The Sinkiang Executive q-8

by Adam Hall

  “These airfields,” I said. “What’s their strength?”

  He was trying to sit up straight but his wrist was still painful and all he wanted to do was nurse it and I got fed up because he was wasting time.

  “It’s your own fault,” I said, “you shouldn’t be so bloody uncivilized. These are the only three airfields in the whole of this area without squadron designation and combat strength and I want to know about them, come on.”

  His face was still white but he was making an effort now and looking down at the map. I think it was more shock than anything: they’re the cock o’ the north all the time they’ve got those piddling little toys in their pockets but as soon as you take them away they go to pieces, it’s always the same.

  “Come on Kirinski for Christ’s sake I’m waiting.”

  “Decoy airfields,” he said on a breath, “they’re decoys.”

  “What the hell for, if they — ” then I got it: the whole of the Sino-Soviet border was an armed camp and they were keeping a hot war on ice and that meant a permanent state of military intelligence preparedness and that was why Kirinski was so busy working for both sides like this.

  “What are these planes,” I asked him, “dummies?” It was one of the aerial photographs presumably taken by covert reconnaissance from the Chinese side and the two aircraft were standing in dispersal bays some distance from the hangars.

  “We fly two planes from each field,” he said and got out his handkerchief while I watched him carefully. “Can you read Chinese?”

  I didn’t answer. You never admit to knowledge of a foreign language and he ought to know that. Most of the sheets detailing Soviet installations and military strengths carried Mandarin hieroglyphs, and the Sinkiang-Mongolian-Chinese defences were annotated in Russian.

  “Where do you cross the border, Kirinski?”

  “At Zaysan.”

  “What’s your cover?”

  “You know what my — ”

  “Answer my question.”

  He hissed somerning through his teeth and took a breath and said:

  “Geological engineer.”

  He didn’t like this a bit: he was doubling for two camps across the border and had a nice comfortable apartment with a girl-friend installed and a protection agreement with the KGB and this bastard Rashidov had come along and rifled his safe and threatened to blow him if he didn’t behave. I could see his point but I wasn’t going to let him waste my time because as soon as London heard the courier was dead they’d belt out another signal through Chechevitsin and throw me into a new phase and it might not give me any leeway.

  “How difficult is it for people to cross the border from dm side?”

  “It’s impossible,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “The situation is sensitive.”

  “Listen, Kirinski, when I ask you a question I want you to go on talking till you’ve told me all you know, you understand? I don’t want any more of your bloody monosyllables. What situation is sensitive and what does sensitive mean?”

  He made that hissing noise again: I think he was still frozen stiff and of course his nerves were hitting an all-time high and there was something else: he was a proud man and he didn’t like people treading on him.

  The total strength of the Red Army,” he said with careful articulation, “is one hundred and fifty divisions. Forty of those are deployed along the Chinese frontier. That is the situation and it is sensitive in terms of unpredictable flare-ups. Six months ago there was a battle on the Sinkiang border involving fifteen thousand troops who were carrying out field exercises. Two thousand were killed. Since that time the frontier crossings have come under very strict control, especially at Zaysan. I trust I have answered your question.”

  “You’re getting the idea.” I checked through the rest of the Soviet stuff and slid it into the envelope because there wasn’t time now to ask him for translation from the Mandarin: I was going to freeze everything until I got a signal from Chechevitsin. “What was Opal Light?”

  He looked down at the batch of sheets stapled together top and bottom, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer; then he looked away and said:

  “It was a Chinese operation.”

  “What sort? Come on, Kirinski.”

  “It was directed at the Lop Nor missile installations security services, last November. Intelligence was obtained.”

  I let it go at that because it looked like a closed file and London wouldn’t be interested in a Sino-Soviet mission: most of this stuff would probably go to the CIA and I didn’t expect them to find anything new because the Americans were far more concerned than the British with the Sino-Soviet confrontation and its potential for world war, and they had the field well covered.

  I put the batch away and looked at the photographs again and put those away too and asked him; “Did you start working for the KGB first?”

  Another fractional pause: this was an assault on his innermost privacy and he was feeling the exposure.

  “Yes.”

  “How long had you worked for them before you started working for Peking as well?”

  Pause.

  “Two years.”

  “Is it the money?”

  I didn’t think it could be anything else: there was no kind of motherland ideology involved because this man wasn’t a double agent for one organization he was doubling for two. The amount of material I’d found in his apartment was equally secret and equally substantial for each side, and if either side found out what he was doing he’d go sky-high and that was why I could control him like this, as long as I had the material.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes it was the money.”

  I didn’t believe him but I didn’t think he was lying to deceive. He wasn’t the type to go for the money: there was too much tension, too much pride, and too much resistance to my attempts at dominance. The reasons why we go into this trade are varied and we never talk about it because it’s always personal — we do it for money or out of some buried loyalty to a flag or to express an ingrained sense of duplicity or simply because of the razor’s edge syndrome: the inability to live too far from the brink without getting bored or drunk or going round the bend for the want of a starting-point to distant horizons we hope never to reach. It’s convolute and involute and we don’t question even ourselves, especially ourselves, because we don’t want to come up with an answer we can’t live with.

