The Kremlin Device (17 page)

Everyone nodded.

‘I don't think the radios will work underground,' I added, ‘but everyone stay on listening watch. Pav and I are One, Whinger Two, Toad Three. Our ERV is over there, under the bridge. Right, then – let's go.'

Whinger swung round and drove back at a moderate pace. Now the gateway was on our side of the road. One car overtook at speed, and we watched its tail-lights draw rapidly away into the distance.

Whinger was slowing.

‘Nothing behind,' I said. ‘Now!'

In seconds the three of us were out and under the gateway. I heard, rather than saw Whinger pull away behind us.

I led us forward into the dark courtyard, keeping to the right-hand wall. Above our heads, lights were showing in a couple of windows; straight ahead the little church sat hunched in shadows, jutting from the left wall of the yard, and the inner road swung past its entrance at the right-hand end into a second yard at the back.

From an intensive study of the plans I had every inch of the layout in my head. Five metres past the door of the church we'd come to the end of the building on our right. Beyond it, set back farther to our right, was a run of smaller structures – old stables. The second little building from our end would be open-fronted, or at least without a door. The head of the shaft was in the back of that shed, behind a wooden partition.

Moving quickly, we came level with the door of the church, which stood slightly open with slivers of light shining through top and bottom. Women were talking inside, their voices rising and falling. We reached the corner of the tall building. There, just visible in the gloom, stood the low range, a few metres farther on. A dozen quick steps brought us to an open doorway.

The wooden lintel was sagging, and I ducked to go under it. Inside, the darkness was so intense that I had to use my pencil torch. The beam picked out an old wooden partition of horizontal planks, extending half-way out across the stable. Beyond it the earth floor was covered with rough, half-rotten hay. Raking some aside with my fingers, I felt iron: the shaft cover. Quickly I cleared debris away from two padlocks – the two we'd been shown in the photo, which were not rusty but coated in dust. Clearly it was some time since they'd been touched.

‘Stay in the doorway,' I breathed at Pavarotti, and he faced outwards, on guard, as Toad went to work, opening the barrels of the locks with his levers. I held my torch-beam steady on his hands, wincing at every little click and scrape.

The first lock gave itself up easily after no more than a couple of minutes, but the second was more stubborn. As Toad fiddled and shook, Pay let out a sudden hiss over his shoulder. Instantly I doused my torch. Peering past our sentry, through the doorway, I saw two women come out of the church and walk towards the big building.

We let them get clear, then started again. At last there was a louder click, and the hasp of the second lock fell back. As I carefully lifted the cover its two hinges groaned. My torch, pointing straight down, lit up a square shaft with brick walls, and I could see at a glance that it was big enough to take the component parts of Apple. To make certain, I'd brought with me a piece of string thirty inches long – the maximum dimension we needed – and when I stretched it out from one edge it ended nearly a foot short of the other. That was one problem solved.

The disappointment was the ladder – or rather the lack of one. Instead of a succession of built-in steel rungs there were only two, a foot apart, close to the top of the shaft. From the holes and pits in the brickwork lower down, it looked as though the rest had been ripped out.

‘We need the ladder,' I whispered.

I unrolled the springy bundle from my bergen and made one end fast round both hinges. Then I pulled on my overalls, and I heard Pavarotti rustling as he too kitted up.

‘All set?' I asked.

‘Fine.'

‘Right, then, Toad. We'll see you in half an hour.'

I lowered my legs into the shaft and eased my weight down the wire rungs, feeling for them with one foot after the other. Fourteen changes of grip, and my feet touched bottom. As soon as I stepped off the ladder it went slack. I knew they'd feel the change up top, and that Pav would start down.

I heard him scraping on the brickwork as he descended, then felt him touch down beside me. The moment he let go of the ladder, the end went snaking up as Toad reeled it in. His brief was to seal us down with two spare locks he'd been carrying, then to hide up somewhere close by until the time came to release us. That way, if by any thousand-to-one chance somebody did come along to check the padlocks, he'd see nothing amiss. Toad would be in radio contact with Whinger throughout, and could call him in to lay on a diversion if anything started to go wrong.

