Colonel Butler's Wolf

by Anthony Price

  He shrugged. “There could be something in it, I suppose. Take away the natural leaders of any country and you cut it down in size. My Dad used to say that half the trouble in our bit of Lancashire in the twenties and thirties was all because our lads led the attack on Beaumont Hamel on the Somme in 1916. The men who should have been running the businesses —and the unions—had all died on the German barbed-wire there.”

  Every November 11 they had gone down to the War Memorial after the parade had dispersed and the crowds thinned away, leaving the bright red poppy wreaths and the forests of little wooden crosses stuck in the short-trimmed grass like the forests of larger crosses in the war cemeteries across the Channel, only far smaller. Rain or shine they had gone, his father’s heavy boots skidding on the cobbles— 21049844 Butler G., Sergeant, R.E. Lanes R., and his boy, the future colonel who would never command any regiment.

  The big calloused hand, always stained with printer’s ink, would grip his tightly while they stood for an age before the ugly white cross and the metal plaque with the long lists of names. And because he could not escape from that hand he had read the names many times, had added them together and had found their highest common factor and their lowest common multiple. He had even tried to identify them: were MURCH A. E. and MURCH G. really the two uncles of Sammy Murch who had sat next to him at school? Was the presence of BURN M. and BURN E. here on the stone the reason why Mr Burn in the sweetshop was so bad-tempered? Once he had almost accrued enough curiosity to ask his father to answer these fascinating questions, but there was something in the fierce freckled face (so like his own now!) that had warned him off. Not anger, it wasn’t, but something never present except on November 11: his father’s Armistice Day Face …

  “Hah-hmm!” He cleared his throat noisily. “I suppose there could be something in it, yes. But I have my doubts. It isn’t that it’s a bad idea—if they were very careful and very selective. But the KGB aren’t usually so imaginative, I would have thought. And the benefits can’t be shown in black and white … it isn’t like them to start something where the damage can’t be assessed in black and white as an end-product.”

  “Might even do us some good in the long run,” cut in Richardson. “Always thought there were too many brains in the Civil Service, seeing where it’s got us. Bit of mediocrity might do us a bit of good, you never know!”

  This time Audley didn’t smile and Butler knew with sudden intuition why. It was not simply fear of failure that was the horror grinning on Audley’s pillow, but also that he too was a product of that privileged world which took its proved quality for granted. It was a world that had taken some hard knocks as the pressure for quantity rather than quality had built up against it, but it was not beaten yet—and Butler rather suspected now that when its last barricade went up he would be on the same side of it as Audley.

  Richardson was a similar product, but was as yet too young to identify himself wholly with it and too close to the generation of iconoclasts.

  “So?” Audley was watching him warily.

  What was immediately important, thought Butler, was to discover whether the man had managed to retain his sense of detachment, and the best way to find out was to play the devil’s advocate—

  “There could be something in it, as I say,” he said unsympathetically. “But it’s a damned, vague, airy-fairy notion compared with what the Russians usually put up, if you ask me. It hasn’t got any body to it.”

  “Phew!” Richardson exclaimed. “For a man who’s been bloody near burnt to death and smashed up in a car you take a darned cool view of things, I must say!”

  “He’s not denying something’s up, Peter,” said Audley patiently. “I think we all know there is.”

  He met Butler’s eyes again. “Fair enough, Jack. I agree it sounds vague. But as you know we didn’t start all this just because Sir Geoffrey Hobson dropped a word in Theodore Freisler’s ear last summer. We had something to go on before that.”

  “What?”

  “The Dzerzhinsky Street Report.”

  Butler shifted uneasily. But it was no use pretending false knowledge. “Never heard of it.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s sixteen years old.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Sixteen years old. Came out in ‘55. It was all the work of a committee the KGB set up in Dzerzhinsky Street the year before to look into the origins of the East German rising and the Pilsen revolt. You see, what shook them rigid, and went on shaking them right down to the Budapest rising, was that it was the young who were causing the trouble—the very ones who’d had all the pampering and the brain washing.”

