December (12 page)

‘As soon as the work parties for the day have been allocated, Raskolnikov could be dragged off to one of several
locations—logging in the forests, construction sites, the sawmill, and so on—so we really won’t have a clue where he will be.’

‘Flippin’ ’eck,’ muttered Colin. ‘I’m just wondering when you’re going to give us the good news.’

Alex stood back and looked at them. ‘Right, well, I did say it wasn’t going to be easy. We’ve got six blokes and a helicopter against a hundred and ninety armed guards in a heavily fortified prison camp.’ He paused. ‘Suggestions, anyone?’

The discussion began with all the team members chipping in ideas, pacing around the table picking up photos and looking at them from different angles, trying to get new perspectives on the problem. Proposals were put forward and debated; some were chucked out, others kept in play.

Alex surveyed the room, pleased with the way it was going. Having laid the problem out in front of them they were now really stuck in to solving it.

He was feeling increasingly certain that they would come up with a plan to get Raskolnikov out.

TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER

Raskolnikov and the other nine men of the 33rd work team climbed up into the Vityaz.

They had just been through another roll call parade. Once he and the men were packed into the enclosed cab, a guard slammed the door shut and they were locked in.

They quickly huddled together on the floor over the vehicle’s massive diesel engines. The metal plates were warm and they were out of the wind. This was the best part of the day.

The vehicle grunted and jerked, they were on their way. The DT-30 Vityaz was a huge beast with a wide body like the hull of a tank with a square cab covering the top. An all-terrain, tracked, amphibious vehicle the size of a large truck, it was the only thing that could withstand all the rigours of Siberian terrain from snowdrifts to forests and bogs. Behind them it dragged a separate, tracked, flatbed unit with a knuckle crane for the logs.

Shubin, the team leader, sat up front in the cab with the drivers, guards and crane operator, a ‘trustie’ or prisoner trusted to work on his own. Shubin was an experienced forester and used a remotely operated searchlight on top of
the cab to spot stands of trees with the correct diameter for the Chinese timber merchants that they supplied. The team would then dismount, cut them down and load the trunks onto the flatbed unit.

The prison camp lay fifty miles north of Krasnokamensk on a plain covered in mixed woods of pine, larch and birch, but all the decent pine near the camp had already been cut so the teams had to be sent further and further out over the snowy wastes to find wood.

The prison was very remote; in winter the deep snow meant that they could only really be resupplied by helicopter, as it took at least ten hours by snowmobile. With the murderous December weather, very few precautions were taken to prevent escape; just leaving the shelter of the camp was a death sentence. Prisoners were transported there in the short summer when trucks could actually get through and then just dumped for years. Very few made the return journey.

The ATV belched black diesel smoke from the pipes on either side of the cab, like a pair of horns, and drove out through the inner prison gates of the camp and then on through the second pair of gates set in the perimeter fence of the whole site. Snow spewed out of the back of its tracks as the driver picked up speed and they flowed over the undulating terrain through the forest.

After half an hour, Shubin spotted a stand of correctly sized pine, up on a small hillock, and they stopped. The team was let out of the lockup and walked over to the trees with guards covering them with assault rifles.

Shubin revved up his chainsaw and began working away at a tree. When he had nearly cut through it, he stepped away and the snarl of the chainsaw halted. There followed a second’s silence and then the heavy crack and soft crash
of the tree falling. The rest of the team closed in on the fallen trunk like workers stripping the body of a whale and used axes to cut away the branches.

Roman became absorbed in the work, swinging his axe and enjoying the brief flood of warmth throughout his body. When the trunk was bare, each man got out a dragging tool with a spike on the end at right angles to the long handle. Roman swung his hard into the trunk and kicked it home with his heavy boot. All ten of them lined up either side of the trunk and did the same. Shubin looked down the line of black-clad figures in the half-light of early morning and shouted: ‘One, two, three!’

They all hauled at once, dragging the two tons of wood through the snow a few feet at a time, out of the stand towards the crawler. Big Danni was opposite Roman, his huge shoulders bent as he strained at the load. Sweat broke out on Roman’s body and he gasped at the raw air. He felt as if his arms were being pulled out of their sockets as he dug his heels in and tried to stop the log breaking away and sliding down into the crawler.

