I circled out to the right and came in above it: a rectangular storage shed with no windows and a corrugated roof of what looked like asbestos. I felt my heart speed up. Radio signals would pass straight through that roof. Without any real evidence, I became convinced that the bomb was there.
"The Mafiosi are nervous of the device," I told myself.
"They don't want it inside the house, so they've put it here."
Behind the shed was a big heap of what looked like freshly excavated rock. Maybe that was spoil from the nuclear shelter they were digging out of the mountainside. Maybe the shed covered the entrance to the bunker.
To complete my anti-clockwise circuit I had to cross the mountainside above the villa, and it was up there, a couple of hundred feet higher than the house, that I came across the helicopter pad a circle of concrete in the middle of a shallow natural bowl, from which the trees had been cleared. I could see at once that it was big enough to accommodate a Chinook, but not until I was moving away from the centre did I realise what was positioned on one side. From a distance the object looked like a crumpled garden hut. Creeping up to it, I saw that a tarpaulin was lashed down to rings set in the ground. Close inspection revealed a .50 machine gun, set up on a heavy tripod so it could engage targets in the air as well as on the ground. I felt under the cover and ran a hand down the barrel, thinking that the bastards probably had hand-held SAM systems as well.
Sasha had no action to report, so together we pulled off to a safe distance from the villa and settled in a hollow surrounded by rocks from which I could transmit without fear of anyone hearing.
By now the moon was down, and the night had become much darker. As I assembled the Satcom aerial I said, "Sasha — I'm working on the plan for tomorrow. I'm going to call for the HALO troop to drop in as soon as it's dark. But during the day I reckon we'll want to watch both the house and another building I've seen on the far side, over there. That means we need to man two separate OPs. You all right on that one?"
"No problem. Many times I do such observation."
"Good. We'll have radio com his with each other, anyway.
Now let's get this thing working."
I had the Satcom set up on a flat rock, and now turned it a couple of times until I got a strong satellite signal. Then I draped my sleeping bag over my head to muffle the sound of my voice, and seconds later I was through to the squadron base in Kars.
"Blue," said a voice I didn't recognise.
"Red here," I went.
"Can I speak to Bill Chandler?"
"Roger. Wait one."
I waited, imagining the hangar, guys in sleeping bags around the perimeter, and the squadron GO with his head down in some reasonably secluded corner.
"Geordie?" He sounded lively enough.
"How goes it?"
"Fine. No problems."
"Where are you?"
"Inside the compound. We've got eyes on the villa. We're maybe a hundred and fifty metres above it."
"Any sign of our guys?"
"Not yet."
"Or of the three heavy cases?"
"No, but I think I know where they are.
"Can you identif~j the site?"
"Not now.
"In the summerhouse?"
"Yes. Listen, the drop was spot-on. We've recced as much as we can in the dark. As soon as it's light I'll shoot some footage with the video, get pictures back to you. But basically the plan holds."
"So…" He paused, evidently looking at his notes.
"The same
DZ?"
"Yep. It's an ideal place. Looks like a summer pasture.
Nobody within miles. I'll get myself up there with a Firefly to guide the lads in."
"OK, then. We're aiming to drop at 1900 your time. That's half an hour after full dark."
"Can you make that 1930? I'll need time to get up to the DZ, and I don't want to move in daylight."
"OK. 1930 it is. That's confirmed."
"Great. Obviously Pat will want to work out his own plan.
But as I see it there are three objectives: first is to cut the road coming up from the barracks at the bottom; second is to secure the summerhouse, third to hit the villa."
"Roger. How many in the garrison?"
"Very few. Could be twenty. Nothing like the rumours. But they've got a fucking great machine gun set up beside the helipad, and I'm sure there are guys we haven't seen yet inside the house."
"OK. How's the rest of the garrison deployed?"
"By the time we got here they were all in their pits, bar one. I told Bill about the sentry patrolling the perimeter, but said we hadn't seen anyone inside the wire.
"Is the helipad big enough for a Chinook to land?"
"Definitely. But we'll have to take out that five-oh first. What's the position on the exfil?"
"I think it's going to be possible from the north. Your Russian friends are playing ball. It looks as though we'll be able to get the choppers up to a place called Nalchik. Then they can hop over the mountain when they're needed, and come back out the same way.
They'll be in and out of Chechnya air-space in a few minutes. The only thing is, the met looks a bit dodgy. There's a depression moving up from the south."
FIFTEEN
It was at 11:30 the next morning that things suddenly started to move. Sasha and I had both made secure OPs, buried under piles of pine boughs about 400 metres apart. Once I'd left him with a good view down to the front of the villa, I moved on round and found a site that commanded not only the summerhouse but also the exit road. There, lulled by an intoxicating smell of fresh resin, I'd crawled into my sleeping bag for warmth, and dozed off for the last hour before dawn.
We'd put our covert radios on listening watch, and agreed that from 0700 we'd come up on the air to compare notes on the hour and half-hour unless we wanted to alert each other at any other time, in which case we'd give a double jab on the press el
At first we hadn't much to report. Sasha told me that a couple more cars drove up to the villa, and one went down. Work started on the fence. I couldn't see the site, but when I heard an old tractor spluttering up and down and men chatting quite close behind me, to my right, I thanked my stars that we hadn't cut the wire.
Once again the weather was fine, but I sensed a change coming. Soon after dawn the sky began to haze over and the air moistened, as if snow was on the way. My priority task was to get video footage of the villa and send it back to Kars, so that the guys would have extra information to back up the satellite imagery and could start working out their assault plan. Now I reckoned I'd better go pretty soon, before the landscape got blotted out.
Breakfast consisted of slimy, cold lasagne which came out of its foil bag tasting of mud, and cold water that tasted of plastic.
With that feast down my neck I slipped out of my hide, taking my 203 with spare mags in my pouches, but leaving my bergen, to give myself greater mobility.
The mountainside was so broken by gullies, rocky outcrops and stands of trees that I found it easy to keep in dead ground, hidden from the wire above me on one side, and the villa below on the other. Not that I didn't keep a sharp lookout: before I crossed any open space I scanned repeatedly with my binos in case sentries were posted on vantage points.
I filmed the helipad on my way past, hoping that shots of the .50 mounted on its tripod would give an idea of scale, and came out on a high point above Sasha's LIJP. Lying face-down on a rock under some trees, I got good footage of the house, first the front, then the western side with its underground door — making sure I kept each take long enough for members of the QRF to spot detail. I zoomed in for close-uy shots of the security cameras and IR devices, then filmed the road going down towards the barracks and the gate. I contemplated going down and taking in the barracks as well, but decided that any extra information I might gain wouldn't be worth the risks involved. My gut feeling told me it was the villa and the summerhouse that we were going to assault. With any luck we wouldn't need to go near the barracks: we'd just block the road to anyone trying to come uphill.