  He shook his head sadly. “You know, the pitiful thing about my students at Cumbria is they think they invented student protest, or at least that it was invented here in the West. I can’t seem to get it through their heads that the East European youth started it back in the early fifties.”

  “And by God those poor little devils really had something to complain about too—I’d like to show some of our protesters a cadre sheet from the East with a note about a ‘class-hostile’ grandfather, or an uncle who’d got himself on the wrong end of some party purge, and then let ‘em have a look at our college files for comparison!”

  “And most of all I’d like to open up our file on the Hungarian Revolt—60,000 dead and only God knows how many maimed or deported, and more than half of them under 25, and tell ‘em that was how the Communists settled their youth problems in the fifties. Not with a couple of elderly proctors, or a crew of panicky National Guardsmen, but with eight armoured divisions and two MVD special brigades—“

  He stopped abruptly, embarrassed at his own sudden flare-up of passion. “Sorry about that—the way people don’t remember Hungary always sticks in my craw.”

  “The point is, when the Dzerzhinsky Street committee put in their report they had to be bloody careful not to criticise their own set-up too much, so they dressed it up with half-truths about the inadequacy of the parents, how they’d been over-concerned with material prosperity at the expense of political consciousness, and that had led their kids astray—“

  “This report,” Butler interrupted him, “I’ve never seen it on the check list. Damn it—I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “The famous Dzerzhinsky Street Report?” Audley’s lips curled. “You’re not the only one. We only got it from the CIA last summer, and it was more than ten years old when they got it.”

  “Why the hell—?” Butler frowned at Audley.

  “Why didn’t they pass it on earlier?” Audley smiled thinly. “For the same reason—the same basic reason—as the Russians managed to conceal it so well. They simply didn’t reckon there was any value to it.”

  “You see, when the KGB turned it down as useless it was declassified, so no one took any notice of it. It wasn’t until the mid-sixties that someone in their K Section remembered about it. He was swotting up the latest American campus riots in Newsweek and Time—at least, that’s how the story goes—and he remembered reading one of the recommendations of the Dzerzhinsky Street committee. They’d reckoned that it was in the nature of youth to revolt under a given set of circumstances, and the Party ought to watch out for them developing in the West. They reckoned they could cash in on them because the Western governments wouldn’t be capable of handling them with ‘revolutionary firmness’.”

  “Meaning eight armoured divisions and a couple of MVD special brigades,” murmured Richardson. “And a thousand cattle trucks for the lucky survivors … “

  “Maybe not so lucky, Peter,” said Audley. “But that was the start of it anyway. Because all of a sudden the Dzerzhinsky Street formula—pampered students and materialist parents—seemed to fit the West like a glove.”

  Butler frowned. “You mean the Russians have had a hand in the student power movements? Because I rather understood the students didn’t approve of the Kremlin any more than the Pentagon—“

  Audley raised an admonitory finger. “Now
that is precisely the point: they didn’t and they don’t! You’ve got it exactly, Butler. There was a bit of Maoism or Castroism on the edges —and a lunatic fringe of Weathermen and such like—but none of them was amenable to anything like effective manipulation. The KGB agents in the States reported back that it was hopeless to try anything with them. It seems the activists were either too darned intelligent or too active to toe their sort of line.”

  “We know this for a fact?”

  “For a fact we know it. The CIA had a priority instruction to watch for it, and the moment they spotted the KGB’s men on the campuses they went to work in a big way—right the way back to their own Kremlin cell. And the result was a big zero—the right wing in the CIA would have liked to have found just the opposite, but they didn’t. You see, what the KGB found was loads of trouble for the American establishment, but it wasn’t trouble they could either direct or control. And what’s more, it frightened them.”

  “It frightened them?”

