in France, I believe we can trust you to do the right thing.’
Richter inclined his head in acknowledgement. It was coming to something, he mused, when a senior Russian military intelligence officer seemed more inclined to trust you than your own boss did.
‘So what’s the story, Viktor?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather wait until we get to the hotel. Then we can talk freely and in comfort.’ As he said these words, Bykov gestured briefly towards the front seats of the Mercedes, and Richter understood perfectly. The GRU officer had borrowed the car only as a matter of convenience, but either its driver or the escort might well be reporting to a different master.
Careless talk could still cost lives, even in today’s relaxed, post-glasnost, pro-capitalist Russia.
‘Stop what you’re doing right now,’ the senior Bulgarian Air Force guard ordered, and strode into the warehouse. The other three members of his patrol followed him, their Kalashnikov assault rifles held ready. ‘You.’ He gestured with the muzzle of his weapon. ‘Get out of the forklift.’
The man at the vehicle’s controls climbed down and stood alongside his five companions, as they stared silently at the new arrivals.
Looking irritated by the interruption, Draco stepped forward. ‘What’s the problem?’ he snapped.
‘The problem,’ the patrol leader explained, ‘is that we have no collections or deliveries scheduled for today.’
‘I don’t understand. We have our orders.’
‘Let me see them, then.’
Draco strode over towards the patrol commander, reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers that he handed over. The Bulgarian guard shouldered his weapon and flicked through them, then looked up, puzzled.
‘These are blank,’ he said.
‘Oh, sorry, I must have given you the wrong ones. Here.’ Draco reached inside his tunic again, pulled out a silenced semi-automatic pistol and fired a single shot. The Bulgarian fell backwards, his forehead sprouting a third eye, as a spray of blood and brains flew towards his companions.
‘Now,’ Draco yelled, jumping to one side, out of the line of fire. He brought his pistol to bear on another of the startled patrol members, fired again and watched the second man fall. To his left, three of his men had now produced their pistols but, despite the shock of the sudden attack, the two remaining patrol members reacted immediately, by splitting up and running outside the warehouse to raise the alarm.
‘Find those two and kill them,’ Draco ordered, and a couple of his men picked up the Kalashnikovs belonging to the two dead men, and followed the escaping Bulgarians out of the door. ‘The rest of you, shift these bodies, then finish the loading.’
Outside, the two Bulgarian guards were running for their lives. They might have survived if they’d only used the buildings as cover, but in their panic both of them had decided that they must get back to the guardroom where the telephones were located. So they set off in a more or less straight line.
The first of their pursuers rounded a corner and spotted the two running side by side only about seventy yards in front of him. He knelt down, aimed the Kalashnikov and fired two rapid bursts of perhaps six rounds each. The result was immediate: both his targets fell clumsily to the ground, their weapons spinning uselessly from their hands. He stood up and watched their collapsed figures for a few seconds, then ran towards them.
One was clearly dead – two rounds had ripped through his back, emerging messily near his sternum – but the other was still alive. He’d been hit once in the lower back, the bullet cutting through his spine, and was now trying desperately to drag himself to where his Kalashnikov lay a couple of feet away. His assassin walked calmly across to the writhing figure, kicked the assault rifle well out of reach, then fired two rounds into the man’s skull.
He next picked up the AK47s and slung them over his shoulder – the team being armed only with pistols, the Kalashnikovs might prove useful once they’d left Dobric. After searching the corpses for spare magazines and ammunition, he headed back to the warehouse.
Ninety minutes later, they’d loaded all three trucks with a total of forty-eight of the long, heavy boxes, sixteen to each vehicle. Draco checked their loads carefully to ensure that the weight was evenly distributed and properly lashed down. Finally he gave the order to drive off, but only after they had dragged the dead men out of the warehouse and dumped them out on the roadway near their two companions. That way, there’d be no immediate pointer to the munitions they’d stolen, though the theft was bound to be discovered within days or even hours.
The trucks stopped just outside the main entrance while the seventh member of the group locked the gates behind them. Then he carefully returned both sets of keys to the safe and climbed back over the gates to rejoin his companions. Before they moved off, they all discarded the Air Force uniforms they’d been wearing and replaced them with blue workmen’s overalls.
Draco waved briefly from the cab of the leading truck, whereupon they turned out onto the road and headed south. Varna was only a short drive, about thirty-five miles, and Draco knew a cargo ship with Panamanian registry was waiting there for their precious load. Once they’d delivered it, this group of men would disperse, and probably never see each other again. They’d been recruited individually from the Bulgarian underworld for this single operation, for which they had all been very well paid. None had any idea what was contained in the boxes or of their importance to their recruiter, a middle-aged man of Chinese appearance who spoke their language only haltingly.
As the trucks bounced and rattled on down the road, only the drivers themselves were visible in the cabs. In the back of each vehicle the other men were completing their penultimate task by carefully pasting pre-prepared shipping labels over the stencilled ‘R-40T’ markings.
The Rossyia is vast: twelve floors containing three thousand two hundred rooms; nine restaurants, two of which can each accommodate a thousand diners; six bars; fifteen snack bars, and the world’s biggest ballroom. It also possesses a huge cinema, the Zaryadye, that can hold three thousand people. Publicity material relating to the hotel dubs it ‘The Palace’ but, as the black Mercedes approached the vast structure squatting beside the Moskva river, Richter could see why it had attracted that other, less complimentary, epithet, ‘The Box’.
Bykov had booked him a room on the sixth floor, and the GRU officer suggested they adjourn to a bar, once Richter had deposited his bag there.
‘We checked the room thoroughly for bugs yesterday,’ he explained, ‘but in Moscow you never really know who’s listening to you. That’s why I’d feel more comfortable in the bar. I regret to say that your presence here has not been met with universal approval, and I’ve been instructed that you should not to be allowed to visit my office or any other building used by the GRU or SVR.’
‘Hotels and bars are fine with me,’ Richter assured him.
They found a booth at the back, ordered drinks and waited till they were placed on the table in front of them.
‘Right, Viktor, I’m all ears.’
Despite his fairly fluent English, for a moment Bykov looked confused – he hadn’t heard that expression before – but then his face cleared. ‘Very well. Let me start at the beginning. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union our armed forces have remained in a state of flux. For a long time it wasn’t always clear exactly what weapons or aircraft were located at what bases, nor who had control of those assets. Salaries weren’t being paid, officers and men weren’t getting relieved at the ends of their tours of duty, all that kind of thing. It was a total mess, an administrative nightmare.’
Richter nodded. ‘The West was very concerned about what was going on. But now you seem to have got everything sorted out, yes?’
‘Yes, we have – or most of it, anyway. But as Moscow re-established positive control of all branches of the armed forces, and as a matter of routine began comparing listed inventories with the assets that could actually be located and identified, some accounting discrepancies were discovered.’
‘“Accounting discrepancies”?’
