It was then he saw the figure advancing through the smoke for Shabanov. He pushed the Russian to the floor and fired his Kalashnikov. The figure went down like a target at a funfair duck-shoot.
When the invigilators burst through the door a moment later he knew he’d fucked it. They raced to the point where the figure had hit the floor, their Russian babbling made doubly unintelligible by the gas masks they wore. They raised the figure until it locked back in the upright position. When the wind lifted the smoke he saw it was a mother carrying a young child. Had they been real, not cardboard, both would have been dead.
He and Shabanov walked back to the debriefing centre, the Russian full of well-meaning comments about the fog of war and the inevitability of civilian casualties. For Colonel Elliot Ulm, head of the US Air Force’s elite antiterrorist unit, the Pathfinders, the humiliating fact remained: he had shot the wrong target and the Russians were laughing at him behind his back.
The heat at the training compound was insufferable. Located some hundred and fifty kilometres outside Moscow, it was a vast complex sealed from civilian life, filled with hundreds of different stages and backdrops that had been earmarked by the Soviets as likely arenas for low-intensity conflict. There were whole towns here, buses, airliners, airport buildings, even sections of supertankers and cruise liners. And Spetsnaz practised against them all day in and day out. They were, Ulm had to admit, remarkable troops.
The woods crackled with the sound of near and distant gunfire. Occasionally, he saw Spetsnaz going about their work, but for the most part, their operations remained stealthy, unseen. The Russians, after all, didn’t want to show him too much. In the New World Order, special operations lay at the heart of a nation’s defence.
The Romeo Protocol was designed to overcome this natural reticence. The agreement which had brought Ulm here was established to pool the resources of the United States and Russia in the war against terrorism, the new enemy.
But like the CFE treaty limiting their conventional arms, the Romeo Protocol was an agreement that worked better in theory than reality. It was a politician’s dream and a soldier’s nightmare. For the moment it remained secret, its existence to be acknowledged only after the two sides had been into battle together and one more terrorist outfit had been brought to heel.
Ulm hated the idea of going into action with Soviet special forces — there was so much that could go wrong. He tried to put it to the back of his mind. He was going home in a few days to prepare for Shabanov’s exchange visit. A month in Russia on little better than K-rations was quite enough.
They reached the barrack hut that served as the debriefing centre. Shabanov pushed the door open for Ulm and they stepped inside.
In the gloom of the corridor, Shabanov was greeted by a deferential private, who snapped to attention and passed him a note. He read the message cursorily before stuffing it into a top pocket of his camouflaged tunic.
‘Excuse me, I must make a call,’ he said to Ulm. His English was perfect. Active colonels in Spetsnaz were expected to have at least one language under their belts. Shabanov had several.
As Ulm carried on to the briefing room, Shabanov entered his office. It was a spartan affair, with nothing but the bare essentials: shelves crammed with military textbooks, foreign defence magazines and a lone copy of the Ruhdiydt of Omar Khayyam, a gift from his mother. In the centre of the floor was a utilitarian metal desk, its surface adorned with an in-tray and a telephone.
He raised the phone and dialled.
‘You took your time, Roman Makhmadzhanovich,’ the general said.
‘The American and I were doing a little shooting in the woods.’
General Aushev grunted. He was in no mood for humour. He told Shabanov about Syria. And then he told him about the Sword.
‘You have found him?’
‘Someone has come forward with information. An old contact from my Middle East days. Happily, little has changed since those soft-arses in the Central Plenum stopped funding organizations like the PFLP-GC. They are still as divided as ever. My friend is impatient for Ahmed Jibril’s job, it seems. Such betrayal does not come cheap, but it’s up to us to see that every kopek is well spent. This could be the biggest breakthrough in years, Roman Makhmadzhanovich. It couldn’t have come at a better time.’
‘Firm intelligence?’ Shabanov asked.
‘Not yet, but a time and a meeting place have been established. I’m sending Sinitsky to London. He will buy the information for us and bring it back to Moscow.’
‘Sinitsky? Who’s he?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard of him. He is an unprepossessing character, but less conspicuous than you.’ The general paused. ‘This is all I have to report.’
‘The clock is ticking, Comrade General,’ Shabanov said. ‘We must act quickly.’
‘I know, Roman Makhmadzhanovich, I know.’
The general hung up, leaving Shabanov with the sound of a dead line in his ear.
It was typical Aushev to pull something from the bag at the eleventh hour. Still in his early fifties, he was considered young to be heading up the 2nd Chief Directorate, a GRU department he had made very much his own. Knowing of his tough reputation, the liberals had tried to remove him on several occasions. But Aushev was too wily to be put out to pasture just yet. And too clean to be implicated in any post-coup purges.
The radicals were wary of Aushev principally because of his vast knowledge. Almost thirty years in the Army’s intelligence service had made him a very powerful man.
In times of crisis — and there was little doubt Russia was facing its worst since the Great Patriotic War — it was good to know that he, Shabanov, General Aushev, and men like him were all on the same side.
CHAPTER 1
Boris Sinitsky shunned a slight feeling of dizziness when he emerged from the depths of the London Underground into the damp summer’s evening above London’s Hyde Park Corner tube station. It seemed as if he had been breathing a nauseating bouquet of stale sweat and luxuriant perfume the entire day.
He looked at his watch. His run around the network had taken him an hour. He had not been followed.
His stomach churned as he recalled the air of the trains, heavy with the aroma of expensive soaps, aftershave, perfumes, and the soiled clothing of the tramp in the seat beside him. The odours had combined in his head, wreaking havoc with his senses.
He sucked in the cool air of the park and let the nausea subside.
London was a long way from the 2nd Chief Directorate’s headquarters in Krasnovodsk Street, a narrow, nondescript alleyway in the tree-lined suburbs behind Moscow’s Dynamo football stadium.
Sinitsky was only too well aware of the importance of his mission. He felt proud to have been entrusted with the secret. His task was to obtain the missing piece of the jigsaw from a man who had cause to volunteer it.
It was almost dark. Away from the throng his sense of isolation was acute. The case hung heavily in his right hand.
A newspaper hoarding caught his eye. More unrest predicted back home, and in the old Central Asian republics. The stark words of the headline stiffened his resolve. He walked briskly along the subway that led under Hyde Park corner. Above him he could hear the rumble of traffic as it inched towards Piccadilly and Marble Arch. The lights in the dank, gloomy passageway flickered.
As he crossed Rotten Row, a few pedestrians passed him, their heads bent low against the drizzle that had begun to fall in the gathering darkness. When he reached the long, rectangular pond he turned left and started counting. One, two…