by A P Bateman
The retreat was nameless. Zukovsky was sure it didn’t exist on the map. Google Earth may well find it, but he knew the old Soviet maps only showed forest, tundra and mountainous rock. That was a long time ago, but he had to put map reference coordinates into the satnav as no address had been given to him. The drive had been long and he had been glad of the Audi’s four-wheel drive system on the icy road. It had snowed recently. Great piles had been cleared to the side of the road and were mixed with mud and pine needles. Although the road was clear, he could tell from the vast piles of snow and ice that it would have been practically impassable a few days ago. He knew the forecast was good for the next few days so his return trip tomorrow should be uneventful.
Ahead of him the trees on either side of the road thinned out and he could see the gates just off the road on his right. He crossed over and swung the Audi into the driveway. The drive was about two hundred metres and as he made his way down towards the series of log cabins set out in a crescent he was hit with a pang of familiarity and nostalgia. They were not all necessarily good times; they had been brutal to say the least. But the brutality of communism and the state ruled by the iron fist of the KGB had given the USSR something that western decadence, civil freedoms and the free market had not. Power on the world stage. The Russian President was seen as a joke by most of the world, a man’s man who cared not for what was thought about him, but that he was powerful and not to be pushed or dominated. Pictures or footage of him bear hunting with a crossbow, bare-chested riding horses or sparring with troops in albeit carefully choreographed judo grapples were sending out a message of strength. However, this was not truly the case and the rest of the world could see it for what it was. Posturing in light of two facts. Russia was not to be trusted on the world stage and could survive with such extremes of wealth and poverty for only so long.
Zukovsky could not forgive the current state of affairs. He was in Afghanistan when they pulled out. He commanded a battalion in the North. A godforsaken land that hadn’t given up its fight easily. Or at all. With the systematic withdrawal of Afghanistan, the waiting satellite states had bolstered themselves and the Soviet Union had started to fall like dominoes until only the Russian Federation remained and was renamed. Many high-ranking military figures had found it unforgivable that they had not fought for the Union, or started to take it back afterwards. They were told by the leaders that they would bide their time and wait until they could fight and win. But these times had never come. The military leaders of the day were either dead or old men.
Zukovsky was an old man now. Another old man was Yevgeny Antakov, who was walking down the wooden steps of the centre cabin. Antakov stood six foot five, or used to. Now he was stooped and making good use of the wooden handrail. His once salt and pepper hair, trimmed short to military grade was now wavy and snowy white. He watched his old friend as he parked the car and lifted his left hand in greeting. Not so much a wave as an acknowledgement.
Zukovsky switched off the engine and opened the door. As he got out he stiffened. The drive had been long and this far north was colder than he had been used to in recent years.
“Vladimir, my old friend!” Yevgeny called from the bottom step.
Zukovsky noted the man walked no further, but still held the handrail. “Yevgeny!” He mock saluted, smiled as his old comrade returned the gesture, although noted, rather to his annoyance, that it was with his left hand, the right still taking his weight.
“The years have treated you well, General,” Yevgeny paused. He remained still as Zukovsky walked towards him.
“The knees and hips need a good oiling, but they loosen eventually,” he smiled.
The two men stared at each other fondly, then bear hugged and back-slapped. Yevgeny motioned a hand out to the woods beside him. “If this place could talk, eh? The secrets it would reveal; the lives it would know lost…”
“Time buries the past, my old friend. Who are we to awaken it?”
Yevgeny chuckled. “Oh, Vladimir. How right you are. And yet…”
Vladimir Zukovsky held up a hand. “Enough… you call me out here in the bitter cold and fail to offer me vodka before talking?” He caught hold of his old friend’s elbow and took some weight as they made their way up the steps. He felt the man relax and lean on him.
“Vladimir, I have vodka. Plenty for us both,” he paused. “And our guests also, when they arrive.”
They stopped on the decked porch. Zukovsky looked back at the woods. The trees were bare and covered with a hard frost. The ground would be hard. He knew how hard it could get. Hard to dig, even just a few feet. There was permafrost this far north, at about four feet. He wondered whether the bodies were still preserved. There were many of them out there. The ones who had held their secrets. The ones who hadn’t unburdened themselves and survived to make the one-way journey to the gulags.
“What other guests?”
Yevgeny smiled. “Like minded men, Vladimir. Like you and I, they yearn for change.”
“We are old men now, comrade. What can we do?”
“Nonsense! I am old, I am broken and frail,” Yevgeny nodded. “But this!” He tapped his temple with his finger. “This! Well, it is as sharp as it always was. Maybe more so. Old men have time to think, time to reflect. I have evaluated failures, learned from them. My mind is a sabre and with you to steer it towards our enemy’s heart, well we will prevail.”
Zukovsky nodded. Intrigue had got the better of him. It had to, he had driven two days to get here. He looked up at the car making its way down the drive towards them. It was a large Mercedes SUV, black with dark tinted windows.
“Ah, they are here,” Yevgeny smiled and looked at Zukovsky. “You will find this interesting, no doubt.”
