On the Back Foot to Hell

by Roland Ladley

  Inside the bags, suspended in clear liquid, was an eye. A whole eye. Like someone had ripped it from … well, what? A human? Someone’s eye? Surely not? It must belong to an animal. Or it’s fake?

  He had no idea how big his own eyeball was, but he could guess. About the same size as the one in the bag …

  A human eye? What kind of sick joke was this?

  His brain went into spasm. All manner of scenarios filled the gap between his ears.

  What? Well … no, surely not?

  The note!

  That might help.

  Still holding the bag at arm’s length and with the box now between his knees, he took out the note. It was written using the same felt tip that had scribed his name on the outside of the brown packaging.

  It read:

  LEAVE HIM ALONE!

  What the …?

  Gareth felt his stomach weaken.

  Him? Who?

  Monza?

  How did they know? Who were ‘they’? How did they get onto him so quickly? He’d only met with Chiara this morning. Were they listening at their table? Did they know Chiara was going to talk to him about Monza? Were they monitoring his computer?

  Really?

  And they’d got into my apartment!

  My apartment!

  And … for God’s sake.

  Who were they?

  He didn’t have time to consider that question any further. His stomach had a clearer and more present danger. He had to make it to the bathroom.

  Chapter 4

  Bolotnikovskaya Ulitsa, Moscow, Russia

  Sam picked up a bowl from the plastic rack on the draining board. She wiped it dry with a gingham tea-towel, half turned and placed it on the wooden table behind her, next to the other items she had just finished drying. The kitchen was clean and simple. But there was no dishwasher.

  ‘It’s a lovely apartment, Alena.’ Sam said in perfect Russian. ‘How long have you, Vlad and the children been here?’

  Alena was washing a big pan which an hour earlier held the largest pork and dumpling stew Sam had ever seen. Sam had ladled onto her plate as much as her stomach could cope with – Russians don’t do small portions and she was very keen not to appear rude. Vlad, just as she remembered from having shared a restaurant table with him before, ate more than enough for three men. The two kids, a lad and a lass, followed their Dad. Alena, who untypically for a middle-aged Russian woman had the body of someone 20 years younger, ate less than she did. Which was good news. Sam didn’t feel so bad about turning down seconds.

  Alena stopped mid-scrub. She stared absently out of the ground floor window. It was getting dark. Sam had caught the end of the news as she’d arrived at their apartment. Rain was expected in Moscow any time soon. Maybe snow overnight. It would be turning colder and staying that way for, well, possibly until next April. The weatherman hadn’t said the last bit, but having spent a winter in Moscow Sam knew what to expect.

  ‘About eighteen months, maybe. After Vlad came out of hospital.’ Alena looked over her shoulder, through the kitchen door and into the small sitting room. Sam followed her eyeline. Vlad was on the settee. The daughter, whom Sam reckoned was around 12, was sitting on his lap. The son beside him. They were watching one of those madly-painful Japanese athletic shows, where men attempt almost impossible assault courses before falling in the drink. All three of them were shouting at the screen.

  Alena continued. ‘He couldn’t make the stairs up to the old flat, so we had to find this place real quick. It’s nice enough. And the local schools are good.’ She was scrubbing the pan again now. Sam, efficient as ever, was waiting for her.

  ‘It’s good to see him again.’ Sam meant it. A couple of years ago she and Vlad had worked together for six months on various SIS/FSB collaborations. That was before they’d both got involved in the Sokolov affair. He was the only member of the FSB team who showed her, a woman, any respect. Until the cabin fire separated them, they had been a good team.

  Alena stopped washing and turned to face Sam.

  ‘Will you promise me something?’ Alena’s face had anxiety sketched all over it.

  Sam knew what was coming, but didn’t pre-empt what Alena would say next.

  ‘Of course, Alena. If I can.’

  ‘Please keep Vlad safe. I know what happened before wasn’t your fault, but we can’t afford to lose any more of him.’

  There were tears in her eyes now.

  Immediately Sam felt out of place. This wasn’t her thing – displaying empathy, even though somewhere deep inside she felt something stir. She had absolutely no idea what to say - or do - so she answered the question as honestly as she could.

