by Andy McNab
‘Okay, show me Kaffarov. I want everything, down to which hand he jerks himself off with.’
She didn’t alter her expression.
‘That may be difficult. He has a very attentive harem.’
‘“Many hands make light work.”’
Kroll looked up from his laptop. ‘What?’
‘English proverb. Go back to work.’
Omorova spread out the files and took a deep breath. ‘I’ll skip to the highlights. He’s fifty-four, a sixty a day smoker and despite tennis twice a week is not fit. Don’t expect him to do anything physical like scale a wall or run very far. He’s nervy, pushy and impatient. He won’t be taking kindly to being held but values his life and is not physically fearless. He uses a lot of cocaine so you can expect him to be wired — or strung out if he’s separated from his stash. Could be helpful to give him a top-up if you’ve got time before you lift him. He’s also a control freak who hates to be driven. He used to pilot himself everywhere before he did a hard landing in Ghana and ripped the undercarriage off his Falcon.’
‘Is he likely to have loved ones with him?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Interesting choice of words. He’s got a second wife in rehab and at least two mistresses, one here in Moscow, another who was in Tehran.’
‘Could be with him?’
‘Maybe. She’s Austrian. Kristen. I don’t have her cup size.’
‘I’ll use my imagination.’
‘Put it this way, he’s never been over-attentive to any of them. The first wife was kidnapped. .’
‘And?’
‘He didn’t pay.’
‘What was the demand?’
‘A million dollars.’
‘Cheap. What happened to her?’
‘Never seen again.’
‘Okay, I’m getting the picture now. Where is he based?’
‘Apart from his Moscow house on the Arbat and a dacha in Peredelkino, he’s based himself in Iran for the last ten years. And as a Tajik, he gets by in Farsi and has taken full advantage of Iran’s non-aligned status, smoothing access to some of his more — unconventional clients.’
‘By which you mean terrorists. Tell me about his background.’
‘Russian passport. Only son of a Tajik assembly worker and seamstress mother. Father worked in the Togliatti Lada plant until an injury put him on crutches. They devoted their lives to his advancement. He’s had no contact with them for twenty years but funds all their care.’
‘Anything about his time in the air force?’
‘Undistinguished. Mostly a tender pilot, passed over for combat training. Always a troublemaker. He was investigated for dealing ammunition to Mujahideen in Kandahar. Unproven, but it was generally accepted that he was guilty. No long-term friends, no attachments to any causes or other individuals. He’s believed to have fathered at least three children, none of whom he recognises as his own. He lives for his business. He negotiates harder and longer than anyone else, and when a client can’t meet his prices he takes a stake in whatever land or mineral reserves might be going. In fact his property and oil earnings exceed his arms trading, according to our estimates. He’s so off the grid it’s hard to say, but he’s probably Russia’s richest man.’
‘What does he do for security?’
‘It’s all handled by a pair of twins. North Koreans known as Yin and Yang.’
‘Not really?’
‘Really.’ Her perfect mouth tweaked itself into the hint of a smile: the Mona Lisa in Armani. ‘He used to use a gang of Azeri mafia boys, but he caught them with their hands in the till so they had to be “retired”.’ She held up her hands and made a pair of quotation marks with her fingers. ‘Legend has it he did it himself, with a hacksaw — as a warning to their replacements. The twins have their own posse of Koreans who do the driving and so on.’
‘Were they with him?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not clear. He certainly counted Al Bashir as a valued customer, so it could be he’d let his guard down, though it would be out of character.’
‘What’s our contact with Al Bashir?’
‘Officially, none.’
‘Meaning?’
‘One officer in our Tehran embassy has kept a line open with them but it’s all gone dead the last fifteen days. Plus we’ve pulled most of our diplomatic staff out of there because of the crisis. The country’s unravelling.’
‘So it’s about arms the PLR wants access to?’
Omorova blinked. ‘Presumably.’
Dima peered at her. ‘You blinked.’
