'Who goes first, Wickso, you or me?'
'Not him,' Wickso grinned and looked down at Ferret. 'And can't be Locke…'
Locke murmured something that Wickso barely heard, about 'watching their backs'. He held the Skorpion away from him, as if it might bite.
'…between you and me, Lofty.'
'I'd like to.'
'You go first, then, Lofty.' He unfastened the bleeper from his webbing. It made a shrill repetitive howl, but long blasts. He hooked it on to Lofty's webbing, where it could be seen and heard easily. When Lofty was closer to the dinghy the bleeps would come shorter; when he was over it they would be shortest. 'We'll follow when you get into the water. Two targets. No call to make life easy for them. When we get to you, you'll be under and breaking the bottles. If there was a second way, I'd take it. It's what we've got.'
He heard Locke mutter again about 'covering fire'.
'Look, I didn't ask you to trip along, don't know why you did—just fucking shut up.'
Lofty heaved the launcher into Wickso's lap, then took all the grenades he had from his pouches—there were six left, not that it mattered, and a seventh up the tube. All that had been fired had been wasted. Lofty was off his stomach and seemed to crouch, like a sprinter in the blocks.
'If I don't…'
'Don't even go there, Lofty. That's crap.'
'Yes, yes.'
'You can do it, Lofty, and we're right behind you.'
He saw the tremble of Ferret's body, and his arms seemed to be in spasm; his hands were clasped together as if to break the shaking. It was a quick gesture, meant as kindness: Wickso took Ferret's neck in his hand and squeezed hard. Ferret choked. Give him something else to think about, Wickso reckoned. And he needed it, they all did. It would take Lofty, in the wetsuit, a clear fifteen seconds to reach the beach, then twenty-five to reach the waterline, then he was left with the waifs and strays. He squeezed Ferret's neck again, hurt him some more. Not kindness now, but to ready him.
He barked at Locke, 'You just follow me, stay on my shoulder. I don't hang about for you.'
He felt the fear squeeze his guts worse than he had squeezed Ferret's neck. He had seen Billy and Ham. He knew the hitting power of the machine-gun, and he knew the skill of the man who fired it. The fear cramped his stomach.
Lofty was rocking—waiting for the gun. There was a dullness, a darkening. Two flares down, and another drifting lower to the beach. A gloom spread across the dunes, the sands and the sea.
Wickso snarled, 'For fuck's sake, Lofty, get on with it—or do you want a bloody cup of tea first?'
Lofty was up and the shadows spread on him. He took a first hesitant step away from the trees. He would have heard the whip in Wickso's voice, and perhaps the fear was infectious. The darkness seemed to creep over the open dunes and down on to the beach. He was clear of the trees. To Wickso it was like the crack of the pistol…the flare burst above him, hung, and the light blistered away the shadows. Lofty shambled away from them.
Wickso understood the trick played on them. The flares had been allowed to die. The marksman or the man who directed the marksman wanted them flushed from the trees. The bait was to let the flares fall, to recreate the natural murk, to get them out and unprotected. The brightness, the return of daylight, fell on Lofty. Wickso watched, willed him on. Maybe Lofty had covered a quarter of the ground, gone a quarter of the way across the dunes. Trying to sprint, but not able to because the sand under his feet was soft, giving. He had asked too much of Lofty but, then, too much had been asked of all of them. Lofty was the simple one, the one who was led, the one who raked leaves from graves, Lofty…
He said, emptiness in his voice, 'When we start there is no stopping. You don't stop for me, I don't stop for you. We follow Lofty.'
Lofty had crossed half of the dunes, then there was the open beach where kids in that sunshine might have played. The big man ran and his boots slithered, slid in the giving sand. Wickso pulled Ferret up, and kept a tight hold on his collar. He tensed. Wickso stabbed a backward glance at Locke. He saw a vacant stare. He cleared spit from his dried-out mouth, coughed it. Lofty was going over the edge of the dunes.
'Take him.'
He heard Bikov's voice.
