Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  I examined him.

  He was conscious.

  He was bleeding in many places, his back and sides. If the whistle had not blown the man would have had time to kill him, but the whistle had blown. He was in huge pain. Any movement hurt him. He said then that it would have been better if we had died on the fence or in the minefield. He thought himself too severely hurt to move, and tried to urge me to leave him and go on, further into the forest, alone. And the rain fell on his back and the water was reddened. I didn’t know what to do. I was against the tree and he was across me. I had my shirt, my blouse, against the wounds. My chest was bare but I didn’t feel the rain or the cold, only his pain. I wasn’t strong enough to move him – if I had been able to move him I didn’t know of anywhere I could take him.

  I saw the child.

  A child, a boy of five or six, stood among the trees and watched us. He had clothes on that were little better than rags. I thought him to be the child of a peasant family. He stood with his hands behind his back, and the look on his face was curiosity. I called to him to come closer so that I could speak to him, but he wouldn’t move. He was among the trees. I didn’t know whether the child was an idiot from birth, was simple, but there was no fear on his face, or excitement, and no charity. I was pleading with him to find me help, and he stared back at me. I lied to him. I offered him money: I had no money. I pointed to the wounds on Samuel – as if it were necessary to point. I showed him my hands, which were washed in Samuel’s blood. I screamed for him to help me. And he ran. I shouted after him that he must bring help.

  I was alone again with Samuel.

  I don’t know for how long. His strength was going. Too much blood had been lost. I couldn’t save him. All I hoped for was that he would be comfortable and – in his own time – slip away. I talked to him and didn’t know if he heard me. I said to him that I was privileged to have known his love and that I would survive to carry the memory of him … and I heard the voice of a child.

  We, who were in the camp for a week or a month or a year, had forgotten how to weep or show joy. I could have cried, in my desperation, for joy when I saw that child and the man who followed him. The child led him, skipped ahead. He was a man of young middle age, rough-dressed and rough-faced, and he carried a woodsman’s axe, a long-handled one, and a dog was with them. I heard the child’s voice, then the dog barking, and I thought help had come.

  The child’s father had not come to help.

  I saw greed in his face, and hatred.

  He crouched over Samuel, who had wriggled across my body. At first he didn’t speak but started to search through what pockets he could reach in Samuel’s trousers, Samuel’s coat. I crawled, writhed, was no longer under Samuel and turned on his attackers. I tried to stop him. Samuel screamed at the pain made by my movements and by the father’s. The man shouted at me that all Jews had money, all Jews had jewellery. I struggled with him. He slashed at me with his axe but I was moving and it didn’t hit me. The blade hit the top of Samuel’s head. He came again: where was the money, the jewellery? I fought him. He had kicked Samuel with old boots, and that was his anger at his failure to find money and jewellery. I scraped my nails across his cheeks, hard enough to draw blood. He swung a fist at me, I caught and bit it, felt the bones of his fingers – and he backed away. He yelled now at me that I was worth a two-kilo bag of sugar at least. His voice had risen and his hand was bloodied. More blood was in his beard, and he told me he would bring Germans and the reward for identifying Jews in the forest would be paid him in sugar. He had the same hatred for me as the men of the Armia Karjowa had shown. He circled me. I faced him. I stood over Samuel and defended his body. I heard Samuel’s labouring breathing and knew his death was close. The forester did not dare to come closer to me. He said he would bring the Germans and spat at me.

  He went with the child. He hurried. He went to earn his two-kilo bag of sugar.

  Death had come.

  His last moments, those last struggles of his life, were frantic and brave, and he had attempted to stand that he might protect me. There was no dignity in his death … but neither was there dignity for those going to the chambers at the end of the Road to Heaven, or for those on the wire and in the minefield. There was no mercy there, in the camp or in the forest. Only betrayal .

  I took Samuel’s weight, had my hands in his armpits. I dragged him as far as I could. I cannot say where I found that strength.

  I buried him.

