"This car came up behind. Somebody put a burst through the rear window. The rounds must have gone right between me and Johnny, on out the front... "Slow down!" I shouted.
We'd come round a bend. Through the murky dark we could see nearly half a mile up a long straight ahead. There wasn't a car in sight.
"Either they've got right away or they've pulled off into the forest. Look for side-roads. There! Just ahead. Stop!"
Whinger slid to a halt across the mouth of a dirt track that ran into the trees at a right angle to the highway. Johnny and I leapt out, flashing torches over the surface in search of fresh tyre marks.
"Nothing doing," I called.
We jumped back in and set off again.
"OH this fucking car!" Whinger groaned, exasperated by the lack of acceleration.
"Keep talking," I told them.
"The car that was harassing us," went Johnny.
"I dropped the driver with my Sig. That fucked them. They were struggling to get him out of the driving seat, so I cracked a couple more rounds off into the front of the car. Bit of luck the thing blew up. Bullet must have severed a fuel pipe. The whole thing went woof-' "THERE!" I yelled.
Another small road had loomed up. Whinger hauled on the wheel and we squealed round. This track was surfaced and quite smooth no point in looking for tyre marks. We followed it for a minute, scanning frantically for any spur or lay by among the trees where the villains could have pulled in. Then I shouted, "This is fucking useless. We've lost them. You're sure they turned back?"
"Yeah, yeah!" Whinger was emphatic.
"Just after you'd called for the pick-up, a whole shower of cars went flying back towards Moscow. A dozen at least, going like the clappers."
"Was the Volga in among them?"
"Couldn't tell. There was a Mere at the front. The rest were in a bunch. Really motoring."
My mind was churning. Blood had reached my waist and was sogging round my belt.
"Back to base?" Even Whinger sounded temporarily defeated.
"I guess so."
"What happened to Pay and Toad?"
"I couldn't tell. The last I saw of them they were both still in the vehicle, with an armed guy on either side of them. I tried to get back to them but I was taking fire from the car behind ours. I got a nick in the shoulder, as it was."
"Not serious?"
"I don't think so. More of a burn, really. It's bleeding, though." As we drove the short distance back to camp, the scene ran through my mind again and again like a closed loop of film.
Already I was blaming myself for making mistakes. Maybe I should never have got out of the car. Maybe I should have just driven off But then, if I had, our lumbering vehicle would certainly have been cut out by one or more of the faster cars I'd seen lined up. But again, once I had got out once I realised things weren't right maybe I should have made a greater effort to get back to the Volga. But if I'd done that, I'd almost certainly have ended up getting shot dead. The guy in the backup car couldn't have gone on missing for ever.
"Where's the Rat?" Whinger asked suddenly.
"Christ!" I felt for it, on my belt.
"I've still got it. It must have activated the bomb's alarm signal. The thing will be transmitting by now. I hope to hell the Yanks can track it."
Before the lift my moral confusion had been bad enough: now it was acute. What the hell was I to tell Anna and Sasha?
Obviously we couldn't conceal the fact that we'd lost two guys, or that they were probably in Mafia hands. Apart from anything else, we needed the Russians to launch a search.
The lads we'd left in camp were appalled by the news. As we compiled a coded message for Hereford, they got a brew on and we brought them up to speed on what had happened.
My shoulder wound turned out to be little more than a groove cut through the skin. Dusty got out his medical pack, swabbed it thoroughly, bombed it with disinfectant and smacked a wound dressing over the top.
"You'll live," he pronounced.
"But you were lucky. A couple of inches lower and your shoulder would have been a mess.
"If it was Rick's whoring about that put them on to us," I said, 'he wants to be well away from Hereford before we get back. If I see him I'll bloody murder him."
"Maybe the Mafia have been doing better surveillance than we thought," Mal suggested.
"Maybe they'd got us marked down anyway. D'you think somebody slipped a hundred dollars to one of the guys on the gate, to shop us?"
"It was that fucking hit on the flat that did it," said Whinger savagely.