Finally, they got it down alongside the flatbed trailer unit. The trustie was sitting up on the little crane seat at one end, wrapped up in his hat and facecloths like the rest of them, but having spent the interim inside the warm cab. The team stepped back from the log and looked up at him with silent contempt.

He powered up the crane and the heavy arm unfolded itself. A huge pair of metal jaws on the end of it reached out and grasped the log firmly in the middle, the hydraulics whined as the crane lifted it high over their heads ready to swing it in over the large metal supports along the edge of the flatbed that held the logs in place.

The steady inbound movement stopped and the arm
jerked towards them. All ten men leaped backwards as the huge tree slammed into the ground right in front of them, sending a heavy jolt through the soles of their feet. Roman tripped and fell over on his back. The tree rose again in the air over his head, he frantically tried to push himself backwards with his heels and elbows but it moved with him, poised to strike again.

There was a shout and a heavy thud as the crane operator was pulled bodily off his seat and hit the ground. Danni smashed a fist into his face before one of the guards ran over and swung the butt of his rifle into the big robber’s kidneys. He crumpled with an involuntary ‘Oof!’ as the air was forced out of him.

Getmanov rolled on the ground, put both hands to his face and held the cloths against it to stem the flow of blood.

The guard commander ran over and took in the failed murder attempt with one glance. He looked down at Danni squirming on the ground, trying to get breath back into his body.

‘That’ll be the cold and the dark for you, I-331.’

Once they had agreed a plan, Alex was able to get on with organising specialist equipment and training for it.

Magnus had brought two large crates of high-spec arctic kit with him. Alex had emailed him the men’s boot and clothing sizes and he had picked it up from a supplier in Oslo on his way to London, along with a supply of winter rations.

The large medieval hall was used as a fitting room and equipment store for all the gear they were taking. As the crates were unloaded and divided up it became strewn with piles of heavy parkas, salopettes, boots, cross-country skis and poles, tents, sleeping bags, rucksacks and cooking equipment.

The weapons and ammunition would have to wait until they got to Transdneister. Arkady was constantly on his BlackBerry, haggling with his arms dealers to make sure they got the best assault rifles, machine guns, heavy weapons and explosives available.

Magnus then took them all out into the snowy grounds and got them practising cross-country skiing and some basic arctic survival drills.

He also came up with an idea for getting across the open ground to the camp perimeter.

As usual he started his sentence by clearing his throat quietly. ‘Prevailing wind is northerly so I think maybe we have the ground blizzard on the north side?’

The others looked at him.

‘Ground blizzard?’ said Pete.

‘Yes, it’s when the wind picks up the snow and the ice and you have the fog effect on the ground, two feet high? Maybe it gives us the cover, but then,’ he paused, ‘we also have the frostbite risk as well. Ambient temperature is minus forty at night but for each mile per hour of windspeed you add a degree of freezing and so with average windspeed of thirty miles an hour you have minus seventy degrees.’

Col winced.

‘At that temperature frostbite time is maybe,’ he shrugged, ‘five minutes. Even with the heavy clothing on, you will certainly be experiencing hypothermia by the time you get through the wire and that is not a good state to go to assault in.’

‘Hmm.’ Alex nodded; this sort of detailed knowledge was exactly why he had brought his old friend along.

‘I take your point about the wind but I think we are on to something there.’

They began working on ways to reduce the wind exposure using Magnus’s experience in snow camouflage and concealment.

Pete also came into his own. He took over an isolated storage barn on the estate and quickly turned the huge, empty, metal shed into a FIBUA training centre. Using the rough-and-ready training techniques that they developed in Iraq, he drew chalk lines to the floor to simulate floor plans of buildings and used the stairs to the hayloft for all-important stairwell drills. He then took the team through a quick refresher course on urban warfare skills.

It wasn’t perfect but in the limited time they had available Alex could see that they were beginning to function as a team: assessing threats quickly, communicating well and moving fluidly around obstacles.

Alex came back from a session in the FIBUA barn early one afternoon to check his emails, principally that the regular flow of mail order invites kept coming through from Sergey. So far, he was relieved to see that they had.

