THREE
For the next few days my most important task was to keep up the momentum of our countdown to departure; but at the same time I had to show Sasha round the base and give him an idea of how we did things. Certain areas of camp were out of bounds to him, notably the SAW and the ops room, but there was plenty else for him to see, not least the Killing House, where the CT team laid on a demonstration of hostage-lifting. At first he was cautious about expressing opinions, but the more time I spent with him the more he became prepared to criticise or compare our methods with his.
For us, Killing House demos were routine, but for Sasha they were an eye-opener. The guys put him and me into the left-hand corner of a special room, corralled with two other visitors behind white tape. As usual, the live hostage-figure was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, with his two guards, in the form of figure-targets, on either side of him. Behind the hostage stood the sergeant in charge, commentating on events.
Just as he seemed to be in the middle of his spiel, giving the principles of close-quarter battle: "Speed, aggression, surpr-' BANG! Loud explosion. Door blown off Two assaulters running in. Ba-ba-born! Ba-ba-born! Short bursts from MP5s. Targets riddled, hostage lifted and gone before anyone else could react.
Nothing left but smoke and dust.
As our ears recovered, Sasha turned to me, beaming, and said, "Vairy good! Vairy prafyessional!"
Before we went out he took a close look at the construction of the building, pulling back the metre-wide sheets of thick red rubber, which overlapped each other by nearly half their width,
so that he could inspect the steel-plated wall some three inches behind them. Seeing all the crumpled bullets lying on the floor, he understood at once how the rubber caught anything which flew back off the wall, killing its energy.
"This we would like," he said wistfully, looking round.
"You don't have it?"
He shook his head.
"Only rubber wheels."
"Tyre houses?" He nodded.
I knew what he meant, because I'd seen them in the States: skeleton buildings with walls made of piled-up motor-tyres filled with concrete, which, in a crude way, performed the same function as the rubber sheets.
In another room a young assaulter dressed in full black kit had his equipment spread out on two tables for Sasha to look at.
The Russian carefully inspected the guy's primary weapon an MP5 with laser marker and torch attached and some of his EMOE devices. His close interest offered an unwelcome opening to the range warden, a retired RSM who'd been given a kind of grace-and-favour job keeping the place tidy and sweeping up empty cartridge cases. The old guy could be a pain in the arse, as he always tried to latch on to our guests, and now I had to prise Sasha away from him before we got any awkward questions about where he came from.
From Sasha I gained a more precise idea of our task. He had already explained that the personnel of the new Tiger Force were being drawn from various sources. Most were from Spetznaz, the elite military special force, controlled by the Ministry of Defence, or from Omon, the civilian militia, which came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior.
Normally, Sasha told me, Omon dealt with problems inside Russia while Spetznaz worked in foreign countries; but the point of Tiger Force was that it should be a highly trained and highly mobile unit, ready to tackle emergencies either at home or abroad. When I remarked that this made it rather like the SAS, Sasha seemed surprised: he had always supposed that we only operated overseas.
He told me that Tiger Force would be directed by the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB, the largest remaining constituent of the old KGB, which had now been broken up into several parts; the bureau was in charge of security and counter-intelligence.
The person in charge of our tour, our liaison officer and interpreter, would be an FSB officer.
"And who will that be?" I asked.
He spread his hands.
"So far, no information. I find out when I am back in Moscow."
As I guided Sasha round camp, his meetings with the CO, the ops officer and the rest of the team all went fine; but where he came into his own was in polishing up the diagrams we were preparing for the course. Technically he was way behind because we were working on computers, aiming to project three dimensional diagrams from our laptops, whereas the Russians apparently were still using blackboards and overhead projectors but he was very quick on the uptake.
Among the diagrams Sasha had brought with him were two of the weapons that Tiger Force personnel would be using: the Stechkin Mark 5 9mm automatic pistol, and the latest creation of the Rex Firearm Company in St. Petersburg, the 9mm Gepard, a modular weapon which can be instantly adapted for use as rifle, sub-machine gun or pistol. I thanked Sasha as gently as possible for bringing them, then let him know that, as well as better diagrams, we had an actual example of the Gepard which we'd acquired via another channel. In fact I'd arranged that Johnny would give the rest of the team a lesson on stripping down and reassembling the weapon, with Sasha present.
This demo proved a big success. For one thing it gave Sasha a chance to start getting to know our guys, and for another, he hit top form during the talk, acting up and joining in Johnny's commentary.
"Gepard is Russian for cheetah," he told the team.
"Very fast, very light." He made springing, bounding movements with his hands.
"It was developed from the Ryss, which is lynx. Lynx is OK, but cheetah is faster and lighter."
"That's right." Johnny took him up, holding the weapon across his knees as he sat at the front of the classroom.
"It's a beaut. It's got everything bar the spots." He hefted it in one hand.
"Extremely light. Under four and a half pounds without a mag.
As you see, there's a strong resemblance to a sawn-off Kalashnikov AK74U: more than half the parts are interchangeable. But it's a hell of a lot more versatile. From what we've seen on the range so far, it's accurate and nicely balanced.
Handles exceptionally well. Looks like it could be a winner in CQB and law enforcement."
He demonstrated how the tubular steel butt-stock could be flipped out to turn the weapon into a rifle, or downwards to form a grip for sub-machine-gun mode. Then he rapidly stripped it, removing the bolt and bolt-carrier, the return spring, the upper hand-guard and gas chamber. As he brought each component away, Sasha gave us the Russian names.
"Two models of magazine," Johnny went on, having reassembled the pieces.
"This one holds twenty-two rounds, this one forty. The selector switch here has three positions. On safe, the bolt is locked half-way back so you can just see down into the magazine. Second position, 0, as you know, stands for odin one. Odinochmy is single fire. Is that right, Sasha?"
"Konechno." The Russian grinned.
"And next position, AV, is for avtomaticheskiy automatic."
So they went on, back and forth. The Gepard's greatest novelty lay in the fact that it could fire several different types of 9mm round without having to change the barrel. Sasha reeled off eight possibilities, ending with the 9 x 30 hard-alloy-core bullet called the Groin.
"You know what groin means?" he asked jokily.
"It means thunder! Very big impact and penetration. Will pierce body armour at three hundred metres."
Sasha also sat in on a couple of language classes. When he and Valentina found they came from the same city the place the Communists had called Gorki, now back to its original name of Nizhni Novgorod they really hit it off There was one hilarious session when somebody asked Val for a few swear words just to put us in the swim, and she pretended to be greatly shocked.