Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'You are there?'

  'We believe the exercise would be of exceptional interest to Captain Archenko. It is the general's invitation. Space is severely limited. The invitation is for Captain Archenko alone, not a subordinate. Do you have it written down?'

  'I do, but…I can transfer you to the senior officers' mess, or to Captain Archenko's quarters.'

  Ham grated, 'I am a busy man. Find Captain Archenko, deliver my general's message.'

  'Yes, it will be done.'

  The phone slipped from Ham's hand. He rocked and the sweat trickled down his neck and his stomach. 'God, don't just sit there. Get me a drink.'

  Viktor sat in total darkness.

  There was a light and respectful knock at his door.

  He had returned from Kaliningrad and had spent an hour in the outer room beyond the admiral's office working methodically through the remaining memoranda and messages in his in-tray. When he had cleared them, he had gone to his room. He had eaten no lunch and had no hunger for dinner.

  The quiet was broken by the rap at his door. He sat on the floor, his back against the foot of the bed. He didn't answer the knock.

  He heard a slight scuffle at the base of his door, then the retreat of footsteps down the outside stairs. Although his curtains were drawn, an opaque, dulled light penetrated the room and he saw the folded sheet of paper on the carpet.

  Viktor stared at it. Filling his mind was the snapshot image: the man approaching him, brushing against him, whispering the name of Alice, and the instructions. The words came again and again in his mind: I'm from Alice. Follow me in ten. Go where I go. And, still clear, the view of the car, the open door and the fence gap. Could he have run? Could he have burst through the line of watchers who blocked him? When he had been there, seen it and faced it, the answer to the moment of dilemma had been obvious. He would have been knocked down, they would have been taken at gunpoint from the car. Now, in his room, the doubt wormed in him. Then, he had been certain about everything; now he was certain about nothing. He crawled towards the door.

  A ribbon of light, from the landing and the stairs, seeped under it. Viktor reached the folded sheet of paper. He opened it. He spread the paper on the floor, held it against the door and the light flooded it. A night-flying exercise. A location. A time. An invitation. He was confused. He crumpled the paper and tossed it into a black corner, where his bin would be. He was on his haunches, and the self-pity that was fuelled by fear. He yearned to be back in the zoo, to have again the chance to run.

  He was jolted. He knew about drownings at sea. A man clung to a single straw if that was all he could reach. On his knees and elbows he crossed the carpet, groping for the crumpled paper. When he found it, Viktor stood, went to his bed and switched on the sidelight. He blinked in the brightness. He took his diary from the drawer of the chest beside the bed, flicked the pages until he saw the necessary number, and memorized it.

  He left his room, the door wide open, and slipped quickly down the stairs. He went out into the night air and scented the tang of the sea. Crossing the parade-ground, he sensed that watchers observed him, but did not turn to look at them. He could not use his own telephone, the one beside his bed. He strode towards the repair workshops down by basin number two. Only the night-duty sailors and engineers were there. Without explanation, he strode past the table where they sat, smoked and ate sandwiches, to the back of the workshop. There was a wall-mounted telephone. He dialled the Kaliningrad code and the number.

  'Good evening. This is Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky. You are NDO for airforce headquarters? You are, yes? Thank you. Some confusion here. Do you have a night-flying exercise, low-level simulated bombing across the Baltiskaya Kosa tomorrow evening?'

  The voice in his ear was abrupt. 'No, we do not.'

  A faint glimmer of hope was born, as if a candle were lit. 'To confirm: You do not have a night-flying exercise at 20.00 hours tomorrow evening?'

  'Absolutely not. Good night, Captain.'

  The light of the candle that had guttered, now flared brighter.

  Locke left the hotel. He had knocked on Alice's door, woken her, called to her, had dropped his bag and laid his note on it. By the time she'd opened the door the corridor was empty but for the bag and the note, and he was on the last flight of stairs, carrying a blanket from his bed and shielding it from the reception desk.

  He saw the fierceness of the lights ahead of him, brighter now than when he had come back to the Excelsior. Then there had been spotlights, now there were raised arc-lamps that brought unreal daylight to that part of the quay and the marina.