When I heard the cover come down with a faint thud, I felt a shudder of claustrophobia run through me. If anything serious befell Toad and Whinger, we'd be sealed down here for the duration. Pav was obviously having the same panic, or worse: I could hear him breathing deeply and effing and blinding under his breath.

The air was rowsty and moist, full of a smell of damp decay. Our head-torches revealed a tunnel with a horse-shoe section, lined with bricks. The roof was just high enough for me to stand upright, but Pav, who was a couple of inches taller, had to crouch slightly to keep his head clear.

Somehow – perhaps because of the colour of the Kremlin walls – I'd expected the bricks to be red. In fact they were dirty cream, or had been: much of the surface was black with fungus or slime, and when I touched the wall beside my shoulder my fingertips slid along the wet surface leaving pale streaks. In many places individual bricks had crumbled or fallen out, so that there were frequent piles of rubble on the floor. That gave me encouragement; if the tunnel had been in immaculate condition, any tampering we did would have been that much more obvious.

I bent down and examined the floor. It was evenly covered with damp dust – paste, almost – the same dull colour as the walls. There was no sign of any disturbance – not even any traces of rats, which I'd expected to find. I saw that we wouldn't be able to help leaving footprints.

We'd measured the distances, and I had them in my head: 160 metres to the river bank, 110 metres across the river, seventy-five to the Kremlin wall: 345 metres in all to our preferred site. When I went forward I was going to count.

‘Ready?' I whispered.

Pav didn't answer.

‘Eh!' I went. ‘Let's go.'

‘
You
go!' he gasped in a peculiar voice. ‘I'm staying here.'

I could tell he was having problems just from the way he sounded. When I put out a hand and touched his arm, I felt him shaking violently. I turned the beam of my head-torch on his face and saw beads of sweat trickling down his cheeks.

‘Get hold of yourself!' I snapped. ‘We haven't got time to piss about.' In my mind I added, A great big feller like you, too! But I knew his hang-up was getting to him.

A few seconds later he said unsteadily, ‘I'm all right now.'

‘Come on, then.'

I moved forward, counting. For 102 paces the floor of the tunnel remained level. Then it began to descend.

‘Going down under the river,' I said.

‘Aye,' Pavarotti agreed. ‘I reckon.'

At the start of the slope was a big heap of debris. Such a chunk had fallen out of the upper right-hand wall and roof that the pile of bricks stretched across the tunnel floor to the base of the opposite wall, and we had to scramble over the lowest part of it. When I directed my head-lamp at the raw wall where the bricks had been, I saw that it consisted of moist grey clay.

‘At least we can dig into that,' I muttered.

‘Pity we can't put the bloody thing in right here. Save messing about.'

‘It's too far from the proper site.'

We were still talking in whispers, partly out of habit, partly because we reckoned any sudden noise in a place that had been silent for generations might precipitate a further collapse of roof or wall.

We crept on again, but after a few more steps I stopped. My torch was picking out some difference in the texture of the floor ahead. Instead of light grey, it looked black. I stared for a minute, then said, ‘Shit! It's water. The fucker's flooded.'

‘Never,' said Pavarotti. ‘If part of the tunnel was flooded, the whole thing would be full of water.'

I saw the logic of what he said – but he was wrong. At the point where the water started the floor was still dropping away, so that as we continued forward the flood gradually deepened. The water was cold and black and stank of decay, and we had no option but to wade into it until we were knee, then thigh, then bollock deep. Only when the surface was above our waists could we see that, a few more yards ahead, it came right to the roof.

‘Jesus Christ!' said Pavarotti. ‘We're knackered. We can't get through this lot.'

We pulled back and started wringing the filthy, black water out of our trousers.

‘Pretty obvious, isn't it?' said Pav. ‘Of course it's going to be flooded, under the bloody river.'

