At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  They travelled in the fast lane, where the government officials were driven. Big blasts on the power horn to keep clear the path of Her Britannic Majesty's ambassador. There were men with brushes, there were old women with bundles of sticks; the street and pavement cleaning had started.

  Holt could have cried, he felt so bloody miserable.

  But how could she have told him? Of course she couldn't have bloody told him.

  At the airport there was already a slow-moving confusion of queues. Valeri deposited their luggage at the rear of a queue and checked with Holt when they would be back, and the time and number of the return flight.

  He wished them well, and said the Crimea would be beautiful after the Moscow winter. He had good cause to be pleased. With the big man away he'd have time on his hands, the chance to burnish the bonnet of the Roller with a leather. Holt carried the ambassador's briefcase, and Jane carried her own, and Holt hoped to hell that there wouldn't be a foul-up with the tickets.

  There wasn't.

  Nor were there special facilities for the ambassador and his party. It was the way he liked things done.

  Didn't want a brace of officials there to shake his hand andwish him well. That's what he'd said to Holt. On such a trip he could sense the mood of the nation, and the temperature could not be taken in a VIP lounge.

  They took their place in the queue. The ambassador lit his pipe and unfolded yesterday's Times from London.

  Holt craved a cigarette, the prohibition could not last.

  And Jane touched his arm. They had been in the queue for five minutes and not moved an inch.

  "Do you know the hoary old one about queuing here?

  If you do you're still going to hear it again. Ivan was in a queue for two hours trying to buy a pair of winter boots, and he snorts to the people around him that he's had enough, and he's going down to the Kremlin, and he's going to shoot old Gorbachov, and that's going to be his protest about the inefficiency of the Soviet Union.

  off Ivan goes, and three hours later he's back. He's asked if he's indeed shot Comrade Gorbachov. 'No,'

  Ivan says, 'I couldn't be bothered to wait, the queue was too long.' Like it?"

  Holt managed a small smile. Jane squeezed his arm, as if to tell him to calm down, as if to say that a queue at Vnukovo wasn't his fault.

  "Certainly hoary, Miss Canning," the ambassador intoned "I have heard that anecdote told in turn of Messrs Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov and now Gorbachov. But I think that I am safe in stating that it was never said out loud during the revered leadership of uncle Joe Stalin . . . Don't fret, Holt, it won't go without us"

  The blockage at the head of the queue was removed.

  A man was shoved aside, hoarse with complaint and waving a ticket. Jane said it meant the flight was overbooked, and they were shedding the least important. A sour-faced woman behind the counter examined their tickets, looking at them as if to ascertain whether they could possibly be forgeries. They were checked once more by a bored militiaman at the gate, who then took an age studying Holt's and Jane's Foreign Ministry permission to leave the Moscow environs zone. They went on to the security barrier. Two more militiamen, an X-ray machine, and a metal detector arch to pass under. Jane had a camera, a palm-of-the-hand-sized Olympus that she took out of her handbag before it went on the belt. The ambassador's spectacle case, attracted the flashing red light and earned him a cursory body patting.

  They were in the departure lounge. Holt and Jane went off in search of coffee for themselves and an orange juice, diluted, for the ambassador.

  "Bit heavy, wasn't it, the security?"

  "They've their quota of nasties just like the rest of us." He'd noticed, since reaching Moscow, how much she enjoyed filling him in on insider detail. Couldn't have happened in London, when he was doing his initial FCO time and she was just a secretary in Whitehall.

  "Georgians and Jews and Estonians and Ukrainians, they've all got grievances, they all foster little cells that want to get out. Not easy. They've sent up fighters to shoot down aircraft that have been hijacked in the past.

  And if there's half a chance of settling the problem on the ground then they go in firing. Happened last year.

  They don't play about here, none of your patient negotiation. Storm and shoot is their answer. Not that they admit there's a political problem. It's always drug addicts and delinquents. I laugh like a drain each time I hear of a hijack. It's the biter bit, isn't it? That little shit Carlos was trained at the Patrice Lumumba University right here in down-town Moscow. And he's only the tip of the iceberg. They train them to do horrible things to us, and we broadcast on BBC World Service and the Voice of America what they've done, and the folks back home pretty soon get into the same act."

