Next morning, Misha had Ivan put word out on the street that a fashion consignment was newly arrived from Italy, and by the afternoon the shelves had been cleared at many times the price Misha had paid. Only the sample styles remained hanging on the rails. Alina, who had been helping, look frazzled; the morning had been a free-for-all, with traders jostling each other for attention.
He counted her out fifty roubles. ‘I have another job for you, if you are interested. I want you to go visit those people who left empty-handed and then the ones who bought, take advanced orders, 25 per cent upfront, US dollars, balance on delivery, 10 per cent for you, all right? Just traders – we need volume.’
Alina nodded enthusiastically. ‘I’ll be on it as soon as I finish this coffee.’ She was clearly pleased with the turn of events. ‘When are you going to bring in the next order?’ she asked, putting on her jacket.
‘Let’s see how you do on the sales side.’
Misha went out onto the street and found Ivan smoking a cigarette in animated conversation with Rodion. He handed him a wad of dollars.
‘You were right about Gleb. I could have had my whole consignment impounded. The End. And I’ve been thinking… I do need security, plenty of it. I have a good feeling about all this – better than that. How about you running that for me… security? You know how it works. You’ve got contacts… Rodion, for instance.’ Misha mentioned a figure in US dollars many times what he was making trading CDs on the street and nightclub security work. ‘And you won’t have to be sharing digs with me forever, not on that! What do you think?’
‘Seems like I’m about to get paid for what I’ve always done for free,’ he said smirking. ‘Okay.’
‘Good,’ said Misha, delighted. ‘Have we still got the van?’
Ivan pointed down the street at its tail poking from a side turning.
‘Right… first job.’ He looked at his watch – three thirty.
‘We’ll take the van, drop off the money at the lock-up, and then pay a call on Gleb.’
They parked one hundred metres down from the café. Misha recognised Gleb’s man standing on the doorway. The three of them climbed out of the van and broke up, taking different directions. Ivan approached the café from the left, Rodion from the right and Misha from across the street. The guard on the door had no time to react. Rodion felled him with one blow to the solar plexus. He let out a loud ouff sound and collapsed onto the pavement. Inside, Ivan grabbed hold of the second minder, bending his arm behind his back and spinning him around so that his face was pushed hard against the rough plaster. Gleb, startled, jumped to his feet as Misha stepped forward, kicked over the table and punched him hard in the face, breaking his glasses. He fell heavily to the ground, gushing blood from his nose. Misha bent down, prised open Gleb’s front pocket and extracted a wad of dollar bills. He counted out $300 – the price he had paid – and threw the rest back at him.
‘I like to think I’m a reasonable man, but you let me down badly, Gleb. I could have lost my entire life savings, such as they are.’
Gelb stared at him. ‘What do you want?’ he said finally, trying to stem the bleeding with a handkerchief.
‘Exit visas and import permits, real ones, free for the next six months. I’ll send my man. Let me down and you won’t live to regret it.’
FEBRUARY 1987
Chapter 11
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN VELIZH AND CURILOVO, 100 KILOMETRES NORTH OF SMOLENSK
‘So, what happened?’ Colonel Yuri Romanavich Marov asked the two men.
One of them pointed at a fallen tree, fifty metres ahead; it had been pushed into the roadside gully. By its size the colonel estimated it would have blocked the entire highway; the freighter would have had no chance negotiating a way round it. He walked over to a pile of freshly made sawdust and idly kicked his boot through it.
‘They hit us with machine-gun fire the moment we stopped. The driver died instantly. We managed to make it to the forest. We got one of them.’ His friend pointed at the twisted body in the middle of the open road not far from the fallen tree.
Yuri looked up at the MTV hovering overhead, momentarily blinded by its spotlight. He looked down at his watch, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness – one in the morning. Ten heavily armed soldiers formed a perimeter around the scene, facing outwards. Yuri walked over to the trailer-less Kamaz, slewed at a forty-five degree angle across the road. It was a wonder anyone had survived. The cab was riddled with bullets, its windows shattered and tyres shredded.
He nodded at the soldiers standing next to the two men to lower their weapons.
‘They hooked up the trailer to a new truck.’
A sergeant searching the clothes of the dead man came up empty-handed.
‘How many men?’ Yuri asked.
‘Eight… ten? It’s difficult to say.’
‘And what colour was the hijackers’ truck and the trailer?’
‘Red and orange. Their car was a dark sedan of some sort. I didn’t get a clear look.’
‘And what time did they hit you?’ asked the captain.
‘Ten forty-five, it must’ve been around then.’
One of the soldiers handed Yuri a map.
‘What do you think, Captain? They must be somewhere within this circle.’ The captain nodded agreement. He was probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight, thought Yuri, maybe only five years younger than himself. ‘Order the other MTV to search here.’ He pointed at the map. ‘We’ll take this highway. And, Captain, they are not to engage until they have orders from me.’
The captain turned to the radio operator and passed on the new order to his lieutenant some twenty kilometres to the east in the second helicopter.
Five minutes later they were airborne again. Keeping low, the MTV followed the highway north towards Usvyaty. The Klimov gas turbos made normal conversation impossible. Yuri noticed several soldiers nod off, rocked by the motion of the MTV as it clattered through the night sky. A corporal idly stripped and reassembled his Kalashnikov, trying to outdo the private opposite.
The voice of the reconnaissance officer from the second MTV cut into his headset, loud and clear against the low-level shushing of white noise.
‘We have sight of a cargo freighter, red cab, orange-topped trailer, dark car following… five men in the car.’ He read out the coordinates. The flight captain tilted eastward and pushed the MTV to maximum speed.
‘Rendezvous fifteen minutes, Colonel.’
Yuri ordered the second MTV to maintain a discrete distance and track with infrared.
‘Captain, I want Lieutenant Ryzhkov’s platoon to take up a position ten kilometres to the north on the M20 just above Pustoska.’ Yuri read out the map reference. ‘They are to stop them there. Remind him, Captain, they are heavily armed, probably ex-army. He is not to underestimate them… and let’s try not to damage the trailer – not if we can help it,’ he added wryly. He could only guess what the manifest was really worth… no doubt many times the number he had seen on the import papers.
The two MTVs deposited their cargo of soldiers at the reference point, touching down lightly before heaving away into a velvet black sky. Back up at fifteen hundred feet, bent over the infrared scanner edging the reconnaissance man aside, Yuri studied the scene below. This was going to be the captain’s action. He had decided not to intervene. Soldiers unwound a heavy belt of three-inch spikes across the road while the sergeant stood in the middle, barking orders. The rest of the platoon fanned out along the highway as two snipers took up firing positions fifty metres behind the barrier. Yuri imagined them checking their night-sights, making last-second checks: safety catch, ammunition, a clear line of fire. One of them stood up and moved five metres to the left and settled back down again using a boulder to steady his aim. Ten kilometres to the south his MTV picked up the small convoy of two vehicles moving steadily towards them.