At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  There was the far away sound of a siren.

  He had been behind Ben and behind Jane. He had been behind them and safe. He had seen the man with the aimed gun, and he had done nothing. Could not explain to himself how he had watched the slow ballet movements of the man raising the weapon and aiming, and done nothing. Desperate misery, and it had all been so slowly drawn out in front of his eyes. He squeezed Jane's hand, her fingers, hard enough for it to have hurt her, and she did not flinch.

  The driver broke the circle. He jostled the people back, and was shouting to them to retreat, pushing a corridor clear through them. Holt could see down the corridor, down the steps, across the pavement, into the street. He could see where the man had stood and taken his time to aim. He was aware of the closing bleat of the siren.

  His view of the street was cut by the white bulk of the ambulance.

  The driver was tugging at his shoulders, trying to pull him upright, trying and failing to break his hold on Jane's hand. He still held her while the ambulance men swiftly heaved Ben onto a stretcher, carried him away down the corridor to the open rear doors. They came back for her, for his Jane. He saw the shrug in their shoulders. The shoulders and the faces told him that they knew this was not work for ambulancemen.

  They lifted her more gently than they had lifted Ben, and more awkwardly because his hand never unclasped hers.

  The doors closed behind him. Ben's litter lay on one side of the ambulance's opaque interior, Jane's on the other. Holt crouched in the space between. One ambu-lanceman was with them, going perfunctorily through pulse checks, and bending to listen first at Ben's chest and then at Jane's breast. The ambulance was going fast, siren loud.

  Her last words were clear in his memory. Scathing words.

  'Don't be childish, Holt."

  Young Holt had loved Jane Canning and the last time he had seen her face it had been puckered, screwed up in annoyance. He bit at his lip. He looked down at the fright that was set like wax on her face. That was the obscenity of it, that all the good times, wonderful times, were blasted out.

  "Don't be childish, Holt."

  He had a bowl of beetroot soup in front of him and a tub of sour cream and two slices of black bread. He had a quarter bottle of vodka in the desk drawer beside his knee. The militia major was tucking a napkin into his collar when the news broke out of the control room.

  Garbled, staccato chaos. A shooting on Lenin Street, He was gulping a spoonful of soup. A killing at the Oreanda Hotel. His napkin sliding into his soup, Foreign visitors attacked with rifle fire. He was careering from his desk, the sour cream slurping over his papers.

  A call for all assistance . . . It was Saturday lunchtime.

  It was the time that Yalta closed itself down and the militia headquarters was at one-third strength. He felt sick. The tang of the beetroot and the chopped onion was choking in his throat.

  Into the control room. A relay coming through on the loudspeaker from Ambulance Control. The young sergeant at the console listening at the telephone and writing urgently. The telephone slapped down.

  "Major, the management at the Oreanda Hotel on Lenin Street report that the British ambassador and his interpreter were shot outside the hotel..."

  ''Dead?"

  "They did not know . . . Ambulance Control reports that they are carrying two cadavers and one survivor to the clinic on Naberezhnaya..."

  A foreign diplomat, possibly dead . . . Everything he did now was going to be examined under a microscope at the investigation in a week, in a month.

  "Inform the KGB Control, exactly as it comes in.'

  The sergeant was reaching for his telephone. To go to the clinic, to go to the Oreanda, to stay in headquarters Which?

  He picked up a telephone himself. He rang the number of Criminal Investigation two floors above, and the telephone rang and his fingers drummed on the console surface and his feet shuffled. Bastards gone their lunch. The sergeant came off the telephone and the major told him to send all militia cars to the Oreanda The major ran out of the building, howled in the yard for a driver, had himself taken to the Oreanda.

  The KGB had beaten him. Half a dozen of ther there. Crowds gathering but back on the far side of the street. He shouldered his way forward to the knot of men all with radios, all either talking into them or listening to the return messages. In front of the broken plate glass front door he saw the blood stains. Perhaps, in the car he had half hoped the radio at headquarters had carried an aberration . . . well, that some hysterical idiot had .

  The bloodstains and the KGB swarming over the steps of the hotel wiped that out.

  They treated the militia major as dirt. They were the Organ of State Security, he was a common policeman Brusquely he was told what had happened.

  "You had a very fast call," the militia major said.

  For answer there was a cursory gesture, down the steps towards a black Chaika car. A man was sitting haggard over the wheel of the car, a radio in his hand, shaking his head in response to the questions of two others. The driver, the militia major understood; a KGB driver had been assigned to the British ambassador's party.

  '"So you have a description, something I can broadcast?"

  The man he spoke to looked away.

  ''If I am to seal the city, put in road blocks, I have to have a description."

  "He saw nothing."

  "What? A close quarters shooting, right under your own man's nose, and he saw nothing? How could he see nothing?''

  "There is no description."

  "There has to be," the militia major shouted.

  "He did not see the killer approach. He took cover when the shooting started. He did not see the killer leave. There is no description."

  "Shit," spat the militia major. "You pick your men."

