“We’ll have been reported as visiting you, then.”
“There is always the risk, yes, but some risks have to be taken or there is no progress at all – you must know this – ”
“Yes,” I said. “I do know. And you? You’re prepared to – ”
“I am prepared to give my life. I am not afraid.” The tall, thin body seemed to grow taller as Katrina loomed over me like an animated skeleton. “The individual is lesser than the cause. The Soviets have made great strides, have made many achievements since the Revolution. These must not be jeopardised by the wild men of Greenfly … “ She went off into quite a tirade: here was one hundred percent dedication and fanaticism. I caught Felicity’s eye: she seemed fascinated by the performance, which came to an end after about a couple of concentrated minutes.
When Katrina had run out of steam I asked her again why it had not been possible to get word through to the West, and what it was thought the West would do when the word did get through. I asked, “What about our Embassy?”
She said, “Your Radley-Bewick.”
“Now dead. I told you.”
“Yes. He was our contact, as of course you know – ”
“Yes, I – ”
“He had not passed anything on to the British Embassy.”
“No,” I said. “I knew that too.” Arthur Webb in Focal House had said that even Radley-Bewick hadn’t been told the facts, and now I asked why this was, and got the answer I’d been given when I’d asked Webb the same question: the Ladybirds wouldn’t take a chance with Radley-Bewick, who was closely watched by the KGB.
“And Greenfly?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But surely,” I said in much bewilderment, “something would have leaked through to our Embassy? They have their intelligence services, after all! They’re not asleep the whole time. This is exactly the sort of situation they’re supposed to monitor.”
She shrugged. “It has been very secret, so secret that – ”
“But you know,” I pointed out.
“Yes, we know. We also have our people, our women, in high places. One of our number has been party to all that has gone on within Greenfly. It is she who has warned the official Party leadership and the Supreme Soviet. As a result there has been the most iron-hard fist on all possible dissemination of intelligence and information generally. The Kremlin has no wish for the West to learn the facts, Comrade Shaw – ”
“In case the West goes moving as to war,” I murmured more or less to myself, and Katrina nodded. “An interesting situation,” I went on. “Just me and Comrade Mandrake, to prevent the total nuclearisation of the northern hemisphere!”
“Yes,” Katrina said. “But I have not yet told you all there is to tell.”
There was something very ominous in her tone and her eyes had taken on an inward look. I said, “Then you’d better get on with it, Comrade. If you’re being watched – ”
“Yes,” she said again. “I have not told you how and where the strike is to be made – that is, the first strike of all, before the saturation attack is mounted by the Soviet missiles and the armoured divisions.”
“The first strike?”
“This will come from one of your British missile-armed submarines, Comrade Shaw.”
I laughed, but without any humour. She was being ridiculous. I said, “The British, pre-empting the pre-emptive Russian strike? Somehow I can’t see that being authorised by my government unless the message has got through. Which currently it hasn’t. Even if it had, I don’t believe we’d mount the first attack.” This was true: my view was that once that message of approaching doom reached London, Whitehall would blow the whole thing sky-high by getting on the hot line to the Kremlin and revealing their knowledge. With the Greenfly guns spiked in advance, the official Soviet line would be re-established and we would all stagger on together towards the Armageddon that might come in time but which would have been delayed a few more years, a few more years’ breathing space for the world’s warriors either to go on beating the drum or really try for peace. Once again, I thought, it all came down to a question of time; and I wanted to be on my way out of Russia, fast, a jump or two ahead of my potential liquidators. I said as much to Katrina.
