Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  He felt himself failing.

  The door opened and came across the room, flying free. Light blazed in his face. The fingers loosened. Grey gas smoke spread. Above him was the ceiling, around him were the bare walls and under him was the concrete floor. The fingers came off his throat and he gasped, drank in the smoke spreading from the ceiling, the walls and up from the floor. He should have…

  The figures were grotesque, huge, smoke swirling around them. The pain came to his eyes and his lungs burned and he rolled away, and a weapon barrel broke through his front teeth and bedded in his throat. He heard the command cry.

  'Viktor, identify yourself—which is Viktor?'

  The command was in his own language, but muffled. His eyes were open. He did not dare to wipe them, to cleanse them of the pain. There were three men in the room, black-suited with the water still on them, and the great masks guarding their faces. He saw the hand raised, then a torch shone sharply into his prey's face. The hands reached down. His lungs were filled and his eyes were coated in the smoke. Arms grabbed at his prey. He rolled to escape the smoke and the torchlight torturing his eyes. A shot exploded close to him, but he had rolled. Windows had been thrown open, and doors. Each time they passed a window or a doorway where a face peered at them, Ham shouted in Russian: 'Main gate—major incident—barricade yourself inside.' Little went through Ham's mind as they ran, but paramount was the need to exploit the first minutes of chaos. He had shot both of them in the building and the blood had spurted up from the one who had groped for his shoulder holster and the droplets had bounced to the eyepiece of his mask and there were smears there from when he had wiped it. They were going towards the canal and Billy's back was only a blurry shape through the smears.

  The package was a dead weight, and with each stride was heavier. He clung to the package, as Wickso did. Between him and Wickso there was a little gasp of pain. His mind focused. The package had no coat, no tunic, and the white shirt shone out each time lights trapped them. The package had no belt and clung to his trousers to stop them sliding down, impeding his stride. They ran past workshops, and the track Billy took was over gravel. He heard the whimper from the package's throat. He looked down.

  The package wore no shoes, no boots. Its weight went down on the gravel and it shuddered. They were going under a high light. The face of the package winced. He saw the already shredded thin black socks. The package was a passenger. They carried him to the quay and, behind them, the shouting, the alarm blasts and the siren made a cacophony of sound.

  Lofty covered them. Wickso hooked a little life-jacket over the package's shoulders and snapped the clasp.

  Ham said, 'He can't run, he's no shoes.'

  Billy threw the bags into the canal and the blackness of it seemed to call them. They went down into the water.

  The telephone rang, unanswered, on his desk, and the alarm pealed from the siren on the roof of the headquarters building. The fleet commander stared down at the key beside his hand. The curtains of the inner office were open and Admiral Alexei Falkovsky had expected to go to the window in time to see the tail-lights of the car driving towards the outer gate. Then he would use the key. Through the evening and the night he had thought only of the waters of the Tsushima Strait and the fate of a previous Baltic Fleet commander in chief, Admiral Rozhdestvensky, and the disaster visited on the navy's reputation then, which still lingered. A fist beat against his door, and a voice shouted his name with increasing impatience. It was eleven minutes past three o'clock in the morning. He had thought by now he would have seen the car drive his friend, his chief of staff, his protégé, away towards the main gate. His door was opened.

  He yelled at the night duty officer, 'Fuck off, get out! Fuck off away.'

  He was told, 'The base has been attacked, a terrorist attack. Two of Colonel Bikov's colleagues have been murdered in the FSB building, but Colonel Bikov has survived. The terrorists are in flight and with them is Archenko. The base is now on black alert, the Ready platoon is about to move.'

  He never looked up. His head sank, and his eyes rested on the key.

  They spilled out of the senior officers' mess. The last of the drinkers lurched on to the step. Three had stayed with Piatkin, the zampolit, to gain a glimpse of the saloon car that would take Archenko away. As the zampolit on the base, he was always assured of having toadyish men around him who would laugh with him and share his gossip. The three represented the network that augmented their service salaries with the sale of weapons, building materials, food from the kitchens to Chelbia, who paid well. At the moment the siren had started the telephone call had come and the steward had passed it to Piatkin. He, and the three others, shouted slurred orders into the night at any sailor or infantryman passing them, at any officer racing past in a jeep.

