by Dan Latus
‘They should stay where they are, in my opinion. And what about Yugov? Where does he fit into all this?’
‘Yugov? Oh, you don’t need to worry about him any more. He’s with me, George. I’m using him, employing him. He’s going to get the stuff out of the depot and put it in the right hands. There’s nobody else who can do that, without the US – and me! – taking the blame.’
‘Ted, for chrissake!’ George said angrily. ‘Tell me you’re not paying Yugov?’
‘He’s a businessman, George. And I need him. We need each other. He’s lost a lot of factories in the fighting in the east, and needs to rebuild his business. And I need his distribution network.’
‘He’s a killer, Ted. It was him that had Jack Olsson whacked. Remember Jack – and why you brought me out of retirement?’
‘This is more important. Right now, he’s an ally.’
‘Don’t do this, Ted. You don’t need to do this.’
‘I’ve been working on this project with Yugov for quite a while, George. You need to know that. I’m not going to stop now. We’re doing what’s right.’
George paused for a moment. Then he said, ‘Keep out of the damned cave, Ted. Don’t you or Yugov dare touch anything in there.’
‘Come on, George, for chrissake! Do you think I’m going to let the goddamn Russians walk all over yet another country? We’ve been fighting them all our lives, one way or another. Come and join us!’
‘The stuff in there’s too dangerous ever to be brought out.’
‘Crap! The Ukrainians will be glad to have it. It’s a bit one-sided at the moment. We’re going to even things up a little.’
‘Make things worse, you mean!’ George said bitterly. ‘That’s the old better-dead-than-red song sheet you’re reading from, Ted. Them days are over.’
‘Get real, George.’
‘He’s ended the call,’ George said in disbelief.
‘It wasn’t going anywhere,’ John said. ‘You were wasting your breath. What were you doing, trying to save his miserable skin?’
George slumped down into the snow hole again and sat for a while with his thoughts.
John let him be. Something was going on in the other man’s head that he didn’t want to intrude on. Instead, he watched as a party down below brought the first consignment of weapons out of the cave. A big truck was making its way up the track, to receive it.
‘They’re moving stuff out already,’ he said tersely. ‘They’ve started.’
George didn’t reply.
First it would be small stuff, rifles and ammunition. Then there would be armoured vehicles, missiles – and the rest of it. John felt himself tensing with the weight of expectation. Come on, George! he said under his breath. For chrissake, make up your mind!
George moved up alongside him. They watched as Yugov and Pearson conferred, spoke to a group of Yugov’s men and then walked into the cave entrance together. They were going to see for themselves.
John steeled himself to be controlled, unwilling to make the decision. This was George’s call.
The seconds passed. A couple of minutes went by. No-one had emerged from the cave yet. The big truck labouring up the track had almost reached the pickups.
‘Make the call,’ George snapped.
John took out his phone and began to tap in the sequence of digits.
Chapter Forty-Four
For long moments nothing happened. They waited and watched in silence. George turned his head slightly to look at John, who grimaced and bared his teeth in anguish.
He didn’t know. He just didn’t know. Maybe he hadn’t got it right. There were never any guarantees it would work anyway. The cold …
Then it started.
It began as a slow rumble they felt rather than heard. Snow on the slope in front of them began to slide. Far below, a trace of smoke appeared in the cave entrance. Puffs of it appeared elsewhere. The world began to shiver and became hazy. Then the surface of the land below seemed to shudder violently. Masses of snow and frozen rock began to rise slowly from the surface of the ground, reaching up into the sky.
‘Down!’ John snapped, grabbing George by the shoulders and pulling him backwards.
They both slid down into the snow hole, cowering there and listening with awe as shock waves blasted over their heads and a roaring noise passed them by like a mighty avalanche. The atmospheric disturbance was followed moments later by the muffled thunder of a huge explosion somewhere beneath the earth itself, and the air over their heads filled with flying debris.
Lumps of rock, boulders and showers of gravel, ice and snow rained down on them for several minutes. They closed their eyes, protected their heads with their arms and made themselves small. They stayed where they were, in a state of shock and disbelief for what seemed like an eternity.
Eventually, it all stopped. At last, John opened his eyes and said in a hoarse voice, ‘It’s over.’
‘Thank God!’ George said in a strained voice. ‘That was a helluva bang you engineered for us, son.’
‘The best I’ve ever done,’ John replied, with an attempt at a grin that felt as if it was cracking his face open. ‘Better take a look.’
He scrambled upright and peered downslope. The landscape had changed. The ground below their position was no longer pristine white with new snow. Now it was a dirty colour, covered by muck and filth from the explosion. Black smoke, pouring now from a variety of fissures, cracks and holes, indicated there were fires raging deep below the surface.
The big truck they had watched labouring up the slope towards the entrance to the cave was no longer where it had been, although a pile of burning wreckage some distance away indicated where what was left of it might be located now. The four pickups that had brought Yugov and Pearson, and the others, had simply disappeared. It looked as though the other big trucks alongside the river had also been hit and badly damaged. Two were smoking. One had a strangely crumpled appearance. Another lay twisted across the road.
