by Adam Hall
Chapter 15
BREAKOUT
They came with me, two ahead and two behind, keeping their distance. I checked the flank and saw two more and it threw me a fraction because they wouldn’t have left the rear of the hotel uncovered. It was an eight-box. He really didn’t want me to do anything that he didn’t know about.
The snow fell from an iron-grey sky and in a lot of the windows the lights were on. I took the yellow Trabant at the head of the rank and told him the Dworzec Warszawa Glowna and as we pulled out I saw a black 220 making a U turn across the station gates. It tucked in and waited and I leaned forward with my arms on the front squab so that I could square up with the mirror. It was an eight-box with mobility. We passed two of them walking back to the Kuznia to cover the point of departure, routine and predictable. Two others were using an M.O. telephone point to report movement.
You can’t plan anything specific when you have to flush an overt surveillance complex but you can’t rely on luck either: the compromise is to watch for breaks and take them and play them as they develop. The difficulty is built-in: with a covert tagging operation the assumption is that you don’t know they’re on to you and if you sense and start flushing they won’t risk showing themselves but in an overt situation they’ll close in and block your run the minute you start anything fancy. because they’ve nothing to lose: you already know they’re working on you. So it has to be done very fast and the danger is that when you choose a break it’s got to be the right one because it’s going to be the only one you’ll get.
In this case there’d been a gentleman’s agreement between a rat and a ferret and when I broke the rules and made my run they’d go for an immediate snatch. Those were their orders because Foster was taking’ a chance and he knew it. My offer was quite a big one or he wouldn’t have listened: they knew that even if they decimated the population of Warsaw by midnight tonight there’d still be a few isolated Czyn groups ready to shed their blood across the barricades and I’d told him I knew where they were. But he didn’t trust me: he wasn’t a fool. The risk he’d taken was calculated and he’d imposed a break-off point: the point where I went out for a flush.
The Slasko-Dabrowski was a mess. A five-tonner was spreading sand and clinker-dust along the north side and the traffic was being diverted, a man with a flag at each end of the bridge. Someone had spun a Mercedes and put the tail through a gap in the balustrade and a crowd was there but it had happened some time ago because a small boy had lost interest and was throwing snowballs, lobbing them high so they’d burst on the roof of the car. A crash truck was crawling through the diversion lane with its heavy-duty chains throwing out clods of broken ice and we had to wait and my driver said it was very malowniczy, the snow in Warsaw, very picturesque, did I not find it so? The public services had been briefed by Orbis and tomorrow when visitors were running for cover they’d be told how exciting the city was, how very animated, did they not agree?
First-class chance of a break here with the five-tonner available for cover, and the crash truck turning through ninety degrees across our bows and if it had been the boy with the quick eyes in the beaten-up Wolga I’d have told him to get traction and beat the gap and keep going but this was the Trabant and I’d have to do it on foot and we were standing halfway across the bridge so there’d only be one direction I could use, no go.
The 220 had closed right up, not chancing anything. In the mirror I saw their faces and they could see part of mine and we looked at each other.
‘It would be quicker for you to walk, I think.’
‘Perhaps.’
It was tempting.
‘What time does the train go?’
‘In twenty minutes.’
Let him go through the gap when the crash truck had pulled over and get out and walk and use it for cover, a fair chance, a respectable chance.
‘You could walk there in twenty minutes.’
‘I’m not sure of the way. I’ll stay with you.’
Because a fair chance wasn’t good enough: it had to be as close to a certainty as I could make it. This was only the first step in the operation I’d spent twenty-four hours working out and the set-up was so flexible that even the Merrick thing had only called for a bit of tinkering and if I made a mistake as early as this I’d blow the whole lot.
Get out here on a bridge in daylight and I’d be a rat in a rut.
‘We can go now.’
‘There’s no hurry.’
At the end of the bridge I saw an M.O. patrol car coming away from the kerb along the Wybrzeze Gdanksie and going through the amber in front of us, pulling in again while we stood idling at the red. They’d used a radio somewhere, probably at the Commissariat three blocks from the station: Yellow Trabant taxi registration 00-00-00 moving west across Slasko-Dabrowski survey and contain. You couldn’t say he wasn’t the cautious type.
