Bob from Five: ‘It was a convention for Black Hats, our view of them. We took down some of their best and brightest. Those people have been hitting our banks, our utilities, our research and development in engineering – military and civilian, and cross-over. Just a matter of time before they hit us with a Category One assault. You could argue forcefully, that the hack-attacks are tantamount to an Act of War. Take that further . . . We are entitled to strike back, utilise a justifiable counter-measure. With an Act of War goes the right to an Act of Self-Defence. They hit us and we hit them. They slap our ear and we bloody their nose. We can argue that it was an Act of Self-Defence when the US and Mossad coalition dropped a memory stick in a car-park outside the nuclear centre where Iran spun centrifuges. Just dropped it. A guy picks it up, that guy plugs it in. That is Stuxnet. Might have pretty holiday snaps, might have a porn film, unimportant as long as it is interesting and then it gets passed on. The virus runs: acorn stuff, humble beginnings, and the bomb-building programme is delayed by many months. We are taking a hell of a beating from them in sophisticated cyber warfare and have not yet raised a fist, gloved or bare, as reprisal. NATO Article Five is about collective defence, but in cyber it is vague because of the problem of attribution. We had it, copper bottom. They are hurting us and costing us; they are bullying, and we are responding. Not before time. It was a good plan. Clear up whatever dirt our people have left behind and it will have been a brilliant plan. Create confusion and internal argument and it could be an exceptional plan. I rest.’
Harry was VBX, and did the coffee pouring and would write up their findings. ‘The Kupchino meeting offered a unique opportunity. We had a date and a time and an insider. Not for me to say whether the force used was excessive. We had them in place and a chance to degrade their capability through confusion. Human intelligence will always beat – sorry, to all of you – electronic intelligence. We had a Jo in there, and he was calling it for us as state-sponsored. That is the highest organs of their security apparatus targeting the UK and affecting all our capabilities to protect national security – and the US and half the rest of the world – and it will have been sanctioned at the top of their tree because that is the society they have, top down. We are not dealing with the aims and ambitions of a gang of thugs who look to swallow money out of our banks, our credit unions, or rip off our blue chip companies. We are naming their government as an aggressor. Heavy talk. This is not some ancient Bear bomber lumbering down the east coast with a pair of ?Typhoons alongside. It is theft on an industrial scale and decided on by the administration. They go to the Black Hats and pull in a group of them who they rate, and they give them a shopping list. Confession time: I am not a Genghis Khan throat slitter, but I am not losing sleep on this . . . but we have to be off territory and evidence cleaned for us to feel satisfied.’
Digestive biscuits went round the table. Leanne from the ‘private sector’ spoke. ‘I am the outsider, looking in on your world. What do I add? I can tell you about the frustration of an arm tied, strong knots, behind a back. The arm cannot counter the volume of traffic that is directed against our critical national infrastructure. They are walking through us, over us, confident of total safety. We don’t understand them. We cannot talk to them, learn their mind-sets, get under the culture of those who deploy the hack teams. They are into our banks and utilities and military structures. On average, twice every day, we are defending against Category Two or Category Three attacks. Every day. Our experience is that they pull together tight teams, Russian people, pay them well, have them under close discipline. We are not supposed to display emotion towards our enemies, our adversaries. Many talk of the need for appeasement, not aggravating an already difficult scenario. I disagree. I want them hurt. They are groping inside our knickers for every facet of government policy – energy, diplomacy, intelligence gathering, anything. We should give them pain. Why? Because if they are hurt, after the pain I feel in my work, then I can go home, open a bottle and feel good. But if the confusion is to linger, and the back-biting in their ranks to continue and breed, the people on the ground have to make it home. Put another way, what would scalp the operation, destroy the mission’s effectiveness, is for evidence of UK involvement to be in their hands. Worse, a prisoner in a courtroom and singing . . . But you know it and will have taken all necessary precautions. Yes?’