  'Extra guard on the gate, seal the base. Double the perimeter patrols—treble them.'

  'Road blocks on the Kaliningrad road, get them in place.'

  'Reinforce the frontier, close the frontier—no traffic out, no trains—shut the airport. Mobilize the Ready platoon.'

  Piatkin, swaying, started to run towards the armoury where the Ready platoon would be forming up, where he could take control. The drink seemed to slosh in his body. Muddled, but already present, was a sense of impending disaster. He was responsible for base security. He would face an unmerciful inquiry. He ran towards the armoury, speeded on his way by the catastrophe that had enveloped him.

  The queue snaked back out of the building.

  One at a time, the conscripts were handed assault rifles off the racks, two empty magazines, and had to dig in a wide box for fistfuls of ammunition. Only one clerk served the queue. Half dressed, half asleep, the conscripts took what they were given and shuffled back outside.

  Vasiliev was at the back. Maybe he had slept for two hours, restless and fitful, but no more. His head ached from the explosion of noise, the siren blasts and the screams of the sergeant. The sergeant, a demented ghost, had run down the length of the dormitory barracks stripping the blankets off them. Behind him the platoon formed up, and among the yawning, coughing and grunting was the scrape sound of ammunition being loaded into magazines, and the rattle on the paving of dropped bullets, and the yelling of the sergeant, and the shouting of the zampolit. In front of him, an assault rifle was handed over and rounds were gathered up.

  'Next.'

  A rifle was thrust at him. 'No, I use the heavy machine-gun.'

  'You use what you are given.'

  'I should be given the NSV heavy machine-gun.'

  The clerk threw up his hands in exaggerated complaint, then shuffled off to the back of the armoury. When he reached the far end he shouted for Vasiliev to come to help him. The sergeant called after him that the whole 'fucking platoon' was not waiting for him he should catch them up at the headquarters building. Two heavy youngsters, the last in the dormitory to be half dressed, Mikhail and Dmitri, made the final length of the queue. Piatkin's voice rose above the sergeants; the platoon should go immediately to the headquarters building. He went past the desk and down past the rifle racks into the dim-lit recess of the building. Against the rear wall was Vasiliev's weapon resting on its tripod—as he had left it when he had come back from the range, and after he had cleaned it.

  'Don't think I'm carrying it. You want it, you carry it. And how much ammunition?'

  'Two hundred rounds, ball and tracer and—'

  A voice, soft as zephyr wind, behind him said, 'He wants seven hundred and fifty rounds—ball and tracer and armour piercing—and he wants a second barrel.'

  Vasiliev turned. The man close to him was slightly built and wore dirtied casual clothes. There was blood on his hands, caked dry, and his eyes were deep reddened as if from weeping. 1

  The clerk snapped, 'And who are you to give orders in my—'

  'I am Colonel Bikov, FSB military counterintelligence. He wants seven hundred and fifty rounds and a second barrel, and he gets them whether I have to break your neck or not. An
d I want one 82mm mortar, and I want twenty-five para flares. How do you want your neck to be?'

  He barely knew Mikhail and Dmitri. They were wide-shouldered, wide-gutted, and inseparable. He knew they came from the great wheat plains of central Russia, near to the Urals. He'd heard other conscripts say that Mikhail wet his bed at night and that Dmitri cried for his home and family. They had been one month in the platoon, and he had never seen evidence of that. Standing behind the shabby bloodstained man, the great swollen muscles of their shoulders burst inside the singlets and the open tunics, and their hands—big as hams from a smokehouse—reached for the 82mm mortar that the clerk pointed to, and the boxes for the mortar shells.

  They had the machine-gun and its belts of ammunition, the mortar and the boxes. They struggled, the four of them, back down the length of the armoury shed to the door. The clerk shouted at them that he needed signatures.

  A second platoon of naval infantry was reaching the armoury and had begun to form a queue.