The sight was set for 1200 metres. He had tracked the target for ten seconds, from the moment the target had emerged from the treeline. He had held the target, running but not well, from the flare's burst. The fitness instructors made the conscripts sprint on the loose sand of the dunes by the ruined village of Rybacij. He knew how hard it was to go fast on the dunes. Magnified for him, the target's knees pumped but could not gain good grip. His finger was on the trigger's bar. He paused his breath, squeezed the bar, and the thudding weight pressed into his shoulder. The noise exploded around him.
As he watched the tracer round go, the target went down. The target, in the scope sight, broke its stride, stopped, stood upright, then fell. The target was not pitched sideways, or backwards or forwards; it subsided. The target collapsed. His finger eased from the trigger bar.
Vasiliev said, 'I tell you, Colonel Bikov, there is not another man, not a conscript or an instructor NCO or an officer, who could have hit a moving target at 1200 metres—only me. You have seen me shoot. What am I, Colonel Bikov?'
'You are the best, Igor.'
'The barrel was warm. I did not need the help of the tracer because my first shot was perfect. You will not see better shooting, Colonel.'
'When the last of them makes the run, and Archenko—and they must—I will see better shooting. You are supreme.'
'Did you see, Colonel, that I made what we call a "beaten zone"? It has the shape of a cigar, one that an officer would smoke. Inside the beaten zone of a heavy machine-gun, no target can survive. The "beaten zone" is the margin of error, caused by the shift of the tripod's feet, thirty metres long, two metres wide. When I shoot, anything in the "beaten zone" is dead.'
'I salute you, Igor.'
He heard only the praise heaped on him. He did not take his eye from the sight as he nudged the crosshairs away from the body, black under the bright light, and traversed them back towards the trees, where the target had come from. Had he taken his eye from the sight, twisted his head, let his gaze wander down the line of bullets waiting for feeding into the breech, then he would have seen the eyes of the colonel, and he would have known that they did not match the honey of the words…and had he looked beyond the eyes, where the mortar was set up, he would have seen the anger that misted the faces of the farm-boys and the contempt of the petty officer. He did not. Vasiliev—proud, the exhilaration pounding, the best—did not know he was despised, detested.
As the flare fell, two more were fired. He was his own man. He had no more need of the friendship of Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko. His excellence was proven. He watched the trees and waited for the last of them to break, and for the glimpse of the white shirt in the crosshairs.
The arm came up. They saw the black sleeve and the hand that was stained with dirt and blood, and it was clenched as if to withstand pain. It was rigid. Wickso couldn't help himself…The arm was raised above a gently rippling lake of grass stems, as if it had been thrust up from deep water and now broke the surface. Wickso wanted to weep.
The arm fell back, as if the water closed over it.
'Give it a minute,' Wickso said.
The treeline was a refuge. While they stayed there, harboured by the pines, they were safe. His mind rambled. He kept his hand on Ferret's shoulder and felt the pounding of the blood in the veins that wound around the upper spine. Locke was behind him, and ignored. He could see all of the dunes and most of the beach and he could see, clear, the water, could make out each small, surging wave. Out beyond the waves and the white caps was the ship. She seemed to come so slowly, and far to the east of her, but coming faster, was a bow wave—bright white in the gloom. If he could see the bow wave, Wickso knew it, they were late, the schedule was gone. The dawn came. He sent a signal.
No frills, no favours—no call-signs, no sign-offs, no chatter. Delta 3 was down, they were going for the dinghy.
The minute was exhausted, and another. Wickso said, 'Just one more minute, get our breath back, then we'll hack it.'
He was thankful he couldn't see Lofty. The waving grass stems, thin and green-yellow, hid Lofty. And more thankful that he couldn't hear Lofty. Wickso knew about death in the field. Lofty, he hoped, was unconscious. If he was still alive, but critically wounded, his pulse rate would be slipping to twenty or thirty, down from sixty to eighty, slipping towards the coma, on the route between life and death, and the coma would stifle what was left of the heartbeat. Lofty, Wickso hoped, was now clinically dead and within twenty minutes—after the creeping brain damage—would be biologically dead. Another minute had gone. He loved Lofty, could have wept for the big, quiet man who was now down on the dunes, hidden by the grass stems.