The turn of Dunc, off the dawn train from Cheltenham. ‘All very simple, but first where we are. What we hear is that an explosion took place, and caused fatalities and injuries. An Organised Crime autorite, hurt, accused a rival group of causing the explosion. Accusations made inside FSB that two “roofs” fell to fist fighting inside the HQ building. A general has now taken charge of an investigation – named Onishenko – veteran of Chechnya and recently in Syria. This morning a team has come in from the capital and will take charge of the evidence-gathering procedure. At the moment the local news outlets are merely reporting an industrial accident. Currently, but about to be relieved of responsibilities, the man in charge is an FSB major, low-level and unimportant. So, these are critical hours, and we await with some anxiety the information that we have successfully retrieved our people. A trail of guilt would embarrass. What is simple? We are led in this aspect of warfare. We have fast jets, a few tanks, effective Special Forces, proven ground-to-ground, ground-to-air, air-to-ground missile systems, decent intelligence-gathering capabilities, but in this field we are not in the same game as them. They are ahead and drawing away. What use is our conventional weapons systems if our population has its savings stolen, its bank accounts emptied, cannot feed itself, cannot heat itself, wealth leaching and our primary economic assets stolen from under our noses? If we then seek to deploy what military we have we may discover, unpleasantly but not a surprise, that the logistics of defence have been sabotaged. A window opened. We climbed through it. Equally simple, we have to rely on the team having the ability to climb back through that bloody window before it slams shut. It was good to do, but it isn’t finished. That’s about where we are.’
The laptops were shut down, except for Harry’s. He would write the report. What was it all for? It would be on a desk in the upper reaches of the building on the south side of the Thames within an hour. The others were heading for the door.
Leanne said, ‘Will it be what is wanted by them up high who launched it?’
Dunc said, ‘More important, will it do any good?’
Bob said, ‘Rather me than them, those on the other side. Easy here, isn’t it?’
Harry looked up from his screen. ‘Have a party tonight, hardly in the mood. What old people say, On a prayer and a wing. See you guys, the next time – if we ever do this kind of caper again.’
Boot said, ‘Might as well be here. Good vantage.’
Daff said, ‘I’d hoped he’d be over by now, across.’
They sat on a bench, close to the wall of the bastion, and could see the river below them, and the bridge to their right, and noticed the increased number of guards milling at the far end, where the barrier was.
‘Didn’t come in darkness, cannot come in daylight. A day to kill, except for your boys, Daff.’
‘It’s where they have to do it, over the bridge. Don’t have the training for anything else – drive or walk.’
Rare venom. ‘Another of these bloody bridges. Watching for a man approaching a checkpoint, and having the glasses on him. He offers up his papers, usually forgeries, and he’s hoping the blighters are half-asleep, or thinking of women, or of the next meal break, and we see them, and they start walking, start driving. Getting too damn old for it. Always the crucial bit, the approach to the centre span, where that white line is, and maybe they are playing games or maybe they have second thoughts on the validity of the papers they’ve been shown . . . The noises start. They shaft into your bones, the klaxon would wake the dead, the sirens, and up here, elevated, Daff, we’d hear the weapons cocking, one up the spout and ready. We have to wait for them, least we can do . . . Then go
to look for our boy, and that bloody river . . . Be a good girl, Daff, find me a mug of tea.’
She grimaced, then headed for the café. The cold bit at him. Responsibility weighed, but excitement out-performed it. Too damned old, but addicted.
The Major said it like he thought it was.
The General did not take a note.
The Major tried to be coherent but accepted that extreme tiredness caused him to hesitate, to stammer over the more complicated arguments, and sentences went unfinished and conclusions left to hang. They were alone, no aide present; no record would exist. He had started to talk of a girl, and a cleared apartment and a meeting in the car-park of a supermarket, and of an incident at a road-block on a bridge at— The General lifted his finger, made a slight movement in front of his face, across his mouth, broke the Major’s thread.
‘Thank you, Danik. I appreciate your rigour. Your intellectual courage I knew of and the physical courage you demonstrated with the thugs close to the airport. You have done well. I believed you would, and your reputation travelled ahead of you, an independent thinker. If I surround myself with people who tell me only what they assume I want to hear, then I will not know when I am wrong. Sometimes there are occasions when I am in error, make substantial mistakes, but I never apologise for them.’
