by Craig Thomas
'It is a matter of time,' the interrogator said, checking the earpiece the doctor had removed from Gant's hands. He had used it to listen to the comments of his aide, seated in another room in front of a bank of monitors where hidden cameras focused on eye-movements, muscular reaction, a hundred other tiny factors. He shook his head ruefully. 'A pity - but next time for certain - '
Vladimirov grabbed him by the upper arms. 'I want that information - I want it tonight!'
'He has to be allowed to rest now. We have to clear his system before we try again.'
'I want that information!'
'You'll have it - before morning,' the interrogator snapped, shaking off Vladimirov's fierce grip. 'Before morning!'
The Hercules transport, bathed in hard white light, sat like a stranded whale at the end of the runway. Beyond it, the lights of Lincoln created a dull, furnace-like glow on the underside of the low clouds. As he stood with Pyott near the RAF Land-Rover which would ferry him to the transport aircraft, Aubrey was impatient. The breeze lifted Pyott's grey hair and dishevelled it. It gave a wild, almost prophetic emphasis to the gloomy expression on his features.
Buckholz and Curtin were already on board. The Hercules waited only for Aubrey. The small, routine Ops. Room was behind him. He had left it, and the larger underground room beneath it, with a sense of freedom, of advantages gained, of wilfully having got his own way.
Now, Pyott held him - like the Ancient Mariner, Aubrey thoaght irreverently, and then said, 'Well, Giles, I wasn't on my way to a wedding, but you've nevertheless detained me. What is it you want to say?' His smile was an attempt to jostle Pyott into a more acquiescent mood. The soldier smoothed down his wind-blown hair and returned the smile.
'I want your assurance, Kenneth - ' he began.
'Oh, don't be so solemn!' Aubrey chided.
'Kenneth-damn it, you're impossible! I want your assurance, your solemn word that if the Skyhook does not arrive before the deadline expires - you will destroy the airframe completely.'
'Oh, Giles -'
'Don't "Oh, Giles" me, Kenneth. The airframe must not be left intact for anyone else to retrieve. You must salvage the most important systems and then destroy the rest. Now, do I have your word on it?' He paused, then added, 'It's too serious for anything less than your word. I know it isn't in your orders - you've persuaded everyone that your precious Skyhook will arrive - but, you must make certain the Firefox is not recovered by the Soviet Union. That is imperative.'
Aubrey patted Pyott's arm, just at the elbow. 'I promise, Giles, that the Firefox will not fall into the wrong hands. Don't worry - you'll give yourself ulcers.'
'You will give me ulcers, Kenneth.'
Aubrey looked across the tarmac. His gamble was beginning: He knew that Pyott was right, that his entire fortune was staked on breaks in the weather and a single helicopter already in difficulties and behind schedule. And, for himself, he was on the point of laying do wn his cards.
Gant, he thought suddenly, and shivered. He pulled the collar of his overcoat around his neck and ears, but felt no warmer.
'Good luck,' Pyottsaid, holding out his hand.
'What? Oh, yes - ' Aubrey returned the handshake. There was no trace of excitement left in his body; nothing now but cold and fear and nerves.'
SEVEN:
Felony In Progress
His head hurt. It was heavy and seemed grossly enlarged, a huge melonlike thing. He could not lift it from the pillows. Faint lights washed across the ceiling, but he could not hear the noise of passing traffic. When he breathed in, there was the smell of ether. Hospital. The word filled him with a vague dread. His body seemed jumpily alert, filled with an undefined tension.
