He’d just found himself a seat in Cappuccino’s coffee shop, on the second floor, when one of the girls from the reception desk appeared beside his table. On showing her his passport, he received a white A4-size envelope in exchange. It was marked ‘URGENT. Strictly Private and Confidential’. He didn’t think was a good sign at all, so he waited until he’d finished his coffee before opening it.
The envelope contained a single sheet of paper with a brief message printed on one side only. Like all communications that might be intercepted or read by third parties, the text was innocuous and capable of more than one interpretation.
RICHTER, CROWNE PLAZA, DUBAI. PROCEED MANAMA, BAHRAIN, SOONEST. NEW PROCESS DEVELOPED BY PARENT COMPANY. ASSESS VIABILITY AND REPORT CONCLUSIONS. EVANS, LONDON.
It was the kind of communication that any ordinary businessman might receive, but for Richter the hidden meaning was perfectly clear. ‘Parent company’ meant SIS, and ‘Evans’ was the name of the officer who would contact him when he reached Bahrain. The rest of the message was essentially padding, but by implication the local Six office had discovered something they needed help to resolve. Or, even more likely, there was some kind of a dirty job that needed doing, and Richter had been volunteered by Vauxhall Cross, via Hammersmith, to do it.
‘Bugger,’ he muttered. His investigation of James Holden would just have to wait.
As Richter was heading for his room in the Crowne Plaza, James Holden walked into the tiny space he called his study — actually the third bedroom — sat down at the desk and turned on his computer. Until his wife left him a couple of weeks earlier, he’d invariably locked the door before switching on the power. Now there was no point in turning the key because there was nobody else in their small apartment to see what he was doing.
Holden was a long-time resident of the Middle East, and for most of his career he’d been employed as an accountant in the oil industry, but that job had ended abruptly five years earlier. He’d been reduced to working part-time as a waiter — the only job he’d been able to find. He hadn’t been entitled to a pension due to the circumstances of his dismissal from the oil company — in fact, he’d been lucky to escape prosecution when details of his attempted theft of almost half a million dollars had been revealed.
So when he’d been approached just over a year earlier and invited to participate in a scheme likely to make him a great deal of money, he’d jumped at it.
Holden first opened Outlook Express and checked his inbox. He’d been expecting at least one email, and he grunted in satisfaction when he recognized the sender’s name. He read through the short text, then copied the message itself and the three jpeg files attached to it into a hidden directory on his hard drive, before he looked at the pictures.
The quality wasn’t as good as he’d been hoping, but they were clear enough. Holden studied each picture for a couple of minutes, then he closed the directory, deleted the original message from his inbox, and purged the ‘deleted items’ folder as well.
Once he’d shut down the computer, Holden sat in thought for a few minutes, then took a pen and a slightly crumpled sheet of paper and began scribbling notes, just single words and disjointed phrases, scrawled apparently at random across the page. Then he reread what he’d written, folded the paper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.
Ten minutes later he walked away from the apartment building. He hadn’t arranged an appointment, but he was sure his new friends at Al-Seef Road would be pleased enough to see him, bearing in mind what he’d told them before.
Vaslav Litvinoff stood on the quayside and watched the scene unfolding in front of him. The motorized barge was almost alongside, its crew out on deck ready to throw mooring lines to the waiting stevedores. Some twenty police and FSB officers were standing in position around the berth, their Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifles trained on the approaching vessel. Beyond the barge, and in a low hover over the dark waters of the Volga, was the reason the barge’s captain had been persuaded to deviate from his planned itinerary.
When Litvinoff had deduced that the stolen nuclear weapon was probably stowed in the cargo hold of the barge, he’d contacted the closest military base — Volgograd — and requested an armed helicopter. He’d explained to the base commander that he believed the barge was carrying stolen weapons — he’d not mentioned the nuclear bomb — and emphasized the vital importance of stopping it.
The officer had believed him, and had dispatched what amounted to a one-aircraft army, and every tank commander’s worst nightmare; a Ka-50 Black Shark or Werewolf. The helicopter wasn’t normally based at Volgograd, which is primarily a MiG-29 repair facility, and was simply passing through, but it was undeniably the ideal tool for the job.
Many helicopters look ungainly, some look sleek and luxurious, but the Black Shark is probably the only one that manages to look implacably evil. From its fifteen-metre-diameter twin main rotors to the pair of stubby wings carrying an awesome array of weapons, it looks more like something dreamt up by a Hollywood special-effects studio than a real aircraft.
This highly classified combat helicopter, designed by the Kamov Company and built by Sazykin Aviation, entered service with the Russian army back in 1995. Powered by a pair of two-thousand horsepower turboshaft engines that gave it a top speed of nearly four hundred kilometres an hour, the helicopter was designed as a tank-buster, but its two-ton combat weapon load meant it could tackle virtually anything.
Stopping — or even sinking — the barge would have been easy using the armour-piercing and explosive incendiary rounds fired by the standard thirty-millimetre cannon, but the pilot had taken no chances. The aircraft was also armed with a dozen Vichr supersonic anti-tank missiles, each capable of destroying a main battle tank at five miles, and with a laser-beam guidance and control system that virtually guaranteed a hit probability of one.
The barge captain had taken one look at the jet-black helicopter, bristling with ordnance and hovering a mere ten feet above the forward deck of his vessel, and had immediately decided to follow the instructions that issued from the aircraft’s loudspeaker.
As soon as the mooring ropes were secured, a gangplank was lowered into position by a waiting crane, and Litvinoff quickly led his men on board. The captain was waiting on deck, and the FSB man wasted no time. As his men fanned out to search the vessel, he stepped forward and showed his identification.
‘Captain, are you carrying any unauthorized passengers?’
‘No, of course not.’ The man shook his head in bewilderment. ‘This is a working cargo vessel, not a pleasure cruiser.’
‘Good. At least I know you’re telling the truth about that. So what about your cargo?’
‘What about it?’
‘Are you carrying anything that doesn’t appear on your manifest? And, before you answer that question, let me tell you that I have come here direct from Saratov.’
The barge captain stared at Litvinoff for a long moment, then dropped his eyes.
‘We collected a single crate there, yes. It was an unscheduled addition, but why are you interested? Why all this?’ The captain spread his arms to encompass just about everything from the armed men on the quayside to the hovering Black Shark.
Litvinoff ignored his questions and watched as one of his own men approached. ‘We’ve searched the vessel, sir, and there is no one on board except for the crew members.’
‘Good. Now contact the helicopter and thank the pilot for his help. We won’t be needing the aircraft any longer.’
As his subordinate moved towards the gangway, Litvinoff turned back to the captain. ‘Who delivered this crate?’