Zukovsky watched the vehicle swing into the drive in a large circle and park facing outwards. Four people got out of the car. The old KGB General was right. Vladimir Zukovsky found it extremely interesting.
4
One year later
Festival Pier, South Bank, London
Detective Inspector Hodges hated these sorts of cases. First there were the voyeurs. The few who had seen something terrible had massed into a sizable crowd and were looking on at the gruesome scene with macabre interest. Smartphone cameras with instant YouTube, Facebook and Instagram uploads were clicking away with no respect for what they were witnessing, and then there was the legal aspect. Evidence was already in the public domain. A few uniformed officers were dispersing the crowd and putting up exclusion zone tape and the coroner vehicles were backed to the edge of the pier waiting to transport the bodies away.
Apart from the publicity, Hodges hated these sorts of cases because of what they gave you in terms of investigative material. The Thames was a huge body of moving water with pollution, a large tide and rainwater and drains emptying out into it constantly. Water was not the forensic investigator’s friend. You lost fingerprints and the transferal of fibres and DNA. Depending how long the body was in the water would depend on what you could get. He felt sure they were looking along the lines of at least ten hours, possibly twelve of submersion. There were a few factors to aid his thinking towards this. Firstly, it was five-thirty PM and the post work drinks and meetings were in full swing. The tide was not quite halfway and on the drop. Which meant that the four bodies would have been in the water by six thirty AM, given the time of sunrise and height of the tide.
The team had got a partition in place and River Police were redirecting a pleasure boat loaded with passengers to another pier. The crowd at the end of the pier had gone back to various bars and Hodges felt that there was a little more control in place as he stood at the top of the steps and shouted down to DS Mathews who was working with the two firefighters below using a River Police RIB moored to the strut of the pier. “You got it sorted yet?”
“Nearly boss,” he paused, grunted under the exertion. “That’s it! They’re free. Two minutes and we can start getting them out and into the RIB. We’ll motor bac
k to the pontoon and unload from there. Better get the coroner vehicles to go there instead.”
“Nice one,” Hodges walked back along the pier and waved at the coroner driver who was leaning against his van. The driver looked up and Hodges pointed down the riverfront. The driver nodded, stubbed out his cigarette and got inside the plain, but beautifully polished vehicle.
Hodges looked out across the river. There was a harsh, cruel wind coming straight in from the East, the direction of the North Sea. He shivered, his suit jacket doing little to fend off the cold. He would have to start wearing his coat now. Autumn had been held off by a rare but often anticipated Indian summer, but it was fair to say that it was gone now. The water must have been cold for them, he thought as he watched the RIB motor steadily towards him.
The River Police officer expertly steered the RIB into the pontoon, throttled back and threw Hodges the rope. Hodges wrapped it inexpertly around a cleat and the officer jumped off the boat, untied it and wrapped it around the cleat again, threading the end of the rope around another cleat at the stern so the boat was fully tethered portside on.
“Impressions?” Hodges asked his junior officer.
Mathews stepped off the boat, stood aside for the two men from the coroner office as they wheeled a gurney beside the boat. “Sick bastards,” he said.
“Because?”
“You see their faces, the tape around their mouths?”
“I have, detective sergeant. I’m asking you.”
“Alive when they went in. Alive when they were chained in place. From their expressions it hurt a great deal and was terrifying… Also their wrists and ankles are raw. They struggled.”
“Variables and methodology?”
The young officer reached into the boat and unfolded a towel. He dried his clothes as best he could, had started to shiver. “The lengths of chain were the same, so the shortest drowned first. The others would have watched. They would have known who was next.”
“So an element of sadism.” Hodges stated flatly.
“It wasn’t a lone job.”
“Obviously.”
“They could have been drugged, something to make them cooperate. Maybe Rohypnol, it’s easy to get. Loads of it about in bars and clubs.”
“That’s for toxicology to find out.”
“Okay, it still would have taken at least three people. One to drive the boat, two to deal with the chains and hostages. Maybe they were at gunpoint?”
“Undoubtedly. Why hostages?”
“They died there. They were hostages until they died. Then they were bodies.”
“Good.” He was pleased with the young detective’s progress. He always gave the junior officers on his team the chance to mind map in the field. Mathews was new to the role of sergeant. In six months or so he’d be accompanied by his own junior officer.
“Hate crime, Sir?”
“They all are.”
“Specific hate crime. Vendetta perhaps?”
“Definitely personal. Maybe a message,” Hodges paused. “ID’s?”
DS Mathews watched the first body slouch onto the gurney. He reached around to the rear trouser pocket and pulled out the wallet. “Didn’t do it out there, Sir,” he said sheepishly. “I was getting a bit seasick.” He thumbed through. “Hello…” He showed DI Hodges the opened wallet.
“Check the others,” Hodges said.
The young officer jumped into the boat and pulled at the leather handbag wrapped around the neck and shoulder of the woman’s body. He delved inside, water pouring out as he did so. He retrieved a leather wallet and threw it up to Hodges before going towards the next body.
Hodges opened it and stared at the identification card. “Shit,” he said quietly, as he turned and took out his mobile phone.