It was going to be difficult.
‘Have you got some paper, an old envelope or something’
He rummaged in the glove pocket ‘Will this do?’
We cleared the lights.
The M.O. patrol was three cars ahead of us and the 220 immediately behind. It was a year-old leaflet, Jazz Gala at the Andrzej Kurylowicz Wine-cellar, but the back was plain. Writing wasn’t easy because we were meeting with cross ruts at the intersections but he wouldn’t be fussy. When I’d finished I folded it twice.
Warsaw Central Station.
‘You only have five minutes.’
‘There’s time.’
‘Get your ticket at the other end. It is permitted.’
Warsaw Central was busier than Wilenska and I began watching the breaks as soon as I was in the main hall, aware of conflicting needs: the need to make a quick flush because time was running out and the need to protect the overall operation from the risk of a precipitate move.
Two main entrances and three gates towards the platform area, upwards of a hundred people and a lot of them in groups of three or more, bookstall, Orbis kiosk, island cafeteria, static and mobile cover, say seventy-five per cent in normal conditions but he was being so bloody windy, wouldn’t give me a chance.
There was another factor now coming into play: my movements were surveyed and they didn’t have to be aimless. Take a taxi to a station but I couldn’t just loaf around and walk away again: they wouldn’t like that. On the other hand I didn’t have anywhere to go except to the unknown place where in a minute from now or an hour from now I’d try for the break.
Purpose-tremor was setting up in the muscles, normal but hazardous: my feet felt light and I breathed as if I’d been running. Check and decide and in deciding remember that the whole of the mission hangs on this and that he’s up there rubbing his bloody chilblains waiting for the phone to ring so for Christ’s sake don’t go and muck it just because the nerves are overtuned.
Two at each main entrance, two splitting up and bracketing the cafeteria blind spot, two going down to the ticket barriers at three and nine o’clock from centre, all minor exits covered. This wasn’t a box. It was a net. These were elite Muscovites, trained till they ticked like a clock; they may have been in force to this extent round the Hotel Kuznia or held back in reserve until the movement report had gone in. The thing was that within ten paces of the entrance where I’d come in they’d deprived me of visual cover. Their specialised field overlapping a neighbouring discipline: the observation of V.I.Ps. in public places; the two jobs had various factors in common and the chief of these was geometry: they moved to their stations as if instructed by the computed findings of compass and protractor; they knew the distance I’d have to go before the island cafeteria obscured me from points A and B, the angle subtended by the view of C and D, the sector through which I could move under observation from E. F and G before the A and B zones picked me up again.
They didn’t see the cafeteria or the bookstall or the ticket-gates: they saw vectors, diagonals, tangents. It amounted to this: if each man were a spotlight I would have no shadow.
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All I needed to do was get where just for ten seconds they couldn’t see me and they knew it and they weren’t going to let me so I crossed to the bookstall and bought a noon edition of Zycie Warsawy and gave the woman the leaflet I’d folded in four.
‘Would you be kind enough to keep this for a moment? A friend of mine will ask you for it.’
I offered ten zlotys but she shook her head, putting the message in the inside pocket of her lambswool coat. ‘Will he give his name?’
‘No, but he’s a Russian gentleman; you’ll know him by his accent.’
I didn’t look back until I’d reached the cafeteria towards the far side of the hall. One of them was already there at the bookstall.
‘Kawa, prosze.’
The girl pulled a waxed-paper cup from the column. They hadn’t necessarily seen me pass it but they’d seen me talking to the woman and a station bookstall is one of the classic letter-drops.
I estimated that he’d get it within ten minutes.
Two birds: my movements were surveyed and mustn’t be aimless and this was what I could have come here for; and it would keep him happy for a few more hours.
‘Dziekuje.’
I stirred it.