  The KGB officer walked away. The militia major sighed his relief. The fear of failure was shed. A KGB

  matter, a KGB failure. Best news he could possibly have been given.

  He followed the KGB officer.

  "What do you want of me?" the militia major said flatly.

  "We have closed the airport, we have suspended all telephonic communication from the city, we have referred all details to Moscow. You should put blocks on all routes out of the city."

  "For what are they looking?"

  No response.

  He sat on a long wooden bench in a corridor of white walls and polished linoleum flooring. Two old ladies hadat first shared the bench with him, but they had long since been ordered away by the militiaman who stood with arms folded and watched over him. Through the flapping rubber doors on the other side of the corridor the trailing white coats of the doctors and surgeons and the white skirts of the nurses came and went. He waited. Another militiaman stood on guard by the rubber doors. He hadn't fought it, he hadn't wanted to be inside the Emergency Room. He was alert now, conscious of everything around him, aware enough to know that he did not want to see the last medical rites performed on the girl he loved and the man he admired.

  Each man and woman who went into the Emergency Room, or came from it, gave him a glance and then looked away when he met their eyes.

  It was an older man who came to him. White haired and lean, and with his smock coat bloodstained. He spoke with his hands, his hands said that hope had gone.

  In Russian, Holt was told that the man was the senior surgeon on duty at the hospital. He was told that the injuries had been too severe for treatment. He shook the hand of the surgeon, and thanked him.

  Holt said that he needed a telephone. Again the hands of the surgeon were in motion, it was outside his prov-ince. The surgeon backed away. Two trolleys, sheet shrouded, were wheeled through the rubber doors and down the corridor. He sat numbed, watched them go.

  His attention was to his right. The man wore perfect creased slacks and a well cut wool jacket. The man flashed an identity card, didn't linger with it but it was there long enough for Holt to recognise the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Holt read the
name of the KGB officer.

  "I want a telephone," Holt said, speaking in Russian. ; The KGB officer was fishing a notebook from his pocket, and a ballpoint pen.

  "I said that I wanted a telephone."

  "There will be a telephone, Mr Holt. But my first priority is to apprehend the despicable culprits responsible for this crime."

  "Just a telephone - the street was packed solid. You don't need me to tell you."

  "Mr Holt, we need to have a description from you."

  He was in a police state, a state controlled by the leviathan apparatus of the Organ of State Security. A state where the KGB crushed all dissent, kept the gulags filled. He was in a country that boasted no terrorism, no law and order problem, no incidence of armed crime. He believed, as never before, that in this country nothing moved, nothing happened, without KGB authority. Now a charade about the need for a description.

  "Ask someone else what the bastard looked like,"

  Holt yelled at him.

  The militiaman close to him had clenched his fist, ready to intervene, and the militiaman beside the rubber doors had his hand wavering close to the wood trun-cheon fastened to his belt.

  The KGB officer strode away.

  All so clear now to Holt. The State had butchered them. The authorities had killed them . . . He went off down the corridor, he shrugged away a feeble attempt by his militiaman minder to stop him. He went into an office that was empty because of the weekend. He picked up the telephone, he dialled a zero and then seven for long distance, he waited for the clicks, he dialled the Moscow code and the embassy number. The "unob-tainable" whine sang back at him. He tried twice more.

  Twice more the same blank whine.

  Out of the clinic. The short walk along the sea front, the two militiamen trailing him, a distance away as if he might turn on them, savage them.

  He reached the Oreanda Hotel. The street and the half steps picketed off, brown paper stuck where the glass panels had been, the glisten of soap and water on the steps. In past the militia and more KGB, up to the reception desk. He wanted a telephone call to Moscow.

  It was regretted there was no telephonic communication with Moscow. Then he wanted a telex connection with Moscow and he wanted it now, right now. It was regretted that there was also no telex communication with Moscow. By whose authority? By the authority of State Security.

  So tired, so bloody exhausted. Slowly, deliberately,

  "I have to speak to Moscow."

  "I am so sorry, Mr Holt, but it is not possible for anyone to speak to Moscow. All the lines are closed."

  "Is there a post office?"

  "It is Saturday afternoon, the post office is closed, Mr Holt."

  > "I'have to speak to my embassy."

  "I am sure that later, Mr Holt, the lines will be restored."

  The reception manager gave him his room key and then reached below the counter and shuffled to him Jane's handbag. Dropped it when she was hit. It was a small, kind gesture by the reception staff, to have retrieved the handbag, kept it for him. He offered his thanks. He went slowly up the flights of stairs to his room. He locked the door behind him. He tipped her bag out onto the coverlet of his bed. Her purse, her passport, her notepad, her pen, her embassy I/D, her lipstick, her mirror, her hairbrush, her letter from home, her photograph of Holt in Whitehall held in a small silver frame, her camera . . .

  He was shipwrecked. His landfall was a room on the second floor of the Oreanda Hotel in Yalta. His sea was a closed down telephone and telex system to Moscow and a wall of silence. He had gone through shock and misery and fury, now his reserve failed. Alone, where no-one saw him, Holt knelt beside his bed and wept, and his face covered her possessions, and he said over and over again the words she had spoken to him.

