When I went forward I was going to count.
"Ready?" I whispered.
Pay didn't answer.
"Eh!" I went.
"Let's go."
"You go!" he gasped in a peculiar voice.
"I'm staying here."
I could tell he was having problems just from the way he sounded. When I put out a hand and touched his arm, I felt him shaking violently. I turned the beam of my head-torch on his face and saw beads of sweat trickling down his cheeks.
"Get hold of yourself!" I snapped.
"We haven't got time to piss about." In my mind I added, A great big feller like you, too!
But I knew his hang-up was getting to him.
A few seconds later he said unsteadily, "I'm all right now.
"Come on, then."
I moved forward, counting. For 102 paces the floor of the tunnel remained level. Then it began to descend.
"Going down under the river," I said.
"Aye," Pavarotti agreed.
"I reckon."
At the start of the slope was a big heap of debris. Such a chunk had fallen out of the upper right-hand wall and roof that the pile of bricks stretched across the tunnel floor to the base of the opposite wall, and we had to scramble over the lowest part of it. When I directed my head-lamp at the raw wall where the bricks had been, I saw that it consisted of moist grey clay.
"At least we can dig into that," I muttered.
"Pity we can't put the bloody thing in right here. Save messing about.
"It's too far from the proper site."
We were still talking in whispers, partly out of habit, partly because we reckoned any sudden noise in a place that had been silent for generations might precipitate a further collapse of roof or wall.
We crept on again, but after a few more steps I stopped. My torch was picking out some difference in the texture of the floor ahead. Instead of light grey, it looked black. I stared for a minute, then said, "Shit! It's water. The fucker's flooded."
"Never," said Pavarotti.
"If part of the tunnel was flooded, the whole thing would be full of water
I saw the logic of what he said but he was wrong. At the point where the water started the floor was still dropping away, so that as we continued forward the flood gradually deepened.
The water was cold and black and stank of decay, and we had no option but to wade into it until we were knee, then thigh, then bollock deep. Only when the surface was above our waists could we see that, a few more yards ahead, it came right to the roof.
"Jesus Christ!" said Pavarotti.
"We're knackered. We can't get through this lot."
We pulled back and started wringing the filthy, black water out of our trousers.
"Pretty obvious, isn't it?" said Pay.
"Of course it's going to be flooded, under the bloody river."
For a minute I sat on the deck, holding my head in my hands, trying to think constructively.
"There's no way we're going to get closer to the Kremlin anywhere else."
"Why not forget this bastard?" Pay suggested.
"Get the other one in first and then see?"
"No, no," I told him.
"This is the one they want. I'm sure of that. We've got to crack it. What we need to get through this lot is breathing gear and dry-suits."
"Yeah. But how do we know what happens the other side of the water? If there is another side. If the rest of the tunnel's flooded we're buggered. Jesus, I hate this!"
"It must be quite a small leak," I said.
"Otherwise, like you said, the whole tunnel would be full. Maybe the pressure's equalised itself somehow or mud's filtered into the fissure."
"Let's get the hell out, anyway.
I'd been planning to sweep away our footprints behind us, but I realised now that, even if we went to that trouble, we'd still leave fresh marks and it would be obvious that somebody had been down here. In any case, the chances of anyone else coming down in the next few days seemed infinitesimal.
We were back under the access shaft just twelve minutes after leaving it. Eighteen minutes to wait. I tried the radio again but got no response. I wasn't going to shout, just in case some Russian was passing the old stable up top. I imagined Toad, on the lurk up there, and Whinger, on standby in the Volga somewhere along the embankment. Maybe they were chatting to each other on the radio.
"Have to wait," I whispered.
"Let's take a stroll in the other direction."
That didn't get us far. This time I wasn't counting the steps, but about a hundred metres to the south the tunnel was blocked by a major fall. The damage to the roof and walls was so extensive that I felt sure they'd been bulldozed in or deliberately dropped by hand. Bricks, rubble and clay were tumbled in an impenetrable mass.
Back under the shaft, we waited. We peeled off our sodden overalls, but still we were soaked to the waist and higher. Soon we were pretty cold. I went over the various levels of our fall back plan in my mind. The first was that if Toad got accosted in the yard, he'd pretend he was drunk and had staggered in there to sleep it off The next level was that if we three didn't reappear, Whinger would park the car out of the way and come looking for us. The final stage laid down that if all four of us weren't back in camp by 6:00 a.m." the rest of the team would come out to search. I knew that in an emergency we could seek sanctuary in the grounds of the Embassy, but that could only be a last resort because it would blow the whole Apple programme.
Spot on 2150 we heard faint metallic noises above our head a clinking and scraping. Then came a slight change of pressure as Toad lifted the cover. A few seconds later the ladder-end flicked down beside us. I sent Pay up first, and heard him grunting with effort as he climbed. When the ladder twitched twice, I started up myself.
In the blackness of the shed I whispered, "OK?" and Toad said, "Fine' as he undid the ladder, closed the hatch and slipped the original padlocks back through the securing rings.
We pulled some of the rotten hay back over the cover and stood listening in the doorway.
"There's still something on in the church," said Toad quietly.
"People keep coming back and forth. They're crossing to that doorway with the light showing.
We were so wet and filthy we looked like a couple of drunks who'd fallen in the river, so even if we did meet someone there was a chance they'd pay no attention.
"Let's go," I said.
We hustled along the edge of the yard, past the church door, back to the entrance gate. We'd hardly crossed the road on to the pavement beside the river when we saw a car coming in our direction.
In my earpiece Whinger's voice went, "I have you visual," and I knew it was him. Ten seconds later he pulled up beside us, and we were safely on board.
"All quiet up top?" I asked.
"Beautiful. But, Christ, what have you been doing?" He turned and glared at me.
"Eating caviar and drinking vodka," I told him.
"What's the matter?"
"You stink like the arse hole of the universe."
"Thanks, mate. That's what it's like down there. Stinking. The bastard tunnel's lined with shit and what's more, it's full of water.
"Could you get through it?"
"Not this time. We waded as far as we could, but we need breathing kit and dry-suits. Head for base, Whinge. We're soaked to the bloody skin."
Back at Balashika I called straight through to the duty officer in Hereford on the secure Satcom link. We'd set up our equipment in the office-cum-ops room, with the dish aerial on the roof of the building. Daily sweeps for bugs showed that the microphone in the kitchen was still live, so nobody talked any kind of shop in there; but there'd been no reaction to Steve's disabling of the bug in the office, and we reckoned that room was secure.
We were back at 10:40 Moscow time; England was three hours behind, and I knew the duty officer would be around in the ops room in Stirling Lines. Technically, the connection was perfect; if it hadn't been for the half-second lag in transmission as the message went up to the satellite and down again, I might have been in the next room rather than 2,000 miles away.