Rollerball (Commander Shaw Book 17)

by Philip McCutchan

  Demichevich smiled again and said, “There is your Porton Down.”

  *

  The situation seemed to be worsening. Demichevich withdrew after saying that there would be a full meeting of the Supreme Soviet that morning and the Minister and Dr Seiko would be called before it. The Minister asked if I could attend also and this, Demichevich said, would be considered by the comrades and we would be informed in due course. Meanwhile we were all left in the room. We distributed ourselves among a number of hard chairs set along the walls, and we waited. I discussed the chances with the Minister; he didn’t appear to be hopeful, The USSR had its warmongers in plenty, the hard-liners who were looking for an excuse just as much as the NATO powers were said to be doing, and their view was going to be nothing but hostile.

  I said, “I’d like to try something — if you agree. I don’t want to foul up the diplomacy.”

  “Well?”

  “Another word with Seiko. The atmosphere’s right. He didn’t like the crowds’ reaction in the streets. He’ll be glad to be back in the UK.”

  Fawcett said, “Surely that’s a good reason why he won’t make any admissions while he’s in Moscow.”

  I said, “I’m not going to utter threats. I just want some more information.”

  “You know as well as I do, you’re not likely to get it,” Fawcett said, “but go ahead if you want to.” He closed his eyes; he was looking hopeless now and I don’t believe he’d ever gone along with the idea that Seiko might crack inside Russia. He saw the Jap’s usefulness as being of a negative kind, hoped only that the comrades might see for themselves the contrast between his innate nastiness and anti-communist ideals — which might be made to show — and our brightly shining honesty. Something like that. I went across to Seiko and had him shifted, with his guards, out of earshot of the Foreign Office contingent, who were mostly sitting in silence with their brief-cases in front of their chests like shields.

  “Now,” I said, not bothering about possible bugs.

  Seiko stared at me.

  “You’re slap bang inside Russia. Inside Moscow. Very close to the Kremlin. You’re no communist, and that’s going to emerge. You’re on a very shaky wicket, my friend.’

  “Not shaky. No proof one way or the other.”

  “Perhaps not at this moment. A time will come. We have Demichevich’s word that Rollerball’s not so far off the Kola Peninsula. I believe you were surprised at that. Right?”

  He gave no answer but there was a sudden flicker in the black eyes. I didn’t press that point but went on, “If there’s anything we don’t know, you’d better tell me — fast. You may ask why. Answer: you’ve told Demichevich that the British Government forced you to co-operate. Co-operation pre-supposes that you’ve told them everything. Right? Now — with Rollerball speeding up — you’re probably going to be still in Russia when it gets to the end of its run. If anything unexpected happens, I’d say it’s curtains for you.”

  “No. For you. Because you will not have told truth. That will clinch in mind of Supreme Soviet.” There was more than a flicker in Seiko’s eyes now; there was a positive glitter of triumph but I believed I’d struck gold though I had yet to dig out just what that gold was.

  I said, “We’ll leave that point for now. I agree it’s debatable. But that there is something else I’m damn certain. And you’re going to tell me before you go before the Supreme Soviet.”

  “Nothing else to tell.”

  I said, “Just do some hard thinking, Seiko. Whichever of us the Supreme Soviet believes, the undoubted fact remains that it’s your Rollerball. They’re not going to like that. Your own best hope of getting out from under is to rely on us. You’d better face it.”

  There was no response. I hadn’t penetrated at all. I tried again, telling Seiko what should have been obvious: that whoever won out now, it certainly wasn’t going to be him. Again I insisted that it would be in his own best interest if he told all; I could have said the world’s best interest but that would have been a waste of breath. Seiko wasn’t concerned with the world as such. I think in the end something did penetrate but if it did then wisdom came too late. Comrade Demichevich and Colonel Chevik came back.

  Demichevich approached the Minister and said, “The Supreme Soviet is in session, and you will come.”

  “May I attend?” I asked.