'We give it one more…'
Ferret turned his head, looked up at him.
'We give it one more minute, do you understand me?' Wickso spoke more slowly, to a child, and held up a single finger. 'One more minute.'
'I understand English. You do not have to speak carefully. I understand everything you say.'
'Sorry. I didn't know. Sorry, sir.'
'I am Viktor—do we have one more minute?'
Behind him, from the side of his vision, Wickso saw that Locke had discarded the Skorpion and his hand now lay on the grenade launcher; he could make out the deep-ploughed shadow lines in Locke's forehead as if he studied it to find a truth.
Locke said, 'You have to go, you don't have one more minute.'
Wickso flared, 'We go when I say we go. We go when I am ready to go. I run this bloody show. We go when I decide it is the right time.'
Locke said, 'You don't have another minute.'
Viktor said softly to Wickso, 'I understand that you are frightened. I am frightened. For three weeks I have been frightened, sometimes beyond control, sometimes within control, but frightened. It does not make you a lesser man. Too much is asked of you. You are the bravest of men…it is better that you acknowledge the fear.'
Locke said, 'Fuck the fear—just get moving.'
Wickso twisted his body. He hit Locke, caught him with a clenched-fist punch to the side of the chin and saw the head jerk back. When the head was back, he hit it again. His third punch split Locke's lip. He was over him and the blows came in a frenzy. Wickso had seen Billy without his leg and Ham without the upper part of his head, and he had seen Lofty's arm raised in the pain spasm. Locke did not fight him and did not cover his face, just stared back, and with his fingers Wickso would have gouged the eyes, but he was pulled off. Viktor held him, smothered him, held his arms tight so that he could not reach Locke's eyes. In front of him was the stretch of the open dunes and the beach that had no cover and the sea where the mist had lifted, and he saw himself magnified in the crosshairs of a gun sight.
Wickso panted, 'We go when I say we go.'
'Victory has many fathers, but defeat is a lonely child.'
Maybe he had read it but he did not know in what volume. Perhaps he had been told it but Bertie Ponsford could not recall when or by whom.
The technician had brought the signal through the glass door dividing the annexe from the Central Communications Unit. Four, five times he read it, willing the words to disappear, change, be erased, 'Delta 3 down.' He could not alter it.
Bertie Ponsford felt the loneliness.
He turned and faced the screen. The outline of a head with no features stared down at him. He was not the best with matters technical. He had been on the courses where senior officers were drilled by hard-faced, patronizing young women, in the arts of electronics. He could manage the Chinagraph pencil that linked to the screen's image—pathetic, really, that he could only manage. He put crude hairs on the head's scalp, and ears. He did not attempt the eyes, because he did not know whether they were tight set or wide, or a mouth. He brought slight life to the opponent, the enemy, but he did not know the man—all he could be certain of was that one of Giles's 'little people' had bested him.
He cleared his table.
Bertie Ponsford thought they played a game, an old man's game. But others had intruded, younger men, who did not know the rules. Younger men had spoiled the pleasure of the game by barging into it. He gathered his papers and files together and placed them in his briefcase.
The technician had his back to him and was deep in a magazine. His going was not noticed. He followed in the footsteps where the Director General had led, where Giles had gone. He justified himself—to cut a firebreak was sensible.
The lift surged him up to the Russia Desk floor. If he hurried he would be clear of the building before the first of the day shift came on. His hurried, heavy footfall clattered down the corridor past the numbered doors, past the noticeboards where holiday lettings were advertised and invitations were posted for players for Sunday morning sports teams and where the in-house orchestra and Light Opera and Dramatic Society advertised, and the newest amendments to health and safety 'in the workplace' regulations were posted, and he swiped his card for entry to his office.
It was all so damnably normal.
