"Can you make that 1930? I'll need time to get up to the DZ, and I don't want to move in daylight."
"OK. 1930 it is. That's confirmed."
"Great. Obviously Pat will want to work out his own plan.
But as I see it there are three objectives: first is to cut the road coming up from the barracks at the bottom; second is to secure the summerhouse, third to hit the villa."
"Roger. How many in the garrison?"
"Very few. Could be twenty. Nothing like the rumours. But they've got a fucking great machine gun set up beside the helipad, and I'm sure there are guys we haven't seen yet inside the house."
"OK. How's the rest of the garrison deployed?"
"By the time we got here they were all in their pits, bar one. I told Bill about the sentry patrolling the perimeter, but said we hadn't seen anyone inside the wire.
"Is the helipad big enough for a Chinook to land?"
"Definitely. But we'll have to take out that five-oh first. What's the position on the exfil?"
"I think it's going to be possible from the north. Your Russian friends are playing ball. It looks as though we'll be able to get the choppers up to a place called Nalchik. Then they can hop over the mountain when they're needed, and come back out the same way.
They'll be in and out of Chechnya air-space in a few minutes. The only thing is, the met looks a bit dodgy. There's a depression moving up from the south."
FIFTEEN.
It was at 11:30 the next morning that things suddenly started to move. Sasha and I had both made secure OPs, buried under piles of pine boughs about 400 metres apart. Once I'd left him with a good view down to the front of the villa, I moved on round and found a site that commanded not only the summerhouse but also the exit road. There, lulled by an intoxicating smell of fresh resin, I'd crawled into my sleeping bag for warmth, and dozed off for the last hour before dawn.
We'd put our covert radios on listening watch, and agreed that from 0700 we'd come up on the air to compare notes on the hour and half-hour unless we wanted to alert each other at any other time, in which case we'd give a double jab on the press el At first we hadn't much to report. Sasha told me that a couple more cars drove up to the villa, and one went down. Work started on the fence. I couldn't see the site, but when I heard an old tractor spluttering up and down and men chatting quite close behind me, to my right, I thanked my stars that we hadn't cut the wire.
Once again the weather was fine, but I sensed a change coming. Soon after dawn the sky began to haze over and the air moistened, as if snow was on the way. My priority task was to get video footage of the villa and send it back to Kars, so that the guys would have extra information to back up the satellite imagery and could start working out their assault plan. Now I reckoned I'd better go pretty soon, before the landscape got blotted out.
Breakfast consisted of slimy, cold lasagne which came out of its foil bag tasting of mud, and cold water that tasted of plastic.
With that feast down my neck I slipped out of my hide, taking my 203 with spare mags in my pouches, but leaving my bergen, to give myself greater mobility.
The mountainside was so broken by gullies, rocky outcrops and stands of trees that I found it easy to keep in dead ground, hidden from the wire above me on one side, and the villa below on the other. Not that I didn't keep a sharp lookout: before I crossed any open space I scanned repeatedly with my binos in case sentries were posted on vantage points.
I filmed the helipad on my way past, hoping that shots of the50 mounted on its tripod would give an idea of scale, and came out on a high point above Sasha's LIJP. Lying face-down on a rock under some trees, I got good footage of the house, first the front, then the western side with its underground door -making sure I kept each take long enough for members of the QRF to spot detail. I zoomed in for close-uy shots of the security cameras and IR devices, then filmed the road going down towards the barracks and the gate. I contemplated going down and taking in the barracks as well, but decided that any extra information I might gain wouldn't be worth the risks involved. My gut feeling told me it was the villa and the summerhouse that we were going to assault. With any luck we wouldn't need to go near the barracks: we'd just block the road to anyone trying to come uphill.
By 9:00 a.m. I was back in my own OP, having filmed the summerhouse as well. My scramble around the mountainside had got me well warmed up and my fingers were nimble when it came to down-loading information from the camera into my lap-top and sending it up via the Satcom to the squadron at Kars.
Within five minutes Bill Chandler came on air to say that the quality of the pictures was excellent. He also confirmed that Orange was still transmitting from the same site, and that we had definite permission to exfil via the Russian Caucasus.
It wasn't until 11:20 that things started to happen. I got a sudden tsch, tsch in my earpiece, and there was Sasha, fired up.
"Beeg development!" he went.
"I have seen your men.
"Our lads?"
"Yes. They came from lower house into upper house."
"Out of the basement entrance?"
"Yes. Four guards bring them."
"How did they look?"
"Bad. Zheordie, I am afraid they are smashed up.
"What did you see?"
"The big man, Pavarotti his eyes are black. The small one has clothes on his hands."
"Clothes? Bandages?"
"Bandages. Yes."
"Where did the guards take them, Sasha?"
"Inside the house. Upstairs."
"The ground-floor entrance main door?"
"Yes."
"OK. Thanks. Keep watching."
I went straight through to Kars and relayed Sasha's information. Anger ran through me as I lay under my heap of pine branches. My first thought was to take the pressure off our guys by creating a diversion. A 203 grenade into one of the villa's windows would stir things up, all right. Sasha and I could drop quite a few of the home team if they came running out of the house. But a premature attack by just the two of us could well panic the Chechens and make them top their prisoners.
I spoke to Bill again and suggested what I'd been thinking.