  The note he had left for Alice asked her to pay his bill when she checked out in the morning, bring his bag, and meet him in the forecourt of the railway station after she'd been picked up by Jerry the Pole. He'd given no explanation.

  To get to the stone road bridge over the Motlawa, he walked fast past the marina and kept clear of the lights. They were bringing the body from the pontoon. Four policemen laboured under the weight of the stretcher and water drained off it. He saw the scene-of-crime photographer and the flashes from his camera. Detectives stood in knots and watched. The back doors of a hearse were open. Locke had imagined men coming to his door, the same detectives that he now saw, and battering on it, him being confronted with the night porter, and being asked to explain what he had seen when he left the Excelsior Hotel because he had followed the Russian out. What had he seen? If he claimed diplomatic immunity then he identified himself as an intelligence officer, and by now they would know the Russian shared his trade. Two intelligence officers leaving the same hotel lobby within a minute of each other, and one dead, the other claiming he had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. He would not be believed. Libby Weedon, severe and remote, would be up from Warsaw before the first bloody cock crowed, and legal officers from London would be on the first flight. Would they protect him? Could he rely on them to play the diplomat's card for immunity? Do pigs fly? He had said, himself, with bravado: Anyway, if he's in difficulty, this Codename Ferret, I cannot see that anything can be done for him. Heads had nodded when he'd said it.

  The body went into the hearse. Locke walked head down as the hearse surged past him.

  He crossed the historic city, which had been restored with love from the ravage of the world war's firestorm. He was on Mariacka and the clatter of his shoes was the only sound around him. The amber-jewellery stalls and the shops were shuttered, the coffee bars were closed, as were the tourist restaurants; the boutiques were barred. A notice in his hotel had warned of the danger of walking at night, on one's own, through the streets of the old quarter, and had cited the dangers from pickpockets, muggers, addicts, thieves. It was for that danger that he had left behind the warmth of his room. The beat of his own footsteps echoed back at him from the high buildings with ornate gold-painted decoration on their pastel-painted walls.

  Locke wanted to run but dared not.

  He reached the station. The departures board was empty save for a long-distance train south to Katowice, the straggling passengers milling under it. It was years since Gabriel Locke had been in a mainline terminus so late, with the flotsam who travelled through the night in upright seats. He went into the subway tunnel.

  There were little groups of kids in it, some sitting against the tiled walls where the shadows of the shut kiosks darkened them, some already laid out flat on cardboard beds. He looked for a space. Vacant eyes watched him. He went the length of the tunnel and found a corner where the ceiling lights barely reached, the roof dripped and the wind came down the staircase ahead of him. He settled into the grime and wrapped the blanket tight around him. He snuggled under it. Here he felt, at last, safe. His own words laughed at him: Cut him adrift, forget him. Not worth the hassle. The train for Katowice rumbled on the track over the tunnel.

  He had trouble with the key at the front door. The bulb had gone in the porch and Bertie Ponsford swore because he could not find the keyhole. As he shifted,
he dislodged a geranium pot from its metal stand. A light came on upstairs, and that was enough for him to find the keyhole. He righted the stand and put the pot back in place.

  Inside his hall, he threw off his coat. She was at the top of the stairs. 'Are you drunk, Bertie?' It was not a criticism.

  'No, more's the pity…'

  Gail was coming down the stairs, tying the belt of her dressing gown.

  '…utterly sober, sadly—just couldn't get the key in the bloody lock.'

  She sat on the bottom step of the stairs. 'What happened? What's going on?'

  Around him everything was familiar and safe. It was a home that he and his wife had built over nearly thirty years of marriage. Paintings, the bric-a-brac of antiques fairs, little ornamental mementoes of foreign and domestic holidays, the wallpaper that they'd hung together two years before. It was all, he believed, threatened. The comfort of the castle was breached.

  'Nothing happened.' Ponsford cracked his fingers. His post was on the hall table and he pecked at it, examined the envelopes that would hold bills and circulars, but didn't open them. 'We couldn't do the pickup. Our man walked away, one direction. Our team drove away in the other.'

