The Kremlin Device (2 page)

Stars wheeled across the big, square opening as the pilot put in his final turn. I glanced to my left at Harry Price, known to all as Pavarotti, the hefty Welshman famous for singing in the showers and for the eyes tattooed on the cheeks of his arse. He'd had them done one night when he got pissed in Cardiff, by a Chinese bloke for a fiver a side, and the eyes were a bit slitty.

Now, under his helmet, goggles and oxygen mask, not much of his face was showing, but I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he swallowed. He was thinking the same as I was: for fuck's sake, let's get out of this damned aircraft and on our way.

Anyone who says he's not nervous when about to free-fall at night wearing full equipment is bullshitting. All eight of us were crapping bricks. A night-time HALO – a high-altitude, low-opening drop – is no picnic, however many times you've done it before. After two seconds you're heading for the ground at 125 miles per hour. You roar through the first thousand feet of air in ten seconds, the next in five, and so you keep going.

A clean free-fall is one thing; a drop with full kit something else, because of the risk that your load may move and render you unstable. Tonight we were jumping at 22,000 feet and dropping to 4,000 before we popped our chutes: a free-fall of ninety-five seconds. This way, on this moonless night, we'd come out of the blue – or rather, out of the black – as far as anyone on the ground was concerned: until our chutes deployed nobody would see a thing.

Our target was a clearing among the chestnut forests of the Cevennes where, according to the exercise scenario, partisan forces would be waiting to guide us in, meet us and take us to safe houses.

The captain of the aircraft had given the wind as eight knots on 260 degrees – just south of west. We were going to jump four ks west of our target and fly ourselves in towards it. The sky was clear but the air was full of turbulence, and the Here kept juddering and twitching so that the guys were being jostled against each other as we huddled on the ramp.

Somebody gripped my right arm. I twisted and saw it was the head loadie, asking with thumb up if I was all set. I nodded and gave him a thumb in return. He raised a single finger. One minute to go. Cushy bastard: we were going out into the black night while he was safely tethered to his aircraft by a harness and long webbing strop. By the time we hit the deck he'd be well on his way back to Lyneham and a warm night tucked up in bed . . . I caught myself up. Geordie, I told myself, stop pissing around. You're in the SAS, and this is what it's all about. If you did the crew's job you'd be bored out of your mind.

I passed the signal to Pavarotti and glanced down at my altimeters, one strapped on either forearm: both dials were registering 22,000.1 felt the angle of the floor change slightly as the pilot throttled back, dropping speed for his final run-in towards the DZ. Screwing my head round, I got a glimpse of Whinger Watson, my second-in-command. All I could see was the red light glinting off his goggles, but I could imagine the oath he was muttering to himself: ‘Firekin ell,' again and again. He and I were the old men of the party: at thirty-six and thirty-seven, we could almost have been some of the guys' fathers.

Time for last-minute checks: harness straight, bollocks clear of crutch straps, bergen in position, weapon secure, mask tight, gloves on. I reached round and bent the Cyalume light velcroed on to my bergen, cracking the glass phial in the middle and setting the chemical reaction going so that everyone would have a marker to steer towards when they followed me out of the plane.

Thirty seconds to go. Into my mind came a sudden vision of Moscow. For a moment I imagined we were doing a night drop into the heart of the city, heading down towards all those red-brick towers and golden onion domes. I knew that the dark land below us was France, not Russia, and that we were only on a preliminary exercise; but Moscow was our ultimate destination, and for the past few days we'd heard so much about Spetznaz, Omon, Alfa Force, the Mafia and the break-up of the KGB that I'd started seeing red in my sleep.

Then I felt the head loadie grip my arm again. I tensed myself and hunched forward.

The two little jump-warning lights were still on. Still on . . . Still on . . . Then the bottom half of each ping-pong ball sprang to life.
Green on!

All I had to do was tumble forward, head-first into the black space outside. Lean forward – gone.