He did not speak directly to the Major but stood looking out of the window, and might have followed the craft on the river, some of the last sailings of the year before the ice came, and his voice was quiet but not conversational, and he’d not have tolerated interruption.
‘I choose to disregard the conclusions you veer towards. Myself, I lean in two possible directions. Less credible is the opinion that, for reasons not yet established by forensic examination, there was a gas explosion in the building, maybe overloaded electricity circuits in conjunction with a supply pipe. More credible is the suggestion that two vile creatures, major crime players, fell out over the awarding of a contract by state security: hacking, stealing, but the interests of our country are involved. Intelligent young people, usually engaged in activities that are basically illegal but who are not prosecuted, were gathered together. Considerable funds would flow into the pockets of one autorite while another would feel cheated. That to me is the most likely eventuality. Jealousy, greed.’
Austere features marked him and because of the angle of his head, the Major could clearly see the scar that ran below the lobe of his left ear and down to his throat and disappeared under his collar: said to be from a combat injury.
‘A fresh team has come from Moscow and will no doubt take stock of what evidence is available and I am confident they will follow the correct path . . . It should lead to the suspension, pending investigation, of two FSB colonels for systematic corruption. Also, two criminal figures will be arrested and will face the full severity of the law in regard to non-payment of taxes, money laundering, perhaps even charges of murder. The matter of the explosion will be kept close to the seat of the detonation, that building and the purpose of that building, where it belongs.’
The pitch of his voice did not change, nor did he look for a reaction from the Major. Subsequent disagreement would pit a general’s word against a junior officer’s, a man with a chest of decorations against a foreigner from Belarus. The Major stayed impassive.
‘It was a position that you seemed to be going slowly towards, Danik, that a third party was involved. I reject that. I have little time for leisure, but when I find it and with my family, we watch American crime films, always fancifully enjoyable. There is a phrase common to many of them: the smoking gun. It is a grand moment when the smoking gun is discovered, confirmation of a theory that up to then seemed impossible to substantiate. You were interested in the location of the detonation and the belief it might have been close to where the hacker, Nikki, sat. You believed it significant, but I would imagine the table was littered with laptops and files and that these kids were constantly moving, coffees and to pee . . . Not conclusive of anything. Do you, Danik, in this matter, have a smoking gun?’
He had no evidence . . . only understanding. Said nothing.
‘I think not. You needed one but have not produced one. Go back to your regular duties having handed to the Moscow team what information you have collected. You should hold up your head, feel pride in your work, especially the taking of control at the seat of the explosion, which impressed me. What would I have done had you produced that smoking gun, Danik? You are entitled to ask, but you will get no answer. You did not. Thank you for your time, and thank you for your work. Go home and sleep.’
The Major took the elevator down to his own floor. He ordered all the material collected for the investigation to be deleted from his computer. He said where they were headed and after the deleting was done he led out his sergeant and the young female officer, and they were bent under the weight of the combat vests and their side-arms. He locked the door behind him, and they went to the basement and signed for a jeep with good off-road capability.
He sat in the back, dripped confidence, told them their destination was Kingisepp, what sort of man he wished to meet there, and spoke of the scent of cordite from the barrel of a gun, the equivalent of ‘smoke’ . . . He would be asleep before they were clear of the city.
They left Toomas.
Had argued, spat over it. Hissed exchanges between Martin and Kristjan while Toomas’s head rolled between them as they carried him, taken all his weight. As if he did not hear a word of what was said. Neither knew how much Toomas had bled internally from the wound. Nor how much longer he could live without emergency care. The decision for Martin and Kristjan, the biggest of either of their lives, was to deny Toomas the possibility of survival through the intervention, assuming it remotely feasible, of a trained team in an accident/emergency hospital: survival from a gunshot wound in the gut, and then . . . That side of the river or the far side? That side was identification, interrogation, perhaps the same drugs as used on Toomas’s grandfather to keep him alive a few more hours and dumped in a basement cell.
