Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London

  ‘What do you think, John? Is it can’t or won’t?’ Walter Hicks asked, his voice echoing on the scrambled transatlantic line.

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ Westwood replied, ‘and nor does Roger, but if you asked me for my guess, I’d say it’s probably a bit of both. We’ve no indication that SIS has got a highly placed source in Moscow. There’s been nothing in any of the British intelligence summaries I’ve seen in the last six months to suggest they’ve got anyone other than the usual low-level informers on the fringes of the government and military. Plus, we’ve really got nothing to go on, no hard evidence to show SIS, so even if they had a source, they probably wouldn’t agree to risk him, despite our disclosures to the JIC. And,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t blame them.’

  ‘No, I guess not,’ Hicks agreed.

  ‘OK, John, we have some good news and some bad,’ Cliff Masters said from Langley. ‘The good news is that Rigby was contacted again by RAVEN yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ John Westwood asked. ‘Why the delay in letting me know?’

  ‘The usual reasons,’ Walter Hicks said. ‘First we had to get the message from Moscow to Langley, then get it translated – which caused some problems – and checked. Then we had to decide what to do about it. This one, John, was very specific.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘RAVEN states that the last component will enter the West on the ninth of this month – that’s next Tuesday. He also says that implementation will take place two days later, on Thursday the eleventh.’

  ‘What does he mean by “component”?’ Roger Abrahams asked.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Masters replied, ‘but the consensus here is that he must mean a weapon of some sort.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Westwood muttered. ‘Did the message say anything else?’

  ‘That was the entire text, apart from a single Russian word – Pripiska.’

  ‘And what the hell does that mean?’ Abrahams asked.

  ‘That was the word that caused the delay in translation,’ Hicks said. ‘According to the Linguistics Section, it’s old-Russian slang and it means generating false statements about agricultural and industrial production. “Cooking the books” is about as close to an accurate translation as we can get.’

  ‘I don’t see what possible connection that can have with this assault,’ Westwood said.

  ‘Nor do we,’ Hicks said. ‘Our analysts’ best assessment is that Pripiska is simply the Russian code-name for the operation, but that’s really just a guess. OK,’ Hicks continued, his voice brisk, ‘we now have a date, something to aim for, but it doesn’t really change anything. I still want you to go to Paris, John, and see if you can get anything out of the French. Roger – talk to your SIS man again, and pass the substance of this new message to the Joint Intelligence Committee. I don’t suppose it’ll do any good, but you never know.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Westwood asked.

  ‘We have very few options, John,’ Hicks replied. ‘The Director of Central Intelligence is still away, so I’m presently the acting Director. I have a meeting with the President in a little less than two hours, and as far as I can see I don’t have too many options. I’m going to suggest he treats the threat as real and kicks the military into action.’

  East Anglia

  Richter drove up to Cambridge on the Old North Road, the A10, rather than the faster A1(M) or M11 motorways, and was approaching Ware when he spotted the grey Vauxhall. Four cars behind the elderly Escort supplied by the Motor Pool – the Transport Officer obviously still hadn’t forgotten about the Granada – Richter saw the Cavalier. A common, even unremarkable, car, but what bothered Richter was that he had seen the same vehicle three times before on the journey, always well behind him but, essentially, always behind him.

  He patted his left armpit to reassure himself that the Smith and Wesson was snug in its holster, and decided what to do. There was always the chance that the driver was entirely innocent, and that it was simple chance that he was following the same route, but Richter didn’t believe in chance.

  First, confirm the tail. He checked the road ahead and selected a garage a quarter of a mile in front. He indicated left, pulled on to the forecourt, stopped beside the pumps, climbed out and watched the road closely. The Cavalier drove past, its two occupants seeming to take no notice of him whatsoever. Richter shrugged. Maybe he was getting paranoid. But, he reflected, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  Richter pumped ten pounds’ worth of fuel into the Escort’s tank, paid at the kiosk, started up and pulled out, heading north. He checked every driveway and turn-off he passed for the next five miles and saw absolutely no sign of a Vauxhall Cavalier, grey or any other colour. He shrugged again, and dismissed the incident from his mind.