As I cleared the belly of the aircraft upside-down, the slipstream hit my front with a huge thud. Head up, chest out . . . An instant later I was horizontal and falling in a good position – face down, arms and legs spread, chest thrust out, steering with my hands turned up and out. The engine scream had been replaced by the roar of air blasting past my helmet.

So far, so good. Now I needed to get eyes on the other guys, make sure everybody was OK. Pavarotti had jumped a couple of seconds behind me, the others after him. I wanted to slow my descent so they could catch up. Bending in the middle, I de-arched myself – that is, curled my body into a banana shape to increase resistance to the air.

Staring down, I saw long streaks of haze between ourselves and the ground: a thin layer of cloud. As I hit it, drops of water stung my cheeks and forehead like fire. A second later I was through, and aware of someone coming down on my right, a black shape slanting in at an angle, monochrome, but more solid than the surrounding darkness. Another appeared, then another. There was no way of telling who was who, but I was glad they were keeping a safe distance from me, facing inwards in a wide ring.

I stuck out my chest again and straightened out to pick up speed and keep pace with them.

Below us the wooded hills were crow black, not a light in sight. Then, at three o'clock to me, I saw a brilliant spark flare up: a Firefly, our reception committee. Now I could count six other guys around me, all more or less level. Good work. But where was the seventh? Maybe behind me, out of my vision.

For a few moments I positively enjoyed myself. Hurtling through the night, keeping control, gave a feeling of terrific exhilaration. I was free as a bird, flying; everything seemed easy. Inside the thin gloves my fingers were freezing, but what the hell!

Again I thought irrationally, Moscow, here we come!

Against the illuminated faces of my altimeters the hands were unwinding fast. My mind was making continual checks: I'm fine. Eighteen thousand. My position's stable. Sixteen. Keep that posture. Left hand down a bit. Now you're OK. It's fourteen. You're good. It's twelve.

Then
wham!
Some heavy object flew down from the side and slammed into the back of my right leg with a terrific blow. Jesus, I thought, a meteorite. No – a falling human body. The impact knocked me out of the posture I'd been working to hold. Worse, it knocked my bergen from its central position behind my knees and pushed it over to the outside of my left leg. In an instant I was destabilised, still face-down, but spinning.

I knew I was in the shit. A spin is the worst thing that can happen to a free-faller, the fate everybody dreads. If one starts on its own it may wind up slowly, and you stand some chance of correcting it. But after an impact of that kind, you're away. The combination of momentum and air pressure is so ferocious that you're rotating like a propeller, and that's you gone.

I struggled with hands, arms and legs to adjust my posture, to regain control. But whatever I did, I just spun faster. For the first few seconds my mind stayed clear. Maybe one of the lads will see what's happening, I thought. Maybe someone will steer in to give me a hand. Then I realised, No, they can't. This is too violent. If anyone tried to make contact I'd smash them, or they'd smash me. We'd break limbs, knock each other out. If they've got any sense, they've pulled off to a safe distance. I'm on my own.

All this went through my mind in a flash. Then I thought, I'm going to have to cut my bergen away. Pull the cord to dump it. Lose all my kit. But by the time I'd taken that decision it had become physically impossible. The centrifugal force of the spin was so great I couldn't get my hands anywhere near my body. No way could I reach my knife, still in its sheath on my right leg. My arms were locked straight out, hands and fingers throbbing with the pressure of blood forced into them. They felt as if the skin was going to burst. My head seemed to be swelling, too, the skin round my eyes bulging, vision deteriorating. Geordie Sharp, I told myself, this is it. During your career in special forces you've got out of plenty of tight corners, but this time, finally, you're fucked.

I wasn't exactly frightened; everything had happened so fast there was no time to worry. I just seemed to accept that fate had got me by the short-and-curlies, and I was going in at 125mph. Obliteration, I thought. Fair enough.

In fact I must have been losing consciousness. Then an almighty jolt brought me back to my senses. It was as if a huge hand had arrested me in mid air. The thump knocked the breath out of my lungs, and I was still spinning, but much more slowly. It took me a few seconds to realise that the auto-release had fired my main chute, and that I was descending more slowly, in a sitting position.

