under the bed, fanning out his arm in search of the power source that had to be within the length of the cable, and hit a solid, heavy box. He felt the top and what seemed to be battery terminals, attached the crocodile clips to the nodules, and light from several bulbs in the ceiling and on the walls instantly glowed, illuminating the chamber.
Zhilev crawled out from under the bed, covered in dust, and as he stood he had to hold his head for a moment and support it as his neck began aching fiercely. He massaged the vertebrae, bringing his head back and then dropping it forward down on to his chest hoping for the click that usually brought some relief, but it did not come this time. He moaned loudly as he forced his head down, increasing the pain, and then it suddenly cracked. He released it slowly, enjoying the comparative relief, dropped his shoulders and exhaled to relax, then took a look around at the long, narrow, sombre, metal chamber. In shape and size it was similiar to the inside of a road- haulage fuel tanker. It was just high enough for Zhilev to stand up in although he had to lean forward to prevent his head scraping on the ceiling. The memories came flooding back and the cache grew more familiar to him by the second.
A military communication system sat on its own metal shelf welded to the wall beside the bunk bed. Zhilev turned the radio on and as soon as a series of LED lights glowed, he turned it off.
The length of one side of the cylinder was crammed tightly with shelving packed with durable moulded, black plastic boxes of various shapes and sizes. Two pairs of bunk beds took up most of the other side with a narrow walkway separating them from the shelves. At one end of the bunks was a toilet with no privacy panel or curtain, and a sump in the ground beneath it large enough to take care of four men’s evacuations. Beside the toilet was the ladder welded to the wall directly below the entrance hatch. At the other end of the cylinder, beyond the beds, was a small table with an electric kettle on it as well as neatly stacked plates, mugs and cutlery. Beneath the table were several oxygen bottles. Everything was covered in a thin film of white dust which came from the air-scrubbers, a carbon-dioxide-absorbent powder which increased the life of the air inside the chamber in case it was unsafe to open the hatch for a long period. Like the submarines of old, if the percentage of oxygen dropped below a partial pressure of point two bars absolute, which affected most people’s brains, causing an initial drunken-like state before unconsciousness, the oxygen bottles could be activated and a trickle flow of the live-saving gas would maintain the correct percentage.
On the floor beside the toilet was a camouflage disk the size of a car tyre, designed to fit snugly inside the entrance hole; it was secured in place from beneath prior to closing the hatch and intended to hide the hole from the outside. It would not sustain a close inspection or an adult standing on it, but then it would only ever be used in the event of a real operation and the odds on someone walking through that precise part of the forest during the short period it would be in use were calculated as acceptable.There were also contingency plans in the event the cache was discovered. If the alarm was not immediately raised by the discoverers and they could be captured before they escaped, they were to be killed and their bodies buried. If it was the British military that made the find, and the inhabitants of the cache had no chance of escaping to continue their task, then the final option, which involved explosives and the total destruction of the cache, was none too pleasant for anyone in the immediate vicinity. This was the only kind of operation Zhilev had ever been involved in that called for suicide in the event of the threat of capture, and he remembered his team accepting the order wholeheartedly, understanding the logic and necessity of it.
The placing of the chamber in the ground sometime in the early sixties had been an impressive operation, taking several years to plan and many months to execute. The bare cylinder, or habitat, was purchased from a company in Hull which made it to spec believing it was to be used as an underground fuel reservoir for a factory outside Glasgow. The ground preparation and digging of the hole was carried out by a small group of KGB agents masquerading as geologists, archaeologists and students. Their cover story was that they were on a joint archaeological and soil-sampling project for Exeter and Munich Universities and they had genuine documentation giving them formal written permission to carry out limited earthwork in the area, which was more than enough to satisfy any curious passing police patrol or forest official. The hole itself was dug in a few hours late one afternoon using a rented digger and the cylinder delivered by truck early the next morning, lowered into the ground by crane and buried the same day. This took place far enough away from the road to be shielded from view by the young forest, which was part of the reason for selecting the location. The young pine trees that had been removed to dig the hole were replanted once the cylinder had been buried. The displaced soil which was not redistributed around the area was taken away on the truck that delivered the cylinder. None of the KGB involved in this phase of the operation had any idea what the cylinder was to be used for. The rumour deliberately circulated suggested it was to contain electronic eavesdropping equipment to monitor aircraft movements in and out of various airfields in the region.