For a minute I sat on the deck, holding my head in my hands, trying to think constructively.

‘There's no way we're going to get closer to the Kremlin anywhere else.'

‘Why not forget this bastard?' Pav suggested. ‘Get the other one in first and then see?'

‘No, no,' I told him. ‘This is the one they want. I'm sure of that. We've got to crack it. What we need to get through this lot is breathing gear and dry-suits.'

‘Yeah. But how do we know what happens the other side of the water? If there
is
another side. If the rest of the tunnel's flooded we're buggered. Jesus, I hate this!'

‘It must be quite a small leak,' I said. ‘Otherwise, like you said, the whole tunnel would be full. Maybe the pressure's equalised itself somehow – or mud's filtered into the fissure.'

‘Let's get the hell out, anyway.'

I'd been planning to sweep away our footprints behind us, but I realised now that, even if we went to that trouble, we'd still leave fresh marks and it would be obvious that somebody had been down here. In any case, the chances of anyone else coming down in the next few days seemed infinitesimal.

We were back under the access shaft just twelve minutes after leaving it. Eighteen minutes to wait. I tried the radio again but got no response. I wasn't going to shout, just in case some Russian was passing the old stable up top. I imagined Toad, on the lurk up there, and Whinger, on standby in the Volga somewhere along the embankment. Maybe they were chatting to each other on the radio.

‘Have to wait,' I whispered. ‘Let's take a stroll in the other direction.'

That didn't get us far. This time I wasn't counting the steps, but about a hundred metres to the south the tunnel was blocked by a major fall. The damage to the roof and walls was so extensive that I felt sure they'd been bulldozed in or deliberately dropped by hand. Bricks, rubble and clay were tumbled in an impenetrable mass.

Back under the shaft, we waited. We peeled off our sodden overalls, but still we were soaked to the waist and higher. Soon we were pretty cold. I went over the various levels of our fall-back plan in my mind. The first was that if Toad got accosted in the yard, he'd pretend he was drunk and had staggered in there to sleep it off. The next level was that if we three didn't reappear, Whinger would park the car out of the way and come looking for us. The final stage laid down that if all four of us weren't back in camp by 6.00 a.m., the rest of the team would come out to search. I knew that in an emergency we could seek sanctuary in the grounds of the Embassy, but that could only be a last resort because it would blow the whole Apple programme.

Spot on 2150 we heard faint metallic noises above our head – a clinking and scraping. Then came a slight change of pressure as Toad lifted the cover. A few seconds later the ladder-end flicked down beside us. I sent Pav up first, and heard him grunting with effort as he climbed. When the ladder twitched twice, I started up myself.

In the blackness of the shed I whispered, ‘OK?' and Toad said, ‘Fine' as he undid the ladder, closed the hatch and slipped the original padlocks back through the securing rings.

We pulled some of the rotten hay back over the cover and stood listening in the doorway.

‘There's still something on in the church,' said Toad quietly. ‘People keep coming back and forth. They're crossing to that doorway with the light showing.'

We were so wet and filthy we looked like a couple of drunks who'd fallen in the river, so even if we did meet someone there was a chance they'd pay no attention.

‘Let's go,' I said.

We hustled along the edge of the yard, past the church door, back to the entrance gate. We'd hardly crossed the road on to the pavement beside the river when we saw a car coming in our direction.

In my earpiece Whinger's voice went, ‘I have you visual,' and I knew it was him. Ten seconds later he pulled up beside us, and we were safely on board.

‘All quiet up top?' I asked.

‘Beautiful. But, Christ, what have you been doing?' He turned and glared at me.

‘Eating caviar and drinking vodka,' I told him. ‘What's the matter?'

‘You stink like the arsehole of the universe.'

‘Thanks, mate. That's what it's like down there. Stinking. The bastard tunnel's lined with shit and what's more, it's full of water.'

‘Could you get through it?'

‘Not this time. We waded as far as we could, but we need breathing kit and dry-suits. Head for base, Whinge. We're soaked to the bloody skin.'