  He was near Buntingford when he decided to stop for lunch. He pulled into the car park of the next pub he came to, locked the Escort and walked into the lounge bar. He ordered a club sandwich and a coffee, and sat down at a corner table from which he had a good view of the pub door and the road outside. About a dozen cars parked outside while he was eating, none of them Cavaliers, and the pub’s bars filled steadily.

  Richter finished his lunch, stood up, brushed the crumbs from his jacket, nodded a farewell to the barman and walked outside. As he turned towards the parking spot where he’d left the Escort, Richter glimpsed a grey Vauxhall Cavalier about fifty yards down the road, well out of sight of the pub’s windows. He’d taken only a couple of steps further when something hard was pushed into the middle of his back and a hoarse and unmistakably Essex voice murmured in his ear. ‘A word with you, my son.’

  Richter froze, his mind figuring the angles before he started to move. Then he saw a second man approaching from his right. Big, bulky and with the kind of face even a devoted mother would have a job cradling to her bosom. He was wearing a brown coat over his shoulders like a cape, but not because the day was cold. He had the coat on to help conceal the whippet – a sawn-off double-barrel twelve-bore shotgun with a pistol grip – he was carrying in his right hand. The chances were, Richter realized, that the object pressing against his spine was the other half of the pair, and that changed the odds, seriously.

  Richter’s ace in the hole was the Smith, but before he could even think about using it, he had to get these two comedians where he wanted them – in front of him.

  ‘Over ’ere,’ the man in the brown coat said, inclining his head towards the waste ground at the rear of the pub. His accent confirmed Richter’s suspicion that he was dealing with a couple of contractors hired from the underworld by a cut-out, not SVR agents or professionals. That, he hoped, would help a little.

  The man behind him shoved Richter forwards, and he walked in the direction indicated, his arms held wide apart. At the edge of the wood which extended up the hill at the back of the pub, they told Richter to stop. He did so, and turned to face the two men. Both were holding whippets, and both were smiling, but they were the kind of smiles that didn’t reach their eyes.

  ‘We ’ear you’ve bin a bad boy,’ the man with the brown coat said, menace apparent in every syllable. Good God, Richter thought, they’ve been learning their dialogue from the television. ‘A very bad boy, and my colleague ’ere is goin’ to teach you a lesson.’

  The other man placed his whippet carefully on the ground, then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two lengths of iron pipe each about a foot long. Never taking his eyes off Richter, he slowly and carefully screwed the two lengths together, then hefted the weapon in his hand.

  Richter knew exactly what they intended to do. This was going to be a mugging that went wrong. No knife wounds, no bullets, just a few well-placed blows from the pipe and he’d be dead inside two minutes, his wallet gone and the police with even less clues than usual. What he had to do was get the man in close, close enough to disable him and so close that the other man wouldn’t be a
ble to fire his weapon. But he also had to increase the distance between himself and the whippet. The advantage of the weapon was also its disadvantage – at anything over about ten feet it’s a genuine scatter-gun, ideal for blowing away an opponent but useless if you’re trying for accurate shooting.

  The man with the pipe took off his jacket and dropped it on the ground, then walked slowly over to where Richter stood. As he closed, Richter let a look of panic and fear spread across his face, and he took a couple of steps backwards, subtly increasing the distance between himself and the whippet.

  The thug smiled again, raised the pipe and swung it in a vicious arc, the iron singing through the air. It wasn’t intended to hit Richter, just frighten him even more. Richter looked over the man’s shoulder to where the second thug stood, still smiling, the whippet dangling from his right hand. He estimated the distance at about twenty feet; far enough, he thought.

  Richter stopped moving. The thug swung the pipe again, but this time Richter didn’t flinch. A look of puzzlement crossed the man’s face as he raised the pipe for a killing blow. Richter stood there, gazing levelly at him, arms by his sides, hands open and ready, his left foot slightly advanced. An aficionado of martial arts would have recognized his posture as the hidari-hanmi position, one of the Aikido preparation kamae, or stances, but Essex Man probably thought Aikido was something on the menu of a Chinese take-away.

