Northlight q-11

by Adam Hall

  Had Fane told the KGB my cover?

  When they'd made that famous deal of theirs, had London instructed my local control to reveal my cover: Petr Lein? So that everything should look above board? That was possible. It was possible that the two KGB officers who'd checked me out on the train had known who I was, that I was working partly for them, for their sacred motherland, by arrangement with Mr Croder. In which case my papers could now be lethal. It had been all right before that thing had blown one or two of their men to bits in the freight-yards but things were different now and if Petr Lein got picked up by a patrol he could find his name on their all-points bulletin sheet: finis.

  They hadn't moved.

  The scale was 1:250,000, the biggest I could find. Elevations and sea depth in metres, civil and military aerodromes marked, roads, railways, navigable canals. The area covered was from the junction of the Soviet, Finnish and Norwegian borders in the south to the Barents Sea in the north. The Soviet-Norwegian border was the northernmost leg of the Iron Curtain, ending in the sea.

  Somewhere along this line I would have to cross into Norway.

  Without London?

  Movement along the periphery. They were going out. I lifted my head half an inch and saw them more clearly. One of them was looking back. Not at me, at the girl with the footballs under her sweater, ah, sweet affirmation of life, comrades, what would we do without it.

  Finnmark on one side, Murmanskaya on the other. It looked easy enough on the map but the map didn't specify the number of watchtowers and floodlights and war-trained dogs and mines and trip-wires and peak-capped sharpshooters frustrated with boredom of guard duty and eager for relief, bang bang and you're dead, my good friend, you shouldn't have told Chief of Control where to get off, he doesn't like it.

  No regrets.

  The nearest part of the frontier to Murmansk: 110 km. The nearest town to the frontier: Pechenga, 11 km. Airports at Pechenga and Koshka-Yavr, with another one at Salmiyarvi, further west, much further west, too far from here with the roads in this condition. And in any case there was no chance of getting into an aeroplane without London's help.

  It's easy for the local directors because they carry permanent cover and they don't have to go clandestine. It's possible for a shadow executive to reach his objective and get it across the border or hand it to his control or a courier and leave the host country — a charming term, yes — just as he came in with his cover still intact and his papers acceptable for franking, but it's rare. During the course of the mission things can get very sticky and he'll have to go clandestine and assume a host-country cover and operate just this side of the capsule unless he's lucky. Even if a wheel doesn't come off somewhere it's not often he can avoid going clandestine: I was working under the cover of a journalist but that was restrictive: a foreign journalist can't suddenly take off for Kandalaksha on his own and that's what I'd had to do because that's where the objective was.

  The man opposite me at the worn teakwood table was nursing his chilblains under black wool mittens, running a finger down the columns of print, his one eye steady, his cracked lips moving as his finger stopped and he read the paragraph and then moved on, not an old man but a man beyond his years, his cheeks cavernous and ears shrivelled by unending winters, red as raw bacon. What was he looking for, with his eye and his finger? An apartment? A second-hand chair? A job?

  Not for a hole in the frontier.

  A railway line ran from Murmansk into Pechenga. That might be still open. The roads would be impossible. But once in Pechenga?

  The sea.

  A boat.

  Without London?

  In the ordinary way if your main control is good and knows how to pull strings internationally, how to handle DI6 in the overseas missions, how to use Interpol for special information, and if your director in the field is also good, and knows how to get papers forged and couriers briefed and safehouses set up and protected, you stand a fair chance of getting home, sometimes a bit shot up or with your nerves like a disco hall but getting home. Otherwise we wouldn't let them send us out, we're not in the kamikaze club for God's sake. We like to know there's a chance.

  But that's with London behind you.

  Different now.

  A feeling of being dwarfed suddenly by the immensity of this foreign land with its regiments of men with black boots and peaked caps and bolstered. guns, their eyes restless as they looked for inconsistencies in the social environment, for someone hurrying or turning away or giving unsatisfactory answers to a doorman's questions — he offered me fifty rubles, comrades, but of course I refused, being suspicious of such a thing — and most of all for not being in possession of correct papers: that was where the greatest danger lay — at the checkpoints, the road-blocks, the frontier posts. You are from Murmansk, citizen? Then what are you doing in Pechenga?

  A feeling of having, yes, committed suicide, or at least of having set the scene, tying the rope aloft and fetching the chair, and out of vanity, being too proud to go on marching to London's bloody tune. My chances were no better now: they were worse; the only difference was that when the time came I would at least go decently, mown down by enemy action, not sullied by traitor's knife.

  He turned the page of the newspaper, the man opposite me at the table, his lips moving again as his chilblained finger stopped at a line of print. A second-hand stove to keep back the deathly cold of his cramped apartment? A coat with more weight to it than this moth-eaten thing he was wearing? His finger moved on.

