The Bear's Tears kaaph-4

by Craig Thomas

  It was cold in the aircraft despite the cabin heating. Most of the soldiers who were his companions, returning from leave in Karachi and Hyderabad and the southern towns, rubbed their arms beneath their greatcoats and shuffled their feet. They had taken little notice of him almost from the moment they had left Karachi's military airfield. He was foreign — English — and they probably guessed his purposes in journeying north towards the border with Afghanistan. They were refugee-camp nursemaids and policemen; he was probably a border-crosser, illegal, frowned-upon, tolerated but unofficial.

  As the plane taxied to a halt, Hyde could see two trucks waiting for the returning troops. Drawn up perhaps ten yards from them was a Land Rover. A Pakistani officer who managed to appear neat, small, groomed even in green combat jacket and black and white scarf stood beside it. To Hyde, he might have been part of some ancient and romantic war film. He presumed it was Colonel Miandad of the Pakistani Bureau for the Border, a branch of army intelligence. He collected his hand luggage and followed the last of the disembarking soldiers through the huge door in the fuselage. Immediately he appeared on the passenger steps, Miandad's attention switched to him. Incongruously, the Pakistani officer raised a swagger stick in greeting and moved quickly to the bottom of the ladder, hand extended. The first of the trucks was already pulling away towards the low, shack-like airport buildings.

  "Mr Hyde, I imagine?" Miandad said in clipped, almost accentless English. His features were narrow, dark, intense. His eyes glittered on either side of a hawkish, aristocratic nose. Hyde thought he appeared most like a civilised, assured pirate.

  Hyde shook the extended hand, then they both replaced their gloves. "Colonel Miandad?"

  "That is correct. Please come with me. Some coffee, I think?"

  "Please."

  Hyde climbed into the Land Rover. As Miandad got behind the wheel, he said: "You look very lost, very out of place, Mr Hyde — if you do not mind my saying so?" There was, after all, a hint of the comic Asian inflection expressing itself in archaic colloquialisms. Hyde was almost relieved to discover it.

  "I am," Hyde admitted.

  "Here." Miandad passed him a vacuum flask. Hyde poured himself a strong, sweet coffee.

  "It is most unusual — your visit," Miandad continued. "However, perhaps not the strangest request we have received in the Bureau since the Russians entered Afghanistan. Usually, it is the CIA who require the most outrageous assistance." He smiled with very white teeth. He looked young around the mouth, experienced around the eyes, where fine lines had begun to appear. Hyde assumed he was probably in his mid-thirties.

  "Coffee's good."

  "Excellent. I — do not have great good news for you, Mr Hyde. Not so far, at least."

  "Oh."

  "Professor Massinger's idea was a very clever one," Miandad admitted. "In theory. And, as my old university teacher, he was sensible to think of myself, and to remember that I had been trained, at least in part, at one of your establishments in the Home Counties…" Miandad's eyes seemed to stare into the distance, towards the mountains, or towards memories that were years old. "… by your Sir Kenneth Aubrey. Who is now in such deep trouble—" The comic, sing-song inflections were stronger for a moment, as if Miandad parodied his English education and experience. "Yes, all that was very astute. However, it relied upon the assistance of the mujahiddin, and Pathan mujahiddin into the bargain."

  "I see…"

  The pilot and crew of the Douglas were already in the second truck, which then pulled away after its companion towards the airport buildings.

  "I don't think you do see, Mr Hyde. And I'm afraid we should move now. There are sometimes eyes who watch, even in Peshawar."

  "Russians?"

  "The occasional one. No — Afghan army spies who cross over as refugees, some of them even posing as rebels. I will take you now to meet the man who is the problem. A mujahiddin leader called Mohammed Jan. A brave, independent, pig-headed man. Without his help, I do not think you could even cross into Afghanistan. You certainly will not be able to reach your objective." As he put the Land Rover into gear and revved the engine, Miandad watched Hyde. He seemed to be weighing the Australian, who felt his glance was clear and keen, missing little.

  "What are our chances?"

  Miandad shook his head. "I should say, Mr Hyde, that they are very poor. Mohammed Jan does not send his people into Kabul any longer. Certainly, he would not send them to attack the main headquarters and barracks of the Soviet army!"

