Spider's Web: A Collection of All-Action Short Stories

by Leather, Stephen

  In the Russian capital Ilyushin was always vulnerable to a drive-by shooting, and there was the ever-present risk of becoming the latest oligarch to fall from the Russian president’s favour. In London, although he still had bodyguards, he felt a freedom that he had not enjoyed in Russia even in the freewheeling Yeltsin era. He enjoyed walking the streets and the royal parks to clear his head and detoured regularly to Green Park or St James’s Park when on his way to see his mistress, but no one accumulated his kind of fortune in Russia without making enemies, and wherever he walked it was with a bodyguard team of a leader and four men who walked with him. They used the ‘Open V’ formation that all professional bodyguard teams used – the open end of the V at the front allowed the principal to walk unhindered, but at any sign of a problem his team could pull him back and encircle him.

  The leader of Ilyushin’s security team and two of his bodyguards were Russian and had learned their trade among the gangs and corrupt, venal cops on the streets of Moscow. The other two bodyguards were British. All five were unarmed. Under British law it was an offence for anyone other than a police officer to carry a weapon, and while half the nation’s gangsters had no qualms about going about their business equipped with a gun or at the very least a knife, the authorities came down hard on bodyguards caught in possession of a firearm.

  Tracking the bodyguard team down the street were Ilyushin’s armoured Rolls-Royce and his security team’s Mercedes. They always wanted to be within a hundred or so yards of him, so that if there was an incident, his team could get him to the armoured safety of his car in seconds and he could be driven away from the danger at top speed. As he walked, Ilyushin took a cigar from a leather Dunhill case, bit off the end and lit it with a gold lighter. He had no idea that only a few yards away a professional assassin was preparing to take his life.

  Alexei Tchorek had killed close to a hundred men in the course of his career. Most of them had been Chechen rebels, admittedly, but he always figured that a kill was a kill. They all counted. He had killed for the Spetsnaz, the Soviet Special Forces, or ‘Special Purposes’ troops, as the Russians called them. Then he had been recruited by the KGB, then after the Soviet Union fell apart he switched to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation – Russia’s main domestic security agency. His job had been to kill spies and traitors – at home and abroad – and he had been very good at it. So good that at the turn of the century, just a few weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, he was headhunted by the private sector and now killed for a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars. He was getting double that for Sergei Ilyushin because Ilyushin was a hard target. His London home was a fortress, but no more of a fortress than his half-dozen homes around the world. All the vehicles he travelled in were bullet- and bomb-proof and whenever he was out in the open he was surrounded by highly trained bodyguards. Tchorek had spent the best part of three months planning the job and was now primed and ready.

  He had begun by driving all the way to the Moray Firth in the far north of Scotland.nd of Scot He had been to the area once before, many years ago, when he was serving with the Spetsnaz in the DDR – as East Germany was then known. Then he had travelled from Rostok to the Summer Isles at the mouth of Loch Broom, off Ullapool, carried by a trawler that was bristling with the electronic equipment used to spy on nuclear submarines sailing from the base at Faslane to the Barents Sea – just another part of the Cold War cat-and-mouse game between East and West.

  They had arrived off Ullapool after dark and he was rowed ashore in a rubber dinghy by one of the trawler’s crew. As the dinghy nosed into the sand, Tchorek hoisted his heavy, waterproofed pack on to his back, and, carrying another, smaller pack slung across his shoulder, he walked up the narrow beach, with the gritty sand crunching under his feet, and took a narrow path up the steep hillside beyond it. At the top, parked at the side of a rutted, single-track road, was a battered old Post Office van, with the EIIR logo still dimly visible through the clumsy green overpainting. Tchorek loaded his packs into the back of the van and then took his seat alongside the driver.

