Mowbray beamed. 'Welcome, gentlemen—what a tip of a place. Sorry about that. My name's Mowbray and I seldom, as those who know me will tell you, deal in untruths. Like yourselves, I'm retired, pensioned-off, but I've been called back for this one operation because the present generation of heroes don't want to risk dirtying their hands. It's never been a problem for me, dirty hands.
'Why are you here? You're here because those fine courageous people from Hereford say they're not too "keen on a trip in there". "There" is Kaliningrad, a shit-heap, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. The equally fine people at Poole, whom you'd know rather better than me, said that they didn't want to know and asked, "Is he worth it?". "He" is a naval officer at the Baltic Fleet headquarters, and has been my asset for the last four years. He is now under close surveillance and near to arrest, and if he is arrested his ultimate fate will be a bullet in the back of the neck. He is one of the finest men I have been privileged to know, and I—and you—are going to save his life. If any of you wishes to leave, now would be the correct moment.'
He looked into each of their unshaven faces. They wore a uniform of trainers, jeans and sweatshirts. None of them moved. None of the chairs scraped back on the parquet. Mowbray heard Locke's sharpened breathing behind him.
'We begin our journey tonight. There's rather too much to cram in, but we'll manage. We'll start with the maps—Kaliningrad, its borders, the naval base and so on. You all come recommended—you're the best and you will achieve the best result and we'll leave the faint hearts with their scrubbed hands in awe of us.'
They started on the maps, and pored over them until the helicopter came for Rupert Mowbray.
There was shooting further up the beach.
The wind had turned and came from the north, otherwise the fisherman would not have heard the staccato bursts. Roman often heard shooting on the range far behind the fence that separated the Polish stretch of the beach from the dunes on the spit where the Russian troops exercised and practised. He worked at repairing his nets. It was most likely that rubbish had been thrown overboard from a passing freighter that week and had drifted then gone to the bottom. He would have said, and so would all the other fishermen who worked from the village of Piaski, that he knew where every obstruction lay in the shallow waters where he fished. Roman was the expert and always brought home the best catches of dab, flounder and plaice. His fingers moved fast, with a whipping motion, as he made good the tears in his net. If it had been early summer he would not have stayed out on the beach to repair the rents, he would have gone to the café in Piaski, drunk beer with the other fishermen and put off the work until the morning. But autumn had come, and soon winter would be hurrying after it. In two more weeks, or three at the most, and Roman was as expert on the weather as on the fishing grounds, storms would lash the beach most days and it would not be possible to launch the boats. The fishing would be over until spring. Then there was no money to be earned and Roman and his family, and the other families of Piaski, would have to scrape, scrimp, for survival. Each day that he was able to fish before the storms was valued. There were a dozen boats pulled up on the sand, white-painted planks with a yellow-painted gunwale, all numbered, but the other fishing crews, and the colleagues who sailed with him, were long gone to the village café. The border was two kilometres down the beach.
If he looked up, away from the nets on which he concentrated—and he was blessed with eyes as sharp as the cormorants' who competed with the gulls to feast on the heads and carcasses that were thrown over his shoulder when he gutted and filleted his catch—he could see the empty Polish watchtower and beyond it the Russian watchtower, which was always manned. If he squinted he could see the border's fence, which ran from the spit's pine forest and down onto the beach to the low-water tideline. Beyond were the exercise areas, the missile launching pads and the ranges. He knew the sounds of the different weapons the Russians used. Thirty-one years before, he had been a conscript in the Polish army and he remembered well the sounds of tanks firing, mortars and machine-guns. But he had not heard that day the familiar thunder, carried on the wind, of the 12.7mm heavy machine gun.
Riding on her anchor, the Princess Rose pitched in a swell made worse by the wind that strained the cable and tried to drive her towards the rocks and the shore.
The engineer watched from the rail. The master and the mate were on the bridge and had brought the boat to within a nautical mile of what the map called Mew Stone. He could see the lights up the estuary of the town of Dartmouth, and the white waves thrown back into the darkness by the rapid approach of the dinghy.