  “I have that straight from the horse’s mouth—from my old buddy Howard Morris, in the State Department security. What Sukhanov, the KGB top man over there, told Andropov was that it was a damn dangerous disease, and the sooner the Yanks stamped on it the better for everyone.”

  Butler stared at the big man, and then past him at the wall of baled hay at his back. He had seen the symptoms of this dreadful disease, which apparently struck down healthy little communists and coddled capitalist toddlers alike, scrawled on the ancient stones of Oxford: Beat the system—Smile and Make love, not war. For all his ambition, clever Dan McLachlan had it—and maybe the man who called himself Smith had died for it. And back in his Reigate terrace home there were three little girls incubating it for sure.

  And the name of the disease was Youth.

  If the societies of the West were still fundamentally healthy, they wouldn’t die of it; they would slowly change and grow stronger because of it. Maybe they would even grow up!

  But Sukhanov’s society, which relied on such quack remedies as tanks and cattle trucks and censorship, would die of it sooner or later, if only the West could hold on.

  Except—the disquiet twisted inside Butler—except if the KGB had failed in Britain as it had failed in the States, what was he doing here with Audley?

  He focussed on Audley again.

  “So what’s happened here to change the pattern?” he growled. “Is Sir Geoffrey Hobson really on to something after all?”

  Audley shook his head and spread his big hands in a gesture of near despair. “Up until a few days ago I’d have said almost certainly not. There are a few suspicious cases, but not enough to add up to a conspiracy. What we’ve found this year adds up substantially to what the Americans found —and much the same goes for the French too apparently: from the KGB’s point of view the whole thing’s been a flop— and it never was more than a reconnaissance … “

  “But now?”

  “But now—I don’t know, Butler. I really don’t know. Because we’ve got a whole houseful of the best young brains from King’s and Cumbria up at Castleshields and there’s something damned odd cooking up there.”

  XIV

  “ … THE DEVIL OF it is, Jack, that just when we need it most we haven’t got anyone of our own in the house at student level. Peter’s not really in with them—he’s been off on his own too much. And when it comes to it they don’t really trust me, of course.”

  That might be the truth of it. Or it might be that Audley was still not quite desperate enough to compromise either himself or Richardson. There was no way of telling.

  “You’ve no idea at all what they might be up to?”

  Audley spread his hands. “If it’s a demo of some kind there are only two places up here—there’s the satellite tracking station at Pike Edge and the missile range on the coast. But they’d need to hire transport to get to them. They haven’t got enough of their own.”

  “Are those the sort of places they’d be likely to demonstrate at?”

  “Not this bright lot, I shouldn’t have thought. The Americans have been helping us at Pike Edge, it’s true, so we’ve had the usual crop of rumours. But it isn’t like Fylingdales, and these boys would know it.”

  “And the missile range?”

  “Only very short range stuff—anti-aircraft and antisubmarine. It’s the better bet of the two though.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s a long shot, but there has been a rumour or two that the South Africans are interested in some of the weaponry there.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “It isn’t true, that’s the trouble. And the Russians know it, which is more to the point.”

  “Damn the Russians! If they want to compromise these lads it doesn’t matter whether it’s claptrap or not—it might be better if it was, but it doesn’t matter either way. South Africa’s the one thing all the young idiots can be led by the nose on.”

  Audley blinked and frowned. “It still doesn’t fit. These boys aren’t fools to be led by rumours.” He paused. “But the real objection isn’t that at all, to my mind.”

  “What is, then?”

  Audley sighed and shook his head. “It’s simply that I agree with you. This thing of Hobson’s—it’s a bloody intelligent project, but it just isn’t the sort of ploy that would appeal to the Russians. Industrial sabotage, or trade union infiltration, yes. But there’s evidence there, and until Smith phoned up Hobson there wasn’t a shred of real evidence we’d picked up at Cumbria. Yet now there seems to be, and there’s something that smells all wrong somewhere.”