"Somehow the bastards got wind of the fact that we were involved."
"What if we got followed to the church?" said Dusty.
"Maybe there was a dicker out, somebody who saw us going in and out of the Embassy."
"Possible," I agreed.
"Jesus now I suppose we'd better get our ames back there and check the padlocks on the shaft."
I thought for a moment and changed my mind.
"Cancel that," I said.
"There's no way the Mafia could have known about Apple or Orange. Our security on that front's been one hundred percent. Even if they got eyes on the cars going to and from the Embassy they couldn't have known what we were doing."
"Extortion," said Pete.
"That's what we were up against.
They're after money. They've scented a chance of making a quick fortune. And now, in handing them Orange, we've given them the biggest fucking lever in the world. God alone knows what ransom demand they'll make: ten million? A hundred million?"
I said, "The question is, will they go public, or will they do it under cover?"
"If they go public we're buggered," said Dusty.
"If they start honking about how they're holding two SAS guys, the whole operation's blown."
"Will they realise what the components are?" asked Mal.
"After all, they're not nuclear specialists."
"No," said Dusty, 'but I bet they'll have access to someone who is. It won't be long before they find out. And anyway, they've got Pay and Toad to tell them."
There was a moment's silence. Although nobody spoke, I know we were all thinking the same thing: that our guys were going to get badly knocked about. They were in for a hard time, whatever happened. And if they refused to talk, there was a high risk they'd be topped. We needed to find them fast.
We had local maps out on the table, but they were precious little use.
"Let's think where they're likely to put the thing," said Johnny.
"Lock-up garage, probably," Whinger suggested.
"Leave it in the car, drive in. Easy."
"What about its alarm signal?" Mal asked.
"Will that still reach the satellite if the device is inside a building?"
"I don't know. Toad could tell us. Listen, I'm going to call Anna. She can get a search going."
"What are we going to tell her?" Mal, ever careful, had been making notes with pencil and pad.
"That two guys have been lifted."
"What about the bomb?"
"Not a whisper."
I had to use the local line, which I knew was insecure. But that now seemed the least of our worries. I tried the emergency number she'd given us, and got some Russian-speaking female.
"Anna," I said several times.
"Anna Gerasimova."
A torrent of Russian came back.
"Ya Anglichani," I went.
"Ni pone mayo Another incomprehensible rush of words. For a moment I half-wished Rick was with us. At last the woman stopped and said, "Moment." A second later a man came on, speaking slow, heavily accented English.
"Anna no here."
"Can you give her a message, please?"
"A message? Yes. It is what?"
"Telephone Zheordie immediately."
"Zheordie?"
It was beyond me to spell the name in Russian letters, so I repeated it several times, gave the number slowly, and rang off "Jesus!" I gasped. In the state I was, any small delay seemed a massive aggravation.
"What about Sasha?" asked Pete.
"Good idea."
As the number rang, I thought of old Lyudmila and her bloody great cat, tucked up there on the eighth floor.
"Sasha, it's Geordie. Sorry to bother you, but we're in big trouble."
I told him what had happened. As soon as he got the gist of it, he said, "No, it is impossible. Not real."
"It's real enough," I told him.
"They've gone.
"I come in."
"Well, if you can.
"No problem. Twenty minutes."
"Thanks." I rang off and said to the lads, "Sasha's on his way. Watch yourselves when you're speaking to him. This is where we need to start juggling the story."
"The Embassy," said Whinger.
"What about them?"
"Christ, yes. Better inform them."
"What about the bomb?" Mal asked in his voice of doom.
"Same thing. Not a whisper."
"They know you went in to collect kit," Mal persisted.
"OK, we collected it."
"So where is it now?"
"It was in the car that got through."
Even as I dialled the Embassy number on the secure link, I felt amazed at how easy it seemed to be to invent plausible falsehoods. They were fairly whipping off my tongue. At the same time, I was aware of how easy it would be to make one fatal mistake and bring the whole edifice of lies crashing down.
"British Embassy," said an unfamiliar voice.