She did a kind of I’m-not-smiling smile, sphinx-like. ‘I do sometimes.’
‘But not until then, when I asked you a question.’
Kroll sighed. ‘Oh come on. Leave the lady alone.’
‘Keep out of this Kroll. She’s a big girl, she doesn’t need your protection.’
Dima raised his fingers from the table. She maintained her smile. They had both been too long in the job to pretend. Dima took a moment to consider. He could make a fuss, demand from Paliov that he be given the full facts. He probably wouldn’t give them. Perhaps Paliov didn’t know them. Omorova and he were doing well so far. It would be a shame to ruin a good rapport. He calculated that she could probably be more help in the long run if he didn’t pressure her.
He leaned forward, glanced round. The Ops Room team had retreated. He fixed his gaze on the woman. ‘Comrade.’ He liked the old nomenclature when it came to people he recognised as allies. ‘Are you saying that’s all you have or that’s all you’re allowed to have?’
‘I’d say the latter.’
‘So if you were my commanding officer, what would your advice be?’
She looked at him like a woman who didn’t always get the respect she deserved, but was getting it now.
She blinked — differently this time, a little more slowly. ‘Watch your back, at all times.’
She stood up and gestured at the files she’d brought. ‘You want these?’
He shook his head. ‘Can I reach you if I need more? Information, that is.’
She smirked. ‘You’ll have to get clearance.’
‘From your mother?’
She laughed and swept out of the room.
He watched her go. Supressed a thought or three and turned to Kroll.
‘We’re going to need all the toys. This job doesn’t smell right.’
Kroll sighed. ‘You love to do everything the hard way, don’t you?’
‘Meaning?’
‘This is easy. It’s undefended. There are no sentries. There’s only one way in and out. If they’ve got manpower there they’re not showing up on the images. Those trucks may have kit on board but they won’t have time to make ready if we don’t give them warning. We go in and slot everyone who isn’t Kaffarov, swing him on to your back and pull him out. Job done.’
‘Sometimes, Kroll, I honestly wish I was you. You make everything sound so simple. Maybe that’s why your life is so complicated.’
‘You’re going at this as if he was Bin Laden.’
‘Because there are a lot of unknown unknowns. Me and Donald Rumsfeld, we no like unknown unknowns.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, why is Mother Russia expending any energy on repatriating this shit-fuck? Why has Al Bashir gone to all the trouble of deliberately getting on our tits when we’re supplying his kit?’
Kroll went back to his laptop and started typing again.
Dima nodded at the machine. ‘Is that your go-plan?’
‘Letter to my wife. Won’t take a minute. I think this time I might be in with a chance.’
Dima let his head drop into his hands. Kroll paused, fixed Dima with a frown. ‘You haven’t said why you accepted the assignment. Did they blackmail you?’
‘Worse.’
‘What then?’
The photographs flashed in front of him for the hundredth time.
‘They gave me hope.’
7
I
raqi Kurdistan/Iran Border
Not much got to Black: that’s what his buddies believed. Patient when tempers were frayed, calm when others were jittery, measured when they were up to their armpits in the shit. It was a source of private pride that he got credit and respect for being what Cole called a ‘steady, solid soldier’, which was good because Cole didn’t do compliments.
At Fort Carter, lined up on the freezing Michigan tarmac before they boarded the plane, the Colonel had told them, This is no game. You will see terrible things, some you will struggle to understand. It will change you. . In the week before, at a stress briefing, the Chaplain had said, You need to be prepared to die, to see your friends die. He counted himself prepared. His mother, who always told him how strong he was, as if willing it to be, told him to make it go his way. You are always you, no matter who or what they try to make you be.
He showed early promise, commended in his first week in Iraq for pulling a half-burned Sergeant from a Humvee sinking into a drainage ditch. The FOB Commander, Major Duncan, had told him, ‘I see a great future for you in the Marines.’ But that wasn’t the plan. Once he’d done it, proved to himself he could, he was all done with it. Stay alive, stay sane, get home.