Several months later, after the empty habitat had settled, the Spetsnaz took over the next phase, which was filling it with its various pieces of equipment and making it operational.The first stage was putting in the basic survival and living requirements such as toilet, beds, air-scrubbers, food and water. After that came the communications systems, and then finally the weaponry.
Buried cylinders were only one of the inventive ways the KGB used to provide operational war caches for the Spetsnaz. Some were in the sealed basements of town houses or farms owned by sleeper agents, others were in cleverly concealed caves. Their locations were limited only by the imagination, their main requirement that they could remain in situ without discovery for fifty years.
The last time Zhilev had been in this cache he had spent a week locked beneath the ground, the hatch sealed, with three of his comrades. It was classed as an exercise but deep inside his enemy’s territory. The cache was not a surveillance post and never intended to be one. It was specifically designed as a saboteurs’ hide, to keep four men in the most basic of comforts while they waited for the order to climb out and head for pre-designated targets where they would carry out their directives. That order would come via a one-way communication system, the signal received by pushing up an antenna through the soil using a specially designed telescopic system in the roof. If sensors under the ground around the cache detected movement by anything as large as a human, the antenna would be lowered. Twice a day, for half an hour each time, it was raised and the radio operative listened on three specific frequencies, each for ten minutes duration, for the Morse sequence that would precede the coded message that contained the vital signal to commence operations. It was a passive receiver device since the ever- watchful electronic ears of the British army intelligence corps might pick up a transmission and come sniffing in the woods for the source of the signal, for the British were well aware these caches existed, although as far as Zhilev knew they had only ever found one in England. He thought there were over two dozen in the British Isles, twice that number in Germany and several dozen more throughout the rest of Europe including Scandinavia. America had the largest number, understandably so, with over a hundred between the two coasts.The only other cache Zhilev had been to was in America, situated beneath a small lake in North Carolina a mile from a series of long-range nuclear-missile silos, and accessed by duck-diving down to a sump, like the U-bend in a toilet.
Zhilev turned to the shelving and looked at the numerous and varied cases spread in front of him, deciding where to start. He was looking for something specific, but also for anything that might be useful on his mission and therefore he decided he might as well search all the containers now that he was here. He moved to one end of the shelves and studied the catch on the front of the first container which consisted of a butterfly screw system that pulled the lid closed as it was turned. He unwound the first pair of latches and forced the halves apart. The hermetically sealed container popped as it opened. Zhilev raised the lid to find it filled with a variety of canned foods, powdered soup, tea and coffee, hard tack biscuits, dried milk and sugar, chewing gum, chocolate and boiled sweets. There were six of these containers, enough food to last four men a month if they kept their calorific intake down to two thousand per day.
Zhilev took out one of the tins to read the label: Meat and Cabbage Stew. He smiled to himself as he remembered the jokes that always accompanied this infamous meal and the fear of being in the confined space after it was consumed, especially with such an exposed toilet. In practice there never was an inordinate amount of noxious methane produced and everyone suspected that was the work of the great National Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Defence Ministry who had toiled relentlessly and no doubt spent millions of roubles to find a way to reduce the foul gaseous odour. It was with much comic relief the men whiled away the time adlibbing the likely conversations between the scientists on the subject of fart reduction in the Russian military, on account of its multitude of tactical disadvantages including noise, smell and flammability.
Zhilev replaced the tin and examined the next and largest container which was filled with water. On top, neatly stacked, were boxes of sterilising tablets and filtration tubes. In the event the team was required to stay longer than two weeks, water could be collected, even from dirty puddles and ditches, and made fit for drinking.