Kristjan had said it. ‘Honest, truthful, do you want him to live? Is he better dead?’
Martin had not answered.
They were on higher ground. Away to their right was the smoke pall above the chimneys of Ivangorod, and the upper turrets of the castle. And beyond, lit by an early sunshine, the façade of the fortress built by the Swedish monarchy as a protection for Narva. Shame would live with them, Kristjan said. Neither – if they survived the next few hours – would be free of it . . . No one would know beyond the two of them, it would be bottled guilt. They could not carry him any farther. A compromise was agreed.
‘He has it, has the possibility to use it.’
Martin said, ‘We put it in his hand, put his hand against his head.’
A big decision for Martin, since his return from the Kaliningrad assignment, and the leaking of the money he had been paid, was whether an interior wall was best in magnolia or avocado or brush-pink paint. Martin thought the big decision for Kristjan would have been how much of his wage to slot in his hip pocket on a Friday night when he hit Narva’s casino.
They laid him down on the frosted ground. No grass, just a layer of needles shed by the trees. Martin said again, repeated it, that he could not manage to carry Toomas any farther, and Kristjan just shrugged, and stood above their friend – after a fashion a ‘friend’ but one linked to them by the catgut of history, not easily broken – and both gasped air into their lungs and hunger ravaged them, and thirst. Martin reckoned that Kristjan gave it grudgingly, put the Makarov into Toomas’s fist, and curled the index finger around the trigger guard, and cocked it and freed the safety, and Kristjan raised one finger of his hand as confirmation that a single bullet was in the magazine. One shot left, and it would have seemed to both of them that the option left with Toomas mitigated what they did. Already the guy looked thin, no colour in his cheeks; he still breathed, but did not speak, and sometimes his lips bubbled.
Turning
away, didn’t wish him ‘Good luck, friend’, no mention of ‘Back soon as we can with help for you’, nothing of ‘Don’t feel good about this, but no other way’. They blundered clear . . . By the early afternoon, Martin said, they should be south of the town and then moving into the remote bog land of lakes and streams, and be within sight of the far bank and of refuge. Martin felt the cold on his face, worst where tears had run and turned near to ice. Neither looked back.
Merc caught her arm, held it tight enough to halt her.
Another pace forward and Kat would have been out of the darkness of the pines and among the birches, the edge of the forest. She gasped, seemed to go limp. Had reason to, would have realised the width of the river, might then have seen a tree trunk carried in the flow, their side of the imaginary centre line, moving fast and showing the current’s strength. She would have seen, also, the barrier of densely packed reeds, as high as her head. He relaxed his hold but laid a finger on his lips. She looked to the right and saw a small boat in the far distance, downstream, two fishing rods poking over the side, and looked left and saw the patrol boat, the Russian flag on the back and an open wheelhouse where a uniformed guy was driving it and another was out behind him with binoculars and scanning their bank. And beyond the boat was a watch-tower. And she looked ahead, stood on tiptoe to see above the reeds, and seen the late morning sunlight on the far side where it bounced on car roofs. It looked pretty there, the far side, and would have made pictures for postcards. But was formidable, frightening, and Merc was taken on trust.
He had been in the barn with her, had made a desperate loving with her, had warmed her, and she was not certain what he felt for her . . . a friend? Adored? A vehicle for releasing the pent-up tension? Merely needed? Reflected.
Should he judge her by her possible usefulness on Hill 425, and the speed with which she could reload an assault rifle’s magazine? Was the ‘sometime’ any day soon? Well justified, in looking across the expanse of moving water, feeling the chill of the wind on her face, seeing patrols, estimating distance, and feeling fear. What to do with her? Could ask her to hide, stay quiet and calm, or take her when he went to find the board. He did not recognise where he was, did not see the marker he’d left. Had to have the board, had to watch for patrols. Had to hope the board was sufficiently buoyant. Too much to do and look for . . . but a promise had been given, was not to be forgotten . . . and he imagined a pack closing behind him. Rob was not there, not Brad; had no one to ask.
A Damned Serious Business Page 41