"No go, Geordie," he replied.
"For Christ's sake take it easy.
It's great to know the guys are there, but until we've got the bomb secure, the plan must hold. They have to stick it out, and so have you.
Fuck them all, I thought savagely as I switched off. When it comes to the crunch, all senior ruperts are unfeeling bastards who don't give a stuff about losing guys.
I lay there feeling furious, but not for long.
The next development was almost worse. Shortly before 12:00 I became aware of a drone, faint at first but rapidly growing louder. Chopper, I thought. Then I caught the fluttering beat of a rotor, and a few moments later the thing came swishing and roaring so low overhead that its down draught made the roof of my OP thrash about, and I had to seize hold of some branches to stop them being blown away.
For perhaps a minute the roar persisted, as the pilot came in to land on the helipad. Then he shut his engine down and the noise fell away to a dying whine.
Sasha was already on the air.
"Zheordie helicopter in."
"Yeah. Did you see what sort?"
"Small civilian, passenger aircraft. Three to four persons. I knew Sasha couldn't see the pad from where he was, but he would get a look at the incoming party if the people walked the few yards down to the villa.
"They'll probably come down to the house," I told him.
"Stay on the air and let me know."
"Prinyato."
A couple of minutes later he said, "Now they are coming.
Three men. I think one is Akula. I recognise .. . Yes, definitely this is Shark."
"What are they doing?"
"They are coming to the door. Door opens in front. Inside house now. Zheordie?"
"Yes?"
"I notice something. When they were five metres distant, door open avtomaticheskii. And why? Some persons inside are watching with cameras.
"That's right. They've got closed-circuit TV. I filmed the cameras.
My mind was racing. Had the prisoners been taken upstairs for another session of interrogation, this time by Shark himself?
Had he brought some ace torturer with him, or maybe a nuclear expert, to find out the truth about the bomb?
I reported the arrival of the chopper to Bill Chandler.
"It could be set to lift our guys out," I warned him.
"Or the bomb. Is there any way the Yanks can track a helicopter if it takes off from here?"
"I'll ask," he said.
"I'll pass the message through. You'll tell us if it does move.
"Of course. What about binning the HALO and bringing the QRF in earlier by chopper?"
"Not a chance." Bill was adamant.
"We still don't have clearance to fly in Russian airspace. Besides, we need the element of surprise. Our information from Colonel Gerasimova in Moscow is that the defence force is bigger than you think.
There's a bigger barracks down the valley with a hundred or more in it. Plus any local guys they can muster."
"Is that right?"
"Yep. And listen, Geordie, the colonel's done us another favour. She got on to Kelsen, the firm of Finnish architects who built the villa, and faxed us the plans."
"Oh, great!" I said.
"There's a basement floor," Bill went on.
"That's got gym, games room, sauna, showers and so on. Then, below that, there's another floor, a kind of sub-basement, marked "Storage". That tallies well with the pictures you sent."
"Tochno," I went, thinking of Sasha with his eyes on the building and unconsciously slipping into Russian.
"Exactly.
That's where they brought our guys out of, that lower door. I reckon that's where they're being kept. When the assault goes in, we're going to need to hit that door first. Wait a minute, though. There must be some internal access from the store area to the upper floor. Isn't anything marked on the plan a staircase or a lift?"
"There's a lift-shaft, yes."
"Maybe the lift's knackered. Or maybe it hasn't been installed yet. Plan round taking out that lower door, anyway.
Shortly before 12:30 Sasha buzzed me up again. Toad and Pavarotti had been taken back underground, looking even worse than before. Pay was walking with a limp, and there was blood showing through the bandages on Toad's hands.
Bastards! I said to myself Just wait till we get in among them.
Bill Chandler had already told me, "No hostages." Now, after what Sasha had seen, I was going to feel no compunction about taking out everyone in the villa.
The sun never came out that day. The haze of cloud thickened steadily, and early in the afternoon snow began to fall. My problem was exhaustion. I fought it as hard as I could, but I know that I nodded off several times and when I suddenly came to, just before 3:00 p.m." I couldn't remember where I was.
Then, as I moved, snow slid off the flap of my sleeping bag and on to my face. I rolled over on to my front and looked out. Snow was falling hard a real blizzard, fine flakes slanting in towards me from my right front. The weather was coming from the south-west, from the high mountains.
When I scanned the summerhouse through my binoculars, I saw that a white blanket of snow lay unmarked all round it.
Nothing doing there.
I knew that the helicopter hadn't taken off: for one thing, I'd have heard it go; for another, it would never fly in this weather.
So Shark must still be in residence. Little did he realise that his time was rapidly running out.
Or was it? A new fear began to needle me. If this weather kept up, with its heavy cloud cover, the HALO jump might have to be postponed. Snow on the ground wouldn't matter -in fact it would make the DZ show up all the better, white in the middle of the black wood but snow clouds in the air were another matter. I'd better report the conditions to the FMB.
When I tried to go through to Kars, my anxiety rose a notch.
No response. I suspected the blizzard was to blame, and that the snow was blocking contact with the satellite. Comms are notoriously fickle. They go up and down, and often there seems no reason. I fiddled with the dish aerial, turning it this way and that, and then moved out of my lair on to a more prominent site.
Still no contact. I tried again and again, to no avail.