The Kremlin Device (12 page)

‘How are we supposed to handle them? I mean, are they portable, or what?'

‘More or less.' The CO gestured to his left. ‘Mr Laidlaw is going to give you an initial briefing.'

Laidlaw stood up to expound. Plump and rubicund, with dark hair slicked back and a big gut bulging against his double-breasted, navy pin-stripe suit, he looked a bit of a character, a man who enjoyed a glass or two. Yet his manner was anything but frivolous: ‘Gentlemen,' he said in a thick, fruity Scottish accent, ‘for simplicity's sake I shall refer to the devices by initials. In the trade they're known as CNDs, compact nuclear devices. Ironic that the same initials stood for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which some of you may remember. Nevertheless, those are the initials that we tend to use.

‘The two CNDs you will be placing in position weigh approximately a hundred and fifty kilograms apiece. However, each one comes in two parts the size and shape of large suitcases. One component weighs eighty kilos, the other seventy. Thus each component can be carried without much difficulty by two men. Easier with four. The device is primed by fitting the two halves together. It is then connected to a smaller unit, a radio receiver. The whole is detonated by signal from a satellite in synchronous orbit.'

He stopped, scanning our faces. ‘Gentlemen, I can see you looking worried. May I emphasise that the chances of any CND ever being detonated in anger are extremely remote. The devices are being planted purely as a deterrent, which the West will use as a form of control, should the situation in Russia deteriorate to a level which threatens the international community. Think of them as an insurance policy, not as weapons of aggression.'

Seeing Johnny shift on his chair, he prompted, ‘Yes?'

‘These bombs. How do they get to Moscow?'

‘You'll take them with you when you fly in.'

‘Where are they now?'

Laidlaw looked at his watch. ‘They're due into Lakenheath any time now. They should reach Hereford this evening.'

I was finding it hard to believe that this whole spiel wasn't some crazy test, sprung on us to gauge our reactions.

‘How do we know where to site them, once we get there?' I asked.

‘Our friends in the Pentagon have got everything worked out for you. I'll give you a quick idea from these maps. Of course, you'll have detailed diagrams which you can memorise, but these will show you the general idea.'

He bent over an open laptop which stood on the table and punched a couple of keys. The big VDU beside him flickered into life – and even before he began to explain the coloured diagram that came up on the screen I knew where we were: on the bank of the Moscow River, opposite the Kremlin wall, practically at the spot where we'd had the showdown with the mugger.

‘For security reasons,' Laidlaw was saying, ‘as from now, the devices will be referred to only by code names. CND 1 is Apple, CND 2 Orange. All right? Now – this diagram shows the site for Apple. We're right in the centre of Moscow. Here you have the Moscow River, marked blue, flowing west to east. The river at this point is a hundred and five metres wide. This, here, is the south wall of the Kremlin, running parallel with the river. The interior of the Kremlin lies to the north. Alongside the north bank of the river is a road, then there's a strip of grass. The distance from the water to the Kremlin wall is seventy-seven metres.

‘Fortunately for your purpose, the ground beneath the city is honeycombed by tunnels. Not sewage tunnels like in London, because Moscow works on a system of relatively small-bore pipes, which are cleared by high-pressure water jets. Of course, there's the Metro – the underground – with tunnels on many different levels, as in London.' He stopped to clear his throat, and continued in a strange, slightly theatrical voice. ‘But there are also various other tunnels, less well known. For instance, there is one major and totally secret system which was built during the seventies, in the depths of the Cold War, to give party leaders an escape route from the Kremlin in the event of invasion or nuclear attack. It's very deep, and one of them's big enough to take lorries.

‘At the inner end, access is by lifts from a secret terminal under the Presidium. The tunnel runs roughly here' – he drew an imaginary line with his pointer – ‘southwards under the river, and all the way out to a site near Vnukovo Airport, twenty kilometres to the south-west. There, a complete underground city still awaits its first refugees. The place has its own supplies of food, power, water, air and so on.'

