Rick broke off, looked up and said, ‘Guess what this respected Russian scientist is called.’ When nobody answered, he said, ‘Yablokov. We all know what that means.’

Somebody gave a groan. Yabloko was one of the first words we’d learnt on our Russian course. It means ‘apple’.

‘Either it’s a fluke,’ I said, ‘or someone’s having a laugh.’

‘Maybe someone nicked a couple of suitcases from the KGB, and we’re just taking them back,’ Pavarotti suggested.

‘There’s a worse possibility than that,’ said Pete. ‘If we’re doing this to the Russkies, who’s to say they haven’t done it to us already? What if there’s a CND nicely placed in the wall of the Thames, under the House of Commons terrace?’

‘Yeah,’ Whinger agreed, ‘and another under the guardroom, right here in camp.’

‘It’s no bloody joke,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you remember that time in the seventies when the Finns stopped an articulated truck and found it contained the roof for a Mexi stay-behind shelter, destined for England? If the bastards were getting dug in in the UK then, why should they have stopped now?’

‘Here’s something else off the Net,’ Rick went on, scanning his second sheet. Again he read: ‘“Russia is regarded as an increasingly unreliable partner on international issues, because of the power of corrupt officials, crooked businessmen and organised crime, a US public policy research group declared on Monday. A panel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that the criminalisation of Russia’s economy, if left unchecked, would make normal state-to-state relations with the country unviable. It will become impossible for the United States to have traditional, satisfactory dealings with an emergent Russian criminal state.”’

He lowered the paper and said, ‘What about that?’

‘That’s it, exactly,’ I said. ‘The stupid bastards in the Pentagon have got the wind up. They’re bobbing like the shit-house fly, and want us to do their dirty work for them.’

Once in Russia, we were going to need several days for site recces. Obviously we’d have to get the training course up and running; so no matter how fast we moved there was no way we could install Apple and Orange immediately. That in turn meant that the devices would have to be stored somewhere secure for the time being.

The idea of having them with us in that decrepit barrack block at Balashika seemed impossible, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that we must get them into the cellar at the British Embassy at the first possible moment. There, apart from other considerations, Apple would be practically on-site anyway, only a few hundred yards from its ultimate destination. The trouble was, the devices would travel into Russia with us on the Here and be off-loaded on the strip at Balashika. How could we account for the fact that we needed to transport heavy boxes into the centre of Moscow?

‘Tell the Russians we’ve shipped in some new comms equipment, at the Embassy’s request,’ Whinger suggested.