  Vasiliev struck out towards the headquarters building.

  The command cut in the night air. 'You are with me. You take my orders.'

  'Where do we go?'

  'To the nearest point of water, where there are no fences and no regular patrols.'

  He pointed towards the canal. Now Vasiliev led. His right hand on the barrel, and Bikov's on the shoulder rest, took the weight of the machine-gun; with their left hands they carried the ammunition box. Behind them, with the strength of farm-boys, Mikhail and Dmitri brought the 82mm mortar and the boxes of flares. They could not run, could barely trot. After a hundred metres, he thought the officer struggled, but he had seen his face and did not think this was a man likely to show his weakness.

  Vasiliev said, 'May I ask, sir, did they take Captain Archenko?'

  'They took Captain Archenko.'

  'The sergeant said Captain Archenko was a traitor, and that terrorists had freed him and…'

  '…and murdered two good men. What is your name?'

  'Vasiliev, sir.'

  'Your given name?'

  'Igor, sir.'

  'Please, Igor, keep your strength and don't talk. Please, don't waste your strength.'

  A searchlight played over the base, flitted between buildings and over roads, and as they struggled forward the light caught the glimmer of the canal.

  The searchlight's beam tracked from the base to the beach below its mounting on the wall of the fortress. For a few moments its cone crossed the length of the sand and the sea wall then it raked on further and out on to the water. The beam had the power to penetrate the mist that had followed the rain. When it hooked on to a breakwater or a buoy marking a sunken wreck, it lingered, then moved on. It found a speck of white, traversed beyond it, and was jerked back. The cone of the searchlight's beam settled on five men, one in white and half out of the water clinging to something that the searchlight's crew could only identify as a floating black bag. One screamed into his radio what the searchlight showed them, and the other held the target. The target was close to the wall on the west side of the canal. The beam locked on to the swimmers.

  Locke was away from the track and could move quicker on a cushion carpet of pine needles; the wand stick eased his path. There were no more brambles to catch at his clothes and tear his hands, and fewer of the hazels, which had whipped back on to his face when he'd blundered into them. He was beyond the line of trenches and bunkers, and he thought that this ground, now pine-planted, had been given up in that old battle. It was the first time in six years that he could remember being without the weight of the mobile telephone on his belt.

  He felt a sense of peace. The phone was always on his belt in Warsaw and had been with him every working day, and every weekend day, and had been on charge at night, always within reach. The phone, its presence and its link to his work, had been confirmation of his status as an intelligence officer, a symbol of constant responsibility.

  The mobile phone was now in the pocket of Alice's coat, which hung on the back of a chair in the kitchen of the bungalow. Only when it was over, when she needed her coat, would she find his mobile phone. He wanted no contact with a world away from the sand spit and the forest.

  Without the phone, he was free of them. He was liberated from Ponsford and Giles, and from Rupert bloody Mowbray. He was released from the spectral image of the dead man floating under the pontoon bridge.

  He heard a whisper of sound that was alien to the motion of the high pine canopy and to the tread of his shoes over the carpet of needles.

  Eight miles from his parents' farm, a direct line over fields and past rock outcrops and bracken slopes, was a quarry. Regular enough that a clock could be set to it, they had blasted a fresh fall of granite boulders each working morning at six a.m. As a child, in the school term, he had slept through the distant crack of the explosion, but in the holidays his father had pitched him out of bed and he had been frogmarched to the milking parlour to help. Every holiday morning, milking began at five forty-five a.m. Sourly, he had driven the cattle into the bays of the parlour, and every one of those mornings he had promised himself that as soon as he was able he would be gone from the cold, the cow shit and the smell of the farm. Ten minutes before the blasting, eight miles away, as the milk was sucked from the beasts' udders, a siren warned of the explosion. For ten minutes, if the wind was from the east, in the milking parlour he could hear it faintly.

  It was the same sound. He knew they were running.

  ... Chapter Seventeen

  Q. Where is the longest sandspit in Europe?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  The first rung on the ladder had broken when they had gone down into the water, a second fell away as they came back up out of the canal.

