Lichnyy nomer (2004)

Chechnya. After intercepting the satellite-phone signal of one of the militant leaders, Russian Mi-24 helicopters destroy two Range Rovers near the Georgian border. At the site of the missile attack, they find a survivor: Major Alexei Smolin, who had been captured by terrorists. Smolin is handcuffed, tortured, exhausted, and weak. He is a career officer in the FSB special forces: an excellent shot with every kind of firearm, skilled with edged weapons, good at hand-to-hand combat, and exceptionally adept at navigating terrain. He not only drives superbly but can also pilot an aircraft if necessary, including a heavy transport plane. He speaks fluent English, has a highly developed tactical mind, and knows how to anticipate and forestall an opponent’s actions. Alexei is taken to the commandant’s office at a federal forces checkpoint. The officers watch in horror a videotape found at the scene where the jeeps were shot up. On the tape is Major Smolin’s “confession” that his unit supposedly carried out several terrorist attacks in Russian cities on orders from the FSB. The Russian military are so outraged by Smolin’s “revelations” that they will not even let him contact his superiors: “You’ve said all there is to say, Major.” Soon, journalist Catherine Stone from the World News television network arrives at the base. Smolin manages to seize the journalists’ car, with Stone inside, and escape. After abandoning the car when it runs out of fuel, they make their way to a small town, where Alexei obviously cannot go. On the way, Smolin explains in detail that the “confession” on the videotape was actually obtained under torture and with the aid of psychotropic drugs. But “there’s a tape, and all the talk is nonsense.” The Major gives Catherine his identification tag, bearing personal number 40021, and asks her to deliver it to General Karpov in Moscow through the FSB reception office. Then he leaves. Meanwhile, an international summit on combating terrorism is about to open in Rome. The Arab terrorist group Ansar Allah, acting on orders from its overseas sponsors, is preparing an unprecedented attack: it intends to use a “dirty bomb” in Rome that will make several thousand square kilometers uninhabitable for hundreds of years. To do this, the Arabs need to obtain a capsule containing plutonium isotopes, stolen in Britain and sent to Latvia by diplomatic mail. The terrorists decide to use Chechen militants as unwitting accomplices. The militants are funded by Lev Pokrovsky, a fugitive Russian oligarch and partner of the terrorists’ overseas bosses. The plan presented to Pokrovsky is this: Chechen terrorists will seize a circus in Moscow, take the entire audience, all the performers, and the circus staff hostage, and demand that Pokrovsky be brought in to negotiate, claiming they trust only him and that only he can stop the war in Chechnya. Pokrovsky, who faces immediate arrest in Russia, will hold sham negotiations and triumphantly “free” two thousand hostages, at least a thousand of them children. This will allow him to return to the country “on a white horse” and, at the same time, take revenge on his political enemies by planting a duplicate of Smolin’s “confession” tape with the media. Saulius Boikis, Pokrovsky’s surviving militant and the architect of the scheme involving Smolin, had managed to salvage the duplicate from the Range Rover destroyed near the Georgian border. Pokrovsky agrees to take part in Ansar Allah’s operation, but neither he nor the Chechens involved in the attack realize that all of this is merely cover for the international terrorists’ real, principal plan. Pokrovsky gives Boikis another assignment in Moscow: for the tape to “work,” Smolin must be neutralized. But the Major’s immediate superior, General Karpov, ignores the arrest warrant issued for Smolin by the Military Prosecutor’s Office and hides him at an FSB service dacha. So, to lure Alexei out of his hiding place, Saulius gives circus tickets to the schoolchildren in the class attended by Smolin’s daughter Ira. A joint group of Arab and Chechen terrorists seizes the circus. The militants demand that Western journalists be brought to them; Catherine Stone is among them. They also demand that Pokrovsky be summoned from London. At the same time, Boikis calls Smolin’s ex-wife and insists that the Major come to the circus too. While an emergency counterterrorism headquarters debates what to do, Smolin—tracked down by his ex-wife through General Karpov—makes his way into the circus through a storm drain and rescues his daughter. Along the way, he kills several terrorists, including Boikis, and frees the hostages who were being held outside the auditorium. Umar Tamiyev, son of a prominent Chechen politician and minister in the republic’s government, is an unwitting accomplice in the seizure of the circus. He works in Pokrovsky’s business. On Pokrovsky’s orders, Boikis was supposed to bring Tamiyev to the scene of the attack and make him address Western television correspondents about the “hard lot of the oppressed Chechen people,” then kill him, because Pokrovsky was jealous of his mistress Masha. Tamiyev refuses to make the speech. He is ready to die, but Smolin intervenes in time, and Umar remains in the circus, hoping to persuade his fellow Chechens to lay down their arms. Ansar Allah’s Arab militants demand an armored personnel carrier to take them to the airport and an airplane. Having obtained a BTR-80, they set off for Sheremetyevo with Stone. A car carrying a World News camera operator follows them. He must film the armored personnel carrier as it moves through Moscow’s streets