James Barrington - Foxbat

Then he checked in with Dekker, so the SAS man would know what he was planning. ‘Alpha One, Spook. I’m going in through the side door, after I next see the guard check this side of the building.’

The voice in his earphones was quiet and reassuring. ‘Roger, Spook. We’re watching your back.’

Three minutes later the sentry stuck his head around the far corner of the hangar and glanced along the side of the building, then again retreated.

‘Spook. I’m going in now.’

The moment the guard vanished, Richter moved, sprinting across the fifty-odd yards of short-cropped grass that separated him from his objective. The side door was slightly recessed into the brickwork, but not enough to hide him from sight. He had to make sure he got the door open before the guard decided to take another look this way.

The first thing he did was check for wires or sensors, or any kind of an alarm system. He wasn’t really expecting to find one, since the hangar lay inside an airfield constantly patrolled by armed guards, but it was his practice to check everything, and usually twice over. Then he tried the door handle, just in case somebody had forgotten to lock it, but that got him nowhere. He slid the tension wrench – a slim steel tool shaped like an elongated ‘L’ – into the keyway of the mortise lock and exerted gentle turning pressure, then inserted the snake pick and started probing.

Lock-picking was a skill Richter had only recently acquired, while attending a short course in Camberwell conducted by a professional locksmith employed as a consultant by the Security Service, MI5. That instruction had been arranged solely in preparation for this operation.

The lock was an exterior-quality five-lever unit, but it felt old and worn and, more importantly, loose. Holding the snake pick lightly between forefinger and thumb, he began twisting it gently, locating the various wards and trying to visualize the shape of the key that would fit, then moving the levers gently, guided by the pressure of the tension wrench. It was a delicate, highly tactile process, and here Richter was trying to rush it. Suddenly he felt the wrench move slightly in his hand, and he continued turning. With a faint click, the pick and wrench rotated through a complete circle. The first lock was now open.

He tried the door handle again, but it still didn’t budge. Richter transferred the tension wrench to the other lock, and took the electric pick out of his pocket. This type of lock was known as a pin-tumbler, and he saw with some surprise that it wasn’t just Yale-pattern: it was actually a genuine Yale. According to the MI5 man, unless there was something very unusual about the design, opening a pin-tumbler would normally take only a few seconds. This realization had persuaded Richter to replace the entire security system for the entrance door of his attic apartment in Stepney.

Through his night-vision goggles, Colin Dekker lay watching the figure crouching at one side of the hangar. Beside him, outside the Aïn Oussera boundary fence, Sergeant-Major Wallace was doing much the same, but he was peering through a Davin Optical Starlight scope fitted to a 7.62mm Accuracy International PM sniper rifle, with a bulky suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.

Wallace wasn’t concentrating on Richter, though. His weapon was aimed towards the front of the hangar, at the corner where the sentry would appear if he suddenly decided to take another look along that side of the building. If the Algerian guard spotted Richter, then Dekker’s instructions were perfectly clear: Wallace was to take him out at once, before he could raise the alarm. Then it would be up to Richter to conceal the body, probably by hauling it inside the hangar, assuming he could get the door open. It wasn’t much of a plan, admittedly, but it was the only one they had, under the circumstances.

Richter inserted the needle all the way into the keyway then eased it back a fraction in order to allow it to move freely, exerting gentle pressure on the wrench and then pressing the button to activate the pick. The unit hummed and shifted slightly in his hand as the vibrating needle impacted the pins, and only seconds later he was able to rotate the wrench. He released the button on the pick and turned the lock against the pressure of the spring holding the latch. With his left hand he reached for the door handle, turned it and pushed with his shoulder. Immediately the door swung open and he stepped inside the hangar. Quickly he pushed the door closed behind him, the latch clicking back into place.

‘You can relax, Dave,’ Dekker murmured into his headset microphone, after he watched Richter disappear. ‘He’s inside now.’

Beside him, Wallace eased the sniper rifle off his shoulder and rested the butt on the ground, while the front of the weapon was still supported on its bipod. ‘Just remind me, boss. How’s he going to get himself into the right hangar?’

Dekker still didn’t take his eyes off the scene in front of him. ‘He’s got a plan – but it all depends on what he finds in there.’

Inside the hangar, three hundred yards away, Richter was beginning to hope that he hadn’t wasted his time. In the light from his torch he could see three aircraft: two MiG-25PDS, the up-rated export model of the Foxbat interceptor; and a two-seat trainer, the MiG-25U, probably belonging to the 110th Escadron de Chasse, if the Six briefing officer had got it right. But Richter had no interest in the fighters: he was looking for something much smaller.

The thing about hangars is that they’re very large and tall, designed to accommodate one or more aircraft while they’re undergoing maintenance, and to facilitate this work they need banks of powerful lights mounted high up. Since lights periodically need their bulbs replacing, what Richter was looking for was the cherry-picker hoist, or whatever the Algerians used to do this. What he was hoping now was that they kept one in each hangar, rather than rely on a single hoist shared between them.

Then he saw it, tucked back against one wall: a standard electric-powered cherry-picker with controls in the cradle itself. The only problem was that it probably didn’t have the height for him to reach the very top of the building, but that wouldn’t matter. Up there, Richter could see a latticework of girders supporting the gently curved roof of the hangar and knew that if he could at least reach the top of one of the steel side-pillars, he could climb up the rest of the way. So as long as he was quiet, the guard outside shouldn’t hear anything, but if the cherry-picker was fitted with a petrol engine, he’d just have to do it the hard way.

Moving the contraption was an unnecessary risk, so Richter left it in position, climbed into its cradle, and ran the beam of his torch over the controls. Fortunately, they looked simple enough. He flicked on the master switch, shifted the joystick lever forward, and the cradle began to move upwards and, to his relief, almost silently. As he neared the top of the side-pillar, he adjusted the elevation angle slightly so that the cradle stopped, virtually at its upper limit, right beside one end of a steel rafter.

Shining his torch across the underside of the roof, he observed that its structure was strong and simple. The main support was a single central steel beam running all the way from the front to the back of the hangar, with about a dozen girders positioned like ribs on either side of it, and additional longitudinal supports to carry the roof panels.

He calculated it would necessitate a fifty-foot climb – at about a fifteen-degree upward angle all the way, and hanging upside down underneath the rafter, in order to reach the central supporting span.

Richter secured a webbing strap to the harness he had already strapped around his torso, looped it over the rafter and clipped it to the D-ring. That would now be his safety line. Then he pulled on a pair of custom-made leather gloves with yellow mesh webbing on the palms and fingers, designed to provide the maximum possible grip, checked that all his equipment was secure, grasped the rafter with both hands and swung his feet up, digging his heels into the recessed sides of the steel beam.