‘Not Natasha!' I said. Bloody hell! I knew he'd taken her address but I didn't realise he'd made contact again.

‘Yeah – laid himself on a taxi, too.'

I wasn't going to sit up half the night waiting for the randy bastard to come back, and I never did hear what time he rolled in. But after breakfast I lit into him for taking off without letting me know what he was doing.

‘Can't you see?' I told him. ‘It's plain bloody stupid. If anything had happened to you we wouldn't have had a clue where you were. If you got picked up by the Mafia, for instance, the whole team would be in the shit.'

He saw the point of that, and apologised, but I still warned him that if he couldn't control himself, I'd have to send him home.

Friendships quickly formed between the two sides, boosted on one occasion when Pete Pascoe, a great hunter-gatherer, returned from a run with a handful of brown mushrooms he'd collected in the forest. The sight of them brought vigorous protests from our own guys. ‘For fuck's sake!' cried Whinger. ‘Throw 'em out. Don't cook them, Mal, or you'll poison the lot of us.' But when the students saw them they went ballistic. ‘
Beliye griby!
' they shouted. ‘Boletus mushrooms!' and rushed out to the spot where Pete had found them in search of more.

These were the best, most sought-after kind of fungus. Pete became a hero, and Anna confirmed that Russians are crazy about mushrooms. ‘Weekends, at this time of year, thousands of Muscovites go hunting for them in the woods. They come out by train, car, everything. They're like locusts, and sweep the place clean. But the training areas are out of bounds to the public, so we're lucky.'

The week also saw an amazingly rapid proliferation of swear words far worse than any Valentina had taught us. The strangest thing was the way each nationality began to curse in the other's language: very soon the Brits had adopted
yob tvoio mat
(fuck your mother) as their basic expression of disgust, and several of the Russians were giving brilliant imitations of Whinger's ‘firekin ell'. They'd started calling Dusty ‘Dostoievsky', and Johnny, with his high complexion, had immediately become ‘Svyokla' – Beetroot.

After supper on Friday evening, before the weekend break, the students invited us round to their block for a drink. It was a strictly private affair, as drinking in barracks was totally forbidden even to officers. But somebody had slipped out for a few bottles of vodka and some cans of beer, and camaraderie flowered in an impromptu sing-song.

‘I hope to Christ this isn't home-brewed,' I said to Whinger as I downed a slug of vodka. ‘Otherwise we may wake up blind.'

I turned to Sergei Dva, holding up my glass, and said, ‘Not
samogon
?'

He looked outraged. ‘
Samogon?
' he roared. ‘
Nyet! Almas!
It is Diamond' – and he grabbed a bottle to show me that it had a big white diamond, flashing reflected light, on its blue label.

Somebody produced an accordion, and it turned out that a man called Yuri had a phenomenal bass voice. To look at him you'd never have suspected it, because he was slim and wiry: the voice sounded altogether too big for such a spare frame, and seemed to come right from his boots. After a few pints of Baltika No. 6 – a powerful, dark brew – he launched into the ‘Volga Boatmen's Song', and his mates joined in the choruses with terrific growls of ‘
Ayee och-nyem, ayee och-nyem
'. When Pavarotti hit back for the visitors with an impassioned rendering of ‘Drink to me Only', he won loud cheers.

As merry shouts shook the windows, I sat there sunk in the blackest thoughts. With a couple of exceptions, these Tiger Force guys were ordinary, lively fellows like ourselves. Too many people in Britain still had a Cold War image of the Russians, and thought of them as sinister, alien beings. Now, after a week in the country at grass-roots level, I saw that normal people, like us, had remained human in spite of all the horrors heaped on them. They had their strengths and weaknesses, their good and bad points, the same as us. And an attack on Britain was the last idea that any of them would have entertained.

Nevertheless, the job had to be done – and even as Sergei Three handed me another slug of Diamond I was saying to myself, ‘Right: the city centre recce's going down tomorrow night . . .'

SEVEN

When we next went to the Embassy, we left camp at the same time as on our first run, but this time we took just the black Volga. I hadn't told the Chargé we were coming into town: officially, we were going out for a couple of drinks and a bit of a bar-crawl.

Whinger drove, I read the map, and in the back sat Pavarotti, alongside Toad, with his lock-picking kit and two spare padlocks for the cover of the shaft. I'd deliberately nominated Pav as my No. 2 in the tunnel: I'd told him I might well need his height and strength, and that he'd just have to overcome his phobia. We were all wearing civvies, but Pav and I carried thin, dark overalls to wear on top of our other clothes while we were underground.

The weather had turned wet, and rain glistened on the tarmac. We soon realised to our cost that the car's wiper blades were knackered, and created more smears than they removed; but once again the traffic was light and we made rapid progress. On the long, straight run in we turned off the highway a couple of times, waited in a side-road, then came back out, to make certain we didn't have a tail.

No threat presented itself, and this time my navigation was spot-on: we reached the embankment without a false turn. There was a chance that the dicker we'd seen before, or some replacement, might still be on station, so we put in one drive-past, cruising westwards along the gentle, left-hand curve of Sophieskaya Quay, past the pink-and-white gateway, then past the Embassy, both on our left. To our right, across the river, the great buildings of the Kremlin were splendidly floodlit, and faint reflections gleamed in the wet tarmac of the embankment. A couple of cars came from the opposite direction, and a man and a woman were walking away from us, but there was nobody loitering.

At the end, before the bridge approach, Whinger pulled into the kerb and stopped in a dark area between street lamps.

‘Right, lads,' I said. ‘Just to confirm. The time now is 2105. Drop-off will be in five minutes, at 2110, near enough. A couple of minutes to reach the stable. We'll assume Toad can manage the locks in five minutes. If he has any trouble, Pav, you have a try. That means we should be in the tunnel by 2120 at the latest. Half an hour to suss it out. Back at the ladder by 2150. Pick-up at 2155 from this street, south side, east of the gateway. OK?'