by Adam Hall
London knew nothing either, except for the last signal Cone had just sent in through Cheltenham for the board.
Executive has initiated end-phase, reports within reach of target.
Theirs not to do or die, theirs but to stand and wait, so forth. I didn’t envy them. But Trumpeter was to go ahead, and that was a surprise. On whose decision? Not Shepley’s. The Prime Minister’s, possibly after consultation with the Chairman of the Praesidium on the private line.
Pollock would be delighted.
No. I’m just a kind of coordinator.
But it was your idea?
Yes.
The tape-recorder turning, Cone sitting there shrunk into his raincoat, Melnichenkov sweating hard, Schwarz saying nothing, the smoke thick in the cellar.
‘How did it begin?’
‘With Schwarz, actually. He and Bader used to come into the Club, and we got talking. A lot of it was political, like most of the talk in that place. There was a feeling in the air that Miki was coming to East Berlin to open the Wall, you know - an official ceremony and all that; but I knew he couldn’t do it. They’d sling him out of power.’
Cone:
‘That was your impression?’
‘Most of us felt that way. With a man as charismatic as Gorbachev, there’s always the risk of his opponents feeling jealous, and scared of his getting too powerful - look what happened to Khrushchev. Then it was something Schwarz said that put things together for me.’
‘What did Schwarz say?’
Pollock looked across at him. ‘I think this is your bit.’
The pilot got up and walked about, hands tucked into his belt. ‘Listen, I am Jewish, like Hans.’ Bader. ‘And these people won’t let us go over there to see our families. They gave us the high privilege of taking us into the bloody Airforce but won’t trust us on the other side of the Wall for a couple of days. They -‘
‘But they’d be afraid you’d give away military information.’
‘Others have been allowed across - people with classified information in their heads. So we hate the Wall, and more than most people. So one day I told Dickie -‘ Pollock ‘- that it was getting to be an obsession with me, and with Hans. Every time we flew on training and exercise missions there was the Wall down there, and we were flying bombers…’
Cone leaned over to check the recorder, see that it was running. Everyone had gone very still.
‘So I talked discreetly to someone else,’ Pollock cut in again. ‘Someone at the Soviet Embassy close to Talyzin, in the Kremlin.’ Quick clean smile. ‘From that point it all built up into Trumpeter.’
Walls of Jericho.
‘It was Talyzin who took charge, then?’
‘That’s right.’ He got out of his chair too. ‘You see, he knows Miki very well; he’s his right-hand man, behind the scenes. Of course in the Kremlin most things happen behind the scenes. Politically, it was felt that if Miki tried to get the Wall down officially it would cost him his career, but if someone could breach it for him, he could make the grand Marxist gesture of yielding to the will of the people and leaving it open - and in fact ordering a new street to be driven through it in the name of peace and the brotherhood of nations - you know the line.’
‘My God,’ Cone said. He was hunched forward now, squinting up at Pollock. ‘You’ll never get away with it.’
‘Talyzin says we could.’
‘You mean he’s talked about this to Gorbachev?’
Pollock stopped pacing. ‘Put it this way. Talyzin is a staunch ally of the General-Secretary’s politically, and a close friend on a personal level. I don’t think for a moment he could mastermind Trumpeter from the wings without sounding Gorbachev out first.’
Cone turned a glance on me and looked back at Pollock again. I didn’t know what he meant. I think he was wondering if I could accept Trumpeter for what it was, for what it could do in Europe, with global repercussions.
‘Look,’ Pollock said, ‘Miki’s brilliant at PR work and he’s a showman. He’s also got a great deal of savvy and a great deal of courage. I think he might have told Talyzin to go ahead.’
‘Whose idea was Cat Baxter?’
‘That was mine.’ Pollock looked rather pleased. ‘Just making a gap in the Wall wouldn’t do it. We had to get world-wide attention and we needed a symbol, in a big way. Like ten thousand East German rock fans climbing over the rubble and crowding through the Wall and dancing in the streets with the West Berliners. They -‘
‘Not escaping,’ Cone said.
‘Oh no - that wasn’t the thing at all. Germany reunited - that was going to be the message. Cat Baxter jumped at it, as you can imagine. What a role to play … Joan of Arc at the barricades with banners waving, leading the faithful through. Talk about promotion …’
Mr. Ash, she’d said to me, will you be at the concert?
I hope so.
Try and make it. It’ll blow your mind.
Cone glanced at me again. He thought Pollock was mad. So did I. But I remembered Einstein. No new idea will ever succeed unless at first it sounds crazy.
‘You’d be forewarning the media?’
