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They parked three streets away from their target and walked the rest of the way. The chain-link fence at the rear of the premises proved no match for the bolt cutters. The three men ran at a crouch across the intervening fifty feet of concrete and disappeared into the shadows cast by a pile of ink drums.
Fifteen minutes later the solitary night guard made his round. He heard a loud burp from a patch of shadow, spun around, and fixed his flashlight on the source. He saw a drunk, collapsed against the warehouse wall, clutching a bottle of vodka.
He had no time to work out how the man had got into the sealed compound, for having turned his back on the pile of drums he never saw the figure in black overalls who emerged from between them and hit him hard on the back of the head with a piece of lead pipe. So far as the guard was concerned there was a brief flash of fireworks and then darkness.
Brian cinched the man’s ankles, wrists, and mouth with heavy tape while Ciaran and Mitch took the padlock off the door. When it was open they dragged the senseless guard inside, laid him by the wall, and closed the door.
Inside the cavernous factory a string of night-lights burned among the girders of the roof, casting a dim glow over the interior. Much of the floor space was taken up by great ree
ls of newsprint and stacked drums of ink. But the center of the factory contained what they had come for: three huge web-offset printing presses.
Somewhere near the front doors of the building they knew the second guard would be ensconced in his warm glass booth, watching the television or reading his newspaper. Brian slipped quietly between the machines to take care of him. Having done so he returned, went out the back, and stood guard over the exit route.
Ciaran and Mitch were no strangers to the three machines in front of them. They were Baker-Perkins presses, made in the United States and not replaceable in Russia. Re-supply would require a long sea journey from Baltimore to St. Petersburg. Provided the mainframes were distorted, not even a Boeing 747 could bring the needed components by air.
Posing as Finnish newspaper executives contemplating the reequipping of their plant with Baker-Perkins presses, both men had kindly been given a tour of the factory by a company in Norwich, England, which used the same machines. After that a retired engineer, handsomely rewarded, had completed their education.
Their targets were four in type. Each press was fed by giant reels of paper, and the feeders for these rolls of newsprint, the reel stands, were of sophisticated technology, capable of ensuring that as one reel ran out it was seamlessly replaced by another. The reel stands were the first target and there was one for each machine. Ciaran began to place his small bombs precisely where they would guarantee that the reel stands would never work again.
Mitch took care of the ink-supply mechanism. These were four-color presses, and the supply of the exact amounts of four different inks at the right moment in the press run depended on a mixer unit fed by four great drums containing different colors. With both these pieces of technology taken care of, the two saboteurs addressed the actual presses.
The parts they chose for their remaining bombs were the mainframes and the bearings of the impression cylinders, one per machine.
They spent twenty minutes inside the press shop. Then Mitch tapped his watch and nodded at Ciaran. It was one in the morning and the timers were set for one-thirty. Five minutes later they were back outside, dragging the guard, now awake but still helpless, behind them. He would be colder out there, but shielded from flying fragments. The guard at the front, lying on the floor of his office, was too far away to be hurt.
At ten past one they were in the Volvo and moving. At half past, they were too far away to hear the almost simultaneous series of booms and cracks as the presses, reel stands, and ink feeders crashed to the concrete floor.
So discreet were the explosions that the sleeping denizens of the Vorontsovo suburb were hardly roused. It was not until the guard lying outside had hopped laboriously around the building to the front gate and hit the alarm button with his elbow that the police were called.
The liberated guards found the phones were still working and called the factory foreman, whose home number was pinned up in the office. He arrived at half-past three and examined the devastation with horror. Then he called Boris Kuznetsov.
The Union of Patriotic Forces’ propaganda chief was there by five and listened to the factory manager’s tale of woe. At seven he phoned Colonel Grishin.
Before that hour the rented car and the Volvo had been abandoned just off Manege Square, where the rental would soon be found and returned to the agency. The Volvo, which was unlocked with its keys in the ignition, would certainly be stolen before then, and was.
The three former soldiers took their breakfast in the insalubrious café at the airport and boarded their flight to Helsinki, the first of the morning, an hour later.
As they flew out of Russia, Colonel Grishin was surveying the wrecked printing plant with black anger. There would be an inquiry; he would institute one, and woe betide anyone who had collaborated. But his professional eye told him the perpetrators were experts and he doubted he would find them.
Kuznetsov was distraught. Every week for the past two years the Saturday tabloid Probudis!, Russian for “Awake!,” had carried the words and policies of Igor Komarov to five million homes across Russia. The idea of establishing a major newspaper owned and run entirely by the UPF had been his, as had been the monthly magazine Rodina, “Motherland.”
These two vehicles, a mixture of easy contests with big prizes, sex confessions, and race propaganda, had carried the words of the leader into every corner of the land and contributed enormously to his electoral popularity.
“When can you be back in production?” he asked the head printer. The man shrugged.
“When we have new presses,” he said. “These cannot be mended. Two months, perhaps.”
Kuznetsov was pale with shock. He had not yet told the leader himself It was Grishin’s fault, he assured himself, the place should have been better guarded. But one thing was certain: There would be no Probudis! this Saturday and no special edition of Rodina in a fortnight. Nor even for eight weeks at a minimum. And the presidential elections were in six.
It was not a very good morning for Detective Inspector Borodin either, though he had entered the office in the Homicide Division of the militia HQ on Petrovka in good humor. His geniality during the previous week had been noted by his colleagues, but had remained unexplained. In fact the explanation was simple: his delivery of two valuable documents to Colonel Anatoli Grishin after the still unexplained bomb explosion at the Metropol had brought him a very handsome bonus to his monthly retainer.
Privately he knew there was not the slightest point in continuing inquiries into the outrage at the hotel. Restoration work had already begun, the insurers were almost certainly foreigners who would pick up the tab, the American guest was dead, and the mystery was total. If he suspected that his own inquiries concerning the American, ordered by Grishin himself, had something to do with his almost immediate death, he, Borodin, was not going to make an issue of it.
Igor Komarov was certainly going to be the new president of the Russian Federation in less than two months, the second most powerful man in the country would be Colonel Grishin, and there would be rewards to almost dizzying heights for those who had served him well during the years of opposition.
The office was abuzz with news of the destruction during the night of the printing presses of the UPF Party. Borodin put it down to Zyuganov’s Communists or some paid hoodlums from one of the mafia gangs, motive obscure. He was just airing his theories when his phone rang.
“Borodin?” said a voice.