by Andy Maslen
After his shower, he put on the white, towelling robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and sat on his bed to make a call.
Don picked up on the second ring.
“I’m in Tartu,” Gabriel said. “You know I said Drezna has a scrapyard here? I got the lead through a guy called Yuri Volkov. He’s your basic Russia mafia, owns clubs, bars – including the one where I was working – runs prostitutes, the works. And he’s not a big fan of Chechens.”
“Par for the course. I’d say the antipathy is equally intense whichever way round you look it. What else?”
“He’s fitted out an AMG Merc estate like an Apache. We have M16s, a Dragunov, Glocks, grenades, C-4 and more ammunition than we’d need to take out an army. And he’s billeted a couple of his men on me. They’re like a couple of pumped-up undertakers only without the happy-go-lucky demeanour.”
“Still, they could come in handy, eh? Even up the odds a little more in your favour?”
Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it up into short, black spikes. “True. Although we’re a long way from nine to one.”
He was referring to the ratio of “us” to “them” favoured by the SAS, a tripling of the balance of forces deemed acceptable in the general Army.
“You have the element of surprise working for you, remember that. Any chance you’ll get them out by stealth? There’s an order from on high that you can use lethal force, but it’s always good to keep the claret to a minimum on friendly soil. I don’t want to be hauled in for a tongue-lashing by the Estonian Ambassador.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Too early to say. But a scrapyard? I’m thinking dog, or dogs plural, loud rusty gates, razor wire, Christ knows what additional security if it’s a holding pen for kidnap victims. I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will. But the women’s lives are your prime and main goal. Anyone gets between you and them, you deliver the Queen’s message.”
“Understood. My only challenge at this point is pinpointing the scrapyard itself. I’m going to do some research after this and identify how many there are here. Volkov was vague on the details.”
“Which is where I can save you some time and effort.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had my usual email update this morning from my oppo in Langley. One of their spy planes picked up what she called ‘an anomalous mobile signature’ in a routine sweep over the Baltics. Some bright spark has been transmitting a military-strength GPS ping every fifteen seconds from a smartphone. No chip apparently, just a signal booster of some kind. Nothing a regular app would ever do. Anyway, this little nugget has been stuck in the bowels of CIA HQ because nobody could find a connection that mattered. Well, it’s got one now. We have the coordinates for a location in southeast Estonia. Tartu.”
“That's the best piece of news I’ve had since I arrived in Tallinn.” Gabriel leaned over to the side table and grabbed the pocket-sized pad of notepaper and branded pen left there by the hotel. “OK, go ahead.”
While Don gave him the precious string of digits, then repeated it, Gabriel wrote neat, upright numbers in a line across the page. He repeated them back to Don.
“That’s it,” Don said. “Now all you need to do is get tooled up and get our girls out of there. Shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Gabriel smiled at his former CO’s laconic sense of humour. “Walk in the park, Boss.” If only.
They signed off after this exchange, with a promise from Gabriel to report in as soon as he had the Bryant women safe, or if he had less welcome news. Gabriel launched a geo-location app on his phone and keyed in the map reference. As he watched the screen redraw itself, zooming in from a point somewhere out in the stratosphere to Estonia, then the southeast of the country, then Tartu itself, there was a knock at the door and a call.
“Room service.”
He let the uniformed man in, watched in silence as he placed the tray on the low table, then tipped him a couple of Euros and waited for him to leave the room.
The burger, contrary to expectations, was excellent. Dense, lean meat with just enough fat to enhance rather than smother the flavour, white onions fried to crisp brown shreds, and a spicy relish, rich in paprika, spilling out the sides where Gabriel could collect it on the fries. He washed the food down with long draughts of the cold, gassy lager.
As he ate, he looked at the screen of his phone. Now he had a location for the search and rescue. But although the display could tell him a little about the layout of the terrain and the surrounding network of roads, the real intelligence-gathering was still to come. It was clear that they’d have to leave the Merc in Tartu and tab out to the scrapyard cross-country. There was only one road that led from town to the scrapyard, and they couldn’t risk being seen making a direct approach. And despite Volkov’s jibes about the English love of discretion, Gabriel remained unconvinced that a brand-new, steroidal Mercedes muscle car with a crew of three fit-looking ex-Special Forces soldiers packing assault weapons was exactly unobtrusive.
