The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  I wished to Christ I knew what had happened. All Chechevitsin had said was that I had to stop the 10.25 express from Tashkent twelve miles north-west of Yelingrad and rendezvous with Gorodok at the south end of the Litsky Bridge. I had to fill in the gaps for myself and that wasn’t difficult but I didn’t like the message because if I had to get the courier off the train in open country it meant he’d already been blown at this end and if he got off at Yelingrad Central they’d snatch him cold.

  So I’d been moving into a trap before I’d got the signal from Chechevitsin and I hadn’t known it, but London had. It’s not my favourite feeling: it’s like when you’re going across on the green and someone takes it on the red and it’s a question of inches and you think Jesus, what if. The labour camps were there in Murmansk and Chita Province for me too, as well as Kirinski.

  9.41 and two miles to go and I took the left fork and found the dirt road that ran alongside the railway. There were clinkers and broken asphalt and bits of timber the whole way along it because it was a service road for the maintenance crews when they had a problem on the line: I’d talked to a switchman for half an hour at the station when I’d gone there to pick up the films.

  The moon was in the south-east and I tried shutting the headlights down at intervals and found I could keep up the speed if I watched the left-hand side below the embankment. The switchman had said the signal-box was a mile this side of the bridge and the express was due at the bridge at 10.09 unless the snow had delayed it. He’d asked me why my department was surveying the line in midwinter and I’d said there were some embankment faults showing up on the far side of the bridge and he didn’t seem inclined to argue.

  I passed the signal-box at 9.45 with my lights full on and kept going for two minutes and then slowed and doused them and turned round and stopped and waited. The timing had to be cut fine because the man in the box would put a call out for emergency crews and I would only have as long as they took to get here.

  The snowscape was bluish-white under the three-quarter moon and the stars were huge; the line of telegraph poles alongside the railway cut the dome of night in half, their stark outlines diminishing to a vanishing-point where the squat black rectangle of the signal-box made a blot against the snow. Over to my right, to the east, a small cluster of lights drifted, red and green and white, as an aircraft went into the circuit above the field six miles away: the maps had it down as a civilian aerodrome. With the window down I listened in the silence, and picked up the sound of its engines: it was a turbo-prop. Nearer and much louder a night bird called across the desolate countryside.

  At 9.53 I started up and put the headlights full on and reached forty miles per hour over the rough surface before I hit the brakes and began using the horn in short warning blasts as the yellow-lit windows of the signal-box loomed above me on the right. I was already running with the cinders crunching under my feet and the Trabant sliding to a halt with the door open and the handbrake on and the engine still running. The steps to the box were free of snow and dark with sand as I went up them two at a time and hit the door open.

  ‘There’s a plane down across the line!’

  One man, thin, greying, startled, dropping long-legged from the stool and standing uncertainly, staring at me.

  ‘It’s blocking the down line - give me some flares!’ I was looking around for them but the light was bad in here: a couple of enamel-shaded bulbs hanging low above the plotting desk that threw awkward shadows.

  ‘Are there people?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pilot. Does he -‘

  ‘Yes. Have you got a first-aid box too?’

  He went on staring at me for another two seconds, was I a drunk, was I a joker, was I a psychopath, so forth, then he moved steadily and threw one of the big metal levers and ducked below the plotting desk and dragged out a bucket with a wooden cover and swung it towards me. I caught it and he pulled a cupboard door open and slid a box down, white-painted with a red cross, using his fist to make sure the lid was secure.

  ‘You have a lamp?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes.’ I made for the door.

  ‘Where is the machine down?’

  ‘Just this side of the bridge -‘

  The Litsky Bridge?’

  ‘Right.’

  I left the door open and dropped down the steps and ran to the Trabant, gunning up and slinging a wave of snow and cinders into the moonlight as I skid-turned and hit the lights on and got going. At this point the time pattern became critical because the train had to reach the bridge before the emergency crews got there and in snow conditions it could be half an hour late, an hour, it was totally unpredictable and therefore characteristic of what happens when a wheel comes off: you can keep going but you’re always just this side of a smash till you make a mistake and then the whole lot goes.