He entered the main house through the big porch, stamped the snow off his boots and headed in through to the medieval hall, paused to throw another huge log on the fire, before crossing to the other side into the kitchen to get a cup of tea.

This was a shabby modern room; last done up in the 1970s when some land had been sold off. His father had never updated the lurid orange cupboards and Alex retained a curious childhood affection for them.

He walked in and found Lara sitting at the table in front of the Aga, warming herself. The house still didn’t have central heating so the kitchen always was the focal point in the winter.

They both looked startled and quickly scrambled for something to say.

She beat him to it,‘Ah, Sasha, how is your little winter training ground?’ she said with a smile; he noticed that she had adopted the familiar ‘ty’ form of address in Russian with him now.

He hadn’t seen her on her own since she’d arrived. She had listened in carefully to the planning discussions and had passed on a number of requests for special equipment to Sergey by email. She had also briefed the team on the Moscow end of the plans, when they hoped that events on the street would move their way and the team wouldn’t have to be as directly involved as they were in the assault.

She had relaxed a lot since her uncomfortable journey here; the men were all focused on the job in hand and hardly paid any attention to her, apart from the odd covert glance at her figure as she walked past.

Alex adopted a similarly low-key manner with her now. ‘Oh, it’s going OK. The guys are out practising FIBUA in the barn.’ He busied himself making tea. ‘You want some?’ he asked rather abruptly and she nodded.

He was normally pretty good at chitchat, he enjoyed the company of intelligent women, but he still found it hard to talk to Lara because at least half his brain was scrambled by the sheer physical hit of being with her; the sight of her long limbs, the curve of her cleavage, the thick snake of blonde hair twisted over one shoulder exposing the elegant arch of her neck. All these stimuli kept cutting into his normal thought processes like interference on the radio. It really didn’t help this self-consciousness to have had Sergey’s tactless quip about her being a man-eater.

He had no idea what Lara thought of him, but beneath her icy calm he suspected she was terrified. He had caught her once, when he turned away, out of the corner of his eye: her expression of intelligent interest in the briefing had fallen away and been replaced with a disconcerted, lost look.

He sorted out the tea and gave himself some time to restore control:
You’re on a job, Devereux, stop fucking around! You do
not
have time for this
.

He turned back to her, prepared to be as chatty as possible, but she was quicker off the mark.

‘Have you always done this?’

‘What?

‘Fighting.’

‘Yes, I didn’t go to university and joined the army straight
from school. Yes, I have always done this.’ He sounded more defensive than he had intended to.

‘Well, your Russian is very good.’ She didn’t mean it to but it sounded like a consolation comment.

‘The army was keen for people to learn it and I discovered that I did actually want an intellectual challenge, after all, so I took a course.’ He didn’t add that it had been another way of sticking two fingers up to his father, who had been furious at him ‘wasting his time on all that foreign crap!’

Alex continued, ‘I also once had a Russian girlfriend in London.’

Oksana.

She had been so far removed from the sort of girl his father expected him to date that he had felt it was safe to go out with her. His main memory—apart from a lot of sex—was of the smell of her cheap hairspray and her mouth reeking of the strong Russian Prima cigarettes she favoured. She had been hard work but he had loved learning the language through her; even the most banal conversation—‘Pass the salt’—had become an adventure.

Lara nodded and there was a slight pause.

‘And you? Have you always done TV?’

‘Well, yes and no,’ she said, recovering her poise. ‘I did chemical engineering at Voronezh Institute of Technology.’ She nodded, acknowledging his surprised look. ‘Yes, I know. Everybody in the West always looks like that when I tell them, but technical education was always a lot bigger in Russia. Plus my father thought it would be a sensible thing for me to do.’

‘And was it?’

‘Well…’ she paused to consider its merits and then said in a very direct manner, ‘you have to work hard to get it right and I enjoy intense experiences. I mean, I like the rigour
of engineering, it’s very black or white; things are either right or wrong. Flow rates either go down a pipe or they don’t. It teaches you to be very intolerant of bullshit.’

She looked at him straight, and now he had a moment of discomfort. He hadn’t realised that she was that analytical about life. What was she making of
him
? He felt his previous remarks must have been scrutinised with a microscope.