  The Land Rover bumped in the rutted wake of the two trucks. Hyde did not know whether his uppermost sensation was disappointment or relief. Three days ago, he had been asleep in the hired car as they approached Munich in a grey, wet dawn. A weary yet fiercely wakeful Massinger had been driving. In the moment that a halt at traffic lights had woken Hyde, he had seen a determination that amounted to passion in the American's face. The smile that Massinger had directed at him had been ominous in its self-satisfaction and its attempt to disarm. Hyde's relief at escaping from Vienna remained, but it was severely lessened by the promise in Massinger's smile.

  In the forty-eight hours that followed, Massinger never left his hotel room; rarely was he not engaged in a telephone call. Hyde supplied his drinks and his meals, and otherwise wandered the city in the chill rain to escape the hothouse atmosphere. The man burned with organisational energy, and with an almost demented sense of purpose. His face and voice and the countries and persons who received his calls continually hoisted signals of danger to Hyde, unsettling him, making the adrenalin flow, eroding his reluctance.

  Shelley, of course. Call after call to the telephone box outside the village pub. Shelley's wife had answered the telephone at first, and forestalled Massinger identifying himself. Shelley had gone to the telephone box and rung Munich; the first of perhaps twenty conversations between them. Then other people in London, then old colleagues in Langley and Washington or even retired to New England, Florida or California. It appeared as if Massinger were calling his whole, lifelong acquaintance. Then Pakistan…

  Eventually this neat, purposeful man beside him. Colonel Zahir Miandad of Pakistani Military Intelligence; an expert on Afghanistan and the guerillas and the Soviet occupation. On that first occasion a crackling, scrambled military line down which Massinger had to shout to be heard. Perhaps the first of fifteen or sixteen calls, the last of them almost the beginning of Hyde's journey. Massinger had not asked him to go, simply told him what had been arranged, having continued in the assumed role of his field controller.

  He had one simple task — the capture of a senior Russian officer from his headquarters in Kabul, or from any place he was to be found. Petrunin. The creator of Teardrop. Hyde, with guerilla help, was to attempt to capture Tamas Petrunin of the KGB.

  "I have talked to Mohammed Jan on many occasions," Miandad was saying as the Land Rover nudged and shunted its way through the maze of rutted, frozen mud streets of one of Peshawar's ugly, low suburbs. It was a shanty-town, a disfigurement. Miandad's eyes were carefully intent upon the traffic — bicycles, oxen, ancient cars. Hyde saw a Morris which had been daubed orange and was probably pre-war, and an old, partially roofless Leyland single-decker bus. "I have talked to him of this matter twice — no, three times — in the last twenty-four hours. He refuses to entertain the idea." Miandad turned to him. "I cannot make a bargain on your behalf. You have no weapons to supply him. He is not interested in men and what is in their heads. Only in guns — rocket launchers, especially. He would capture the Russian First Secretary for you in exchange for a half-dozen 'Red Eye' launchers and suitable missiles!" Miandad's smile gleamed. "But — it is not the case. And, although I am able to assist you because I am much my own master here, I cannot offer our weapons on your behalf."

  "I understand…"

  Was he relieved, or disappointed? He could not decide. The Land Rover broke free of the restraining traffic, and almost immediately they were beyond the last petrol-tin and corrugated-sheet shanties and the bu
llocks and the wrapped women and turbanned men. The mountains that contained the border and the Khyber and the other passes into Afghanistan lay ahead of them, grey barriers climbing to dazzling white peaks and ridges. The contrast was too great, almost unbearable, burning like rage or nausea in Hyde's chest. The mountains loomed pitilessly over the river plain that was scabbed and diseased with the shanty-towns and refugee camps that surrounded and clung to Peshawar. Hyde had seen the like of it in South Africa, and on a few occasions when his flight from Australia had refuelled at somewhere like Bombay. The big-eyed, big-bellied children outside a tent made from a corrugated iron sheet and a length of cardboard, propped against one another…

  He dismissed the images, both remembered and recent. It was his task to glide across the surface, not to look through the ice at what lay beneath. A white bullock ambled across the track. Miandad slowed the Land Rover, then jarringly they accelerated again. Disappointed, Hyde told himself. Even though Petrunin had almost killed him twice, directly or indirectly, and even though Hyde feared meeting him again — he was disappointed.

