He looked back again but, as the vehicle headed towards him, it passed under a streetlight, and he recognized the sallow features of Ryu Chang-Ho in the driver’s seat.
It was then Lenkov started running, his feet pounding loudly on the pavement as he desperately sought sanctuary. When the lights of another bar beckoned, he skipped across the road, pushed open the door and rushed inside.
But even as he strode across the room, he heard the street door slam open behind him, and a rough voice called out ‘Police! Stay where you are.’
Lenkov turned to see the same two Russians advancing towards him. One of them was holding up a shield that looked remarkably like the double-headed golden eagle of the MVD, the Russian police.
‘Those aren’t cops,’ he shouted desperately, as he backed away towards the smoky rear of the bar. But nobody was listening to him, as the sight of two men claiming to be MVD officers was quite sufficient incentive for them to all mind their own business.
They were on him in a moment, one man pinning him against the polished wood of the bar counter while the other pulled his hands behind his back and snapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists.
Lenkov kept shouting for help as they hustled him towards the door, but nobody in the bar so much as looked at him. Outside, the car waited, Ryu still in the driver’s seat, the engine idling and the rear door already open. The two Russians pushed Lenkov inside, then climbed in after him. The moment the door closed, the car drove away from the kerb.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Lenkov demanded in panic, but none of the three men replied.
As they began heading out of Perm, Lenkov started yelling at the top of his voice and kicking out at the men imprisoning him.
‘Shut him up,’ Ryu instructed briefly. One of the two burly Russians pulled a cosh out of his pocket, as his companion forced the captive’s head forwards.
The cosh swung down in a short, vicious arc, smashing into the back of his skull. It wasn’t sufficient to knock him out, but after the second blow Lenkov collapsed forward, unconscious, into the footwell.
Fifteen minutes later Ryu pulled the car to a halt by some thick woodland on the outskirts of the city. ‘Bring him,’ he instructed, and led the way between the trees.
As they dropped him to the ground, Lenkov was beginning to regain consciousness. The first thing he was aware of was rough hands emptying his pockets, taking his wallet, keys and loose change, and then unstrapping the watch from his wrist. He opened his eyes to see Ryu staring down at him, a semi-automatic pistol in his right hand. The two Russian thugs stood by, watching with disinterest.
‘Wait,’ Lenkov said, desperation in his voice. ‘We can talk. I’ll do what you want.’
Ryu stepped close to him and looked down. ‘The time for talking is over,
Lenkov lapsed into shocked silence as Ryu cocked his pistol.
The bullet smashed into the young man’s face, just below his right eye, and he toppled backwards, killed instantly. The sound of the shot was shockingly loud in the silence of the wood, and birds flew out of the trees in panic, their wings beating an ironic applause to the execution, while somewhere deeper in the wood a dog started barking.
Ryu stepped forward, rolled the body onto its side and removed the handcuffs from the wrists, then the three men walked away without a backwards glance.
Seventy metres behind them, a middle-aged Russian peered cautiously from behind a tree, a dog lead clutched in his hand. He’d heard, but not seen, the shot being fired, and the sight of the three men walking away had immediately caught his attention. He looped the lead around a branch to stop his trembling dog from following him, then quickly made his way to the edge of the wood. Moments before he got there, he heard a car engine start, so he paused for a few seconds. Then he heard a vehicle moving off, and began to run.
Some fifty metres in front of him, a grey saloon car was driving away, bouncing over the rutted track as it headed towards the main road, but he couldn’t make out the digits on its number plate. As he walked back into the wood to fetch his dog, almost the first thing he came across was the crumpled body of Georgi Lenkov.
Yershenko was getting progressively more irritated with the staff at Letneozerskiy. He and his team had been ready to leave for almost two hours, but their aircraft – an Antonov An-28 – still wasn’t ready. The delay, according to their pilot, who seemed almost as frustrated as his passengers, was because of a problem during refuelling.
One of the tanks wasn’t filling properly, and the ground engineers had elected to carry out a visual inspection of its interior and to check the associated fuel lines for blockages and contamination. That had required specialized equipment and a fibre-optic viewing device, and simply assembling this had taken them over an hour. The process, as far as Yershenko could tell, would then take a further thirty minutes, and only then, assuming they found nothing wrong, would they be able to fill the tank.
It was nearly three hours after his inspection team had assembled in the squadron office, their bags beside them, that the Antonov was finally towed out of the maintenance hangar and chocked on the hardstanding in front of them.
‘At last,’ Yershenko muttered, as he watched the fuel bowser approach.
Fifteen minutes later, he strapped himself into his seat at the front of the cabin and opened his briefcase. His inspection report was far from finished, and he proposed to use this long flight to continue drafting the final document. And it wouldn’t just be a single hop: the Antonov was a slow aircraft with a very limited range, so would have to land and refuel at least three times before reaching the Ukraine.
The aircraft levelled at ten thousand feet and the pilot relaxed, trimmed the Antonov for straight and level flight, and then picked up an en-route chart to work out an updated estimate for the next military airfield they’d be landing at to replenish their tanks.
In the passenger cabin behind him, Yershenko continued with his report while most of his team opened the packs of sandwiches they’d been given on departing Letneozerskiy. The Antonov didn’t run to a galley – even the chemical toilet was very much an afterthought – so any food and drink had to be carried on board.
Twenty minutes after reaching its cruising altitude, there was a muted thud somewhere near the main radio set. It sounded almost like a bird-strike, so at first the pilot was relatively unconcerned. Just as a precaution, he tried calling the Letneozerskiy radar controller, but found the set was dead.
Loss of the main radio was an irritation rather than a serious problem, but it still remained a matter of concern. Thirty seconds later concern changed to worry when the pilot realized that the standby radio was also non-functioning. There were emergency procedures for this kind of situation, and obviously they would have to land as soon as possible to get the radios fixed. The pilot consulted his en-route chart, calculating times and distances, then selected cabin broadcast to tell his passengers what had happened, and explain what he intended to do.
But the words never formed, for at that instant there was a colossal explosion somewhere in the lower section of the fuselage. The cabin floor erupted upwards, the detonation peeling the aircraft apart, twisting and severing pipes and wires, and scattering seats, boxes, cases and aluminium panels alike. Most of the team had removed their seatbelts and were now catapulted instantly from the falling wreckage. Mercifully for them, most were killed or knocked unconscious by the force of the explosion. The pilot was flung forward through the windscreen and was dead even before he started falling.
But Yershenko remained conscious all the way down and, in the last moments of his life, understood exactly why there’d been such a delay in refuelling at Letneozerskiy.
It doesn’t take long to plummet ten thousand feet, and in just over a minute what was left of the An-28 and its human cargo impacted the frozen and unyielding ground at around two hundred miles an hour.
Back in the air traffic control room at Letneozerskiy, a senior officer advised the station commander that the Antonov had disappeared from the radar screen, with its pilot no longer responding to radio calls. The commanding officer ordered him to initiate a search and rescue operation immediately, then phoned each of the squadron commanders in turn to brief them on the apparent loss of an aircraft.
However deeply concerned the 524 IAP colonel sounded, he had already begun preparing himself for a long and completely unauthorized journey of his own that would take him first to a private bank in Austria, and
