The Accidental Spy

by Jacqueline George

  After the service, he waited for Danka to appear. She came out near the end, her face swollen from crying.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  She looked at him with cold loathing. “You killed them,” she whispered in a harsh, unnatural voice and brushed past him. By the time The Virgin reached the street she had disappeared.

  He felt lonely at home by himself that night. Having the Russians taken did not really touch him, but the thought that he had lost a friend hurt more than he could have imagined. He called Elena in the morning but she had nothing for him. No invitation to a meeting yet, so they just chattered about the weather and how much they wanted to meet again. He felt glad to hang up the phone and make his way to TAMCO.

  Back in the office, it was definitely time to get down to some serious planning for the 9-5/8” casing job. The Virgin should have been rubbing his hands together at the thought of the half million dollars or so the job would make, but his world had clouded over. Taking his pipe data book, he went through the motions of re-calculating the cement quantities required and checked them with the desert. They wanted to have a big surplus of cement on location in case the hole was washed out. Big washouts would mean that large cement volumes would be required, and there would not be time to rush them up to Sabah after Revards had run the calliper log. Better to have the cement ready and waiting, just in case.

  He was eating lunch at home alone the next day when the radio surprised him. The BBC World Service headlines announced that two Russian chemical warfare experts had defected from Tabriz to Israel. His lunch forgotten, he waited through the other headlines for the details to come. His blood was racing. Remembering the listening bugs he started to eat automatically to make some noise, then the news came.

  The Israeli Government has announced that two Russian experts in chemical warfare have defected from Tabriz and have been offered asylum in Israel. In a press conference in Tel Aviv the two men, Professor Victor Kuryagin and Boris Pulyakov, said they had been employed privately by the Tabrizi Government in a weapons plant at Sabah in Tabriz. They denied that they had been recruited to work on weapons, but had gone to Tabriz thinking they would be working at a military training college. They described the Tabrizi chemical warfare capability as primitive and disorganised. Israeli sources say that the Russian men had been working on a chemical weapons programme that could be very dangerous to peace in the Middle East.

  Usually reliable sources report that the two men were snatched from Tabriz by Israeli commandos last week, but there has been no official confirmation of this. The full story of their defection has been sold to an American newspaper and will appear next Sunday.

  The news moved on to a story of unrest among French farmers but The Virgin was not listening. He felt a large grin spreading over his face. So Victor had made it. And Boris. And their success would make The Virgin’s life much more secure when the shipment arrived. He wondered if he had blind chance to thank, or whether Standford and Crossman were behind it.

  He waited impatiently at the office until four o’clock when he was sure that Danka would be in from her duty and took off for Barani. Danka was still in her uniform when she answered the bell. Her face darkened when she saw The Virgin and she started to close the door but The Virgin’s smile stopped her.

  He held his finger to his lips and bounced into the apartment saying, “Hey! Did you hear about Victor and Boris? They’re on the news. They’ve gone to Israel.”

  Danka was sure she had not understood. “Again, Virgin?”

  “That’s right. Israel. It was on the BBC. They said on the news that the Israelis accepted them into Israel. They say they’ve been working on chemical weapons.”

  “Virgin – slowly,” Danka pleaded. “Why they go to Israel? They are not Jew. They just work in laboratory here.”

  “I don’t know how they got there, but I suppose that if the Israelis granted them asylum, they must have known something useful. Where did they go on Friday after the Army let them go?”

  “Virgin, they not come back from Army. No-one sees them after church.”

  The Virgin gave himself a pause for realism. “Maybe the Army sold them then. I’m sure the Israelis would give a good price if they’ve been working on chemical weapons. Dollars in Switzerland, no problem.”

  “Weapons, Virgin?”

  “You know - guns, bombs, things like that. Only using poison gas.”

  “Gas? Boże! Victor is doing this? I do not believe.”

  Again The Virgin put his finger to his lips, and Danka nodded distractedly to show she had understood. “It’s possible, you know. Russia has lots of strange military scientists with no jobs. Are you going to give me coffee?”

  “Boże!” mused Danka as they sat over their coffee. “Victor in Israel. What will he do there? Have operation and become Jew?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t need an operation.”

  “Is necessary for him,” she said with a smile, “But only a small one.”

  “Are you coming to the rig with me? Let’s go and see my friend Terry and perhaps he’ll show you round.”

  Terry, who rarely saw a woman from the beginning of his hitch until the end, was delighted to have a real live one in his trailer. He hurried to tidy up and made the coffee.

  “Have your lady sit over here, Greg. You don’t want to keep her all for yourself.”

  Danka looked down at herself. “I think there is enough of me for all people,” she said sadly. They laughed with her.

  “Terry, you near the tannery here? Danka has friends there.”

  “Tannery? That’s what it is. We get a whiff round here sometimes – never knew what it was. Where is it? We’ve got some kind of bone-yard over the fence. Dead equipment everywhere. Never saw such a collection of junk. Must have been there forever. If it was back home, you’d have all sorts of collectors rooting through it. Wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t some steam-powered stuff.”