Instinctively I reached up and pulled on the webbing strops to test the reaction. Something wrong: a rough, grating feeling, too much resistance. Glancing up, I saw from the outline of the chute against the stars that the canopy was lopsided. Instead of being rectangular, it was all sharp angles. The rigging lines had tangled round each other in the spin. Instead of working down to a position just above my head, the spreader bar had become jammed in the twisted ropes.

Because it wasn't properly deployed, the chute started spinning as well, winding me around like a fairground ride. But by then, thank God, my mind was back to normal. I saw my options clearly. I was descending much too fast. If I couldn't free the main chute in the next few seconds I'd have to cut it away and deploy my reserve. Also I'd have to ditch my bergen, because its weight was too great for the reserve chute to support.

I held the strops and started giving violent twists, turning my body hard to the left. The third jolt did the trick. Above me there was a hefty
smack
as the chute deployed fully, then a twitch came down the lines. When I next looked up, the spreader bar had slid down to its proper place and everything was back to normal. I took a few deep breaths, thanked my lucky stars and turned my attention to the ground.

As far as I could tell, I was little the worse. My eyes felt funny and my face was glowing red hot, but nothing was broken. My breathing was OK, vision fair. There was the Firefly, away to my left. Because of the spin I'd drifted several hundred metres off my heading.

I'd just started steering back towards the DZ when I became aware of someone else flying in dangerously close to me. What the hell was he doing?

‘Piss off, you stupid git!' I shouted. Still he came at me, slanting in.

Belatedly I realised that, now that we were under canopy, the others should already be on comms. I switched on my set and immediately heard guys coming up to check in: ‘Seven, roger . . . Eight, roger.' Then Whinger was saying, ‘Come in, One. One, are you OK?'

With a jab on my pressel switch I said sharply, ‘One, roger. I'm all right. And I'd be even better if some cunt hadn't flown into me. Now get off the air.'

After that close call, the rest of the exercise seemed pretty tame. Our reception committee met us in the forest clearing. They'd seen nothing wrong, and didn't realise we'd almost had a fatality; when they heard, there were a good few
mon Dieus
flying about, but I'd recovered my composure, and we let down the tension by having a laugh. We quickly established that it was Pavarotti who'd nearly written me off. I couldn't hold it against him, because it turned out that he himself had gone unstable when clearing the aircraft, and he'd had a load of trouble of his own. The result was that he'd got separated from the rest of the group. He'd been flying back in to re-establish contact when the collision occurred, and he'd never seen me until the impact.

‘Christ, Pav,' said Whinger. ‘With eyes in your arse like you've got, you ought to be able to see in every fucking direction at once.'

As we gathered up our chutes, Pav and I felt our legs stiffening from the bruises we'd sustained, and knew we were going to be pretty sore in the morning. But our French colleagues spirited us past the opposing forces and put us in position to take out the power station that was doing duty as the enemy's comms centre.

No snags there – and after a wash-up next morning, we moved into the civilian phase of our exercise, which required us to make our way back into England under assumed identities. Use of the tunnel was banned, so we had to travel by sea, using either Dover or Folkestone. The rules laid down that we had to land between midday and midnight – and we knew that the immigration authorities had been briefed by the Int Corps guys from Hereford. In other words, the bastards were poised to intercept us.

We travelled up to the Channel individually, and by the time I reached Calais at about 6.30, after two nights with no proper sleep, I was knackered.

One of the first people I saw on board the ferry was Whinger, easing his nerves with a quick pint of lager in one of the bars. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that someone had put dickers on the ship, trying to eyeball us before we'd even landed; so I went past without giving any sign of recognition. With his Mexican moustache, Whinger looked every inch a veteran SAS operator, and I had myself a private bet that the watchers would pick him up. His face was deeply lined, with telltale furrows up his cheeks and across his forehead, giving it that strained, prematurely aged appearance brought on by years of pushing yourself to the limit.