Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  The agent stared at him and it was like the light died in those eyes, and the anger.

  Deadeye had the receiver box in his hand and a green light flashed. Had he tweaked the volume he would have had a constant bleep. Good signal, strong.

  He was gone.

  On hands and knees for the first fifty yards, bent low for the next hundred, fast on his toes and the balls of his feet till he reached the car. They were both snoring gently. Deadeye put the receiver on to the grille on the dashboard, beside the satnav. He crawled into the back, eased a bit of space for himself from Dennis but didn’t wake him. He closed his eyes and let his head drop. The bleep was good, comforting.

  Yashkin had set himself a target, a challenging one.

  The target of Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin was to find, that evening, entertainment in the Belarus city of Pinsk that would change the mood, ease the melancholy, of Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov.

  The light had dropped and the rain had not lifted when Yashkin drove the Polonez into the inner streets of the city. His first impression: Pinsk was a pit. He said, with bogus cheerfulness, ‘I reckon it looks a fine place.’

  ‘You must be blind,’ Molenkov growled. ‘It’s a shit-hole.’

  ‘A fine place, and one where we’ll find a meal, a bar, somewhere to sleep for three, four hours before we move on.’

  ‘You think, here, we’ll find a good meal without cockroaches in the kitchens, a good bar where the glasses have been decently washed that’s not for whores to work in? You’re optimistic. What do we know of Pinsk?’

  ‘A definition of optimism: “Whatever is, is right.” I was told that by Poliakoff, the academician in theoretical physics in my time. It was how he coped with the regime, pressures, then the scaling down in resources. The quotation is from the German philosopher, Leibniz.’

  ‘It’s shit. I repeat, what do we know of Pinsk?’

  Yashkin could have told him what he’d read in the guidebook when he’d planned the legs of the journey. Pinsk was on the confluence of the Pina and Pripat rivers, had been a Slavic centre in the eleventh century, sacked by Cossack marauders and the captured wounded buried alive. A canal linking the city to the Vistula river and the Baltic Sea was in disrepair, but it had the church of St Barbara and the Franciscan monastery … but he didn’t know where they could eat and drink.

  ‘I know nothing, except that we must eat something, then sleep a little and move on.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Molenkov said heavily. ‘And after that we must make our delivery.’

  Yashkin found a parking place at the edge of the old town. It was dark, poorly lit. In front of him was the start of what he presumed would be a network of narrow streets. He saw few cars – and those that were there sped past – and fewer pedestrians, who were hurrying as if anxious to be elsewhere. He looked for neon signs advertising food and drink, and a hotel that would have secure lockup garaging, and saw only shadows. The schedule, to be kept to, allowed for a meal, a drink or three, a short sleep, then the last section of the drive west. The rendezvous point from the code message was now – Yashkin estimated – a mere hundred and thirty-five kilometres ahead. He stepped out of the car, went to the back and unlocked the tail hatch.

  He gazed at the bulk of the tarpaulin. He reached inside, past their bags, wriggled his hand under it and let it lie on the canvas coating of the Zhukov. He was smiling to himself. Had he expected to feel its warmth? Of course not. Was he certain he hadn’t expected to register on his fingertips the evidence that it lived? Well … no, not certain. He understood and was tolerant of the doubts, hesitations, confusions that battled in Molenkov’s mind. Molenkov had not lived with the beast for the past fifteen years – it had not been in his garden, under lettuces and carrots, cabbages and potatoes in summer and under the winter snow, it had never been on a cart pushed by conscripts under Molenkov’s control, going through the security of the main gate at Arzamas-16. He took his hand from the roughness of the canvas, strewed sheets of newspaper over the uniforms to hide them, then slammed the hatch. He locked the Polonez, walked round the car and tested each door, satisfied himself that the vehicle was secure and offered no target of opportunity to thieves.

  Molenkov was up the street and called, ‘Yashkin, up here, on the left. I think there may be a place.’