Chapter 40
In the hotel restaurant the following morning, Gabriel and the two Russians didn’t stand out as much as he’d feared. They’d all dressed in the same outfit of dark chinos and sweatshirts or hoodies, with high combat boots covered by their trousers. Seven-thirty was obviously the preferred time for the corporate-type guests to be up and doing. Nearly every table was occupied by small groups of men dressed in dark suits, their shirts open at the neck, ties left in rooms to be knotted and cinched into place before the real work began. For now, though, they lined up along the buffet, loading plates with sausages, limp rashers of bacon, grilled tomatoes, and rubbery mountains of scrambled eggs. It was easy to spot the Germans – they always began with a plate of cold meat and cheese.
The room was noisy. Perhaps fearing that the combined bantering and laughter of seventy or eighty engineers, salesmen and management consultants wouldn’t be sufficient to create the correct atmosphere, the manager had piped soft-rock through speakers let into the ceiling and screwed to the walls. Combined with the noise of clattering plates, stainless steel serving spoons clanking on dishes, hissing coffee machines and the occasional dropped plate, it served as an effective mask for any conversation containing sensitive information, whether details of a business deal or a paramilitary search-and-rescue mission.
They sat at a corner table, Gabriel having rejected, politely, the table in the centre of the room offered to them by the young Italian hostess. The two Russians sat facing him, working through pyramids of eggs, bacon, grilled tomatoes, hash browns and sausages. Each man had also loaded a side plate with pastries, dinky replicas of full-sized croissants and cinnamon buns. As they pushed the food into their mouths, cheeks bulging as they chewed, he pushed hand-drawn maps of the route from the hotel to the scrapyard towards each man.
“This is where the Chechens are. It’s a scrapyard. We go over there very quiet, understand?”
Both men nodded, without raising their eyes from their food.
“On foot.”
The men nodded again, chewing rhythmically.
“Split up. Take one side each. North, east, west,” he said, pointing first at his own chest, then at Erik, then at Konstantin. “Leave the south – not enough cover from the road side. Observe and make notes. Get back here by eighteen hundred hours. OK?”
Another synchronised nod.
“Erik. Tell me the plan.”
Erik put his knife and fork down, finished chewing a huge mouthful of sausage and egg, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then spoke.
“We go to scrapyard. Quiet. No car, too much flash. I take east, Konstantin takes west, zaichik takes north.” Konstantin sniggered at the Russian word, then Erik continued. “Gather intelligence. Meet at hotel at six. Da?”
“Da. Very good. So what did you call me, then? Zy-what?”
“Zaichik. Means ‘big boss’ in Russian,” Erik said, to another snort of laughter from Konstantin.
Ga
briel nodded, signalling his approval. So you think I’m a little hare do you? Just remember two things about hares then, tovarishch. They’re fast. And they’re excellent boxers.
Back in his room after breakfast, Gabriel spread the map of Tartu out on the bed. He found the scrapyard easily enough, tracing his finger along the main access road. Then he spotted something potentially far more useful. Curving around from the southeast was a road marked “Military – disused”. It left the E263 and continued for half a mile with no junctions all the way to the perimeter fence.
Happy with his initial intelligence on the scrapyard, Gabriel moved to his weapons. The six-and-a-half-inch-long suppressor made the gun less easy to conceal, but the advantages of the device were overwhelming. He unscrewed it from the SIG’s barrel and slipped it into a trouser pocket, covered by a flap closed with a press-stud. Then he selected another thirty rounds from one of the boxes and zipped them, clinking quietly, into the right hand pocket of his windcheater.
Firearm sorted, he strapped the switchblade around his right ankle with tape. No need for the KA-BAR today – or the knuckleduster. As a recon mission, the whole objective was to stay silent and invisible. He grabbed the binoculars, then took the notebook and pen from the nightstand and shoved them into another stud-fastened pocket on his chinos. Time to move out.
