it was to be used as an underground fuel reservoir for a factory outside Glasgow. The ground preparation and digging of the hole was carried out by a small group of KGB agents masquerading as geologists, archaeologists and students. Their cover story was that they were on a joint archaeological and soil-sampling project for Exeter and Munich Universities and they had genuine documentation giving them formal written permission to carry out limited earthwork in the area, which was more than enough to satisfy any curious passing police patrol or forest official. The hole itself was dug in a few hours late one afternoon using a rented digger and the cylinder delivered by truck early the next morning, lowered into the ground by crane and buried the same day. This took place far enough away from the road to be shielded from view by the young forest, which was part of the reason for selecting the location. The young pine trees that had been removed to dig the hole were replanted once the cylinder had been buried. The displaced soil which was not redistributed around the area was taken away on the truck that delivered the cylinder. None of the KGB involved in this phase of the operation had any idea what the cylinder was to be used for. The rumour deliberately circulated suggested it was to contain electronic eavesdropping equipment to monitor aircraft movements in and out of various airfields in the region.
Several months later, after the empty habitat had settled, the Spetsnaz took over the next phase, which was filling it with its various pieces of equipment and making it operational.The first stage was putting in the basic survival and living requirements such as toilet, beds, air-scrubbers, food and water. After that came the communications systems, and then finally the weaponry.
Buried cylinders were only one of the inventive ways the KGB used to provide operational war caches for the Spetsnaz. Some were in the sealed basements of town houses or farms owned by sleeper agents, others were in cleverly concealed caves. Their locations were limited only by the imagination, their main requirement that they could remain in situ without discovery for fifty years.
The last time Zhilev had been in this cache he had spent a week locked beneath the ground, the hatch sealed, with three of his comrades. It was classed as an exercise but deep inside his enemy’s territory. The cache was not a surveillance post and never intended to be one. It was specifically designed as a saboteurs’ hide, to keep four men in the most basic of comforts while they waited for the order to climb out and head for pre-designated targets where they would carry out their directives. That order would come via a one-way communication system, the signal received by pushing up an antenna through the soil using a specially designed telescopic system in the roof. If sensors under the ground around the cache detected movement by anything as large as a human, the antenna would be lowered. Twice a day, for half an hour each time, it was raised and the radio operative listened on three specific frequencies, each for ten minutes duration, for the Morse sequence that would precede the coded message that contained the vital signal to commence operations. It was a passive receiver device since the ever-watchful electronic ears of the British army intelligence corps might pick up a transmission and come sniffing in the woods for the source of the signal, for the British were well aware these caches existed, although as far as Zhilev knew they had only ever found one in England. He thought there were over two dozen in the British Isles, twice that number in Germany and several dozen more throughout the rest of Europe including Scandinavia. America had the largest number, understandably so, with over a hundred between the two coasts.The only other cache Zhilev had been to was in America, situated beneath a small lake in North Carolina a mile from a series of long-range nuclear-missile silos, and accessed by duck-diving down to a sump, like the U-bend in a toilet.
Zhilev turned to the shelving and looked at the numerous and varied cases spread in front of him, deciding where to start. He was looking for something specific, but also for anything that might be useful on his mission and therefore he decided he might as well search all the containers now that he was here. He moved to one end of the