The assault team was dressing and “tooling up.” Over his underwear, each man pulled on the standard one-piece black jump suit of fire-resistant fabric. At the last moment this would be complemented by a treated black fabric balaclava hood. After that came the body armor, lightweight knitted Kevlar designed to absorb a bullet’s impact by spreading it outward and sideways from the point of penetration. Behind the Kevlar the men stuffed ceramic “trauma pads” to complete the job of blunting an onrushing projectile even further.
Over all this went the harness to hold the assault weapon, the HK, and to hold the grenades and handgun. On their feet they wore the traditional ankle-high desert boots with thick rubber soles, whose color can only be described as “dirty.”
Captain Lyndhurst had a last word with each man, and the longest with his assault leader, Steve Bilbow. There was, of course, no mention of good luck—anything else, but never “Good luck.” Then the commander left for the observation post.
He entered the Adrians’ house just after 8:00 p.m. Preston could feel the tension emanating from the man. At 8:30 the phone rang. Barney was in the hall, so he took it. There had been several calls that day. Preston had decided it would be fruitless not to answer—someone might come to the house. Each time, the caller had been told that the Adrians were at her mother’s for the day and that the speaker was one of the team of painters redoing the sitting room. No caller had refused to accept this explanation. When Barney lifted the receiver, Captain Lyndhurst was coming out of the kitchen with a cup of tea.
“It’s for you,” Barney told the captain, and went back upstairs.
From 9:00 onward the tension rose steadily. Lyndhurst spent much time on the radio to the holding area, from which at 9:15 the gray van and its shepherding police car left for The Hayes. At 9:33 the two vehicles had reached the access on Belstead Road, two hundred yards from the target. They had to pause and wait. At 9:41 Mr. Armitage came out to leave four bottles for the milkman. Infuriatingly, he paused in the gathering gloom to inspect the stone bowl of flowers in the center of his front lawn. Then he greeted a neighbor across the road.
“Go back in, you old fool,” whispered Lyndhurst, standing in the sitting room and gazing across the road at the lights behind the curtains of the stronghold. At 9:42 the unmarked police car with the two rear-garden men was in position in Brackenhayes and waiting. Ten seconds later Armitage called good night to his neighbor and went back inside.
At 9:43 the gray van entered Gorsehayes, the development’s access road. Standing in the hall by the telephone, Preston could hear the chitchat between the van driver and Lyndhurst. The van was cruising slowly and quietly toward the entrance to Cherryhayes.
There were no pedestrians on the street. Lyndhurst ordered the two rear-garden men to leave their police car and start moving.
“Entering Cherryhayes fifteen seconds,” muttered the van’s co-driver.
“Slow down, thirty seconds to go,” replied Lyndhurst. Twenty seconds later he said, “Enter the Close now.”
Around the corner came the van, quite slowly, with dimmers on. “Eight seconds,” murmured Lyndhurst into the receiver, then a savage whisper to Preston: “Dial now.”
The van cruised up the Close, passed the door of No. 12, and stopped in front of Armitage’s bowl of flowers. Its position was deliberate—the assaulters wanted to approach the stronghold slantwise. The oiled side door of the van slid back, and into the gloom, in complete silence, stepped four men in black. There was no running, no pounding of feet, no hoarse cries. In rehearsed order they walked calmly across Armitage’s lawn, around Ross’s parked hatchback, and up to the front door of 12 Cherryhayes Close. The man with the Wingmaster knew which side the hinges would be on. Before he had finished walking, his gun was at his shoulder. He made out the hinge positions and took careful aim. Beside him another figure waited, with a sledgehammer swung back. Behind them were Steve and the corporal, HKs at the ready. ...
In his sitting room, Major Valeri Petrofsky was unquiet. He could not concentrate on the television; his senses picked up too much—the clatter of a man putting out milk bottles, the meow of a cat, the snarl of a motorcycle engine far away, the hoot of a freighter entering the estuary of the Orwell across the valley.
Nine-thirty had produced another current affairs program with yet more interviews with ministers and hopeful ministers-to-be. In exasperation he flicked over to BBC 2, only to find a documentary about birds. He sighed. It was better than politics.
