The Kremlin Device (10 page)

He shook his head. ‘It was only small thief. Teepical Moscow. Zheordie, I am sorry.'

‘In that case, forget it. But what about the bust?'

‘Probably this was Omon. They get information of criminals in the car. Maybe they hear them on their radio.'

‘Their methods aren't exactly subtle.'

He shrugged. ‘Moscow is very violent place.'

‘Well, we're all in one piece so far.
Idyom!
'

He smiled, like he always did when I hit a Russian word accurately, and said, ‘Let's go.'

I piled into the front passenger seat of his car, the other two got in the back. As Sasha pulled into the traffic, he announced, ‘One more dead.'

‘Who? Where?'

‘On radio news this morning. The boss of Russavto, big car import, shot dead in his Mercedes. Or maybe roasted. They found the car burning on Komsomol-skaya Square.'

‘Mafia?' I asked.

‘Of course.'

‘What did he do to annoy them?'

‘Refuse to pay money – just how I told you.'

‘The women in the hotel,' I said. ‘How do they get in there? I mean, is the hotel supporting them?'

‘I tell you, all Mafia-controlled.'

‘Yes – but d'you mean the hotel or the girls?'

‘Both.'

I looked round at Rick and said, ‘You'd better watch yourself, mate. You don't want to fuck this whole job just because of one hooker. You could end up floating down the Moscow River.'

We were heading out of town towards the east. The traffic going our way wasn't too bad, but the incoming stream was diabolical: crossing after crossing gridlocked, drivers hooting. When I remarked on it, Sasha said, ‘Moscow traffic goes to collapse. It is impossible.'

After I'd asked about the make of a car in front of us, he was quick to point out others. ‘That is big-engine Volga. This is tenth-model Lada. This is Zhigudi.' Then he added contemptuously, ‘Nobody want Russian cars.' What he coveted, I could see, was a BMW or a Mercedes, a few of which nosed through the rush-hour crawl, sleek and well-polished.

As we drew away from a set of lights, he said, ‘Now we are on Shosse Entusiastov.' He turned to me with a grin. ‘All revolutionaries who must go to prison use this street!' He saw me looking puzzled and went on, ‘Why? Because in Communist era all people sentenced to gaol passed along this highway to the gulags. They never return! Nobody return! The street goes to Siberia.'

Our journey took less than an hour, and as we drove the morning began to brighten: the air was quite warm, and as the cloud thinned we started getting glimpses of blue sky. After a scatter of new high-rise blocks on the outskirts of the city, we passed under the ring-road whose lights we'd seen from the air, and suddenly Moscow was at an end. The land here was dead flat; enormous fields stretched away on either side, apparently uncultivated, covered in rough grass, punctuated with tussocks a couple of feet high. Then, on our right, we started passing a forest which exactly matched my expectations of Russia: tall, slender silver birches with bark mottled white and grey rising among dark green pines, giving a pleasantly open texture to the wood.

I was admiring the trees when I realised that a uniformed man had walked out into the road ahead and was flagging us down with a black-and-white baton.

‘What's the matter?' I asked quickly.

‘It is nothing.' Sasha sounded unmoved. ‘Only GAI, the traffic police, making checks.'

He pulled in to the verge, and the cop came to the window. He wore a grey uniform with a thin red stripe down the seam of the trousers. Sasha wound down his window and started to give the policeman a bollocking. Even I could understand what he was saying: that he was an army officer on an important mission and had no time to piss about. But the cop gave him as good as he got, and after a minute Sasha gave a sigh.

‘
Isvinite
. He demands my documents. One minute, please.'

Muttering under his breath, Sasha leant across me to extract an envelope from the dashboard pocket, got out of the car and followed the man into the flat-topped concrete hut at the side of the highway. Waiting, we had time to take in the decrepit surroundings: the road's edge churned up, rutted mud beyond the tarmac, heaps of rusting metal lying about, broken drainpipes dumped in a heap.

‘What it is,' said Whinger thoughtfully, ‘is the size of this godforsaken country. At home everything's neat and tidy because we have so little space. Here there's millions and millions of fucking acres, and it doesn't matter if you scatter rubbish about.'

