Then he heard it again. At first it seemed to be going away from him, but then was coming toward him — a faint scrambling. He resisted the temptation to use the flashlight. Then there was a fast rushing movement, a furry rat racing over his feet. He could smell them now — a stream of them.
The fact that the rats had apparently turned back toward him indicated he was coming to a cul-de-sac. He heard another sound: a tinkling. He brought his wrist up close to his eyes so he could read the watch face. He’d been down only three minutes. It had seemed like an eternity. The thought of rats gnawing his face if he should fall turned his stomach.
He waited for ten seconds or so, hoping that his eyes might adjust to any faint moonlight that might be penetrating a vent— if there were any — but if anything, it was blacker than before. He heard the tinkling again.
Up above the tunnel, in the world of moonlight and fresh air, Wezlinski cursed silently to himself. Someone in the squad had broken wind and the odor of putrefied baked beans engulfed him, and he thanked God for the breeze that whipped it downwind toward the river.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Officer on parade!” called the SAS sergeant major. “Atten-shun!” There was a crash of rubberized Vibram boots from the eighty-man squadron that shook the hall.
“At ease, gentlemen,” said Major Rye. “Gather ‘round.” As they all crowded in about the twelve-foot-square table, Cheek-Dawson at the adjacent corner, ready, upon Major Rye’s word, to take off the cover, Rye announced, “Another HALO jump, gentlemen. That’s why we’ve been giving you lots of practice up in Scotland. This, however, is not an exercise. Gentlemen, you have been requested!. Code name for the operation is ‘Merlin.’ “
There was silence following a few joking comments such as “ ‘Bout time…”—comments that would immediately have been withdrawn had they foreseen what now lay before them as, with a flick of the wrist, Rye and Cheek-Dawson removed the green cloth cover from the model of the mission’s target. The scale on the accompanying map Cheek-Dawson was pinning on the wall showed the target was no more than an hour’s flight from the Allies’ most forward airfields — no farther than the Wales-to-Scotland exercises. But even David Brentwood, who, in the Australian’s consistently gregarious presence, had adopted a self-protective nonchalance, could not suppress his surprise. The very air seemed to quiver as the new “Sabre” squadron crowded around the model.
“Son of a bitch, Aussie!” said Thelman. “You’ve just lost a bundle.”
“Bloody hell!” retorted the Australian. “The fix is in.”
“It is indeed,” said Major Rye, looking up at them. “As you gentlemen will appreciate, the location of this target had to be kept from you till the last moment. Now, however, the request has come and you have a full twenty-four hours to walk it through. Inch by inch.” He paused. “Any SAS target, gentlemen, is important. The very fact SAS is called in makes it so. But I can tell you quite frankly that this is the most important in our history. I have it on good authority both from 10 Downing Street and, for you American chaps, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that if we do not succeed in—” he paused “—in ‘adjourning’ a meeting which intelligence tells us is scheduled for tomorrow night, the war on the European continent will suddenly shift to chemical and possibly all-out nuclear war.”
The red-star-topped Byzantine spires were at once familiar and unfamiliar to every man in the room. While they did not know the names of all its salient features, there was no one who didn’t recognize the grim and forbidding grandeur of the Kremlin, the cluster of gold cupolas that were atop the once proud yellow brick imperial palaces and cathedrals of the czar of all the Russias, and amid them, the high, ocher-red walls that now contained the seat of Soviet power. In thirty-six hours, they were told, in the Council of Ministers Building, the Politburo and STAVKA of the Supreme Soviet would meet to put their signatures to what the KGB had already decided — to launch nerve gas attacks against the entire NATO front.
“The three troops of Sabre squadron,” explained Rye, “will be designated A for Alfa, B for Bravo, C for Charlie — each troop of sixteen subdivided into your four-man modules. Fluent Russian speakers from among the twelve-man HQ group will attach themselves to any of the troops as necessary during the operation. Lieutenant Laylor, leading A Group, will be the first out of three Hercules we’re using for the operation. Group A’s job is to establish and provide a perimeter of fire, Group B will eliminate the Politburo-STAVKA, and Group C will provide backup and detonations for retreat and for pickup, which I’ll get to in due course. One Hercules per group. Second group, B, I must emphasize again, will concern itself only with getting into the Council of Ministers and eliminating the enemy war cabinet. Those of you in this group may require more of the Russian translators than A or C, but I don’t expect there’ll be a great deal of time for conversation anyway.”
There were a few awkward grunts.
“The objective is simple. Doing it, not quite so easy.” He took the pointer. “As you can see, the Kremlin is an odd shape — five sides, none of them the same length — but we are only concerned with the northern triangular-shaped section up here.” The pointer moved to the top of the map. “This is made up of the arsenal tower at the top left of the triangle, Trinity Tower and Gate further left, to the west, Spasskaya or Savior’s Tower and Gate on the right, on the eastern side of the triangle.
“Whatever you do, try to avoid the onion-shaped domes down here south of the triangle. The domes are not your target. No reason you can’t abseil down from them, but this will consume precious time, and we estimate you’ll have twenty minutes maximum from point of landing to complete the mission.” Rye paused. “Questions so far?” Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the map as Rye waited a few seconds, then continued.
“For the last month, U.S. Second Air Force and RAF have been flying bombing missions out of our most forward airfields around Minsk, hitting Kolomna, fifty miles east of Moscow. This has diverted the mobile SAM and AA batteries away from Moscow as well as drawing off Moscow’s fighters. At the same time, we’ve been flying two or three Hercules — very high, under radar-jamming protection — dropping propaganda leaflets. Usual kind of stuff from NATO Psychological Warfare Unit, telling the Russian population at large that ‘while you are fighting the war, your leaders are living in luxury.’ The Russians already know that, of course. Personally, I think that this sort of thing is highly overrated and indeed counterproductive, but in our particular case, it does serve a very real purpose. By running these propaganda flights over the central Moscow area on a fairly regular basis, it’s caused the Russians, when their radar does manage to penetrate our jamming, to pay less and less attention to the Hercules they’re used to and instead to concentrate their mobile SAM sites and AA defense units around outlying industrial targets like the Likhachev Works that once produced Zils and are now busy turning out armor, et cetera. In any event, they’re understandably much more interested in having their expensive SAMs and AA batteries engage our bombers, not three transports that have been dropping leaflets over the last few weeks, which we’ve been using as a decoy for your drop. Even so, once you land inside the Kremlin, you’ll be up against SPETs elite guard units.”
David Brentwood suddenly looked across at the major. “We have any idea how many, sir?” he interjected.