The Dark Chronicles: A Spy Trilogy

by Jeremy Duns

  We walked through the tables looking for a free one. The furniture was in the same style as the architecture: a hideous hand-me-down modernism that, at a guess, was an attempt to look Scandinavian. They couldn’t even get that right.

  There were three tables with good views of the door, and after considering all three I indicated to Sarah that we should take the smallest of them. It was the farthest from any other occupied tables, and it was positioned in a small alcove of its own, meaning it was not in direct light and we could talk more easily.

  We installed ourselves in the metal chairs, and looked around. There was a queue at the counter, but just as I was about to get back up again and join it a waitress passed by and I managed to attract her attention with an ingratiating smile. I ordered a couple of coffees and sigarety to secure our presence for a while, and as she sidled away I turned to Sarah. She was running her fingers through her crop of hair, her large blue eyes surveying the room, and for a moment she looked as she had done the first evening I’d met her: poised, elegant and without a care in the world. But then I saw that her jaw muscles were making tiny fluttering movements beneath her cheeks, and realized she was trying to stop her teeth chattering.

  ‘It’s good to see you again,’ I said quietly, keeping my tone neutral for the benefit of anyone watching us. ‘I’m sorry things turned out this way. I should never have let you come with me to the embassy in Rome.’

  She looked across at me and gave a wan smile. ‘You couldn’t have stopped me.’

  I looked into her eyes and saw fatigue and fear in them, but also pride. Well, she had outrun me at the start, surprising me. Then again, she was a good ten years younger than me, so perhaps she was the better field agent and I was teaching her to suck eggs. She had certainly proven herself in Italy. But I was getting ahead of myself. I’d known her barely a week, and most of that had been while we’d been confined together by her husband and his neo-fascist chums.

  ‘So your hearing came back,’ I said, ‘just like that?’

  She averted her gaze. ‘Not quite. They gave me some treatment.’

  ‘Yuri?’

  She nodded fractionally, and my exhilaration that she had recovered was replaced by a surge of fury. I reached out to touch her hand, then thought better of it. The last thing she needed was people touching her. I didn’t want to know what they had done to her, exactly, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask her to recount it and live through it again here. But they would pay for it. Yuri would pay.

  The waitress returned and placed two mugs of black coffee, a packet of twenty cigarettes and a box of matches on the table. I paid her with some of the coins I’d stolen, and she wandered off again.

  I picked up the matchbox, which showed a picture of the Urals and proclaimed ‘The best holiday is a motor tour’. I lit a cigarette for Sarah and then one for me, and inhaled it deeply into my lungs, luxuriating in the rich glow. After a few puffs, I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted pretty foul, but it was hot and strong, and this cheered me a little, because I knew that within half an hour the caffeine would be making its way through my bloodstream along with the nicotine, and would boost my energy and alertness. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

  Yuri would have ordered his men to comb through the neighbourhoods surrounding Detsky Mir looking for us. He would be utterly furious that we had managed to get away. Had he told the Supreme Command yet, I wondered? Perhaps not, in the hope he could find us before anyone became too concerned. But every minute we were free was a problem for him, because eventually he would have to tell them, and Brezhnev would hit the roof.

  At any rate, we were now the target of a manhunt, and it would only become more concerted as time went on and more resources were allocated to it. Once they found Vladimir, some of the men would be even hungrier to find us, because there was nothing like personal motive to get the blood pumping, as Vladimir had discovered to his cost. But perhaps there was a silver lining. If we managed to survive long enough, they might have to draw men from the nuclear strike preparations… No, that was probably too hopeful. The opposite might happen instead: Yuri and the others would realize I was planning to try to stop a strike from going ahead, and Brezhnev might start thinking about ordering it now to retain the chance of taking the West by surprise. By fleeing, I may have hastened the very event I was trying to stop.

  ‘We’re not going to the embassy,’ said Sarah, ‘are we? Or home.’