  'So, it's all gone belly up?'

  'No, no. Dear Rupert—never underestimate dear old Rupert. The second plan is now in place. Believe me, I am not sneering, but Rupert always had a second plan, and such a reasonable one. We're sending our team in by sea, can you believe that? We're sending armed men for a covert landing on Russian territory—and I've agreed to it. We all have.'

  'You're not being serious, Bertie. What'll happen to us?'

  He smiled sparkily. 'Early retirement, a carriage clock and a decanter, time for the garden—but the whiff of failure is banished by Rupert. He doesn't acknowledge the possibility of it. I agree to his preposterous idea because that way I show élan, and because I know that ultimately, Peter Giles is the one who has to rubber-stamp it. Peter agrees because I have, and anyway it'll go to the DG. The DG agrees because I have, and Peter has, and he will seem weak and fussy if he kills it. We're not the men of yesteryear, and we know it. We're not the glory boys of the past, but still we crave a little hidden limelight.'

  'I can't believe you're saying this, Bertie—if you're not drunk.'

  'Did you ever read any of those First World War books? You know, the mobilization, and railway timetables? The Austrians mobilized so the Russians did. Because the Russians mobilized, the Germans followed. With German mobilization, the French had to start the process, and we were sucked in so as not to be left behind. There was an inevitability, once Rupert mobilized. I suppose, then, in 1914, men all around the chancelleries of Europe wondered when they could have acted and stifled the chance of war, but by then it was too late—and it's too bloody late now. We had our chance when Rupert bloody Mowbray turned up, like a bad penny, on the doorstep in the night. I didn't have the balls to send him packing. Ah, well…'

  'You're doing a whinge, Bertie. Let's go to bed.'

  The Princess Rose slipped her moorings.

  The pilot took her out and towards the lanes of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme. Already, Rupert Mowbray had laid the ground; he was a master of disinformation. On his instructions, as the engineer had started up the diesel engine, the master had muttered to the pilot that the engine was sick, the power was uncertain, but he hoped it would last long enough to get the ship across the eastern Baltic with its cargo.

  In the master's cabin, now the operational centre for the team, his Dogs, Mowbray stood by the porthole window. They were quiet behind him as they prepared their gear, the kit they would take ashore. Clear of the mouth of the Motlawa river, the sea caught the Princess Rose and rocked it, and that, he had been told, was good.

  They would be boxed up in the confines of the cabin until they were at the extremity of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme, until the pilot went down the rope-ladder and jumped for the deck of the boat that would collect him; and they must all be quiet. The pilot should not know more men were on board than was stated in the master's crew declaration. The pilot took them to port and they skirted the headland. Mowbray wiped the porthole window and stared out. On the headland the monument was lit, a gaunt pillar rising up. He turned.

  Their eyes watched him, pierced him, and the Princess Rose rode the growing swell.

  'I've given, to London, the mission you will undertake a name, a fine name. This is Operation Havoc. All of Locke's communications from the ground to me will include the word "havoc". "Cry Havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War." "Havoc" is yours, gentlemen, not mine. Forgive me if I show slight emotion—God speed.'

  Mowbray stood at the porthole until he could no longer see the floodlit monument, and the Princess Rose dipped, fell, rose again and ploughed towards the open water.

  ... Chapter Eleven

  Q. Where is the distillery that produces the cheapest vodka liqueurs in Russia?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  The Princess Rose drifted.

  In the master's cabin, commandeered by Rupert Mowbray, the dog had finally won admittance. For the dog, the mate's cabin or the engineer's was not home. Home was on the master's cabin floor by the bed, and now the dog shared the territory with the weapons and the gear. Billy had shared out the equipment, had allocated responsibility.

  The freshening winds from the south-west pushed the Princess Rose in a jagged north-easterly line up the coast from the exit of the Inshore Traffic Separation Scheme.