The day was foggy, but Gabriel could still feel the sun warm on his chest as he left the hotel. Erik and Konstantin were standing, smoking to the left of the main doors. Konstantin came over.
“Fog. Good for close target recce. This your words, CTR, yes?”
“CTR, yeah.”
Konstantin smiled. “Spetsnaz. Me, Erik, five years. Know many things about SAS, Delta, Mossad.”
“Special Forces, eh? Well, good for you, mate. Yes, the conditions are perfect. Now go and do your stuff, and we’ll meet back here for a debrief later.”
*
It took Gabriel fifty minutes to reach the scrapyard. He could have done it in less by following the road, but the whole point was to stay out of sight. Instead, he made his way there around fields and through the woods fringing Tartu. He saw nobody on his journey, and was certain nobody had seen him. If there were farmers in this part of Estonia, they were all obviously indoors filling out paperwork to get EU grants because they sure as hell weren’t out on their land. The fog was lifting as the sun burned its way through, but there was still plenty of cover for a skilled and determined man to approach a reconnaissance target without being observed.
The site was huge, enclosed by a boundary fence of chain-link topped with coils of razor wire. It resembled a shanty town, only instead of rows of corrugated steel dwellings, there were towering piles of cars, each one squashed into a brick, its cabin flattened so it was level with the bonnet and boot. Lanes and roadways led between the piles, and directly in front of Gabriel’s position beyond the wire, where he’d hunkered down in a thick hedge of flowering shrubs, was an orange and white crane, its boom mounted with a circular electromagnet.
The fog inside the yard was thicker than in the open scrubby ground outside the fence. Gabriel peered through the binoculars but couldn’t see further than fifty yards. He flicked the switch for the night vision and waited while the electronics whined to life. The image through the eye-pieces changed from the natural colours he could see unaided to a ghostly green and black. If anything, the electronics made things worse, so, cursing, Gabriel switched them off and left them to dangle on his chest.
He lay flat under the bushes for another four hours and thirty minutes, willing the fog to lift. There was the occasional break as a gust of wind split the drifting vapour into strands and wisps that swirled amongst the ruined cars, but for most of the time, it obscured all but the closest details in a sickly, grey blanket.
There was a buzz against his hip from his phone. An email from Don. It contained a URL that began HTTPS and ended with a gov.uk domain. The message was terse.
Login: gwolfe
P/W: tf54£9HHcs7
Gabriel clicked on the URL and waited while his phone launched a browser and served the page. Typical spook site: terrible design, worse English. He tapped in the login and password and fifteen seconds later, found himself looking at . . . himself.
On the phone’s screen he could see, rendered in grey, the scrapyard. On one side, there was a man-shaped blob, prone, picked out in shimmering white. As an experiment, he brought his right arm out from his side and flapped it up and down as if making a one-sided snow angel. The tiny figure on his screen followed suit.
He swiped right and left and found Konstantin and then Erik, well separated and also lying flat just outside the wire.
“So, Mr Drezna, where are you and your bloodthirsty band of cutthroats?” he murmured, swiping, pinching and then spreading his index and middle fingers apart as he zoomed in on the small complex of structures at the centre of the parcel of land.
Outside stood two vehicles: a small car, a hatchback of some kind, and a biggish van or small truck with the faint but unmistakable outline of a woman’s body on the roof. There they were. Inside the central building, he could make out four separate figures. Two were seated, one was standing by the window and one was walking towards the door. Out it went, into the yard outside, where it came to rest. A flare of bright white told the story: cigarette break. Two smaller blobs closed in on the smoker and merged into one. They moved fast. Guard dogs, maybe.
Best of all, he could see two more blobs in a second building abutting the first. Their silhouettes were full-body, so they were lying rather than sitting or standing. And the heat signatures meant they were alive. But were they OK? Had they been abused or tortured? That, the technology couldn’t tell him. He watched for a few minutes longer, but they didn’t move, and the only change was that the Chechen smoking finished his cigarette and went back inside. He logged off.
