As merry shouts shook the windows, I sat there sunk in the blackest thoughts. With a couple of exceptions, these Tiger Force guys were ordinary, lively fellows like ourselves. Too many people in Britain still had a Cold War image of the Russians, and thought of them as sinister, alien beings. Now, after a week in the country at grass-roots level, I saw that normal people, like us, had remained human in spite of all the horrors heaped on them. They had their strengths and weaknesses, their good and bad points, the same as us. And an attack on Britain was the last idea that any of them would have entertained.

Nevertheless, the job had to be done – and even as Sergei Three handed me another slug of Diamond I was saying to myself, ‘Right: the city centre recce’s going down tomorrow night . . .’

Chapter Seven

SEVEN

When we next went to the Embassy, we left camp at the same time as on our first run, but this time we took just the black Volga. I hadn’t told the Chargé we were coming into town: officially, we were going out for a couple of drinks and a bit of a bar-crawl.

Whinger drove, I read the map, and in the back sat Pavarotti, alongside Toad, with his lock-picking kit and two spare padlocks for the cover of the shaft. I’d deliberately nominated Pav as my No. 2 in the tunnel: I’d told him I might well need his height and strength, and that he’d just have to overcome his phobia. We were all wearing civvies, but Pav and I carried thin, dark overalls to wear on top of our other clothes while we were underground.

The weather had turned wet, and rain glistened on the tarmac. We soon realised to our cost that the car’s wiper blades were knackered, and created more smears than they removed; but once again the traffic was light and we made rapid progress. On the long, straight run in we turned off the highway a couple of times, waited in a side-road, then came back out, to make certain we didn’t have a tail.

No threat presented itself, and this time my navigation was spot-on: we reached the embankment without a false turn. There was a chance that the dicker we’d seen before, or some replacement, might still be on station, so we put in one drive-past, cruising westwards along the gentle, left-hand curve of Sophieskaya Quay, past the pink-and-white gateway, then past the Embassy, both on our left. To our right, across the river, the great buildings of the Kremlin were splendidly floodlit, and faint reflections gleamed in the wet tarmac of the embankment. A couple of cars came from the opposite direction, and a man and a woman were walking away from us, but there was nobody loitering.