  “Permission has been given,” Demichevich said. I felt very uneasy; Demichevich’s manner was sombre, indeed he had a look of total gloom. My guess was that things had gone against him in the hierarchy and that meant against us as well. No doubt at all, Buckingham Palace tea-party or not, he wouldn’t still be sticking his neck out once he saw himself in too much of a minority. He gestured to the Minister to follow, and while the rest of the mission remained behind we went out to a big black limousine with a KGB escort in front and in rear with motorcyclist outriders. Even at this stage, I supposed, diplomatic niceties prevailed and the top brass wouldn’t want us to be torn to pieces in the Moscow streets.

  The cavalcade accelerated sharply; and at immense speed, in spite of the frozen roads, with sirens blaring, we were driven behind the stark walls of the Kremlin. Seiko sat between the Minister and myself, lips parted in his hideous, almost permanent grin. I asked no more questions; in front with the driver was a plain clothes man, thin-faced and pale, waiting to record any indiscretions that came to him via his bug.

  *

  The Supreme Soviet of the USSR, highest legislative assembly of the state, stared at us with varying degrees of hostility. There were a lot of them to stare. Both chambers were packed in, many of the members standing. The Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities together consisted of some fifteen hundred deputies from the various republics, autonomous areas and national areas. From a dais the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet looked down on the rest. Comrade Vice-Chairman Demichevich, one of fifteen vice-chairmen elected by the deputies to represent each of the Union republics, took his place with them as we entered.

  There was a hush as we came in. I looked back at the faces on the dais: just a few were familiar from the press and television, faces that had so often dominated the news and caused many a flutter in the NATO dovecots. The President of the Presidium, the figurehead boss, was a shadowy figure; not so the Chairman of the Council of Ministers who was the effective boss, the much publicised front man, Comrade Alexei Nikolai Solushev; or the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Comrade Pilshe. These two, the best known in the West for their general obstructiveness and ability to double talk, were physical opposites: Solushev was a bucolic figure, hearty, hail-fellow-well-met but with plenty of peasant cunning; Pilshe was small and dapper with a face like granite and a rat-trap for a mouth. I had never met them face to face before and the experience was more than enough to give me a stomach-sinking sensation as, having been told to sit, we were at once brought to our feet again to listen to a long diatribe from Comrade Pilshe. It was in Russian and I didn’t follow it all; my Russian had grown into disuse for some years. But what I did pick up wasn’t encouraging. The British imperialists, said Pilshe, were at it again. At any moment the nuclear warheads might be in the air. The NATO powers had been stupid to believe they could get away with lies that were now exposed before the whole world. They were, Pilshe went on, waving an arm towards us, trying to put the blame on the Japanese. This was itself a lie; we weren’t blaming the Japanese at all, just one Jap-

  When Pilshe sat down, Demichevich got to his feet and another spiel was delivered. Again I couldn’t follow it all but gathered that Demichevich was urging caution. The British could be speaking the truth and no-one wished for war if it could be avoided. Britain must know only too well that her capitalist island would never withstand the Russian missiles and thus would not take the risk. That was the gist of it; sensibly he didn’t mention the Queen. He might have been accused of bias, even of bourgeoisie thoughts and that would have dished everything.

  He ended by flinging his arms wide towards us, and say
ing that we and Dr Seiko must now be given our opportunity of stating our cases.

  Fawcett was accorded first go. His Russian wasn’t too good either and he spoke through an interpreter. He spoke effectively, re-eemphasising that of course no-one wished for war, least of all Britain who couldn’t afford it financially anyway. He didn’t speak for long; he did no more than put the facts, the facts that both he and I knew to be true. The whole thing was down to Seiko who was acting in his own interest and nefariously vilifying the British Government who had not and had never had any part in the admitted threat posed by Rollerball.

  “I ask you to question Dr Seiko,” he said. “Then you will form your own conclusions. All I have said can be borne out by Commander Shaw and by thousands of ordinary men and women in Britain who have seen for themselves his efforts to stop Rollerball.”

