But my worst worries now were about our two missing men. I shrank from thinking what they might be going through. Much as I disliked Toad, I didn’t want him hurt. I had to admit that on this task, so far, he’d pulled his weight and caused no trouble. As for Pav – still less did I want him to get beaten up. I clung to one small straw of hope. Neither of them had been involved in the bust on the apartment, so they could deny all knowledge of that.

But what were they to say about the bomb?

So far as we’d worked it out, our cover story – in the event of getting bumped – was that the device belonged to the Russians, and that we’d been moving it on their behalf. Toad had repeatedly assured me that every part of the device was anonymous and deniable: nowhere on the casing or any of the contents was there a single letter of Western writing. If he and Pav claimed to be ordinary squaddies, and professed complete ignorance about how the thing functioned, they might get away with it for a few hours. As always when someone is captured, their policy would be one of controlled release – letting out as little information as possible, as slowly as possible. The best I could hope was that they’d be able to hold out until we discovered their destination and got after them.

Chapter Thirteen

THIRTEEN

It was the telephone that roused me.

Tony’s voice sounded incredibly close. Half asleep, I thought he’d flown into Moscow. Then I came round fully and realised he was calling again from New York.

‘I think I woke you,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No sweat. What time is it?’

‘Here, we’ve got a quarter of nine. I don’t know about you.’

‘Still dark. Wait a minute. Quarter to five. What’s happening?’

‘We’ve found your missing Orange.’

‘Fantastic. Where is it?’

‘A nice quiet place called Grozny.’

‘Ah, Jesus! Chechnya. Just what we thought.’

‘That’s where it is. It came back on the air ten minutes ago, and it’s now proceeding westwards into the mountains.’

‘OK. Can you continue monitoring it?’

‘Sure. How about we update you every quarter-hour?’

‘That’d be brilliant. I’m going to get right on to Hereford, ask them to establish a forward mounting base.’

‘Eastern Turkey’s where you want to be looking. Kars – somewhere like that.’

‘I bet they’re on to that already.’

They were. It was just before 2.00 a.m. GMT when I got through to the ops room, but the place was up and running. The ops officer and the CO were both there, planning to launch the QRF.