  I wouldn’t have to make a mistake but Gorodok could make one and so could Chechevitsin and so could London because they were running this thing by remote control with no director in the field and the courier line beginning to blow. We could go down on luck alone because tonight’s action was strictly shut-ended: if the Tashkent express arrived any time after the deadline I’d have to get out, and the deadline was the precise moment when the emergency crews would start asking questions. If they got here before tie train came they’d want to know where the aircraft had come down and I could expand the timing quite a bit by telling them it was between here and the signal-box, hadn’t they seen it, so forth: the embankment was forty feet high along this stretch and they could easily miss any wreckage because it’d be above them and unlit. But then they’d come back because they hadn’t found anything and at that point they’d start asking me questions and that would be when I’d have to get out of here and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t use the phone in the signal-box and report a hoax and get me stopped by a police patrol on my way back to the city, strictly shut-ended if I pushed the deadline to that particular point and just as bad if I decided to get out before they suspected a hoax because they’d douse the flares and change the signal and let the train go through and Gorodok would get off at Yelingrad and walk straight into a snatch, no bloody go: the classic mortality rate of a courier line after the first courier gets blown is a hundred per cent and that’s perfectly logical because they’re a chain and a chain is as strong as the first link to break, finis.

  By 9.59 I was near the bridge and saw that the signal for the down line was still at red. It was a dead-straight stretch and I left the Trabant on rough ground, kicking the throttle and holding the wheel hard over and burning the snow off the surface to leave me with a reliable take-off pad for use in an emergency. The flares were a foot long, red-paper-wrapped pitch with an iron spike at one end and a friction-ignition cap at the other. The moonlight was good enough to use as background and I staked them out at fifty-foot intervals on both sides of the track but left them unlit because on the wrapping paper their duration was given as fifteen minutes and they could burn out before the train got here if it was late.

  I began waiting.

  From where I was standing, at the top of the embankment, the night had two components: a disc and a dome, the gigantic disc of the earth’s surface spreading blue-white under the moon and the gigantic dome of the sky, pricked and glittering with stars. Only the bridge made a connection between the two, breaking the skyline a quarter of a mile away with its dark skeletonic girders curving across the snows like the bones of a dead rainbow. In the opposite direction, to the northeast, I thought I could glimpse the windows of the signal-box a mile distant, a yellow point of light that I could see only when I looked slightly away from it, and not always then. That was where the headlights would begin showing along the service road, a little while from now.

  Eastwards a small plane was taking-off from the airfield; its navigation lights were still invisible but I could hear the distant snarl of its engine as the power came on. Moments later the red and green motes of light began rising and floati
ng across the stars, turning and drifting towards the south as the engine’s note died, over the minutes, leaving the night soundless. To the southwest, beyond the Litsky Bridge, there was nothing. The whiteness of the land, lit from overhead, had lost all definition: I could only tell where it ended by noting where the stars began. Somewhere in that direction was the train, and Gorodok.

  10.10 and from this moment my nerves began tightening: when the ETA is reached you start thinking that a minute late is going to mean an hour late, and the situation seems critically changed.

  Gorodok. Who was Gorodok?

  Smith, Jones, Robinson, Brown, nothing in a name, but he was certainly English because a courier can be any nationality providing he’s not in a line, and the Bureau has a strict ruling on the point. Too many operations have come a mucker because of a blown courier line, and apart from all the other considerations it can be deadly when it goes up. Two years ago we crashed a mission in Scandinavia like that and the ruling was established immediately afterwards.

