Authors: James Barrington
Yershenko was getting progressively more irritated with the staff at Letneozerskiy. He and
his team had been ready to leave for almost two hours, but their aircraft – an Antonov An-28 – still wasn’t ready. The delay, according to their pilot, who seemed almost as
frustrated as his passengers, was because of a problem during refuelling.
One of the tanks wasn’t filling properly, and the ground engineers had elected to carry
out a visual inspection of its interior and to check the associated fuel lines for blockages and contamination. That had required specialized equipment and a fibre-optic viewing device, and
simply assembling this had taken them over an hour. The process, as far as Yershenko could tell, would then take a further thirty minutes, and only then, assuming they found nothing wrong,
would they be able to fill the tank.
It was nearly three hours after his inspection team had assembled in
the
squadron office, their bags beside them, that the Antonov was finally towed out of the maintenance hangar and chocked on the hardstanding in front of them.
‘At last,’ Yershenko muttered, as he watched the fuel bowser approach.
Fifteen minutes later, he strapped himself into his seat at the front of the cabin and opened
his briefcase. His inspection report was far from finished, and he proposed to use this long flight to continue drafting the final document. And it wouldn’t just be a single hop: the
Antonov was a slow aircraft with a very limited range, so would have to land and refuel at least three times before reaching the Ukraine.
The aircraft levelled at ten thousand feet and the pilot relaxed, trimmed the Antonov for
straight and level flight, and then picked up an en-route chart to work out an updated estimate for the next military airfield they’d be landing at to replenish their tanks.
In the passenger cabin behind him, Yershenko continued with his report while most of his team
opened the packs of sandwiches they’d been given on departing Letneozerskiy. The Antonov didn’t run to a galley – even the chemical toilet was very much an afterthought
– so any food and drink had to be carried on board.
Twenty minutes after reaching its cruising altitude, there was a muted thud somewhere near the
main radio set. It sounded almost like a bird-strike, so at first the pilot was relatively unconcerned. Just as a precaution, he tried calling the Letneozerskiy radar controller, but found
the set was dead.
Loss of the main radio was an irritation rather than a serious problem, but it still remained
a matter of concern. Thirty seconds later concern changed to worry when the pilot realized that the standby radio was also non-functioning. There were emergency procedures for this kind of
situation, and obviously they would have to land as soon as possible to get the radios fixed. The pilot consulted his en-route chart, calculating times and distances, then selected cabin
broadcast to tell his passengers what had happened, and explain what he intended to do.
But the words never formed, for at that instant there was a colossal explosion somewhere in the
lower section of the fuselage. The cabin floor erupted upwards, the detonation peeling the aircraft apart, twisting and
severing pipes and wires, and scattering seats,
boxes, cases and aluminium panels alike. Most of the team had removed their seatbelts and were now catapulted instantly from the falling wreckage. Mercifully for them, most were killed or
knocked unconscious by the force of the explosion. The pilot was flung forward through the windscreen and was dead even before he started falling.
But Yershenko remained conscious all the way down and, in the last moments of his life,
understood exactly why there’d been such a delay in refuelling at Letneozerskiy.
It doesn’t take long to plummet ten thousand feet, and in just over a minute what was left
of the An-28 and its human cargo impacted the frozen and unyielding ground at around two hundred miles an hour.
Back in the air traffic control room at Letneozerskiy, a senior officer advised the station
commander that the Antonov had disappeared from the radar screen, with its pilot no longer responding to radio calls. The commanding officer ordered him to initiate a search and rescue
operation immediately, then phoned each of the squadron commanders in turn to brief them on the apparent loss of an aircraft.
However deeply concerned the 524 IAP colonel sounded, he had already begun preparing himself for
a long and completely unauthorized journey of his own that would take him first to a private bank in Austria, and eventually to somewhere agreeable in southern Europe, perhaps on the
Mediterranean coast of Spain.
