by Craig Thomas
In the 'fifties, he could not turn to America — had they been the enemy in whose ranks he could have secretly enlisted, he would have done so — and thus he had turned East, to Moscow. To the Soviet Union, to the KGB, he was as important as Kapustin, as important as the Chairman, almost as important as First Secretary Nikitin. For that secret pinnacle, for that value to be placed upon him, he had waited for almost thirty years. For that he had worked, for that he had made his original choice, treachery rather than loyalty. He was one of the most important figures in the hierarchy of a superpower. England, now bankrupt and laughable as she was, proved every day to his immense satisfaction that he had chosen wisely.
He crossed the narrow, linoleumed landing almost blithely, and opened the door. The musty passageway was unlit, but there was a dim light from the lounge beyond. Yes, Oleg would be sitting there with his silly little headphones on, his foot perhaps tapping in rhythm to some unheard jazz.
Babbington smiled. Twenty-four hours, no more than that. That is what Oleg would want to hear, and that is what Babbington felt himself able to guarantee.
* * *
"Babbington played a very uncharacteristically minor role in the ensuing investigations… His absences, his pattern of behaviour — they could be regarded as suspicious with ease, my dear fellow."
Zimmermann watched Massinger carefully slicing at his portion of apfelstrudel with a small pastry fork. The American deliberately would not look up, nor would his wife. It was infuriating. Even their mutual choice of the homely German dessert seemed like a species of insult.
The dining-room of the Königshof was almost deserted. They were some of the last guests enjoying — no, not that word, Zimmermann instructed himself… enduring a late supper. Behind them, the river glittered with, lights reflected from both banks of the Rhine. Navigation lights moved on the river apparently without solid forms beneath them. Rain pattered against the huge windows.
When Massinger did not reply, Zimmermann pursued: "I have made a great many telephone calls this evening, since I left you…" He had rushed, in an unseemly way, from the hothouse of that hotel room, escaping the tense, violent, heady emotions sparking between the American and his wife. He had plunged into the pursuit of his intuitions regarding Babbington as into a cold, refreshing swimming pool. Babbington had indulged a brief affair with a married woman during his residence in Bonn in '74; it was the perfect cover, if it was a cover. "There is a woman in prison in Cologne…"
Massinger looked up. His eyes were abstracted, hardly focused. "What?" was all he said.
Margaret Massinger continued to devote her attention to her dessert, picking at it without appetite. Zimmermann realised that the woman was determined. For her, there were no more decisions to be taken. They had all been made. Zimmermann cursed himself once more for giving them the address of Clara Elsenreith as a peace-token between them when he returned to the Königshof to join them for supper. The instant, greedy lights in their eyes had predicted the manner of this conversation and its outcome. He was no more than a boring pedagogue on the last day of term, insisting on unremitting study while the sun shone outside and the holidays stretched ahead.
"Prison. She was arrested two years ago, on charges arising from… for war crimes. She still has not been brought to trial. I intend to see her. She was the secretary assigned to Babbington during his residence here… he used her flat for — his assignations, you see." Zimmermann spoke without pause or interruption, as if speed and emphasis would attract their deeper attention.
Massinger stared with little interest across the table. Margaret, Zimmermann could tell, was alert but stubbornly refusing to accept the importance of the subject he had broached.
"What — what do you expect to learn?"
"The truth of Babbington's story — what else?" Zimmermann snapped. He dabbed his lips with his napkin, his own dessert of cheesecake finished.
"You think Babbington's the man?"
"I don't think, I merely suspect."
"But that's nonsense—!" Massinger burst out, as if all that had been said to him had only just impinged on his reason. "That's too fantastic to be true."
Margaret looked up, shaking her head. "The idea of Andrew being a traitor is ridiculous," she said calmly, with utter, dismissive certainty. "Impossible," she added as she saw his expression change to one of anger.
Zimmermann remembered the murmured promises, over and over repeated, that the American had made to this woman. It had been like overhearing the whispers of approaching climax, having strayed into a darkened bedroom where copulation was taking place. Promises, adorings, devotion, deep passion. It had made him flee the room. Now, he realised it blinded and determined them. Tomorrow, they would travel to Vienna to see Clara Elsenreith.