  "Is that what you specialise in?" Holt asked.

  She smiled at him, a big and open smile. She said,

  ' 'God knows why Ben wants orange juice, it's quite foul here . . . There's a fancy dress party at the dacha next Saturday, what'll we go as?"

  "I'll go as a boar with a ring in my nose, and you can go as a farmer and lead me round, and show everyone who's boss."

  They both laughed. She thought it was funny and he thought it was sad, and the ambassador's orange juice looked as awful as their coffee tasted.

  They boarded, and take off was only 25 minutes late.

  The ambassador was behind them, in the aisle seat, and next to a man in a dark suit with a bulging briefcase.

  Before the belt sign was off the ambassador was booming out his conversational Russian, angling for a rapport. A one-class aircraft, a Tupolev 134, rear engines and 72

  passengers. He had hardly slept, not after she'd run him back to the embassy, and he'd been plagued with the niggling worries about getting the trip moving well - he started to doze. There was the drone of the voice behind him, and he was wondering how the ambassador managed to test the waters of Soviet opinion when he talked so much that the fellow next to him barely had the chance to get three consecutive words up his gullet.

  He'd sort it all out. He'd sort it all out with Jane in time, because he had to, because he loved her. Up to cruising altitude, and he was nodding, eyes opened then collapsing shut, so damned tired. He was a wild pig, and she was pulling him round, and they were all laugh-

  ing, all the Second and Third Secretaries and their wives, and all the personal assistants, all laughing their heads off because his girl had him on a leash.

  Flying due south. A journey of 750 miles. A route over Tula, Kursk and Charkov. Cruising at 29,000 feet, ground speed 510 miles per hour.

  He felt her pull him forward, and then to her. And his eyes were closed, and he waited for the soft brush of her kiss behind his ear, where she always kissed, and he waited. He opened his eyes. She was looking down at her watch, concentrating. His head was forward, as if guarding her, hiding her breasts and her hands and her lap. Away from her watch, looking through the porthole window, the visibility was stunning and the daylight spreading, the fields sharp and the roads clear and a city laid out as a model. She took three photographs quickly, and the camera slipped back into her bag, and she grinned at him and eased him back so that he was fully into his seat. Then she kissed him, behind the ear, a fast peck.

  He was a pig on a lead, and he didn't have the strength to argue.

  The vapour trails of the airliner were brilliantly clear five and a half miles above the ground surface. The first airliner of the day, and a lorry driver leaned from his cab to watch the slow progress of the puffy white scars in the blue skies. The lorry driver was delivering prefabricated walls for a factory development on the east side of Charkov. The factory development was an extension of 260,000 square feet, and when in production would manufacture one-piece cast turrets for the T-72 tank.

  It was the evaluation of the boffins in British and American Intelligence who concerned themselves in such studies that the T-72 main battle tank was technically superior to those of the NATO forces. The factory, when enlarged, cou
ld greatly increase its output of the low silhouette turret, so low that the crews fighting in them could be no taller than 5' 4". To have a photograph of the tank turret factory extension would not be an Intelligence coup, but it would be useful. There were few coups in that painstaking world, but much that was useful. The size of the extension would enable the analysts to calculate the increased output of new T - 7 2 S .

  The vapour trails bowled on. The lorry driver reached the building site gate.

  At a military airfield west of Moscow, an Antonov transporter bearing the insignia of the Air Force of the Syrian Arab Republic was in the final stages of loading. The manifest listed a cargo of MiG interceptor spares, a sizable cargo, but not enough to fill the aircraft because space had been set aside for basic seating forward in the hold. The pilot was engaged in his final checks before take off clearance and the start of a filed flight plan that listed a brief stop at Simferopol to take on personnel and then a direct onward flight to the El Masr base close to Damascus.

