No threat presented itself, and this time my navigation was spot on we reached the embankment without a false turn. There was a chance that the dicker we'd seen before, or some replacement, might still be on station, so we put in one drive past cruising westwards along the gentle, left-hand curve of Sophieskaya Quay, past the pink and-white gateway, then past the Embassy, both on our left. To our right, across the river, the great buildings of the Kremlin were splendidly floodlit, and faint reflections gleamed in the wet tarmac of the embankment. A couple of cars came from the opposite direction, and a man and a woman were walking away from us, but there was nobody loitering.
At the end, before the bridge approach, Whinger pulled into the kerb and stopped in a dark area between street lamps.
"Right, lads," I said.
"Just to confirm. The time now is 2105. Dropoff will be in five minutes, at 2110, near enough. A couple of minutes to reach the stable. We'll assume Toad can manage the locks in five minutes. If he has any trouble, Pay, you have a try. That means we should be in the tunnel by 2120 at the latest. Half an hour to suss it out. Back at the ladder by 2150. Pick-up at 2155 from this street, south side, east of the gateway. OK?"
Everyone nodded.
"I don't think the radios will work underground," I added, 'but everyone stay on listening watch. Pay and I are One, Whinger Two, Toad Three. Our ERV is over there, under the bridge. Right, then let's go."
Whinger swung round and drove back at a moderate pace. Now the gateway was on our side of the road. One car overtook at speed, and we watched its tail-lights draw rapidly away into the distance.
Whinger was slowing.
"Nothing behind," I said.
"Now!"
In seconds the three of us were out and under the gateway. I heard, rather than saw Whinger pull away behind us.
I led us forward into the dark courtyard, keeping to the right-hand wall. Above our heads, lights were showing in a couple of windows; straight ahead the little church sat hunched in shadows, jutting from the left wall of the yard, and the inner road swung past its entrance at the right-hand end into a second yard at the back.
From an intensive study of the plans I had every inch of the layout in my head. Five metres past the door of the church we'd come to the end of the building on our right. Beyond it, set back farther to our right, was a run of smaller structures old stables. The second little building from our end would be open fronted or at least without a door. The head of the shaft was in the back of that shed, behind a wooden partition.
Moving quickly, we came level with the door of the church, which stood slightly open with slivers of light shining through top and bottom. Women were talking inside, their voices rising and falling. We reached the corner of the tall building. There, just visible in the gloom, stood the low range, a few metres farther on. A dozen quick steps brought us to an open doorway.
The wooden lintel was sagging, and I ducked to go under it.
Inside, the darkness was so intense that I had to use my pencil torch. The beam picked out an old wooden partition of horizontal planks, extending half-way out across the stable. Beyond it the earth floor was covered with rough, half-rotten hay. Raking some aside with my fingers, I felt iron: the shaft cover. Quickly I cleared debris away from two padlocks the two we'd been shown in the photo, which were not rusty but coated in dust.
Clearly it was some time since they'd been touched.
"Stay in the doorway," I breathed at Pavarotti, and he faced outwards, on guard, as Toad went to work, opening the barrels of the locks with his levers. I held my torch-beam steady on his hands, wincing at every little click and scrape.
The first lock gave itself up easily after no more than a couple of minutes, but the second was more stubborn. As Toad fiddled and shook, Pay let out a sudden hiss over his shoulder. Instantly I doused my torch. Peering past our sentry, through the doorway, I saw two women come out of the church and walk towards the big building.
We let them get clear, then started again. At last there was a louder click, and the hasp of the second lock fell back. As I carefully lifted the cover its two hinges groaned. My torch, pointing straight down, lit up a square shaft with brick walls, and I could see at a glance that it was big enough to take the component parts of Apple. To make certain, I'd brought with me a piece of string thirty inches long the maximum dimension we needed and when I stretched it out from one edge it ended nearly a foot short of the other. That was one problem solved.
The disappointment was the ladder or rather the lack of one.
Instead of a succession of built-in steel rungs there were only two, a foot apart, close to the top of the shaft. From the holes and pits in the brickwork lower down, it looked as though the rest had been ripped out.
"We need the ladder," I whispered.
I unrolled the springy bundle from my bergen and made one end fast round both hinges. Then I pulled on my overalls, and I heard Pavarotti rustling as he too kit ted up.
"All set?" I asked.
"Fine."
"Right, then, Toad. We'll see you in half an hour."
I lowered my legs into the shaft and eased my weight down the wire rungs, feeling for them with one foot after the other.
Fourteen changes of grip, and my feet touched bottom. As soon as I stepped off the ladder it went slack. I knew they'd feel the change up top, and that Pay would start down.
I heard him scraping on the brickwork as he descended, then felt him touch down beside me. The moment he let go of the ladder, the end went snaking up as Toad reeled it in. His brief was to seal us down with two spare locks he'd been carrying, then to hide up somewhere close by until the time came to release us. That way, if by any thousand-to-one chance somebody did come along to check the padlocks, he'd see nothing amiss. Toad would be in radio contact with Whinger throughout, and could call him in to lay on a diversion if anything started to go wrong.
When I heard the cover come down with a faint thud, I felt a shudder of claustrophobia run through me. If anything serious befell Toad and Whinger, we'd be sealed down here for the duration. Pay was obviously having the same panic, or worse: I could hear him breathing deeply and effing and blinding under his breath.
The air was row sty and moist, full of a smell of damp decay.
Our head-torches revealed a tunnel with a horse-shoe section,
lined with bricks. The roof was just high enough for me to stand upright, but Pay, who was a couple of inches taller, had to crouch slightly to keep his head clear.
Somehow perhaps because of the colour of the Kremlin walls I'd expected the bricks to be red. In fact they were dirty cream, or had been: much of the surface was black with fungus or slime, and when I touched the wall beside my shoulder my fingertips slid along the wet surface leaving pale streaks. In many places individual bricks had crumbled or fallen out, so that there were frequent piles of rubble on the floor. That gave me encouragement; if the tunnel had been in immaculate condition, any tampering we did would have been that much more obvious.
I bent down and examined the floor. It was evenly covered with damp dust paste, almost the same dull colour as the walls.
There was no sign of any disturbance not even any traces of rats, which I'd expected to find. I saw that we wouldn't be able to help leaving footprints.
We'd measured the distances, and I had them in my head: 160 metres to the river bank, 110 metres across the river, seventy five to the Kremlin walclass="underline" 345 metres in all to our preferred site.