Zimmermann had sent no one, had not spoken to the woman himself. It was cowardice, he acknowledged. He did not wish to know.
But they did. More than anything; more than safety, more than friendship, more than the future, they had to know. Who killed Castleford, and why.
Zimmermann understood the woman. She was behind it. Her whole being rejected the idea that her father could have been, might have been, was ever a Nazi. To disprove that monstrous fiction, she had to know from Clara that, if he was killed by Aubrey, it was a crime of passion. That she would accept, her father's death as an adulterer. But never a Nazi, at one with the beasts of the past.
It was hopeless. He would never convince them.
"Will you promise me to come back — once you have spoken with Frau Elsenreith — and help me?" he pleaded.
Even now they hesitated, as if they could not see that far ahead; cautious investors in an uncertain future, machines programmed for one simple, immediate task. It was as if they mutually assumed everything would be over, ended, once they knew the truth of Berlin in 1946. He sighed inwardly. Anger and frustration were as palpable.as indigestion. Why could they not see — ?
"We'll — yes, but we can't promise until we — we've been to Vienna," Massinger replied lamely after a long, embarrassing silence. Margaret touched his hand, as if to strengthen a flagging resolve.
God, Zimmermann thought — God in Heaven!
"I see," he said coldly, rebuffing them. He laid his napkin on the table. He wished to be cruel, so added: "Remember you are known in Vienna. Be careful. Employ your old professional instincts, my friend." He stood up, nodded a stiff little bow towards Margaret, who remained silent, then announced: "I shall go to Cologne at once. I am concerned to hear this woman's story. Good night — and good luck."
Massinger made as if to rise. Zimmermann waved him back onto his chair, and left with a firm military step.
* * *
The snow in his mouth and nostrils was choking him. It hadn't melted and run icily into his throat. His eyes were caked with snow and he was blind. He brushed at them, opened them, coughing out the snow and sneezing. He sat up quickly to clear his nose by violent blowing. He was white from head to foot, encrusted with snow.
The soldier was standing over him, Kalashnikov pointed towards the middle of Hyde's form. The Australian looked up, searching the pale young face for nerves, for apprehension and doubt and the need for prompt support. He found everything he sought, and rolled over slowly, clutching his right arm with his left, groaning.
"Stay still," the young soldier warned. Hyde continued to roll slowly until his right arm was masked by his body. Melted snow trickled down his back like a trail of fear. His chest and stomach were icy with the melted snow he had swallowed. He reached carefully behind him and drew the Makarov automatic that had once, long ago, belonged to the young lieutenant he had killed. He sat up, gun masked by his thigh, then shot the Russian soldier twice, once in the stomach, bringing his head forward, then a second time through the forehead, just above the left eye. The Russian's body sprang away from him, as if in surprise at some electric shock, and lay unmoving in the snow.
He had killed the man without calculation as an immediate response to
the threat of capture. He looked up the furrow of disturbed snow that indicated his fall. The flying-buttress of the ridge stretched up and away from him and was empty of other troops. They'd split up, then — probably on orders from the nearest helicopter; the one he could hear clattering up the side of the mountain, still well below his own altitude. The sky was now uniformly grey.
He scrambled to his feet and fought his way up the slope, slipping and staggering in the deep drifted snow, eventually reaching the ridge once more. Still no one. He skirted the hidden crevasse and climbed the buttress to the point where it joined the face of the mountain. Slowly, with caution that memory advised, he edged his way along the narrow, snow-hidden ledge that climbed around the mountainside, no wider than a goat-track, its precise dimensions fattened and masked by the snow. He rubbed his back against the rock for the sense of security its contact gave him as he moved.
Gradually, he moved out of sight of the place where he had fallen, where the dead Russian lay. He was perhaps a couple of hundred feet above the overhang where Petrunin lay. He was exposed above the tree line. After twenty minutes, he could see the most distant and higher peaks, beyond Parachinar and in Pakistan, tinted with gold.The sky had lost its leaden greyness. The cloud was wispy and thin and the snow had stopped. The ledge broadened ahead of him into a path where two men could have walked abreast, climbing steeply to the sharp crease in the mountain that gave access to the long, narrow valley at the other end of which lay Pakistan.