Dobric Air Base near Varna had been ‘inactive’ since the millennium, but there
are degrees of inactivity and, despite the fact that no aircraft flew to or from the base, there were always armed guards on duty there. This was because Dobric had become one of
Bulgaria’s largest repositories of reserve planes, aircraft stores and munitions.
Deliveries and collections were frequent, but these were always carefully pre-notified to ensure
that sufficient staff were on hand to assist with the loading and unloading. So when a trio of unmarked three-ton trucks pulled up outside the locked main gates, the guard in the concrete
security post at first more or less ignored them because no such movements had been scheduled for that day.
He watched with greater interest though when two men wearing Bulgarian Air Force uniforms
climbed down from the lead vehicle and walked over to the security post, arguing loudly. Reassured by the sight of the familiar uniforms, the guard didn’t think to pick up the assault
rifle leaning against the wall beside him. Behind him, a small and cheap TV set blared out a current pop song, while professional dancers writhed unenthusiastically on the black-and-white
screen.
One of the arrivals, who was using the name Draco, nodded to the guard and slid a folded sheet
of paper through the slot under the window. The Bulgarian took it, expecting to find the address or location they were looking for but, on unfolding it, found it completely blank. He looked
up in puzzled surprise to see the man smiling slightly.
The next thing he registered was the muzzle of a silenced pistol levelled at him through the
slot. Before the guard could react, there came
a sound like a cough, and he fell backwards, shot directly through the heart.
Immediately, the second man jogged over to the main gates and studied them carefully. Even if
not electrified, some kind of an alarm system might have been expected, but he saw nothing there to cause him concern. That meant all they had to do now was find the key and get inside.
Typical of military establishments the world over, each gate comprised a ten-foot steel frame
with cross-braces, and diamond-pattern wire mesh secured to it. He could have easily cut through this, but it was just as quick to climb over.
Grasping the wire with his gloved hands, he pulled himself up, jamming the toes of his boots
periodically into the mesh, feeling for the firmer frame and cross-braces behind it. In less than ten seconds he was astride the gate, and fifteen seconds after that was standing outside the
door of the security post, trying the handle.
As expected, the door was locked, so he reached down to his equipment belt and removed a crowbar
from one loop. Then he forced the end of it into the gap around the door and pulled hard. The wood splintered, but held, so he changed position slightly and levered again. This time the door
creaked loudly, then flew open. He stepped inside.
Ignoring the sprawled body of the dead guard, the intruder strode across to the open key safe
bolted to the wall. Inside, there were probably a couple of dozen sets of keys hanging on labelled hooks, but he knew exactly which ones he needed. He chose two sets and headed back to the
main gates. Inserting one key in the lock, he pulled the double gates open wide.
The moment he did so, the three trucks started up and drove inside the base. At this point he
stepped up to the leading vehicle and handed over the second set of keys to Draco, who’d meanwhile returned to his cab. After that he closed and relocked the main gates. As the
threetonners drove away towards the storage buildings, the first intruder started a perfunctory clean-up operation in the security post, by dragging the guard’s corpse out of sight of
the window.
Deep inside the Dobric complex, the three trucks stopped outside a likely-looking building while
the driver checked the number painted on its wall. He shook his head and they drove to the next one. There he
swung the truck in a wide turn so that he could reverse close
up to the doors.
Draco climbed down and jogged across to a sliding steel door, the second set of keys ready in
one hand. The door was secured by a single lock, but before he tackled this he used another key from the same set to disable an alarm bolted to the adjacent wall. Once the tell-tale light
changed from red to green, he inserted the key for the loading door itself. Thirty seconds later the two men were inside the building, the door left wide open and fluorescent lights blazing
overhead.
They were joined by another four, all similarly wearing Bulgarian Air Force uniforms. They
spread out quickly, systematically scanning the steel racks and piles of boxes for those they wanted. Within a couple of minutes one man called out, and the others gathered round to check
that he’d found what they were looking for. In front of them rose a pile of some fifty wooden boxes, each over twenty feet long and bearing the stencilled marking
‘R-40T’.