Five minutes later Sasha returned, sliding papers back into his folder. ‘Forged documents,' he said as he started up. ‘Always they are looking for forged licences. People sell them for fifty dollars.'

‘Are these the regular police, then?'

‘No – GAI only traffic.'

We drove on. Soon I saw a large sign which I could read easily:
BALASHIKA
. Behind it, set back from the road and running parallel with it, was a wall of concrete sections topped by coils of barbed wire. The solid part of the barrier was about two metres tall, so that it effectively blocked the view of everything beyond.

‘Here is the camp,' Sasha announced. ‘Very big.'

Certainly the wall ran for miles. On and on it went, broken at one point by a single-track railway line, but even there baffles of concrete slabs set at angles made it impossible to see inside. At last Sasha slowed and we drew up at what was obviously the main entrance: a double gateway with sliding barriers of heavy metal bars forged in squares, and flat-roofed guardrooms on either side. The roadway was pitted, the buildings badly finished, the wall cracked where it was propped by pillars. Twisting round in my seat, I glanced at Whinger and saw that his reaction was the same as mine: the place had an instantly depressing atmosphere.

When I look back on that day, I realise that from the start I had a feeling of foreboding about our whole operation. There was no friction of any kind – indeed, our hosts were friendly and welcoming – but the squalor of the barrack blocks and the primitive nature of the training facilities made me dread spending two months in such surroundings. Get a grip, Geordie, I kept telling myself. What matters is the training. You can put up with anything for eight or nine weeks.

As soon as we were inside the camp, Sasha disappeared briefly and came back dressed in DPM fatigues, without badges of rank, but with the emblem of a tiger's head on his left lapel. On duty, we soon saw, his manner changed: he became sharper, more efficient – and that gave me confidence. He introduced us to a couple of fellow officers – who seemed good enough guys, with a positive, open approach – but they spoke hardly any English, and at this first meeting their names didn't stick.

It was Sasha who showed us round and explained the facilities. I said nothing as we toured the camp, because in the Regiment you work with whatever assets you've got, and don't start criticising others when they are doing their best. But I couldn't help noticing that most of what we saw was way out of date: again and again I was reminded of conditions when I'd joined the army nearly twenty years before.

The camp had its good points, one of which was space. Beyond the drill squares, the barrack blocks and other buildings, the land ran straight out into ranges and training areas. Several thousand acres were taken in by the surrounding wall, which struck away through the forest at the back and disappeared out of sight. You could drive or even walk to the various ranges without leaving the base's perimeter.

At the Killing House, our hosts put on a demonstration of hostage rescue – no doubt in return for the one we'd given Sasha at home.

As Sasha warned me, their building was nothing but a hollow square formed out of old lorry tyres filled with sand and cement and stacked on each other to make walls about eight feet high. Because the room had no roof and was open to the elements, we had a good view down into it from our vantage point on the observation tower. As at Hereford, the guards either side of the prisoner were represented by figure targets, much the same as our own, but the hostage between them, far from being a live human being, was only a dummy.

When the assault went down, the explosive charge failed to blow the barricaded door first time, and when the assaulters opened up with their sub-machine guns, instead of firing a couple of short bursts, they sprayed the inside of the house with dozens of rounds. The entire exercise was marked by a lack of precision. There was also a worrying lack of emphasis on safety. The assaulters had no flame-proof clothing like our black gear, only standard DPMs – and as the day warmed up I saw several guys remove the heavy Kevlar plates from the fronts and backs of their flak-jackets. Without the plates the jackets would stop secondary impacts like ricochets, but not live rounds. And whereas at home we always have a fully equipped ambulance standing by, manned by two paramedics, the Russians had nothing but an ancient meat-wagon, with jack-shit kit on board and only two squaddies in control.

Sasha seemed amazed when I told him that the SAS had only ever lost one man in the Killing House. Plenty of guys had broken arms and legs when they fell off buildings while abseiling, but in the Killing House itself only one man had died; he'd been shot in the femoral artery and had bled to death in seconds.

‘Reelly!' Sasha seemed impressed. ‘We lose one or two men a year.'

