Along the track of the Zhar-ptitsa Grand Prix circuit, a number of vehicles were approaching. A police car led a convoy made up of a forklift truck, a small flatbed lorry and, coming up the rear, a 4×4 car pulling an open trailer.
At the apex of the now-infamous bend, Turn Eleven, the police car stopped. Police Colonel Pudovkin climbed out. Waving to the forklift truck, he beckoned it to follow him across the gravel trap; he also waved at the car pulling the trailer, instructing it to follow on behind.
At the tyre wall the police colonel was saluted by the guard. Pudovkin barely reciprocated before ordering the policeman out of the way.
Police Colonel Pudovkin assessed the width of the hole punched through the wall by Sabatino's car. He instructed the forklift driver to close in.
Rolling forward in its lowest gear, the forklift driver saw the gap was too narrow – that his truck would hit the edges of the broken wall on either side. He readied himself for an impact. Rather than feel any kind of bump, though, the driver found his machine able to keep going – experiencing little resistance. Several concrete blocks on either side were pushed easily out of place and fell to the ground. He was soon through the wall and emerging into the area at the bottom of the grassy slope on the far side. At the same time, Pudovkin ordered the car and trailer to pull up alongside the wall, on the inside of the circuit.
The police colonel strode up the hill, instructing the forklift to follow him. Climbing slowly, this truck's tyres flattened and crunched numerous fragments of Sabatino's car, even pushing some of them down into the earth, out of sight.
A minute or two later Pudovkin – standing beside the remains of Sabatino's monocoque – gave the signal for the forklift to move in. Riding over a slight mound as it approached, its wheels bounced slightly at the very moment the forks were expected to go beneath the car. The metal blade of the left fork rammed the side of it, piercing the carbon fibre. The forklift driver flinched, selected reverse, and pulled the blade back out of the wreckage. The police colonel showed his impatience at the delay.
A second approach by the forklift was made, more carefully and cleanly this time. The driver pushed on until the monocoque was butted up against the backrest. When he came to raise the load up the mast, Sabatino's car rocked uneasily.
Colonel Pudovkin gesticulated to the driver again, this time pointing back down the slope towards the hole in the wall. To prevent the wreckage rolling forwards off the forks down the incline of the slope, the driver turned the truck tightly, and brought it down the hill in reverse – resting the remnants of the car in the heels of the hoist.
Trundling down the bank, the forklift came back through the puncture point in the perimeter fence and across the gravel trap onto the asphalt of the Grand Prix circuit. Once alongside the flatbed lorry, the driver set about disengaging the monocoque, by tilting the mast. The car, though, didn’t move. The driver encouraged it by juddering the forklift backwards and forwards. Sabatino's monocoque began to roll. It ended up tumbling off the forks, dropping down onto the back of the lorry. A number of cracks and breakages could be heard as the carbon fibre absorbed the force of the fall.
Elsewhere across the grassy bank, Pudovkin's team of uniformed officers was scouring the area, picking up shards, fragments and segments of Sabatino's Ptarmigan. These retrievals were simply being thrown over the perimeter wall into the back of the open trailer behind the 4×4.
No one photographed the hillside. No one recorded the locations from where any of the pieces had been recovered.
No one knew where the remains of the Formula One car were about to be taken.
NINETEEN
Their car was still making its way into Moscow, heading towards McMahon's offices.
Straker brought himself back to the case in hand.
‘We should start with the basics,’ he said, ‘start our defence by building a full understanding of the crash. That’ll put us in a position to refute – or at least repudiate with conviction – any accusations or claims that might be levelled against us.’
‘How will that even be possible if Ptarmigan can’t examine the car?’
‘We won’t be completely devoid of data. Little in Formula One is left to chance these days. Competitive pressures prompt the teams to monitor their cars and performance in microscopic detail. Ours carry over two hundred and fifty sensors. These measure every pressure, loading, temperature, G-force and orientation – in real time. From that data, we should be able to build up a very clear picture of what went on before and during the crash. Ptarmigan also records every inch of video footage, streamed and TV broadcast, put out during a race, enabling us to study our performance and that of the other teams. We’ll be able to use that as well to study the crash and to look for clues as to what might have gone wrong.’
‘Where's all the data recorded? On some sort of black box?’
‘It is, actually, except on our cars there are several components which store them.’
‘Not much good if the car has been impounded, and we can’t get to them?’
‘Agreed, but that's not the whole story. All those sensor readings – metrics – are transmitted from the car back to the team's computers remotely, hence the term: telemetry.’
McMahon's expression lightened slightly.
Straker asked: ‘Do we still have access to the Ptarmigan telemetry truck – motor home – or have the authorities impounded that too?’
‘No, they haven’t – not yet, at least.’
‘Good, we should be able to access the recorded data from there, then.’
‘And if the motor home does get impounded?’ she asked.
‘It wouldn’t be the end of the road. The telemetry doesn’t stop in the pit lane; Ptarmigan, like most teams, fires much of its data via satellite link to a master server, back at base. We would still be able to access most of that information through the Ptarmigan factory in Shenington, Oxfordshire. It would be a very different story for the video library, though,’ added Straker. ‘Our video recordings do only stay on the motor home's recorders; Ptarmigan doesn’t fire them back – and we have no other copy. If we lost access to the motor home, we would lose that source of evidence.’
Remy Sabatino's bed was surrounded by a group of medical staff. Mr Uglov held court and discussed their patient's progress. In the centre of this conference lay Sabatino, on her back – still groggy with her eyes half closed – but closer to consciousness than she had been so far.
‘The patient,’ declared Mr Uglov, ‘is showing some signs of recovery. The effects of the sedative will not fully wear off for some hours. I am happy that her state now allows us to conduct a few more tests, particularly cognitive and brain responses. I want to run these further investigations,’ he said handing out a pre-prepared sheet of paper.
Mr Uglov shot a glance through the frosted internal window of the room at the shape of the armed policemen standing guard outside Sabatino's room.
‘I intend us to be thorough,’ he stated with a clear message in his voice. ‘I don’t want this patient to be vulnerable to medical deterioration when she leaves our care. If the legal fallout from this accident prompts the kind of media turmoil we’ve seen already, any comment about inadequate medical attention received – or any use of her medical condition to prevent her standing trial – will reflect badly on this hospital. As a medic, of course I want her leaving here with a thoroughly clean bill of health. But, for all our sakes, I do not want the hospital used – or seen to be used – as any form of legal scapegoat.’
Sandy McMahon's phone went again. This call was short. She turned to Straker in the back of the car. ‘That was my office. We’ve just heard from the British consul. We have had our application to the Moscow Police approved. You’ve been granted – very limited – permission to speak to Dr Nazar.’
Straker nodded.
In Russian, McMahon gave the driver a new set of instructions.
‘Where's he being held?’
‘In a cell at the Moscow Police HQ, in the Tverskoy District.’
‘You said very limited – what does that mean?’
‘Thirty minutes.’