  The air was freezing and I had to keep on the move, going down the embankment and along the road and up again fifty yards on to make channels in the snow: if I had to get out of here fast I didn’t want to waste any time doing pratfalls. In one place there was a lump of rock about half-way down and I pulled it out of the frozen earth and threw it farther away and filled in the hole with gravel and looked at my watch again and saw we were going to cut this fine, too fine for comfort, 10.21 and the night quiet with no sound from the southwest, nothing to break that silence out there.

  This time I was certain I could see the yellow light of the signal-box, low on the horizon. He had seemed an efficient, steady-handed man, the type who would think of telephoning the airfield while he was waiting for the tram, asking them if they knew there was a plane down across the line not far to the west of them: in which case there would be a helicopter over with a searchlight and as soon as it had made its first run I’d have to get out because they could scan the track for five miles in five minutes and report it clear.

  10.24.

  Silence across the night.

  Whoever he was he knew what he’d got to do because we had a definite rendezvous and he’d be expecting the train to stop and he’d be ready. God knew when the alert had gone through but they must have warned him before he boarded the thing at Tashkent: they couldn’t have got a message to him after that. The network was in a big hurry - he could’ve been simply sent to ground and someone else could have come in his place to take over the films but that hadn’t happened and the obvious answer was that they hadn’t got anyone else to replace him, but I don’t like obvious answers and I would have said that London wanted the films as soon as they could get them and I wished them luck because someone had blown Gorodok and they’d have his description out and he was going to have a bad time getting clear.

  Who had blown him?

  I stood listening to the night. My hands were now numb and I blew into my gloves but my breath was cold before it reached the skin. The stars had the glitter of broken icicles and the snow was an ocean, stilled and frozen, capping the curve of the planet and reaching to infinity, making it seem absurd to wait here for a thousand tons of metal to come steaming out of the void with the force of a fallen comet: there was a degree of sensory deprivation in this vast silence as I stood here, small as a molecule, between earth and sky.

  Of course it didn’t strictly matter who had blown him. What mattered was that the whole of the line was now vulnerable and would become exposed if he was caught and interrogated : it wasn’t certain that the network could alert the rest of them before Gorodok was broken and the KGB went to work on what he’d given them. A courier is a mobile entity and not always at the end of a phone.

  10.32 so there was snow on the line or the points were frozen or there’d been a derailment because we were now running twenty-two minutes late.

  Or they’d stopped the train at Alma Ata and taken Gorodok off and he was sitting there now under the bright lights and they were starting with a cosh. They might have to work all night on him but in the end Sounds northeast, vehicles, and I turned round with a jerk and listened, cupping my ears. Lights. The sounds were intermittent, a series of low rumbles, and the lights flickered up and down. They were coming from the direction of the signal-box and I watched them. The distance was a mile and over this road they’d keep up a good speed and be here within three minutes.

  I turned and looked the other way but there was nothing.

  Four and a half miles southwest of the Litsky Bridge there was a tunnel marked on the map and the express would use its whistle on the far side of it, assuming standard procedure; and in this stillness I’d hear it over that distance unless the emergency crews were too close by then. Their headlights were bright now, already throwing shadows over the scrubland and silvering the telephone wires along the track.

  I gave it ten seconds and stooped and lit the first flare and then the next, moving back from side to side until there were ten of them going, their short flames reddening the snow. The Trabant was directly below me now and I slithered down the embankment through one of the channels I’d made and got in and started up and gunned into a half turn with the lights off and headed for the bridge.

  The flares would burn for fifteen minutes and in that time the crews would be here asking questions and if I told them the plane had come down half-way between here and the signal-box they’d take less than ten minutes to look for it and come back and at that point I’d have to get out and if they’d left one of their vehicles in the way I’d be blocked and it’d be no go.

  The light was tricky and I hit something with a front wheel and the Trabant lurched and half-spun and dug into the snow at the side of the road until I banged the shift into first gear and put the power on and burned the snow down to solid ground and took off again with the back end snaking across the surface until we got traction. On the far side of the bridge I slung it in a U-turn and stopped under the first outrigger girder from the south end and got out and stood listening.