  I’d put Kirinski down as a psychopath. That is the type I know best, and for good reason.

  “Does Liova work with you?”

  He jerked his narrow head to look at me. “No.”

  “Does she work for the KGB?”

  “No. She is my wife, and that is all.”

  “Your legal wife?”

  A slight hesitation. “Yes.”

  I didn’t go into it. The art of interrogation is a paradox: you learn more from the questions than the answers, if you know how to bring out those questions by your silences; you also learn more from the way the answers come than from what they purport to tell you. Most of them are deliberate lies and this is accepted by both parties, but lies will protect you only up to a point: the point where you produce so many of them that you get lost in the confusion of your own making; the truth is easily remembered because it exists, but lies demand a trained memory and the stress can become overwhelming. This again is paradoxical: the more you lie, the more you reveal the truth.

  She wasn’t, for instance, his legal wife. Because of the hesitation.

  “Does she have any connection with the KGB?”

  “No. I’ve told you, she — ”

  “Or any other police or intelligence or security organization?”

  “No. None.”

  “Is she afraid of anyone?”

  “Of course not!”

  “So she doesn’t need protection.”

  “No.”

  “Even the protection of a gun?”

  His hesitations lasted only a fraction of a second
but they were beautifully consistent.

  “No.”

  “All right. Now I want a general preliminary picture: your contacts with the KGB, your contacts with Peking, then liaison, couriers, communications and security background. Take your time.”

  He hissed in his breath again and began pointing with that long nose of his like a parrot trapped in a cage and I watched his hands because they’d be the first sign of movement and at some stage in the interrogation he was going to try making a break for it.

  I could feel the tension in him and it was communicable: I was getting on edge. There was something about this man that I couldn’t place, some extra dimension that explained the inner shaking of his nerves. All right, he knew I could blow him and he knew what they’d do to him as a result; but I’ve been in the company of men in the final stages of stress and I’ve been there myself and all I knew as I sat in the cramped confines of the Trabant with Alexei Kirinski beside me was that his tension was a part of him and not wholly induced.

  “I have no regular contacts,” he said, shivering.

  “Names,” I said, “come on.”

  “But I tell you I — ”

  “I want their names.”

  He began making them up and I let him because their names wouldn’t mean a thing to me and he didn’t seem to know that: he wasn’t KGB himself because even those people are put through a modicum of training and he wasn’t even a beginner — you don’t just walk away from a missed rendezvous and settle for a bowl of soup without even looking behind you.

  We worked at it for fifteen minutes and I didn’t interrupt except to goad him on, and after a time he picked up the tricks and started hesitating deliberately to make me believe I’d asked a sensitive question.

  “There is no direct contact with Peking. I use couriers for material, through Yumen.”

  “What about signals?”

  He hesitated and for no reason: there was no equipment in his apartment and he could throw me another bunch of phony names and get away with it.

  “I signal through a frontier post.”

  “Both ways?”

  “No.”

  “Come on then — which way?”

  “From here to Sinkiang.”

  “What about the other way — look, I want you to go on talking.”

  “The other way I use a contact in Yelingrad.”

  With a transmitter and cyphers and onward transmission to his contacts in the KGB, so forth. I let him go on talking while I listened for the right lie in the wrong place and watched the scene through the windscreen. Only a dozen people had crossed the waste ground since we’d got here and only a few vehicles had come past the corner, all of them with chains on. The cold was coming into the car and slowly cancelling out the heat of our bodies and Kirinski began rubbing his hands together but his teeth went on chattering as he talked.

  “How much money do they pay you?”

  “Not very much.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred rubles a month.”

  “This bonuses?”

  “Bonuses? What kind?”

  “For a special assignment, or special information. There must be bonuses.” It’s a major part of Russian economic thinking.

  “I received an extra hundred rubles for the decoy airfield photographs on the Chinese side of the frontier.”

  “What about Peking? How much do they pay?”

  He was tremendously fast and caught my throat with a curving ridge-hand before I could block it and followed this with his elbow rising as my head came forward on the reflex but I avoided it and formed a four-finger eye shot with my left hand but it wasn’t any good because all that tension was coming out of him and he was like a wildcat and I stopped trying to do anything formal because any kind of reaction would have to be instinctive if I were going to get out of this alive.

  The first thing he’d go for was the gun but the magazine was under the seat and he knew that. The second thing he’d go for was the envelope because without that stuff I couldn’t blow him and he knew mat too. At present there wasn’t time for him to go for either the gun or the envelope because I was catching up on the initiative and had his left arm in a clamp while I went for his face again. He was trying to get leverage against the dashboard with his foot and I saw the heel of his black leather boot gouge into the speedometer as he straightened his leg and got the pressure he needed and started to use it, his shoulder braced against my throat and his right hand darting for the eyes and missing and darting free again as I blocked him every time until he used a wedge-hand against the throat and half-succeeded: I began choking and brought my knee up and smashed it into his ribs and forced some of the pressure off.