After a long, searching look, George nodded, turned his head and said, ‘That takes care of business. We’d better get out of here while we still can.’
John agreed and started to clamber out of the snow hole that had been their refuge for the past many hours, scarcely able to believe how cold and stiff he was and feeling relieved he was still capable of moving at all. He gave George his hand and helped him out, too. Then, without a backward glance, they set off back to the car.
Already, John noted, it was growing dark, but at least the wind had died down now, as if shocked by what had happened down by the river.
The way back was downhill most of the way on long, gentle slopes, and the easier for it, but in the eerie light of a gathering winter night under a starlit sky, it was as strange a journey as John could remember. Silent, mostly. They didn’t talk. They seemed to have arrived at an unspoken consensus that there was nothing worth saying.
He didn’t dwell on the mayhem behind them. That was for another day. For a while, he took refuge in the knowledge of the chaos they had averted by what they had done. It was a comfort.
But he didn’t even think very much about that, either. Mostly, he focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and making sure that George was able to do the same. He wasn’t as fit and durable himself as he had once been, but the older man was of a different generation altogether. They had had some hard days, and now they couldn’t afford a catastrophic slip and injury on these icy slopes. They had to leave this neighbourhood far behind before the authorities arrived to investigate the cause of the disturbance that must have been felt wherever scientists monitor the earth’s crust for evidence of seismic activity.
It took them a couple of hours to reach the car. After a quick cup of coffee and more bread and salami, they set off north, John driving, heading away from a place neither of them ever wished to see again.
‘I sure am tired of bread and salami,’ George said.
‘Me, too,’ John responded.
They drove on a little further, accessing a wider road. Further on still, they hit a main road with signposts telling them how far they had to go to reach Lviv and Kiev.
‘We did it,’ George said suddenly, with what sounded like heartfelt satisfaction.
John nodded. ‘We certainly did,’ he replied with a reluctant grin. ‘And how!’
Chapter Forty-Five
At Lviv International airport they managed to get KLM flights leaving for Heathrow in a couple of hours.
George charged his card.
‘Are you sure?’ John asked. ‘They’re not economy prices, even if they are economy seats.’
‘What do you expect, somewhere like this? No, we’ll stick them on the card Ted gave me. Let his budget manager sort it out.’
They got through the formalities and headed for a lounge.
‘How about a beer?’ John suggested.
‘Excellent idea!’ George chuckled and said, ‘How about two?’
John grinned. They had certainly earned it. Once settled, though, the pressure off, he wondered if George felt the same. He seemed subdued. Fatigued, probably. Exhausted. He was tired enough himself, and George had a lot more years than him to carry.
A Ukrainian language news programme was running on a nearby TV monitor. John watched it, waiting for the news the two of them could relate to most of all. Nothing appeared. He grew bored and turned away.
An announcement in several languages told them their plane was now boarding. John looked expectantly at George, who didn’t seem in a hurry to respond.
‘George?’
‘Just thinking of poor old Ted.’ Shaking his head, George said woefully, ‘A lifetime of service in the national interest.’
‘And then you’re dead,’ John fired back. ‘Ain’t life a bitch?’
‘It sure is sweet, though,’ George responded with an appreciative smile. ‘And we saved a lot of lives back there.’
‘Amen to that. Come on, George. Let’s go home.’
From London, they flew on to Newcastle, where Sam met them in Arrivals. Their appearance seemed to take some of the strain from her face.
‘All right?’ she asked anxiously.
John smiled and kissed her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve invited George to come back with us, by the way.’
‘Good! Now I’ll hear his side of the story, as well as what you tell me.’
‘My story will be the same as John’s,’ George assured her. ‘There won’t be a cigarette paper between ’em.’
She studied their faces for a moment and then said, ‘You’ve been through a lot together, I can tell.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ George said, reaching to touch his hat. ‘We sure have.’
Tired as the two of them were, that evening they gave Sam a quick rundown on their visit to Ukraine. They wouldn’t have been allowed to go to bed without it. She had spent an exceedingly anxious few days waiting to hear from them.
‘So, in the end, George,’ Sam said slowly, still thinking about it, ‘this was all down to Ted Pearson, your former boss?’
‘Not all of it, but enough. Ted never left the Cold War behind. He never really accepted that Russia had changed. But it has. Perhaps not enough, but it is different now. I know that. President Obama isn’t all wrong.’
They were all quiet then for a little while.
‘More coffee?’ Sam asked, as the silence in the room threatened to become oppressive.
‘I’ll get it,’ John told her. ‘You sit down.’
She smiled at him gratefully.
‘You were the key,’ George told her. ‘Ted wanted those weapons out and available, but he didn’t know where the depot was. Nobody did. Setting it up had been such a secret project, that no records were kept anywhere. Jack Olsson and Viktor Sirko had the knowledge, but it was lost with them.
‘But somehow Ted knew Viktor Sirko’s daughter also had the knowledge. He wanted her found, and he wanted to know what she knew. Then he would be able to access the depot and get the weapons out there where they could be used.’
‘So with you in his sights, Sam, he went into partnership with Yugov,’ John contributed. ‘Yugov would do what he couldn’t do himself.’
