Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  The Englishman was no coward, but neither was he stupid. Faced with a terminal situation, from which there was clearly no possibility of escape, there was only one choice. ‘I’ll answer any questions you ask,’ he said, his voice choked with fear.

  ‘Good, good.’ The interrogator sounded gratified. He sat down on the plastic chair, picked up his clipboard, selected a particular page on it and began the questioning. Two minutes later he sat back, then stood up. He did not look pleased. ‘That is not what I wanted to hear. I do not think you realize the gravity of this situation. I have explained the options to you, but I must have the information I want.’

  The captive shook his head desperately. ‘But I don’t know the answers,’ he shouted. ‘I’m trying to answer your questions, but if I don’t know the answers, how can I?’

  The interrogator looked at him coldly, then smiled again and resumed his seat. ‘Well, let’s try once again, shall we? But this time, you really must help me.’ Again the questions began, but again the answers did not satisfy the interrogator, and after a few minutes he stood up and shook his head sadly. ‘I thought you were going to be sensible about this, but I was wrong. I told you that I must have this information, and you will tell me – now or later.’

  The Englishman shouted again, naked terror in his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want – everything that I know. But these questions – I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The interrogator looked down at him and patted his shoulder gently. ‘We shall see,’ he said softly. ‘We shall see.’ He stepped across to the wall next to the interrogation table, reached up and clicked on two switches marked, in Cyrillic script, ‘video’ and ‘audio’. Directly above the table, two red lights winked on, showing that the video camera and tape recorder were operating. The interrogator nodded, walked across to the corner of the room, selected a waterproof apron from a peg, and put it on. He motioned to the technicians and the doctor, and they followed his example.

  The captive on the table began to scream. The interrogator looked over at him and issued a swift command to one of the technicians, who walked over to the table and roughly applied a sticking-plaster gag. The doctor sat down at the captive’s left side, and attached a blood-pressure cuff to the Englishman’s arm. He opened his bag and prepared a number of injections, principally stimulants, and taped his stethoscope microphone to the man’s chest. With his preparations complete, he nodded to the interrogator.

  The technicians waited expectantly by the trolleys, looking at the captive with all the compassion of a couple of butchers contemplating a side of beef. Finally, the interrogator sat down again on the plastic chair and leaned close to the Englishman, who was still trying to scream, even through the gag. ‘Quiet, now,’ he said. ‘You have had your chance to act sensibly. Now you must face the consequences.’

  The interrogator spoke briefly in Russian, and leaned forward to watch as the technicians began their work. He enjoyed assessing the resilience of his subjects, and this man, he was certain, would be easy to break. Four minutes later the captive passed out. When the doctor had revived him, the technicians started again. Then they tore off the gag and the questioning began. The answers still didn’t please the old man with the innocent blue eyes, so he stepped back from the table and motioned the technicians back to work. When the captive had stopped screaming, the grey-haired man asked him exactly the same questions again.

  A little over two hours later they stopped. The captive had mercifully gone into massive shock, and no efforts by the doctor or the technicians had the slightest effect. The interrogator stood and looked down at the wreck of the man on the table for a long moment. Then he selected a thin steel probe from one of the instrument trolleys, and carefully pushed it through the captive’s left eyeball and deep into the brain cavity. For good measure, he did the same to the right eye. He pulled out the probe and tossed it back on the instrument trolley, then turned to the chief technician. ‘Get rid of it,’ he said.

  Officially, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, has ceased to exist, and certain parts of the organization’s old headquarters building at number 2 Lubyanskaya ploshchad – formerly Dzerzhinsky Square – are even open to parties of tourists during the day. The tourists are not allowed into any sensitive areas of the building, and the impression given by their guides is that the huge structure is just a shell, no longer used for any important purposes, a monument to an evil past that has no place in modern, post-glasnost, Russia. But, as with so many things in Russia, past and present, the official position differs markedly from reality. Certainly, the KGB has officially ceased to exist, but a new organization, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi or SVR, has inherited its mantle – or at least that of the First Chief Directorate – with virtually no visible changes apart from the new name. The SVR occupies the former KGB’s sixty-acre office complex at Yazenevo, located close to the orbital ring road in Moscow’s southern suburbs, and virtually all the personnel now employed by the SVR are ex-KGB staff, many still in their original offices and doing precisely the same jobs.