I almost said, ‘I'm not surprised,' but bit it back and made a mental note that safety instruction was going to be at the top of our agenda when the team came out.

Another fundamental decision was about food. For lunch, we were taken to a canteen and ate with the rank and file. The menu was exactly as Sasha had described it in the pub in England:
shchi
, cabbage soup with lumps of gristle floating in it, black and white bread. The soup was OK if you avoided the gristle, but I could see Whinger's eyeballs rotating.

As soon as we were on our own outside, I said, ‘We're going to get fucking hungry here.'

My spirits sank even lower when we saw what we were being offered for accommodation: the ground floor of a three-storey block which was standing empty and looked as if it hadn't been used in years. There was no shortage of space – a dozen rooms of reasonable size led off either side of a central corridor – but the building itself was in a disgusting state, with plaster coming away from the concrete-block walls, dirty cream paint flaking off, and yellowing newspapers strewn about the bare cement floors. The security was shite, as well: no locks on the doors, and several window panes broken.

Sasha saw the way my mind was working and said, ‘We get it cleaned up. No bother.'

‘Yes, please – and some means of securing the doors. We're going to want beds, too.'

‘How many?'

‘Eight – no, better make it ten.' I adjusted my estimate as I counted in the scalies.

As we left to return to the city, we took a short drive round the town of Balashika – and that depressed us even more. The road verges were sheets of dried mud, flanked by blocks of flats made from hideous yellow brick, with badly fitting windows and cracks gaping in the walls. We looked in vain for shops – and as for a pub, the idea that one might exist in such a place seemed like a bad joke.

We were driving against the tide of traffic once more, and in less than an hour we were alongside the river, passing the spot where the knife had gone over the wall and pulling up outside the gates of the British Embassy.

Sasha, who had changed back into his civvies, glanced at his watch and announced with satisfaction, ‘Three hours fifty-eight.'

The security guards had been briefed to expect us. The first two – Russians – checked our documents. The inner post was manned by a Brit, as I'd predicted. He spoke a few words into his radio, then directed Sasha to drive on across the courtyard and round the left-hand side of the main building. Behind the inner post was another open space with an attractive garden, a hard tennis court and, across the back, a low two-storey building which had obviously once been the stable block belonging to the main house. A forest-green Range Rover was parked in one corner with a small, shiny blue Fiat beside it.

By the time we arrived at the front door a man was already standing outside – a tall guy, probably in his early forties, with a shock of thick, grey hair springing forward over his forehead and a bushy moustache to match. He was wearing a white shirt and a navy tie with diagonal stripes that no doubt indicated some fancy school or regiment.

‘Sergeant Major Sharp?' He came over and shook hands with a firm grip. ‘Pleased to meet you. I'm David Allway, Chargé d'Affaires.'

‘Hello,' I said. ‘This is Major Ivanov – Sasha – who's looking after us.'

Sasha shook hands and gave a deferential nod in place of a salute. Then I introduced Whinger and Rick.

Allway swept a hand at his forelock, which instantly flopped back into its former position, smiled at everyone and said, ‘Your liaison officer's here already.'

‘Great,' I said. ‘What's his name?'

‘
Her
name . . .' he paused, smiling again, ‘is Colonel Gerasimova. She's waiting in the office. Let's go in.'

‘Just a second,' I said. ‘A colonel . . . Is she army?'

‘No – she's from the FSB, a section of the former KGB. On formal occasions they still like to use KGB ranks.'

Ah, Jesus, I thought. This is all we need.

If I don't remember much about Allway's office, it's because I was so startled by the appearance and manner of our interpreter. She was dark, with short, straight hair, and very slim – ‘lithe' would be a better word, because her movements were quick and elegant. She was wearing a smart suit of cornflower-blue linen with a cream-coloured shirt underneath. After so much squalor outside, she was like a vision. When we entered the room she was sitting down, talking to a red-headed secretary, but when she stood up to greet us, I saw she was nearly as tall as me. Her face caught everyone's eyes as we came in: it was a bit too long and narrow to be classically beautiful, but there was something striking about it, especially her big, dark eyes.