  Aikido is probably the most unusual of the oriental martial arts, in that it is essentially defensive in concept and its primary weapon is the attacker’s own strength, which an Aikido expert will use against him. Attacking an Aikido master is a bit like trying to punch smoke – frustrating and ultimately pointless. Richter wasn’t a master, but he had the basic skills.

  The man grunted, stepped forward and swung the pipe down and sideways, a hard, savage blow that would have broken Richter’s neck if it had connected. But it didn’t connect, and the reason it didn’t was that at the moment Essex Man moved, so did Richter. What surprised his attacker was that he moved forward, not back.

  Richter stepped inside the blow, turned to his left and placed his back against the thug’s chest. He stretched up his right hand, fingers splayed until the web of his hand contacted his attacker’s swiftly moving right arm. Richter slid his hand down until he reached the wrist, where he clamped his fingers tight. He pulled the man’s arm down, bending sharply from the waist as he did so. The man’s own momentum pitched him forward, and Richter’s steady pull on his right wrist did the rest. He tumbled over Richter’s body and slammed into the ground on his back, pipe tumbling away and the breath instantly knocked from his body.

  Richter kept moving. Still gripping the man’s wrist he braced his right foot against the man’s armpit and pulled, instantly dislocating his shoulder. Richter looked up. The second man had watched his actions with a kind of dumb disbelief, but the sight of his colleague lying incapacitated on the ground prodded him into action. He raised the whippet towards Richter and began to squeeze the trigger, but his target was already diving to one side.

  The shotgun boomed, pellets hissing through the leaves, and Richter felt some tugging at his jacket as he hit the ground, but none, as far as he could tell, had injured him. But he knew the weapon had a second barrel, and that he had to deal with the situation quickly.

  He rolled once, then came up into a crouch. In a single fluid motion Richter hauled the Smith and Wesson out of the shoulder holster and sighted down the barrel. The heavy recoil from the whippet had forced the thug’s arm upwards and back, and as Richter stopped moving he swung the weapon down again. But before he could squeeze the trigger Richter had completed his move. The pistol boomed once, the recoil kicking Richter’s arm up, and the .357 magnum round took the thug squarely in the chest, knocking him backwards. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  The noise of the shots echoed and faded and Richter knew that within seconds the occupants of the pub would be pouring out into the car park to find out what was going on. But he only needed seconds. He stepped across to the first attacker, who was trying to sit up, moaning over the pain of his dislocated shoulder. Richter kicked his good arm from under him and the man slumped back on the ground. For a brief moment time seemed frozen, then Richter pointed the pistol straight at the man’s stomach and pulled back the hammer, the sudden click unnaturally loud.

  ‘Who sent you?’ Richter asked, his voice quiet and level as he spoke for the first time since the encounter had begun.

  For a moment it looked as if the man would refuse to answer, then he shook his head. ‘The people you owe money to,’ he said sullenly. It was pretty much as Richter had guessed. The old story – a man running up gambling debts which he can’t or won’t repay, and a couple of bruisers sent to straighten him out. The only thing that surprised him was that the Russians had stooped so low.

  ‘I hope they paid you in advance,’ Richter said, holstering the Smith and Wesson, ‘because if it’s by results you’re not going to make much of a living doing this. Sorry about your boyfriend,’ he added as he walked away towards his car.

  Oval Office, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  ‘Walter, isn’t it?’ the grey-haired man asked, rising to his feet and advancing from behind the massive mahogany desk as Hicks entered the room.

  ‘Yes, Mr President.’

  ‘You know the Secretary of Defense?’

  Hicks turned and nodded towards the man sitting in one of the Oval Office’s comfortable armchairs. ‘Yes, I do. Good day, Mr Secretary,’ he said.