  I put my mug down and looked up at her. ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve got a crisis on our hands. Brezhnev and his generals believe the West is on the verge of launching a nuclear attack, and they’re preparing to get their retaliation in first.’

  She stared at me for a moment, then took a long drag of her cigarette as she considered it.

  ‘And is the West about to launch a nuclear attack?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so. But I can’t be sure.’

  I quickly told her about the meeting in the bunker, the B-52s, the mustard gas ‘attack’ and the U-boat. She took it all in, listening intently, her jaw tight but her expression giving nothing away.

  ‘What about the hotline?’ she asked when I’d finished.

  ‘They haven’t used it, and won’t. They think it would warn the Americans they’re on to them, and lose them a strategic advantage.’

  ‘So how long do we have?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either,’ I admitted. ‘But it might not be long enough.’

  ‘I see.’ She stubbed out the remains of her cigarette in the ashtray and straightened her back in her chair. ‘So what are we going to do? Do I take it that the case between your feet contains Yuri’s documents from the meeting, and that you hope they offer firm enough evidence about what’s going on to stop this?’

  She was a pretty cool customer, I reckoned. I could see how she’d survived the last six months.

  ‘Yes. But it depends on precisely what’s in the case. Do you think you can hold the fort for a few minutes while I find a lavatory to look through it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But please leave me the cigarettes.’

  I nodded, giving her as encouraging a smile as I could muster, and then stood up and looked around for the toilets.

  *

  I found a room at the back of the establishment, and after waiting for it to be vacated, jumped in and locked myself in it. It was a tiny space, with a lavatory almost pressed against the basin and a grimy window looking out onto the street, protected by a thin grey cotton curtain.

  I seated myself on the lavatory and looked at the case: to my horror, I saw there was a combination on it. I pressed the clasps down, hoping that Yuri had not thought to lock it for a ride to the Lubyanka, but it was fastened shut.

  Shit.

  I sat there for a moment, wondering how the hell I was going to break a six-digit combination, when I looked at the numbers again. The left-hand numbers read 446, and the right-hand ones read 683. But the 3 was not completely in the frame, the tip of the 2 below it just visible. Could it be that that frame was a little looser than the others, and that in all the movement since I’d grabbed the case in the car, that number had simply shifted? I looked at the numbers again, and saw a pattern: 44 66 8… 8? I clicked the 3 several notches around until the 8 was in the window, then pressed the clasps again.

  The case clicked open.

  Thank Christ. Resting inside, snug as a bug, were several sheaves of documents, most of them stapled together. I took the lot out and started sifting through them. The first was a threat assessment, prepared by the GRU, on the supposed attacks on the bases in Estonia and the B-52 flights. It looked to have been written by Yuri, and reiterated a lot of information I’d heard in the meeting. There were maps of the affected bases and a report on the incidents there.

  The index case was a 22-year-old lieutenant who had come back from one of the observation posts on the shoreline of the Paldiski base, having picked up an ‘amber lump’ that had washed ashore. Within a few hours he and some o
f his colleagues had experienced violent and repeated vomiting, and he and one other had lost their sight. A detailed chemical analysis concluded that the chemical involved was an unknown form of mustard gas that was much more viscous and powerful than had been seen previously.

  The bloody fools. It fitted Winterlost precisely: these were classic mustard gas symptoms, and it had been contracted by touch to boot. It had to be a leak from the U-boat. I turned to the conclusion of the threat assessment:

  There can be little doubt that the West has launched a chemical attack on our bases in Paldiski and Hiiumaa. The purpose seems to be to put them out of action in advance of a surprise nuclear strike. As we have repeatedly advised – see the attached document, which we regard as still current – this is in keeping with our estimate of strategy among some of the hardline generals in the West. Our assessment at this time is that we must consider launching a nuclear strike, perhaps within the next twelve hours.

