crawled over the side of the skiff and half swam, half pulled himself with the branch to the bank. I threw my backpack to him when he’d climbed up the bank and followed him. We collected stones to put in the skiff and sank it. Finn tied the painter on to a branch that dipped beneath the water; we’d be returning another way, but it was a good precaution if things went wrong.
We waited at the edge of the wood under cover until we could be sure no sentries were close or troop manoeuvres were taking place nearby and then crossed a dust track into some fields of vines. They provided the cover we needed to reach a road on the far side of several fields, where we could wait out of sight for a bus that came sometime after dawn.
It was a short journey by bus to the border town of Bendery. By mid-morning we had reached the town, with its statues of Lenin still in place, fifteen years after the Soviet Union collapsed. We were two British backpackers, fascinated by this frozen piece of history, on a walking holiday.
The town of Bendery lay further north back upriver from where we’d landed. The capital Tiraspol has some modern buildings paid for with mafia money, and a huge new stadium, but Bendery has very few modern structures. Both cities are museums of Soviet architecture, but thanks to its border position with Moldova, Bendery’s few modern buildings are paid for from legal and illegal cross-border traffic.
The two companies we were interested in, which are effectively Transdnestr’s economy, were both based in Bendery. The first place Finn wanted me to look for Reiter’s trucks was located in the barbed-wire fenced yards of Pribor, Transdnestr’s arms manufacturer, controlled by the shadow state company Salyut in Russia.
We knew we were at the point of no return, illegal entrants into an illegal country, one of us an SVR officer, and the other a British spy. There was nothing we could do now if things went wrong. I’d be escorted to Moscow. And Finn? I didn’t know what they’d do with him, but I doubted he’d choose to be captured alive.
It was in a cafe, about a mile or so from the Pribor factory, that Finn and I went our different ways. His job was to find a car, mine to enter the factory. A car hire company, if one existed in Transdnestr, was out of the question and he’d have to buy a car with cash.
Both of us were nervous. I saw the rationale behind the practice at the Forest- and I’m sure at MI6- that two people in an intimate relationship were never sent together on an assignment. It was distracting me now. Leaving Finn was uppermost in my mind when I should have been thinking about the job.
‘We could have a coffee, if you like, Rabbit,’ he said. ‘Or we could just go home.’
I put my arms around him and whispered in his ear.
‘I love you, Finn.’
He kissed me, squeezed my hand, and we both turned and walked in opposite directions.
I walked towards the depot without looking back and found a cafe a few hundred yards from the entrance. It was hard to clear my head. We had several rendezvous, depending on my timing. If I found what we were looking for at Pribor, there followed one set of rules between Finn and me: we would meet in the main square at Tiraspol. If I had to go to the second factory, there would be another day’s work at least. In this event, and with the increased possibility that the authorities would be alerted, we would head for the mountains to the north and wait for the hue and cry to die down before crossing back to Moldova.
I sat and drank a greyish coffee and watched the movement of trucks in and out of the depot’s gates, observing the procedures followed by the drivers and military personnel who checked their papers. After half an hour I had what I needed and I left. Any strip searches of the trucks must have taken place at the border.
I took a bus back a few miles or so along the main road towards Moldova and disembarked at a stop where nobody else alighted and walked towards some trees in a copse away from the road that offered some cover.
When I knew I was unobserved, I took my SVR Colonel’s uniform from my backpack and changed into it. Then I walked back to the road until I saw the truck-stop cafe just on my side of the river, the Transdnestr side of the border, that Willy had told us about.
There were only trucks in the car park behind the cafe, no other vehicles. I entered the dingy jerry-built truckstop and found more grey coffee. I took it outside to the area at the back and studied the truck plates and any logos that were visible.
There were three German trucks, all with blue tarpaulins covering their sides and obscuring anything that might identify them easily. Trucks entered and left the park every quarter of an hour or so.
I looked under the blue tarpaulins of the three German trucks but saw no insignia to say any of them were Reiter’s.
I waited for nearly two hours watching trucks enter and leave. Their drivers waited aimlessly in the cafe, presumably for the right time to arrive at their final destination somewhere up the road into Transdnestr.
Finally I saw a German truck enter with the usual tarpaulins covering its sides, and a young man stepped out and walked across the park to the cafe. Again I looked behind the tarpaulin but saw no logo.
I walked into the cafe, had another coffee and watched the driver. He was reading a paper and sipping something from a cup that was too hot to drink. He seemed to be in his late twenties, though he looked Russian to me and it is hard with Russian men to tell how old they are; most Russian men look at least ten years older than their real age. He had an open face and he smiled at the silent woman serving coffee and asked for a
‘What time are you going to the depot?’ I asked him.
‘To Pribor?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘You know more than me, I expect,’ he said, and laughed. I laughed with him and nodded in agreement.
I asked him about his life and he told me that he was scraping a living doing two or three jobs and had a wife and children in Moldova. They’d got out of Russia, and then out of Transdnestr, and he wanted to go west and make a new life for his family. I told him I could help him and asked him what he needed.
‘Asylum and money,’ he said and laughed again. ‘That’s all. I have a cousin in France, working on the roads, but we want to go to America. They say it costs ten thousand dollars to arrange a marriage there. I want to go south, to the heat. My wife, she doesn’t like the Russian cold. The winters in Krasnoyarsk made her cry.’
‘There are problems at the depot,’ I said. ‘You may know about them.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ he laughed, and put up his hands. ‘That’s your business.’
‘You may be able to help us.’
‘And why should I trust you?’ he said, smiling still. ‘Because you’re a woman, perhaps? But it’s not just the Russian winters we want to leave. We also want to say goodbye to Russian uniforms.’
‘You seem very confident,’ I said, taken aback by his lack of respect, let alone fear.
‘What do you want? I’ll help you and maybe you’ll help me too. But I don’t expect it. That way, I am always happy.’
‘I’m going into the depot, but I’m going in unannounced. You get me?’
‘Sure.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘I’ll trust you to do what’s right.’
‘You’re not like a Russian.’
‘I haven’t lived in Russia for three years, thank God.’
‘You’ll have a thousand dollars. Meet me in two minutes by the truck.’
‘No hurry. I don’t need to be there for an hour,’ he said, without reacting at all to the offer of what was so much money to him.
‘Two minutes.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said and put his hands up again mockingly.
I went to a filthy toilet at the back of the cafe and took off my SVR uniform and put on some dirty overalls I had in my backpack. To my surprise and relief, the driver was by the truck when I returned.
‘I’m Anatoly,’ he said, and held out his hand.
I paused, then took it. ‘Good to meet you, Anatoly,’ I said, and he didn’t ask me my name.
‘I can put you in the toolbox in the truck,’ he said. ‘I smuggled three tiger cubs across the Ukrainian border six months ago in there. There’ll just be room.’