George nodded. ‘That’s how it was.’
‘But how did he know where I was?’ Sam asked.
‘George has got all that worked out,’ John told her with a smile.
‘Not all of it,’ George cautioned.
‘But most of it.’
‘Let’s just say some of it,’ George conceded.
‘Well, I want to hear it,’ Sam said firmly.
‘As an old Cold War warrior, Ted Pearson wanted to do more to stop the Russian incursions in Ukraine. But he couldn’t. The White House had made a stand, and not even Ted could go against the wishes of the President. I believe he grew very frustrated.
‘But this whole thing started when the discovery was made of what had happened to my old friend, Jack Olsson. It had been a mystery for many years, and Ted took it up automatically. The department always seeks to avenge its own.
‘Inquiries brought him to your doorstep. Here was this guy who had been in that same hotel in Slovakia when Jack was killed. Naturally, Ted wanted to know all about the guy. If it turned out that he had shot Jack, then he could expect a short life.
‘But the usual inquiries would have come up against big gaps in the guy’s history, and not a few blank walls. Then there was his wife, who didn’t seem to exist at all, at least according to official records. That got him started on some serious inquiries.
‘What they told him was that once upon a time, there was an Englishman working in Lviv for Viktor Sirko, and that Englishman had a thing going with Sirko’s daughter. On the fateful day when the Sirko empire was hit, the two of them disappeared, never to be heard of again. Now Ted was hooked. He couldn’t have let go now even if he had wanted to.’
George paused, shrugged and looked at his audience expectantly. ‘You with me?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Sam assured him. ‘Please carry on.’
‘I’m a bit tired,’ he said, teasing.
‘Oh, you can’t stop now!’
John laughed. ‘I’ll make some more coffee to keep you awake, George. You just carry on.’
‘It’s a deal. Well … this is guesswork, you understand? Your husband and I have put our heads together, and this is what we believe, but we can’t be certain of everything at this stage.’
‘Guesswork is good,’ Sam assured him.
‘Well, then. Learning about Olsson’s death triggered Ted’s memory of the long-lost arms depot in western Ukraine. It was so secret that nothing had been recorded about the location. It was off the books.
‘Knowledge of it had been vested in Jack Olsson and Viktor Sirko, who had been retained to look after it and manage it. That was a miscalculation, a huge mistake! When they were gone, the knowledge was gone. Yugov had blundered, too. He had wanted the depot badly, but had inadvertently killed everybody who knew about it when he attacked Sirko’s headquarters.
‘But Ted must have remembered that Sirko’s daughter also knew about the depot. Perhaps Sirko himself had once told him. So now Ted wanted you folks checked out properly. He still wanted Olsson’s death avenged, but most of all he wanted the location and the key to the depot.
‘In other words, Sam, he wanted your knowledge. He hit on the idea of using me to ferret it out, maybe by bargaining with you about the Olsson money. I don’t know. And he used me because I was off the books, too. I was retired. Either that or he decided to use Yugov to get the information he needed once I had confirmed your identity.
‘Yugov was already in the picture, by the way, because Ted had decided to use him to get the arms out of the depot and distributed to people who could use them effectively.’
‘Wouldn’t the government in Kiev have done that?’
‘Not really. They would have been too squeamish about the chemical weapons. Also, the official armed forces don’t seem t
o be worth a damn when they come up against Russian troops. The real fighting in the east is being done by irregular volunteer militias. They were the boys to get the weapons to. And Yugov would be in a good position to do that – for a price. Ted wouldn’t have wanted them to be wasted.
‘But things got out of control, which is what usually happens. Yugov got impatient and jumped the gun. He didn’t wait for me, and then Ted, to confirm your identity and get the location of the depot. He decided he could do all that quicker himself. So he came for you, Sam.’
George paused, sipped his coffee and added, ‘The rest you know.’
‘Thank you, George,’ Sam said gravely. After a pause, she added, ‘My poor country!’
‘It’s in better shape than it might have been, if Ted had got away with it,’ George pointed out. ‘Chernobyl would have been nothing compared with what would have happened then.’
The next day, John decided this was the right time to do something about a remaining piece of unfinished business. He was surprised George hadn’t mentioned it himself.
‘When you go home, George, how about taking the best part of $10,000,000 with you?’
George looked at him owlishly.
‘We don’t need it. We don’t want it, either!’
‘Give it back to the US Treasury,’ Sam urged. ‘John’s right. It has been a big problem for us for the last ten years.’
George chuckled and shook his head. ‘You folks! Still, bound to be somebody in Washington who can use it! I’ll see what I can do.’
The man in charge of the storage depot in Wallsend said he was very sorry. They had been on his list of people to contact, but it was such a long list he just hadn’t been able to get to them yet.
‘What about?’ John asked.
The man waved vaguely towards a distant building on the site. ‘The fire,’ he said. ‘The entire interior of the building was gutted. We don’t know how it happened. It’s still being investigated. Arson, the police think. I’m sorry. Can we talk another time about how to proceed?’
‘Just a minute! You can’t brush me off like this. I had important …’
‘Leave it for now, John,’ George said, touching his arm.