  It has been known for an executive to be trapped on this side of the Curtain and never get out. Thompson is in Moscow somewhere according to rumour in the Caff, and Pick is said to be in one of the labour camps. Another man, Cosgreave, is said to be living on the shore of the Black Sea with a woman from Tashkent, having decided that the risks of trying to get across on his own weren't worth taking: there's life, after all, in Soviet Russia. Those are the ones we know about, or at least talk about, creating legends to lend a little colour to those dreary corridors. There are others, but we won't discuss them, though I knew personally a high-echelon and very effective shadow who now works for the Fourth Department of the KGB.

  And there are those known to have died here, caught in the heat of a counter-operation or running for the border or finishing off a mission the only way they can. Webster, Finnimore, Clay.

  Requiescat in pace.

  'Have you by any chance, comrade, a violin for sale?'

  His one eye watched me with the light of hope in it.

  A violin, with fingers like these? 'I'm sorry.'

  'Never mind. I had mine stolen, and it's my living, that's all.'

  'That was bad luck, comrade.'

  I walked out of the public library and turned to the right, conscious that my feet were taking a definite direction, if only back to the hotel to fetch my overnight bag and pay the concierge for his silence. After that I would take the first step towards the frontier and see how far the animal cunning of the organism would get me.

  I'd left some spare gloves and a train timetable at the safehouse but I couldn't go back there now. Liz had been sent there to monitor my operation for the Company and Fane would have made contact with them: there was no point now in her staying on. Even if she were still there the place could be a deathtrap for me if she were blown; she wouldn't be utmost-security trained for light cover and she hadn't gone clandestine because her Russian wasn't good enough.

  Where else would a man go but to the earth mother?

  Not now.

  Between the library and the hotel I saw three street-checks going on in the distance: four or five militiamen stopping every pedestrian and at one intersection a whole group of men with shovels on their way to the snow-clearing zones. The search for Captain Kirill Zhigalin, Soviet Navy, was being intensified.

  Two militiamen were patrolling the street where the hotel stood and I had to make a detour and keep them surveilled until it was safe to go on. Question: if it was like this between t
he Murmansk public library and the Aurora Hotel, what would it be like between here and the frontier?

  I kicked snow from my boots against the brickwork at the top of the steps and pushed the glass door open.

  'You are asked to telephone this number again, comrade.'

  He held out the scrap of dirty paper.

  Fane answered after three rings. 'They've located Ferris,' he said. 'He's on his way.'

  25 CHECKPOINT

  I was getting used to the thing. Most of the time I carried it across my shoulder, and I was taking more care with it now when I passed people on the pavements. ' Watch that shovel, you stupid whoreson!'

  And a happy Christmas to you too, comrade. But he was perfectly right: I'd slipped on the slush and nearly clouted him with the edge of the blade.

  In the last two days there'd been three more signals from Fane. The first was to the effect that Ferris had confirmed by a radio message from the flight deck of a British Airways plane that he was prepared to local-direct me and that he needed all facilities made available to him. London would have already begun work on that, the moment Ferris had agreed to switch his operations. I didn't know who was going out to replace him in Tokyo but I hoped for the sake of the shadow there that it wouldn't be Fane.

  The second signal reported that Ferris had landed in Karachi and had received Telexed briefing material from our consulate there, sent from London through Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham.

  The third signal had been to the effect that Ferris had raised questions concerning the courier who had purportedly been sent to rendezvous with me in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha at the time when the KGB had moved in. Had they arrested the courier following the explosion and had they interrogated him and if so horn much did he know of the executive's operations in Murmansk? That was a good question and I'd asked Fane for the answer. He said the courier hadn't been seen since the explosion and might in fact have been arrested and put under intensive interrogation. The last part of the question was therefore important. Perhaps crucial.

  In the two days before the fourth signal came I had time to surveille the environment and try to find out how to move across the city without running into a checkpoint or a militia patrol. By the end of the second day I'd begun to see that it was impossible. The KGB had relied on taking Karasov and putting him under interrogation as soon as we'd flushed him for them but he was dead, and their one last chance of allowing the Kremlin to send the President of the Presidium to Vienna without making critical concessions to the West was to find Captain Zhigalin and obtain his absolute silence with a bullet through the brain. Even though they had no idea that at this moment a British Secret Service agent was flying in to Murmansk to direct an operation specifically designed to get Zhigalin over the frontier they were throwing a security net across the city to make certain that if he emerged from ground they would seize him and that if he remained there they would eventually find him and drag him out.

  If they had known that he had already contacted a Western embassy and requested transit across the frontier and subsequent asylum and that his request was being given immediate and active response they would have called out military reserves to augment their efforts to find him. If Ferris actually found it possible to put me into contact with Zhigalin and arrange and somehow protect a rendezvous it was my opinion at this time that it would be impossible for him to move us as far as the frontier, let alone across it, simply because the search for Zhigalin would extend and intensify towards that frontier on the assumption that he would try to reach it. We would be going into increasing KGB and militia activity at every hour and we had no papers that could get us through any checkpoint.