  "Don't be childish, Holt."

  The ciphered message whispered onto a teleprinter at main headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square. A report from KGB Yalta to KGB Moscow, giving information, requiring guidance. Saturday afternoon in the capital city. The message, still in cipher, passed to Second Directorate, domestic counter-subversion, and to Fifth Chief Directorate, suppression of dissent. Rows of weekend empty desks in Second and Fifth Chief, dust covers over the computer consoles, skeleton staffing.

  The minutes sliding away. Second Directorate duty officer going in search of his senior, his senior telephoning home to the man commanding the Second Department of the Directorate, the man commanding Second Department waiting for a call back from the Directorate chief out walking his dog. Fifth Chief Directorate on hold and looking for a lead from Second Directorate. Foreign Ministry Embassy Liaison stating they would take no action until briefed by Second Directorate, and until consultation with Fifth Chief Directorate. The dog was a young German Shepherd and needed a good long walk on a Saturday afternoon.

  The duty officer at the British embassy whiled away his afternoon in the near deserted building, and watched the ripple of the Moskva River from his upper room.

  He had run down Lenin Street. He had turned away from the shore front into a small alleyway. No more running then. He had walked as he had shrugged into his windcheater. One bad moment, when the windcheater had been on the ground and he had had to scoop it up. The gun under the shoulder of the windcheater. Another right turn, and another left turn, and the Volga car in front of him, and the man starting the engine.

  The rifle - magazine detached and metal stock folded down - wrapped in sacking on the floor of the car. Going fast out of the city and towards the Alushta road.

  "Did you succeed?"

  He punched the air in front of his face, and turned to the wide billowing smile of his commander. > There was no obstacle to their flight. They had beaten the road blocks.

  He was Abu Hamid. Abu Hamid was the name he had taken when he had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was 28 years old. His body was bone thin, spare, as if he ate little, as if he enjoyed no luxuries. The complexion on his face was smooth with the exception of the scar under his left eye. He wore no moustache and his matted dark hair was cut close to his scalp. Beyond the scar he was unrec-ognisable, unremarkable.

  He was a chosen man.

  He sucked hard, like he was panting, on his cigarette.

  He exploded the smoke from his mouth. He had stripped off the civilian clothes in which he had appeared on the front pavement of the Oreanda Hotel.

  He was now in military fatigues. They had stopped by the roadside at the city's limits and behind the cover of flourishing saplings Abu Hamid had swiftly dug a deep hole in the ditch and crammed in it the windcheater, the trousers, the shirt, the moustache, and the wig.

  The city of Yalta was behind them. The high slopes of oak and beech forest that dominated the city were lost to them. In a comer of the car park of the Sechonov Climatic and Physiotherapeutic Institute, shielded by small recently planted acacia and laurel and magnolia trees, they had transferred from the Volga car to a military jeep. The car could not be linked to them. The car had been hired from Intourist. The car had been fitted with false plates. Later, the plates exchanged, the car would be returned, the bill paid. None of that was the business of Abu Hamid.

  The commander knew that the journey from Yalta to Simferopol would take, given a few minutes either way, one hour and three quarters. They hammered through Gurzuf, past the signed turnings to the Defence Ministry sanatorium and the "Sputnik" Youth Camp.

  The commander's eyes flickered to the side mirrors of the jeep. They had no tail. Through Alushta, as if it did not exist, as if the narrowing streets in the town were merely an inconvenience on their journey. The commander pricked his ears to listen for a trailing siren. He heard nothing. The jeep straining when they climbed towards the lower reaches of the Chatir Dag that rose higher than any mountain in Lebanon, higher than the mystic Hermon of Syria, higher than any mountain of Palestine that was the homeland of Abu Hamid.

  The aircraft should now be leaving Moscow. There was a schedule to be met. At the road's summit, un
der Chatir Dag, they did not pause to look back and down towards Yalta and the hazed seascape.

  Abu Hamid leaned forward. He unwrapped the AK-47 assault rifle from the sacking on the floor space between his feet. He emptied the magazine. On semi-automatic, at a range of five or six paces, he had fired eleven bullets. He knew the weapon as he knew himself.

  Now he put the remaining rounds with the magazine and the rifle carefully into the mouth of the sack, wrapped it tight into a bundle and tucked it under his feet. A tradesman's tool, and he had finished with it.

  Holt lay on his bed.

  He had heard the whispered talk in the corridor outside his room. He had already been into Ben's room and into Jane's room and he had packed their belongings. Ben's case and Jane's were at the foot of his bed.

  He presumed the low voices outside were of a guard posted there. For his protection? To keep him inside the room?

  Each half hour he rang reception to see if the line to Moscow was open, and each half hour he was told that it was not. Each half hour he requested a call to KGB

  headquarters in the city, and each time he was told that all KGB numbers were engaged.

  There was no other explanation. Of course they had killed Ben and Jane. He lay on the bed, her blood still on his hands and on his shirt.

  Simferopol is in the centre of the Crimean peninsular.