  Lofty had the weapons. They had been lugged up the narrow ladder, through the entry hatch from the engine room and he had made four heaps of them. They had talked about what they wanted, what suited them, and what they could best remember from the long-ago days. They were men not inclined to noisy exuberance, but the sight of the weapons served further to quieten them. The heaps made a square around the sleeping dog.

  Each time he took a weapon from the black bags, Lofty—the disciplines were not forgotten—checked the breech to be certain it was empty then rattled the arming mechanisms and clicked the firing trigger. He had a respect for weapons, dinned into him by instructors at the commando training centre on the south coast of Devon and at the base at Poole. The respect would never be lost.

  Lofty had always been big with firearms, at Lympstone, at Poole and wherever he had served in the happy days. He had been the one who lingered in armouries, spent time with the men who were the custodians of weapons, and who read the magazines and the books cover to cover. For Billy he had laid out, by the dog's docked tail, a Vikhr SR-3 9mm short assault rifle with a rate of fire on semiautomatic of thirty rounds a minute and on automatic of ninety rounds; it had a maximum effective range of 200 metres. It was the right weapon for a leader who would take them where they were going. He knew that 'vikhr' was the Russian word for 'whirlwind', and he judged it right for suppressive, defensive fire. With it were the six magazines he had loaded with the 9mm bullets.

  By the sleeping dog's back legs, in the next neat pile, was Ham's firearm: a Model 61 Skorpion 7.65mm machine pistol. From a Czech factory, it was short, had a fold-over stock and was a mafiya firearm capable of intense volume of fire but effective only at short range. Lofty had seen the Skorpion fired on a range and would never forget the crashing punch of its power; it was for close quarters, in a building, on a stairwell, a last throw to drive back a superior force. He had loaded six more magazines and left them beside the Skorpion.

  By the dog's front paws, Lofty had laid the weapon selected for Wickso, the OTs-02 Kiparis submachine-gun, in service with Russian interior-ministry troops; the range of the Kiparis was little more than 100 metres, but its rate of fire on automatic was higher than that of the Vikhr. It came from Kazakhstan.

  At the dog's thrown-back ears, as it snored, was the hardware he'd chosen for himself. Lofty would be back marker when they had done the pickup, when they moved back towards the dinghy and their beach-head. It was the AK-74 assault rifle with a 40mm mounted grenade-launcher. He had fired it o
n a range, he knew the procedure of reloading the grenades, four a minute on a bad day and five on the best day. The weapon would buy time if the pack followed them, closed on them. Lofty would be principal fire support: he had loaded ten magazines of ammunition for the rifle and had laid out beside them twenty high-explosive grenades, five more that threw out phosphorus, and six loaded with smoke. If it all went to hell, Lofty with the grenade-launcher was the last best chance they would have. Then there was a pistol for each of them, a Makharov and two magazines, useless but Lofty knew it would make them all feel better.

  They drifted in the darkness and the navigation of the master was expert. Only rarely did they hear him use the main engine to correct the direction they took.

  Ham handled the communications. A headset for each of them, with a bar microphone, plastic earpieces, and a control box to be strapped to their belts. His voice murmured as he tested each earpiece and each microphone, from the workbenches of a Bulgarian factory. When he was satisfied, he put the earpiece, microphone and control box on the pile beside the weapons and the ammunition.

  The sea caught them, rocked them. It was the best sort of night they could have.

  The kit was for Billy. He plundered the boxes. To each pile of weapons, ammunition and communications gear, he added a wet suit, a pair of flippers, socks, camouflage tunics and trousers, boots from Slovakia, the night-sight goggles, the compasses…and the Meals to Eat, dry rations that had not been opened since their capture in the Kuwaiti desert eleven years earlier, which still carried the Russian instructions duplicated in Iraqi Arabic…and the condoms for keeping weapons' barrels dry, the webbing for ammunition magazines and stun grenades, the masks to keep the smoke out of their windpipes, toilet paper and clingfilm…and bergens, the inflatable waterproof bags, the sealed water canteens, the explosives and detonators. Like a housewife, Billy checked each item, and any label not Russian or Russian satellite was snipped off. They were deniable, and each of them had been taught—long ago, brutally—the science of Resistance to Interrogation.