‘I’m ready to send the same message,’ Pollock said, ‘to every major TV news network and every newspaper and magazine world-wide: warn your camera crews and reporters in East Berlin to stand by for a major story. There’d be instant replay.’
‘What about the police? Casualties?’
‘The HUA would be willing to turn their backs on the scene when Cat goes through the Wall, with a request direct from Moscow. They -‘
‘From Talyzin.’
‘Yes. They want a united Germany themselves. They’d be asked to evacuate the area around the projected breach on the excuse that toxic chemicals are escaping from a crashed truck. A warning would go to West Berlin, with the same story. I don’t have to tell you the planning that’s been necessary.’ A shrug, and no bright smile. ‘You’ve got to tell London? Now that you know the project?’
‘They’d have my head,’ Cone said, ‘if I tried to keep this dark.’
Another shrug. ‘Then I can only hope I’m right in thinking that Talyzin has sounded Gorbachev out. Then if Thatcher calls him, it won’t change his mind.’
He lit another cigarette, and I remember thinking it looked like a slow fuse burning.
‘If we can’t nail Horst Volper,’ Cone had said, ‘there won’t be any point in bombing the Wall.’
He’d shut the recorder down and got onto his feet.
Leaden light was seeping over the sky from the east, casting a metallic sheen across the landscape and the distant buildings. There was no sound in the area, no traffic; Dollinger had told me that a redevelopment scheme had been started and then become stalled, leaving two or three square miles of no-man’s-land.
07:49.
Twice I thought I heard a sound from the derelict hotel, but it had been without identity - not the closing of a door or footsteps or a voice. It could have come from the airport.
He will be there alone.
Then he’d waited, forcing me to use more pressure, to drain the blood from his face and bring sweat springing.
But where will he attack the target?
Waited again, forcing me to induce a degree of pain that I had to share with him, to identify with, so that my own face was bloodless as I brought the nerve to breaking point.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
07:50.
Nothing moved inside the hotel. The car still stood there, half-concealed. There was no sound in the immediate area.
A spark came into the sky to the north and gradually broke into two as the landing lights of the plane grew brighter and it lowered towards the runway, passing directly overhead and landing within half a minute, reversing thrust as the brakes came on.
And then I knew that Volper was not going to leave the hotel at all and that I’d left it too late.
Chapter 26
TUPOLEV
Smell of death.
I climbed
to the next floor. The elevators were not working. The electric power had been cut off months ago. On the next floor I waited again, listening.
The smell of the death that this building was going to die when the men came again with their demolition tools, the smell of damp plaster, mildew, decay along the corridors and on the stairs. The glass had gone from most of the windows, and some of the balconies were sagging. This was the sixth floor, below the roof-garden I’d seen from the car, with its collapsed trelliswork and dead plants and the remains of a flag shredded by the wind.
I had seen tracks on some of the floors below, but they might not be his; workers had been here, disturbing the thick patina of dust and grime along the passages. Some of the doors had been left wide open, and the strengthening light of the morning came into the windowless rooms, pooling along the corridors, innocent, shadowless.
I stood perfectly still, breathing tidally, projecting my sense of hearing across the environment, desperate now to pick up any sound that would give him away.
Silence.
I moved again, crossing the corridor and going into an open room, keeping clear of the window until I’d studied the components of the view: three windows in the other wing of the building and a section of the rubble-strewn courtyard below. Then I moved nearer, keeping to the side, looking across and down. I had made this survey on each floor from the second level upwards, and I suppose the angle of reflection in the broken pane of glass on the opposite wall hadn’t been right, as it was now, because I hadn’t seen movement before.
It was very slight: the broken pane was only a few inches across and it was dirty; but the movement was there, and I watched it, stilling the breath and listening to the blood coursing past the tympanic membranes. It still wasn’t definable; it was still no more than movement, except that it didn’t seem to be made by a rat or a bird, because there was a glint to it, like a watch would make on a moving wrist.
At this angle the source of the reflection must be on the floor below, the fifth floor, and from the room next along from where I was standing. I could hear sounds now, small ones, some of them identifiable as metallic or hard wood, hard plastic, an object or objects not moved about by rats or birds.
When I looked at my watch it showed four minutes to eight o’clock and when I looked down at the balcony below and to the left I judged it to be five feet to the side and nine feet down, a total distance of ten feet. The balcony was sagging, like most of them, with the railings broken away. The one outside the room where I stood was in much the same state, with the railing on the left end rusted and buckled.
He was, then, ten or twelve feet away from me.
Volper.
07:57.