He managed to nod sagely in response and then handed her a mug of tea.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered and sipped it thoughtfully.

He sat down opposite her at the table.

‘So, after that, how did you get into TV?’

‘Oh, Sergey “discovered” me.’ She made speech marks in the air and laughed.

Alex smiled. ‘Oh, right, was that a recruitment programme they ran or something?’

‘Not exactly. He was drunk—can you believe it?—in a bar in Moscow and some instinct deep within him instantly recognised my journalistic potential.’ She grinned a million-volt smile this time and then indicated her body with a downward sweep of her hand.

Alex was sent back to square one. He had been making some polite headway off that topic, but she had now, with disconcerting directness, brought him right back onto it.

She looked straight at him. ‘Alexander, I am under no illusions as to why Sergey liked me: I have a fantastic ass and great tits. He always said they were a work of art, he thinks they should be in the Hermitage.’ She laughed at the memory, folded her arms and squeezed her breasts together as she arched her back, pouted and cocked an eyebrow at him.

This was killing him.

She relaxed the pose, went back to sipping her tea and
continued, ‘So, as you can see, after engineering I have subsequently done a degree in flirtation with a Masters in flashing my tits. I’ve done
a lot
of field work on my thesis.’

There was something rather disturbing in how coldly she was able to be honest about her attractions.

Alex nodded as he scrabbled to regain traction. ‘Right…So, you’re very close to Sergey then?’ he said with an intelligent frown on his face.

Lara’s eyes lost their mischievous look; the blue suddenly seemed very cold.

Oh shit…He felt he had just touched an electric fence around a no-go area and flinched under the intensity of her anger.

She dropped her eyes and turned away, realising that she had invited such a question by being so frank. She looked back at Alex in an evaluating way; he seemed a thoughtful man to her and she knew that they might well both be dead in a few days’ time, so she felt an urge to tell him the truth about everything.

She said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘He took my soul,’ then paused and shrugged. ‘But you can live without one.’

His mind whirred. What did
that
mean?

There was an awkward pause before, with an effort, she regained her light-hearted tone and continued: ‘But, unfortunately, Sergey has the emotional attention span of a five year old so it was never going to last. He is a very good businessman but he has still got to learn that women are not businesses—you can’t invest in a diversified portfolio of them. I think he finds it easier to commit to grandiose ideas than a single real woman; somehow she might threaten the perfection of his idealism.’ She shrugged again and concluded generously, ‘We all make choices in life.’

Alex tried to move on. ‘Sergey certainly seems very
passionate about the coup; he’s a lot more profound when you get to know him.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Has Sergey been talking to you about literature again? About
Russkaya dusha
?’

Alex nodded and she tossed her head in annoyance. He realised that Sergey had not only favoured him with his thoughts on the matter.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Russian literature, it was one of the great things we shared, but he talks shit—all Russian men do. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.’ She shook her head dismissively and looked away.

Alex couldn’t quite believe it was all nonsense; Sergey had seemed so passionate on the topic. ‘You don’t think so?’

She turned dangerously slanting eyes on him and a slight flush came over her high cheekbones.

‘Believe me, it’s all bullshit.’

‘The Russian soul?’

She flared up and pointed at him. ‘It’s a romantic dream of his. Russian men like to get drunk together and talk about grand emotions to justify their boorishness by making out that they are profound underneath it. They’re not, they’re just ill-mannered louts. Look, Tolstoy once said, “Everybody thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.” Russian men are a prime example of that; I have had enough of them.’

She warmed to her theme. ‘Sergey says he loves Russia but it’s easy to love people from a distance. If he really loved the Russian people why does he spend most of his time living in London?’

This passionate speech completely steamrollered the attempts Alex had been making to calm his emotions; now he just stared openly at her.

It wasn’t just Lara’s beauty that made her so captivating
—her lucent hair, her figure, her finely etched features. It was the fact that such a keen spirit animated her, so that when she spoke she became almost iridescent: each word brightly illuminated by the arch of an eyebrow, a widening of the pupils, a pout of the lips or a tilt of her cheekbones. It all came together in a brilliant fusion of thought, expression and gesture, holding him helpless in its beam.