  ‘Right, Walter, let’s hear what you have to say.’

  Hicks sat down and opened his briefcase. ‘This will sound unbelievable, Mr President, but we have information which suggests that an assault is about to be launched upon the United States by Russia.’

  The Secretary of Defense rose abruptly to his feet. ‘What in hell! Is this some kind of a sick joke?’ he demanded.

  Hicks shook his head wearily. ‘No, Mr Secretary, it isn’t any kind of a joke,’ he replied. ‘I wouldn’t be here now if it was.’

  The President was still standing, looking appraisingly at Hicks. ‘Go on, Walter,’ he said quietly. ‘What kind of assault, and what is your evidence?’

  Hicks pulled out a file bearing the title ‘Ravensong’ and began to speak.

  Cambridge

  Richter spent a busy ten minutes on his mobile explaining to Simpson what had happened on the A10, and Simpson agreed to let the Metropolitan Police lean on the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. The story they worked out between them was that the incident was a shoot-out between gang members, which wouldn’t be that difficult for even a policeman to believe. When he got to Cambridge – late – Richter parked near the railway station, then took a cab to the Department of Theoretical Physics.

  Expert assistance from the academic world is surprisingly often required by a variety of government departments, including what is usually called the Illegal Section. As a result, following a covert security check known as Negative Vetting, certain leading authorities in numerous and diverse fields are approached and asked to act as consultants to the government as required, in return for a predictably small annual retainer.

  Since the Second World War, and increasingly through the sixties and early seventies, with the embarrassment caused by Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and others of their ilk, the security forces of the Western world have greatly increased their emphasis on checking and screening people who will have access to sensitive material.

  This was something that the British had never been very good at. The system’s failings could largely be laid at the door of the old school tie, and to the peculiar belief that, even if it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half an eye that a particular individual was an habitual drunk, a raging queen with a boyfriend called Boris or Ivan and, in some cases, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, the fact that he had been to Winchester and Cambridge somehow outweighed all this evidence. Indeed, for some
years about the only consistent qualifications for membership of the security establishment appeared to be unusual sexual proclivities and a general sympathy with Stalin’s long-term aims.

  Eventually and despite, rather than because of, the system, vetting was improved and a new breed of security man evolved – the Screener, as he is colloquially known. Screeners are usually ex-service officers of a fairly senior rank who have shown some aptitude for what one might call ferreting, and they spend their working lives checking, cross-checking and then checking again, all relevant details of the personnel whose files appear on their desks.

  There are two types of security checking procedure which may be undertaken, and the one used depends almost entirely on the intended employment of the individual in question. The more usual procedure is Negative Vetting, which is a covert operation. Virtually all the Screener does is to confirm that stated details are correct, by checking birth and marriage certificates, details of the individual’s immediate family, school records and so on, and weeding out any obvious insanities like an uncle who’s the Secretary of the local Communist Party. Negative Vetting is the normal procedure for people entering the armed forces in an officer rank, and is generally considered to provide clearance up to Secret.

  Positive Vetting is required for anyone needing access to Top Secret, Atomic Secret, Cosmic Top Secret or any of the other thirty or so grades and classifications above Secret, and starts more or less where Negative Vetting finishes. The co-operation of the subject is essential, and the process ensures that the entire life history of the individual is scrutinized, starting from conception and ending the day before the screening started. Family and friends are interviewed in depth. Past employers are contacted and receive a visit, and even the sex life of the subject is placed under the microscope. The process is thorough, lengthy and moderately distasteful, but it does work, which is the intention.

  However, despite the fact that some of the civilian consultants used by the government work on projects which are technically of a much higher security classification than Secret, usually only Negative Vetting is applied. The rationale behind this is that as these consultants would only have a limited view of one aspect of a project, rather than an overview of the whole thing, they do not need to be investigated thoroughly. The truth is that it was felt that the uproar and predictable howls about civil rights which would accompany the Positive Vetting of scientists would be more trouble than the resulting clearance would be worth, and so it is only applied in situations where there really is no other option.