"Swear-words?" she said.
"In Russia, there are no such things. The Communist system was so pure that after seventy five years of it, all obscenities were eliminated."
Her teasing kept everyone in good spirits. Of course there was no question of her joining the team in the field, but as we broke up from one lesson, to butter her up, I said, "Val, I wish to hell you were coming with us."
"Get me a visa and give me a Gepard," she quipped back, 'and I'll be there."
One little task I set the lads was the creation of lapel badges bearing their names in English and Russian. Obviously we didn't want anything that would flap about, so I told everyone to make up a cream-coloured linen patch, with black writing on it, that could be stitched on the tunic of the Russian DPMs we would be wearing. My own name came out as ZHORDI, Mal was exactly the same MAL and Rick was RIK, pronounced as if he stank.
Johnny became ZHONNI, Dusty DOSTI, and Pete PYOTR.
Even Pavarotti could be easily transliterated. But the one name that knackered everybody was Whinger. His real name was Billy, but he'd been known as Whinger for so long that none of his mates could call him anything else. The trouble was, the Russian alphabet has no W, and the nearest we could get to it was VUINZHA.
Among the lads there was a good deal of talk about money, because this looked like being a lucrative trip. What with allowances for food, accommodation, laundry, arduous conditions and so on, our pay was going to build up to two or three times its normal level. The expenses for the whole trip had been reckoned at 6,000 per head, and four grand of this had been paid up front. Anyone prudent put most of the cash into his bank account, but Pavarotti went straight into Monmouth and put down a deposit on a thirty-five-year-old scarlet XJ12O Jag which he'd been fancying for months. I put three grand into my building society account and changed the rest of the money into dollars, insisting that the paymaster got me new notes from the bank, with no year earlier than 1997 on them and in low denominations, because I'd heard that fifties and older notes wouldn't be accepted in Russia.
When we asked Sasha about the black market for money, he said that it had collapsed. He explained that Moscow, like all Russian cities, had become so flooded with US dollars that anyone could get them, and the rate of exchange was the same everywhere about seven roubles to the dollar, ten or eleven to a British pound. In the previous year, he told us, following rampant inflation, the rate had swollen to outrageous proportions: 7,000 roubles to the dollar, 10,000 to the pound. But then on 1 January the Russian government had divided the currency rate by a thousand in an attempt to simplify things and calm the economy down.
More briefings about the Russian Mafia came from another visiting professional from the Firm, this one a smooth, silver haired fellow called Edgar (his surname). Again, Sasha was able to supplement his information, which had been collected from intelligence reports, with first-hand knowledge. The briefings confirmed what Sasha had already told us that the main Mafia activity was extortion, and the worst threat was against people with big money: leading businessmen, heads of companies, bankers. We learnt that over the past few years various branches of the Mafia had risen to prominence and then faded away. The first to show had been the Solntsevo gang, named after the scruffy suburb on the south-western fringes of Moscow where its members lived. Lately, however, that lot had apparently yielded supremacy to the Ismailovskaya Mafia, also based in Moscow and led by a notorious crook called Sergei Askyonov.
This group, with its strong military connections, claimed to have a private army of more than a thousand men.
Edgar, an intelligent guy, quickly appreciated Sasha's worth, and started asking for comments about what he himself was saying.
"One reason for so much crime," he told us, 'is that there's a fantastic amount of paper money actually in circulation. On the one hand, people don't trust the banks. On the other, inflation's moving so fast that they reckon they get a better return by having dollar bills in their possession. So there's cash everywhere, and a big incentive for robbery. Is that right, Major?"
"Certainly!" Sasha gave a vigorous nod.
"More dollars in Russia now than in rest of world."
"Outside the States," Edgar corrected.
"Of course. But that is very much money.
The lectures helped us all to refine the aims of our course.
With kidnappings so common, hostage rescue was obviously of prime importance, and we decided to concentrate on that. EMOE explosive method of entry, or blowing in doors and windows was clearly going to be another key area. A third vital subject was ambush drills, and a fourth, the body guarding of VIPs.
Strictly speaking, BG work fell outside the remit of the Subversive Action Wing, but as all the members of our team had been on specialist close-protection courses it seemed natural to include the subject in our syllabus.
Sasha's tales of the Mafia were so lurid that they acted on the team like shots of adrenalin. All right, we were going in on a training task, but soon every one of the lads was dreaming that we would somehow become directly involved in a Tiger Force hit and get some action ourselves. And it was obvious from the relish with which he described anti-Mafia operations that Sacha was a born killer.
"In Gorki, my home town, is this godfather figure," he told us one evening.
"Real name Borzov. But he calls himself Nepobedinyi — Unvincible."
"Invincible," I suggested.
"Yes Invincible. He thinks nobody can keen him. He is former criminal, many years in gaol. Like I told you, he is true vor v zakone, a criminal in the law. Now his chauffeur drives him in bullet-proof Mercedes. Always four bodyguards with him when he moves around. He lives in a palace like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, almost. At night, in the yard round his house, a Siberian tiger is wandering. Like a guard dog. A guard cat, you say?"
"Some cat," said Pavarotti.
"Two hundred kilos," Sasha said, not joking.
"We heard he feeds this cat on human flesh, his enemies. This Invincible wears a Patek gold watch. His body is covered in pictures…
tattoos. Small Mafia are not allowed such pictures. If some man gets one without authority, he can be keel led But Invincible has on his chest a portrait of Lenin. And why? Because no one would dare to shoot at our great Communist leader. On his knees, he has pictures of stars. And why? That means he never kneels for anyone.
Sasha broke off and gave a quick, rather nasty laugh.
"But one day soon, I think we make him kneel."
When Sasha flew back to Moscow we missed his cheerful company, and I looked forward to seeing him again when he met our recce party at Sheremetyevo Airport.
"What's the weather going to be like?" I asked him before he went.
"In Russia, autumn is one month ahead. Days warm, nights cool. Typical September."
His final instruction as I saw him off was, "Breeng plugs."
"Plugs?"
"For bath and basin. In Russian hotels, such things do not exist."
FOUR
We had the weekend clear for our own preparation, then on Monday morning we set off for Heathrow myself, Whinger and Rick. Obviously the commander and second in command had to go, and we selected Rick as a third partly because he was one of our signallers he and Pete Pascoe were level when it came to radio work but mainly because he was our best linguist. He had an incredible knack of picking up languages informally, learning wherever he went: already he spoke French and German, and Russian seemed to be giving him no problems.