  "Where is this Jan?" he asked.

  "In one of the camps. One of the many, many camps," Miandad added wearily.

  Before them, at the edge of the plain, the mountains gleamed with innocent snow and ice.

  "But you think seeing him again will do no good?"

  Miandad shook his head. "I'm afraid not," he murmured.

  * * *

  Alison Shelley pushed one trolley, Massinger the other, down the busy aisles of the hypermarket. The Shelleys' young daughter sat, legs akimbo, facing her mother from the trolley. She seemed contented with chocolate, the corners of her small mouth already stained like her fingertips. Shelley walked beside Massinger, occasionally depositing bottles or tins in the two trolleys. Were anyone observing them, their activities would have appeared an obvious fiction.

  Peter Shelley had brought his family by hovercraft on a day's shopping expedition to Calais. Massinger had spent the wet morning patrolling the beach and seafront of the Pas de Calais like an exile, as if simply to catch some distant, half-illusory glimpse of his adopted country. His damp hair had been blown over his forehead, into his eyes, by a chill, searching, salty wind, his body had shivered and his raincoat had become sodden. Yet he had remained on the seafront until it was time to meet Shelley because across the grey, uninviting water he could sense Margaret's existence, know precisely the distance that separated them, thereby lessening it.

  He had telephoned, of course. Eager to establish his health and safety, she had, once worry had been assuaged, allowed their last meeting to flood back, filling the present. She had ordered him home; he had feared she might have spoken to Babbington; the gulf between them had yawned open again. He had put down the receiver with the sensation of a physical pain in his chest and a hard lump in his throat which he was unable to swallow.

  "Some smoked ham, darling?" Shelley asked absently. A short, dumpy woman with a thin, moustached, grey-featured husband in tow passed them, her arms laden with the weaponlike shapes of half-a-dozen long French loaves. The tip of one of them had already broken off. She held them protectively to her ample bosom, eyeing the two trolleys malevolently. Massinger turned his aside for her to pass.

  "Very well," Alison replied, tight-lipped. She had accepted the fiction of the shopping expedition, yet her tension was evident. She appeared to blame Massinger for her situation, for Shelley's situation.

  Shelley pointed at a large ham. The French delicatessen assistant flung it into a bag, twisted the neck, and then priced the item. Shelley dumped the parcel in Massinger's trolley, and seemed reluctant to leave the hanging rows of sausages, their skins crimped and wrinkled and provocative. Massinger read off the names of dozens of pates in earthenware bowls. There seemed singularly little point in the meeting, as if their tension and urgency had been separately expended and lost during their journeys to Calais, or during the past days when they had been in almost constant telephone contact.

  "You think Hyde has any chance?" Shelley asked, reaching up to finger one of the dark, thick sausages. Liver, with herbs. Pate Ardennes, Massinger read automatically. Coarse. Suddenly, he did not feel hungry, because pates became pate-bread-wine and the occasion of picnics. He did not wish to remember them.

  "I don't know," he replied. "It was some sort of chance — he had to be sent. Besides, it keeps him out of Europe at a period when he's in great danger."

  Shelley's eyes narrowed, then he nodded. "I just don't see how—" he began.

  Massinger's eyes glared. "Neither do I!" he snapped, his Bostonian accent more pronounced, as if he wished to dissociate himself from Shelley's very English doubt. "Hyde's a dead man if he's caught — maybe I am, too. Did you ever think of that, Peter Shelley?" His voice was an urgent, hard whisper. "I'm laying it out for you now, just as it is. Unless Hyde and ourselves can discover who and what is behind this — behind what happened in Vienna and what's happening to Aubrey — then we'll never be safe again. I don't intend to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder."

