by John Gardner
As it turned out, that had been a waste of time. The idea had been to make certain Nina’s parents, and the two British agents, were corralled in the tunnel when Yuskovich’s loyal Spetsnaz troops arrived to swell the garrison and make sure nobody was left to tell the tale of how the trial had been faked. There was no reason to doubt the impact of the tape when it was aired. The Kremlin would be placed in a position of extreme embarrassment and the Russian people would, possibly for the first time, become truly aware of the natural leadership of this ascetic looking, single-minded officer, Yevgeny Yuskovich.
Yet the final, and wonderful, card was yet to be played. In the past weeks, six of his hoarded missiles, the big Scapegoats with their mobile Scamp launching systems, had been brought out of the bunkers where they had been stored but always ready.
At the Soviet Naval Infantry base near Derbent, skilled mechanics and builders had erected huge containers made from light alloys and lined with thick rubber hulls which incorporated flotation tanks. When the tanks were filled with water, the loaded containers would lie just below sea level. In expertly camouflaged hangars, they had designed and constructed these underwater monsters – three of them – each large enough to hold two Scapegoat missiles complete with their Scamp launching systems which had been fitted with tracks to make them usable in desert conditions.
Only last night, Major Verber had confirmed that the Scamps and Scapegoats were in place. This meant that these weapons of mass nuclear destruction had been taken, with great stealth, to Derbent where they had been loaded into the huge oblong containers. By now, those containers would be in the water, submerged, with their flotation tanks filled, while, on the top of each, the hull and upper structure of a large fishing boat had been affixed with explosive bolts. From sea level, and from the air, it would seem as though three fishing boats rode at anchor, guarded by the minesweeper that would be Yuskovich’s command post. The Scamp and Scapegoat crews were housed in the useless hulls of the fishing boats, and in a couple of days, it would be accomplished.
Yuskovich would be there simply as an observer. His presence was, strictly speaking, not required. But he was a leader, and to his mind, it was essential for him to be there.
As they approached Baku, he thought of the last phase. Certainly the American satellites might well pick up the oddity of the fishing boats, but that did not worry him. It would take them a long time to work out their sinister meaning. He had carefully laid the ground. The Iranians, so recently released from terrible combat against their neighbours, the Iraqis, were naturally in a difficult position. The bulk of the huge coalition force now spread across the deserts of Saudi Arabia was the Iranians’ natural enemy. Until any fighting broke out, they were willing, for a consideration, to turn their eyes into the sun and go blind.
In the meantime, Yuskovich had sold the Iraqi leadership three of the old, but very serviceable, huge Mi-10 helicopter cranes – great stilted, ugly looking beasts which could lift vast weights and carry them for many miles and up to 10,000 feet above the ground.
The accommodation reached with Iran meant that the minesweeper could safely tow the three ‘fishing boats’ close inshore at the small coastal settlement of Bandar Anzali, where they would be blown from the top of the containers by the explosive bolts. The flotation chambers would be emptied and the containers nudged ashore. The Scamps, with their deadly Scapegoat cargoes, could then be hauled up by the Iraqi Mi-10s, taken high over the mountains and deposited in strategic readiness. Each of the flying cranes would make two trips, and it had been calculated that, should all go to plan, the off-loading might be completed in six hours or so.
Before these hideous weapons finally left on their journey, the final piece of the puzzle would be recorded for history. The French and British agents would be photographed assisting and supervising the hand-over of the missiles. They would smile and look pleased with themselves. Yuskovich had constructed the final trap, the last box within the nest of boxes. In the end, if it became necessary, they could prove that the treacherous French and British had been the real suppliers of nuclear weapons to the Iraqi leaders in Baghdad.
The whole thing should not take more than two days, three if there were handling problems. The containers would be towed out to sea again and sunk and the Iraqis would have the weapon for which they had spent so much time scheming and intriguing.