  ‘Vlad and I are not, strictly speaking, working together. You know, side by side. Not this time.’

  She tried to sound natural – caring. But she knew she was talking to Vlad’s wife as if she were briefing a senior officer. Any normal person would have given the woman a hug. Or held her arm gently whilst they chatted. She’d seen them do that on TV.

  But no, not me. Not Sam, bloody-hopeless, Green.

  ‘We are travelling south tomorrow. Together. But Vlad is staying in Russia. I’m going “overseas”, as it were. He’ll be quite safe … I’m sure.’ She added the last bit as an afterthought, realising as she spoke she had no way of guaranteeing Vlad’s safety.

  Still uncomfortable, Sam smiled, leant forward and touched Alena’s arm. A pat, that was all.

  Like how an allergy-ridden idiot would treat a moulting dog.

  Alena smiled back and nodded, dabbing her eyes with the dishcloth. She didn’t seem convinced.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. Vlad tells me very little.’

  There was a lot Sam could have told Alena. She’d had the full FSB briefing on the FFO this morning. It had answered a number of growing concerns that Sam had about her part in Vlad’s plan.

  And she wasn’t the only one who was dubious. As Vlad had suggested, she’d called Jane from the hut on the beach. Jane, who was surprised to hear from her (they hadn’t chatted for over six months) was even more surprised when Sam had put the, ‘would it be treasonous if …’ question to her. Their conversation hadn’t been a long one. Sam wasn’t one for small talk, and stuck in a wooden hut on a shingle beach in Norfolk with the FSB for company, it probably wasn’t an appropriate time. What had caught Sam off guard was Jane - and therefore, she guessed, the whole of SIS - had not heard of the Freedom For Oppressed. After a couple of supplementaries Jane asked to be given some time to consider the question.

  Putting a hand to the phone’s mouthpiece, Sam had asked Vlad, ‘How long do we have?’.

  He’d looked at his watch and replied that the Gulfstream’s flight plan to Moscow would be void in 85 minutes, and the airfield was 30 minutes away.

  That would be none, then.

  In the end Jane had told Sam to fly to Moscow. She would brief the staff in the Embassy to expect her in country. And finally she and Jane had agreed to talk again this morning.

  Jane had phoned mid-morning after Sam had had the FSB brief. As Sam knew they were going to be discussing classified information, she’d phoned her back on one of the SIS/FSB secure links.

  Once live, Sam’d asked, ‘You remember the Moscow suicide-bus bomb in February?’

  Jane came straight back. ‘Yes. Filevsky Park. Twenty-five dead. FSB attributed the attack to Chechen rebels. They arrested five of the group after a highspeed chase on the E30 motorway to Smolensk. The court case in currently ongoing. It will be a whitewash.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sam replied. ‘That’s exactly what happened. Before the attack FSB had their eyes on a new Chechen grouping. The bomb goes off and, as if by magic, five of the new Chechen team go down. Classic FSB reaction: incident – then round up anyone you want, as soon as you can. Everyone’s happy.’

  ‘That’s their MO, Sam. But, as you know, they also undertake a thorough investigation and, in their own time, find the real culprits.’

  ‘Yes. An
d they’ve done that. This time it’s the FFO - a new, tightknit terror cell. They’re South Ossetian Muslims, but with Georgian blood. They hate the Russians, who have their Kirka Army boots trampling all over their homeland – and they hate the mostly secular Georgian government, who still think they run their country. And, according to the FSB, they have lots of Muslim fans on the Russian side of the border. It’s a tinder keg down there.’ Her briefing was sharp.

  Sam waited for an answer. One came a few seconds later.

  ‘But it’s not our fight, Sam. If the Russians want to take apart a terror cell across the border in South Ossetia, there may be some murmurs in the UN from, say Iran, but against the backdrop of the latest terror cycle it’ll be lost in the noise. However, an ex-SIS case officer getting caught in the process … well, that would leave us with some very uncomfortable questions. At the highest level.’

  Jane was right. So far.

  But she didn’t have all the intelligence.