All his life he’d heard his father’s screams at night, found him covered in sweat in the cold Wyoming dawn, the same story in the morning. ‘Just my goddamn kidney stones, son.’ The stones that he never went to hospital to have removed. As a kid he’d accepted the excuse. In his teens he’d begun to question his mother, who just replied with silence and, when pressed, tears. So he did some research. Read up about his father’s platoon, about Khe Sanh in February ’68. Michael Blackburn never spoke a word to his family about Vietnam. Henry was determined to understand his father, who hadn’t waited for the draft, who loved John Wayne movies, who had grown up listening to Grandfather Blackburn’s euphoric tales of the liberation of Europe, of cheering crowds and grateful French girls throwing their underwear at them. But three weeks into his tour, his father, then just eighteen, was cornered along with his entire platoon in the jungle. He and the three others who survived spent the rest of their teens in a Viet Cong bamboo cage not much bigger than a coffin, sometimes immersed up to their necks in a snake-infested tributary of the Mekong. The week he came home, he married Laura, his high school sweetheart, his prom queen, who had promised to wait for him. But the man she married wasn’t the boy she’d danced with. He quit college midway through the first semester and by Christmas had been fired from the 7-Eleven he was training to manage. She would never admit it but from then on Laura, the grade school teacher, was the breadwinner.
For Henry, enlisting wasn’t about fighting for his country. It was more personal than that, to slay a ghost that haunted his family’s life. A validation of his father’s decision to go to war, that fighting was a worthwhile and noble choice. And privately — to prove to himself that he could go into battle and come back in one piece, solid and, more to the point, sane.
Today he was having trouble sticking to his plan. He had done the right thing. As soon as the girl was contained he’d gone for the battery. Found the grips. Paused, looked, checked the initiator, picked a wire to disconnect and cut the circuit. Shouted down to the men below: ‘Clear!’
But on his way back to the stairs, he’d felt his legs turning to water. He’d stopped, looked down at the girl, reached down, and as he closed her eyes for the last time he saw his hand was shaking. In that moment he heard one of his father’s unforgettable screams and realised that it wasn’t in his head but in his mouth. He was screaming so loud the walls were starting to shake. And as the walls folded in he crashed down across her body and felt the floor collapse under him. Could a scream do this? That was the last thought that had gone through his head.
How much time had passed, he had no idea. It took him a while to remember where he was. The dead girl beside him was a reminder. He replayed the scene: the girl, the detonator, the girl again, closing her eyes, his scream — a grim comfort to realise that it wasn’t reality that was caving in, it was the building. An air strike? He thought again and remembered the first tremor, expecting it to be an APC and not seeing one, and the second, prolonged shudder that set him off. Bigger than anything a RPG could deliver.
As his eyes adjusted he could see a triangle of light. No, not light so much as a shape of grey in the blackness. His left wrist was trapped under something metal. Foul-smelling water from a ruptured drain had drenched him, weighing down his fatigues. His body armour had probably saved his life but it was also trapping him in the cavity he now occupied. He reached round with his right hand and unstrapped the ceramic plates to give him more mobility. Then he undid his watch, a present from his mother, which made it easier to work the wrist loose. His hand was numb, and so swollen it felt like a baseball glove had been grafted on. He mentally checked the rest of his body, toes, legs, flexing each muscle, gradually becoming aware of a pulsing throb on the back of his head. He snapped his fingers, heard nothing except the rushing of air — the sound of no sound. His eardrums had been blasted. His ears still worked, though most of what they heard was the pulsing thud of the pain. He inched forward, sliding from his armour as if it were a moulted skin, toward the dull light, quietly thrilled that whatever had happened had spared him — for now. He wasn’t religious, but thanked an invisible deity for that triangle of light he was twisting and scratching towards like a low-bellied reptile.