When the United Nations’ deadline came on January 15th, if the Americans and their coalition forces did as they were expected, and attacked Iraq, the response would come in seconds. Six Scapegoat nuclear missiles would airburst over Saudi and the massed forces of the coalition would cease to exist. In a moment, in the wink of an eye, the entire enemy army would be turned into so much glass.
‘What then can be done about immediate United States ICBM retaliation, the so-called second strike?’ General Berzin had asked outside the Red Army Senior Officers’ Centre when they had been searching for the agent Bond. Yuskovich had an answer for him, an answer which meant the crippling of the United States for decades to come. They would be decimated, unable to function for a very long time, and during that time Marshal Yevgeny Yuskovich would lead a new and recharged Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into the land promised years ago, early in the century, by Lenin himself.
The minesweeper with its painted white number 252 on the bows began to move. Beneath the Caspian Sea, the hawsers took up the strain and began to pull the three fishing boats in its wake. It looked like a mother leading her brood out to fresh waters, and in a sense that was exactly what it was.
Night was falling and it was dark on the sea by the time they got fully underway. The minesweeper had only a crew of seven on board, so plenty of room was available for Yuskovich and his entourage. Below in a secure hold aft, usually a storage compartment for depth charges, the four prisoners had been shackled and left with food and wine. The marshal did not want them to seem haggard or strained when it came to taking pictures, though he had been tempted to separate Stepakov from the others and place him in solitary confinement for the entire voyage.
Soon, Yuskovich thought, soon, his part of the operation would be over. He would return to Moscow and oversee the final days before taking absolute control.
Forty-eight hours later they were within sailing distance of Bandar-e Pahlavi. Yuskovich had been down to see the prisoners whom he described as ‘unco-operative, but what can you expect? The sooner we get the symbols of Western decadence out of Russia, the better. I, for one, do not wish to be part of a society which produces Coca-Cola cans that dance when you clap your hands. For a country that’s so advanced, America, and, by inference, all the Western countries, are backward.’
He ordered dinner early. ‘By midnight we shall be starting to surface the first missiles. The signals have already been sent and the Iraqi Mi-10s should be here by two in the morning,’ he told them. ‘I suggest food and then a little rest. It will be a busy night for everyone.’
They ate large plates of Shchi, a spicy cabbage soup, which had been almost their staple diet since setting sail from Baku. After the meal, everyone did as the marshal had suggested, except Lieutenant Batovrin. ‘I’ll take a turn around the deck, sir, if I have permission.’
Yuskovich nodded. ‘Go ahead, Sergei, but not for long. You also need rest.’
Lieutenant Batovrin went out on deck, the hood of his camouflage combat suit turned up against the cold air. He thought it smelled like snow. Someone had once told him that in this region during the winter you could get hailstones the size of tennis balls. People were killed by them every year.
He walked aft and went down the companionway to the compartment where the prisoners were being held.
The soldier on guard duty came to attention. ‘At ease,’ Batovrin told him. ‘I’m going to see if I can talk these people into being more co-operative. If you want a smoke, you have my permission to go up on deck.’
‘Thank you, comrade Lieutenant.’ The man smiled and Batovrin nodded. Sliding back the
dead bolt, he opened the hatch and stepped inside.
Stepakov lay on his back drinking from a bottle of wine, one hand secured to a metal stanchion. The man they called Pete had his eyes closed and the Frenchman glowered. It looked as though he would like to tear his handcuffs from the rail to which they were attached and rip Batovrin’s throat out.
The Frenchwoman, one wrist chained to another stanchion, looked up. She seemed to be taking it very well, for there was hardly a hair out of place. The marshal had said she insisted on being taken to the heads at least six times a day, and once there, spent much time in front of the mirror. Even though she had no cosmetics, they allowed her a comb for these excursions.
Lieutentant Batovrin threw back the hood on his combat suit, touched his waxed moustache, then chuckled.
‘Well, what a sorry sight you are,’ said James Bond. ‘We’re all going to have a long night’s work, I fear. So rise and shine.’