  In fact, the old building in the heart of Moscow is still used, outside what might be termed visiting hours, for purposes little different from those that characterized the heyday of the KGB. Number 2 Lubyanskaya ploshchad has a grandeur and a presence that is lacking in the featureless new complex, and many of the more senior officers much prefer to operate from it when their duties permit. It is also useful for clandestine meetings or covert actions that would not be practical, or even possible, at Yazenevo.

  The grey-haired man left the cellar after removing his waterproof apron and blood-splattered white coat, and ascended in the lift to the third floor. He walked down the light green painted corridor, his shoes rapping on the parquet flooring, then paused and entered a room after a perfunctory knock. He carried the clipboard upon which he had made copious notes in both English and Cyrillic script during the interrogation. The audio tapes would be transcribed later, and the video tape was nestling in his jacket pocket, ready to be hand-delivered to a Ministerial address later that day, but his verbal report of the interrogation was required immediately.

  In the room at a massive old oak table, ranged with brand-new office chairs, sat two men. On the left was a tall, thin and sharp-featured man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general in an artillery regiment. The GRU – Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff, the Russian military intelligence organization – does not have a uniform of its own, and Viktor Grigorevich Bykov continued to wear the uniform of his previous regiment, in which he still nominally served. He was sipping dark Turkish coffee from a fine china cup.

  On the opposite side of the table – for the GRU and the KGB have never been willing bedfellows – sat a senior SVR general. Nicolai Fedorovich Modin was the former head of Department V of the KGB – the Executive Action Department responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination. A powerfully built man of medium height, iron-grey hair topping a flat, almost Slavic face, he could have passed in a crowd as just another Russian peasant – as indeed he frequently had done in the early part of his KGB career.

  Originally known as the Thirteenth Department of Line F, Department V was reorganized and renamed in 1969, but the KGB slang term for its activities – mokrie dela – remained unchanged. The Russian expression means ‘wet affairs’, because most of Department V’s activities involved the spilling of blood. With the creation of the SVR, the General’s title had changed, but not his duties.

  As the SVR interrogator entered the room, Bykov put down his cup. ‘Well?’

  The interrogator shrugged his shoulders, walked across the carpeted floor and helped himself to coffee from the American-made percolator. Sipping the bitter liquid, he sat down in a chair at the end of the table. ‘I need this,’ he said.

  The GRU officer drummed his fingers on the table impatiently. ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing.’

&n
bsp; ‘Nothing?’

  The grey-haired man shook his head, and put his cup down. He passed the clipboard over. Nicolai Modin took it, scanned rapidly through the notes, then put it down on the table and looked up.

  Viktor Bykov reached over, took the board and stared at it. ‘Is he…?’ The interrogator nodded. Bykov tossed the clipboard down angrily, and looked with disgust at three small spots of blood on the interrogator’s collar. ‘You should have used drugs. We allowed you adequate time for a thorough interrogation. Your methods are crude and out of date.’

  Modin intervened. ‘How the SVR gets its answers is none of your concern, Bykov. We use whatever methods seem most expedient.’

  ‘I question the expediency of using this animal—’ Bykov said to Modin, gesturing at the interrogator, who was sipping his coffee with a pleasant half-smile on his face ‘—on such a sensitive matter. These days the GRU very rarely has to resort to such crude tactics.’

  The interrogator put down his cup and interrupted. ‘You miss the point, General. I did not have time for a thorough interrogation – with a resistant subject it could have taken days or weeks to obtain results with drugs, and you needed answers today. The—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Bykov interrupted. ‘You could have—’

  ‘No, General, I could not.’ The raised voice cut across Bykov’s. The smile had left the grey-haired man’s face, and his blue eyes were steady, bright and totally devoid of humour or compassion. ‘This is my field. I am the expert, and if I tell you something you should listen, and perhaps even learn.’