Draco nodded in satisfaction and began to issue crisp instructions. In one corner he had already
noticed a fork-lift truck, specially modified to handle the awkwardly shaped boxes that were neatly piled against the walls or on rows of steel shelving. One of his men drove the forklift
over to the boxes they had located and expertly plucked the top one off the pile. He manoeuvred it carefully down the aisle between the racks and deposited it neatly into the back of one of
the three-ton trucks.
They’d already loaded ten of these boxes when a challenge rang out. Four Bulgarian Air
Force guards stood in the open doorway, Kalashnikovs aimed directly at the intruders.
‘We meet again, Mr Richter.’
Viktor Bykov looked pretty much the same as Richter remembered – tall and thin with sharp,
almost predatory, features. And he looked suspiciously pleased to see him.
‘Hullo, Viktor,’ Richter said, and shook hands.
Bykov snapped his fingers and a junior officer scurried forward to
take the
Englishman’s suitcase. He extended a hand for the briefcase as well, but Richter shook his head. ‘I’ll carry this, thanks. I’ve had to sign for the laptop inside it,
and I’ll be in all sorts of trouble if I lose it.’
‘Follow me. I have a car outside,’ Bykov said, leading the way through the arrivals
hall. Outside the terminal building a black Mercedes saloon stood idling beside the kerb, the driver leaning against the door. The number on the boot lid was 630 SEL, which meant nothing to
Richter, who’d never been a fan of overpriced, overweight and frankly vulgar German machinery, but he did notice the registration plate: ‘MOC 65’. Those three letters
immediately identified it as a Russian diplomatic vehicle.
‘You have diplomatic status?’ he asked Bykov curiously, but the Russian shook his
head.
‘Thankfully, no. But having that plate makes things a lot easier, as it saves arguing
with those idiots.’ He gestured towards a number of traffic police who were eyeing the Mercedes in a somewhat hostile manner.
The junior officer put Richter’s suitcase in the boot, then went to sit in the front
beside the chauffeur. Bykov opened the rear door for their visitor, then slid in beside him.
‘We’ve booked you into the Rossyia,’ he announced, as the Mercedes pulled out
into the flow of traffic. ‘You may be interested to know that Muscovites refer to it as “The Box”, so we thought you’d feel at home there.’
‘The Box’ was one of the nicknames of the Security Service, MI5, from its original
postal address of ‘Box 500, London’.
‘Kind thought, Viktor, but you know I don’t work for Five. In fact, I don’t
even work for Six, except indirectly.’
And that was the truth. Richter worked for the Foreign Operations Executive, a covert –
and unacknowledged except when things went wrong – organization subordinate to the Secret Intelligence Service. Basically, FOE performed any dirty little jobs that Six itself
didn’t want to get involved with.
‘Yes, we’re aware that your employment arrangements are quite unusual. We did some
checking on you through our London
rezident
before we extended this invitation. Despite what happened in France, I
believe we can trust you to do the right thing.’
Richter inclined his head in acknowledgement. It was coming to something, he mused, when a
senior Russian military intelligence officer seemed more inclined to trust you than your own boss did.
‘So what’s the story, Viktor?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather wait until we get to the hotel. Then we can
talk freely and in comfort.’ As he said these words, Bykov gestured briefly towards the front seats of the Mercedes, and Richter understood perfectly. The GRU officer had borrowed the
car only as a matter of convenience, but either its driver or the escort might well be reporting to a different master.
Careless talk could still cost lives, even in today’s relaxed, post-glasnost,
pro-capitalist Russia.
‘Stop what you’re doing right now,’ the senior Bulgarian Air Force guard
ordered, and strode into the warehouse. The other three members of his patrol followed him, their Kalashnikov assault rifles held ready. ‘You.’ He gestured with the muzzle of his
weapon. ‘Get out of the forklift.’
The man at the vehicle’s controls climbed down and stood alongside his five companions,
as they stared silently at the new arrivals.
Looking irritated by the interruption, Draco stepped forward. ‘What’s the
problem?’ he snapped.