This time it was she who laughed and I didn’t like the implications. Then she came out with it: the first missile, to be fired from a British nuclear-powered submarine on patrol off the Bay of Biscay, would land harmlessly – more or less – in a sparsely populated part of the enormous Soviet land mass, up north along the fringe of the Kara Sea. That would start the ball rolling. I asked her in amazement how she knew this and whether she thought the British Prime Minister had gone mad. She didn’t go into details as to how she knew – obviously, in view of her next bombshell, it was another Ladybird contact inside the Greenfly set-up – but she said, and this was the bombshell, that the British Prime Minister wouldn’t know anything about it, nor would the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. The missile would be activated by electronic beams, an interference with the weapons’ system by the clever boys in Russia, the Greenfly faction using the WUSWIPP knowhow. Even Greenfly liked to be shown as whiter than white before the courts of international public opinion and who could blame the Soviets when Britain fired the first shot without provocation?
My mind was going round in circles, filled with racing thoughts of a nuclear holocaust with Britain as the bad boy – I didn’t doubt WUSWIPP could have come up with something technical like this, didn’t doubt it for a moment – and I failed to hear something else the Ladybird said. I asked for a repeat. She said very distinctly, “There will be assistance from thoughts thrown onto a screen.”
I jerked back to Katrina’s presence. “You can’t mean the ESP stuff?”
She nodded. “A defector from your country – known to Radley-Bewick, which is one reason why Radley-Bewick could not be wholly trusted.” She gave me the defector’s name: it was known to me as that of a scientist from the Ministry of Defence, not, I would have thought, an important man but certainly one of some useful knowledge and his defection, not long before in fact, had caused a rumpus in the press. Katrina said this man had personal knowledge of the British missile-firing submarine fleet and had been many times to sea on exercises. His drug-induced thoughts, if dead Senyavin’s process worked without the presence of the mastermind – but there would be other Senyavins who would have been trained up to its use – that man’s thoughts and know-how might very well be a handy adjunct to electronic interference, almost a textbook guide to effective procedure.
I asked, “Tell me, Comrade: do you believe in all this? The ESP business?”
She said it wasn’t quite ESP as the experts knew it but yes, she did. I thought she looked the sort of person who might. Those dark deep-set eyes and the intensity. She said Comrade Mandrake and I must now go, and make our way out of Russia. In heartfelt fashion I agreed. She gave me a name and an address, a friend of Radley-Bewick who would make certain arrangements, one who did not know the facts but knew that Radley-Bewick wanted to make contact with a western agent. This person could be trusted, she said.
I had just mentioned the documentary proof referred to by Olga Menshikova when heavy banging came at Katrina’s front door and echoed like the knell of doom along the concrete passage. Katrina went very white and began shaking, a hand to her mouth. I said, “Hold on a moment – ”
“They will break down the door!”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I want a moment to reassemble the guns.”
11
Felicity and I were ready with the assembled guns as Katrina opened the door. I heard her say something, then she was cut off by a man’s voice and there was a brief scuffle and a short, sharp cry. A few moments later, by which time we’d concealed ourselves behind the open door of the sitting-room, I heard the footsteps coming along the concrete. No-one entered the room: I hadn’t really expected the visitors to be fooled by an apparently empty room, but it had been the only thing
I could do.
A man’s voice spoke again. “We know you are there. You were seen to enter.”
I kept silent; Felicity’s breathing hit my ears like a drum. The voice said, “I will count to ten. Then I will kill the woman, the Ladybird.”
Somehow it didn’t sound like the KGB. They kill, but in private, and they aren’t normally so blatant about it. I settled for Greenfly. I wasn’t going to contribute to Katrina’s death so I gave Felicity a nudge and we both came out, holding the machine-pistols. I saw a short man, thick-set, with shoulders like a bison, and only one eye. The left one was just a black, wrinkled socket. He was accompanied by another man, a younger one with a foxy face and a ginger moustache. It was this man who was holding Katrina and twisting both her arms up behind her back. She looked agonised, her eyes staring and mouth trembling.
The thick-set man said, “So. It is you. Shaw and Mandrake.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I have your descriptions.” He spoke good English. “You have now reached the end of the road, my friends.”
“I doubt it,” I said coolly, though I knew he could be right.
“The guns. Place them on the floor, with the butts towards me.”
“Why should we?”
The man grinned. “Because if you do not, the woman dies.”
