by Alex Dryden
Anna drank some water from a flask, then strapped the Contender on to her body inside her thick jacket, its barrel extending behind her and over her waist. It was strapped for a rear draw, her favoured stance when shooting in tight circumstances. But the length of the barrel necessitated that anyway. It would have been impossible to walk with the gun strapped to the front. Then she stood and, once she was satisfied that it had got as dark as it was going to get, she strapped on the pack and began to walk the remaining miles to the rendezvous.
Burt wanted intelligence on the ground, human intelligence, not push-button intelligence from a video console in Virginia, and Anna was the best operative he’d come across in more than forty years of intelligence work, whether with the CIA or now with Cougar.
Anna continued to follow the rut on the left side of the track at first, its lighter shade of ice against the slightly darker snow making it just visible, and the tufted broken line of grass down the centre showed the way. After three miles she took out night vision binoculars and surveyed the terrain for three hundred and sixty degrees around her position. Finally satisfied she was alone, she turned off the track and, in almost complete darkness, set off at an angle in the direction of the border where copses of trees afforded some protection as she approached the foreseen rendezvous. She made the next three miles at a slow pace, in just under an hour, stopping at regular intervals to search in the dark with the aid of the binoculars. Then she found herself at the edge of another lake, bigger than the one that she’d passed earlier, and which, she knew, was the one that straddled the border itself.
She made a hollow in the reeds on the shore and, when she was satisfied she was concealed from all sides, she took out the night vision binoculars once again. She trained them first on the Ukrainian side. She needed to know first that she was well protected behind her.
To her alarm, she immediately picked out what looked like an old wooden agricultural cart of the kind still used by farmers in the area. It was stopped at the edge of a wood on a slight incline about a quarter of a mile behind her and above the lake. It was less than half a mile inside Ukrainian territory. At first she thought it had simply been abandoned there for the winter, but, on closer inspection, she picked out a horse grazing on a bag of hay tied around its neck, a little further away from the cart. She wondered if her arrival had already been seen.
Anna stayed in the cover of the reeds. One advantage of the cart’s presence was she now believed she needed only to observe it if the rendezvous took place. It must be connected. At just after nine o’clock, several hours after dark and with the temperature now well below freezing and still falling, she saw movement up in the wood. There were three men wearing what appeared to be camouflaged jackets and caps. She studied them closely to see if there were any insignia to say they were from the Ukrainian army – border guards in some kind of rear position, perhaps. But she could see nothing of any such detail through the binoculars. They were dressed as hunters, she guessed, not military, that was the reason behind the camouflage. They were using the cover of hunting.
She watched as one of the men took a piss in the grass at the edge of the wood and then he walked to where the horse was standing passively chewing, took away the hay bag and led the horse towards the cart. Then he harnessed it to the cart, while the other two men began to descend towards the lake. They walked slowly, purposefully, apparently knowing where they were going. They reached the edge of the lake about two hundred yards away from her and now she noticed they were carrying fishing rods.
She turned in the cramped space of the reed nest to look in the other direction, across the lake towards the border. She listened for the sound of an engine, but the stillness was complete and the silence unbroken with the exception of a duck calling in alarm from where the men stood.
The first sign she had of anything coming from the border was the light outline of water pushed up apparently by the prow of a boat. Then another white line appeared just behind the first. The binoculars began to pick out the darker shape of a craft against the water, and then a second craft. She fitted the silencer to the handgun, placed the two grenades in a pocket of her jacket and began to crawl through the reeds just above the waterline. It would be best if she could allow the transfer to take place, and let the Russian side of it retreat to the border. That way she would have only three men to contend with.
As the craft drew nearer, she recognised they were tracked amphibious vehicles, but there was no sound of an engine. Only now did the wave caused by the boats begin to ripple outwards and finally to reach the water below the reeds where she crawled. She was thirty yards away from the men on the shore.
She dimly made out the shadows of the craft as they silently pushed through the reeds and finally rested on the snow with solid earth beneath it. She saw six men disembark, three from each of the craft, and then turn the craft around to make it easier to unload the cargo. When the covers came off she thought there were four boxes on each.
In her intense study of the bank ahead, and the contents of the craft, she hadn’t noticed that two of the men had walked to either side of the boats and were searching the area with binoculars. One of them was now approaching along the bank, on the other side of the reeds where she was hiding. She held her breath. The man came closer and finally stopped, standing just two feet away from her still concealed by thick reeds. She waited, considering the options; by remaining silent she would almost certainly be unobserved. But there was still a risk. She quietly drew the bowie knife from its sheath on her leg. The man didn’t move. It seemed as if this was his prearranged station. She gripped the knife and drove it into his calf muscle.
With her free hand she pulled him down by his wounded leg and, clamping one hand around his mouth, she drove the knife again into his throat. But the brief cry had already escaped his lips before she could silence him. She lay in silence on top of the dying man and felt the blood seeping from his throat and covering her hand. At last, he lay still.
