by Dan Latus
‘It’s all right, Harry,’ I said soothingly. ‘We’ve got you now. And Johanne’s here.’
Perhaps it was hearing her name that did the trick. His eyes opened again, and this time I heard him say, ‘I gave him it, Frank. I gave him it.’
‘Good lad! Well done, Harry.’
Then he faded away again. But he hadn’t gone far. There was plenty of Harry left, even if his brain was temporarily closing him down to rest.
And he’d done it! Thank God for that, I thought. I straightened up and looked for Johanne. Now what we had to do was stand and hold on.
I pulled out the gun Harry had given me what seemed like an age ago and changed places with Johanne. She needed to be with Harry now.
I might not have been in great condition myself at that moment, but I was utterly determined that no one was going to get along that damned passageway and reach us. We absolutely had to hang on. This was my time. This was why I was here. It was time I earned my pay.
Meanwhile, there was one more thing I needed to do for Harry, now he couldn’t do it himself. I took out my phone and emailed the attachment containing all three strategies to both Greta Campbell and Giles Henderson. There. That was it. Done.
Chapter Sixty-Four
So far as the bigger picture was concerned, it was up to Greta Campbell and Giles Henderson now. Harry and I had done our bit to save the world, Harry especially. It was out of our hands.
Johanne and I had our hands full anyway, right here. We couldn’t do everything.
We had stopped Harry from being beaten to death, which was exactly what had been happening. Once Harry had told me what he’d managed to do, I was in no doubt about that.
Petrov had got what he’d come for. He would probably have liked to stay and torture Harry to death himself, for personal reasons. But he was a busy man and an important one. Time was pressing. He had things to do.
As did I.
At the sound of running feet, I poked my head out into the passageway and loosed off a couple of shots at the bodies charging towards us. I was confident the shots hit home, but they didn’t immediately stop the attack. There were screams and curses, but those bodies kept on coming.
I was aware of return fire, but I ducked out again anyway, lowered my aim and fired two shots into legs. That seemed to do the trick. Bodies crashed to the floor.
I pulled back into cover, wincing as I anticipated a hail of machine-gun fire from the attackers I hadn’t hit. It duly came. All I could do was grimace and stand my ground.
Bullets filled the air and ricocheted between metal walls. The noise was terrifying. One or two bullets managed to deflect into our room, but most of what was fired at us just filled the air outside with noise and light.
Unlike the people wielding the machineguns, I was acutely aware that any rounds I fired had to count. I had what was in the gun and no more. I had to make sure my shooting was effective. For a time, it was. The attack stalled.
Johanne broke off from attending to Harry to help me drag and throw the three men who had been torturing him out into the passageway. At least one of them was alive still, but he didn’t get any sympathy from us. Inside the room they were a potential danger to us. Outside, they would be an obstacle course that might help us if the attackers got close.
First, though, Johanne searched them and stripped out their guns and ammo. ‘We need them,’ she explained, very practically.
I nodded. She was cool and thinking rationally. Most likely she was more used to battlefield conditions than I was. I was impressed.
That done, Johanne went back to Harry and I stationed myself in the doorway again.
‘How is he?’ I called after a few moments.
‘Too soon to tell.’
That sounded about right. We couldn’t do anything much for him here either. He badly needed medical attention. The question was whether he — and we — would live long enough to get it.
Johanne re-joined me. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I’m not sure. Their frontal assault didn’t work. So maybe they’re working on something else.’
My fear was that they had retreated to the ground floor. From there, at a distance, they would be able to fire directly into our room. We would have no defence against that.
‘They might be going up on the roof,’ Johanne pointed out.
It was possible, but I doubted it. To get a shot at us from up there would involve a fair bit of work opening up a hole that would give them a line of sight.
‘A lot of noise out there,’ Johanne pointed out.
I had become vaguely aware of that in recent minutes. Something was going on. I listened, trying to make sense of it. There certainly was a lot of noise: machinery moving, helicopter noise, gunfire.
So, all the shooting wasn’t around us, I realised with a surge of hope. Something was happening out there. I would have given a lot to know what it was.
‘I think they might have gone,’ I said after a few more minutes of quiet in our vicinity.
‘You think?’
‘I hope! There hasn’t been any activity around us for a while now. They’ve stopped shooting at us. All the action seems to be somewhere else.’
‘Do you think . . . ?’
I nodded. ‘Maybe.’
A few minutes later the iron staircase rang with the feet of men running up from below. I fired a couple of warning shots. They were returned by whoever was on the staircase, but thoughts of continued ascent were abandoned.
Not long after that, the general noise died down completely, and a voice amplified by a loudspeaker filled the space all around us.
Johanne and I looked at each other in amazement on hearing our names and Harry’s.
‘It’s Greta!’ I said jubilantly.
It was too. She called our names repeatedly, telling us it was safe to come out.
‘It’s over,’ she concluded. ‘The site has been secured.’
I wondered if the claim was strictly accurate, but not for long. It was enough for Johanne and me to high-five. We were ready to go, more than ready.
