Lacomte looked puzzled. ‘Do you think they’ll have a radio link to Moscow from one of the vehicles?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Richter said. ‘There are good reasons why they won’t be using long-range radio, although as Captain Colin said earlier they’ll probably be using short-range walkie-talkies for contact between the vehicles. But what they will have is a lot simpler and more effective. They’ll have a mobile telephone – or more likely several mobile telephones.’
‘Of course,’ Lacomte nodded. ‘Digital mobile phones will work almost anywhere along the autoroute, and they could actually talk to Moscow in clear with one, because of the digital transmission system – it works almost like a scrambler.’
Dekker nodded. ‘Quite right,’ he said, ‘but easy to fix.’ Lacomte raised his eyebrows in enquiry. ‘It’s simple,’ Dekker said. ‘You just knock out the local cells serving that section of the autoroute. No operative cells, no calls. With the authority you’ve got,’ he added to Lacomte, ‘that should be no problem at all.’
The Frenchman nodded slowly, then smiled. ‘No, no problem at all,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’ As Lacomte reached for the telephone, it rang. He picked up the receiver and held a brief conversation. Then he replaced it on its rest and looked up. ‘The clock,’ he said, ‘is running. The convoy left Strasbourg at eleven fifty this morning.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Wednesday
Richter, Dekker and Trooper Smith were sitting in a British Embassy car and heading east out of Paris fifteen minutes later, with Westwood and Tony Herron following in a second car. Dekker was muttering quietly into his personal radio, briefing the troopers at Davy Crockett Ranch that the group was en route and organizing weapons and equipment for the operation. He also told them to buy sandwiches and drinks, something Richter hadn’t thought of. ‘Why not?’ Dekker said. ‘This could turn out to be another very long day.’
At the Ranch they disembarked from the cars, which Herron sent back to Paris. Dekker and Trooper Smith went into their cabin to get changed; Jones and Brown were ready and waiting, dressed in camouflage clothing, not the jet-black combat suits normally worn by the SAS on operations. Herron, Westwood and Richter waited and watched as Brown made a final check of the equipment. Dekker and Smith emerged from the cabin and trotted over to the Ford. ‘Right,’ Dekker said, climbing aboard. ‘Reims, go.’
Jones slid the Transit into first and drove out of the Cherokee Trail and down the road out of the Ranch. He turned right on to autoroute A4, and held the Transit at a steady one hundred kilometres an hour, heading east. The run to Reims, about ninety kilometres, took just under an hour, and when they turned north onto the A26 Richter knew they had time in hand. As the Transit approached the Vallee de l’Aisne junction, Richter noticed three yellow autoroute maintenance vans clustered together on the hard shoulder, with a group of men sorting out cones and ‘
The rendezvous was at thirteen forty at the parking area just east of Laon, in the Foret de Samoussy, and they pulled in five minutes early. Jones found a quiet spot at the rear of the area and parked. At thirteen forty a dark blue Renault Trafic van with ‘
They followed the Trafic along the autoroute for about another ten kilometres, past junction thirteen. When the Trafic’s indicator began to flash the Ford overtook it, pulling off on to the hard shoulder just beyond the Renault. Colin Dekker hopped out and went back to the Trafic to consult with Erulin. Richter looked up and down the autoroute. It wasn’t an ideal place for an ambush, as it was almost dead straight, but he hoped the ‘accident’ would give them the edge they needed.
There was some cover to the north of the auto-route, where men could be concealed, and the central reservation had established shrubs, which would act as a shield between the two carriageways. Dekker returned to the Transit and looked inside. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘this is it. The two artics will be positioned about two hundred yards in front of us.’
‘Where are they now?’ Richter asked.
‘Patience,’ Colin Dekker said. ‘According to Erulin, they’re on their way to the parking area we used for our rendezvous. They’ll wait there until we know the convoy is a bit closer.’
Dekker called the troopers out of the Transit and stood with them by the side of the autoroute, shielded from the view of passing traffic by the van. By his gestures Richter knew he was trying to decide on force disposition and arcs of fire for his men, and probably also for the Gigenes snipers. Richter looked back at the Trafic van, where a group of a dozen men in camouflage clothing were standing. He could see two were carrying 7.62mm FR–F1 sniper rifles fitted with flash suppressors and laser sights – the standard GIGN weapon.
‘Nervous, Paul?’ John Westwood asked.
‘Of course I’m nervous,’ Richter said. ‘I don’t ambush armed Russian convoys carrying nuclear weapons every day. There’s a hell of a lot riding on this.’
‘Granted. What do you think of the site?’
‘It’s not perfect. I would have preferred a sharp bend immediately before it, but you don’t get sharp bends on French autoroutes.’ Richter looked at the passing traffic and then at the terrain to the north. ‘Once the traffic stops, it should be quiet enough. No houses in view, no awkward farmers ploughing fields. It should do. In fact,’ he added, ‘it will have to do.’
News of the crisis had, of necessity, spread. Key congressmen had been summoned to either the Pentagon or the White House and been briefed on the situation. The Secretary of Defense was still flitting between the White House and the Gold Room at the Pentagon. They had adequate communications between the two establishments, but the President preferred face-to-face discussions. You can’t, he often said, tell what a man is thinking if you can’t see his face.
‘I think,’ the President said, at the end of a meeting at the White House, ‘that it’s time to start taking preventative measures.’
The Secretary of Defense nodded. ‘Agreed, Mr President. I’ll implement JEEP as soon as I get back to the Pentagon.’
Five minutes later Lacomte arrived in an unmarked light blue Trafic van, parked in front of the Transit, got out and walked back to Erulin’s vehicle. He returned with the GIGN lieutenant, motioned to Dekker, and then to Richter and the other two men. The back of Lacomte’s Renault was a mobile command post, with radio and other communications equipment. Two operators sat in swivel chairs wearing headphones and listening intently. As they clustered together at the back, one of them raised a hand and then addressed Lacomte. ‘Valmy,’ he said.
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