"Until now, as you know, it's been classified Top Secret," he said.
"That classification was imposed primarily for the safety of the team going into Russia. I need hardly remind you, it's essential that Mafia elements don't get wind of your presence.
He paused and looked down at his notes. Then he said, "The name of the operation has been changed. It is now Operation Nimrod. Further, it has become a black operation. I don't need to tell you what that means, but I will. It means that absolutely no further mention of it is to be made to anyone except members of the team. The reason will become obvious in a moment. Is that clearly understood?"
We were sitting facing the brass on two rows of chairs, three and five. When I glanced round, I saw everyone nod quickly.
The CO's tension had communicated itself to the team.
"Right, then." The CO cleared his throat.
"Another element has been added to the operation. The training of Tiger Force will go down as planned, but as from today that will serve as cover for a new main task. The first priority of Operation Nimrod is now to plant two compact nuclear devices in strategic positions, where they can be detonated by satellite signal if or when such action is deemed necessary."
Silence. For several seconds nobody moved. I felt as if I'd been skewered to my seat. When the CO continued, I seemed to be hearing him from a distance.
"We realise, of course, that this action is not in line with overt Western policy. The initiative has come from the United States Defense Department. For some time they've been looking at the concept of infiltrating nuclear devices into the former Soviet Union. Now Operation Nimrod is about to provide an opportunity. Any questions so far?"
"You mean you're expecting us to plant nuclear devices?" I went.
"Just that," the CO replied.
"What under the bloody Kremlin, I suppose?"
"Exactly. One of them, anyway."
"Boss you can't be serious."
"I am, Geordie. It sounds outrageous, I know. But I am.
Totally serious."
I felt myself growing angry.
"I thought we were supposed to be helping the poor bastards."
"We are. In the short term, we're on their side. We'll go through with the training programme as planned, and I hope we'll do them a service. The new phase of the operation is a long-term measure designed to keep the lid on things in the event of a take-over by criminal elements."
"That's one way of putting it," I said.
"You keep the lid on things by blowing the whole fucking place sky high."
"Geordie!" The CO's voice sharpened.
"Get hold of yourself The Regiment has received this request from the Pentagon, via the British Governnment. We've agreed to carry it out."
Already I regarded Sasha as a friend, a comrade in arms, who needed all the help I could give him. Now I was going to have to double-cross him in everything I said or did. All my friendly actions were going to be undermined by treachery. Then there was Anna. Even though we'd only met once, I sensed that I could work with her. From day one I'd be deceiving her too.
I heard myself asking, "Does our embassy in Moscow know about this?"
"No." The Boss shook his head emphatically.
"Not a thing.
They'll never hear of it."
Immediately I thought, More people to deceive: the Charge d'Affaires, for a start.
"Christ!" I glanced at Whinger and saw he was looking pretty sick. I looked on along the line of faces Rick, Mal, Pavarotti, Dusty hoping for back-up, but they all wore blank, puzzled expressions.
"These devices," I said.
"Are you talking about suitcase bombs the sort of things that were developed for taking out bridges or dams?"
"A modern version," the CO conceded.
"Slightly bigger, and very much more powerful."
"How are we supposed to handle them? I mean, are they portable, or what?"
"More or less." The CO gestured to his left.
"Mr. Laidlaw is going to give you an initial briefing."
Laidlaw stood up to expound. Plump and rubicund, with dark hair slicked back and a big gut bulging against his doublebreasted, navy pin-stripe suit, he looked a bit of a character, a man who enjoyed a glass or two. Yet his manner was anything but frivolous: "Gentlemen," he said in a thick, fruity Scottish accent, 'for simplicity's sake I shall refer to the devices by initials. In the trade they're known as CNDs, compact nuclear devices. Ironic that the same initials stood for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which some of you may remember.
Nevertheless, those are the initials that we tend to use.
"The two CNDs you will be placing in position weigh approximately a hundred and fifty kilograms apiece. However, each one comes in two parts the size and shape of large suitcases.
One component weighs eighty kilos, the other seventy. Thus each component can be carried without much difficulty by two men. Easier with four. The device is primed by fitting the two halves together. It is then connected to a smaller unit, a radio receiver. The whole is detonated by signal from a satellite in synchronous orbit."
He stopped, scanning our faces.
"Gentlemen, I can see you looking worried. May I emphasise that the chances of any CND ever being detonated in anger are extremely remote. The devices are being planted purely as a deterrent, which the West will use as a form of control, should the situation in Russia deteriorate to a level which threatens the international community. Think of them as an insurance policy, not as weapons of aggression.
Seeing Johnny shift on his chair, he prompted, "Yes?"
"These bombs. How do they get to Moscow?"
"You'll take them with you when you fly in."
"Where are they now?"
Laidlaw looked at his watch.
"They're due into Lakenheath any time now. They should reach Hereford this evening."
I was finding it hard to believe that this whole spiel wasn't some crazy test, sprung on us to gauge our reactions.
"How do we know where to site them, once we get there?" I asked.
"Our friends in the Pentagon have got everything worked out for you. I'll give you a quick idea from these maps. Of course, you'll have detailed diagrams which you can memo rise but these will show you the general idea."
He bent over an open lap-top which stood on the table and punched a couple of keys. The big VDU beside him flickered into life and even before he began to explain the coloured diagram that came up on the screen I knew where we were: on the bank of the Moscow River, opposite the Kremlin wall, practically at the spot where we'd had the showdown with the mugger.