  Fawcett sat down and mopped at his face with a handkerchief His hand, I noticed, was shaking a little. There was some consultation on the dais and then the President of the Presidium called upon Dr Seiko to state his position. I glanced aside at the Japanese. The grin was dissolving; very slightly he moved his jaws, then the grin returned. It stayed there, and Seiko didn’t move until suddenly he slumped sideways, toppling across Fawcett’s knees, still grinning in death.

  14.

  Fawcett heaved the body aside as KGB men closed in. “Pill,” he said. “Suicide pill.” I nodded; I believed I’d seen him crunch it. God alone knew how he’d managed to conceal it whilst in Focal House. 6D2 is well accustomed to looking for that sort of thing, but probably Seiko had been deft in shifting it around when necessary. Now it posed more problems. The result of death could go two ways: either it would prove Seiko’s guilt, or it would tell the massed deputies that Britain, perfidious as ever, had silenced the truth very effectively. Fawcett, of course, saw that as well; he was swearing beneath his breath, very un-Foreign Office language. Then he got to his feet and demanded a doctor. I just hoped the doctor would issue a truthful diagnosis and not a merely popular one …

  When he got to the scene the doctor was truthful. “Self-administered by the Japanese,” he said after his examination. “A very clear case of suicide by crunching in the teeth a small phial of hydrocyanic acid.”

  Our breaths of relief came out like hurricanes. The mood of the deputies changed like magic once the announcement was made. Smiles warmed the hitherto frosty faces and there was a minor pandemonium of conversation until it was silenced from the dais. They didn’t all want war. Many of them would still have memories of Stalingrad and Hitler’s march on Moscow.

  There was so much relief that I believe they were not far off voting us Heroes of the Soviet Union; but they didn’t get that far. The President of the Presidium conferred for a while with Comrades Solushev and Pilshe and then spoke to Fawcett.

  “Rollerball remains,” he said. “Comrade Chairman of the Council of Ministers Solushev will speak personally to the British Prime Minister, telling that there is now trust between the two governments. Yet Rollerball remains and must be rendered harmless.” He paused, coughed, then said, “If not … ” He didn’t finish that sentence but those two words brought a chilly blight and a shiver down my spine because now Seiko was dead I could see no possible way of dealing with Rollerball.

  *

  Demichevich was allocated to us, to act as a liaison officer with the Soviet authorities and to see to it that we were given every assistance. Demichevich was all smiles and co-operation and it was as though some of the royal miasma had rubbed off on me who had once been in the same service as the Duke of Edinburgh. Of course the Russians had a small dilemma of their own insofar as it had been me who had brought about the smashing of their earlier plans for the Kola Peninsula and its fissure entry and they had by no means forgotten this. But double-think has its advantages and it wasn’t too hard for them to re-digest me and disgorge me in the role of saviour. After all, I was now the only man they had who possessed a little knowledge of Rollerball, now coming closer and closer to the Russian land mass. It was that and my own close acquaintance in the past with the fissure that gained me my appointment in effective charge of the counter-measures. I could ask and everything would be given unto me. Fawcett asked what I proposed to do.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t tell the Russians that if I were you.” Fawcett was in an anxious state. The Moscow mood could change quickly if Rollerball decanted its bacteria-and-spore cargo into the naval complex.

  I said, “For a start I’ll get to the Kola Peninsula.”

  Fawcett nodded his approval and said he would need to remain himself in Moscow. After that no time was lost. Fawcett and the rest of his mission were found accommodation, not in a hotel but, for their own safety until the Muscovites had heard the facts, inside the Kremlin. Demichevich and I were driven at high speed to Sheremetievo where an aircraft was waiting to rush us to the far north. In flight I pondered; I believed I had definitely to work on the assumption that Rollerball contained high explosive and I said this to Demichevich.

  He seemed surprised. ‘‘You told me, I think, that Seiko said this was not the case.”

  “That’s what I gathered. But I don’t believe him any more on that. It has to have explosives to get through from the fissure. We know — and Seiko would have assumed — that your naval authorities started blocking it off again as soon as they got word through from us.”