To keep it normal, Bertie Ponsford would need a firebreak—a bloody wide one. From the start of the adventure his name had been loud in the minutes. He checked that all of his papers were off his desk and in the safe. Without a firebreak, he would be destroyed. He took down his coat from the stand. It had been a dream. He looked out of the window and saw the early commuters on the Embankment across the river, and the first speeding buses. Whether he survived or whether he was swept away he would never again speak with Rupert Mowbray. He remembered Mowbray's leaving party. All the older men drunk, and all the younger officers eyeing them with embarrassment, or amusement, and the talk had been of the glory days when the writ of the Service ran wide. The decanter and the crystal glasses had been presented, and then—in his cups—Mowbray, moist-eyed, had told them of the worst morning he had experienced in forty years with the Service: the shocked, hushed gloom in the little corner of the Broadway building, when the news had come through of the execution of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. 'Handkerchiefs out, and bottles from cupboards, not a single silly little frightened giggle—like the mourning wake for an esteemed friend. A man of infinite courage lost because we didn't get off our bloody arses or lift a finger for him.' Nobody, then, had told Mowbray he was talking second-class rubbish. Then the talk had gone back to the glory days. Old men jerking off…and he, Bertie Ponsford, was one of them.
He closed the door after him.
Down the length of the corridor he scraped the head of his battery razor across his cheeks, chin and upper lip. By the time the lift dropped him in the atrium, he thought he had made himself passably decent. His last gesture, before the doors opened and exposed him, was to straighten his tie. Crisis? What crisis? Already the first of the day shift were busy swiping for admission. He slipped towards the main entrance.
The cool morning air caught him. The streetlights still burned but the dawn negated their power. The first cars were arriving, being flagged through the outer gates. The early cyclists in their gaudy Lycra kit were dismounting. The stream on foot pressured round him. He stood on the pavement, looked for a taxi.
'Morning, Mr Ponsford,' the voice trilled behind him. 'Off home, then?'
He turned. Clarence beamed at him.
'Yes, off home.'
Clarence winked. 'All done and dusted, is it, Mr Ponsford?'
'Where's my best bet for a taxi?'
'Taxis are always best across the bridge. Been a good night, has it? If it's not impertinent, Mr Ponsford—well done.'
'What do you mean?'
The second wink was heavier, and a grin. 'Just my little joke, Mr Ponsford. The likes of a gentleman such as yourself don't stay overnight unless it's for something worth the sweat—a big, big show, what the Service is about—like old times. No offence.'<
br />
He went on his way, far from a spit of sand in the eastern Baltic. He cleared his mind. He would be behind his firebreak when the final message came in, with the phone at home off the hook. He would be in bed, and secure. He would be safe from the fate of Ferret, and from Mowbray's team, and from young Locke, whom madness had caught—not his worry.
He walked briskly up the pavement and began to wave for a taxi. Others could take the strain, were welcome to it.
The problem lay at Piatkin's table.
Military and airforce officers now hustled for space in the operations room, and generals were reported on the road from Kaliningrad. The problem was his—the ship out in territorial waters. He was watched. By default, he had assumed responsibility, but now the weight of it hung on him. Ringing through his mind was the accusation: the failure of security could only have been caused by his incompetence or by his intention. He would rot in premature retirement, or in gaol. In the crowded operations room, the only free space was close to him…the ship. He was told the ship's history, its engine failure in Gdansk and the repairs, its loading, then the repeat failure. He was told it had been boarded, checked, and found to be above suspicion. The ship, named to him as the Princess Rose, was now under power, moving towards the beach, and a patrol-boat closed on it. The commander of the patrol-boat demanded instructions. Many times Vladdy Piatkin checked the chart map. As a zampolit attached to the Baltic Fleet he had a rudimentary knowledge of naval affairs, but it was just that, rudimentary. The ship flew the flag of convenience of Malta. Alarm bells, as shrill as the sirens that had tipped him out of the senior officers' mess, pealed in his head. If he panicked, ordered the patrol-boat to fire on the ship prematurely, he would be gutted by the inquiry board that would follow. Nobody, none of the uniformed, medal-ribboned officers, stepped forward to help him. He broadcast his order.
'Intercept, then escort away from the coastline. Do not open fire unless you face resistance and can confirm the ship is engaged actively in the land action. Get the fucking thing out of the area.'
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