  Modin leaned back in his chair. Despite the seriousness of the situation, and his deep personal dislike of the interrogator, he was almost beginning to enjoy it.

  Bykov was furious. ‘How dare you address me in such a manner? I am a lieutenant general in the GRU—’

  ‘That is precisely why I can address you like that, or in any other manner that I wish. I am the senior SVR interrogator. Neither you nor any other member of the GRU has any power whatsoever over me, and I suggest you remember that.’

  ‘Enough, both of you,’ Modin interjected. He pointed at the interrogator. ‘You. Finish what you were going to say.’

  ‘Thank you, General. I would be delighted to do so, and preferably—’ he looked sharply at Bykov ‘—without any further ill-informed interruptions.’ He turned to face the SVR officer. ‘I agree that my methods are crude, but they are rapid, and they do work. All my interrogations have yielded positive results, just as this one has.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ General Modin said, picking up the clipboard and waving it. ‘There is nothing here that is of the slightest use to us. There is not a single mention of the project.’

  The interrogator smiled. ‘Precisely, comrade. Because the subject did not know the answers to any of the questions you instructed me to ask.’

  Modin considered this for a moment. ‘Are you sure – absolutely certain?’

  ‘Quite certain. If he had known, he would certainly have told me. He would have told me anything. Anything at all.’ The interrogator chuckled and picked up his coffee cup again.

  Modin stared at him with an expression of acute distaste, then spoke. ‘Get out.’

  The smile left the interrogator’s face for an instant, and his blue eyes stared without expression at Modin. Then he gently placed his cup and saucer on the table, stood up and bowed slightly to the senior officer, and left the room without a word.

  When the door had closed behind him, Modin looked across the table. ‘He would have known, wouldn’t he?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’ Bykov was unsure what the SVR officer meant.

  ‘The Britisher. If anyone here in Moscow had known, it would have been him?’

  ‘Definitely. In his position, he had to have known. What other reason could he have had for sending his deputy to Sosnogorsk? What other conclusion could we have drawn?’

  Modin shook his head. ‘And all for nothing. What a waste.’

  There was genuine regret in his voice. Although Nicolai Modin had ordered the termination of many – far too many – men in his long and successful career with the KGB and SVR, he had always been personally satisfied that each of them had deserved to die. His assiduity in checking and double-checking the details of each case before signing the termination order was not just a matter of personal pride; it was also the mark of a professional intelligence officer.

  There are few rules in the ‘wilderness of mirrors’, as the clandestine world has been aptly named, but one obeyed by almost every intelligence service is that opposition agents are never terminated without very good reason. This reluctance does not derive from any sense of compassion or respect for human life, but simply from considerations of operational necessity. The ever-present fear is that even a single execution could lead to an escalating spiral of captures and killings – essentially a private war – something that no service would want. The fear is so prevalent that, if a termination is thought to be essential, it is not unknown for the deceased operative’s parent agency to be advised afterwards, with an apology and a justification for the action taken.

  Modin had no doubts about the real identity of the man whose body was even then beginning to stiffen in the sub-basement of the building. He knew who he was and the organization for which he had worked, as he had known since the Englishman’s arrival in Moscow. If the interrogation had produced the answers that both he and Bykov had expected, Modin would probably have regarded the man’s death as justifiable, but the results the interrogator had obtained worried and concerned him.

  The GRU officer, sensing the uncertainty of the older man, spoke again. ‘Minister Trushenko’s orders were most specific, General. We had no option but to obey – to make sure. It was the only way.’

  Modin nodded again. ‘I know. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if we’re right – even if he’s right.’

  ‘Whatever our personal feelings,’ Bykov said, ‘whatever our private doubts, we’ve gone too far now to stop it. We have to carry it through to the end. We have no choice, no choice at all. What we’re doing is for the good of Russia, for the good of all Russians.’