“You won’t risk gunfire in a block of flats.”
“It has been done before. In Moscow, one does not interfere – it is never wise to interfere. In any case, death does not come always by guns alone.” As he’d been speaking he’d been sliding a hand into the front of his jacket and now it reappeared holding a thin, fairly long knife, a very nasty job with a tapering point. “You understand now?”
I nodded. “I understand,” I said. Meekly, I bent to lay my gun on the floor. I fancied the Russian was a shade too confident: that happens to people who live under dictatorships and who are part of the elite, the upper crust of intellectuals and scientists, and this one, in spite of his build and general demeanour, didn’t strike me as being the action-man type with fast reflexes. I proved right. He didn’t react half fast enough when I came suddenly out of my bent position and slammed the barrel of the gun into his mouth so hard that I think it went right through the roof and left him speechless and staggering. Blood poured and the knife clattered down to the thin carpet. Felicity picked it up, looking white, and handed it to me. I said, “Hang onto it for now.” I had the second man covered. He was looking as if he wanted to be far, far away, all fight gone.
I said, “Let go of the lady,” and he did so. Katrina went shakily across to a chair and sat. Outside, the day was still dark with the falling snow. The thick-set man was lying in a heap on the floor, making moaning sounds. I didn’t know the prognosis for a shattered mouth-roof but he looked as though he was bleeding to death and if the barrel had gone far enough I reckoned that his brain might never be the same again. I kept the ginger moustache covered and asked its wearer for identification and explanation.
It was Katrina who answered. “They are Greenfly,” she said.
“I thought as much. You know them?”
“Yes.” She gave me their names but they didn’t convey anything to me. They wouldn’t be the big boys of the WUSWIPP break-away faction; the brass wouldn’t take any personal risks in public. “They are here for – what you spoke of.”
The documentation, the proof to be taken back to London before it was too late. But I didn’t want to go into that just then. I didn’t want Katrina to say she had it in the flat. And I was, in fact, wondering what to do next. The thick-set man might die if left – I just didn’t know. The other man was very much alive. I could not, of course, let them go. I couldn’t leave them, either. Katrina could come with us to find Radley-Bewick’s friend and I would keep her safe to the best of my ability, taking her back to London if possible to tell her own story in Whitehall. But to leave the two Russians behind would ensure that we never did get back to England, any of us – or anyway, at the very least it would make the whole thing that much more hazardous. But I didn’t like the idea of killing in cold blood, killing men who were now defenceless. To say nothing of the noise. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the thick-set man’s statement that in Moscow one didn’t interfere. But I could use the knife.
As matters turned out, my conscience was allowed to remain intact.
*
It was a flat of death now, death and a lot of blood and general mess. Felicity and I left at speed after we had made a thorough search of the whole place, looking for that documentation. Unsuccessfully – it just was not there, neither was it on Katrina’s now dead person. Either Olga Menshikova had had her facts wrong or Katrina had decided it was too dangerous to keep and had passed it on. If so, God alone knew where to. Radley-Bewick’s friend? Maybe.
“Nasty,” I said to Felicity as we reached the street hoping we weren’t under observation – there didn’t seem to be anyone around; the weather was thick and quite appalling and keeping obbo today wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a policeman’s happy lot, though the thought of Siberia could be presumed to keep all hands on the ball.
Felicity shivered, not, I thought, with the cold alone. It had been slaughter and Katrina had started it – very bravely. She had said earlier that she would die for the cause, the cause basically of peace. It could be that the Ladybirds were in their own way the Soviet’s equivalent of our Peace Women, though there had been nothing peaceful about Katrina when she had got suddenly up from her chair. She had become a wildcat, unstoppable as she flung herself on Felicity and wrested the knife away and turned viciously on the younger man, who hadn’t a chance, being unarmed and taken, as we all were, by surprise. The knife had gone through his throat and he had gasped himself to death, drowning in his own welling blood. I dropped my gun and grabbed her but her elbow, a sharp and bony one, was slammed backwards into my face and I tripped over the other body and fell; it had been ignominious and it had given Katrina time to use the knife on the thick-set Greenfly – the throat again. By this time Felicity was covering her with the other gun, too late of course and with not much purpose left since we could assume Katrina wouldn’t attack her allies, though she looked crazy enough just then to do anything.
A second later I realised she wasn’t well, physically. Her face had gone deathly white and her breathing had become stertorous. Then she collapsed in a heap, with her face all twisted up, the mouth awry, tugged down at one corner.
“I think she’s had a stroke,” Felicity said. “Or a heart attack.”
I bent down by her side. No heart beat, and the eyes, still open, glazed over. I could detect no breath and I got on my feet again. “Dead,” I said. That was when we made the search, and then got out, closing the front door behind us so that it locked on the Russian equivalent of a Yale.
All dead, and no noise. That, at any rate, was something. Plus our intact consciences.
*
We went back, struggled back, through the snow, across Moscow, past the Kremlin again. I was not too worried about the lack of documentation: I reckoned I had enough weight inside 6D2 to make my story stick and be acted upon. And did I believe it all? The answer was yes, I did. So many lives had been and were being risked, and I knew WUSWIPP of old. They were a brilliant bunch of bastards, and I mean bastards even if this time they were acting in the cause of peace against Greenfly. It was the WUSWIPP know-how behind it all and I had no reason whatever to doubt that they could do the job – or rather that Greenfly could do it. Underwater interference by radio impulses, beams and so on, would not have been possible when last I had been familiar with submarines but times had changed and WUSWIPP could always be relied upon to find a way and the ship’s company of whichever nuclear sub it was wouldn’t have a chance to correct, negative or abort. At least, that would be the theory. It just might not work out in practice but that couldn’t be banked on: Greenfly would have done their homework and made plenty of tests and dummy runs.
My m
ind going off at a tangent I said, “I wish I’d asked Katrina about the crucifixion angle. There must be a reason.”
“Just anti-Christ,” Felicity suggested.
“Symbolic?”
“Could be.”
We trudged on, muffled in our padded anoraks, hands deep in pockets. We still had the guns: somehow by this time I hadn’t wanted to part with them. The traffic was virtually non-existent now, for some reason or other, and I found it alarming, only military transport seemed to be moving, with chained tyres or caterpillar tracks, and the pedestrians were few. That made us stand out and we kept away from the big squares and the main thoroughfares. I was certain we had no tail but I didn’t like the atmosphere. I wondered how often the military was so evident in the Moscow streets. Maybe it was just my personal knowledge of what was scheduled to happen; maybe it wasn’t. Time could be shortening rather fast for comfort, the men in the Kremlin being pushed by Greenfly to the final act – that was the feeling that gripped me, anyway, a feeling of doom that was not going to be averted. As if sensing the way I was thinking, Felicity asked what action could be taken by Whitehall if ever we made it back across the border.
I gave her my earlier thoughts, that the hot line to the Kremlin would be used to spike the guns. I said, “In the meantime, Defence Ministry will bring in all the missile fleet from patrol and disarm them.”
“If there’s time.”
“Yes,” I said, and left it at that. In all probability there wouldn’t be time. Greenfly might go into action the moment they got word I was over the frontier, or even before, stymying the official Soviet leadership, forcing them into action, making their interference signals before Whitehall could react. Even if Whitehall didn’t use the hot line right away but brought in the subs first, any sudden deviation from patrol would be noted by the Greenfly monitors and interpreted aright, and the first strike would be sent off to start World War Three. There would never be a World War Four once the nuclear clouds drifted across the northern half of the globe. Armageddon, just as the Bible had predicted. Was there some link with that dreadful crucifixion of Yasnov’s daughter in Minsk? The symbol of the saving of sinners, to be cruelly and blasphemously followed by the triumph of the devil and the extermination of half the world?
Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18) Page 13