He was from Rostock, the old principal port of eastern Germany on the Baltic. He had worked in the shipyards until his life had crashed around him and he had been sacked as a casualty of the new grail of capitalism. Reunification had cost him his safe job and the security of cradle-to grave certainties. His wife and daughters were in Rostock and the coaster would sail north of the port where the shipyards were now silent, but he would not have a chance to stop off and visit. He was a heavily built man, with a shaven head, and next week he would celebrate, with the master and the mate, his forty-eighth birthday.
His life on the Princess Rose involved eating, watching wildlife films on video, and keeping the diesel engine alive. It was near to death; without the tender, nursing care Johannes Richter gave it, it would have failed long ago. He liked to say the engine was 'temperamental—like a woman', and he did not allow the master or the mate near it. It was in his care, and he gave it love. When the Princess Rose had reached the Mew Stone, as the anchor was dropped, the master had radioed the coast guard and Customs—Richter had heard him do it—on shore and they had been cleared immediately to take a small cargo on board. Richter did not understand how there should be so little interest from the authorities in their coming close to land, at night, and taking on a cargo.
The dinghy came alongside them and pitched under the hull. He threw down a rope-ladder and saw that its crew wore naval berets, but their bodies were in black wetsuits. The master had ordered the Filipinos below deck, the able seamen and the cook, as if the loading of the cargo was not their business. They had no integral crane on the Princess Rose, but two of the dinghy's crew scrambled up the rope ladder and the two left in the dinghy passed up four heavily weighted black canvas bags, then four big cardboard boxes that were more than a metre long and a half-metre deep and wide, then a deflated dinghy and an outboard motor.
The last man on the dinghy, rocking below on the swell, was not a sailor. He wore an oiled weatherproof coat, had polished shoes and a mane of silver hair that the wind tangled. When the bags and boxes were on board, and the deflated craft and the outboard, this older man was helped up the rope-ladder with one of the dinghy crew clutching his coat collar from above and one finding the rungs for his feet from underneath. The man showed no fear as he climbed up from the tossing black waters splashing between the hull and the dinghy. The master had come down from the bridge. Richter saw the man pass a thick brown envelope to him, and he watched as the master was given a receipt to sign. He thought the man had come to supervise the loading personally, as if he did not trust others to do his work. It impressed Richter, and confused him, that an obviously senior man bothered to board the Princess Rose to see the stowing of a cargo of less than a tonne weight.
Richter was joined by the mate and they started to transfer the bags and boxes, the craft and the outboard off the deck, and he had no more time to be impressed or confused. He did not see the man and the dinghy's crew leave. When the last box was in the mess, the master came to him and said that he should bring the ship to power. He went down into the bowels of the Princess Rose. Within fifteen minutes Richter had coaxed thrust from the diesel engine, heard the clanking grind of the anchor's cable being winched up, and felt the motion of the ship as she ploughed out into the Channel's wind. If he achieved the maximum from his engine, it would take them four days to reach the Polish port of Gdansk.
&nb
sp; He came without fanfare, like a wraith in the dark evening.
There had been delays in Moscow because a warning light, governing the undercarriage of the aircraft, had played up. Yuri Bikov should have been into Kaliningrad Military in the late afternoon. The problems of maintenance were more acute with each passing day. It suited him better to land in darkness. He had ordered a signal to be sent ahead that forbade any welcoming party. He wanted neither senior officials from the city's headquarters of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti nor the FSB resident at the Baltiysk naval base to meet him. One car and one driver were all that he required. He did not wish to draw attention to himself, was determined that his arrival should not be announced.