  It's possible to represent any given mission schematically on graph paper and these days it's put through the computers before the monitors at the board over the mission control desk are allowed to make any report or recommend any decision, and at this stage my operation in Murmansk would look like a V configuration narrowing to a point in the direction of the future, since the more effort we made towards achieving our goal the more risk there would be of exposing the operation, be it given that the environment was at the same time being brought under increasing KGB surveillance.

  This was my view, as the shadow executive in the field, of the status of Northlight at noon of January 18th, and it was reported in essence to London by Fane, the outgoing local director.

  Nothing would appear on the operations board in that anonymous building, in Whitehall to show that in point of fact the focus of the mission was at this moment a man lurching over the snow drifts of Murmansk with a shovel across his shoulder.

  At 20:00 hours the telephone rang in the lobby of the hotel and the concierge fetched me to take the line. It was the last time I ever spoke to Fane. He reported that Ferris was due to land at Murmansk airport from Leningrad and that I was to meet him there as soon as I could. The precise rendezvous was arranged for 22:00 hours without further alternatives Ferris would wait for me if he reached there first.

  Checkpoint.

  It was two blocks ahead of me at the intersection of Lenin Prospekt and North Harbour Street. They were setting them up everywhere now and at shorter intervals, bringing in the militia from their barracks and substations in dark green vans and posting them at strategic locations. The moment they began spilling out of the van they called on anyone in the street to halt and show his papers.

  I turned into a side street and climbed the virgin drifts that the ploughs and work gangs hadn't had time to deal with. Half an hour ago I'd seen a checkpoint being set up four blocks away to the west and from my observations during the past two days I'd noted that the average period of checkpoint left operating was one hour, depending on the importance of the street traffic.

  Light snow had started falling again but most of the main streets were clear now except for ruts of frozen slush and gravel. In the side street where I was moving the lamps had gone out, and in the faint light from the aurora that was seeping through thin cloud banks the snow had a bluish tinge like an overcoloured Christmas card. My shovel was over one shoulder, part of my identity. The militia were checking the snow-clearing gangs as well as other pedestrians but it gave me a slight edge: they were to an unknown degree less likely to shout at a distant figure if he looked like a volunteer worker than if he lacked an instantly identifiable image. It was now 21:00 hours and I'd been moving for thirty' minutes towards the airport, doubling on my tracks and making detours to avoid the main intersections where the checkpoints were set up. I didn't know whether I could reach the rdv on time in these conditions but that wasn't important because Ferris would wait for me. The real question was whether I could reach it at all.

  I was now operating in the uneasy twilight zone between clandestine and the final security status they haven't actually got a name for: on the board it would simply show the symbol of a crooked cross to denote that the executive was operating in hazard. But that might not be accurate. I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd shed my identity as Clive Gage, journalist, and adopted the identity of Petr Lein, engineer, and if I now pushed those papers among the tea-leaves and tin cans and fish-heads of the nearest rubbish dump I would technically be operating in hazard: without papers and without any chance of surviving if a single militiaman checked me in the street. It had happened in Warsaw: I'd turned a corner and walked straight into a routine police patrol and they'd asked for my papers and I hadn't got any and they'd put me into a cell and started work.

  What I didn't know, as I climbed the drifts and lurched through the freezing ruts of this city's streets, was whether the papers I carried would get me through or trap me. I didn't know whether they had made the connection yet between the dead Lithuanian and the freight-yards bombing and the man who'd been taken to the General Maritime Hospital. They could still be sifting through the routine reports and questioning the last of the passengers on that train and watching the computer screens as they punched the data in. Two things w
ere certain: they were doing that now and they were inevitably making progress. It was like a slow-burn fuse that would at any hour, any minute reach the papers I carried in my pocket and blow my operation the instant I fell foul of a random check and had to show them.

  There was only one thing more dangerous: not to show them at all. It was a matter of time, and in the diminishing time frame available to me I had to reach the rendezvous before one of the computers threw the name of Petr Lein on the screen and the KGB operator flashed an immediate all-points bulletin to have me picked up.

  Checkpoint.

  I turned into a side street and saw two militiamen on routine patrol coming in this direction at a distance of a hundred metres and there was no cover except for a sandbin half-submerged under a snow drift so I turned back and waited for the shout but it didn't come, though I might not have heard it because one of the civic transport trucks was getting up speed along the main street and I started running — Halt! but only in my mind — Halt, that man! but only in the nerves as I slung the shovel high and one of the men caught it and gave me a hand as I clambered onto the truck and hung jack-knifed across the side until they hauled me aboard.

  'One more for the cattle-yards!'

  'Run out of snow, comrade?'

  Packed, yes, like cattle in the open truck with the slipstream cutting our faces as it got up speed again with the gears jerking and a shovel clanging against the back of the cab.

  'Is this a work party?'

  'No, comrade, we're off to a bloody circus!'

  In the last two days I'd seen that the checkpoint militiamen had let some of the trucks through if they were on their way to a clearing site but it wasn't a hundred per cent predictable and the situation now was strictly Russian roulette because the work truck ahead of us was being waved through the intersection but it didn't mean they wouldn't stop this one — they could be checking them alternately to keep the traffic moving.