  With my fingernails, my hands and a length of dead wood, I made a pit for him. I worked him into it. I was exhausted to the point of collapse. I had to use my boots to push him in. I filled it, handful by handful, with earth and then I kicked leaves over it.

  I was alone. I went on into the forest. I no longer knew the direction I took or what I hoped to find. So many had betrayed me, and at the end a child with an innocent face had joined the others. I vowed then never to love, never to trust, never to care about the deaths of others. I walked until the darkness closed on me, and kept walking, hit trees, fell into ditches – but felt no pain, only hatred.

  ‘Do you understand, Johnny?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The story makes me the man I am.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  He thought the hatred, as expressed in the great mass of the forest behind him by a young woman, still lived with the same snake’s venom as in the days its culture had been bred. Carrick thought of the hatred as something that could not be turned away from. Reuven Weissberg’s world was his world.

  ‘You will stand with me, Johnny?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The punch hit his shoulder, rocked him. Johnny Carrick, too, was a part of the madness at the Sobibor camp. He seemed to see the young woman blundering among the trees in the darkness that hugged him, and he wondered if by then, in those minutes and hours, the lustre of her hair had changed to white.

  The director general, Francis Pettigrew – without a knighthood yet, but it would come – tapped into the console and the lock clicked open. He went into Operations (Current) Control. The room was in the heart of the building, on a second floor down in the basement. He had not had the sword tap his shoulder, but possessed the necessary stature. He glided into the room, made a presence. He saw Banham hunched at a desk with a wall of screens in front of him, telephones, a flask, a half-eaten sandwich and … Of course, if the director general had believed without equivocation in the judgement of Christopher Lawson, it would not have been only Giles Banham here: the full team would have been out – Lambert, Amin and Carthew would have been competing for desk space.

  The room was where operations of sensitivity were monitored in the hours up to the predicted climax of crisis, the time when it screwed up or the corks popped.

  ‘Heard from them over there, have you?’

  ‘No, Director, nothing. Left a couple of texts for Lawson – had an FO response to each. At least to the point. I suppose he’s getting a bit frantic. Don’t mind me saying it, Director, but isn’t this all a tad Ice Age?’

  ‘It’s the way it is, where we are, what we have.’ The director general had known Banham since he was knee high, and his parents three decades. There were not many from whom he would have permitted that slight curled lip when Christopher Lawson was discussed. Not that he could pass blame to Banham. It was he, Francis Pettigrew, who had nominated minimal manning for the room. ‘If something materializes across that bloody river, give me a shout.’

  ‘You’ll be, Director …?’

  ‘At the club.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  He realized then what he had done. Banham, who would remain alone in the room and had already started to consume the remainder of his sandwich, was justified in his visible lack of excitement in a mission called Haystack. Had he merely humoured Christopher Lawson or had he sold him short? Pettigrew didn’t know.

  He slipped out. On that night of the week they did a rather good casserole at the club. Perhaps he
had allowed his one-time mentor to bully him – shouldn’t have done. He walked off down the corridor that led to the lift. Should have asked for greater provenance before signing off on Haystack and committing those resources … Well, he’d be charitable and decent when Lawson came on the phone: ‘No show, Francis, may have been overegged. Worth a try …’

  ‘Absolutely, Christopher, well worth a try.’

  He didn’t have a picture in his mind of where Lawson and his increments were and what it would be like for them.

  He took a lift up. His protection intercepted him, the reception people stood. Security opened the swing doors so that he did not have to swipe his way out. It was the departure of the king-emperor of VBX. His car waited.

  And much else lay on his mind. The door was opened. Damn it, more was on his mind than the comfort of Christopher Lawson, who had taken squatter’s rights on the banks of the Bug river.

  *

  They slipped away.