Hospital. Ether-smell. He found the thread once more. Street, hedges, steps, door, hall, marble staircase, gallery with ornamental urns, white room, white room -
He stifled a groan. This was not the same room, not the same bed. He had been moved. After… after his interrogation under drugs…
Gant understood. He raised his heavy arm. The watch was still there. In the darkness, the hands glowed. A little before ten. He let his arm drop, tired of supporting its weight. He was aware of other bodies; aware of muttered or snorting breaths. People were sleeping in the room. He pushed with his hands against the mattress, easing his heavy body half-upright against the bed-head. Slowly, sweating with the effort and stifling his heavy breathing, he turned his head from side to side. A night-light over one of the beds helped him to see the contours and outlines of the small ward in which he had been placed. It was a brief glance. He slid down the bed again when he saw the male nurse sitting near the double doors. The man was dimly lit by a small angle-poise lamp, and silhouetted against the light entering through small, opaque panes in the doors. He appeared to be reading a book. When he lay flat again he wondered if he had warned the nurse he was conscious, and listened for the scrape of his chair. Eventually satisfied, he closed his eyes and pictured the room.
There were six beds, three of them occupied by sleeping - drugged? - figures. One's head was heavily bandaged, the second was identifiably male, the third, on the far side of the room and away from the weak light, was in deep shadow. The windows of the ward were barred. In a wash of headlights from outside, he had seen the vertical lines of the bars and the wire-reinforced glass beyond them. The male nurse near the only exit from the ward was muscular, probably armed.
Gant listened, but the nurse did not move. So intently was he listening that he heard a page of the book being turned. Then he relaxed, and immediately the small victory of knowing and mapping his surroundings dissipated. He was trapped in the room; parked there until he was again required for interrogation. He knew he had been interrogated twice; he knew they were only waiting until his body had recovered sufficiently to be drugged once more; he knew that at the next interrogation he would tell them what they wanted to know.
He remembered the USAF general in his uniform, he remembered Aubrey's voice. He remembered the scrambled and confused mess his thoughts and awareness had become. He understood the furious, undeniable desire to tell the truth that had come over him, and which they would induce in him again…
Burns?
He touched himself carefully. He was wearing a sweatshirt and shorts. His legs did not hurt when he touched them, nor did his arms or face. There was a lump on his temple, but he remembered the tiles rushing up at him. They had saved him from telling.
But he had believed he was dying -
That was the real measure of their power over him, of his inability to continue resisting.
The sweat was cold on his body. His hands lay beside his thighs, reminding him he no longer possessed even trousers. Nothing but a sweatshirt - no shirt, no jacket, no shoes. He was helpless. Like the figures in the other beds, who were probably criminals or even dissidents, he had ceased to exist. Isolation swamped him.
He struggled to escape it by following the thread back into his interrogation. His removal to this silent ward might mean he had told them everything, that they had finished with him while they checked the truth of his story - had he told them?
Slowly, cautiously, he sifted through the wreckage - father, aircraft carrier, burns, Aubrey, the lake, drowning, burning, ejecting… the tiles, the tiles…
He had been sitting up, screaming for them to listen to him. What had he said? He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. What had he said?
He could not stifle the audible sigh of relief when he was certain. Nothing. He had not told them. They did not know.
He listened as the nurse's chair scraped on the linoleum. He heard the footsteps approach. The light over his bed flicked on. Gant controlled his eyelids, his lips. The seconds passed. He tried to breathe normally. The light went out, the footsteps retreated, the chair scraped once more. The nurse grunted as he sat down. Gant heard the book being picked up, re-opened, pages being shuffled.
He was sweating freely once more. It had taken a vast effort of control and made
him realise how weak he was. The nurse would have been capable of plucking him upright with one hand and dragging him from the bed without effort. He could never overpower him.
And there was no weapon. His itchy, sweating hands, tense yet without strength, did not constitute a weapon. And there was nothing else. He could never take the nurse's gun away from him, even if he wore one.
He heard the chiming of a clock somewhere, a small, silvery, unreal sound. Ten. He must have been asleep for hours. In all probability they would be coming soon. They were pressed for time. There was an almost frantic sense of urgency about their pursuit of what he knew. There was no reason for it - no one else knew of his whereabouts or the location of the airplane, but they could not seem to stop until it was over.
So they would come, and he would be helpless. Weaponless and helpless.
Mitchell Gant lay in the dark waiting for the doctors and interrogators. The bandaged head of one of the other patients loomed in his thoughts. A mummy, almost. Something, like himself, long dead and forgotten.