  Good old Bykov, Nicolai Modin thought to himself. You could always rely on him to quote the party line. He stood up and walked to the window and stared through the bullet-proof glass across Lubyanskaya ploshchad. Early-morning Moscow was quiet, with little traffic and fewer pedestrians. He looked with a sense of sadness towards the centre of the square where, until the madness of glasnost, the bronze statue of the founder of the Cheka, ‘Iron’ Feliks Dzerzhinsky, erected by Khrushchev as a tribute to the KGB, had stared with sightless eyes down what was then known as Marx prospekt towards ploshchad Revoljucii – Revolution Square. They had been better days, but there was, perhaps, just a hope – Modin put it no higher – that they would return, if the project succeeded. Modin squared his shoulders, wheeled round and strode briskly back to the desk, his uncertainty gone. ‘He’d better be right. You do realize what this means, don’t you?’

  Bykov, who was reading through the notes on the clipboard, looked up and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It means that the British don’t know, so they can’t have told the Americans.’

  Chapter Two

  Thursday

  Pechora LPAR, Komi District, Confederation of Independent States

  ‘Colonel!’ The urgent note in the young officer’s voice brought Vitali Yazov across the darkened room at speed.

  ‘Yes, Captain? What is it?’ Colonel Yazov asked, leaning over the younger man’s shoulder and looking at the displays.

  Captain Kryuchkov shook his head. ‘It’s gone again, sir. A solid but intermittent contact, at high level – not a satellite or debris, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘From which direction, and what range?’ Yazov asked.

  The captain pointed at his screen. ‘There, sir. Almost due north and about five hundred miles out, closing rapidly.’ Kryuchkov had inserted five electronic markers into his azimuth display, each corresp
onding to a single contact detected by the LPAR. Each marker showed the time the object was detected, and its estimated height, speed and heading.

  The Large Phased-Array Radar, NATO reporting name Hen House, is designed for ballistic missile detection, satellite tracking and battle management. On the northern Russian border LPARs are positioned at Mukachevo, Baranovichi, Skrunda and Murmansk as well as Pechora. The LPAR is configured to look high, for satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and outwards from Russian territory, and the contact was only being intermittently detected by its lowest lobes.

  Colonel Yazov scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. ‘First contact over the Kara Sea,’ he murmured, ‘and tracking south.’ He leaned closer and looked carefully at the calculated speed and estimated height of the unknown return, based upon which lobes of the LPAR had been penetrated. ‘At Mach three and above seventy thousand feet.’

  He straightened up, gestured at the LPAR display and issued his instructions. ‘Record any other contacts with that object. Designate it Hostile One and get me a predicted track across the whole country, immediately. I’m going to talk to Moscow.’

  The captain turned round in his seat, surprised. ‘Do you know what it is?’ he asked.

  Yazov nodded. ‘Yes. At least, I think I do. But it doesn’t make any sense.’

  British Embassy, Sofiyskaya naberezhnaya 14, Moscow

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Willis, but I really don’t see what you’re doing here. I can assure you that the Embassy staff are more than capable of handling matters at this end.’

  The man in the crumpled suit looked across the desk. Diplomats were not his favourite people, and diplomats who thought that their abilities were being called into question were even more touchy than usual. He ran a hand through his unruly fair hair and tried again.

  ‘I assure you, Secretary Horne, nobody is suggesting that your Embassy staff are in any way lacking. I’m here for just three reasons. I have to ensure that the body of Mr Newman is returned as rapidly as possible to Britain. I’ve also been asked to collect some of Mr Newman’s personal effects for his family, but the main reason I’m in Moscow is to carry out an initial investigation into the circumstances of the accident.’ He drew a breath and held up his hand to forestall any protest. ‘There could be some international repercussions, depending on the degree of culpability of the Russian driver. My company won’t be prepared to make any settlement until this unfortunate accident has been thoroughly investigated.’