  The only sound was from the northeast and I watched the lights moving in line and slowing as they saw the flares, the first vehicle halting below the embankment and dropping its crew off. These were not railway emergency units: their lights were shining on the next truck ahead as they stopped in convoy and I could see the Red Star insignia on their sides. The closest place to find help must have been the army camp and that’s where the signalman had phoned.

  Soldiers were climbing the embankment near the flares, the blood-red light spreading over their uniforms and glinting on their rifles as they stood together, uncertain what to do. I could hear an officer shouting.

  The flares had seven minutes to burn and I turned and walked to the other end of the bridge, watching the snows to the southwest and seeing nothing. The deadline had shifted to a new phase: it would now depend on how long the officers in that unit took to decide there was no plane down and go back to the signal-box and report the line clear. The journey would take them two minutes and the night was freezing; they wouldn’t stay here very long.

  I heard shouting again and saw that a party of men had been formed up and was off on a jog-trot down the track: it had obviously been decided that the service road didn’t offer a good enough view and that a search by foot parties was indicated. A second one was starting off, with an NCO running beside it. The leading transport got into motion, turning and going slowly back along the foot of the embankment.

  Whistle.

  Or my imagination. I turned and looked to the southwest again, cupping my hands behind my ears and hearing nothing. The snows were infinite beneath an infinite sky, and the track’s perspective was lost to sight within a hundred yards of the bridge where I was standing. Somewhere to my right an owl called again and I cursed it because I wanted to bring the vastness of that silence out there to my ears and pick it over, searching for the one sound that sooner or later must break it. All I could hear was the tramp of the soldier
s’ boots along the track behind me and the rumbling of the transport on the move, and I had to shut them out of my consciousness, keeping my ears and my whole body oriented towards the southwest. And then it came again, a far note vibrant on the winter air, from this distance as faint as the, piping of a flute among the snows. It sounded a third time and died abruptly as the tram entered the tunnel four miles away.

  Behind me the whole convoy of trucks had begun moving off, their lights swinging across the slope of the embankment in a sparkling wash as they accelerated nose to tail, their rear lamps farming a ruby chain that lost size and definition as they rolled towards the signal-box. Nearer and half-concealed by the structure of the bridge the flares were burning low. The deadline was dose but there was nothing I could do so I turned again to face the southwest and for the first time saw a gleam of light below the horizon and heard the constant tremble of sound that was coming into the land.

  The signal was behind me, a hundred yards down the track, and I didn’t need to watch it because I’d hear the levers if they moved, and the weight of the arm coming down. The rumbling of the army transports had died away, with the tramp of the soldiers’ boots along the track. Time was taking over and the last few minutes were running out: the flares were burning low and when they finally guttered there would be only the signal left to stop the tram. But if the military reported the line clear then the signal would change and the train would go through and I’d stand here watching it as it carried Gorodok to the trap.

  Over the minutes the earth began shaking under my feet and I saw the great length of the train cutting into the snowscape, its lights brightening until I could make out the separate carriages. When I turned round I saw that two of the flares had burned out and a third was guttering, but the signal was still at red and for a moment I watched it, and then looked back at the train as it began slowing.

  It was already nearing the bridge and I heard the steam shutting down and the brake-shoes clamping against the wheels as a short blast came from the whistle. Ten seconds later the locomotive passed me and I turned my back on the wave of air and smoke as it swept the surface snow from the bridge and whirled it away in clouds. I couldn’t see the signal anymore but the brakes were still on and the carriages passing so slowly now that I could see people’s faces in the dim yellowish light. The guard’s van was across the bridge and I stayed in cover, seeing one of the army trucks coming back along the service road, its headlamps dipping and lifting over the bumps. The signal was still at red and a minute later the train rolled to a stop, with faces coming to the windows to peer at the flares.