Ivan took Richard and Robin under his wing when they were in the Zubr Volgograd, which so swiftly became his territory even though Caleb Maina was its captain. He did this for reasons that were not immediately obvious to either of them — though they, too, adopted the overpoweringly cheery young man. For Ivan knew his special forces. And he knew the men who were slowly filling up the soldier spaces on Caleb’s Zubr Volgograd, by reputation if not in person. But they all, oddly enough, seemed to know him and he became their natural leader long before Richard worked out that this had little to do with his rank as senior lieutenant — Stárshiy Leytenánt, as Kebila had called him — and more to do with his right to wear a Krapoviy or red beret.
So that, one morning late in the second week, Ivan took Richard and Robin down to Volgograd’s main area, which was every bit as large as Stalingrad’s. While the morning was still cool, all the men who had come through the airport during the last ten days were engaged in fearsome exercises. Silent, apart from the odd grunt of effort. Focused. Honing themselves to a level Richard — who understood only too well that he was not special in quite their way — had never dreamed of attaining. Preparing themselves for eventualities he hoped with all his heart to avoid. He exchanged glances with Robin who shrugged, mouthed, ‘Boys!’ and rolled her eyes.
But Ivan clearly had a purpose in mind. A point to prove. And the little talk he gave his two guests as the three of them walked through the echoing enormity of the place was his way of proving it. ‘You see those six there,’ Ivan began. ‘Army types. Military intelligence GRU regulars. Steady as rocks. Like those ones over there, the VDV airborne. They’re elite soldiers, like the Paras and the Green Berets. There’s a good solid squad of a dozen army men in all. They’ve been to Chechnya — right across the Caucasus, North and South Ossetia, and lived to tell the tale. That’s taken some doing, I can tell you. If the going gets tough and you can’t find me, you stick by them. They’ll never let you down.’ No sooner had he finished speaking than the men he was talking about stopped their individual routines, split into pairs and started practising dazzlingly quick fight moves.
Ivan seemed hardly to notice. ‘But that little squad over there,’ he continued, directing Robin’s attention with a huge hand on her shoulder as light as a feather, as irresistible as gravity. ‘Different kettle of fish. FSB. Anti-terrorists — Alpha group and Vympel. They’ve been to Chechnya too, but more likely with intelligence rather than on the front line — though they work both sides, like your SAS. They’re here because they’re expert on how units like the Army of Christ are structured. How they arm and feed themselves. Where they get their financing, drugs, bullets. And how to go about stopping them. In the field. In their supply lines. In their heartlands. Eradicating them. Dead. Buried. It was Vympel and Alpha group, you may remember, who closed down the siege in the Beslan School back in 2004, though none of these guys were directly involved in that. Some of their fathers may have been involved in the storming of the Supreme Soviet building back in 1993, though. This is the new breed, however. And don’t believe all you read about how the special forces started falling to pieces after perestroika.’
Robin could believe him. While the regular army men were still working one-on-one, these guys had started three-on-one and nobody appeared to be pulling any punches.
‘Will you be joining any of this, Ivan?’ she asked as a man the size of a single-decker bus went sailing through the air to crash on to the deck like a falling tree — only to bounce erect, laughing.
‘I’ve done my stint,’ he chuckled. ‘And I’m down for weapons later.’
‘Weapons?’ she teased. ‘That doesn’t sound too tough.’
‘We do it stark naked and blindfold, under water. And we don’t get to breathe till we’ve field-stripped and reassembled our weapon. Even if we get our what-nots tangled in our cocking mechanisms.’
‘And if you don’t do it in time?’ she asked, fascinated. Not least, thought Richard, by the mental picture.
‘You don’t breathe and you get sent home. Sometimes in a box. But I wanted to show you that last group over there, you see them? Police, or rather Politzia: Vityaz and RUS. The Vityaz have the same areas of expertise as the Vympel but their intelligence work is more internal. If the Beslan siege had been organized by the late Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Moskva brigada Mafiya kidnappers, say, instead of Shamil Basayev’s separatist Riyadus-Salikhin Battalion, then it would have been Vityaz and not the Vympel who went in.
‘Those guys doing the knife fighting — the ones with the real knives beside them, they’re the RUS. They’re Politzia too, but they’re here because they travel. I’ve talked to a couple of them in depth and they’ve been all over the world. Negotiating, being trained; training. They’re the real Africa hands. They’ve actually been on the ground out here. Libya, DRC, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique. They know the place. They know the jungle. They’ll be training the others up as they go. And the OMON police special units guys there, they’re the transport section. Military transport.’
‘Spetsnaz. What does that actually mean, nowadays?’ asked Richard, finding even his usually encyclopaedic knowledge taxed beyond its limit.
‘In many ways it means that they’ve all had similar training, and that’s about it. The edges are beginning to blur these days, I must admit. And that’s before you start to address the fact that many of these chaps are like me — they’ve come out of service and gone into the private sector as guns for hire anyway. The army men, the GRU chaps over there, will have been trained to a high degree of expertise in weapons handling, rappelling, explosives, marksmanship, counter-terrorism, how to survive the most brutal beatings, hand-to-hand combat, climbing, diving and underwater combat, long-range marksmanship, emergency medical procedures and demolition. The VDV get all that plus extra parachute work. Some of them, the regiment forty-five men, get boat training too. Most of the rest will have had some, if not all, of it. And they will all have received training in how to fight with everything from knives to shovels — as well as with their bare fists, of course.’
‘They all look pretty experienced,’ persisted Robin. ‘What sort of combat experience will they have had?’
‘They’ll have been involved in situations like the Chechen problems, the 2008 South Ossetia war which kind of rolled over into East Prigorodny, the civil war in Tajikistan, the war in Abkhazia. Dagestan. Georgia. The insurgency in the North Caucasus. Fighting Al-Qaeda in Syria back in 2012. The FSB and Politzia men will have been involved in situations like the Beslan School siege that I mentioned: Alpha group and Vympel. More recently, there have been a string of internal terrorist outrages for them to deal with — or to clear up after. The Moscow market bombing, the Nazran bombing and the Nevsky Express bombing, the Moscow Metro bombings, the Stavropol concert bombing, and of course the Domodedovo International Airport bombing. More recently still, there was the Dnipropetrovsk bombing in Ukraine, and the Makhachkala incident in Dagestan. Anyone dealing with anything more recent than that’s probably still in uniform.’