  Adrian, Dennis and Deadeye headed for the river as they had been told to. Adrian had only a vague sense of history, and thought Deadeye got none of the romance and tragedy of it, but Dennis had a keen interest in the past and with it a love of all things French. Not merely the cooking and wine production, but France’s military history. Dennis thought of their dispatch back to the river as the nearest thing to the final throw, the sending forward of the Imperial Guard – 18 June 1815 – on the field of Waterloo. If they – himself, Adrian and Deadeye – did not turn the day and locate their targets on the river-bank, it was lost. They were the last chance. It was reassuring, in a gallows sort of way, that Deadeye had retrieved a weapon from his baggage, loaded it and was carrying it.

  They had left the guv’nor, the boss, with Shrinks, pacing, deep in his thoughts and murmuring to himself. If Lawson had felt a mounting panic, he had not shown it … Impressive, that. They went off and away, through the trees and towards the Bug, moving carefully because that was their skill, but he seemed to hear the tramp of those marching feet and the squelching mud of the Imperial Guard’s advance. The last throw.

  Yes, if they were coming – with their filthy, contaminated cargo – they would be near. That, at least, he could be certain of.

  ‘Would you choose this fucking place to take a fucking holiday?’

  ‘I would not, Molenkov. Nor would I talk. It takes breath to talk, and breath takes energy.’

  ‘You’re so pompous, always were and always will be. I talk about holidays. Where shall I go on holiday? Not here, so where?’

  ‘Shut up, Molenkov. Use your energy to pull.’

  ‘I have no energy left. I need to think of the beach, the sunshine, the beer, not mud. How far?’

  He didn’t answer. Yashkin heard the drip of Molenkov’s voice and the moan of the wind in the trees. He heard his own gasps and Molenkov’s wheezing hisses. How far? He didn’t answer because he had no idea how far it was to the river, but he used the moon’s climb behind him – between the trees – as a guide. It had risen high enough to show where paths and tracks had been fashioned through the dense planting of the pines. But every pit in their way was an obstacle filled with water, and sometimes they saw them in advance and could skirt them and sometimes they couldn’t. The deepest pit took the water above their knees and doused the beast they dragged. Every rut, where the tracks were wider and long-ago forestry tractors had been, was filled with flooding pools and had cloying, clinging mud at the bottom. Yashkin did not know but he hoped the river was now within a kilometre of where they struggled, and he hoped, also, that his calculations on direction were exact. Each had hold of one of the side straps of the weapon, codenamed RA-114. Clear from a resting-place in the back of the Polonez, and without its tarpaulin shroud, it had the shape of a small oil drum and was encased in a canvas jacket. The straps were stout. The weight was in excess, Yashkin believed, of sixty kilos. Heavy enough when he had been fifteen years younger and had manoeuvred it from the porch at his home, down the side of his house and into the hole he had dug in his vegetable patch. Fifteen years of existing on the Sarov scrap heap had wasted his strength. The week of driving west had sapped what he had left, as had lack of sleep and food, the beating at Pinsk, the high-octane stress of the frontier crossing into Belarus … and for two hours or more they had slipped, slithered and dragged the thing through the forest. Little strength remained, and he thought Molenkov weaker. The weight and awkwardness of it seemed to grow with each metre covered.

  ‘Yashkin …’

  He heard the bleat of his name. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If we ever take the holiday – you, me and Mother – and we’re somewhere that has a beach, sun and many cans of beer …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Would they come after us?’

  For a moment he gagged, then whispered, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would they try to poison us? Would they pay for a contract hit with a pistol? Would they explode a bomb under the car? You don’t know, but what do you think? Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know, and I don’t think. Will you take your share of the weight, my esteemed friend? Do I have to do everything?’ Yashkin swore. The pit in the track was deeper than the others. The mud at the bottom was stickier than it had been in others. Yashkin was in the pit, with the water almost at his crotch, and Molenkov had missed it, and was a half-metre above him, and the weight of the beast seemed to pitch towards him, and it was pushing him lower into the water. He realized what he had lost. Molenkov was pulling at him.

  ‘Oaf – you’re so clumsy. Get up, get out.’

