Snow Falcon kaaph-2

by Craig Thomas

  'Opposed, yes. That is to be anticipated — '

  'Richard, I put Smoktunovsky in the bag because we were afraid of what Exercise "1812" could mean on the NATO central front. It turned out to be a false alarm. But that snatch was the result of well-founded suspicion on our part that the Army was engaged in a bitter quarrel with the Kremlin. Smoktunovsky didn't tell me that they'd kissed and made up.'

  Cunningham rubbed his chin for a while, then nodded. 'It all seems very slim to me, Kenneth. Perhaps you were in there too long with him — ' Aubrey's old blue eyes flared. 'No, I withdraw that. Very well — talk to people, send in a man if you wish. Where might you begin?'

  'I'll talk to a couple of people at MOD — the less dense among them. As to a penetration mission — I accept that I have nowhere to send someone at the present. But, the Red Army is not going to lie down and let its balls be cut off by Khamovkhin and the rest of the Politburo. I'm quite certain of that.'

  'Kenneth — I do hope you're wrong about this.'

  'Exactly my own sentiments. Exactly.' 'Very well, play it back. If it's any good, then we'll send it upstairs for analysis.' The tape-operator made as if to rewind the spool of the tape on the recorder, then his team-leader stopped him. 'Who did you say this old man was?'

  'His name's Fedakhin — Bureau of Political Administration of the Army.'

  'Are we interested in him for any reason?'

  'No. He just used a Secretariat telephone, that's all. He wouldn't have expected it to be tapped, but it was. I was just playing through last night's efforts after I came in, and I heard it. He's talking in code.'

  'OK, Misha, the floor is yours. Impress me.'

  'Captain.'

  The younger man switched on the rewind, and they watched the spools changing their weight of tape, and the numbers rolling rapidly back. Misha stopped the tape, checked the number with a list at his elbow, then wound back a little more. Then he switched to 'Play' on the heavy old German recorder.

  The captain noticed that, as usual with taps done as routine, the installation, and quality both left much to be desired. The voice was tinnily unreal, and distant.

  'Our man for Group 1917 is in place,' the old voice said.

  'Good. But you should not have called.'

  'I apologise. Let the illness of an old man excuse me.'

  'Very well.'

  'You need have no worries concerning Finland Station, my friend. It has been settled, in terms of personnel, and it can now proceed satisfactorily. I shall be able to retire a happy man, and await the great day.'

  The captain's nose wrinkled at the cliches, and he tossed his head, Misha being invited into the contempt he felt. He knew with certainly that contempt for the old fart on the tape was driving out curiously, but the knowledge didn't worry him. Old men — his wife's father — talked endlessly of great days, and happy retirement, and golden ages, come to that 'Thank you, old friend. Take care of yourself.'

  Misha let the tape run for a few seconds, then switched it off. He looked up eagerly into the captain's broad face, so that the older man felt obligated to feel interest 'Well, sir?'

  'Yes — tell me, then. Who was the other man?'

  unidentified.'

  'What number was dialled?'

  'Wrong sort of tap — no record.'

  'A name was asked for?'

  'No. I'll play it, if you like — ' The captain shook his head, lighting a cigarette. 'Only an extension. Could've been anyone.'

  'So — what's the excruciating importance of all this, Misha?'

  'I don't know, sir. But he was talking in code, obviously and people who do that have something to hide, don't they?' After a silence, the captain said, 'Usually, they do.'

  'Stig, old boy — it's you.'

  The heavily-built, florid Englishman who never spoke Finnish if he could avoid it, looked up from the newspaper he was reading, recognised his visitor — unsurprising since he had been waiting for him in the bar on the Mannerheimintie for half an hour — and gestured him to another seat at his table. The bespectacled, fur-hatted Finn sat down, briefcase across knees pressed primly, and tightly together. The Englishman watched him peer nervously into the less well-lit corners of the bar — a nervous tic that Stig always demonstrated, at every meeting — over five years now, too. He'd probably done it with his predecessor, Henderson. Poor little sod 'I — you always choose these public places, Luard. Do you have to?'

  The Finn's English was excellent; unlike Luard, he had no distrust of a foreign tongue, speaking four languages other than his own. Luard's Finnish was improbable at best, Stig considered.

  'Sorry, old boy. Standard procedure. And no one follows you about, old boy. No one has done for years — ' It was as if Luard suddenly became irritated with his companion. 'Everyone lost interest in you years ago, Stig. They wouldn't care if they knew you passed stuff on to my lot — I should think Finnish Intelligence hopes someone does, just in case they ever get hold of something of importance.'

  Stag's narrow, tired face with its doughy complexion suddenly sharpened, took on a vivacity of anger.

  'You need not insult me, Luard. I asked merely on this occasion because I have something that you must see — and this is not the place to start passing round infra-red photographs.'

  Luard's narrow eyes slid into their creases of fat. Then his features went bland as the waiter approached. Stig ordered a beer, and Luard another Scotch. When the waiter had brought the drink, and Luard had made a patronising show of paying, he said, 'Infra-red. They must be good. What of?'

