He would get a cab to the suburb where the man lived, and hope that he didn’t see the audit as the reason for Udi’s late revelation. He juggled the cursor to the top left of his screen and left clicked his mouse, ordering the system to begin shutting down, and headed for the door realising that unless he got a promotion for bringing the information forward, the next month was going to be very frugal once the electricity bill was paid.
Down in the street below his apartment, two men emerged from the back of a van. The flickering light of a monitor screen illuminated the interior, and this blue tinged light gave the men’s features a cruel, deathly aspect as they reached back inside the vehicle for a holdall and a large heavy rucksack.
As Udi’s system finished powering down, the vans screen no longer mirrored everything that Udi had been watching. The vans occupants had tuned in to the radiation emitted by the monitor in Udi’s apartment, and in this way had avoided the danger of detection had they used a surveillance device or line tap.
Udi opened his apartment door and found a man stood immediately in front of it, his brain registered recognition of the face before him even as the blow landed, crushing his larynx and sending him sprawling backwards into the room. His attacker caught him before he could fall, laying him on the worn sofa and quickly, though quietly pushing the door to.
As he fought against the threatening blackness, Udi cursed himself for not having considered that someone on the auditing team would have informed the head of their organisation that her home was bugged.
Udi Timoskova was still alive when his attackers colleagues from the van arrived silently inside the apartment moments later, and through his agony he recognised them also as being with Elena Torneski that night in the dacha.
After putting out the blaze that had gutted an apartment in a Moscow suburb, its watch commander wrote up his report concluding that a faulty component overheating inside the owner’s computer had caused the fire. Neighbours had already told him that they had heard the hum of the machine day and night in the past few days, whenever they had past his door, which concurred with his long years of experience which pinpointed the charred and buckled base unit as clearly being the seat of the fire.
The apartments occupant had apparently been asleep on a sofa when the fire had broken out. A heat cracked, and smoke charred vodka bottle on the floor beside the body meant that he had probably been oblivious to the danger, and would have expired from the smoke before the flames had reached him.
Oblivious to moves behind the scenes back home, the Hussars, Gunners, Sappers, Paratroopers and Guardsmen were still preparing for their next fight.
“How’s it going?”
CSM Probert stopped swinging the pickaxe and leant on it, getting his breath. The inquisitor was Oz; kneeling in the mud beside a hull down position for an MBT being finished off by a half dozen men with entrenching tools.
“I’d say it was going down the pan fast, if it’s got to the point where a Company Sarn’t Major is navvying away, and a mere sergeant isn’t!”
Oz tapped the tops of the ammunition boxes he had brought up the hill.
“I’ve got some of the lads bringing more up.” He nodded toward an SF kit, the tripod in its webbing bag that sat a short distance away.
“You be careful with yer rates of fire Oz, a GPMG in the SF role goes through rounds like Guinness and curry go through a white man… be a shame if after the first hour the most you had to reply with was harsh language.”
They both heard someone calling the CSMs name and Colin climbed from the hole, using the pick like a climber’s ice axe, to see who it was. Struggling uphill through the mud was one of the battalion clerks, fulfilling his other role as COs runner.
“Oye, Radar… up here!” The TV series ‘Mash’ had stuck all clerical staff with that nickname, even the dyslexic ones.
The young man panted his way up to them.
“Sir… warning order for you, O Group in… ” he looked at his watch. “… in fifteen at the company CP, platoon sized ambush patrol, you can borrow three men from 2 and 3 Platoons, and no move before twenty hundred hours.”
The CSM looked at his own wristwatch.
“1530… cutting it a bit fine?”
Dropping the pick he retrieved his weapon and webbing from where he left them, within arm’s reach of where he’d been digging.
“Sarn’t, can you do the honours and pick twenty four good ones please, make sure we don’t get palmed off with lame ducks and dead wood from 2 and 3?”
Oz nodded and turned, and called out the name of his first choice, the man who would also warn the rest.
“Robertso… ” but stopped before completing the name, embarrassed and momentarily at a loss. Confusion ran across his features for a second or two and then he seemed to mentally shake himself. Colin was silent as he watched his friend, seeing the first visible sign of a stress fracture appear. The runner had a bemused look on his face, and was about to correct Oz when he saw the Company Sergeant Major giving him a steely look.
“Haven’t you got some typing or something to be doing?” He snapped.
The clerk nodded and headed back toward the CP, pissed off at the CSMs comment. If senior NCOs couldn’t remember who was still alive and who was dead, then it was not his fault, so why take it out on him?
Colin made the decision then and there that Oz would not be coming along tonight, he couldn’t give him two weeks R&R but he could let him get his head down for one night.
On his way to the CP Colin passed the gun group on their way up, weighed down with Claymore mines and grenades. He paused for a moment.
“I made a start on the gun pit before moving on to the tankies holes.” He pointed uphill in the direction of the gun pit. “Once you get past the mud the grounds still frozen, but there’s only a foot or so still left to do… then crack on with the shelter and ammo bays, ok?” Once they had acknowledged him he carried on down the reverse slope at a jog.
The company commander greeted him with a tired nod of the head, and pointed to a spot away from the activity around the CP. They tramped across the mud to a fallen tree trunk where Colin sat before removing his notebook and map, and then heard about a soviet recce patrol that had found its way into the rear area, and what they were now going to do about it.
It was growing dark as Major Venables arrived in the location, crawling along at 5mph with a broken down Chieftain in tow. He let the two crews and REME fitters manoeuvre the older tank into its fighting position and wandered over to where some of the infantry were rehearsing for something. He had to cast his mind back to his Sandhurst days to work out what they were preparing for, and then identified the cut offs, rear protection and killer groups.
The patrol was going through the withdrawal phase where haste counted for more than stealth, where they would have just have woken up all the countryside within earshot. As they splashed through the mud he shivered and turned back to his vehicle, that dry thing with bullet proof sides and a heater, which could get him out of trouble at 40mph. Thank God he’d had the sense not to join a military formation that walked everywhere, even when it was raining.
CSM Probert was happy with the way his men had performed in the night rehearsal, as he checked the time and saw they were ahead of schedule so he gave them ten minutes to have a smoke and relax.
Somewhere to their rear a soviet airborne unit was probably doing the same thing, before jumping off and attacking the logistic support elements of the ad hoc NATO division.
It had become clear that a large number of the soviet paratroopers had escaped destruction at Braunschweig, because on reoccupying the town there had been a distinct absence of bodies in the fighting positions. Airborne forces have an annoying tendency, in the opinion of their more conventional opponent’s commanders, of not obligingly remaining still whilst the killer blow is being landed.