Chapter Sixty-Five
We emerged to be met by Greta Campbell and what looked like a team of Canadian special forces soldiers. Bristling with weaponry, they certainly weren’t intelligence officers, although I didn’t doubt they were highly intelligent and generally capable guys too. But there are times when what you need is firepower, and that’s what Greta had brought to the party. How she had managed it, I couldn’t begin to guess.
‘Harry will have to be brought out on a stretcher,’ I told her abruptly before she could bring anything else up.
She was prepared for that too and turned to wave in a team of field medics.
‘Is he—?’ Greta began.
‘All right? No,’ I said, interrupting her, ‘but hopefully he’ll live.’
‘And you two?’ she asked, glancing from one to the other of us.’
‘We’re fine, thanks to you,’ Johanne assured her.
‘Your timing was perfect,’ I contributed. ‘We got Harry, and were holding our own in there, but I don’t know how much longer we could have lasted. We were going to run out of ammo. How did you manage it?’
‘Just think of us as the cavalry,’ she said brightly. ‘They always arrive in time, don’t they?’
‘I want to go with the medics to get Harry,’ Johanne said.
‘Sure. You do that,’ Greta said. ‘I’ll get a quick debrief from Frank and catch up with you later. Before you go, though, you should both know that things look to be working out the way we hoped. We caught Petrov, as well as a bunch of others, and we’re holding them. Sir Giles Henderson says he’s been on to Moscow, and the Russians are playing ball.’
‘Mister Henderson,’ I said automatically.
‘Still not “Sir?”’ she asked with a mischievous grin.
‘Not yet.’
‘Sure,’ Greta said with a conspiratorial wink. ‘Whatever you say.’
Johanne looke
d from one to the other of us.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Mystified, Johanne turned and left with the medical team.
‘So, this is where they stored the stuff, eh?’ Greta said with evident satisfaction.
‘Seems to be. It’s not exactly palatial, but I guess it was all they needed.’
‘And far enough away from the town that it wouldn’t have been obvious what was going on here. That’s worked for us tonight, too.’
‘You did very well, Greta. It can’t have been easy, putting it all together.’
‘No, it wasn’t. I did what needed to be done here, but your Mr Henderson worked miracles to get the Russians on board.’
‘So, what’s happening now?’
‘You sure you want to know?’
I nodded. ‘I think I am.’
‘You’re not too tired?’ she asked, with an impish grin. ‘Not too beat up and feeling like to hell with it all?’
‘I’m all of that, Greta. And I’ve got injuries in places I didn’t even know about until tonight, thanks to the working over I got at Coal Harbour. But I still want to know.’
‘Good man! Well, it’s like you suggested. We’re going to hold Petrov for questioning. Initially, the plan was to hold him for a couple of days, which legally we could have done on a number of counts. After the battle here tonight, though, we could hold him forever. We’re not going to do that, of course.
‘When the Russian sub arrives again in forty-eight hours — without the usual cargo this time — he’ll depart with it, just like you suggested.’
‘Hopefully, Moscow isn’t too happy with him?’
Greta shook her head. ‘Your Mr Henderson says the expectation is that he’ll be lost overboard in a freak accident before the sub reaches its home port.’
‘A tragedy,’ I suggested.
‘Absolutely.’
Then she looked at me, wide-eyed, and said, ‘You know something? I never can tell when you Brits are joking.’
‘That works both ways, you know!’ I told her, laughing.
The next couple of days were a bit of a blur. So much was going on that it was impossible to keep detailed track. But I do know that Greta Campbell was tireless and worked miracles. God knows how she managed to pull everything off, but she did. The idea that I had sketched out had been made into a plan by her and Giles Henderson, and then executed. Henderson negotiated with his opposite number in Moscow, and Greta got things together on the ground.
The upshot was that the situation was resolved quietly, without it becoming an international incident that hogged the headlines. In return for the Canadians keeping it out of the public arena, the Russians accepted responsibility for Petrov, who had greatly embarrassed them by his greed, overreach and gross incompetence.
It was no doubt agonising for them to admit to anything at all, but they would have found legal action in a Canadian open court absolutely mortifying. I knew Giles Henderson would have pointed that out in no uncertain terms.
So to avert all that, Petrov, who was not going to prosper further — or even survive — was duly handed over to them to deal with.
They also avoided the public ignominy of having one of their submarines discovered deep inside a Canadian fjord and impounded. It would be allowed to leave unharmed, along with its passenger, in return for a solemn assurance that there would be no more such clandestine visits.
That might have been an empty promise were it not for the fact that both sides understood full well that much-needed greatly enhanced coastal monitoring from now on would make such visits out of the question in any case. A loophole had been identified and would be closed.
Finally, Moscow got the NATO strategy, along with the two strategies of their own, on the memory stick Harry had given Petrov under duress.
Poor Harry had certainly suffered for it, but it was the duress that legitimised Henderson’s argument. It was something to ease wounded pride in Moscow, if the power brokers back there were ever concerned with such niceties.