  'The Finnish-Soviet border area, south-east of Ivalo.'

  'Oh — those.' Stig appeared puzzled, bemused. 'Are your lot still taking them from those high-wing monoplanes, so the Russians don't suspect they're doing something your government has agreed there's no need to do?' Luard was smiling broadly, his face seeming to be enveloped by the fat cheeks, the heavy jowl — nose, eyes being pushed into a little fist of lumps in the centre of the globe of fat pink flesh. Stig hated him.

  'They are still using private aircraft, if that is what you mean.' Luard laughed, raised his glass, his little eyes twinkling, and presumably drank the health of the Cessnas and their pilots from Finnish Intelligence. He watched the antagonisms chasing themselves across the Finn's features, and decided to give Stig a rest.

  'All right, old man. Let's see them.'

  'Here?' The Finn appeared outraged, violated. 'We're in an alcove, aren't we. Don't be such a virgin. Holiday snaps, dirty pictures — doesn't matter. No one's going to care.'

  'Perhaps you could explain, Shelley, why this has taken two months to reach me?'

  Kenneth Aubrey looked at the sheaf of infra-red photographs fanned open on his desk, then up at his aide. The young man appeared disconcerted, but confused more evidently than distressed.

  'Sir, it was passing through my hands as routine. I didn't think you needed to see it.'

  'Very well.' Aubrey sighed. 'I accept that I was being inordinately curious when I removed them from your tray. But — now that I have them, pray enlighten me.'

  'They came in the Bag from Helsinki. With a note from Luard designating his contact as usual, and making light of these.'

  'And what are they meant to represent?'

  'I checked with Helsinki, because the explanatory note was unsatisfactory.' Aubrey nodded in compliment. 'Apparently, it's a practice roll from one of their covert border-checks. We don't have the later rolls they took of the Russian side of the border. This lot was on its way to the shredder when our contact sidetracked them.'

  'Why should he do that?' Aubrey picked up one print, and Shelley another, in order to direct Aubrey's attention. He knew that his superior disliked anyone who stood at his shoulder to draw attention to something he was studying.

  'The smear of infra-red sources in the top left-hand corner is Ivalo, the cold spot beyond is Lake Inari — apparently.' Aubrey nodded, impatiently, it seemed to Shelley. 'Towards the bottom, the other smear is the small to
wn of Raja-Jooseppi. The mystery resides, apparently, in the fact that there should be another, smaller smear, down near the bottom right-hand. A village called Rontaluumi.'

  'Yes?'

  'The practice roll appears all right — except that there is no heat-source whatsoever from the village.'

  'What?'

  'Our contact's superiors rejected the film as partially damaged, or wrongly developed. The rest of the film, the over-the-border stuff, was quite satisfactory.'

  'What other explanation might there be?'

  'Luard said, with scarcely disguised contempt, that it frightened the life out of our contact.'

  'And is he a man given to panic?'

  'No.'

  'Then what is his explanation.'

  'He says that not to make an infra-red impression of any kind means that the village was empty of life — human and animal. And must have been for several days before the film was taken.'

  'Sir, there's no contact from Brunton.'

  PART ONE

  FINLAND STATION

  15th to the 18th of…… 19.

  'The tasks of the Party are… to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.'

  Stalin

  One: The Falcon

  The brief period of daylight had again passed, and the sky was hard with stars. A soughing wind flicked at the snow, wiping it in quick flurries from the ground and pattering it against the walls of the tent Folley awoke refreshed, stiff with the cold and still with the image of the retreating helicopter in his imagination, the tail-light winking as if in valediction.

  He opened his eyes, shook himself, and climbed out of the sleeping-bag.

  He appreciated from the tiny rodent noises of the snow against the tent that the weather was holding, glanced at his watch, and then unstrapped the tent-flap. He knelt there, listening with his whole body, head cocked on one side.

  Eventually he seemed satisfied, and went out into the air which seemed to grasp at the lungs from within. He stretched, easing the stiffness. The ski-ing of the previous night, after dropping from the helicopter which had come skimming in under the radar net into Finnish Lapland, had taken its toll — not of his strength, but of his youth, it seemed. He was aching in muscles he never considered. He rubbed at the backs of his thighs, easing them under the white camouflage over-trousers.

  Then he seemed to decide that further delay was pointless, and there was an urgency about his repacking of the tiny white tent and even in the eating of his rations. He considered coffee, and at once rejected the delay it would involve.

  He was a little less than thirty kilometres south-east of Ivalo, the Lapland town at the southern extremity of the sacred Lake Inari. He was well away from the single main highway from Rovaniemi in the south, and from the single airlane between the two towns. A light plane had passed overhead soon after he had been dropped, its lights winking as it made its approach to the airport.

  He was in a country desolate with snow, a lunar landscape without real features, even so dose to the foothills of the Maanselka, the mountain chain crossing the body of Finnish Lapland. All the previous night he had passed through the ghostly landscape, heading south-east, and this night, too, it would be the same. Winter exercises inside the Arctic Circle had taught him what to expect in terms of terrain — but even then that had been northern Norway, where the slopes of the land were knife-cuts to draw the eye and hold it, where the fjords broke the snow like fingers spread on a white page.

