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It began to rain as they approached Sennybridge, which his driver, who was ex-infantry, told him was typical. It always rained on Sennybridge. The Army Field Training Centre was marked by a badly painted white pole and a bedraggled flag. It always amazed Aleksey that this tiny army, which was the envy of the entire world except the Russians, could be so characteristically undemonstrative, self-effacing and almost apologetic at announcing one of its most important units. If this were a Russian Field Training Centre, or an American one, he supposed, such a place would have pomp, ceremony, vast glass guardhouses and symbols of power. But no, a limp bit of bunting and a lopsided pole.
Again, it defied belief.
They’d sent a young officer to meet and greet him. Not infantry, but attached from some minor corps Aleksey didn’t bother to enquire about. He didn’t do corps. But the young man was amusingly earnest. Being state school, he’d probably had to work harder and be smarter than the Barneys and Ruperts of the regimental world, and Aleksey was feeling charitable and willing to cut him some slack. Especially when his host produced some tea in a fine bone china cup.
Waiting in the anteroom to meet the colonel in charge of the exercise, Aleksey was once more overwhelmed by a sense of utter unreality. He wandered along the wood-panelled wall, studying the faces in the pictures—thousands of young men who had attended various exercises at the camp, captured for all posterity with their comrades. They had come here to dig their trenches and site their anti-tank missiles to defend against an enemy who had never had the ability or the will to attack, whose tanks had never rolled in their thousands over the plains of North Germany. And how could they defend against the current enemy? Not with holes in the ground, that was for sure.
The colonel who arrived to brief Aleksey hid his surprise better than most people did on first meeting him. Aleksey saw the briefest of brow raises, a quick eye flick of approval—possibly envy, admiration, or even fear, any one of which was fine by Aleksey’s reckoning—from head to foot, and then a genuine smile of relief that the titled civil servant from an obscure department in Whitehall who had been foisted on him at such short notice was somehow one of them. Aleksey shook the colonel’s hand and discovered he was called Rupert. He kept his smile to himself and followed Colonel Rupert to the waiting Land Rover.
As they drove across the barren turf towards the mock village where the interrogations were being held, the officer briefed his visitor on the exercise they were conducting—escape and evasion. It was regular training designed for pilots and aircrew in the Army Air Corps and, occasionally, if it fit around their holidays, those in the RAF as well. This particular contingent was all army. His men, SAS, played the enemy, hunting and capturing the escaping airmen, as well as conducting their subsequent questioning.
Aleksey kept his thoughts to himself. He’d seen the result of failed escape and evasion for real in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was one of the reasons he didn’t eat meat.
Fine lines had to be drawn, the colonel was continuing, as they always did in training, between realism and fatality. The chase and capture had to be authentic and mirror the possible conditions these men might have to one day endure in places far more Godforsaken than Sennybridge training camp. So, hungry, cold, exhausted, the young fliers were mercilessly tracked down, roughed up, and then put through an extreme form of questioning designed to break them down enough to confront their own limitations, their own weaknesses. But of course, it was understood on both sides that none of this could ever be anything other than staged. These men were volunteers, and by definition, therefore, any treatment they were subjected to could not be torture—they submitted to the training knowing that being burnt alive in a cage was not to be their fate. Yet.
Aleksey listened to the amusing English euphemisms—bloody uncomfortable; damned unfortunate; teensiest bit squiffy; with even less than his habitual, half-focused attention. He was far away in a different land, another language, and other circumstances.
Was torture ever justified? He wasn’t unaware that he might not be the best person to answer this tricky moral conundrum. If he was unaffected by his actions in the past, then he was, according to some experts, a psychopath, and thus his views on anything were invalid in the first place. But Aleksey reckoned that the opinions of people who debated such things in their ivory towers of human rights—towers erected and propped up entirely by the willingness of men, like him, to do the dirty labouring required to shore up such dainty tastes—were equally invalidated. Those who won’tdoshouldn’t be afforded the liberty to preach and equivocate.
They arrived at a set of buildings that on the surface appeared ramshackle but oddly ominous, covered as they were in Arabic graffiti, and, he noted with wry amusement, the occasional, now very faded, hammer and sickle.
He didn’t like being irrelevant.
Curling his lip slightly at his sour thoughts, as well as at the realisation that it was now seven in the evening and pouring, with cold, horizontal showers gusting around them as they trod over the water-logged, churned ground to the door, it occurred to him that he had done all he had done to leave this life behind him, and yet, here he was. Other than the fact it was Welsh rain and he was in expensive, tailored civvies, he could have been General Aleksey Primakov on a typical Friday night. It was unsupportable and something, clearly, had to be done.
The surface structure of huts was merely a front for what lay beneath—the interrogation and resistance cells where this phase of the training was taking place. There were a number of other visitors already present in the monitoring room. They all appeared slightly nervous, almost as if they were unsure which side of the glass they were actually on. His arrival on their side, much to his intense delight, appeared to ratchet up the tension noticeably.
A few rueful jokes were cracked, which were received with polite smiles by everyone. From what he could gather, most of the other attendees were policemen—some military, some civilian.
The room had a few viewing chairs still empty in front of a large one-way-vision sheet of glass, but he preferred to stand. Sound from the other side was relayed through a microphone to speakers in the ceiling above his head. There was a bank of recorders in the room with them, presumably taking feed from a camera he could see mounted high in one corner of the cell they were observing.
The first prisoner was brought in by his captors.
To all intents and purposes, it appeared quite realistic. Two filthy, bearded men, dressed in dirty combats with chequered shemaghs covering most of their faces, dragged the bound man to a chair.
The questioning began.
A few light punches were thrown, some amusing tools waved in front of his face.
The questioning went on.
Aleksey watched the little drama in the opposite room, listening to the colonel as he read what was clearly a well rehearsed script to explain the scenario to the audience. They made it as authentic as they could, but the main disadvantage of the exercise was that the interrogators were SAS—highly trained, exceptionally capable and professional soldiers who actually respected the men they were…training. This disadvantage was something those who devised the scenarios were well aware of and was something they would address in another demonstration, which everyone was very welcome to stay and observe. Or there was dinner laid on…in the officers’ mess…
Everyone else filed out, chatting jollily of the good spread they were anticipating. A gloomy Friday night under the sodden earth of Sennybridge watching men shout at each other, apparently couldn’t compete with an excellent regimental dinner.
Aleksey watched them leave, glanced once more at the tail end of the interrogation and frowned at his host. “Is that it?”
The officer shuffled his papers. The prisoner was being patted on the back and led away through a door that opened onto a bleak corridor.
“Oh, yes, well. Good effort all round, I think. He’ll be checked over by the docs now, and he’ll definitely pass the course. He did a good job.”
“Good job at what?”
Obviously slightly puzzled at this response to his methods, the uniformed man rejoined weakly, “Err. Resisting?”
Resisting? He’d been shouted at meanly for ten minutes. “Uh-huh.”
“Perhaps you’d like to stay, as I suggested, and watch the next exercise, Sir Nikolas? Not everyone’s cup of tea. Not the all-mouth-and-no-trousers bash of the last one. Different kettle of fish entirely.”