He began moving more quickly now, wishing he had stolen the dead Russian's R/T and so enabling himself to keep in contact with his pursuers, monitoring their progress, their distance from him. He was bent and worn, leaning forward as he jogged desultorily, his head beginning to fill with the noises of his own heartbeat and breathing, emptying of everything else — Petrunin, the computer retrieval that was no more than a pipe-dream unless you were Petrunin himself or a KGB Deputy Chairman; Miandad, Mohammed Jan, the Pathans, the dead young Russian below the ridge — whose Kalashnikov he had forgotten, like his R/T — his last footsteps, the noise of helicopters…
All faded. To each step there were numerous heartbeats. One ragged breath each time a foot was lifted and moved — the snow was thinner here, because the wind sliced it off the path like a knife, cutting through him too, freezing him — and almost ten hurried beats of his heart before each step was complete and the next one begun. He laboured upwards with increasing slowness, staggering from time to time, those times when he failed to lower his foot quickly enough to keep his balance. His breath came more and more quickly because the air seemed so thin and cold. He couldn't get enough of it into his lungs with a single deep breath, and yet did not want to breathe deeply because of the searing pain caused by its coldness. His stubble was frosty where his breath had frozen on his skin and hair. He did not look at his watch — he did not become or remain aware of his wrist which wore his watch at the end of his left arm unless he needed that arm to drive on, to adjust his balance, to plunge into the thin snow and lever his body forward…
All noises outside himself faded. The path had rounded the mountain as he climbed. His hands were deathly white in the first sunlight, the snow began to glitter, hurting his eyes. He was almost there. The path had narrowed — by an effort he remembered noting the fact on the way in — but he could still move freely along it, the wall of the mountain to his left, touched often by his hand, scraped by his knuckles for reassurance or gripped by tense, clawlike fingers for support when he became dizzy or unbalanced.
He passed through the crease, the narrow gate to the valley, without realising. He began to descend into shadow again, away from the first rays of the sun. He paused, then, on his hands and knees, and looked ahead of him, out of Afghanistan.
And realised that he had no image of rescue in his imagination. He had not thought, not considered… He had lost Miandad, his courier, his secretary. Hyde did not know the arrangements.
The slope of the mountains dropped quickly, like the deep sharp cut of a great knife, to the snow-covered floor of the narrow valley perhaps two hundred feet below him. This ran like a twisting snake through high mountains for perhaps three or four miles, until the land lifted again to the pass over which he might reach Parachinar and the Pathan camp.
He knew he could not return, alone, to that camp — dare not.
Something seemed to give out and slump inside him, something more radical and vital than mere physical energy. He shivered with weakness, on all fours, an exhausted animal. Then he fell against the cliff-face, hunching into it as if into a parent's skirts, a lover's comfort. His breathing sounded like sobbing, even to himself…
Until drowned by the noise of helicopter rotors approaching rapidly from behind him, clattering against the rock face, making his body shudder with the downdraught as it lifted into view and hung there, its tinted glass windscreen like a threatening mask, its gunports like a grin. It dipped sideways. He could see faces at the side doors, which were open. He could see a heavy PKMS machine-gun on a swivel mounting in the doorway, aimed at him. He rose from all fours to his knees, pressing himself against the rock. The helicopter moved closer, perhaps thirty feet above him, where the accentuated slope of the mountain peak allowed the rotors closer access without danger. Spiderlike, huge, deafening, the MiL gunship hung over him, filling the morning sky, its racket reverberating like physical blows from the mountain. It sank very slowly towards him. Hyde could not move.