  As they drove off, heading east, his driver, a small, embittered Glaswegian fellow-traveller, who had been indoctrinated in the true faith by his equally embittered dad, began moaning about the British class system in a broad and, to Tchorek at least, unintelligible Glaswegian accent. He kept up the monologue throughout the whole of the long journey, while Tchorek retreated into his thoughts, though his keen gaze missed nothing and he remained alert for any sign of danger or of anything that could compromise his plan.

  They drove through the night, using back roads to skirt Inverness and the few other towns their route took them past, and eventually stopped on a small road on the edge of the Moray Firth some thirty miles east of Inverness. He climbed a low hill with a view of RAF Kinloss in the distance and remained there all day, using his binoculars to observe the Nimrod aircraft taking off and flying east to monitor Soviet naval and submarine traffic entering and leaving the Kola Inlet from Murmansk and the closed military area of Severomorsk.

  Tchorek soon realised that the base was so large and had so many different, well-separated targets that attacking the aircraft, fuel dumps or the weapons and ammunition compounds and bunkers would be pointless. Even if he succeeded in destroying one or more of them, fresh supplies could simply be brought in from other dumps within twenty-four hours. Instead, he decided that any attack should focus on the one area that would be guaranteed to paralyse the base: the Officers’ Mess. He knew that at a time of heightened tension, all aircrew would be called into the base, which would then be locked down. An attack on the Officers’ Mess at that point would wipe out all the available aircrew and effectively shut down the base without even touching the aircraft. Though the base might be in lockdown, a trained and ruthless operative could find a dozen ways to breach the perimeter, carry out his attack and escape afterwards.

  Having completed his recce of the target, he moved away, walking cross-country for ten miles before burying his packs in a copse of trees at the side of a road. All the equipment and explosives in the attacks were Czech-made, not Russian, so that, were the cache ever to be discovered, the finger could not be pointed directly at the Russians. Across a manicured stretch of parkland complete with ornamental lake, he could see a stately home and, next to it, what looked like a re-creation of a Roman amphitheatre. He permitted himself a thin smile at the thought of what his driver of the previous day would have had to say about such a bastion of privilege, and then moved away through the trees, unaware that he had been within half a mile of a target monof a taof unsurpassed propaganda value: the school where the sons of the British royal family were educated.

  That mission had been years ago now. The Cold War had never turned hot and the cache had never been used for its original purpose, but there had never been anything to suggest that it had ever been discovered and Tchorek was now returning to it. He knew of scores of other similar Spetsnaz caches hidden throughout the UK and western Europe, also buried against the day when the Cold War might blaze back into life and they might be needed once more.

  Once the twenty per cent deposit for the Ilyushin contract had arrived in his bank account in Singapore, Tchorek hired a car from a small-scale car rental firm on the outskirts of London and drove through the night all the way north to the shores of the Moray Firth. He then lay up for the day, observing the site and monitoring all people and traffic moving through the area. After dark, he dug up the packs, put them in the car and drove to a remote part of the Cairngorms before opening them. The large one had been so well sealed in layers of waterproof material that it was particularly hard to open, but he eventually succeeded and found the contents still in pristine condition despite their long years underground. The larger pack contained everything he would have needed to attack Kinloss: weapons, Semtex explosive, detonator cord and electric detonators.

  He selected what he needed from the explosives – some Semtex, a length of det cord and an e
lectric detonator – and also took a Skorpion V261 machine pistol, slightly larger than a normal pistol and with a metal folding butt, and some spare magazines and ammunition. From the smaller pack he took a large quantity of US dollars, silently offering thanks that, while other nations periodically called in their old currency and replaced it, to catch out criminals, drug dealers and tax avoiders with large stashes of undeclared cash, the US Treasury was pledged to honour all dollar bills, for all time, however old they might be.

  Tchorek resealed the packs and drove back to the Moray Firth, where he reburied them in a different location, close to the Lossiemouth Golf Club. His reason for burying them in a semi-public site rather than in a remote area was entirely logical. If they were discovered, it would be almost impossible for the authorities to suppress news of the find. There would be gossip and reports in the local media, which he could monitor, whereas if he had hidden them in some remote glen in the mountains it would have been much easier for the authorities to conceal the news if they were discovered, and that would leave him liable to walk into a trap.