“OK,” he murmured. “So we have confirmed sighting of the targets and the hostages. Four of one, two of the other. Time to end this lurk and get back to town.”
He pushed his way out from the bushes and stood, brushing the dirt of his front before turning and walking away, back to the hotel.
Chapter 41
The following morning, Gabriel and the two Russians drove out of the hotel carpark back to the scrapyard. The three men were dressed virtually identically in black trousers and boots, black T-shirts, and black or dark-grey hoodies. On his CTR, Gabriel had confirmed the presence of a disused road leading from the E263 motorway and right up to the southwestern edge of the scrapyard. He headed towards it now. The exit from the main road was a broad swathe of grey gravel, but the start of the narrow road itself was blocked by two truncated pyramids of white concrete, each of their four sides stencilled in bright green with the words NO SÕIDUKEID – ‘No Vehicles’. The blocks were about eighteen inches high and twelve to a side. He pulled the Mercedes off the main road and onto the gravel. He pointed to the concrete blocks through the windscreen.
“Think you can shift them?” he said, turning to look at Konstantin, then Erik.
“Those little things?” Konstantin said. “Of course. We take one each. Show you what real men can do, zaichik.”
Erik and Konstantin got out of the car and walked up to the blocks. They flexed their biceps and performed a few perfunctory stretches from side to side. They exchanged a few muttered words Gabriel didn’t catch, then laughed. They put their right hands behind their backs, counted to three in Russian then pulled their hands out. Now he understood. Rock-Paper-Scissors was alive and well, and being used in Mother Russia to settle matters like who would lift a sodding great block of concrete and risk making a fool of himself in front of his comrade. Konstantin’s meaty palm was held flat above his friend’s fist. He clapped it down to wrap the rock. Erik smiled, then squatted in front of his block. He pulled it towards him then, holding it balanced on the near edge of the base with his left hand, he slipped his right hand underneath it.
Transferring the weight to hi
s right, he repeated the action so that he now held the weight of the block on his hands. With a grunting yell, he bounced a couple of times on his heels then strained and brought the block off the ground and cradled it against his chest. He puffed his cheeks out then straightened, his massive thighs pistoning him upright. He turned to the side of the road and staggered on stiff legs to the edge, then rolled the block of concrete off his hands and into the tangled undergrowth of brambles, long grass and nettles, where it settled in a hidden ditch with a smashing of concealed bottles.
He walked back to Konstantin and, dusting his palms against each other, stood, legs apart as if to say, “Now it’s your turn”. The bigger man spat on his hands and rubbed them together.
Konstantin stood four or five inches taller than Erik. The man had to be six-seven, easily. His weight was harder to estimate, not least because muscle, which nature and Russian army PT instructors had endowed him with the share normally allotted to two men, is denser than fat. If Gabriel had been forced to guess, he’d have said two-fifty to three hundred pounds. Konstantin took off his hoodie and T-shirt to reveal a vast V-shaped torso, the latissimus dorsi muscles two great, triangular slabs of meat each side of the spine. Spread across the upper half of his back, from shoulder to shoulder and reaching halfway down his spine, was a tattoo of a bear, rearing up, clawed forepaws outstretched towards the viewer, fangs dripping blood. Behind it, the Russian flag fluttered from a spear driven into a pile of skulls. His forearms were striated with longitudinal bands of muscle, but it was the upper arms that really impressed. The biceps, triceps and deltoids were dramatically enlarged and defined from working out, and possibly steroid use, too, Gabriel thought – every swell and pleat of muscular tissue was clearly visible under the pale Russian skin.
The giant squatted behind the lump of concrete, as Erik had done, but he took a different approach to lifting it. He placed the flats of his hands against it, put his legs back as if he were a prop forward in a rugby scrum, then grunted with effort and pushed it right over and onto its square top. With the inverted block in front of him, its sides sloping outwards, he simply wrapped his arms around it in a bear hug and stood up, his feet angled outward like a weightlifter. Then he marched to the edge of the road and jettisoned his burden into the ditch alongside Erik’s, before returning to put his T-shirt on again.