"Black will deploy on the ground by vehicle. Their job will be to drive up to the front of Block A and secure the building by capturing or shooting the two guards we saw. Timing will be critical. They'll need to reach the door at the moment the assaults on the flat go in not before.
"If possible, we'll position sniper commentators in Block C the green block. From there they'll be able to observe the windows of the target flat and report movements. When everyone's deployed, we'll use EMOE to blow the door and at least one window from both sides of the flat and simultaneously.
The actions and timings of all three teams will be coordinated by radio.
"I'll be the leader of Red team.
"Whinger here will lead Blue team. Red and Blue will each consist of the leader and three men. Black team will be commanded by an officer nominated by Ivan. For com ms purposes, the snipers will be designated Green."
Ivan asked Anna a couple of questions in Russian, and she gave him answers herself Then she said, "He is afraid control will be difficult because of the language."
"I've thought of that. If we can have you at the command centre, there'll be no problem. You'll be able to translate and pass things on. The only English commands your colleagues need to understand will be the two I'll use at the end: "Stand by, stand by" and "Go! Go! Go!"
Anna immediately translated these. '"Stand by" is Orushiye k boyu," she said.
"That means literally "weapons ready". Go is posh ii. Easy!"
Ivan smiled briefly as he nodded his agreement.
I went on to emphasise that Whinger and I were not in the business of killing Russian citizens, whether Mafiosi or otherwise. All we would do was get the assault teams into position and blow the door and windows: it would be up to the Russians to clear the flat. Again, there was a murmur of agreement. I could see that Wolf-face was still ticking with irritation.
"Ask Ivan, please: what are his intentions? Is he aiming to capture Keet or kill him?"
As Anna translated, a faint smile spread over Ivan's face but it did not extend to his eyes. The only answer he gave was, "It depends."
"In any case," I went on, 'what we need immediately is a forward mounting base. Those railway sheds behind the wall any chance of your taking one over?"
Ivan sent a colleague to make a telephone call. I began going into the nitty-gritty: ladders, ropes, explosive charges, weapons, com ms I said that Whinger and I would carry pistols only, for self-defence in an extremity, but added that the Russian members of Red and Blue teams should take Gepards with short magazines as well as their pistols. The guys in the Black team should have silenced weapons, to whack the ground-floor guards with minimum disturbance.
Within a couple of minutes an answering call came back: inside the railway complex, it said, were the offices of a company operating steam trips in a joint venture with a Swiss tourist firm. The place had modern communications, and also a large, empty engine shed in which we could assemble our kit and lay on some quick training.
Once Ivan had nominated the men for each of the teams, we had only a few hours in which to sort them out. My three Nikolai Two, Igor and Misha were all built like brick shit houses and well versed in abseiing.
The railway office and shed turned out a big bonus. By midday Ivan had sent the normal staff home, taken the place over and set up a command post and control centre in the main office, with a dish aerial on the roof. The engine shed was high enough for us to put in some abseil practice: with ropes anchored to the steel girders under the roof, we had about fifteen feet clear below us.
Ivan's video showed quite a few possible anchor-points on the roof of Block B the tops of lift-shafts, ventilation pipes and so on and I foresaw no trouble there.
From our study of the architects' plans we knew that the flat had two bedrooms and a living room ranged along the southern balcony face, down which we'd be coming. On the other side, along the internal corridor, were the kitchen, hallway, separate lavatory, a bathroom and a big storage cupboard. To us on the outside and to the snipers positioned in Block C the s windows were the first four from the right-hand end on the twelfth floor. I named them Okno Odin, Okno Dva (Window One, Window Two) and so on, numbering from the right. One was the first bedroom, two the second, three was the top half of a door which opened inwards from the balcony into the sitting room, and four another window in the same room.
Ivan agreed that we should time the hit for 2130, in the hope of catching the big players in the sitting room. Therefore we decided to blow the window-door and go in that way.
Whinger, meanwhile, was sorting a route for his team to enter via the fire-escape door on the roof, and come down the emergency stairs to position themselves outside the flat entrance.
I tried to impress on Ivan how easy it would be to create a blue on-blue to have the Red and Blue teams firing at each other.
But in fact the layout of the flat gave us two natural territories in which to operate. For Red, the balcony team, the obvious field of fire was the sitting room; for Blue, entering from the corridor, the hallway would be the main theatre. We made it a fundamental rule that Red team members would only engage targets remaining in the sitting room and not fire at anyone running through into the hall. Blue would be free to fire into the hall or either of the bedrooms.
Of the three guys allotted to me, I was happy enough with Nikolai and Igor. The one who worried me was Misha, one of the relics of SOBR. Sasha had put him in my team because he'd done abseiling, but our experience so far suggested that he had a low IQ, and wasn't all that co-operative either.
No good worrying about that now.
I took the team through our sequence of actions again and again. We'd abseil down to the balcony, aiming to establish ourselves on it thirty seconds before the raid was due to go in.
We'd need to be extremely careful in our movements: not to clank our weapons against the metalwork of the balustrade, not to let a boot or elbow bump on a window. For the last few seconds we'd crouch against the wall of the flat, under the windows. As soon as I confirmed by radio that Whinger's team was in position, I'd call, "Stand by, stand by… Go!" then crack off the door charge and follow it instantly with a stun grenade.
Seeing the blank looks on their faces, I started to flap a bit. I knew what standard they'd reached, and it wasn't as high as we needed. A fully fledged SAS assaulter is so highly trained that his reactions are instantaneous. These guys were nowhere near that level. Nevertheless, since Igor was the sharpest of our team, I detailed him to be first into the room.
"The second the grenade blows, you're through." I told him via Anna.
"When you go in, stay on your feet and move to the left. None of this rolling around we've been practising.
"You other two, give him covering fire through the blown out window. Aim outwards into the corners of the room. Don't fire straight at the door into the hall, otherwise rounds may go through and hit your own guys coming from the other side."
When Igor protested about being first in, I told him he didn't need to worry. The godfathers inside would be deafened and blinded by the stun-grenade.
Suitable ladders took a bit of finding. There were some in the Omon stores but they were too short and heavy for our purpose.
It was Sasha who had the idea of borrowing better kit off the nearest branch of the fire service. They came up with an extending set of four three-metre sections, made from aluminium, well machined and snugly fitting. The overall length was eleven metres, and since the gap between the corners of the buildings showed on the architects' plans as nine metres, we would have a one-metre overlap at either end.