  It was a ten-hour drive back to London and he did not reach the city until the early afternoon of the following day. He parked near his rented terraced house in a dingy street in Kilburn, in the north-west of the city. He had chosen it deliberately, an area where almost all the population was both transient and foreign born, with no reason to look on the authorities as friends. It was a place where one more individual, arriving or leaving, even at irregular hours of the day or night, would arouse no comment or interest at all.

  By now Tchorek had not slept for almost forty-eight hours, but weary though he was, he then spent two hours observing his house before approaching it. When he let himself in, he at once checked the ‘tells’ he had set before leaving. He knew that professional intruders would look for things like hairs fixed across a door edge and carefully replace them. Tchorek had indeed left one across a door, but its purpose was not to reveal to him that an intruder had entered the house, but instead to reassure the same intruder that he had defeated the tells and stop him looking for other concealed devices. Tchorek did not even glance at itstiglance to see whether the hair was still in place, but instead he turned back the carpet in the entrance hall, revealing a few cornflakes he had placed underneath it when he left. Had anyone set foot in the hall in his absence, the pressure of their foot on the carpet would have reduced the cornflakes to crumbs.

  Reassured, he replaced the carpet and, stepping carefully around that area, then went into the bedroom, lay down and slept for an hour.

  As soon as he woke, he splashed some cold water on his face, and made a cup of black Russian tea. He then spread a plastic sheet on the table, put on a pair of surgical gloves and began assembling his explosive device. He took an empty two-litre plastic milk bottle, and packed into it some ANFO – a mixture of ammonium nitrate fertiliser and fuel oil and the terrorist’s weapon of choice, since the ingredients were so cheap and readily obtainable. He mixed it with a dark blue colourant powder, then added the det cord, which looked exactly like plastic clothesline, except that plastic clothesline does not contain a Pentrite explosive core. Lastly he connected the detonator and a thumb-sized piece of Semtex. The det cord was capable of being triggered remotely by an electric pulse and would be enough to trigger the IED on its own, but this was a belt-and-braces job and the Semtex would make absolutely sure that it went off with a bang. He did not want to cause a lot of damage, just make noise and smoke.

  When he had finished assembling the device, he folded the plastic sheet, destroyed his surgical gloves by holding them in the flame of a lighter, then put on a fresh pair of gloves and left the house, disposing of the burned gloves in a litter bin outside a takeaway pizza shop several streets away and dumping the plastic sheet in a wheelie bin at the side of a café another four hundred yards farther on.

  The next morning, Tchorek left the house wearing a hard hat and a worn and faded boiler suit over his other clothes and carrying the device in a toolbox bearing a Thames Water logo. Even the most eagle-eyed observer would have struggled to realise that the logo had been downloaded from the internet and printed on a home colour printer. He boarded a west-bound Central Line tube and rode it for a dozen stops across London before getting off at Bond Street.

  Had he placed his device during the previous night, his actions would have been picked up by at least one of the scores of security cameras in Bond Street, but he knew that there was much less chance of being observed during the working day, when the street was packed with cars and vans and the pavements choked with people, blocking the sightlines of many of the security cameras and also giving the security personnel many other things to worry about than a boiler-suited Thames Water worker inspecting the rainwater drains in the gutters. Although there were more security personnel per square metre in Bond Street than almost anywhere else in the world, all of them were inside the shops, behind the locked doors, and their attention would be focused much more on people passing those doors or approaching them than on workmen carrying out menial tasks in the street.