  “Yes, that is right. But would not an explosion kill the bacteria and spores, and negative the threat?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Logically I suppose it would. But we have proof that Seiko had developed a sort of flame resistant strain.” I told Demichevich about the effect produced in Scotland by the army’s flame-throwers, the fact that the spores actually grew under flame. “We have to make at least the assumption that they could resist an explosion as well.”

  Demichevich nodded but made no further comment. No doubt a busy man, he occupied himself during the rest of the flight by leafing through, without much concentration I fancied, a thick wad of official hand-outs concerned with peasant cooperatives and production norms, something like our 6D2 Required Reading, a tiresome task at the best of times and currently, I would have thought, a somewhat hypothetical one; but possibly better than being too matey with a Western imperialist. I stared from the plane’s windows at snow-covered Russia, bleak and grim, at whitened fields, at factory chimneys, frozen towns and villages, at the desolation of the White Sea and the Barents Sea beyond as we came towards journey’s end — the naval complex lay at the inner end of the channel connecting with the Barents Sea. It was a flight of about 800 miles and we began to lose height for touchdown as the early Russian winter evening closed in around us and scattered lights came up below.

  Demichevich pointed out the more concentrated glow that was the naval base at the end of the fissure. He said, “You will find much change since you were here last.”

  “1 don’t doubt it,” I said. As we came lower I studied the emerging scene. It was quite a complex. Colossal wasn’t the word. I thought of Plymouth, the modernised Devonport dockyard that was now our principal naval base following the rundown of Portsmouth. Below me, between low hills, one of them carrying a vast statue of a Russian soldier with an everburning memorial flame, lay something incomparably bigger than Devonport. It had been built, Demichevich now said, to accommodate not only the warships in those northern waters but to act if necessary in time of war as a strong base for the whole of the Russian fleet as expanded over the last few years, its vital nature as a port being enhanced by the fact that the area lay on the Soviet’s only ice-free coast in Europe north of the Crimea. Down there, Demichevich told me, were totally enclosed submarine pens, berths for frigates and cruisers, even aircraft-carriers, all of them under reinforced roofs that would give protection against all but the biggest nuclear warheads. In addition there were massive underground tanks for the storage of oil fuel, vast armouries and ammunition dumps designed to serve no
t only the naval base itself but also the immense military installations of the Kola Peninsula. There were food stores, a refrigeration depot, fresh water reservoirs and almost anything else you cared to name that was needed to keep a naval and military presence intact.

  “It must not be lost,” Demichevich said. His words contained a very clear warning. If there was a balls-up, I’d had it.

  *

  Immediately after touchdown we were driven into the base. On the way in I saw numbers of Russian seamen dressed in brass-buttoned jackets, their cap-ribbons showing that they belonged to the Northern Fleet. There were busy sounds from the commercial port — the rattle of railway wagons, the haunting noise from ships’ sirens — and there was any amount of security in evidence. In the base we were taken to meet a vice-admiral named Ashimov, in charge of the whole naval area. In almost faultless English he told us that the geologists tracking Rollerball’s progress had marked it as nearing the border between Sweden and Finland. Seven hundred and twenty kilometres to go.

  I asked about its speed.

  “Thirty-three kilometres an hour,” the vice-admiral said “At times a little more.”

  Twenty-two hours left, if the speed didn’t vary too much. I wished Seiko back from hell. I was still worried about the way Rollerball had speeded up after entry; this could have been intended or it might not. I still felt it possible that something might have gone wrong. But I had to cope with things as they were and had to accept the limitations of uncertainty.

  Like Fawcett earlier, the admiral asked, “What are you going to do, Commander Shaw?”

  This time I didn’t say I didn’t know, though it would have been the simple, honest truth. Yet there was a possible way; I had puzzled around the matter whilst in flight and I had come up with something that seemed more and more to be the only likely solution and I put it to the admiral. I said, “If Rollerball was allowed to run free, it could be the better for everyone.”