The West — that is, Giles Henderson and NATO — got Harry back. A bit battered, it’s true, but after a few difficult days it became clear that he could be restored, or rebuilt, as he put it when he was able to speak for himself again.
It also got the Estonia battle plan at last, as well as the cyber-attack strategy, items that Harry had risked his life to obtain. And it had the satisfaction of seeing the entirely bogus NATO strategy that Henderson had whipped up at short notice going off to Moscow — there, hopefully, to waste countless resources on poring over it and developing a counter plan.
More parochially, Canada — largely through the agency of the indomitable Greta Campbell — had unravelled the mystery of what had been going on at Coal Harbour. Not only had the import trade in deadly ketamine by that route been stopped, but the alliance between the Vancouver-based Asian gang and the Russian militia jointly responsible for it had been routed.
An additional plus for Canada, one that the Government wouldn’t want to see publicised, was that a gap in the national maritime defences had been identified. It needed to be dealt with effectively, and it would be. The complacency that had overtaken Canada, like most Western countries, with the end of the Cold War would, here at least, be confronted. The clandestine visits by a rogue Russian submarine would not become public knowledge, leaving the Canadian Government free to get on with the job of improving coastal surveillance systems instead of using all their resources to fight what would have been a rearguard action in law courts and the court of public opinion.
At a personal level, justifying my fee, Harry survived and in time recovered pretty well. He also got Johanne back, and when that happened, I saw her smile for the first time.
Me? I eventually went home to Risky Point, not at all sure how much I could tell Jimmy Mack, and not knowing how much he would believe anyway. It had been a rum business.
But all that came a bit later. Initially, I stayed around for a while to make sure Harry came through, and to help tie up some loose ends.
Chapter Sixty-Six
‘Getting to grips with the drugs import business is throwing up some interesting angles,’ Greta told me. ‘The more we investigate, the more we learn.’
‘For instance?’
‘For instance, we didn’t know there was a Korean angle.’
‘Is there? South Korean, presumably.’
She shook her head. ‘North. We first got a hint of it while interrogating the guy that survived the attack on you and Harry in the motel. Those three were North Koreans, not Chinese.’
I shook my head with surprise. ‘But there is, or was, Chinese involvement?’
‘Oh, sure. Local Chinese, in Vancouver. And their associates back on the mainland, where they make the stuff in their hi-tech laboratories.’
‘How come North Koreans are involved?’
‘We believe that for them it’s a foreign-currency-generating business. Sanctions have hit them pretty hard. They can’t sell much, and foreign currency is a must-have. So they despatch people to work abroad and send their salaries home, and they have innovative ways of making money around the world — illegal trading, sanctions busting, etcetera. Somehow, they came into contact with Petrov, and he invited them to join him out here, working for him and the local Chinese. Basically, they provided extra muscle for hire.’
The news helped explain the ferocity of the attack Harry and I had fought off in the motel. For me, it was another of the missing pieces in the jigsaw.
Giles Henderson flew out to visit Harry in hospital. When he caught up with me, he modestly brushed aside my appreciation for his work in getting the deal with Moscow.
‘They know me,’ he said, as if that was all the character reference needed, as I’m sure it was. We old timers have all been around the block a few times together. We know where we stand with one another. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘it was your idea, Frank, your plan. You came up trumps, ju
st as Harry predicted you would. I can’t thank and congratulate you enough. Well done!’
I wasn’t prepared to let him off the hook, though.
‘My idea perhaps, but you’re the one who ran with it, and turned it into reality. You deserve a medal — from one side or the other!’
He laughed, and then turned serious again. ‘It helped that GCHQ had picked up a lot of chatter between Moscow and someone in Victoria — Petrov, presumably — seeming to suggest that the availability of the NATO strategy was known about even before I made contact with my opposite number.’
‘How could that have helped?’
‘I believe it may have stopped them from simply washing their hands of Petrov, and claiming he was nothing to do with them, that they knew nothing about him. Of course, we can’t know for sure, but I believe it was so.’
I shook my head and said, ‘It’s all a bit like Blind Man’s Bluff, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he admitted with a little smile. ‘That’s exactly what it’s like. But you saved Harry Stone. Never forget that.’
Harry was taken into the hospital in Port Hardy. Greta was all for moving him to a big city hospital, either in Victoria or Vancouver, but in the end, he stayed where he was, and they dealt with him very well there. Initially, they had him in an induced coma, while they did their investigations and allowed his systems to settle down and begin to heal.
I stayed with Johanne, alternating between Coal Harbour and the house she and Harry still had in Port Hardy. I kept her company while we waited for Harry to wake up. As well as wanting to see that he emerged intact from the coma, there were things I wanted to ask him, things I wanted to tell him. I suppose I wanted a day of reckoning.
It never happened. By the time Harry came round, my anger over his deceptions, lies and half-truths had faded. I was just glad to see him alive, and know he was on the road to a full recovery.
‘Job done, Harry! We got the battle plan to where it needed to go at last. And Johanne is here. What more could you possibly want?’
‘Petrov brought down,’ he said with relish, ‘and made to pay for what happened in Starý Smokovec.’