All going well. You’ll be glad you co-operated. I shall see you this evening either at the Praga Commissariat or the Hotel Cracow, in time for you to take all necessary action.
They wouldn’t know it was for Foster but that was where they’d send it, immediate attention. He was crossing over to the row of telephone kiosks now and one of his team was shifting obliquely to cover his p.o.v. I sipped my coffee.
Most of the time would be taken up in spelling the thing out and if it had been something I’d wanted to hurry I’d have written it in Russian but there was no hurry needed and I was damned if an ex-scholar of the Basingstoke Elementary was going to write a note to an Old Etonian in Slavonic hieroglyphs, the English are born snobs.
Analyse the data, make the decision, act.
He was coming out of the phone-box but he wasn’t resuming station and the pattern had changed. I hadn’t expected that. Absorb new data. He was a short man with a small head and a sloping walk and his shoes were quiet as he came and he came looking at no one, looking everywhere but at no one, not at me.
Panic tried getting in but I took a slow breath: the answer to panic is prana. Immediate construction: I’d misjudged the conditions. Foster had decided that I was leaving it too late - I’d said “this evening” - and that he’d settle for the info I’d collected since he’d let me run, without waiting for the rest. He was edgy about the H-hour for Sroda; they all were; they’d pulled in enough Czyn people to know that Sroda would begin at midnight plus one, eleven hours and thirty-one minutes from now. We have stockpiles strategically dispersed, sub-guns, grenades, landmines, you name it. Wednesday morning, 0001 hours, the three main generating stations hit the sky. Will you be here? Don’t be here Wednesday, pal. The station at Tamka wouldn’t go up because they’d wiped out the unit there but in other places, other buildings, there’d be radio-controlled detonators still set up and the U.B. knew it. The U.B., the K.G.B. and Foster. His problem was simple and it was acute: he’d got to balance the risk that I was working against him with the hope that I was working for him, and as the time ran out he’d be driven to a compromise.
The man with the sloping walk looked at me now as he came. I heard the faint squeezed sound from his crepe-rubber soles. He stopped.
‘Do you speak Russian?’
‘Yes.’
He pulled a cheap plastic-covered notebook out of his black leather coat, finding the page. His breath smelt of czosnek.
‘Listen please. “Good of you to get in touch but you’re leaving it too late. We’ll have to meet earlier than this evening. The orders are to immobilise you at four o’clock, so do what you can before then.” ‘ His small head lifted. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you wish to send a reply?’
‘No.’
‘Very well.’
I watched him go back to his station.
Seven minutes. Call it half that for the field-to-base transmission including his walk to the bookstall and from there to the telephone: it was good communication. On the move in a capital city with a travel pattern that could take me five or six miles from receiver-base I could hand in a signal to anyone, bookseller, road sweeper, barman, or just drop it on the ground, and within an average of three and a half minutes Foster would be reading it.
He was as close to me as that.
Time was 12:31 and I made it an overt movement, checking my watch with the station clock as I walked from the cafeteria to the ticket-gate area. Of course it was logical: blind instinct is a contradiction in terms. There was more chance of a break, of making a break, in a mainline station than in the streets; a fair percentage of the place-feel had reached the brain through the feet: this was one of the few extensive areas in the city where a running man wouldn’t slip on snow. The rest had been visual and deductive: the sight of blind spots, obstacles, ticket-barriers, the awareness that patterns would change and provide opportunities as groups of people moved and the trains came in and went out. The trains particularly: in half a minute they’d throw a wall across the scene and in half a minute knock it down again; a street was static and its confines predictable.
Four of them had moved, pacing along the two flanks, turning when I turned, going back. The express for Rzeszbw was scheduled at No 5 ticket-gate: 12:45. People were moving up. Visual cover story for the tags was that I was here to meet someone and they’d be coming in from Bydgoszcz in the north-west.