He paused for effect, and saw he had us well hooked.

‘More recently, in the attempted coup of ninety-three, the rebels were cornered in the White House, the parliament building. You'll all have seen TV pictures of tanks firing on it. Well, when the defenders decided to run for it, they went down tunnels – that was how they got away. The KGB were supposed to be guarding all the tunnel systems, but they just didn't have the manpower.

‘Our tunnel,
your
tunnel, is much more modest, but ideal for your purpose: only six feet in diameter, but adequate for pedestrians. Again, it was built as an escape route, but during the twenties, on the orders of Lenin. This is it – the dotted line – running from beneath the Great Kremlin Palace, under the river and away towards the south. Fortunately we have been able to acquire KGB records, which show that during the Khruschev era – some time in the fifties – it was declared obsolete and the section under the Kremlin was filled in with a plug of concrete. But the next section has remained open, and appears to have been forgotten, or at any rate abandoned, by latter-day authorities.'

Once again I couldn't help making a sarcastic remark. ‘I suppose it passes right beneath the British Embassy. All we have to do is open a trap-door in the floor of the ballroom and drop into it. Brilliant.'

The CO frowned at me, but Laidlaw wasn't fazed. ‘You're not far wrong. In fact it passes about five hundred yards to the east of the Embassy. Here's the Embassy complex, on Sophieskaya Quay, and here's the line of the tunnel.' He drew another invisible line downwards, passing to the right of the Embassy and on towards the south-east.

‘How do we get into it, then?'

‘Access is via a shaft in a courtyard behind a church. I'll show you a detailed diagram in due course.'

‘I know,' said Rick suddenly. ‘It's that pink-and-white structure, a bit like a wedding cake. Three arches and a tall tower.'

I stared at him, amazed that he'd noticed and remembered such detail.

‘Yeah,' he went on. ‘We walked right past it after we'd sorted that interloper. You can look through the gateway and see a little church in the yard at the back. There was a big, wrought-iron gate at the entrance, but it looked as though it hadn't moved in years.'

‘Pink and white,' Laidlaw echoed him, clearly impressed.

Laidlaw went back to his laptop and wiped the picture. ‘Let me show you something else.'

Up came a close-in photo of two heavy padlocks, their hasps passing through a pair of thick metal rings.

‘These,' he said, ‘are the locks on the plate sealing the access shaft.'

Pavarotti, who was good on his lock-picking, gave a low whistle. ‘Fuck me!' he muttered under his breath, as though immediately sensing a challenge, then louder: ‘I could go through those bastards in under a minute.'

‘I didn't think they'd trouble you much,' Laidlaw said with a smile.

‘So that,' he continued, ‘for the moment, is Apple. Now for Orange. Some of you have already been to Balashika, I believe.'

I nodded.

‘The second site is less precisely specified.'

His next coloured diagram showed mainly open country, with a few buildings and fence-lines running across it.

‘This is the southern boundary of the space control complex at Shchiolkovo, next door to the training area at Balashika. It will be for you to choose the exact location, but the objective is to place Orange within a hundred metres of the perimeter, so that its blast effects will cover the entire space complex. As some of you have seen, the training area in which you'll be operating abuts the complex. It should be relatively simple to bury the device at a suitable depth.'

‘Which is . . . ?'

‘A minimum of six feet, a maximum of twenty.'

The guy seemed to know all the answers. Yet still I could not quite believe that what we were hearing could be for real.

‘These CNDs,' I said. ‘How powerful are they? What damage will they cause if they go off?'

‘Apple would destroy much of the centre of Moscow, and remove the Russian high command at one stroke. Orange would take out the space complex, removing Russia's ability to launch ICBMs with any precision. In both cases, blast damage would be limited to some extent by the fact that the devices would go off underground – but it would still be extremely severe.

‘In the city, the Kremlin would disappear. Every tunnel under Moscow would collapse. The entire Metro system would be destroyed. Escape tunnels and nuclear shelters the same. The city would come to a standstill. Within a two-kilometre radius, I would not expect anyone to survive.'

