Exit wound

‘No – just that you’ll be shot if you trespass into the training area.’

I slowed some more and checked behind us for possible observers. There were none. The road was deserted. I swung Cuckoo to the right, across a thin strip of wet grass, then manoeuvred between the trunks of the firs until we reached cover up against the fence. I turned off the engine, dismounted and pulled off my helmet. ‘Now you can fill it.’

I lifted a whole lot of gear off her legs and undid the rope clamping the full petrol cans to the rear parcel rack. As she tried to haul herself out, I dropped one of the cans by the sidecar and left her to it.

The fence was easy enough to climb. I used one of the pickets as support. I wasn’t worried about sensors. This thing stretched for hundreds of miles.

From the top, all I could hear was the gentle glug of fuel into our new Chinese chainsaw. I couldn’t see anything of the runway through the trees. That was good: it meant they couldn’t see us.

I jumped back down and grabbed the other can. We’d topped up the bike at every filling station we’d come across over the last six hours, even if the tank was three-quarters full. If we had to leg it, the last thing we needed was a fuel gauge on zero.

Anna was done. She screwed the filler cap tight. ‘What are we going to do now, Nick?’

‘They’re going to shoot down drones, right?’

She nodded. ‘When the clouds clear. They’ll want to do it at near maximum altitude.’

A MiG screamed off the runway to our right.

‘Maybe they’re going to take off from here. It’s the main base and the only airstrip we know about so far. We should penetrate as far as we can into the area, and check out where the drones are heading.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No, we’ve got to keep on pushing forward. The more we do that, the more we can find out – and the more chance we have of getting on target.’

I pointed to the clear plastic bubble on the side of the chainsaw. ‘Pump that thing until it fills with fuel.’

I went and tied everything back onto the bike. It was beginning to look like a really bad Cub Scout’s rucksack – all we were missing was a frying-pan and a bunch of tin mugs. ‘OK, on the bike. You’re going to ride through the hole.’

I picked up the chainsaw and after ten or twelve wrenches on the starter cord, and finally working out how the choke operated, the thing sparked up. I stuck the eighteen-inch blade against the chain link to the right of the steel post I’d just used to climb up, and throttled up to full revs. It was pointless worrying about the noise. If we were heard, we were heard. There was nothing I could do about it. What I could do was cut the fence and keep cracking on.

The thing didn’t cut that well – they never do at first. The chain bounced and snagged, but we got there. By stretching my arms as far as I could above my head, I cut a strip about two and a half metres high.

I turned off the saw and handed it to Anna. ‘Lash everything down – even the helmets. We have to look as normal as possible when we get back on the road.’

She nodded. We were definitely going to do this job and then escape. Everything would go like clockwork. That was part of the forward-momentum thing. You did your best to make yourself sound as if it was going to work, as if the job was going to be done. With luck, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I laced my fingers through the bottom of the fence and tried to drag it upwards.

105

It resisted at first, but came up easily once I’d wrenched the lower links clear of the undergrowth that had twisted its way through them. We were left with a gap like a badly drawn, inverted V.

Anna revved and pushed Cuckoo through, gouging its beautiful paintwork right down to the bare metal in places. She brushed her fingers lightly across the scars as she made way for me to replace her on the saddle. I knew what she was thinking, but I reckoned both Semyon and Grisha would have thought it was all in a good cause.

We worked our way through the trees and bounced onto a four-metre-wide gravel track that cut through the forestry like a firebreak. Puddles stretched across its rutted and pot-holed surface as far as the eye could see. The Ural bucked and reared and sent up sheets of muddy water, but kept ploughing on just like it was built to do.

I could hear the props of a reconnaissance aircraft taking off a couple of hundred metres to our right.

I just wanted to keep moving forward, try to find something – anything- that might give us a clue as to where we were, and where we should be going. I was working on the assumption that the most secure area, the proving ground, would be in the middle of the site rather than at the edge.

For a moment I was back in Brecon, in the training area where I seemed to have spent half of my squaddie life – a maze of forestry blocks, tracks and firebreaks just like this, and just as wet.