She rolled away from him and snatched up the binoculars, training them on the spot where she’d previously been looking. She saw all the men stationary, looking in her direction. They were professionals, she now saw – special forces, not amateur smugglers. Nobody panicked. Nobody called out the dead man’s name. She watched as they went into crouched positions and drew weapons. She saw the leader wave his arm. Two of the men began to crawl fast on their bellies up the hill towards the wood and the cart. Two others crawled along the edge of the reed bed towards her. She couldn’t see the other four men. They might be with the men coming towards her, but behind them and invisible to her. Or they might be coming through the water, making use of the reed cover. Despite the nearly freezing temperature of the water, that was the way she would have done it in their position; form a pincer movement, even if it meant descending into the freezing lake where ice was now forming. Wherever they were, she watched what she believed to be a highly skilled formation growing around her.
The men who had gone up the hill were now separated and, twenty yards apart, were coming down the hill directly above where she lay. They had some height and were covering their fellows at the water’s edge. If she turned for an escape route now, she would lose sight of the formation – and there was nowhere to go, anyway.
The men coming towards her on their stomachs alongside the reeds were now less than twenty yards from her. Then the men on the hill skirted around again and were behind her. She sensed a man, certainly more than one now, somewhere out there in the water. They were slowly surrounding her position.
When the men had formed almost a complete circle around her she realised that now their firing line went directly through her towards each other. In any exchange of fire they would be firing at each other as well as at her. It was a brief moment of advantage, perhaps the only one she would get. Her other advantage was that they didn’t know what was happening and, if there were a trap laid for them, how many opponents they had. But now she also saw a way to confuse
them.
Making no noise as she fitted the silencer, she put a round into the barrel and fired a single shot into the water where she believed some of the others to be. She then fired in the opposite direction, up the hill, a direct shot that entered the cheek of one of the crawling men and came out through the back of his skull.
She unscrewed the silencer and now fired two more rounds at the water and the hill. The sudden explosion of noise without the silencer blew apart any pretence of her position. She thrust the gun and one grenade into the waterproof pack. Then she lobbed the second grenade towards the water, waited for the explosion, then slid off the bank like a snake and disappeared under the freezing surface.
Despite their training, the men reacted with an instant display of fire which they swiftly realised was dangerously close to becoming a fire fight between the two groups. The guns went silent almost immediately. In the distance, over by the Ukrainian border posts, a searchlight came on and panned across the sky.
Anna swam under the water and bumped a half-submerged body above her. She kept swimming until she felt the bottom of the first craft. She felt her way underneath it and came up for air behind the second craft. The men were all behind her now, she supposed. But whatever happened in the next minute or two, she knew that the remainder of the men would, at some point, return to their cache of smuggled goods. She retreated behind the cover of the second craft, and then realised her muscles were seizing from the icy water.
She didn’t know how she could survive in the water. Her body was becoming completely numb. Soon her muscles would be useless. Most worryingly, her hands were almost frozen now and her finger wouldn’t be able to clamp around the trigger. She had to get out of the water to stand a chance of survival.
She broke away from the craft and swam into another bank of reeds behind it. She could barely move her arms and legs. She crawled into the reeds, found the bank jutting out inside them and dragged herself on to it. She began to rub her arms and legs. It took five minutes for any feeling to return, and still none of the men had returned.
She took the binoculars and found a gap in the reeds where she could get a view up to the wood. The cart was still there, the horse harnessed to it. There was no sign of the men. She wondered how many she had killed in the water with the grenade and what their fall-back position would be. There were, she thought, still three men out there somewhere, but no more. She also wondered how long it would take for a border patrol, alerted by the firing and the explosion, to reach the remote spot. At that moment she saw twin headlights approaching from maybe a mile away, then another pair, and another.
She crawled towards the craft again. With the knife, she cut away the straps from one of them that bound the boxes. She picked up one box. It was heavy, the contents packed tightly. But it fitted in her pack. She was sure now that the men who were left alive wouldn’t risk returning to the craft, not with the patrol approaching. They would have another means of escape.
As the lights approached from far away, she began to crawl up the hill to the shelter of the wood. She would have very little time before her now exposed figure would be picked up, either by any of the smugglers who remained or by the fast approaching patrol itself. She stood and began to run. A shot fizzed into the earth behind her. Then another. It wasn’t coming from the border patrol vehicles, but from somewhere behind her. She reached the wood and continued running in pitch blackness as the lights of the patrol swung towards the lake and picked out the two craft beached in the reed bank.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TWO DAYS AFTER the the first round of the elections, at just before nine o’clock on the Tuesday morning, Taras walked down the short street that led to the SBU offices. They were contained in a large building, described as ‘The Annex’, which was a short walk from the much smaller building in Volodymyrska Street that was the public face of the SBU. He hesitated, then stopped at the outside gate to exchange comments and a cigarette with the guards about the two remaining presidential candidates who would run against each other in three weeks’ time.
‘So it’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko,’ Taras grunted, inhaling the smoke from a Ukrainian-made Marlborough.