When his aircraft had taxied to a remote corner of the apron, the two men who had travelled with him were out first and down the steps, which bucked under their weight. They were his major and his sergeant. The major's expertise was in the areas of office organization, and his sergeant's was in the area of personal protection. They had been with him before and the respect between him and them was mutual. The major wore the executive suit of a young, successful businessman, and the sergeant wore a bulky jacket—sufficient to hide the Makharov pistol in his shoulder holster and the submachine-gun with the folding stock that rested in the jacket's inner pocket. Bikov followed them.
As was intended, the ground crew would have thought that the major was the man of enough importance to be flown from Moscow by military jet. Bikov was not noticed. A heavily filled duffel bag was hitched on his shoulder. He wore the boots that had been hosed but had not lost all of the Chechen mud that clung to the stitching and the laces, and the jeans he had had there, which had been washed but not pressed. There was a small fraying tear in the right knee. He had shaved the night before, the first time since going to Chechnya, enough for his audience with the general at the Lubyanka, and he would not shave again until he left Kaliningrad with his prisoner and his prisoner's confession; the stubble was already on his cheeks and chin.
They were driven away on the outer perimeter road, past a silent, darkened battery of surface-to-air missiles, avoiding the lights of the civilian terminal. They headed for the city and a hotel used by tourists from Germany, which military staff officers would be unlikely to visit. There they would dump their bags. Later, they would go to the back entrance of the city's FSB headquarters.
If any had known of the reputation of Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Bikov, they would have felt the aggravated chill of the north wind that blew on the Kaliningrad oblast. They would have recognized a man who was formidable, dangerous, who did not travel on business of slight importance. He was relaxed and at ease. Bikov asked no more of life than that challenges should be served up to him. He was sandwiched on the back seat between his sergeant and his major. His sergeant told the driver to switch off the car's heating, and his major wound down the window; neither needed to be told what he wanted. He sniffed the air, and on the chill of the wind was the sea's tang.
He was smiling.
Crow's flight, 475 kilometres away from Kaliningrad, another military aircraft landed. A C-130 Hercules, of transport command, out of the RAF base at Lyneham, landed at Templehof, the airport to the west of central Berlin.
Gabriel Locke had tried as they'd boarded to distance himself from the rest of Mowbray's army—and Mowbray, who still smelt of salt spray after his helicopter ride—but the loadmaster had refused him the seat forward and on the far side to the rest of the group. He was with them, was a part of them. When they'd stacked and circled over Templehof, he'd heard Mowbray launch into a description of the Airlift, as if what had happened in the summer of 1948 was important today. Locke had tried not to listen, and Smith, Protheroe, Flint and Wicks had made no pretence and had slept. The woman had worked hard at her nails with a file. In the dimmed light of the transport plane, where their leg movement was constricted by the cargo of wood crates on pallets destined for the embassy's military attaché, only Locke had been Mowbray's unwilling audience. On Mowbray's voice was a whiff of excitement—as if he had come home, as if he valued the city spread out below them in myriad pinpricks of light.
They came down feather sweetly.
Mowbray had shrugged out of his restraining harness before the aircraft had come to a halt, before the loadmaster had given him permission to disentangle himself, with the eagerness of a child about to play a favourite game. When the Hercules finally lurched to its stop, Mowbray had to reach out to steady himself, and Alice caught his arm. It was all pitiful to Gabriel Locke. The rear hatch ground down on its hydraulics to reveal a forklift waiting to lift down the cargo. Mowbray was first off. Locke wondered if the older man was going to do a papal job and kneel to kiss the oil-smeared tarmac. He didn't. He made a little jump to get from the hatch to the ground and then stood, his hands locked behind his back, and seemed to smell the air. Locke wondered why Mowbray should feel such blatant affinity with Berlin.
The team filed off. They were quiet. Alice followed them, carrying Mowbray's briefcase and his bag, and her own briefcase and suitcase; she was loaded like a hotel porter. Locke followed. The loadmaster was already busy with the forklift and had started to supervise the movement of the crates. Three cars waited for them with the engines ticking, spewing fumes. A woman came forward.