  Tchorek made his unhurried way down Bond Street until he spotted a rainwater drain between two closely parked cars. It was then the work of a moment to lift the grate, kneel down and open his toolbox as if checking the drain. The well-off Londoners and foreign visitors passed him by without even a glance, their attention focused on the glittering window displays. He did not even look around before lowering the device into place. He had once seen rich Londoners stepping over an old woman who had collapsed in a Mayfair street, as if she were merely a kerb to be negotiated. None of them had so much as glanced at her, let alone offered help, and he was confident thatWatnfident such people would not even register a lowly workman as they strolled along. He replaced the grate, stood up and made his unhurried way off up the street.

  That afternoon he returned to Bond Street, but this time wearing the uniform of a traffic warden and carrying a hand-held machine that, to a casual glance, looked the same as the ones on which the wardens checked car tax details and printed out parking tickets. He moved slowly down the street, pretending to check cars, and at one point crossed to the far side and waited in a doorway to avoid another warden coming the opposite way. He then remained in the section of street from which he could observe the entrance to Sotheby’s. A Lebanese woman approached him, dripping diamonds and furs, and demanded to know why her car had been ticketed. He first told her to take her complaint to the police and, when that failed to move her, he leaned towards her and murmured something in her ear. None of the people passing by would have heard a word of it or seen anything untoward, but the woman turned as white as if she had seen a ghost and hurried away without another word, choking back her tears.

  After half an hour, the familiar stocky figure of Ilyushin emerged from Sotheby’s, flanked by his burly bodyguards, and began to wander down Bond Street, gazing into the shop windows. He saw Ilyushin take a cigar case from his jacket pocket, select a cigar and then light it. A little farther up the street, Tchorek saw the Rolls-Royce and the Mercedes pull out from the kerb and nose their way into the traffic. He pressed a button on his hand-held machine, initiating the device. He was already moving fast through the crowds towards Ilyushin as the bomb detonated.

  Ilyushin heard a deafening explosion behind him and, as he turned to look back, Bond Street disappeared in a cloud of dense blue smoke. Before he could even react himself, his bodyguards had leapt into action. They made no attempt to locate the source of the explosion, nor to identify any potential threat. Their first priority, drilled into them in hundreds of briefings and practice runs, was the protection of their principal, and at once they half-hustled and half-threw him into the nearest shop doorway and then lay on top of him, protecting him with their own bodies until they could transfer him to the Rolls-Royce and get him away. The shop, a world-famous jeweller’s and one that Ilyushin himself had visited on many occasions, would have provided a safer refuge still, but instead of
offering him sanctuary the shop’s security guard reacted to the sound of the explosion by locking the door and pulling down the steel shutters.

  The remainder of Ilyushin’s security team in the Rolls-Royce and Mercedes were now cut off from him by the pall of smoke. The traffic had ground to a dead stop as a panicking chauffeur pulled out from the kerb and collided with a taxi, and all around them the street was dissolving into chaos with horns and alarms sounding and people shouting, screaming and running around like headless chickens as they tried to escape.

  Tchorek, imperturbable among the chaos, walked over to the shop doorway and looked down at the heap of bodies protecting Ilyushin. He pulled out the Skorpion machine pistol and kicked one of the Russian bodyguards out of the way. Ilyushin lay on his back, staring up at Tchorek, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Whatever they are paying you, I will double it,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not how professionals work,’ said Tchorek, in Russian. He frowned as he saw the gun pointing up at him. It was a Glock and it was in the hands of one of the British bodyguards. It was a professional’s grip, the left hand cupping the right.

  Tchorek immediately switched his aim and targeted the bodyguard’s face. He was in hisrede was i late thirties, nondescript with dark brown hair, and didn’t have the normal bodybuilder’s physique of bulging forearms and a thick neck. ‘It’s over, Tchorek,’ said the man.

  Time seemed to stop for Tchorek as his mind raced.

  The man was English and armed. That meant he was a cop. Or MI5. Either way he wouldn’t be on his own, which meant that there were probably other weapons trained on him at that moment.

  The man holding the gun was a professional and unlike Ilyushin had no fear in his eyes. His finger had already tightened on the trigger and the merest increase in pressure would send a bullet into Tchorek’s brain.