  Yashkin wondered if they could eat fish there, or whether Pinsk was too near to the zone of Chernobyl and that part of the Pripat river. He would like some fish – carp or bream, but a pike would be best, with herbs … A dream. Yashkin would eat anything, and wash away the taste with beer – was there a local brew? Food occupied him, and drink. He felt the acute stiffness in his hips and lower back from that long leg, and the legs he had driven in the previous days. He did not look around, was not alert, had no suspicions. The street was empty except for Molenkov and a distant light in garish red and green. He did not ask himself why it was empty and what district of Pinsk he had come to.

  He remembered. Now Yashkin remembered what the book had said in the library reading room in Sarov. Beer was indeed brewed in Belarus – three beers. Now he could recall the names of only two: Lidskoe and Krynitsa. He struggled to remember the third, and he was ten paces from Molenkov.

  ‘Age, my friend, the ravage of age. I can’t name all the Belarus-brewed beers, only two of three. One escapes.’

  He would have expected Molenkov to give him a finger of derision, to laugh at him or curse the irrelevance of his memory difficulty, but he saw, instead, Molenkov sag to a crouch, his mouth wide open as if to shout, his fists raised. The blow, from behind, felled Yashkin.

  He was clubbed. The impact point was between the back of his neck and the centre of his left shoulder-blade. The breath sang from his throat. He gasped, but had no voice. His legs were kicked from under him. He collapsed, sprawled on the darkened pavement. Two men came past him.

  He could barely distinguish them. They closed on Molenkov. Yashkin had no strength and less will to fight. Didn’t think, had he wanted to, that he could have struggled to his feet and gone to his friend’s aid.

  Molenkov fought them.

  His eyes welled, but he was able to blink hard enough to keep back tears, but the pain was a cruel ache that spread down his arm, up his neck and along his back. Maybe in Molenkov there were faint stirrings of the memory of an unarmed combat course in his early days as an officer recruit in State Security. Maybe, before going to the arsehole spying role of political officer, Molenkov had been on a gymnasium mat and shown how to throw men around, near break their arms, legs, whatever. Yashkin could only watch, couldn’t intervene.

  They laughed. The two bastards laughed.

  They stood away from Molenkov for a moment, and their laughter – more a fucking giggle – rang out on the street. Molenkov confronted them, dared them to advance on him, but the crouch posture made it seem he was about to crap and his hands were raised, like they did in bad movies. They laughed one last time, then went in on Molenkov. Punches broke through his guard, and the short cosh swung down. Molenkov slumped, and the boots went in. Still he fought them. They were over him, fucking hyenas, and his legs thrashed at them. He must have bitten one because there was a stifled scream, then an obscenity, then a shower of blows. Yashkin thought it brave of Molenkov, and didn’t know whether he would have dared to do the same. They were bent over his friend, and Yashkin saw the wallet held up. Then one broke away, came to him and knelt over him.

  Now Yashkin knew he would not resist, not imitate his friend. He was curled up, and his head was hidden by his hands but he could see through his fingers. Hands came into his coat, searched, pried, and found the fold-over wallet his wife, ‘Mother’, had given him as a May Day present thirty-one years earlier. It was taken, and the man stood. The smell of his breath, beer and nicotine, faded, but he saw a guy with a leather jacket, black, a tattoo on the neck, and a shaven head that the rain danced on.

  He realized, and it came hard, that they were not any more a colonel and a major of Stat
e Security. They were two old men who did not have the wit to protect themselves in a strange city – fucking Pinsk. Their wallets were opened, the cash was taken out with the credit cards – not that they would be of any use in Pinsk – and the bastards took the time, had the arrogance, to count the money. Even divided it.

  Their emptied wallets were dropped on the pavement.

  The bastards did not run to get clear; they walked. They did not look back, as if they had left behind them nothing that might threaten.

  He did what he was capable of. He crawled to his friend. He took Molenkov’s head in his hands and listened to the moan of breath sucked between swollen, bloodied lips.

  Molenkov slurred, ‘What did you say “optimism” was?’

  Yashkin said, ‘I said, quoting Leibniz, “Whatever is, is right.”