I took a deep breath. ‘Between them, then, the devices would kill a few hundred thousand people. Possibly a million.'

Laidlaw said nothing, so I went on, ‘This is all well and good, but we aren't trained to handle weapons of this kind. We won't have a clue about them, and unless we postpone the whole training programme there isn't time to learn.'

‘No bother,' said Laidlaw. ‘I gather one of your colleagues has been on a course in the United States.'

‘That's right,' the boss broke in. ‘In fact he's escorting the devices over. He's coming in with them this evening.'

‘Who are we talking about?' Whinger asked sharply.

‘Steve Lime.'

Steve Lime! The guy whose initial and surname spelt ‘Slime'. Whose nickname was Toad. Jesus! This really freaked me. I glanced at Whinger. He hated the bastard as much as I did. Toad! The colleague from hell.

I heard the CO saying, ‘He'll be going with you, of course. You'll need him to look after the devices, and prime them when the time for insertion comes.'

Toad had always been a pain to the lads on the squadron, but over the past few weeks, since he'd been posted to the States for a course in nuclear technology, he'd faded into the distance, as it were, and people had stopped beefing about him. It wasn't his fault that he was ugly, with oily skin and protuberant eyes; what bugged us was that he seemed to have no personality, and never got on with any of the guys. He'd go about with a smarmy smile on his face, but there was no warmth in it, and after a while you came to realise that he was wrapped up in his own affairs. At the same time, he was a real crawler, who'd lick up to anyone if he thought he could gain something from doing so.

How he had ever made it into the Regiment I could never understand. He had come from an unusual source – the Royal Engineers – where he'd worked in bomb-disposal; he was fascinated by explosives – obsessed, almost – and he spent hours tinkering with time-fuses and remote-firing gadgets.

He'd never tell you what he was doing, or have any real crack with the lads. He'd associate with the cooks and drivers rather than with the rest of us. It was no accident that he'd ended up as an instructor on the lock-picking wing, in a dim little world of his own. I know that all SAS guys, myself included, are loners to some extent; but at the same time everyone has to muck in, and Toad never did.

The idea of having to live at close quarters with him in the camp at Balashika was a fucking wind-up. In fact I found the whole scenario a nightmare.

I'd always hated the idea of nuclear weapons because they're bound to kill thousands of innocent civilians, including any number of children – people who have no idea of what's going on. My career in the SAS has always emphasised the need for precision: what you might call ‘economy of violence'. People imagine that guys in the Regiment have a cold-blooded, murderous outlook, and regard anybody as a potential target. It isn't like that. All our training is directed to making surgically accurate strikes on targets that have been properly identified.

For the moment, all I could do was grasp at straws. ‘This tunnel under the river,' I said. ‘How do we know it's still open?'

Laidlaw checked his notes, gave a half-smile, and replied, ‘It was open on the fourth of April this year, and we have no reason to believe the situation's changed.'

‘That means someone's been down it. If access is that easy, how do we know that the KGB or some other security organisation isn't sitting in there, waiting for us to arrive?'

‘The suggestion is that, once you've got Apple in position, you should block the tunnel on the river side of it by dropping the roof, as if there had been a natural fall.'

‘Not that easy if it's concrete.'

‘I didn't say it was concrete.' A hint of irritation edged into the Scot voice. ‘The tunnel is lined with brick, and it's not in the best of condition.'

I nodded in token condition.'

‘Even if you do drop the roof, it is recommended that you brick the device into the tunnel wall.'

‘Hard to camouflage new mortar.'

‘That'll be up to you. I imagine there may be dust or mud that you can smear around.'

Next Whinger came up with, ‘How do we get the devices on site?'

The CO looked at Laidlaw, as if asking permission to intervene, and said, ‘They'll travel out with you on the Here, sealed in Lacon boxes. They can be marked the same as ammunition. The weight will be about right. At the other end it'll be up to you to devise ways of moving them to their final positions.'