It had been on scarcely ten minutes when he heard Armitage next door putting out his empty milk bottles. Always the same number and always the same time of night, he thought. Then the old fool was calling to someone across the street. Something on the television caught his eye and he stared in amazement. The interviewer was talking to a lanky man in a flat cap about his passion, which appeared to be pigeons. He was holding one up in front of the camera, a sleek creature with a distinctive cast to its beak and head.
Petrofsky sat bolt-upright, concentrating on the bird with almost all of his attention, listening to the interview with the rest. He was sure the bird was identical to one he had seen somewhere before.
“Is this lovely bird for showing in competition?” the interviewer was asking. She was new, a bit too bright, trying to squeeze more from the interview than it merited.
“Good Lord, no,” said the flat-cap man. “This isn’t a fancy. It’s a Westcott.”
In a bright flash of recall, Petrofsky saw again the room in the guest suite at the General Secretary’s dacha at Usovo. “Found him in the street last winter,” the wizened Englishman had said, and the bird had gazed out of its cage with bright, clever eyes.
“Well, it’s not the sort we would see about the town,” suggested the television interviewer. She was floundering. At that moment the telephone in Petrofsky’s hallway rang. ...
Normally he would have gone to answer it, in case it was a neighbor. To have pretended to be out would have roused suspicions, with the house lights on. And he would not have taken his handgun to the hall. But he stayed and stared at the screen. The phone rang on, insistently. With the television talk, it drowned the soft pad of rubber-soled feet on the pavement.
“I should hope not,” replied the flat-cap man cheerfully. “A Westcott ain’t a ‘streetie,’ neither. It’s probably one of the finest strains of racer there is. This little beauty will always speed back to the loft where it was raised. That’s why they’re more commonly known as homers.”
Petrofsky came out of his chair with a snarl of rage. The big precision-made Sako target pistol that he had kept close by him since he had entered Britain came up with him from its place down the side of the seat cushion. He uttered one short word in Russian. No one heard him, but the word was traitor.
At that moment there was a roar, then another, so close together that they were almost one. With them came the shattering of glass from his front door, two huge bangs from the rear of the house, and the thud of feet in the hall. Petrofsky spun toward the sitting-room door and fired three times. His Sako Triace, made to take three interchangeable barrels, had the heaviest caliber of the three fitted. It also packed five rounds in its magazine. He used only three—he might need the other two for himself. But the three he fired slammed through the flimsy woodwork of the closed door into the hall beyond. ...
The citizens of Cherryhayes Close will describe that night for the rest of their lives, but none will ever get it quite right.
The roar of the Wingmaster, as it tore the hinges off the door, catapulted them all out of their chairs. The moment he had fired, the gunman stepped sideways and back to give room to his mate. One swing of the sledgehammer and the lock, bolt, and chain on the other side flew in all directions. Then he, too, stepped sideways and back. Both men dropped their weapons and flicked their HKs forward and out.
Steve and the corporal had already gone through the gap. The corporal took three bounds to get up the stairs, with the sledgehammer man following on his heels. Steve ran past the ringing telephone, reached the sitting-room door, turned to face it, and was lifted off his feet. The three slugs that ripped across the hallway hit him with an audible whap and blew him against the stairs. The Wingmaster man simply leaned across the still-closed door and fired two two-round bursts. Then he kicked the door open and went in on the roll, coming to his feet at the crouch, well inside the room.
When the shotgun fired, Captain Lyndhurst opened the front door across the street and watched; Preston was behind him. Through the lighted hallway the captain saw his deputy team commander approach the sitting-room door, only to be thrown aside like a rag doll. Lyndhurst started to walk forward; Preston followed.
As the trooper who had fired the two bursts came to his feet and surveyed the inert figure on the carpet, Captain Lyndhurst appeared in the doorway. He took in the scene at a glance, despite the drifting plume of cordite smoke. “Go and help Steve in the hall,” he said crisply. The trooper did not argue. The man on the floor began to move. Lyndhurst drew his Browning from beneath his jacket.