  Within that timeframe, we will endeavour to bring to the Defence Council a clearer intelligence picture of the West’s actions. Time is against us, but we have agents in place in the West who may have access to information about nuclear intentions and planning. Agents HOLA and ERIC have provided us with a very clear picture of the British development of nuclear research since the Great Patriotic War. We have issued secured instructions through our residency in London to initiate immediate contact with both.

  Our colleagues in HVA also have an agent, MICHELLE, who is providing them with material from the British Director for Operations of NATO’s General Secretariat. We also have several agents with experience of nuclear strategy in the West close at hand in Moscow, notably SONNY and INDEPENDENT, and it may be worth questioning them both for further insight into the strategies and actions we now face.

  The document was undated, but must have been written within the last few hours. My codename was INDEPENDENT, and SONNY was Philby. But who the hell were HOLA, ERIC and MICHELLE? Cairncross and Nunn May had both confessed, so none could be them. It seemed the GRU had at least two more doubles who remained unexposed in Britain and had been in operation since the war. The HVA was East German military intelligence, and if they had direct access to NATO’s British Director for Operations, the Soviets should know pretty much everything Britain and NATO were planning in this field and be able to act accordingly.

  But they didn’t know everything. They hadn’t seemed to know about Corsham, for instance, and they had brought me in to ask me very specific questions they didn’t have the answers to. Some of this was doubtless down to the time factor. It could take an entire day to set up a meet with an agent – more if they couldn’t get away from the office for a convincing reason. So even if ERIC, HOLA or MICHELLE knew about an impending attack, they might not be able to send any information about it in time. And while Brezhnev and his generals were waiting to hear from these agents, the pressure would be increasing. On top of which, even if reports came in from all three agents that they were not aware of any plan to attack, that wouldn’t mean Brezhnev would discount the possibility altogether – very few people were informed of such things. Indeed, if you did know about an impending nuclear attack, you would probably be at a PYTHON site by now.

  In all, this read more like a political statement, perhaps to position the GRU in Brezhnev’s eyes as a better source of information than the KGB. And they certainly seemed like very impressive sources, but in this case, probably not highly placed enough to help.

  The next file was the strategy document Yuri had referred to. It had been written by Ivashutin, the GRU head, and was dated 28 August 1964. It was five years old, but still seemed to represent their current thinking. I flicked through it, and my eyes lit on a paragraph towards the end:

  The imperialist states are engaged in preparations for a war that is not at all defensive. The substance of their military doctrine is a surprise nuclear attack and offensive war against the socialist countries.

  My jaw clenched. I had told them this wasn’t the case. In the winter of ’63, Sasha and I had met at the cemetery in Southgate and I’d sat on a cold bench for hours while he’d questioned me about Britain’s stance towards nuclear war. I’d been in Prague when the Cuban crisis had happened, and had been unable to leave the British embassy compound, so I’d spent most of the fortnight in the basement with Templeton and the rest of the staff, monitoring the radio and the cable traffic. But once the crisis was over, Moscow had wanted to know what the thinking was in Whitehall in the aftermath. I explained that from everything I’d heard, the Cuban crisis had scared the living shit out of everyone, even more than Berlin had back in ’48, when Brooman-White had told me we were heading for atomic war. I had told Sasha in very clear terms that the last thing anyone in Whitehall or Washington wanted was to start a nuclear war. There might be a couple of cigar-chewing American generals who occasionally brought up the idea of a surprise attack, but there was no chance of such a thing ever happening and it was certainly not the West’s military doctrine – far from it, in fact.