  He shook off the sense of deadness. Here, he was less than twenty miles from the Soviet border.

  As he pushed off, digging in with the ski-sticks, putting his bulky, laden form in motion, he knew that this first mile might be the last one, just as every mile he had travelled might have been the mile of arriving.

  The large-scale map of Finland that Waterford had pinned to the wall of his cramped hotel room in Hereford, remained clear in his mind. He could see Waterford clearly, four days previously, pinning up the map, then sweeping his hand down the Soviet-Finnish border. Waterford had stressed that the location could not be precise.

  He sensed, suddenly, the isolation, the loneliness. Water-ford's room had been as redolent of it as this landscape. The experience was emptying. At the same time, the hours on the long cross-country skis increased his awareness, like some drug. Emptiness almost tangible in the snowbound tundra, its tips of small trees jutting like the fingers of buried hands. Or the thin pine forest, always threatening to die or vanish — straggling away from him to expire on the distant slopes.

  He passed deeper into the night, and the only sounds were the constant wind and the ceaseless and rhythmic hissing of the long skis.

  Beneath the arctic camouflage of his winter combat clothing, he wore the uniform of a lieutenant, his own rank, but a Yliluutnantti of the Lapland Rifle Battalion. His uniform was Finnish, the Russian-style fur hat jammed on his fair hair under the camouflage hood. Badges of rank on his combat dress were accurate. Across his shoulders, free of the heavy pack, was lying a 7-62 mm M/62 assault rifle, the Finnish copy of the Russian Kalashnikov; in a hip-holster, a 9 mm Lathi pistol, regulation firearm for Finnish officers. And there were the papers, and their false identity. He was engaged in a crosscountry endurance and survival test, part of his final examination before acceptance into the exclusive and semi-secret Finnish Special Force — a body equivalent of Folley's own British SAS.

  Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.

  He cupped gloved hands round the mug and swallowed the coffee, grateful for the pungent taste. It shocked the palate, unfroze the mind. He could hear Waterford talking in his steely, precise tones, suggestive of a masked or restrained power — even a deep and bitter fury.

  He knew something of Waterford's cavalier and even brutal army record, his connections on more than one occasion with the SIS. He allowed himself to laugh, a sound sharp as cracking wood in the silence and cold air, as he recollected the small, childish excitement he had felt as the briefing had begun. He had understood the crude exploitation of information in his CPP (Complete Personality Profile) by the senior man, yet he had been unable to quench the sudden warmth of the belly or control the shallowness of his breathing as the words separated him from others, acknowledged that he was the only suitable selection for the Snow Falcon thing.

  the two towns. A light plane had passed overhead soon after he had been dropped, its lights winking as it made its approach to the airport.

  He was in a country desolate with snow, a lunar landscape without real features, even so dose to the foothills of the Maanselka, the mountain chain crossing the body of Finnish Lapland. All the previous night he had passed through the ghostly landscape, heading south-east, and this night, too, it would be the same. Winter exercises inside the Arctic Circle had taught him what to expect in terms of terrain — but even then that had been northern Norway, where the slopes of the land were knife-cuts to draw the eye and hold it, where the fjords broke the snow like fingers spread on a white page.

  He shook off the sense of deadness. Here, he was less than twenty miles from the Soviet border.

  As he pushed off, digging in with the ski-sticks, putting his bulky, laden form in motion, he knew that this first mile might be the last one, just as every mile he had travelled might have been the mile of arriving.

  The large-scale map of Finland that Waterford had pinned to the wall of his cramped hotel room in Hereford, remained clear in his mind. He could see Waterford clearly, four days previously, pinning up
the map, then sweeping his hand down the Soviet-Finnish border. Waterford had stressed that the location could not be precise.

  He sensed, suddenly, the isolation, the loneliness. Water-ford's room had been as redolent of it as this landscape. The experience was emptying. At the same time, the hours on the long cross-country skis increased his awareness, like some drug. Emptiness almost tangible in the snowbound tundra, its tips of small trees jutting like the fingers of buried hands. Or the thin pine forest, always threatening to die or vanish — straggling away from him to expire on the distant slopes.

  He passed deeper into the night, and the only sounds were the constant wind and the ceaseless and rhythmic hissing of the long skis.

  Beneath the arctic camouflage of his winter combat clothing, he wore the uniform of a lieutenant, his own rank, but a Yliluutnantti of the Lapland Rifle Battalion. His uniform was Finnish, the Russian-style fur hat jammed on his fair hair under the camouflage hood. Badges of rank on his combat dress were accurate. Across his shoulders, free of the heavy pack, was lying a 7-62 mm M/62 assault rifle, the Finnish copy of the Russian Kalashnikov; in a hip-holster, a 9 mm Lathi pistol, regulation firearm for Finnish officers. And there were the papers, and their false identity. He was engaged in a crosscountry endurance and survival test, part of his final examination before acceptance into the exclusive and semi-secret Finnish Special Force — a body equivalent of Folley's own British SAS.

  Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.