  This morning, once the general briefing had been completed, Vlad had led her into another room which was full of filing cabinets and a standalone safe. He’d taken a thin file out of the safe and passed it to Sam – it was tagged at the highest level of FSB security clearance. Sam had read the three pages in less than a minute: two folios of words, three photos and a map.

  The first photo showed a Russian military convoy. It had been ambushed. There were dead soldiers lying around three Kamaz trucks. A caption said the convoy was a detachment from 21st Guards Motor Rifle Brigade on its way to a live-fire exercise in Elista.

  A second photo was of the inside of a military warehouse. Pride of place were five 82 millimetre Podnos mortars. An insert to the photo showed 12 pallets of high explosive rounds. A caption explained that this stash was a replica of the weapons and munitions that had been taken by the raid on the convoy. There was a paragraph in the blurb which highlighted the lethality of the mortars. Sam didn’t need to read it. She knew the detail. The Podnos was a copy of the British Army 81 millimetre mortar. It broke down into three parts: the baseplate; the tube; and the tripod. It was man-packable - if you’d spent all your time in the gym and didn’t want to lug it too far. Both mortars had a maximum range of around six kilometres. But, as you reduce the C-charges – the propellant that’s shaped like a broken ring-doughnut; they slip on a rod at the bottom of the mortar round – and point the tube skyward, you can hit a target which is very close. Mortarmen don’t like it when you ask them to do that, though. A small miscalculation and they get back what they’ve sent up.

  And that’s the thing about mortars. They’re ‘area’ weapons. You can’t take out a small target, like a tank, with a mortar – unless you’re really lucky. But, if you want to level a sizeable building, cheaply and effectively, then pop along to Mortars-R-Us. And take a big shopping trolley with you.

  The final photo was of the Novovoronezh nuclear powerplant in Voronezh, Oblast, about 500 miles north of the Russian/Georgian border. Again, Sam recognised it immediately. SIS Moscow were constantly concerned about the theft of nuclear fuel and waste. The whole team was alive to that possibility. When she was there they ran four agents in Rosatom, the Russian agency that oversaw the plants. Sam’s view was four was nowhere near enough.

  The map was a 50 by 50 kilometre overhead of the same power station. Whoever had produced it had drawn on two concentric rings, with the powerplant at the centre. The inner had a radius of 500 metres - the second at six kilometres; between them was the effective operating space of an 82 millimetre mortar if the centre was the target. Apart from the nuclear facility and the odd hamlet, inside the outer ring was nothing but fields, forest and hills. Sam had done a quick calculation. She reckoned the space between the two rings was 110 square kilometres. That was a mighty amount of real estate in which to hide five mortars each of which was not much bigger than a wheelie bin.

  The written part of the briefing put together a very plausible case that the FFO were responsible for the attack on the convoy and they now had in their possession five Podnos mortars and enough ammunition to blow up a small town. In addition, FSB had intelligence that suggested a recent grenade strike on an Army checkpoint in South Ossetia had actually been a mortar attack. A sort of ‘practice run’, to familiarise themselves with the equipment - and get their eye in.

  Frighteningly, and the key to the dossier, was that there was additional intelligence, picked up by mobile-phone intercept, that showed the FFO were primed to attack the power station at any time. The latest prognosis was an attack within three weeks.

  Sam couldn’t verify the intelligence – she just had the folder. But it all looked sound. She had to trust it.

  Vlad had added the reason Hasan Kutnetsov wanted to talk to a reputable journalist was so the moment the FFO hit the site there would be someone out there who knew who they were, and believed they were capable of such an attack.

  Sam had briefed all of this to Jane.

  Who said nothing.

  ‘Are you there, Jane?’ Sam couldn’t hide her impatience.

  ‘Yes. Look. If the FFO wants to make the headlines, then why not come out and claim responsibility for the Moscow bombing?’

  It was a good question. She’d posed the same one to Vlad.

  ‘It’s a question of credibility. You can only boast when you already have a reputation. They wanted the FSB to track them down first. They laid a trial from the Moscow bombing to them. FSB made that connection themselves. Now they think they can be taken seriously. And a chat to a bone fide journalist will seal the deal. It make sense if you look at it that way.’ It certainly made sense to Sam.