He became enveloped by the whirling snow dragged up and flung about by the downdraught. The helicopter lowered itself into the writhing cloud of snow it was creating. Hyde pressed his face against the rock, feeling the pressure of the downdraught in his arms and hands — fingers slipping all the time, unable to hold their grip, gtow into the rock enough — then in his body, which juddered with increasing velocity and violence as he crouched with his back to the rotors, then in his knees and calves and feet which shuddered, slid, began to move across the narrow ledge towards the edge and the drop beyond. He was being agitated into motion, like a compound in a chemist's jar, shaken into something else — a body falling from a high place.
He held on, trying to hug the rock. He attempted to sit, then to lie flat. His legs slid away from him like those of a baby, uncontrolled. They were dragged towards the edge of the track, towards the drop. He felt his body slip, too. He turned onto his back and dug in his heels, but could not prevent himself moving. The ground seemed alive and sandlike in its distress beneath him, the helicopter a huge black beetle hovering above him, the cloud of upflung, powdery snow obscuring everything else.
His legs scrabbled in space, then slumped, knees bent, over the edge. His buttocks moved towards the edge. He could not turn over again, his hands could not grip.
The MiL slid to one side. Blue sky where it had been, then a black something dropping from it on a rope. A smaller spider, or only the spider's thread. He lay on his back, legs over the edge, snow boiling around him, covering him, as the helicopter's winch-man came to collect him. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten — he seemed to swoop in towards Hyde, who could only wait for him. He came level, hanging over the drop, then the MiL began to shunt him sideways towards the ledge.
A hundred yards, two hundred, he told himself. Something, at least, told him. No more than that before you reach cover. Then three miles, something else announced. At least three miles.
Two hundred yards, the other something replied.
Six feet, five, four his eyes registered. The winch-man's boots scrabbled on the edge, found purchase, his body leaning slightly away, then straightening. He was on the ledge. Hyde kicked out and the winch-man danced away as the MiL shifted slightly, a puppet on the wire that had lowered him. He came swinging slowly back like a pendulum, feet scrabbling again, then gaining purchase, the rifle already coming around from its position slung across his back. Hyde rolled towards the winch-man, and the MiL danced him away again. Hyde scrabbled in the snow, found frozen dirt, dug his fingernails into it, s
topped the roll of his body towards the edge. He was exhausted and terrified; incapable of much more. The winch-man danced back, feet touching lightly on the ledge again. This time, he was grinning, and the gun was pointing.
Did they want him—?
For a while — two hundred yards — before they kill you…
He made as if to roll again, and the man's feet began to dance upwards — Christ, the pilot was good and they'd done this trick before — and then he hovered as if performing a strange, frozen entrechat in combat boots. The boots remained a foot or so above the path. The powdery snow settled around the legs of the man as he waited. Hyde rolled, the legs danced upwards, Hyde drew the Makarov from behind his back and fired. The winch-man's smile became lopsided, and emitted blood — like Petrunin, and Hyde didn't look any more. The MiL whipped away from the ledge, and Hyde turned and was running. The helicopter buzzed behind him, closing. He heard a terrible, screaming noise, then the scrape of metal and flesh and bone along the wall of the mountain. They hadn't even winched the man in, just left him there, just alive, — banging him along the cliff, trapped — ending the dance.
The PKMS opened up, scattering bullets along the track behind him, shattering the outline of a rock that had been close to his head the previous moment. Hyde dropped into the twisted, jagged, concealing trench of rocks that led to the valley floor, fear making his body flow almost as easily and swiftly as the stream that must once have reached the valley by this sharp-cut course. Hyde, his body jarred and bruised and shaken, continued swiftly downwards.
He looked behind him, just once. The MiL was a hundred feet up, and the dead winch-man was being hauled up. His body hung grotesquely, brokenly, beneath the gunship. Hyde slithered downwards, desperate to reach the valley floor before the MiL resumed the game.
* * *
"There could be — depositions made available, Frau Schröder. I'm sure your lawyer understands me…?" Zimmermann made the statement lightly turning his- head so he could see the reactions of the woman's legal counsel. A youngish man, running to fat, gold-rimmed glasses giving him a learned air that was at odds with the expensive, modishly-cut suit and the flamboyant shirt. He would have been little more than a baby when the Schroder woman was committing the atrocities of which she was accused.