James Barrington - Overkill

He left the phone on the table – it was useless to him now, and would serve to mislead the SVR, as it would continue to show him as being in the Crimea as long as it remained switched on – quickly shoved the computer and his clothes into a suitcase, and walked outside.

Hammersmith, London

In the next half hour Baker tried every word Richter could think of connected with the Russian operation, including Gibraltar, the names of the French and German towns where Modin had told him neutron bombs were positioned, Modin, Bykov, Trushenko, Kremlin, Moscow, Lubyanka and Yazenevo spelt forwards and backwards, in upper case and lower case, KGB, GRU, SVR, GroupNord, and even the names of past Soviet heroes like Sorge, Abel, Philby and Blunt.

With a single exception, the screen blanked each time and the Moscow computer severed the connection. The exception was ‘Modin’, and when Baker entered that name, the system prompted for a password, but none of the suggestions Richter made were accepted.

‘Let’s take a break,’ Richter said, ‘and think about this.’

Baker made instant coffee in the corner of the office. ‘Is it worth trying the Russian for secret and so on?’ Richter asked, taking a chipped china mug.

Baker shook his head. ‘I doubt it. This system will have an administrator who will have access to all passwords, and who should vet them. If he’s doing his job correctly he wouldn’t allow anything that simple to be used.’ Baker shook his head. ‘We need a name, or a word—’

Richter almost spilled his coffee. He had suddenly remembered something that hadn’t really made sense before. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I am slow.’ He reached for the phone, dialled the Registry and told them to deliver the file on Graham Newman to the Computer Suite. ‘I think I know what one password is,’ Richter said.

Karkinitskiy Zaliv, Chernoye More (Black Sea)

The closest SVR area headquarters to the Crimea is at Odessa, but there are smaller SVR units at Sevastopol, Simferopol and Kerch. The message from SVR headquarters at Yazenevo had instructed that the two roads out of the Crimea, through Krasnoperekopsk and Novoalekseyevka, were to be closed to all motor vehicles, the two railway lines closed to all traffic, and ferry operations from the port of Krym to Kavkaz suspended. Stopping the ferry and closing the railway lines was easy – it took two phone calls – but the roads were different. SVR teams set out immediately from Simferopol to reinforce the roadblocks erected by the local police forces, but the traffic queues built up rapidly and there were angry confrontations.

Dmitri Trushenko was not a fool. He had chosen the Crimea deliberately because it is effectively an island, with very limited access and egress, and he had anticipated that if anything went wrong the SVR or one of the other authorities would block the roads. That was why he had bought the powerboat. Fifteen minutes after walking out of the dacha , Trushenko was two miles offshore and heading north-west at twenty-eight knots across the Karkinitskiy Zaliv towards Port-Khorly, where he had left a car. The trip would take him about forty-five minutes, and he anticipated that he could be back on-line to the mainframe, using an ordinary land-line telephone, in a little over an hour.

10 Downing Street, London

The Prime Minister had used the hot-line and secure telephone circuits to talk to the President of the United States more often in the last three days than he had done throughout his entire term of office. The two men had enjoyed, almost from their well-publicized first meeting, a relationship that transcended the purely official functions of their respective offices and had turned into real friendship. And that friendship had helped the two of them face the similar, but in some ways very different, threats posed by Dmitri Trushenko’s Operation Podstava .

It would be too much to say that Britain and America were working together to combat the Russian assault, because Trushenko had placed them in completely different positions – there were no pre-positioned weapons on British soil, but there were over two hundred in place in American cities – and the strategic assets of the two nations were wholly dissimilar. But both men had decided that the best way to combat the threat was to threaten the Russians just as hard, to take up a totally uncompromising, and non-negotiable, position.

‘What targeting instructions have you given?’ the President asked.

‘Ablanket assault,’ the Prime Minister replied, ‘aimed at Moscow, St Petersburg and Gor’kiy. No military targets at all, just the major civilian population centres.’

‘And you’ve told the Russian ambassador? Sharov?’

‘Yes. I’m certain he knew all about Podstava – you could see it in his face when I told him about the weapon we stopped in France. But what shocked him was that we’d also found and disarmed the one in Gibraltar. He knew there was going to be a demonstration, as that Russian bastard Trushenko put it, but he didn’t know where. He’s probably been talking to the Kremlin ever since, trying to find out what he’s supposed to do now.’

‘That was good work by your people,’ the President said.

‘Thank you. I hope that we may have some other good news for you later today,’ he added. ‘We have a team hard at work trying to break into the computer in Russia which we believe controls this entire operation.’

‘You have?’ the President’s voice rose in hope and surprise. ‘If you require any assistance, anything at all, just ask. We have some of the best computer scientists in the world working at the National Security Agency. I’m sure they could—’

The Prime Minister’s soft chuckle interrupted him. ‘Believe me, I’ve already offered your resources as well as our own, but the people involved have told me that outside assistance will not be required. I don’t pretend to understand the technicalities of it, but apparently they can only use one line to access the Russian computer, so the two men who are working on it—’

‘Two men?’ the President interrupted. ‘Only two men? Good God, I hope they know what they’re doing.’

‘I think they do,’ the Prime Minister said smoothly. ‘One of them is the man who stopped the road convoy in France and disarmed the weapon in Gibraltar.’

Hammersmith, London

When the courier arrived, Richter took the file and flicked through it until he reached the notes he had made following his meeting with Piers Taylor of SIS. As Richter read them, he realized that the answer had been staring him in the face all along, and that Graham Newman might have had an inkling that something was going on at Krutaya, even if he had no idea what it was. Richter thought he now knew why he had sent Andrew Payne to Sosnogorsk, and what the exchange of messages probably meant.

‘The SIS Head of Station in Moscow sent his deputy – a man called Andrew Payne – out to Sosnogorsk in June,’ Richter said. ‘Officially, he was acting as a translator to a party of European businessmen, but the real reason he went was to contact a Russian called Nicolai Karelin and exchange messages. The messages,’ he went on, ‘consisted only of single words. He said Schtchit to Karelin, and the Russian replied with Stukach and Chernozhopy .’

Richter wrote the words on a piece of paper, together with the name of the Russian contact. ‘Try Schtchit first,’ Richter suggested.

Baker looked at the paper. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked.

‘The actual meaning is “shield”,’ Richter said, ‘but it has a more specific meaning to GRU personnel. It’s a particular kind of double-exposure film that allows an operative to take two sets of pictures, one entirely innocent – the family playing on the beach, that sort of thing. The other set can be of anything he likes – classified documents, secret military installations or whatever. If the film is developed normally, all that the prints will show are the innocent pictures, but if the correct developing technique is used, the other images will appear.’