  By Wickso's wristwatch, it had taken them seven minutes to swim the width of the canal, and for the last two they had been held in the pool of light. There had been no escape from it, nor was there now. Billy was up the ladder, lay on his stomach and reached back down for the first of the two inflated bags; Lofty was on a rung just below the waterline, and it gave. He fell back and the bag slipped down into the water and seemed, tantalizing, to float away from his arm's range. Lofty had to give up his hold on the ladder's stanchion to retrieve it. It was not difficult to see, because the searchlight was on them, but more time was lost. They no longer had Surprise. They had Speed on their side and they still needed a Shitbucket full of luck. Speed, but three of them, and the man they knew as Ferret, floundered in the water, with two inflatable bags.

  Lofty grasped it and again launched himself at the ladder. He went up and heaved the bag past Billy's shoulder. Lofty was ripping the zipper on the bag, and then Ferret was up beside him and gasping. Lofty saw, in the searchlight's cone, the pallor of Ferret's face; the white shirt clung to him, his trousers were half down to his knees. One of his socks had come off in the swim and the sole of his foot was a lacerated skein of lines. Then Ham was up with the second bag, and Wickso. Lofty, on his knees, dragged the remaining weapons out of the bags—what they hadn't needed for the snatch—felt that each of them had stayed dry, and threw at them all the reserve ammunition magazines.

  He snatched up the grenade-launcher. They left the bags behind, and ran—each with their own scuttling stride—towards the shelter of the wooden hut. Finally, they had lost the searchlight.

  The beam, almost angrily, seemed to Lofty as he looked back to thrash around for them, first it roved beyond them and it scuttled among the sheds and huts and buildings, then it swept back and lit the canal's quay. It retreated, searched the width of the waterway, and then it snapped up a rowing-boat. Lofty saw four men in the rowing-boat, and two bent their backs on oars. But finding the boat was an aberration for the searchlight and it swerved erratically back to the wooden hut.

  None of them had spoken since the far side of the canal's quay, when they had been close to the half-sunken ship and the moored landing-craft. Then it had been Ham. Now it was Ham. 'He's got no shoes.'

 
'His problem,' Wickso grated. 'He'll have to manage.'

  'We've got eleven klicks to do.'

  'His feet are the last thing I'm worrying about,' Billy said.

  A burst of shots hit the upper woodwork of the hut, and some might have sprayed into its roof of corrugated metal. They had escaped the searchlight's cone but not the ever-present and penetrating wail of the siren, and they could hear distant shouting and the roar of jeep engines. They ran.

  There was glass and old iron scrap, sharp stone and rubble crunching under their four pairs of boots. Lofty was back marker, the last of the diamond's points. He heard each of Ferret's stifled cries, and he could see the man's weight flop on Wickso's shoulders and Ham's. Himself, he felt Ferret's pain. He remembered when he had turned in his seat behind the driving-wheel of the old Mercedes, and he had looked up past Ham and out through the opened door and he had seen the same face and the backs of the men who had blocked him. The man, Ferret, had protected them. And then he remembered Alice North beside the Braniewo road, in the farm gateway. It was owed to both of them.

  Billy called back, 'Where we cut through, would a vehicle crash the fence?'

  From Wickso, 'Probably would.'

  Billy called again, 'How long does it take to hot-wire?'

  From Ham, 'Less than a minute, but it's a diversion.'

  They ran in the darkness. There were no more shots, but the shouting was louder, and headlights speared between buildings. They were among scrub bushes and nettle banks. They had to keep moving. Every dozen strides, Lofty would spin, face behind him and hold the launcher poised. If there was close pursuit, and if he fired, he confirmed their position—to shoot was the last resort.

  The vehicle park was in front of them. It was wide and open, but there was a line of six lorries and a second line of three jeeps. Billy led them. None of them would contradict an order from Billy. He ran towards the furthest jeep, the one closest to the wire fence. He made the signs—Lofty would drive, Ham would hot-wire, Wickso would hold the torch. The noises behind them were louder, as if a wasps' nest were disturbed and the creatures with their stings ranged after them.