  “Bone-yard? Oh, I know what that is. That’s Eytie-Joe. He’s been here for years, and that’s all the stuff he’s imported since forever. You can’t dispose of anything you brought in for construction projects. Once it’s done, equipment just has to sit there and rust. You can’t sell it.”

  “Well, it’s only worth shipping out for scrap now. Don’t know why they don’t do it. The Koreans would take it like a flash.”

  “It’ll never happen. It costs so much to bring a ship in here. Then there’s all the other rip-offs you’d have to pay – trucking, cranes, Customs… Plus all the co-operatives with their hands out. It’d cost you more than the steel’s worth, believe me.”

  “Hmmm – Tabriz strikes again. Never mind, there’s plenty of desert out there they can use as a parking lot. I tell you, I climbed up to the crown the other day. This place is fantastic. In the morning you can see forever. If we were allowed to have binoculars, I swear you could see Crete from up there. And in the other direction – the desert comes right up to the edge of town and then goes on and on and on. You ever get to drive out there? Just head south with a four wheel drive?”

  “I wish! But you know what the locals are like. They catch you out there by yourself and they’d make no end of trouble. If you’re not sitting at home and drinking tea, you’ve got to be a security risk. Come to steal their sand or something. I only see the Cape Town Road.”

  “Know what you mean. Sad, isn’t it? They could have tourists all over the place, but who’d want to bother? Now, tell me about the next cement job.”

  - 19 -

  There was a trip to Samida that Friday. The Virgin wondered who to take with him. He suspected the Filipinos would be more fun, but they all went to Mass on Friday morning. He settled for Danka and Wanda. They were waiting for him on the balcony of their flat and hurried out to jump into the car. They lit their cigarettes and The Virgin made for the main road east. The town fell away in scattered villas and empty government factories.

  The road was straight and modern, a divided highway built fo
r more traffic than Tabriz could provide. They swept along at 140 kph over the flat and stony coastal plain. The road crossed boring country. No houses, no farms, just rocks and scrubby trees, browsed into umbrella shapes by goats standing on their back legs to remove any greenery they could reach.

  The sea lay out of sight of the road. It was there, out of reach behind the low string of dunes that divided the sabhka from the beach. It was an empty beach. For much of the year, it was only accessible by walking along the sand from the few causeways that had been pushed across the sabhka during the war. The Virgin had been there on occasion, and as a beach it had little to recommend it. It was a narrow hundred kilometre strip of sand scattered with dried sea-weed, old plastic and pellets of congealed crude oil. The only break in the monotony was the wreck of the Yugoslav ship from Rijeka that had washed gently onto the beach one night a few years ago and been abandoned in a mounting tide of impossible paperwork.

  On the other side of the road, equally distant and equally unchanging, stood the limestone scarp that walled in the coastal plain. The highway they were travelling followed an ancient route. Since men had first walked on two legs, they had passed back and forth along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and they had all tracked along between the sea and the escarpment. They would have seen the same sand dunes and the same limestone wall. Today, sharp eyes could easily pick up stone arrowheads and tools amongst the pebbles. In a milder climate, the Romans and the Greeks had farmed here and travellers must have found villages and taverns to sustain and shelter them and their animals. Those hamlets were now low mounds of soil built up from their decayed mud walls, and evolving pottery shards counted the centuries that people had lived and loved there.

  True, the dryness of the place was relatively new. Arabic colonisation had taken over a land slowly dying of thirst, and their goats had completed the destruction. The only Islamic monuments were the square, standardized Turkish forts built to control the local nomads. Crude and strong, but none of them had survived well in the world war.

  At Rommel’s Pass the scenery changed. The coastal strip narrowed to a few kilometres and a stream falling from the plateau above had carved a weakness in the limestone wall. The modern highway swept upwards under the forlorn, eyeless stare of an old fort, an ochre stuccoed ruin that had been occupied, attacked and rebuilt for millennia. On top the plateau was green. At this time of the year it was blessed with winter rain and wheat grew. The landscape was dotted with identical Tuscan peasant houses, mostly empty, relics of an Italian settlement scheme for soldiers returning from the Great War. Beside them, identical large modern houses with television antennae and solar hot water marked the Tabrizi government’s contribution. People lived normal lives up here and earned their living by working the land.

  The road wound this way and that, passing isolated houses and small villages until it passed a small dirt turn-off. An old truck tyre stood at the edge of the highway, with ‘Samida’ and an arrow painted on it. The Virgin swung off the road and they jolted down through the trees. Samida was famous, well known to classical scholars as an ancient place of pilgrimage. It had been re-discovered in the 19th century and Victorian travellers had sat in the amphitheatre and painted the views. It had been closely studied and between the wars Italian archaeologists had laboured to remove the desert sand and restore the town. They had not finished the job. The war had taken them from their task and their things had been left as they lay. Their narrow railway snaked around the site and the little dump cars sat together in a siding. The old farm house they had used as an office remained, locked and unoccupied, waiting for the diggers to return. The site was Greco-Roman, not Islamic, and the Tabrizi government had no empathy with it. They protected it, but did not care for it. There were no facilities for tourists, only an old man at the gate selling entry tickets for a few dirhams.