  Shelley's face was smooth with disquiet, youthful and somehow incapable. After a moment, he said reluctantly: "I still can't see—"

  "Look, I want Hyde to kidnap this Russian, Petrunin — I admit that. At the very least, he can be exploring the possibility. These Afghans have raided Kabul before, even the embassy. Miandad knows almost all there is to know about Petrunin — dammit, it could happen! There are moments when the man leaves Kabul, when he's vulnerable. It could happen…" Massinger's whisper tailed off into a doubt of his own. Then he shrugged off the mood, and said in a normal speaking voice: "It could, Peter. It just could."

  "Perhaps…"

  "All right — instead of that, what have you got for me? What do you think? Have you any suggestions to make — the rotten apple, I mean?"

  Shelley shook his head.

  "Hadn't we better keep moving?" Alison whispered fiercely, as if afraid they would become some kind of target in the next moment. Her body was curiously hunched over her daughter as she sat unconcerned, finishing the last of the chocolate. She had left fingerprints on the glass counter of the delicatessen. Massinger wondered whether Alison Shelley might want to remove them, for safety's sake.

  "Yes, perhaps we should," Massinger replied as soothingly as he could. Alison's features distorted in resentment. Bottles clinked against each other as Massinger pushed his trolley away from the counter. "But, at least you agree that we're dealing with someone in your service who's helping the Soviets?" he said to Shelley with some asperity. Alison walked a little way ahead of them now, glancing to right and left at the shelves as if they concealed surveillance equipment. Massinger felt sorry for her, dragged into Shelley's world of perpetual mistrust.

  "I have to — after your account of Vienna."

  Massinger nodded vigorously. Shelley deposited some tinned mussels in the trolley. "Good," Massinger said. "There is a traitor, and he has to be a senior officer."

  "Yes…" Shelley sounded alarmed.

  "It's hell for my wife," Massinger blurted, perhaps angered by Shelley's reluctance, or because he simply could no longer ignore the imperative of his own future. He wished to be selfish at that moment.

  "I'm sorry—?"

  "After the whole business in '51 — being told he was murdered, the long pointless investigation, as pointless as the search for him in '46 and '47 — after all that, now to believe that Kenneth murdered him… pointed the NKVD at him, as good as killed him with his own hands…" Massinger's disconnected narrative tailed off into silence. His raincoat still smelt of damp and salt water. He felt bedraggled and defeated.

  "Yes — I'm sorry," Shelley said eventually. "Yes, I agree with you. There is someone high up who wants Aubrey out of the way and is helping the KGB achieve their object."

  "Then, what do we do?"

  "Helsinki — could you manage that? I—" Both of them looked involuntarily at Alison Shelley, a little ahead of them and in
the act of rescuing a can of motor oil from her daughter's grasp. The implication was clear to Massinger. His wife was already lost to him, Shelley's was not and he would not lose her if he could prevent it.

  Massinger looked at Shelley, who averted his glance, then shrugged.

  "Very well," Massinger said. "Why Helsinki?"

  They followed Alison as she turned right, then paused as she halted almost immediately and began inspecting racks of children's clothes. Her nose seemed to wrinkle with disapproval as she examined the garments, glancing time and again in her daughter's direction.

  "There's someone there who might talk to us — to you, if there's anything to talk about. Phillipson used to be station chief in Helsinki, and one of Aubrey's appointments. He was always loyal to the old man. He retired six months ago. He likes Finland and the Finns, so he didn't come home. He's still there, and out of things."

  "Yes?"

  "But he organised some of those meetings between Aubrey and Kapustin — the one on film, the one with the soundtrack…?" Shelley's voice was filled with temptation. They moved on again. A dress had been measured against the little girl, and found acceptable. Shelley's daughter was craning round in her seat to keep it in view.

  "You mean, if there was any funny business, this Phillipson might at least have suspected it — noticed something out of the way?"

  "Exactly. Oh, what about funds?"

  "I'll take whatever you have. Credit cards leave traces. I haven't had time to make a transfer."

  "I brought — well, quite a bit. Petty cash, you know…"

  "Good. What will you do in the meantime?"

  "We need a list of possibles."

  "We do."

  "I can't get access — it'll have to be memory work. It has to be — someone on East Europe Desk doesn't it?" Shelley looked crestfallen; a youngish bank manager whose head office is seriously displeased with him.