  ‘I’ve lost … fuck …’

  ‘What have you lost?’

  ‘My shoe.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Then a chuckle. ‘Lost it? Look at your foot, try there.’

  He thrashed in the water. He came up the side of the pit. He was very close to hitting Molenkov with a clenched fist. He looked back. His left foot was already a frozen, unfeeling mass. He could see the water, silver in the moonlight, and the great ripples flowing on its surface. He didn’t know where he had been in the hole when the mud had caught his shoe, clamped on it and torn it from his foot when he had struggled to free himself. He could have wept. The pit he had gone into was, perhaps, two metres long, a metre wide and more than a metre deep. He swore again. To grope in the mud and search for his shoe would require him to immerse his whole body in the water, maybe even his fucking head.

  Yashkin said, ‘I’ve lost my shoe in the mud and I doubt I can find it.’

  He hopped at first and was reluctant to set his stockinged foot down on the ground. But the track was of soft compost, matted pine needles and old leaves, and had give in it. With each step he was prepared to test more weight on the forest floor. They dragged it between them. They went down into more ruts and more pits. They kept going.

  Molenkov had started again to talk about holidays, another beach, endless sun, beer without limit, but Yashkin didn’t hear him. Above the wheezing and the gasps, the whine of the wind in the branches, was a far-away murmur that grew in intensity with each faltering step they took. He knew what he heard. There was no break in the murmur. He felt pride surge in him and the loss of the shoe seemed irrelevant. He made Molenkov move faster.

  Yashkin said, ‘I can hear, at last, the voice of a great river. My friend, we’ve done it, survived it. Soon you will have, maybe in an hour, a half-share of one million American dollars in your pocket, and you can take a holiday anywhere you want. We’re very close to the river, to the Bug.’

  *

  Viktor saw them.

  They had come through an open space – where a storm might have brought down a cluster of trees – and the moon’s light had caught them. Two were together and one was a few metres apart from them, nearer to the riverbank.

  Viktor was end marker. Upstream from him was Mikhail, Goldmann, then Weissberg and the bastard who was a stranger among them.

  They were fifty metres short of him, he estimated. He rated the one nearer the water as b
eing the more competent, moving quieter and not coming into the silver filtered light. He reckoned the pair were short on the art of crossing rough ground. Thoughts came very fast to Viktor’s mind, and images to his memory. In the Stare Miasto they would have been on familiar territory; on the cobbled streets and the pavement slabs they would have been apart and expert in the environment. He could not recognize in that faint light what clothes they wore or their build, but he had no doubt of it: had the sun been high, had the forest been lit, he would have recognized them from the Old City of Warsaw. He would have seen the same men coming through the choke-points.

  Viktor knew the art of surveillance and knew what gave professional esteem.

  They had not seen him. Most of his body was sheltered by a birch clump. Beside it on the river’s side, there was a similar open space to the one the two men had just come through, and the same degree of moonlight shone into it. Viktor stepped out. He exposed himself, stood tall in the middle of the space, let the light come down and catch his forehead. Maybe it would glint in his eyes. He could recall what instructors had done when he was a recruit officer in State Security and the course was on the finer art of surveillance; it had been done to a friend, not to him, but that recall was sharp, as was the humiliation of his friend. They had frozen, the two men. He couldn’t see the third because his eyeline was directly ahead, locked on the two. Viktor had no doubt now that the surveillance had been on them from the time they had driven down the fast road to Heathrow. Vengeance would come later. It was not to be rushed – was like a good fuck or a good meal, best done at convenience and after consideration. They stared back. They were in their pool of light and he was in his.

  It was his supreme moment.

  He felt a slow smile break on his face. One thing alone irked Viktor. He did not have sufficient light to see their faces. He missed not having a big flashlight to shine at them and catch the moment. He did it like that instructor had at the counter-intelligence school at Novosibirsk, when he had served in the 3rd Directorate. He could imagine what would be on their faces, the dumb shock, the astonishment and the shame.