"Maybe Anna can help on that."
"No!" He bridled.
"I arrange it through my own bosses."
"Think you can manage it?"
"Zheordie for you I arrange anything: even to become beautiful!"
When Anna swept in at 7:30 she brought good mug-shots of Usman Gaidar, aka Akula, the Shark a mean-looking fellow, in his forties, with short, dark hair, heavy eyebrows, lean, hollow cheeks and a prominent jaw. In the photos his teeth and gums seemed to protrude, pushing his lips out hence his name, maybe? Anna said the man was obsessive about protecting himself, and kept a private army of at least a hundred men to guard him.
She'd also brought telephoto pictures of the house he'd been building a tall, pale building with a steeply pointed roof, set into the side of a hill.
"It looks Scandinavian," I said.
"You're right." Anna turned the picture round on the table so that it faced her way.
"It was designed by Finnish architects. No expense spared. Marble floors at ground level. Fitness room and sauna lined with birch wood in the basement. Whole building airconditioned. Bullet-proof windows. It's not confirmed, but we have heard that he's building a nuclear shelter in the grounds by drilling into rock in the side of the mountain and lining the cavity with concrete and steel."
I came within a micro-second of making some stupid joke about getting a nuclear device for his nuclear shelter, but pulled myself up just in time and said instead, "The satellite imagery should show that, if the site's still fairly raw.
When the pictures came over from the States, through the Satcom and our secure computer, they proved brilliantly sharp, and a perfect supplement to the telephoto shots. What the satellite revealed most clearly was the layout of the house and its de fences The building stood on a forested hillside inside a perimeter fence, roughly square, with sides some 400 metres long. The line of the fence showed as a pale gash through the trees, as did the single road running up to the house from a cluster of other buildings on the bottom edge of the compound.
The villa was slightly off-centre closer to the top fence than the bottom and above it, towards the north-western corner, was a circular helipad. There was also another cleared area, nearer the house, which we assumed was the site of the shelter. A wider shot, of a bigger area, showed the river passing to the south of the site and, away to the right of it, the outskirts of Samashki village.
What caught my eye was an oblong open space in the forest, about two ks to the north-west. From its regular shape, it looked like a man-made field.
"Here!" I said to Sasha.
"This looks ideal as a place to drop into. A good opening in the trees, and far enough from the target.
"We land there?"
"That's right and walk in."
So much was visible on the satellite shots. The telephoto picture showed that the pine-covered hillside was steep, with outcrops of rock among the trees.
When I invited Whinger to make an independent assessment, he came up with the same plan as I had.
"Bugger the fence," he said.
"They'd have a job to electrify something that long and where's the power coming from, anyway? It doesn't even look as if it's finished. You could cut throught that, or climb it, no bother. Drop on this football field, or whatever it is, and tab it in. Piece of cake. There may be a patrol on the fence, but I doubt it. The defenders are going to be here, at the bottom, guarding the approach road. There's no other way any vehicle can get near the house."
"I reckon you're right," I agreed.
"And when the time comes, the same drill for the QRF: drop on the field, walk in, surround the house and cut it off from its defence force. A couple of guys with gym pis and a 66 should be enough to suppress anyone trying to come up the road. Look at these bends in the track — it's quite some climb."
With the basic plan in place, I was naturally on fire to get going.
Whinger and the rest of the lads went off to run the course.
Sasha had disappeared to organise our flight, so Anna went with the guys, to interpret, and I was left manning the phones with Terry, the signaller. The sensible thing would have been to get a couple of hours' kip, but although I lay on the bed, my adrenalin was pumping too fast for me to drop off At 11:00 a.m. Allway came through from the Embassy, asking if there was anything he could do. I thanked him but said that we were fine, and I gave him an outline of the plan, keeping details of places and timings deliberately vague. When I asked about the international situation, he described it as 'stabilising'.
The next time he called, half an hour later, it was a different story. He said that the Chechens had surfaced, though their representative in London. They claimed they were holding two SAS men hostage, and in return for handing them over, they were demanding not only a ransom of ten million dollars, but also the release of the Mafia players arrested in Britain.
The news made my stomach churn. In making their demand, had the Chechens said anything about Orange? I couldn't ask directly, but had to fence round the subject.
"What did they say about releasing our guys? Where's the exchange supposed to take place?"
"We have no information on that."
"Who did they make the offer to?"
"The FCO."
"Who's their representative in Britain?"
"He calls himself the Consul."
My questions brought me no nearer the subject of the bomb.
But surely, if the ransom demand had mentioned it, Allway would have told me.
Once again I had to contain my impatience and anxiety.
Around 11:30 I suddenly realised I was starving. I'd been up most of the night and had no breakfast, so I routed out some onions, fried them up, threw in a load of ga ram masala and turned a tin of beef stew into a power curry. We still had plenty of the rice we'd brought out from UK, so I boiled up some of that, and gave myself a solid meal.
I was in the middle of eating it when Sasha reappeared, all smiles.
"Mxnmmmm!" He gave an exaggerated sniff.
"Smells good!"
"Have some.
"No you need it. We have long journey to make."
The Turks had come on side, he said, and we had permission to fly. Better still, he'd fixed an aircraft a P33, a ten-seat executive jet used by senior military commanders. Take-off would be from the military side of Vnukovo airport at 2:30 Moscow time. We couldn't fly direct, but were to stage through Krasnodar, in the north of the Caucasus, so that the plane could refuel before the final hop of the flight and not have to take on Turkish fuel at the far end.
That meant leaving Balashika at 1:00 and suddenly time for planning, which had seemed endless, had almost run out.
At 12:30 I put in one last call to Tony, even though I knew it was 4:30 a.m. in the States. He was asleep, but his stand-in, Cyrus, was fully briefed. He confirmed that Orange was stationary on the same site, and that the weather in the region was likely to remain unchanged for the next thirty-six hours.
"You got a big high centred over the west coast of the Caspian, extending all the way to the Black Sea," he said.
"Predicted wind speeds, three to five knots on 260 degrees.
Moon's three-quarter full. Moonrise 1900 local, moonset 0600.
Looks like you'll have God's own view of the Caucasus range as you drop in there."
"Thanks for your help," I went.
"Tell Tony I'll call him from Kars."
"OK. And take some warm clothes with you. That place is six thousand feet above sea level."
FOURTEEN
The P33 was noisy and cramped, with little headroom and hard, uncomfortable seats, but it did the job. There were two regular army officers on board, hitching a lift to Krasnodar, but otherwise Sasha and I had the cabin to ourselves. The seats were arranged in pairs facing each other, and for much of the flight we kept a map of the Grozny area open on our knees, discussing the terrain.