  The horn had sounded three or four times because we were milling inside the confines of the car and whatever we hit we smashed: the windscreen went and I saw his boot rip from the heel to the top because this stuff wasn’t safety glass. The envelope had slipped down between the driving-seat and the door and I freed my left hand and tried to push it under the seat but he saw what I was doing because if he couldn’t get the gun he’d settle for the envelope: it was all he really needed. The horn was sounding again and I realized I had my knee against it as he wrenched his arm free and drove a palm-hand downwards and connected with a shoulder-blade.

  I tried three consecutive eye-darts and they fell short because my arm was half locked but they worried him and he spun sideways and got purchase again on the dashboard and kicked away from it and broke the seat frame and sent me on my back with the effect of a rabbit chop as my neck hit the edge of the rear seat: bright flashing lights and momentary paralysis, dangerous and I rolled over to miss his boot as it crashed down and ripped some of the seat fabric away, sensation of losing touch, sounds muted, felt him lurch across to the driver’s side as someone began shouting, which I didn’t understand unless it was the noise the horn had been making, face at the window and a gloved hand shooting out and trying to stop Kirinski as he hit the door open and pitched through and began running, knocking one of them down there were more people here and I got up and heard someone asking what had happened, was it a thief, so forth, down on my knees so I made a lot of effort and got up again, still choking because of the wedge-hand strike, still seeing flashes.

  Men running and calling out stop thief stop thief and I told them no, it was just a quarrel that was all and someone said hospital and I made another effort and said no, I didn’t want a hospital. That would mean the police and statements and what I had to do was get away from here as soon as I could because he’d taken the envelope and that was going to change the whole situation: he’d let the KGB loose on me now because there was nothing to stop him.

  Chapter Sixteen: COURIER

  The TU-154 came out of the haze like an image taking shape on a negative, breaking through the low ceiling a mile from the end of the runway and flopping down only ten minutes late despite the weather: they said there was more snow coming in from the south-west.

  People began leaving the observation deck, their faces pinched with the cold. I waited until the plane had turned at the end of its run and started rolling in this direction; I was frozen from the drive in the Trabant but there were other things to consider. I was getting to know Chechevitsin: his signals were brief and security-conscious to the point of being uninformative. This wasn’t typically Russian and I suppose he was probably someone out from London and worried about making mistakes. This time the rdv was for 3.05 at the airport, courier arriving Flight 96 from Moscow, recognizable on sight. No precise point of rendezvous. I was expected to pick him out of a hundred and fifty passengers. No specific instructions: I was to assume that he was to receive the films.

  I’d say the problem had been the Trabant. It was the driving-seat that had broken away and I’d had to take the other one off its runners and use it as a prop, wedging it between the rear seat and the driver’s squab. But there’d been nothing I could do about the smashed windscreen except clear the rest of
the glass away and drive with my eyes half-shut against the freezing blast of air. I’d told the man at the hotel there’d been an accident on the snow and he’d let me put the car into the yard at the rear and I’d left it there, walking around to the household store to call Kirinski and then Chechevitsin: I wanted it out of sight as much as possible because there couldn’t be too many dark blue Trabants driving around the city without a windscreen and I might just as well put my name on the bloody thing. I’d asked Chechevitsin to get me another one but he’d said it would take time and I couldn’t put any pressure on him because even a used car would cost the earth and he’d be lucky to find one.

  Only a few of the people were left on the observation deck now: the 154 was swinging into the reception bay and the service vehicles were going out to it. I waited another two minutes and went through the swing-door and down the steps, moving a little faster than normal but not running. He was still behind me at the end of the passage and I turned sharply, using cover and going into the open again to watch him react when he saw me. He’d lost me for only a few seconds but it had worried him and he shrugged himself deeper into his coat as he walked on past the information desk.

  There’d been nothing in the mirror when I’d driven here but the Trabant had a unique image because of the windscreen and I’d left it parked between a big Chaika and a wall and I’d walked into the main hall through the freight entrance and taken a lot of trouble with mirrors and mirror substitutes and drawn blank everywhere. That had been at 2.40 and I’d come up to the observation deck through a clean field but at 2.53 the man with the sloping shoulder had come through the swing-door and stood there for a couple of minutes making a lot of fuss about the cold, stamping his feet and blowing into his bare hands and going out again. A lot of people were doing that: it was the first big freeze of the winter and they were feeling it; but this man had kept his back to me and faced the line of windows at the right angle and I’d noted it but hadn’t been sure until I’d checked on him. So it had been the Trabant and he’d picked me up at some time after I’d turned into the car park and kept station on me and held back too long and lost me and looked for me and found me on the observation deck, going out again and waiting for me at one end of the passage, not a first-class tag but he wasn’t running any risk because the other one had closed in and was watching me now from light cover near the main entrance.