He felt himself once more on the point of losing the struggle against his sense of isolation.
Aubrey felt the nose of the Hercules C-130K dip towards the carpet of gleaming cloud he could see through the round porthole in the fuselage. It still lay far below them, stippled and endless. The moon was brilliant, the stars as hard as diamonds. It was difficult to believe that from that black, light-punctured clearness would come weather conditions even worse than they had anticipated when the aircraft took off from Scampton.
He removed the headset, his conversation with Waterford at Kirkenes at an end. As he stared through the porthole, the clouds seemed to drift slowly up to meet them. They were still flying along the Norwegian coast, inside the Arctic Circle. The pilot was taking the Hercules down as low as he could, to deceive the long-range Russian radars, before turning to an easterly heading which would take them towards Kirkenes. To all intents and purposes, the Hercules would have dropped out of radar contact west of Bardufoss and be assumed to be a routine transport flight to the Norwegian NATO base.
Aubrey fretted, even though he attempted to allay his mood by losing himself in the mesmeric effect of the clouds. It might have been a white desert landscape with wind-shaped rocks rising from its surface. The self-hypnosis held momentarily, then dissipated. Aubrey transferred his gaze to the whale-ribbed, bare, hard-lit interior of the transport aircraft.
It was almost done, they were almost there. He was for the moment in suspension, unable to do more. It was always the most frustrating, dragging part of an intelligence operation - the flight, the drive, the train journey, whatever it was… just before the border was crossed, the building entered, the target sighted. Useless tension, pointless adrenalin. He did not control the thing at that moment -
Five huge pallets of equipment were secured in the aft section of the cargo compartment. The team of fifteen men lounged or stretched or checked equipment. Charles Buckholz once more familiarised himself with the cargo manifest, in conversation with the WRAP Air Loadmaster. Curtin was standing at a folding table on which lay a large-scale map. He was talking to the Hercules' co-pilot. Everything had been decided, the briefings had been completed. This was repetition to occupy time, nothing more.
The Hercules would land at Kirkenes and Aubrey, Buckholz and the other members of the team without parachute training would disembark. Waterford and his SBS unit, twenty-five men in total, would then embark and the Hercules would take them and their equipment to the area of the lake. The dropping zone for the parachutists had already been selected; the surface of the lake. Waterford had confirmed its suitability. Once the men had dropped, the Hercules would make a low-level run and the five pallets of equipment would simply be dropped, without parachutes, from the rear cargo doors. At first, Aubrey had considered the method primitive, unsophisticated, potentially dangerous to the valuable equipment - especially the winches. RAF reassurances had failed to convince him, even though he accepted them. It still seemed an amateurish manner of accomplishing the drop.
Above the Norwegian border with Finland, Eastoe's AWACS Nimrod was back on-station. It would operate in an airborne, early-warning capacity, a long-range spyplane, observing the Russian border for any and every sign of movement. Also it would provide a back-up communications link with Washington, London, Helsinki and the lake to supplement the direct satellite link established when Waterford's initial search party had left the commpack at the lake.
He turned away from the scene. Buckholz and the non-parachutists would be flown by RNAF Lynx helicopters, arriving no more than an hour behind Waterford's party. Aubrey looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. By four-thirty, the whole party would be in place at the lake, where the Firefox lay in twenty-six feet of icy water.
Twenty-six feet. It was hardly submerged. A man standing on the fuselage would have his head above water. Eighty feet in length - the tailfins in perhaps thirty-four feet of dark water - with a wingspan of fifty feet, it had to be winched no more than one hundred and fifty feet before it was ashore. Or, preferably, plucked out of the water like a hooked fish by the Skyhook which had refuelled on the German-Danish border thirty minutes earlier. The figures were temptingly simple, the task easy to achieve. Yet he could not believe in it, in its success.
Gant -
The nose of the Hercules was dipping into the clouds when the operator of the communications console that had been installed for Aubrey's use, turned to him.