  Molenkov staggered to his feet, and Yashkin supported him. The one-time zampolit said, ‘I have a few coins in my pocket, enough for the toilet cleaner, but all my banknotes were in my wallet.’

  ‘I have some coins in my pocket, and my wallet is empty.’

  ‘What else is near to empty, my friend, if not quite?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Each now held the other upright, breathing hard, seeking to control pain. What was worse than pain – Yashkin’s view – was the humiliation of what had happened.

  Molenkov tried to crack a smile, which hurt and his teeth ground together. He mumbled, ‘It will be hard to be optimistic – “Whatever is, is right” – but we need money to fill the fuel tank, and we’re against the red, very near to it. We have no money to buy fuel. Maybe enough for bread, but not for fuel.’

  He sagged. Molenkov would have gone down again, on to the pavement, had Yashkin not held him. Yashkin took him back up the street and, near to one of the old churches, found a bench. He could see the car from there. Molenkov slept first, snored through his weeping, thickened lips, and Yashkin knew he would follow him.

  He remembered it … He rejoiced. Yashkin remembered that the third brand of beer brewed in Belarus had the Alevaria label but Molenkov slept and snored and he didn’t wake him.

  He heard a whistle, then his name was called.

  Carrick did not know how long he had sat in darkness with his back against the tree, but the stiffness was locked in his hips and knees, and his balance almost betrayed him as he stood. He had to grasp the tree trunk to stop himself sliding down and away.

  The whistle, then the call, had come faintly, but both were foreign sounds, recognizable against the constant rumbling murmur of the river. The clouds had broken. A moon flitted in the gaps and then there was light on the water. The rain came in spasmodic bursts and he was drenched from sitting against the tree above the Bug. He thought that if he lost his footing and went into it – if he went under – he would be lost. He might panic, open his mouth and swallow a stomach and lungful of water, might have his head hit by a submerged branch and be stunned, might be so disoriented that he swam for the centre of the river where the currents were fiercest and not for the bank where he might catch a root or a rock in his fist. If he went in, chances were that he was gone.

  He started out along the bank, headed for where the whistle had come from. Deep in thought, Carrick had wiled away time. The harness was tight on his skin and the vest under his shirt, sweater and coat, while the box pinched the flesh at the small of his back when he moved.

  In the darkness, he groped back towards Reuven Weissberg. Almost careered into him. Was a yard from him when the moon’s light hit his shoulders and lit his face.

  ‘What do I do, Johnny?’

  ‘Tell me, sir.’

  ‘They come to the far side.’

  ‘You meet them on the far side, sir?’

  ‘Meet them, then take back what they bring. Lift it across the river … I had not thought of the flood. I was going to use a rope between trees on their side and our side. I had not considered the flood. What do I do?’

  Alone against the tree, while dusk had gone to evening and dullness to black, he had thought of the command in the warehouse that Mikhail back off, of the kiss on the cheeks beside the Vistula under the walls of the Stare Miasto, of the trust given him and the weapon handed to him … had thought of the friendship.

  For a moment Carrick pondered. He filled his lungs, and didn’t realize that the scales tipped further. There had been a week on the Brecon mountains in a tent bivouac, way up north from Merthyr, and there had been one of those shite courses for leadership evaluation. Carrick’s platoon had been tasked to do the humping for the officer candidates, and a river was in spate. The winning team had had an officer – not the usual Rupert idiot – who had called the best solution, the only time he had spoken. Carrick remembered.

  ‘How big is what they’re bringing, sir?’

  ‘Perhaps fifty kilos. The size would be nearly a metre high and nearly a half-metre across. Then I assume it has extra protection round it.’

  ‘Can it get wet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. That cannot be risked.’

  ‘Can the men who are bringing it take responsibility for getting it to this side?’

  ‘No. They are old.’

  Carrick remembered how the officer had planned the crossing of a river in spate in the Brecon mountains. He asked, ‘Could you, sir, find a small boat?’

  ‘I think I have seen one.’

