“Are we alone?” Enquired one of the Spetsnaz agents as he dragged a chair across the room and sat down on it in front of the desk.
The owner, a Spetsnaz sleeper and an ex-Special Forces operator himself, walked over to the window opposite, peered outside and proceeded to lower the venetian blinds, twisting them until they blocked all view into the office, but gave some visibility looking out. “Yes, it’s Sunday, so there was only a little overtime for one driver. How did the recce go?”
“It went well,” the second Spetsnaz operator responded, a slim twenty-eight year-old with thick black hair that covered his ears, whereas his comrade was shorter, stockier and chose to keep his brown hair close-cropped. “We got a good feel for the complex, but need to go over the photographs again now we have a better perspective on the base’s scale.”
The owner left the window and walked over to a solid-looking, free-standing grey steel safe that was bolted to the floor. He bent down, inserted a key, tugged the heavy steel door open with a yank, pulled out an A4-sized envelope from the bottom shelf and chucked it on the desk. He stood up. “These are the latest. They came in the diplomatic bag this morning.”
The one with the close-cropped hair sat on the edge of the desk and picked up the brown envelope, extracting the glossy prints, dropping them on the top of the desk next to the map his comrade had just placed there and was in the process of smoothing out flat. They shuffled through the pictures, matching them up to the relevant points on the map and laying them down on the outer edge.
The Sleeper placed a sheet of paper on top of the map. “These are the guards’ schedules. Pretty regular; they’ve been doing the same routine for years.”
“Accurate?” asked Cropped Hair.
“As best we can get. There is only myself and one other, so we have to be careful. We can’t hang around too long in case we get mistaken for the IRA.” The Sleeper laughed. “They don’t seem to be particularly suspicious about anything, and I haven’t noticed anything to indicate they are on any alerts. That usually happens if there have been a few IRA bombs chucked at any of their camps. Searches of people and vehicles in and out of the camp are pretty thorough though.”
“Not a problem for us. We certainly won’t be going through the main gate,” Cropped Hair joked. “Anything to drink?”
“Yes, in the cupboard next to the safe. There are some glasses too.”
The dark-haired one got up out of his seat and in a couple of strides was at the other side of the desk, opening the cupboard door and removing the bottle in question along with three shot glasses. With vodka bottle in one hand and the three shot glasses gripped with his fingertips, he got up and placed them on the desk, shuffling some of the photographs aside. “You have a date and time yet?”
“No,” responded the Sleeper.
The bottle glugged as Dark Hair filled the threes small glasses, each one to the brim.
“I am expecting the signal any day now, but I suspect it will be sooner rather than later.”
Dark Hair handed a glass to each of them and knocked his shot straight back. “Na zdorovje.”
“Spasibo,” his comrades responded as they too knocked their drinks back in one, then banging the glasses down loudly on the steel-topped desk.
Dark Hair quickly refilled the glasses. Sleeper waved his hand, but his new found comrade thrust the glass at him.
“I’m driving.”
“Aah, don’t worry about it.”
“You are in the West now, my friend. Not easy to get away with drinking and driving.” He grabbed the glass out of Dark Hair’s hand. “Just this last one, then. Na zdorovje.”
Sleeper had also been in the GRU’s Spetsnaz as a full-time soldier. But now he had a different mission as a Spetsnaz agent: a sleeper. Infiltrated into West Germany in the mid-seventies and given the necessary funds, he had set up his courier business, providing courier services to local businesses, often travelling many kilometres across the country. This gave him an ideal cover for gathering intelligence on other parts of the country for the GRU: photographing bridges, ridges, potential river crossing points and, of course, military bases. He could familiarise himself with terrain that may potentially be of interest to the planners of a potential future invasion by the Warsaw Pact. He would feed back the intelligence he had gathered by leaving film and documents at pre-arranged ‘dead letter boxes’, where a member of the Russian Consulate would retrieve it and ship it back to the motherland via the diplomatic bag. His other role was in fact being enacted now: acting as a contact point and guide for a Spetsnaz unit that had been given instructions to plan for an offensive operation against a major British ammunition dump which was likely to also be a storage point for nuclear weapons. Like the two men that were with him now, Sleeper had also been trained in the art of killing, killing silently, along with sabotage and demolition; and, if called upon, to carry out the assassination of military commanders or senior public officials.
He looked at the two men. “This isn’t just an exercise, is it?”
The two Spetsnaz agents, who had been infiltrated into the country the previous day posing as long-distance lorry drivers from East Germany, looked at each other. The dark-haired one, the leader, responded, “We have only been told that it is an exercise. But the situation between us and the West appears to be taking a turn for the worse. I think you could be correct: we may very well be doing this for real.”
“I think I’ll have that other drink after all.”
Dark Hair topped up their glasses for a third time. “Does that worry you?”
“No, it’s what I was set up here for. Na zdorovje.”
“Na zdorovje.”
Glug, glug. The glasses were refilled.
“Anyway, the capitalists need teaching a lesson. Na zdorovje.” But his own secret thoughts were very different. He had come to like living in the West and had managed to carve himself if not a wealthy life, certainly a comfortable one. A war between the East and West could only be a bad thing.
“You OK?”
He looked up at the dark-haired soldier, conscious that he had been deep in thought. “Just reflecting on what needs to be done: accommodation, supplies, transport.”
“The hotel we’re in seems adequate.”
“Yes, but only for another night. You are lorry drivers. I will need to move you somewhere else tomorrow morning. The German police will have a record of your passports by now. I have new ones for you.”
“Where are our supplies?”
“There’s a bunker about five kilometres south-west of here.”
“How’s it hidden?”
“It’s a fairly dense forest. It’s accessible, not easy, but then that suits our purpose. The bunker is in the centre.”
“When did you last check it?” Cropped Hair asked.
“Day before yesterday.”
“What’s its condition?”
“Good, good. Its seals were intact. I opened some of the weapons packs and, apart from some needing a good clean, they were in good condition and operable.”
“And the special weapon?”
“Intact. I hope to God we don’t have to use it.”
He was referring to a specially made suitcase which, with its contents, weighed close to fifty kilograms. It was a deadly weapon: a SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) smuggled into West Germany three years ago. The Sleeper was responsible for placing it there and watching over its security. Assembled in the Soviet Union, they were made to facilitate the destruction of key NATO targets, such as nuclear weapons sites, communications sites and even power plants. This was what concerned the Sleeper agent the most: the thought of a dirty nuclear bomb being exploded in what had become his new home. Although less than half a kiloton, equivalent to approximately five hundred tons of TNT, it would still cause utter devastation, and the dirty radioactive fallout would contaminate a wide area. Then what? A full nuclear exchange?