19
IN THE WOODSHED
On the night Boris Stepakov arrived at the Red Army Senior Officers’ Centre with General Berzin and the Spetsnaz October Battalion, Bond had managed to make his way to the main lobby without being recognised.
There were two soldiers in the foyer, armed to the nostrils, with grenades hanging dangerously, Rambolike, from the webbing over their combat suits. He thought briefly he should wipe them out but it would be a foolish piece of macho exhibitionism.
Bond looked them in the eye, his gaze running from head to foot, then from foot to head. He walked at speed, like a man with a mission. ‘Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye,’ he barked, telling them he was GRU. The tone of his voice was such that not even these trained Spetsnaz questioned him.
The transition to the cold outside almost winded him. Away in the distance among the trees, there was the occasional shot, hyphenated by a blast of guncotton. There was also a good deal of shouting. Berzin’s troops had obviously been instructed to make it all sound warlike. They were doing well. So were the soldiers in steady employment under the tall, hawklike, ascetic Yuskovich. It sounded, he thought, like a good old-fashioned war film.
He had no idea where he could get the privacy he needed. Maybe he would find another entrance, go back inside, do what had to be done, then destroy the micro notebook computer and transmitter. After that, he might even give himself up. There were sillier alternatives, like being shot to pieces by the troops outside.
He stayed close to the wall for a full two minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. On the perimeter, figures moved under the small spotlights. They looked like battleground scavengers, and in his mind, he saw an ancient field littered with dead. There were horses and knights, bodies everywhere and women bending over the corpses. Men scuttled among the dead, removing weapons or anything of value. He remembered there had been a time in history when the gallant knights had decided to ban the crossbow as being too terrible an instrument of death, and he wondered what those gallant men would think of flamethrowers, machine guns, rockets or the AK-47.
The picture changed. Now he saw the trusted prisoners in the Nazi death camps rooting through the piles of luggage, then pillaging the bodies for the gold in their teeth, the SS men watching, smiling. If men like Yuskovich gained control in Russia, half of the world might sink back into those dark ages. Churchill had said something like that in World War II. Nothing really changed.
His thoughts overcame any cold or fear.
With one hand flat against the wall and the other gripping the pistol, he began to inch his way along, his feet placed flat, carefully, so that he neither slipped nor hit any projecting object. He hugged the wall in this fashion for about twelve feet, then froze as he heard noise from the main doors to his left. A long shaft of light broke through on to the ornamented porch-way and a shadow printed itself on the frozen snow.
One voice was raised and angry, ‘You fool! Idiot! It was the English. We’re looking for him. I could have you shot!’ Berzin, enraged, stamped out into the night.
‘Gleb, the boy couldn’t help it. The Britisher’s clever as a snake.’ The calm, soft voice of Yuskovich chilled more than Berzin’s anger.
From the entrance porch, General Berzin shouted again. ‘Sasha! Kolya! The damned English is out here somewhere. You see him? Kolya! Sasha!’ It was as though he were calling a pair of gun dogs.
A voice floated back from the perimeter. ‘He can’t get out, comrade General. We’ll pick him off.’
‘In the name of Jesus, don’t do that!’ Yuskovich, even with his voice raised, sounded calm, like a whisper on the wind. ‘We want him alive. It’s essential.’
Why? Bond wondered, pressing himself harder against the wall, as if trying to become part of the building’s fabric.
‘We’ll bring him back alive, comrade General. Don’t concern yourself. There’s no way he can get out. The place is sealed up like a virgin.’
Someone closer laughed.
‘If they lose him, I’ll have them all flogged. It was a hard day for Russia when they did away with the knout.’
Bond winced at Berzin’s barbarity. The knout was the ultimate in flogging instruments, worse even than the old British cat-o’-nine-tails. He had seen one in some Scandinavian museum, Oslo he thought, a lash of leather thongs, twisted with sharp pieces of wire. For a second, his mind was filled with streaming blood.