  On that Saturday morning in the Yalta spring, a major had command of the city's militia force. His superiors were at home in their gardens, or in the shops with their wives, or in the mountains with their children. This particular militia major, 49 years old and twice passed over for promotion, sipped a poor imitation of gritty Turkish coffee and cast his eyes wearily over the backlog of reports on his desk. He was responsible for the Department for Combating Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation, for the Department of Criminal Inves-

  tigation, for the Internal Passport Service, for the State Automobile Inspectorate, for the Patrol Service and the Preserving of Public Order in Public Places, and for the Department of Visas and Registration of Foreigners.

  His in-tray contained the overnight reports of apartment block caretakers, reports on the hunting of draft dodgers, an essay on the failure of the traffic lights on Botkin Street, a surveillance report on two Latvians who would be arrested in the following week to face charges of leading an Anti-Social and Parasitic mode of life.

  The radio in the control room spluttered occasionally to life to disturb his half-hearted concentration. He had to last until six o'clock in the late afternoon, and then he could take off his uniform tunic, put on a sweater and go home to his family.

  Deep in his in-tray was a memorandum stating that the British ambassador was arriving in Yalta in company with his private secretary and an interpreter for a semi-official visit, and would stay at the Oreanda Hotel. He was not required to furnish the delegation with a militia car escort.

  It was the militia major's belief, for what little that was worth, that unless the traffic lights on Botkin Street were repaired their failure would lead to an accident, but there was nothing he could do. A waste of his time to try to dig out an engineer from Roads and Transport at a weekend.

  In his briefcase was a book that would help him through the afternoon.

  He was held up at the lights at the junction on Botkin.

  A main intersection and all the lights showing red, and the dumb fools waiting as if they had a day to kill.

  Could not have happened in Moscow. Could only happen in this second-class junk yard to which he had been consigned. After eleven months in the backwater of Yalta it still burned in him that he had been dismissed from the capital and posted to oblivion.

  He had been a captain in the Organ of State Security.

  He had had a promising future in the KGB. By hard work, by passing his exams, he had entered the favoured Guards Directorate. He had served in the personal protection squad of the Politburo member who was First Deputy Prime Minister. He had been tipped for mem-bership of the guard assigned to the General Secretary of the Party. And he had drunk too much, been smashed out of his skull. He had been reduced to corporal and transferred.

  He was no longer the high flier. He no longer possessed the plastic card that gave him access to the luxury goods at the State Security Commissariat. He no longer lived in a three-bedroomed flat with a view over the park. One bottle of vodka, after a stint of 41 hours continuous duty, had greased him down the pole.

  Caught drunk in uniform on the street, on his back in the gutter, and dumped with his wife and two toddler children onto a 23-hour train journey to nowhere, Yalta.

  Of course it still burned. From the personal protection squad of a Politburo member, with the magic card and the right to carry a Makarov PM 9mm automatic pistol, down the chute to KGB corporal. He was unarmed. He was at the wheel of a sluggish Chaika car which needed a new gear box. He was a chauffeur, and held up at the lights on Botkin Street, and his job was to drive the ambassador from Great Britain.

  The KGB corporal hit the horn to clear the dumb fools out of his way.

  Holt didn't wait for the lift. There was too much of a queue. He went up the two flights of stairs, and down the corridor to the ambassador's room, knocked, went in

  ''The car's here, finally."

  "Relax, Holt. You are in one of the most unpunctual regions of a country noted for its tardiness. If we're there on time we'll be standing around on our own, scratching our backsides - not Miss Canning, of course, but you and me certainly."

  "I've checked the room for this evening, and the menu.."

  "Don't try too hard, Holt, for heaven's sake. Foul-ups make life so much more entertaining . . . I feel a younger man already, damn nice air down here."

  'The ambassador slipped on his jacket, straightened his tie, knocked his pipe out into an ashtray.

  "I'll go and rout Jane out."

  The ambassador frowned sharply at his private secretary. "Damn it, Holt, haven't you been listening? I am not in a hurry. I want to make an entrance. I will not make much of an entrance if I am the first to arrive.

  You may put it down, if you wish, to old imperial grandeur. But I do mean to make an entrance when I visit the worthies of the Yalta municipality. Got me?"

  "Got you."

  "You've the Bridport stuff?"

  "In my briefcase." Holt wondered how on earth Bridport on the English south coast had made the decision to twin itself with Yalta, must cost the sad ratepayers a fortune in exchange visits.