The first thing he noticed was the stars. A clear moonless night. Brighter than he had seen in all his time in Iraq, because most of the time the night had been viewed through NVGs (night-vision goggles). He hauled himself out of the aperture, struggled to his feet and immediately fell down again. Okay, take your time. Was there any time? His watch was gone, his armour was gone, his helmet gone, his M4, all the parts of him that said soldier: gone. He lifted himself on to his elbows and looked round. Nothing familiar, as if he’d been teleported to a different landscape. Then he recognised the Stryker, on its side, the booby-trapped truck, still intact. The IED hadn’t detonated. But both vehicles were half-covered in rubble, as if a giant dump truck had emptied its load all over them. He could see an arm, a boot. If there were others under the rubble he was deaf to their cries. No sign of his fellow soldiers, or the wounded in the Stryker.
Still on his elbows he craned round. On three sides of the plaza the buildings had collapsed, as if that same giant truck had flattened them under its wheels. Blackburn had seen plenty of bomb damage, villages razed by bombs, mortar and RPG, but this devastation was on a scale that reminded him of footage of German cities after World War Two, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sight of it drained what little energy he had left. He rested his head in his arms. Had the PLR taken to the air and bombed them?
Then he remembered the tremors, the first as they entered the plaza. This was no air strike. It was an earthquake.
8
Higher Airborne Command School, Ryazan, Russia
From the air it looked so neat, so full of promise, like an architect’s model. A cluster of low-rise buildings with bright red roofs surrounded by perfectly mown grass, bisected by grey metalled roads that radiated out to the edge of the grounds. A place in which there was only order and logic, not a single movement that wasn’t regimented, practised and predicted. To the east, however, behind a curtain of trees, was where the action took place. Twelve olive green tents stood among a vast expanse of red-brown mud. Looking out of the grey framed windows, Dima felt as though his life was on rewind, spooling back to an abyss.
Thirteen years ago he’d stood down there, grateful to have crawled out alive. And promised himself he would never go back. And until 48 hours ago, when Paliov had shown him the photograph, he’d kept that promise. Isn’t life just full of surprises, he thought. You think you’re in control of your life, but fate has an unpleasant trick up its sleeve. I thought I was free, he reflected, but was it an illusion all along?
He had never forgotten the taste of that
mud, in his mouth, in his nostrils and the sensation of it drying on his naked, battered body. It was a common belief that the red tinge came not from the iron in the local soil but the blood spilled by recruits.
The theory of how the Spetsnaz training worked was explained like this. Take an empty barrel and push it right down under water, then let it go. The deeper it’s taken, the faster and further it shoots up out of the water when it surfaces. At Spetsnaz there was no such thing as too deep. Every man was taken to the depths of exhaustion and humiliation. To learn how to take orders, to control and conserve resources when you were past breaking point. To go beyond the limits of human endurance. Only the best were inducted. And many of them didn’t make it. Star recruits with glittering records gave up, broken. Some took their own lives. A few turned their weapons on their instructors. Dima was very nearly one of those.
The whole platoon shared one long tent. In the upper bunks were the stariki, the old men of nineteen who had already survived a year — in the lower, the salagi: those who had yet to pass six months. New recruits were beaten nightly with belts, sticks and spoons. If they protested they were beaten in the morning as well, and made to sleep naked out on the mud. The salagi were the slaves of the stariki: they cleaned their weapons and their boots. The stariki held jousts, riding on the salagis’ backs. All part of the process of learning to manage your emotions: contain, control, direct.
New arrivals would be welcomed — or confronted — with a small white towel laid at the entrance to the tent. What should they do? Pick it up? Ignore it? Generally, their instinct was to step over it so as not to dirty it. At which point the inmates would take umbrage at this slight and so would begin the innocent’s first night of suffering. Dima remembered the hush, the expectant faces watching his polished boots already caked in mud, waiting to see where he would step. It was a lonely moment, the first of many. He stepped forward on to the towel and carefully wiped the uppers of his boots until they shone again. It bought him a bit of leeway, but not much.