the Spetsnaz for international sabotage. A bypass had been built into the bomb’s arming sequence so it could be detonated in the event the chairman and his immediate subordinates were killed in an unexpected nuclear assault by the West. In those circumstances all Spetsnaz in operational areas had orders to continue with their assignments regardless, and to achieve that end they needed to be able to remove all safety protocols so they could initiate their bombs manually. Needless to say, overcoming the protocols was crucial to Zhilev’s entire mission.
Zhilev read the instructions carefully, as he had many times before, but this time he actually pressed the buttons on the numeric pad in the order stated. A small LED screen reacted favourably to each button pressed, and when he got to the end he expected the procedure to be complete, but, to his horror, a message came up on the LED strip stating: ENTER 6-DIGIT CODE.
Zhilev stared at it in disbelief. The book had said nothing about any code. He hurriedly searched the document once more in case he had missed something, but knowing he could not have read anything as important as that and not noticed. He started from the beginning, this time focusing on any numbers that could be interpreted as a code, but as he reached the end of the book without any obvious six numbers, panic set in.
He placed the booklet on the desk and stepped back, rigid with frustration and anger. Suddenly the room seemed to shrink to the size of a prison cell and he felt claustrophobic.
He had no code.
He grabbed his straggly hair wanting to pull it out. Without the code the bomb could not be detonated. The device was too sophisticated to be tampered with, and he would not have a clue what he was doing anyway. How could he be so stupid?
His mind flew back to the cache, scanning his memory for any hint of a code. He wondered if it had been written on the box somewhere, or if he had left some crucial part of the instruction papers in the packaging. He contemplated going back to England and the cache to look for it but he wrenched the thought from his mind as ridiculous. He had failed. The entire journey had been wasted. The only other way he could detonate the bomb was with the consent of the President of the Republic of Russia and there was not much chance of gaining that.
Zhilev wanted to bang his head against a wall to punish himself for being such a useless fool. He clenched his fists, shook them and let out a scream. He had not only failed himself, his heritage and the Spetsnaz, but his brother too.
He crossed the room and raised a fist to slam it through the wardrobe then looked back at the bomb and decided to take it out on that. He walked back to the desk raising his hand, and brought it down on to the block with great force in a momentary suicidal hope of detonating it and putting him out of his misery, but all he managed to do was break the panel cover and send it spinning across the room in pieces. He raised his hand to hit it once again but was stopped in mid-strike by a thought flashing across his head. This system had been designed for field conditions in the event of an all-out war. Every weapon built for the Spetsnaz took into consideration the worst conditions a soldier could operate in, including physical disablement due to health or battle. In other words, it was designed to be simple. But this had not been simple. Had he been an operative in a war situation he would have failed due to a code he did not have. It did not make sense.
He lowered his hand to think about that in more detail.The people who designed the operating procedures must have considered a scenario where an operative would have to grab the device and the instruction book and hurry to a target to set it up for detonation. Designing the device was one thing, but the people whose job it was to think of the practical applications were professional soldiers like Zhilev. It was precisely the kind of job he might have had if they had kept him in the Spetsnaz instead of forcibly retiring him.
He picked up the booklet to feel the pages. As he had discovered on the boat, it was