‘And Yanukovich will win,’ one of the guards said – with a sense of triumph, Taras thought.
‘You think so?’ Taras drew heavily on the cigarette to avoid reacting angrily and swept his eyes around the yard inside the gate, anywhere to avoid literally facing the opinions of the guard.
‘Of course he will. He should have been president six years ago,’ the guard continued. ‘If it hadn’t been stolen by the revolutionaries.’
The second guard was silent, Taras noted. Like Taras, he was avoiding comment. It seemed that those who supported the Moscow-backed candidate talked openly about victory, while the democrats inside the security service were embarrassed to express an opinion; including himself, he was forced to admit. He ground out the cigarette under the toe of his shoe and bid them good morning.
Though he worked for the SBU Taras liked to think he was unlike either his father or his uncle Boris in Moscow and he was in most ways correct to think so. Despite the failures of the past six years, despite the forgotten promise of the Orange Revolution, he believed in a new, independent Ukraine, tied in with Western Europe and NATO, speaking its own language instead of Russian and able, at last, to stand on its own feet after centuries of Russian rule. But his Intelligence family here at the SBU didn’t all share these views. Even within some Ukrainian families the country’s right to be independent from Russia was disputed. And so he kept his nationalist feelings from all but a very few close friends at the SBU headquarters who, like himself, believed in Ukraine for itself and not for the Kremlin.
Taras passed through the internal security screens, and was patted down – unusually – by a heavily armed soldier. Then he entered the building and walked past some worn wooden reception desks into a long corridor lined on the ceiling with an unbroken line of strip lights and on the floor with worn brown and yellowish linoleum, the colour of ancient nicotine stains. In general, the building had a colourless air about it, as if all of nature – and all joy – had been sucked out of it completely. He almost felt an approaching pallor wash over his face to match the surroundings.
But he was too worried this morning to give the surroundings his usual feelings of contempt and headed straight to his office on the third floor. His cousin Masha had evidently disappeared. There was no other conclusion. He’d heard no word from her since her planned arrival on Saturday evening – and that was nearly three days ago now.
Walking down several corridors towards the stairs at the rear of the building, he greeted one or two colleagues, and finally turned left at a T-junction in the warren of passageways. Then he walked another thirty yards on more faded and broken yellow linoleum, before reaching the broad well of stone stairs. He wanted movement rather than taking the lift. As he walked up the steps two at a time, he deliberately stretched the muscles in his legs as if it were a training exercise. He noted the grey walls, the bland cheap paint chipping here and there, and thought that the spy buildings were like hospitals. Perhaps the difference was simply that their aim was to anaesthetise the truth and operate on the soul rather than the body; the spy buildings existed to fix the ills of the body politic. But to whose advantage?
He entered his office with a spring in his step that came from a decision to find Masha. And he would do what his usual decorum usually prevented him from doing in personal matters; he would use his position and all the resources at his disposal, which his position gave him. He refused to allow the familiar grey of the room to dishearten him: dusty paper blinds on the windows; a plain desk and a chair, another wooden chair for visitors that looked like it had come from a car boot; a shelf of books – manuals and regulations; a shabby lamp and the ubiquitous strip lights in the ceiling. It was more like a cell than an office, he thought. There was just the bare minimum – enough to remove any colour from its occupant and
render him a grey servant of the grey state. He flicked open the blinds to allow some low, winter light into the room and found an unwashed coffee cup on the bookshelf. Nothing is as it seems, he thought, but he didn’t know what made him think that or what the thought even meant.
He walked out of the office and down the corridor to the coffee machine. The dark brown liquid filled the cup, he put two heaped spoons of sugar into it and stirred it with a dark-stained spoon. Then he returned to listen to the messages on his internal phone which he’d noticed had been blinking as he’d entered the first time. He saw there were three messages on his internal phone, nothing on the outside line from Masha or anyone else, and when he pressed the Play button all the messages turned out to have been left by Kuchin, the chief of counter-intelligence.
When he’d listened to all three, he was left in no doubt. The words ‘Immediate’, ‘Now’ and ‘At once’ dominated all of them. Go to Kuchin’s office, was the message. Do not pass ‘Go’, do not speak with anyone, do not do anything. Just get upstairs. Now.
Taras delayed. Before he went to see Kuchin, he wanted to run over what he’d discovered so far. Two days after the aborted meeting with Masha at the Golden Fleece – and once his hearing had begun to recover from the effects of the explosion – he’d put in a call to the airline Masha was taking from Simferol to Odessa. There’d been only one person left in the airline offices, despite the fact that it wasn’t even four o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d told the man who he was and there was a five-minute pause while the official checked with SBU headquarters. When he came back on the phone, he asked Taras for a code. When he was satisfied Taras was who he’d said he was, the man told him that Masha Shapko had been on none of the flights from Simferol to Odessa in the past five days. That was when he’d begun to feel that something bad had happened. She hadn’t called him, she was off the map. Masha had disappeared.