  "Then best foot forward, Holt."

  He snapped the door open. He went out into the corridor and rapped gently on Jane's door. The ambassador led the way down the corridor, no glance backwards, the Viceroy's procession, and Jane exploded out through her door, thrusting her small Olympus Into her handbag. Down the staircase, the ambassador leading, and Jane happily in pursuit.

  Thanks be to God that we didn't forget our camera,"

  Holt said. He was always useless at sarcasm.

  "Don't be childish, Holt," she said coolly, quietly so that His Excellency would not hear.

  Down the stairs, across the foyer. The ambassador smiled warmly at a group of exhausted tourists speaking German and attempting to check in, and none of them had the least idea who it was that smiled at them.

  Holt reached the door first, pulled it open and stood hack. He saw the driver moving to open the rear door of the vehicle. He saw a young man, dark-skinned, long hair, ambling across the road towards the hotel and holding a windcheater across his stomach. Distraction, because the ambassador had passed, playing the old-world gentleman, ushering Jane through first. Jane was out onto the steps, and hesitating, as if the light of the Crimea's lunchtime sunshine were too bright for her, as if she needed to adjust. Slow, stilted moments, and each slower than the last. Jane going forward and giving her winning grin to the driver, and the driver bobbing his head in acknowledgement, and the ambassador beaming, and Holt coming through the door. Each movement, each moment, slower. And the man who was dark skinned, with long hair, coming off the road and onto the pavement, and the windcheater falling past his knees and past his shins and past his ankles. And something black and stubbed and squat in his hands, something that he was lifting to his shoulder, something that was a protuberance from his head and mouth and nose, something that was a gun, for Christ's sake.

 
He stared at the man. He stared at the barrel of the rifle. No longer slow movement, the moment the world stopped.

  Jane in front of the ambassador, Holt in the doorway, the driver with his back to them all, bent inside the car to smooth down the rug that covered the leather upholstery.

  Everything frozen. No voice in Holt's throat. The warning scream locked in his mind.

  Gazing into the face of the man, and then the flash, and the flash repeated, and the smoke. Then Jane spin-ning away, beaten and kicked and punched backwards.

  Jane falling against Ben, and Ben not there to hold her upright. Ben fading from his feet, sliding down.

  The glass shattering to his right and to his left, caving in. Holt shaking his head, because he couldn't understand . . . looking at the face that was topped by a wig that had inched over the right ear, looking at the scar on the man's left cheek, puzzling how a face came by a scar that looked like a crow's foot.

  The rifle dropped to the man's side. He peered forward as if to be certain of his work.

  All movement now, speed returning to the world.

  The man ran.

  In that moment Holt found in his ears the crash of the gunfire, and the cordite in his nostrils, and the scream from his throat.

  He was on his knees. His body covered their bodies, to protect them.

  So bloody late.

  4

  He lay across them, sheltering them, as if they were still in danger. Blood was on his hands and on the cuffs of his shirt, red on white. He had taken Jane's hand in his, an unresisting hand, as it was when she was exhausted or sleeping.

  The scream in his throat had died with them.

  He was aware of men and women, fearful, around him. They formed a circle at the level of the door, and on the steps, and on the pavement. The shoes of one of them crunched the glass fragments, and the shoes of another nudged the spent cartridge cases.

  "Ambulance," Holt said, in English. "Get us an ambulance."

  The duty day manager called that the ambulance was sent for. Holt saw his face, quivering and streaming with tears. He saw that the driver was talking urgently into a personal radio, couldn't hear the words, could see the white-faced shock of the man. The street was blocked from Holt's view, only the line of knees and skirts and trousers and shoes for him to focus on. Empty ground between the legs and the feet and where Holt lay covering the bodies of Jane and Ben, empty ground laced with blood trickles and with shards of glass. He held tightly onto Jane's hand as the misery welled in him. He had seen the face of the man. He had seen the smooth pine varnish skin, and the eyes that were burnished mahogany, and the thin chisel of the nose, and the clip of the moustache. He had seen the scar hole on the man's cheek and had followed the lines that ran from in four lines, into the shape of a crow's foot.