  There was more silence.

  ‘Look, Sam …’

  Sam didn’t like the way this might be going. She wanted to meet with Kutnetsov - with the full support of SIS.

  ‘… look. I had a chat to the boss this morning. He was, like me, dead against this. But, maybe with the nuclear thing, and with the FSB seemingly being open with us about this, I think we might be playing a whole new sport.’

  That was better; but Jane paused further.

  Sam waited.

  She could hear the cogs turning.

  ‘Go ahead, but keep in touch. I want this on paper before you leave Moscow, mind. And I want the Director of the FSB to phone C. Clear? I’ll brief him now, and if you don’t hear from me, then you can assume it’s all green.’

  Brilliant.

  That’s what she could have told Alena. That and the fact she knew more about Reuters and how their freelance journalists work than she’d done 12 hours earlier. And that she was due to be met at 4.00 pm tomorrow by a member of the FFO, at a specific point in South Ossetia close to the Russian border - where a dirt track meets a paved road.

  Alone.

  But Sam didn’t tell her any of that.

  Instead she dried the pan, which was the last of the washing up, and put the cloth on the radiator by the door.

  ‘If you go into the lounge, Sam, I’ll make us all some coffee.’ The wetness in Alena’s eyes had gone. But her smile was forced. Alena probably liked her, but Sam thought she didn’t trust her; that Sam favoured mission success over her husband’s remaining limbs.

  If she’d asked Sam that question, her husband’s safety versus mission success, she wasn’t sure she could have answered. She didn’t think she knew the answer. She didn’t have that sort of capacity. Not for deep thinking. She just did what was right when the time came along. She never wanted anyone to get hurt, but she couldn’t say she had any well thought-through principles. No particular mantra. Things happened and she reacted. As best she could.

  And with all the other things going on in her head, dwelling on something was the last thing she was capable of right now.

  Anyhow, thinking about stuff like that made the end of her fingers tingle, and she wasn’t sure that was a good feeling.

  And coffee sounded like a decent idea. And she was pretty sure Alena had turfed out her daughter so Sam could use her roo
m. She’d argue strongly for sleeping on the couch once they got to that point.

  Headquarters SIS, Vauxhall, London

  It was late again. Late, late, late. Jane was shattered. Last night, after she’d finished with Frank and his 80-inch screen with the blue spider’s web, she’d spent another hour sifting through papers she hadn’t had chance to look at during the day. And then today. Another day playing master juggler. Her phone call with Sam. The revelation that the FFO looked like a joined-up Islamic terror group after all, with an eye on a big prize. Then clearing Sam’s support to the FSB with the Chief, something no one in the building could recall ever happening before. There was plenty of recent history of FSB and SIS joint operations, but nothing where the UK’s support was being provided by a ‘mercenary’, ex-SIS case officer. Neither she nor the chief had come to a conclusion as to whether or not Sam was actually working on behalf of the SIS - ‘in from the cold’, or she was working on her own with their tacit approval. They’d checked with the lawyers who, in the first instance, couldn’t agree on a preferred line. Apparently they were going to come back tomorrow with a quorum.

  And then the latest terror attack - 10.22 am local in Singapore. The attacks were getting more and more bizarre; more and more difficult to fathom.

  That reminded her. She needed to update the map.

  Jane stood and moved away from her chair. She had a quick glance in the long mirror on the wall opposite her chair.

  Jane Baker. Head of SIS Operations: North Africa and Mid-East.

  One level below the chief and the deputy. For someone with her experience, the plum job in Babylon.

  In my opinion.

  Some might argue to be head of station in Beijing or Moscow were better posts; manipulating British government foreign policy with the ‘big two’. Using of the minute intelligence extracted from local agents to second guess what China or Russia would do next. Does Russia have ambitions in the Baltic States? Are the Chinese manipulating their currency so their goods were cheaper abroad? SIS recruited agents from every stratum of society – every level of government. Those agents risked everything for money, or for fear of being exposed by the very hands of the case officers who were running them.