Locke heard her say, 'Welcome to Berlin, Mr Mowbray. I'm Daphne, Daphne Sullivan.'
He heard Mowbray say, 'You did well, Daphne. I congratulate you—first-class tradecraft.'
Daphne Sullivan was introducing them to a German civilian, who had brought a passport stamp with him. Mowbray's passport, false name, then Alice North's with her bogus identity. Locke seethed. His passport was genuine, in his own name. Why was he not considered sufficiently important to have been given a new passport with a new name? The team stood back once their passports had been stamped, then began to follow Mowbray to the cars. Alice was close to the greeter, Daphne Sullivan. Locke heard her low voice: 'But he'd been there?'
'The chalk was fresh. The footprints were very clear. I could see that he'd run along the beach. Yes, he'd been there.'
'There were two crosses and Y and F?'
A woman was queried and a woman scratched back. Locke heard Daphne Sullivan say sharply, 'That's what I wrote in my report. Is it a state secret? The Y and the F, that was important?'
Locke thought there was a fractional choke in Alice North's voice, and wouldn't have noted it if he hadn't been close. 'His first communication with us, when he'd walked in, he signed off as "Your Friend"—YF—and in his last line of the letter he'd written, "Protect me." Thank you for having gone there.'
Locke might have registered more, but he was tired as a dog, and his ears still hammered with the engine noise of the transport aircraft—and Alice was scampering with her briefcases and bags, towards the cars, and Mowbray was waving imperiously for him to hurry.
He murmured, 'How was it in there?'
'Foul,' Daphne Sullivan said curtly. 'It's an armed camp…I don't know what boys' capers you're going to indulge yourselves with, and don't want to know. I'm glad I'm not a part of it.'
Locke took the last place in the third car. Why had Alice North craned to listen when told about bloody footprints in the sand on a beach? They drove out of the airport. Why had Alice North thanked an officer from the Berlin station for merely doing her job? They took the fast lane in the late-night traffic.
Under the bright light of a spot lamp, Yuri Bikov read the files that were brought to him. His major had chosen the room and Bikov approved the choice. The room's door led on to a corridor, and at the end of the corridor were the fire-escape steps leading directly to the rear car park behind the building. While Bikov read, the sergeant was at work with a heavy screwdriver, changing the lock on the door. His major was setting up the new telephone system that would carry scrambled calls to the Lubyanka in Moscow.
Already, by midnight, a photocopier had run off a four-times-life size copy of a picture of Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko,
which was now fastened with adhesive strips to the wall behind the door. Neither man interrupted Bikov. He would work through till dawn, until the light came up on the windows across which the blinds were drawn. He read and pondered and let the thoughts swim, then looked up at the face that stared back down at him. He circled the man, and searched for weakness…it was always in the files, it would be there if he could recognize it.
'Land or sea—that's the first thing to be worked out. What do we want, land or sea?' Billy asked them.
'Do we have the choice?' Lofty shrugged.
'Course we do.' Ham snorted. 'That's why we're here, the "experts"—God help them. Go in by land or go in by sea? We tell Rupert God Almighty what we want.'
'Land. Land's better,' Wickso said. 'Go in by land, come out by land—last bit is cross-country. Better than by sea.'
Locke listened.
The hotel on Hardenbergstrasse was big and anonymous, and they hadn't roused a second glance from the harassed girls behind the desk. Rupert Mowbray wasn't with them, was elsewhere, and Alice had told Locke that 'Mr.' Mowbray had gone round the corner to a pension he'd always used in the 'old days'. Locke had repeated 'old days' to her sneeringly, but she hadn't responded. As soon as she'd taken her key, Alice had gone to the room allocated to her rather than stay with him for a drink. Locke had had two beers in the bar, then gone up to the corridor, fifth floor, where their rooms were.
The TV had been on in Smith's room and he'd knocked at the door, too awake to sleep. Maps were out on the bed. He was sat down by the TV, on which an overweight singer performed in short trousers and braces. They ignored him.
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