‘Calm yourself, Gleb. It will be. It will all happen.’ Yuskovich began to talk, as though telling a story to a child who could not sleep. Bond heard it all – the Scamps and the Scapegoats, the submerged containers and the minesweeper, the arrangements in Baku and in Iran. The pick-up point, the Mi-10s and the final horror if the coalition forces so much as dropped one bomb within the Iraqi border. As he listened, he thought his bones would make icicles of his blood. He thought of a great wasteland with a hurricane sweeping over it, and he knew the picture was of the world.
Then Berzin, petulant, asked. ‘What, though, can be done about immediate United States ICBM retaliation? The so-called second strike?’
Yuskovich laughed in the darkness, as though Berzin had told him a joke. ‘I shouldn’t worry your head about that. The moment the Scapegoats go, we put another spoke in their wheels. Yes, of course, the timing could go wrong. Iraq might well have to absorb a nuclear strike. It might take us twenty-four hours, everything depends on the timing of their attack, if it comes. But I promise you, Gleb old friend, unless they cripple Europe and all the Russias in that time, Washington will be no more.’ And he told the rest of it, with Bond stuck to the wall and the searching soldiers everywhere out in the darkness.
The two officers continued to talk for another five minutes, then, impatient, Yuskovich said that with or without Bond they would have to continue the taping. ‘Tomorrow we must leave. We’ll have to get on. I want Vorontsov’s confession in the can and this whole project wrapped up tonight. I’ll tell the man Clive, the silent one.’ And the shaft of light cut out over the snow again.
Bond waited in the darkness, his mind obsessed with death. Once more he started to move, still nestling his back hard against the wall. If he had to kill or die out here in the bleakness, he would do everything possible to get some message through.
Towards the far end, he could now see the shape of a wall and roof, low, the roof sloping at an acute angle, the whole projecting from the building itself like an outhouse or bunker.
It took him nearly five minutes to reach the shape – a wooden wall slightly higher than himself where it met the main building, the slope dropping off sharply so that it would barely reach his neck at the outer limit.
It was fashioned from logs, and there was a door set into the wall at the highest end near where he stood. He tried the door and it gave slightly. Then he realised it was not locked but frozen into place. He put his shoulder against it and pushed, putting all his weight behind the shove. It gave a loud creak and he stood still, his heart thudding in his ears, concerned that the noise had carried to the searchers who seemed to be
sweeping the outer edges of the perimeter. Eventually they would move inwards and he would be ringed and pegged down by them. Once more the desolate wind-swept wasteland came into his mind, and he pushed again. This time the door swung inwards.
It was a wood storage bunker. He could smell the bark and also tar, used to make the store watertight. Under the leather patch on his left shoulder he carried a small penlight. Unzipping the parka, he found the stitching and ripped through it, bringing out the tiny torch, holding it between his gloved thumb and first finger.
One fast sweep of the strong beam and it was clear that the woodshed had been sealed. No light could penetrate the tarpaulins which lined the interior. Softly, he closed the door and squatted on the floor, his back to the geometrically piled logs which took up about a third of the space.
He drew off his gloves and located the notebook computer and the transmitter. Once he had done the job and offered a prayer to whatever saint guided communications, he would have no more use for them.
He held the penlight in his teeth, the tips of his fingers rapidly typing the signal, checking that the tape turned as he provided the input. He was totally absorbed in getting the bare facts into the message, though the conscious stream at the back of his mind showed pictures of microchips and the incredible miniaturisation which was part of today’s word magic. They could make small computers like this with large memories and transmitters which would hurl messages on shortwave frequencies for miles, yet man could still try to bend other men to ruthless wills and destroy life in bizarre ways. It was as though the world, having gained so much, retained a lemminglike desire for self-immolation. As he completed the task, extracted the little tape, rewound it and slid it into the transmitter, his mind saw the brain of man and within it a small kernel of diseased cells, the seat of mankind’s death wish.