It was important to show that I was here to meet a train and not to catch one and this was made easier because Foster had sent his reply in Russian, not English. He’d accept that any agent sent to this side of the Curtain would understand Russian and he’d used it for two reasons: to save time by using normal speech instead of having to spell out, and to let his operator commit the situation to memory as he wrote it down in his own language. The operator thus knew that I was to be immobilised in approximately three and a half hours and would assume I was agreeable to this:
‘Good of you’ and ‘We’ll have to meet’ were phrases indicating a certain amount of accord between Foster and me. I therefore wouldn’t be expected to leave Warsaw on a train with a first stop two hundred and fifty kilometres away. Also it had been seen that I hadn’t bought a ticket, though there’d been plenty of time.
Paradox: the barrier was my best exit.
The first representatives of the Bonn Government began arriving in Warsaw this morning. Among them were the protocol secretariat and the personal aides of Herr Otto Reintz, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs (who will be leading the delegation), and Herr Siegfried Meyer, the West German Coordinator for the Talks. They were greeted in English on their arrival at the Polish Foreign Ministry. In a brief formal discussion they confirmed that the recognition of the Oder-Neisse frontier will be placed high on the agenda.
12:35.
Wieslaw Waniolka, the young student of the College of Fine Arts who a fortnight ago forced the pilot of an L.O.T. Antonov 24B aircraft to alter course for Vienna, has been charged on three counts of extortion, restricting personal liberty and contravening the Austrian Firearms Law.
12:36.
It has now been established that although avowed Rightist groups were responsible for inciting disorder in the city during the past month, demonstrations were mainly staged by students dissatisfied with educational conditions, which are now receiving attention with a view to revision. Calm has returned to the capital, thanks to the courageous efforts of all police departments.
12:37.
I dropped it into the litter basket by the Orbis Information kiosk and turned back to the barrier. ‘Will it be on time?’
‘Perhaps a few minutes late. It’s the local lines that suffer most. You have your ticket?’
‘No, I’m meeting a friend fro
m Bydgoszcz.’
‘Ah. He’ll have had a pleasant journey; the forests very beautiful under the snow.’
The gates were double, thin wrought iron and flat topped, head high, both locked back by ball-weighted tumbling levers. He was the only official guarding them, fifty to fifty-five, twelve stone, five nine, slow moving, the muscles unused to sudden demands.
I checked my watch and paced to the centre of the hall, trebling the distance and taking an interest in the schedules board. When I turned back I saw one of them at the barrier.
What did the foreigner say to you?
He asked if the train would be late.
Which train?
The train from Bydgoszcz. His friend is coming from there.
What friend?
He didn’t say.
The visual cover story had now come alive and been put into the spoken word and it was important to establish meet as distinct from catch because it would keep them on this side of the barrier.
He crossed to the man with the small head and spoke to him and resumed station. None of the others moved: there’d been no signal to move, because they believed in meet.
12:43.
‘A few minutes late: say three, four. But he could be wrong: an official was moving some people away from the edge of Platform No 3 and in the far distance a whistle sounded, its thin note drifting on the wind and funneling into the arched mouth of the station. Fifteen seconds or so later I saw signal wires jerk on their pulleys.
12:44 but chronometric time was no longer useful: a train was now on its run in and it was probably the express. It was now a matter of sighting it and adapting my movements to its approach so that I would be nearing the barrier as it drew in, nearing the barrier without changing my pace. It would be perfectly normal to turn sooner, hearing the train, or to quicken my steps a little, impatient to meet my friend; but I preferred to keep the pattern unchanged because I’d now made them familiar with it.
Similarly any train would do for my purposes since what I needed were the attendant confusion. and the erection of the sliding wall: it didn’t have to be the express; but the pattern had been established to focus on No 3 barrier and I didn’t want to use a new one, a different one, because even the most experienced tags are human and therefore fallible, mentally predicting the actions of the target and basing their own on his. The consequent lulling effect produces a subsequent shock when the actions become inconsistent with their prediction: in the Hocherl reaction test the electro-encephalograph will shift critically when the conditioned subject sees the pointer change its motion after a mere twenty-five beats, and this is always confirmed in verbal questioning: ‘I thought it moved to the left again and I saw a kind of phantom image for a fraction of a second.’