Yes indeed, when I’d been waiting in the car below and suddenly realised the truth, I could have driven as fast as possible to the nearest telephone and called the airport and told them to warn the General-Secretary’s plane and divert it to an alternate but there would have been no point in it - divert his plane, who is speaking - this is Colonel Heidecker of the HUA and I tell you it is imperative that you warn the pilot that - Wait a minute, please, where are you speaking from - so forth, and yes I could have driven as far as the airport itself but time would have been dangerously shorter and I would have met with the same suspicion because a hoax is a hoax and I was wearing a ripped coat and there was stubble on my face and after the bomb thing and the nightmare with Dollinger I didn’t look like your standard respectable policeman so that was the choice I’d been faced with and this was the one I’d made because I’d known by the way Dollinger had given his information that he hadn’t been lying and this was where Horst Volper had to be, a floor below in a room with a rotting balcony and a sixty-foot drop into the courtyard if I got it wrong.
Sound in the sky, the sound of the Tupolev.
The French doors were open, one of them hanging on a single hinge, and I stepped through the gap with my shoes clear of the littered glass and went to the end of the balcony and ignored the risk that he might notice movement in one of the broken window-panes down there as I had done, ignored it because I was moving as quickly as I could and there was no question as to whether the sixty-foot drop should be allowed to affect my thinking, only the question of working out the angle and distance and the force needed to take me over the buckled railing and through five feet of space and then the drop.
A thin, loudening scream from the jets of the Tupolev.
Surprise was the only thing in my favour and it would have to be enough and I dragged on the railing to test its strength and thought it was sound enough and swung over it and felt the air-rush of the drop against my face and hit the balcony below on all fours and used the railing supports for leverage and pitched into the room.
He had the flat, featureless face that I’d studied so many times in the photographs, the eyes rather far apart and the nose running almost straight to the brow. The mouth was open a little at this particular moment and his expression wasn’t one of surprise but of non-understanding, as if his known version of reality had slipped like a time-warp and left him suddenly a stranger in his own world, and untutored to meet the demands on him.
His hands were occupied and he couldn’t reach for a gun or even defend himself as he could have done if they’d been free, and in any case I wasn’t interested in attacking him because the urgent need was to deflect the missile and I managed it but his finger must have been on the launch-button because there was a squeezing sound and the thing jerked and the air in the room felt suddenly solidified with the intense volume of sound as, the warhead burst against the wall across the corner of the building and the building shook, holding for a moment and then collapsing with the slow inexorability of an avalanche.
I suppose he was stunned, because he was physically slow to react and I chopped once and dropped him into the void and saw him whirling among the vortex of shattered concrete and timber and plaster lit by the flamelight of the explosion, and later I found him in the courtyard when I went down there, moving like a drunk amid the smoking rubble. His head was buried under the debris but he had one hand flung out, a finger pointing in my direction, as if he were blaming me for something.
Chapter 27
TELLY
‘I couldn’t see much detail,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t time. But it looked like a Stinger Mark IV. It was obviously hand-held and obviously a heat-seeker. He wouldn’t have missed.’
Cone gave me a glance and switched off the recorder. ‘That’ll be enough for today. I don’t want to tire you.’
‘I’m still thirsty, that’s all.’
He went over to the telephone and asked them to send some more tea up. I’d slept most of the day, not exactly sleep, you couldn’t call it that, just a whole string of nightmares, running through falling buildings, planes blowing up, his white face and his arms tied to the chair, after-shock, I suppose, working itself out.
I got off the bed and went across to the window. The Wall rose against the night, an expanse of floodlit concrete, impregnable. One would have said, impregnable.
‘You shouldn’t be walking on that ankle,’ Cone said.
When the tea came he looked at his watch and turned on the television and played with the local channels.
…What he called a natural corollary to the summit conference in the United States. Mr. Gorbachev made a point of stressing that his visit to East Berlin carries no special political significance, but is simply to enable the General-Secretary to discuss with President Honecker the issues raised between himself and President Reagan., ‘I fear he doth protest too much,’ I said.
‘Right. Blown his cover.’
Cone looked at his watch again and switched channels until he got the scene in the park. Cat Baxter, her mass of blonde hair framing her small kittenish face, her silver sweater and skirt shimmering under the fierce intensity of the spotlights, waving as the crowd gave her a standing ovation. Waving but glancing at the sky repeatedly, the dazzling smile fixed, frozen.
‘Going crazy about her,’ Cone said. ‘Does her kind of stuff do anything for you?’
‘I quite like it. I’ve got some of her tapes in the car.’
We watched for a bit and then the phone rang and Cone went across to it and listened briefly and thanked the caller and rang off and came over to where I was standing.
‘Bombers airborne,’ he said.
The End
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27