  ‘It’s a small boat we need, sir, for you and me.’

  And Johnny Carrick, beside the Bug river, which was huge and flooded with the rain falling on central Ukraine, did not see that his loyalties had blurred and slipped.

  Chapter 17

  16 April 2008

  They were beside a lake. To reach it, Carrick reckoned they had walked three miles.

  He had thought it remarkable that Reuven Weissberg, the Russian who had lived variously in Perm, Moscow and Berlin, could follow trails and tracks through the forest, could move there with the latent confidence of an animal whose place it was. He had followed as exactly as possible under the trees. His target had stayed as the centre of Reuven Weissberg’s back, and when he lost it, the penalty was to blunder into tree trunks or have his face whipped by low branches.

  Carrick had been alerted that they approached the lake by the splashes and call of water fowl. Near to it, they had moved along a track wide enough for a tractor and trailer, and he had fallen into one of the deeper ruts left by a tyre. He had been pitched forward, his momentum catching Reuven Weissberg’s haunches. For a moment, then, a hand had been at Carrick’s throat, tight, hard and squeezing. He had choked once, then heard laughter. He had been on his knees and the hand had left his throat and lifted him … Strange laughter, and not from a world Carrick knew. The same hand had gone to his shoulders and gripped them; then they had gone the last yards and the lake had been in front of them. Remarkable – no map, no compass and the GPS not used. Carrick thought that Reuven Weissberg knew the forest and the routes through it as a native would, or as a boar or a deer.

  The tree line ran right to the water’s edge.

  He was told, ‘I was here once. A man had been fishing. I did not speak to him and he would not have known that I watched him. He brought a boat to this place and tied it, then left it.’

  He was not told why Reuven Weissberg had been in the forest, moving with the secrecy of a hunter or a beast.

  The moon found a cloud gap. The water shimmered and there were ripples to match the squeal of the birds. They went to the very edge. He thought of those few seconds when his throat had been gripped, then freed, and when the fist had taken hold of his coat and the strength of the man had lifted him, of the ferocity of the first seconds and the kindness that had followed. The boat was there. Old abilities had returned. His vision in the darkness, augmented by the moon’s glow, was more complete than it had been when they had begun the trek through the forest. Light reflected up from the water.

  There was a small inlet in the bank, a little gouge, and there was a tree with subm
erged roots at its mouth that would have given shelter to the place. Across the inlet was the angled black shape. He could only admire the faith Reuven Weissberg had shown in his judgement and memory. That faith had bred certainty. He followed.

  He murmured, ‘I’ll do the business, sir. I will.’

  Carrick eased past. He held on to the splayed sprigs of branches as he went down and into the water. His hands groped the length of the boat – well, not so much a boat, more a small punt. It was the sort of craft that some towed behind a narrowboat while navigating the Thames or the Grand Union Canal. There were times when it was easier to moor on an open bank, perhaps where cattle were, and then a punt was needed to paddle across the river or the waterway to get to a pub or a mini-market. He thought of a failed loving on a narrow-boat during the night that he’d been recruited, volunteered, and of her in the arms of the young man who had come with the old bully. His fingers found the punts dimensions, narrow and squared off at front and back, and there was a single board across its centre where a man could sit, paddle or fish from. He reckoned that the sides of the punt were some nine inches, less than a foot, above the water line. He knew little of boats. They had no place on the Spey near its mouth. The water was too fast, there were too many submerged and lethal rocks, and the anglers going after salmon used chest waders to get to the head of a prime pool. Paratroopers did not do water and boats, left them to what they called the ‘cabbage hats’ – paratroops called anybody not wearing a red beret by that title, emphasized it for marines with their green headgear – and reckoned small craft were show-ponies’ toys. There was a rope at the front of the boat and it was hooked to a ring, then looped up to a thick branch. It came away easily.

  He took it and pulled the boat round, then laid the rope on his shoulder and heaved. It came up more easily than he’d have thought likely. It slithered out of the inlet, then up the shallow bank. The mud helped it.