5
20° N 56° E, Baltic Sea
Fifty miles Southwest of Lithuania
The sea was millpond calm. The sky was blue, as was the sea and it was hard to see where the cloudless sky ended and the sea began. Such days at sea were rare, to be savoured.
Max Clenton had been at sea most of his life. He had seen days like these, but not many. There was nearly always a cloud or small swell or airplane contrails, but not many days such as these in his experience. He had served six years in the Royal Navy until he was twenty-three. Eight years followed in the merchant navy, then ten years as a fisherman. He had crewed on trawlers and crab boats, and then captained salvage vessels and fishing boats of all descriptions. Now, at the age of sixty he owned his own boat and had done for seven years. She was a forty-seven metre open decked boat called The Lady Majestic. Clenton utilised her every way he could. Sometimes she would be trawling or long lining for different species of fish, other times she would be stacked with crab or lobster pots. In the height of summer, she had been used as a dive boat for mass diving lessons of up to thirty paying customers and six instructors, a spotting vessel for dolphin and whale watching and more recently in the past three years as a salvage vessel and abnormal load delivery vessel. Three standard shipping containers could herringbone on the open deck and could be double stacked depending on the weight. These deliveries would usually result in a homeward bound load being sought also. Sometimes the boat went under different names as well. Clenton had discovered that people were willing to pay more if the paper trail disappeared. Taxes and excise duty were one reason. Straight forward people trafficking was another. The European refugee crisis had opened doors for him and with a little forward thinking and common sense Clenton had found that not only was Britain an easy border to breach, he could continue to do so with impunity. The secret was to avoid being greedy and to hedge his bets. Like roulette, the luck runs out fast. Clenton would do a few loads of refugees, then simply pull out for a few weeks and stick to fishing. He would then be available for a consignment of cigarettes and tobacco. But only one, and then he would pick up alcohol from another contact. Then he would do a legitimate salvage job for a few weeks. He would file taxes and bank money and submit a set of books each tax year, making a small profit. He kept his cash flow moving and never lived beyond his means. Anything made from illicit deals and jobs went into a safe in a lock-up he had bought for cash many years ago, and he only ever used the money rarely and never to buy anything material, which could create a trail.
The cargo on this trip intrigued him though. He was making a great deal of money for taking the risk, more money than he would ever receive for a job, even if this one took him away from his home port of Looe in Cornwall for a little over two weeks. The harbourmaster there was a good friend and used to him being away for a week or two at a time, so there should be no reason for anybody to be suspicious. Besides, Max Clenton talked a good talk, bought more than his fair share of rounds at the pub and joked so openly about smuggling and fixing his fishing quotas that nobody ever suspected a thing. They saw him arrive at the harbour in the same rusted Toyota pick-up for the past ten years.
He had met the foreign gentleman a month previous and nearly snatched his hand off for the ten-thousand-pound deposit to secure his services. A further ten-thousand had been paid for expenses – fuel, crew wages, any bribe or payoff Clenton may have to make along the way and then he would meet a contact of the foreign gentleman at Parnu, Estonia. Here he would pick up the cargo and receive a final payment of fifty-thousand pounds upon its delivery. Clenton had asked the specifics of the cargo and had frowned at the size and weight. The overall dimensions were tiny compared to his usual loads.
“Russian Icons,” the man had said, in a thick guttural accent which Clenton had taken to be Russian. “Small templates – images of Christ, angels or saints. Made from mosaics, silver or gold. Very fragile. They will crumble if touched. Some are pre-Christ, over two thousand years old. Others are fifth to ninth century when the Byzantine period created many of these artefacts. Many were destroyed under Soviet rule.”
“And they’re illegal to bring out of Russia?” Clenton had asked.
“Absolutely. A
nything over one hundred years. But I will soon have documents from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation saying that I have ownership.”
“So why do you need me?”
The old man had smiled. “Because these documents will only work on rich, stupid Americans… I don’t plan on being around for a refund after I sell.”
Clenton had laughed knowingly. But had soon stopped when the man emphasised that the freight must not be touched.
“There will be a security seal on the box. If it is broken, I will not pay the further fifty-thousand pounds and will enforce a complete refund for monies already paid. I won’t be going to trading standards obviously, but I have many well placed Russian contacts, what many people would call mafia, who will make life unbelievably painful for you if I am not happy with your service…”
Max Clenton lit a cigar from an old scratched Zippo lighter and looked out from the bridge to the blue horizon as far as his keen eyes could see. There was something about the man’s threat, the way it had been coldly delivered that had unnerved him. Clenton was a tough man, a career drinker and brawler. He was not easily scared or intimidated. But there was an underlying menace which had shaken him. Even now, he felt uncomfortable at the thought.
6
London
Charles Forester walked down the corridor, his footsteps echoing around him. There was always an echo on this floor. The floors below were a hive of activity with open offices, voices, ringing telephones and the occasional sound of laughter or banter, just like any offices the world over. The fact that the country’s security and the direction of international policy were conducted in the building didn’t stop people from discussing reality television or a dating disaster they had at the weekend.