‘The problem,’ the patrol leader explained, ‘is that we have no collections or
deliveries scheduled for today.’
‘I don’t understand. We have our orders.’
‘Let me see them, then.’
Draco strode over towards the patrol commander, reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a
sheaf of papers that he handed over. The Bulgarian guard shouldered his weapon and flicked through them, then looked up, puzzled.
‘These are blank,’ he said.
‘Oh, sorry, I must have given you the wrong ones. Here.’ Draco reached inside his
tunic again, pulled out a silenced semi-automatic pistol and fired a single shot. The Bulgarian fell backwards, his forehead sprouting a third eye, as a spray of blood and brains flew towards
his companions.
‘Now,’ Draco yelled, jumping to one side, out of the line of fire. He brought his
pistol to bear on another of the startled patrol members, fired again and watched the second man fall. To his left, three of his men had now produced their pistols but, despite the shock of
the sudden attack, the two remaining patrol members reacted immediately, by splitting up and running outside the warehouse to raise the alarm.
‘Find those two and kill them,’ Draco ordered, and a couple of his men picked up the
Kalashnikovs belonging to the two dead men, and followed the escaping Bulgarians out of the door. ‘The rest of you, shift these bodies, then finish the loading.’
Outside, the two Bulgarian guards were running for their lives. They might have survived if
they’d only used the buildings as cover, but in their panic both of them had decided that they must get back to the guardroom where the telephones were located. So they set off in a
more or less straight line.
The first of their pursuers rounded a corner and spotted the two running side by side only about
seventy yards in front of him. He knelt down, aimed the Kalashnikov and fired two rapid bursts of perhaps six rounds each. The result was immediate: both his targets fell clumsily to the
ground, their weapons spinning uselessly from their hands. He stood up and watched their collapsed figures for a few seconds, then ran towards them.
One was clearly dead – two rounds had ripped through his back, emerging messily near his
sternum – but the other was still alive. He’d been hit once in the lower back, the bullet cutting through his spine, and was now trying desperately to drag himself to where his
Kalashnikov lay a couple of feet away. His assassin walked calmly across to the writhing figure, kicked the assault rifle well out of reach, then fired two rounds into the man’s
skull.
He next picked up the AK47s and slung them over his shoulder – the team being armed only
with pistols, the Kalashnikovs might prove
useful once they’d left Dobric. After searching the corpses for spare magazines and ammunition, he headed back to the
warehouse.
Ninety minutes later, they’d loaded all three trucks with a total of forty-eight of the
long, heavy boxes, sixteen to each vehicle. Draco checked their loads carefully to ensure that the weight was evenly distributed and properly lashed down. Finally he gave the order to drive
off, but only after they had dragged the dead men out of the warehouse and dumped them out on the roadway near their two companions. That way, there’d be no immediate pointer to the
munitions they’d stolen, though the theft was bound to be discovered within days or even hours.
The trucks stopped just outside the main entrance while the seventh member of the group locked
the gates behind them. Then he carefully returned both sets of keys to the safe and climbed back over the gates to rejoin his companions. Before they moved off, they all discarded the Air
Force uniforms they’d been wearing and replaced them with blue workmen’s overalls.
Draco waved briefly from the cab of the leading truck, whereupon they turned out onto the road
and headed south. Varna was only a short drive, about thirty-five miles, and Draco knew a cargo ship with Panamanian registry was waiting there for their precious load. Once they’d
delivered it, this group of men would disperse, and probably never see each other again. They’d been recruited individually from the Bulgarian underworld for this single operation, for
which they had all been very well paid. None had any idea what was contained in the boxes or of their importance to their recruiter, a middle-aged man of Chinese appearance who spoke their
language only haltingly.
As the trucks bounced and rattled on down the road, only the drivers themselves were visible in
the cabs. In the back of each vehicle the other men were completing their penultimate task by carefully pasting pre-prepared shipping labels over the stencilled ‘R-40T’
markings.