  The Virgin pulled under the cypress trees to park beside the others. Most of the Hash and a good proportion of the Polish nurses had come. They gathered up their picnic bags and trickled towards the gate.

  It always pleased The Virgin to walk through these ruins. He felt history and culture seeping up through the soles of his feet. He was treading worn limestone slabs that had been trodden by sandals two thousand years ago. The man living in that house there might have visited Rome and seen Julius Caesar. If he had travelled east, it could have been into Cleopatra’s Egypt. He might have been in Jerusalem during that fateful week. And then, safely home again, his feet would have contributed to the wear and polish of his doorstep. His roof had fallen in now and his walls reached no higher than The Virgin’s waist, but the mosaic that graced his dining room floor was still there, revealed and open for northern barbarians to walk on.

  His wandering and pondering had left him alone in the upper town. The rest of them had hurried down to the religious centre with its spectacular buildings, the amphitheatre and the sacred pool. The Virgin stayed where he was, soaking up the atmosphere and trying to re-create the hustle of a busy town, living, loving and milking the pilgrims.

  The picnic was in full swing when he reached the amphitheatre. Food and drink were spread on the stone seats and in small groups they were laughing and enjoying themselves. The Virgin tucked in with Wanda and Danka, happy but left out of the Polish conversations flowing around him. He sat and let the view carry him. The theatre was small and intimate, set off to the side of the temples and sacred pool. It had been cut into the face of the limestone scarp, using the steep slope to best advantage. There had been a proscenium wall behind the stage, probably destroyed by an earthquake. Now the view over the stage was unobstructed and the audience looked out north, across the plain to the hazy blue of the Mediterranean. It was a magic location, infinitely moving and impossible to photograph.

  Rubberdy-Dub picked his way along the seat row towards him. “Hey, Virgin, I want to say thank you. For the belt. It works great.”

  “You’re still going ahead? You’ve got to be crazy.”

  “Probably – but yes. I’m getting close. I’ve got to go soon, before the ghiblis start. But I want it to warm up a little as well.”

  “I still don’t see how you’re going to get over all that sand.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got it cracked. It’s all a matter of tyre pressure. Get that right and you can roll the cart anywhere. I went for kilometres on the beach last week, and I didn’t even get blisters. And I had 50 kilos of water on board.”

  “50 kilos? Is that enough?”

  “Should be – but I’m taking a couple of ground stills along too. Just in case.”

  “Well, you’re a braver man than I, Gunga Din.”

  Wanda and Danka began to pack. They wanted The Virgin to take photographs of them to send back to their families, and then drive them down to the beach to take some more.

  Next morning was busy. Abdul was in at eight o’clock, something unheard of. And he was carrying a packet of documents. “They bring them to my house,” he complained. “Make my family frightened.” He fanned them out. All the original invoices and certificates of origin for the incoming shipment.

  The Virgin did not need to ask whom he was talking about. He quickly scanned the documents. All stamped and signed off, just as they should be. He looked at the dates. Rotterdam had issued them on one day, and they had been legalized in The Hague on the next. The Tabrizi consulate must have been waiting for them and sent them straight on to Major Jamal instead of returning them.

  “They say the ship is coming today,” ventured Abdul. “Is that right?”

  “Jesus – no-one’s told me. Can you find out?”

  “I try,” said Abdul and disappeared to his office.

  The Virgin continued scanning the documents. He could not find Major Jamal’s container of mustard gas. He guessed the documents for that would have been issued separately in England, and Major Jamal had them right now.

  Abdul came in. “The harbour master say the ship comes in today. Discharge at the military wharf.”


  “Damn! What have we done to deserve that?” The military often indulged in a little private enterprise and unloaded commercial ships. That was no problem – in fact they probably worked better than the normal stevedores – but they had a very inflexible attitude to invoicing. No chance of negotiating discounts with them. Oh well, thought The Virgin, at least this will put an end to the whole business. There was no chance of a second order. Or was there? He shuddered. This one had caused him enough grief, and he did not want to think about what they might order next.

  “Well, nothing we can do about it, I suppose. But you’d better lodge something with Customs right away, to keep everything legal. Do you think you could visit the ship?”

  “Not possible. I cannot go inside the military wharf. Perhaps I can see it from the Customs office – they have very big windows. What do you want?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I just wanted to know if the container for Major Jamal is on board.”

  “It is,” said Abdul complacently. “They tell me last night. First they discharge their container, then they start on everything in the hold for us.”

  “And the truck pusher is ready?”

  “Yes, I see him this morning at his house. He knows, and I will see him again after I go to Customs.”

  The Virgin got back to arguing with the desert over planning for the cement job, and to typing up the job program ready for Tayfun next day. The work took all his attention and he was still at it when Abdul called to say he had seen the tarpaulin-covered chemical container being swung off the ship and driven away on an army truck. He looked at his watch. It was lunchtime, and Saturday. He had the afternoon off. With a wave of relief he shut down the computer and drove home for lunch.