  So either Sasha had failed to pass this information on to Moscow, or he had and it had been discounted. This was very worrying, because if this was the principle they were working from it meant they were much more likely to launch a strike. They had discovered what they thought were preparations for a surprise nuclear attack, confirming their mistaken view that the West was intent on making such a move. Brezhnev had already responded by priming missiles. He hadn’t yet put them in the air, but if this was the way they viewed the West’s intentions, how long would it be before he did? Glancing through the document, it seemed Ivashutin was ignoring the fact that retaliating before missiles landed in the Soviet Union wasn’t going to stop them landing. Or was he? I turned back and started reading from the top. As I did, I realized that the Soviets had a completely different conception of nuclear war than had ever been imagined in the West:

  Strategic operations of nuclear forces will be characterized by unprecedented spatial expanse. They will instantaneously cover all continents of the earth, all main islands, straits, canals, i.e. the entire territory of the countries-participants of the aggressive coalition. However, the main events in all probability will take place in the Northern hemisphere – in Europe, North America and Asia. In this hemisphere, essentially all the countries, including the neutral countries, will suffer destructive consequences of massive nuclear strikes to some extent…

  After that cheerful preamble, Ivashutin veered into bizarre territory. While he admitted it would be impossible to defeat the West in a conventional war because of their greater military might on the ground, he then argued that nuclear weapons, far from being a deterrent, in fact provided the Soviet Union with the opportunity to reverse this situation:

  With the nuclear weapons currently available in the world, one can turn up the earth itself, move mountains and splash the oceans out of their shores. Therefore, the tasks that can be set for the strategic operations of nuclear forces in response to an aggression are realistic, even though they may seem to be based on fantasy.

  The most aggressive forces of imperialism engaged in preparing a thermonuclear war against the socialist countries count on their ability to effectively paralyse socialist countries with an unexpected first strike, destroy their nuclear forces and thus achieve a victory while having saved their countries from a devastating retaliatory nuclear strike. However, there are very few people left – even among the most rabid imperialist military – who would believe in the feasibility of such plans. In the age of an unprecedented development of electronics, it is impossible to achieve a genuine surprise strike. The very first signs of the beginning of a nuclear attack by the imperialist aggressor will be discovered, which would give sufficient grounds for launching a retaliatory strike …

  It made no sense. On the one hand, Ivashutin claimed the West had a military doctrine of a surprise attack. On the other, he thought such an attack would always be detected early enough, and that very few in the West now bel
ieved it even possible. Either way, the situation he outlined was very close to the one they now faced, which I supposed was why they had included it in the papers for the Defence Council.

  Let us suppose that the United States is actually capable of destroying the Soviet Union several times over. Does this mean any kind of military superiority? No, it does not, because the USSR possesses such strategic capabilities that ensure a complete destruction of the United States in the second strike. It does not matter how many times over the United States will be destroyed. One does not kill a dead person twice or three times.

  He seemed to be arguing that a nuclear attack would destroy the West, but have little impact on the Soviet Union. That was familiar enough propaganda – the kind that could be read on a regular basis in Pravda – but this was a top secret document by the head of military intelligence about their strategy for nuclear war. If they couldn’t even be honest with themselves in such a document, there was a serious problem. Was it that they couldn’t admit the reality of the situation to each other for political reasons – or were they completely blinded to it? Worryingly, it seemed like the latter was a real possibility. Discussing the West’s military bases, Ivashutin concluded that the major ones were in the US, Britain and West Germany, and most could be destroyed by medium-range missiles and bombers in a first launch.

  But it was a section titled ‘Ground Forces’ Operations’ that stopped me in my tracks. It discussed ground troops overtaking enemy territory and ‘cleaning up the consequences’ of nuclear strikes.

  Nuclear weapons will incur damage on troops by shock wave, light emission and radioactive emission. These are very dangerous factors, and it is very difficult to protect oneself against them. Still, we can soften the impact of nuclear explosions. Tanks, trenches, dug outs, shelters, natural hills – all give good protective cover from the shock wave; they will substantially reduce the damage. One has to protect the eyes as well as face and open parts of the body from light emission. Each soldier should have dark eyeglasses, or a mask with dark glasses, and gloves. A closed car, tank, gas mask or an overcoat will help protect from the penetrating radiation…