"For security reasons," Laidllaw was saying, 'as from now, the devices will be referred to only by code names. CND 1 is Apple, CND 2 Orange. All right? Now this diagram shows the site for Apple. We're right in the centre of Moscow. Here you have the Moscow River, marked blue, flowing west to east. The river at this point is a hundred and five metres wide. This, here, is the south wall of the Kremlin, running parallel with the river. The interior of the Kremlin lies to the north. Alongside the north bank of the river is a road, then there's a strip of grass. The distance from the water to the Kremlin wall is seventy-seven metres.
"Fortunately for your purpose, the ground beneath the city is honeycombed by tunnels. Not sewage tunnels like in London, because Moscow works on a system of relatively small-bore pipes, which are cleared by high-pressure water jets. Of course, there's the Metro the underground with tunnels on many different levels, as in London." He stopped to clear his throat, and continued in a strange, slightly theatrical voice.
"But there are also various other tunnels, less well known. For instance, there is one major and totally secret system which was built during the seventies, in the depths of the Cold War, to give party leaders an escape route from the Kremlin in the event of invasion or nuclear attack. It's very deep, and one of them's big enough to take lorries.
"At the inner end, access is by lifts from a secret terminal under the Presidium. The tunnel runs roughly here' he drew an imaginary line with his pointer 'southwards under the river, and all the way out to a site near Vnukovo Airport, twenty kilometres to the south-west. There, a complete underground city still awaits its first refugees. The place has its own supplies of food, power, water, air and so on."
He paused for effect, and saw he had us well hooked.
"More recently, in the attempted coup of ninety-three, the rebels were cornered in the White House, the parliament building. You'll all have seen TV pictures of tanks firing on it.
Well, when the defenders decided to run for it, they went down tunnels that was how they got away. The KGB were supposed to be guarding all the tunnel systems, but they just didn't have the manpower.
"Our tunnel, your tunnel, is much more modest, but ideal for your purpose: only six feet in diameter, but adequate for pedestrians. Again, it was built as an escape route, but during the twenties, on the orders of Lenin. This is it the dotted line running from beneath the Great Kremlin Palace, under the river and away towards the south. Fortunately we have been able to acquire KGB records, which show that during the Khruschev era some time in the fifties it was declared obsolete and the section under the Kremlin was filled in with a plug of concrete.
But the next section has remained open, and appears to have been forgotten, or at any rate abandoned, by latter-day authorities."
Once again I couldn't help making a sarcastic remark.
"I suppose it passes right beneath the British Embassy. All we have to do is open a trap-door in the floor of the ballroom and drop into it. Brilliant."
The CO frowned at me, but Laidlaw wasn't fazed.
"You're not far wrong. In fact it passes about five hundred yards to the east of the Embassy. Here's the Embassy complex, on Sophieskaya Quay, and here's the line of the tunnel." He drew another invisible line downwards, passing to the right of the Embassy and on towards the south-east.
"How do we get into it, then?"
"Access is via a shaft in a courtyard behind a church. I'll show you a detailed diagram in due course.
"I know," said Rick suddenly.
"It's that pink-and-white structure, a bit like a wedding cake. Three arches and a tall tower."
I stared at him, amazed that he'd noticed and remembered such detail.
"Yeah," he went on.
"We walked right past it after we'd sorted that interloper. You can look through the gateway and see a little church in the yard at the back. There was a big, wrought-iron gate at the entrance, but it looked as though it hadn't moved in years."
"Pink and white," Laidlaw echoed him, clearly impressed.
Laidlaw went back to his lap-top and wiped the picture.
"Let me show you something else."
Up came a close-in photo of two heavy padlocks, their hasps passing through a pair of thick metal rings.
"These," he said, 'are the locks on the plate sealing the access shaft."
Pavarotti, who was good on his lock-picking, gave a low whistle.
"Fuck me!" he muttered under his breath, as though immediately sensing a challenge, then louder: "I could go through those bastards in under a minute.
"I didn't think they'd trouble you much," Laidlaw said with a smile.
"So that," he continued, 'for the moment, is Apple. Now for Orange. Some of you have already been to Balashika, I believe."
I nodded.
"The second site is less precisely specified."
His next coloured diagram showed mainly open country, with a few buildings and fence-lines running across it.
"This is the southern boundary of the space control complex at Shchiolkovo, next door to the training area at Balashika. It will be for you to choose the exact location, but the objective is to place Orange within a hundred metres of the perimeter, so that its blast effects will cover the entire space complex. As some of you have seen, the training area in which you'll be operating abuts the complex. It should be relatively simple to bury the device at a suitable depth."
"Which is .. .
"A minimum of six feet, a maximum of twenty."
The guy seemed to know all the answers. Yet still I could not quite believe that what we were hearing could be for real.
"These CNDs," I said.
"How powerful are they? What damage will they cause if they go off?"
"Apple would destroy much of the centre of Moscow, and remove the Russian high command at one stroke. Orange would take out the space complex, removing Russia's ability to launch ICBMs with any precision. In both cases, blast damage would be limited to some extent by the fact that the devices would go off underground but it would still be extremely severe.
"In the city, the Kremlin would disappear. Every tunnel under Moscow would collapse. The entire Metro system would be destroyed. Escape tunnels and nuclear shelters the same. The city would come to a standstill. Within a two-kilo metre radius, I would not expect anyone to survive."
I took a deep breath.
"Between them, then, the devices would kill a few hundred thousand people. Possibly a million."
Laidlaw said nothing, so I went on, "This is all well and good, but we aren't trained to handle weapons of this kind. We won't have a clue about them, and unless we postpone the whole training programme there isn't time to learn."
"No bother," said Laidlaw.
"I gather one of your colleagues has been on a course in the United States."
"That's right," the boss broke in.
"In fact he's escorting the devices over. He's coming in with them this evening."