  “Aye, you’re right about that, man,” Butler agreed harshly. “And I’ll tell you what smells wrong to me, too: by all the laws, they should have dropped whatever they’re up to like a red-hot poker the moment Smith went round the bend. They know we’re on to them—the whole thing’s compromised for them. And yet it looks as if they’re going on regardless.”

  “So bully for them!” Richardson grinned. “So we get an extra chance of putting the skids under them—“

  “If you think that, then you’re a fool,” snapped Butler. “If they haven’t disengaged, it’s because they can’t disengage. And you better pray that it never happens to you like that— that you’re on the wrong side of the wall and the other side’s on to you, and the word comes back that you’ve got to stay with it. Because that means it is more important than you. That’s when you become expendable, Richardson.”

  He glared at the young man fiercely, partly because it was time someone cut him down to size and partly because he had no wish to catch Audley’s eye. It had not been so long ago that he had warned Hugh Roskill in the same way, but Hugh had trusted his own judgement and because of that Hugh would never fly for the RAF again. And Hugh had been lucky at that: if he couldn’t fly he could still limp to his pension.

  “All right, Colonel Butler, I’ll pray that day never comes,” replied Richardson coolly, his long face tilted towards Butler. “But I don’t have to get scared in advance by the thought of it.”

  “No—you don’t have to. But their day has come and I’ll bet they are scared, Richardson. And that makes them very dangerous. So if you haven’t the wit to be frightened, I have!”

  “Gentlemen!” The embarrassment was unconcealed in Audley’s voice. “This isn’t leading any place, is it?”

  “But it is, David.” Something of his former banter was back in Richardson’s voice. “Colonel Butler agrees with you —and this is a big one. The question is whether he can help us find out what it is before it goes off bang underneath us.”

  “Maybe I could at that.”

  They both stared at him.

  “I’ve already recruited your inside man for you,” said Butler heavily. “And your inside girl.”

  “McLachlan?” Audley’s eyebrows lifted. “And Polly Epton?”

  “Aye. The boy and the girl.”

  The eyebrows lowered. “I thought you were against that sort of thing—using
civilian labour?”

  “I am dead against it. But in this instance I haven’t any choice. They volunteered.”

  “And you accepted?”

  “After the business at the bridge they tumbled to a few false conclusions of their own. They think Smith was murdered and they’d like to see the killers put down—“

  “And naturally you let them go on thinking that?” Audley looked at Butler curiously, nodding to himself at the same time. “So naturally they would want to help. That was neatly done—though not quite your usual style, surely?”

  “They made it a condition for agreeing to tell me about Smith,” said Butler unwillingly. “It was not much my doing.”

  “Of course not. Not so much volunteers as blackmailers.” Audley smiled. “And just what did they tell you in exchange for lies?”

  Butler glowered at him. “Not anything that’s of much use, damn it all! In fact, what Miss Epton knew made nonsense of what happened at the bridge.”

  “I doubt that.” Audley shook his head. “The Russians simply didn’t know how much she knew. And they couldn’t come round and ask her, so they had to prepare for the worst. I’d guess they were ready to leave her alone as long as we did —much the same as they left Eden Hall intact until you turned up there. When they spotted you in Oxford they went into action—not quite quickly enough, fortunately.”

  Butler stared at him. “It wasn’t good fortune—it was young McLachlan’s reflexes.”

  “Was it indeed?” Audley said, as though his mind was no longer entirely on the job. “But it was still what people would call lucky.”

  “It’s all in my full Oxford report, anyway,” said Butler, feeling in his breastpocket for the photocopy.

  “I shall enjoy reading that. But there was nothing you could put your finger on—nothing that stands out?”

  Butler shrugged. “She said they once had an argument— several of them—about the nature of treason. Smith was very hot against traitors, surprisingly so she thought, because he was normally an internationalist. But he said they were no good to anybody, or any side. But everyone had had a few more drinks than usual and she put it down to that.”