'There's a coded signal coming in, sir - from Helsinki.' He attended to his headset; nodding as the high-speed frequency-agile message ended. 'There's no need to reply, sir. They've signed off.'
'Very well-run it.'
The operator flicked switches, dabbed at a miniature keyboard set into the console, and hidden tapes whirred. It was Hanni Vitsula's voice.
'Charles!' Aubrey called.
Buckholz arrived as the replayed voice chuckled, then said: 'Don't rely on the weather, Kenneth. Forty-eight hours from midnight tonight is our final, repeat final offer. Our forecasts suggest it might be easier to reach the site than you're supposing… don't expect us not to arrive. Good luck. Message ends. Out.'
Buckholz shook his head ruefully.
'He guesses we're relying on getting ourselves socked in by the weather. Think he'll decide to move in before the deadline?' Aubrey waved his hand dismissively. 'No. But, otherwise he means what he says.' He slapped his hands on his thighs. 'Well, that's it. Your President has gained us the dubious bonus of a few more hours.' Through the porthole, Aubrey could see the grey cloud pressing and drizzling against the perspex. 'But that's all the time we have.'
'Let's just you and me hope the weather turns real sour, uh?'
'Then we will have lost the game, Charles. The Skyhook will never arrive in the weather you're hoping for!'
Dmitri Priabin turned slowly and gently onto his back and sat up. In the soft lamplight, he stared intently at the hollow of Anna's naked back, as if he were studying the contours of a strange and new country. Eventually, he clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. He pursed his lips, pulled dismissive, laconic faces, prevented a sigh, but knew that the time of recrimination had once more arrived. He slipped from the bed and hoped she would not wake.
He sat cross-legged on a padded chair. He could taste the onions from the hot-dog one of the boys had pressed upon him, unable himself to finish it. He belched silently behind his clenched hand. Yes, onions - it recurred more strongly than the wine, than dinner, than the vodka. It was more persistent than the taste of the perfume from her neck and breasts on his tongue and lips.
Onions - recrimination. Both brought back the park and the metro station and the other reminders of her treachery that had assailed him at the ticket-counter so that the clerk's face had changed from puzzlement to nerves before he had recollected himself sufficiently to buy the tickets.
Now, recrimination, guilt, fear all returned like some emotional malaria as she
slept. It was an illness which never left him, only remained dormant.
He leaned forward, resting his chin on his fist, studying her.
He lived on the verge of a precipice. He had done so ever since the momentary looks of guilt and fear he had noticed wheri he had answered unexpected telephone calls, looks which had vanished as soon as he put down the receiver and shrugged. And, he reminded himself, he always put it down with the sense that he had been speaking to an American who spoke good but very formal Russian.
He had lived on the cliff edge ever since he began to follow her himself. Ever since he witnessed her make covert contact wih a man who might have been her Case Officer. Ever since he had tailed that Case Officer to a known CIA safe house…
He had been on the edge for six, almost seven months -
She stirred, alarming him, as if surprised in some deep disloyalty of his own. She turned onto her back but did not wake. Her flattened breasts were revealed as her unconscious hand pushed the bedclothes down. It was a strangely erotic exposure; crudely inviting. He studied her unlined, sleeping face; unlined except where the brow was creased even while she slept. He felt tears prick his eyes, and because he could never bring himself to even begin to tell her that he knew, that he wanted to help…
Recrimination, palpable as the taste of onions -
As soon as he had moved into her apartment, he had looked for bugs. He had spent the whole of that moving day checking the telephone, pictures, walls, floorboards, cupboards, wardrobes, bed. His relief at finding no traces of surveillance or bugging had overwhelmed him. As soon as he had straightened from pushing back the last corner of fitted carpet, he had had to rush to the bathroom and vomit into the avocado-coloured toilet.
For weeks after that he had been unable to rest until he had checked the files, checked her office, followed her to discover whether anyone else was following her. He had become like a jealous lover, or like the private investigator such a lover might have employed.