without interruption and broadcast the footage live; otherwise, an Arab suicide bomber who has stayed behind in the circus with the Chechens, monitoring the television broadcast, will blow up the circus by simply opening his hands, which are holding down the detonator’s safety. The same will happen if anyone attacks the terrorist leader or attempts to storm the building. The Arab leader, Hassan, leaves the Chechen commander a talisman: a combat knife with a diamond in its handle, given to him by the “Teacher,” the head of Ansar Allah. The knife is said to “help in deeds pleasing to the Almighty.” On the way to the airport, the terrorists load into the armored personnel carrier the plutonium capsule that their accomplices had previously stolen in Latvia and transported to Moscow. They then cause a car crash involving the police escort, block the road, and head for Sheremetyevo. The armored personnel carrier disappears from the screens. Realizing that the terrorists no longer need the circus and are about to blow it up, the counterterrorism headquarters, led by General Karpov, decides to storm the building. Tamiyev tries to persuade the Chechens to surrender. When he sees the assault team beginning to enter the circus, he distracts the terrorists and, at the last moment, grabs the talisman knife and drives it through both palms of the suicide bomber, who is holding the detonator between them, pinning his hands to a table. Tamiyev is badly wounded in the process. The special forces rapidly clear the circus and free the hostages; Tamiyev survives. Pokrovsky, who has not yet managed to reach Russia, turns his plane around and returns to London. Meanwhile, Smolin leaves the headquarters, where he has reported all the information he gathered about the circus and the terrorists inside it. In an Emergency Situations Ministry helicopter, he catches up with the terrorists’ armored personnel carrier and jumps onto it. The carrier smashes through the gates and enters the airport grounds, but instead of heading for the plane provided at the militants’ demand—the plane in which they were supposed to be killed during a transfer—it turns toward the cargo terminal, where Ansar Allah militants have already seized another aircraft. The armored personnel carrier drives straight into the vast cargo hold of an Il-76. Smolin jumps off and manages to take cover in the closing cargo ramp. After the Il-76 takes off, the terrorists set the autopilot on a course for Rome and activate a computer-linked detonator that is to set off the plutonium capsule as soon as the plane descends to 3,000 meters. Destroying the aircraft above that altitude would also inevitably detonate the charge; the higher up it was destroyed, the larger the area of devastation would be. Thus, the plane becomes a bomb that cannot be defused. Over Smolensk, the terrorist leader Hassan kills two of his accomplices in the cargo hold and prepares to parachute out of the Il-76. Before doing so, he theatrically explains to Catherine, who is doomed to die—she had agreed back at the circus to accompany the Arabs and report live in exchange for the release of 30 children—the true nature of his plans and the purpose of the altimeter connected to the laptop. As Hassan prepares to jump, he opens the cargo hatch, but Smolin suddenly appears from there. Smolin kills the last three terrorists, who have left the cockpit, and, in a fight with Hassan, throws the terrorist out of the plane before he can put on his parachute. During the shootout, several bullets damage the fuselage and one of the engines, and the plane begins to descend. Meanwhile, two Su-27 interceptors approach the Il-76. They have been ordered to shoot it down once it reaches the least populated area, but under no circumstances to let it leave the Russian Federation. Catherine and Alexei go live on World News again using the journalist’s work phone and persuade the counterterrorism headquarters to cancel the order to destroy the plane. Nevertheless, the main problem—the altimeter that will trigger the bomb—remains unsolved. It turns out, however, that the terrorists made a small mistake in their haste: since the cell phones of everyone in the circus had immediately been confiscated, they locked the keypad but simply did not think to disable, or at least password-protect, Bluetooth on their computer. When switched on, Catherine’s sophisticated satellite phone “discovers” the Arabs’ laptop nearby and unexpectedly establishes a Bluetooth connection with it. Using the phone, with only the last scraps of battery charge remaining, a large team of programmers and cryptographers from the FSB and the intelligence services of NATO countries hacks into the computer linked to the altimeter in a matter of minutes, working at a frantic pace. They completely reboot it and disable the program controlling the explosive device. Smolin, for his part, manages with enormous difficulty to land the plane at an abandoned airfield in Belarus. During the landing, the Major, knowing that the whole world can hear him, makes a statement live on air, saying that the videotape recording of him was made under horrific torture, with drugs, and with threats against his family. As soon as the threat of disaster has been eliminated, military aircraft from the United States, NATO countries, and Russia launch missile and air strikes on the Ansar Allah camp in the Middle East. But the group’s leaders, headed by the “Teacher,” who had been warned by their mysterious overseas sponsors, manage to leave the base 15 minutes before the attack. Their tracks are later found in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge.