Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Look, I’ve got to have some more details on your brother,’ he told her, determined to waste no more time. ‘What exactly is it he wants to tell us?’

  ‘You see, he has told me almost nothing about it,’ she answered with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘All he tell me is what I tell Mr Figgis, that corrupt officers have sold kind of missile to Mafiya.’

  ‘Yes, but what sort of missile? And who’s it been sold to? I need names, Oksana, and details.’

  ‘You see, I cannot tell you that. Misha says it is safer when I don’t know such things. He will tell it – tomorrow, when you meet him.’

  ‘Oksana, what he has to tell us could be extremely important,’ Sam whispered, exasperated by her delaying tactics. ‘Why not tonight? Take me to him now.’

  She felt flustered. The Englishman was every bit as handsome as she’d remembered, but rather more aggressive.

  ‘Because first I must know what you will do to help him. Tomorrow at eight o’clock I can take, if you have visas for Misha, Lena and Nadya. Visa for England for all of them.’

  ‘Oksana, you know the ropes. It doesn’t work that way.’

  She glanced down at her hands. Yes, she knew it, but her brother had told her to be tough, so she was.

  ‘You may call me Ksucha, if you like.’ The words had popped out. ‘It is more friendly I think,’ she added quickly. ‘It short for Oksana in Ukrainian. Like nickname, you say?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He’d call her anything she wanted so long as she got a move on.

  ‘And what I call you?’

  ‘Sam. Sam is fine. Look. This visa thing. We have to evaluate what your brother has to say. If it’s as significant to the outside world as you suggested to Gerald Figgis and we’re convinced that there is a threat to Misha’s life and to his family, then yes, a visa can be issued rapidly, together with a permit to reside in England. If everything stands up, they could be on their way to London tomorrow evening. That’s why I want to see him tonight, so I can get things moving.’

  She put a hand up to an ear and fiddled with the pendant.

  ‘Understand please how afraid we all are. Maybe Mafiya – Militsia – maybe they know you are here. Maybe they watching us now. We must be very careful. So tomorrow morning is safer.’

  He glanced round. Several of the other drinkers were looking their way, but it didn’t mean anything. Foreigners always attracted stares.

  ‘Specially we afraid for our children. You . . . you have children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Your wife she not like?’

  ‘Never mind that.’ There was something insidious about her question. ‘Tell me things about your brother. How long has he been in the army?’

  She told him their family history, how they’d been brought up initially in the western town of Ivano-Frankivsk, where in the Great Patriotic War Ukrainian partisans had fought off the Germans and then the Russians. Their father had been a hero of that conflict, she told him.

  ‘My brother Mikhail he want to join army because my father was great soldier,’ she explained. ‘But also, in nineteen-seventies, army officer was good career for boy. Misha he so proud of being officer, he wear uniform always, even when he home on leave. We live in Kiev by then. For him it was honour to be in army. And in those days they paid good money and much possibility to travel.

  ‘But then in Soviet Union we get Gorbachev. And then end of Soviet Union and we have independent Ukraine. Everything change. Is chaos in our country, but really chaos, Sam. Misha he try so hard to keep things how they were. But soon he find that army changes very much. Nothing working any more and persons he does not respect become in control.’

  ‘So he became an outsider?’ Was this the real reason for the Major’s wish to defect?

  ‘Well, yes. I suppose,’ she replied, puzzled by his drift.

  ‘And now he wants to get his own back.’ Embitterment. And in a bitter man, truth seldom survived intact.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Misha wants revenge. Is that it? Revenge on all those people in the army he didn’t like.’

  Her mouth dropped open. ‘You don’t believe . . .’ Her blue eyes clouded. ‘No. You cannot believe . . .’

  Suddenly the waiter arrived with his tray and off-loaded an apple juice and a beer.

  ‘Spaseeba,’ said Sam, handing the man a five-hryvna note. The waiter beamed and moved off.

  Oksana looked utterly perplexed.

  ‘We have to be very careful, Ksucha,’ he soothed, realising he’d been less than diplomatic. ‘You must understand that. It’s why I want to talk to your brother as soon as possible. To make sure his story is genuine.’

  And, more importantly, relevant.

  Her glass of apple juice had been decorated with a slice of orange which she fished out with the swizzle stick. Her neck glowed with perspiration. She picked up a drinks menu and fanned herself with it.

  How old was she, Sam wondered? She had lines on her face that put her in her mid-forties, but she was probably less than that. The last decade in Ukraine had been hard. And there’d been a husband who’d died, he recollected.

  ‘You have a daughter. Have I remembered that right?’

  ‘Yes. She is name Luba. It short for Lubova, which mean love.’ Her expression suggested that as far as she was concerned the name was a joke. ‘Luba is, how you say, a daddy’s girl. So when Sergeyi die, she take it very bad. She think he die because I don’t look after him right. Which is ridiculous, because it was Chernobyl, you know?’

  ‘Yes I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Luba is very difficult girl for me. She want so much things that I can’t give . . .’ She stopped herself. No man wanted to hear a woman moan. And yet she needed to say something. ‘I am afraid for us too, Sam. Afraid that if Mafiya come for Misha maybe they try kill us also.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’ He could see a demand for more visas coming. ‘Let’s talk about tomorrow. Eight o’clock, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’ She stood up and reached for her coat pocket. ‘I have map for you.’ She unfolded it as she sat down again and pointed out the Metro station where they were to meet. ‘I see you there eight o’clock next to barrier. We walk from there. Just five minutes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But you will bring visas, yes?’ she insisted, edgily.

  Sam sighed. He wasn’t getting through to her. Her mind didn’t seem to be grasping the complexities of what she was involved in.

  ‘No, I can’t do that,’ he explained again, gently. ‘But they can be quickly arranged. It depends on what he tells me. You know this, surely.’

  She nodded. She understood well enough, but her brother wouldn’t. And she would have to answer his accusations of not pushing hard enough on his behalf.

  ‘I must warn, if you do not promise visa, he will not talk to you,’ she stated flatly.

  ‘We’ll sort it out when we meet. Don’t worry.’

  There was nothing more he could achieve with her. They were like two bit players waiting for the star to deliver his lines. And hanging around in this public place was unnerving him. He drained his beer.

  ‘Until tomorrow then.’

  She looked down at her hands. It was clear to him that she didn’t want their meeting to end yet.

  ‘You tired?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe you must telephone to your wife.’

  That was twice she’d probed in that direction. Idle female curiosity, or something more complicated?

  ‘No wife,’ he answered flatly.

  Her brightening eyes gave her away.

  ‘That is sad for you,’ she mouthed.

  She was a lonely woman, he realised. The former Soviet Union was full of them – widows, divorcees, or those who’d despaired of finding a man who could stay sober. All of them day-dreaming of some foreigner to rescue them from the shambles they lived in. She might even have an alluring photo with an agency on the Internet like so many of them did.

 
He felt sorry for her. Women like her were vulnerable. But dangerous too. Oksana was the key to everything that mattered just now. Without her, he couldn’t reach the brother. Without his testimony – if it did prove relevant – there would be no uncovering of what Colonel Naif Hamdan and his Ukrainian cronies were engaged in.

  He worried he’d been too brusque with her this evening. Acted too much like the NATO bully that forty years of Soviet propaganda had drummed into people’s imaginations here. He would need to go gently tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow morning then,’ he told her, getting to his feet.

  ‘Oh. You going?’ She made no effort to conceal her disappointment. ‘I hope maybe you tell me about England. Because if Misha and Lena go there, I visit them perhaps.’

  Should he stay a little longer? To soften her up a bit? No. He wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘I’ve had a long day. Eight o’clock, we said.’

  ‘Yes. Eight o’clock.’

  He helped her on with her coat. When they got outside the rain had stopped.

  ‘Goodnight Ksucha.’ He took both her hands in his for a moment.

  ‘You have such nice smile,’ she stated simply.

  He produced one for her, then strode off to find a telephone.

  31

  Tuesday, 8 October, 07.55 hrs

  Kiev

  THE NEXT MORNING Sam arrived early at the rendezvous after switching trains several times and doubling back to check he wasn’t being followed. He hung around by the machine that changed coins into plastic Metro jettons, watching the barrier. He’d dressed in jeans and a windcheater that morning, hoping to pass as a local. Success in that was, he knew, unlikely. Foreigners stood out a mile here, not so much for their clothes as for their look of well-nourished contentment.

  He had a tickle at the back of the throat that morning. All visitors to Kiev suffered from it, he’d been told. An effect of the endemic pollution. Or the after-effects of Chernobyl, some said.

  He watched the press of bodies surging through the exit barriers and guessed from their large number that two trains had arrived simultaneously down below. The soft-featured faces bore the resigned look of a people well used to being trampled underfoot.

  Sam felt in low spirits this morning. A scepticism had taken hold of him, a fatalistic conviction that Oksana’s brother would have nothing of significance to tell them.

  Oksana appeared at the top of the escalator, her fearful eyes already searching for him. She wore beige trousers under the brown raincoat this morning and had gone to town on her make-up. Her bright-eyed look reminded him of a startled deer.

  ‘Dobriden.’

  ‘Dobriden,’ she replied, smiling fleetingly. She hooked her hand through his arm as they walked up the steps into the daylight. From the deliberateness of the act, he guessed she’d planned it.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ she checked, whispering so others wouldn’t hear their English. ‘I think it look more natural. Then people don’t think you foreign.’

  ‘Good idea,’ he mumbled, wondering whether her voice was always husky or whether the pollution had got to her too.

  The Metro station exit was on the edge of a park dotted with trees that glowed with the tints of autumn. A path cut through it, its surface still wet from the overnight rain, despite the morning sky being clear and bright.

  The skin prickled on the back of his neck. He felt exposed.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked tensely, looking round. There was no obvious sign they were being followed.

  ‘Not far.’ She pointed through the trees. ‘See? Over there is Technical University.’

  He saw a complex of brown brick buildings which had a nineteenth-century elegance. As they drew nearer he saw that its glory was all in the past. Walls were stained by leaks from rusty downpipes and most buildings appeared dark and deserted. One door had timbers nailed across to prevent entry. Of students there was no sign.

  ‘Why are we—’

  ‘You see,’ she interrupted, ‘in Soviet times this was very famous place for physic, for electronic, computer – all these things. Much work for military. But today is nothing happening here, because no money. Our science it stopped in nineteen-eighties. We are like prehistoric compared with West. So now we cannot compete. So nobody want.’

  ‘But what’s this place got to do with your brother?’

  ‘Misha is here!’ she whispered. ‘Of course! Why you think otherwise we come? He staying at home of our uncle who was professor.’

  They reached the far side of the park and entered the overgrown campus. Tall silvery poplars stood like sentries over the buildings and the patches of scrub and saplings that surrounded them.

  ‘You see, university is my uncle’s home for last twenty years. They gave him apartment for his life. He have to stay here even if there are no students, because there is nowhere else for him to live.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He does not live well. You will be shocked, I think.’

  They turned a corner. Set back among the trees was a line of accommodation halls built in the same style as the academic blocks. The first was a ruin. Girders supported the end wall and half the windows were boarded up. The block beyond looked occupied, with old blankets draped across windows.

  ‘You know about kommunalka?’ she asked.

  ‘Communal flats. Khrushchev’s solution to the housing problem.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They entered a lobby that smelled of damp and disinfectant. A panel on the dark green wall listed the occupants’ names. Beneath it hung a rack of letterboxes, most with their locks broken.

  ‘Five families in each apartment, just one room each family,’ she explained, preparing him. ‘All must share just one bathroom and one kitchen. Our uncle he live here alone now. His wife die long time ago and his son – my cousin – was killed in Afghanistan. He has pension – maybe thirty-five hryvna each month, when they pay it. About twenty dollar. I bring him fruit and vegetable from dacha, otherwise he only eat bread and pasta.’

  They climbed two flights of stairs, then passed through an open door into the flat. A long, dark corridor reached into it, half blocked with junk. An old bedstead and a mirror stood propped against the wall. Cardboard boxes full of yellowing papers were stacked from floor to ceiling. Every few paces there was a door, each with an electricity meter beside it.

  ‘One small room for each family,’ she repeated in a whisper.

  The third door they came to was open.

  ‘And here is kitchen.’ She pointed in. ‘Wonderful, no?’

  Five identical gas cookers. Five small tables cluttered with crockery and cooking utensils. Five small refrigerators that had seen better days. The blue walls were shiny with grease and the place stank of gas.

  They reached the end of the corridor and Oksana tapped on the final door. From inside a thin voice asked who it was.

  ‘Ksucha.’

  They heard something heavy being moved aside, then the door opened a crack, restrained by a chain. Recognising his niece, an elderly man in jacket and tie swung the door wide, standing aside to let them in. He eyed Sam with a deep suspicion.

  The room was smaller than Sam’s bedroom back in Barnes. Two single couches pushed against the right-hand wall were draped with rugs. Above them a dark oil painting hung from a picture rail. Against the opposite wall, bookshelves stood from floor to ceiling. At the far end a window was partly obscured by the short, sinewy figure of a man.

  Major Mikhail Pushkin felt consumed by shame. Never had he imagined it could come to this. To be face to face with an agent of a power that had been his motherland’s enemy until just a few short years ago . . .

  He watched his sister introduce the foreigner to his uncle, knowing that now the moment of truth had come he couldn’t go through with bending his knee to this foreigner, begging him to save his life.

  ‘And this is Misha, my brother. My uncle he speak some English, but Misha not.’

  Sam offered Pushkin
his hand, but the Major wouldn’t take it. Oksana scolded him for his rudeness, blushing with embarrassment.

  ‘I understand how difficult this must be for you, Major,’ Sam told him. ‘I was a naval officer myself for many years.’

  He glanced at Oksana and she translated.

  Pushkin grunted noncommittally, then strode over to the door and wheeled the armchair barricade back in place. When he turned to face them again, he found he couldn’t look them in the eye. His heart and his head were in turmoil. He felt ashamed at the ineptitude he’d demonstrated in the past ten days. It had been pure arrogance to question that spares order after his commander had ordered him to turn a blind eye. And, when the whole issue blew up in his face, it had been cowardly to run away. He blamed himself primarily for his string of misjudgements, but blamed Lena too. If she hadn’t been constantly pressuring him, always demanding more . . .

  ‘Misha?’ Oksana stared at him in horror. She could see what was going through his head.

  Pushkin met his sister’s gaze, searching for a way to explain that he wasn’t going through with this after all the arrangements she’d made. And he definitely wasn’t. He’d made up his mind. He simply couldn’t. Couldn’t flee to an alien culture, couldn’t struggle with a language he knew he would never master. Couldn’t live as a stranger for the rest of his life.

  ‘Nyet,’ he growled.

  Oksana knew this pigheaded look. She’d known it all her life. She wanted to scream at him as she had when they were children, but no sound came.

  Sam understood enough to realise his worst fears were being confirmed. That his journey would be a waste of bloody time.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’ he suggested, exasperated.

  The professor, who’d been watching the silent drama like a scarecrow, unfroze suddenly.

  ‘Sorry Mister Englishman . . .’

  He removed a stack of jigsaw puzzle boxes from the small, square table in the middle of the room, dumping them on one of the few areas of floor that weren’t already taken up with junk. The table was covered with a white cloth embroidered in red cross-stitching.