The Kobra Manifesto

by Adam Hall

  No go.

  ‘What I should be unhappy to see,’ he said gently, ‘would be your taking on the next mission that comes up, and missing this one that we are all working hard to put together. Because it’s rather substantial.’ He blinked twice, still watching me. ‘And frankly there’s no one I’d prefer to control. No one.’

  I knew one thing about Egerton: he’d get me into this thing if he could, provided he wanted me enough: he’d done it before and now he was trying again - it wouldn’t ‘take long’ to find the access; this operation was ‘rather substantial’ and there was nobody he’d ‘prefer to control’; so forth.

  But this time I didn’t think he could do it because there was nothing about it I liked, nothing at all.

  ‘Can’t you put me on call?’

  ‘I could,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to.’

  Fair enough. It could be for a week or two and I’d have to report in every day and hang around and hope the mission was going to break at any hour and within twenty-one days I’d be a nervous wreck and he knew it.

  ‘Zarkovic,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he have any contact in Zagbreb?’

  ‘None that we know about.’

  ‘What about “Cobra” then?’

  He looked into the middle distance. ‘We’ve got some people working on that. The only thing we know about it at the moment is that it’s spelt with a “K.”’

  ‘Big deal.’ But I watched him because if he knew that much then he must know more. ‘What about this man in Tokyo?’

  ‘We are working on him, too.’ He leaned across the desk suddenly, looking up at me. ‘We have four people out there, you see, all working very hard. Tonight we are sending a fifth, dropping him into the countryside near Beirut. You must admit, at least, that the opening phase is simple enough? There are five men apparently converging upon a given focal point, and we already have four of them under remote surveillance, and by tomorrow the fifth will be located. With any ruck, our five targets will converge very soon, and we shall be able to send in a penetration agent with the access and objective known and integrated. I don’t see why you are so -‘ he moved a long thin hand despairingly - ‘uninterested.’

  I went and sat down again.

  The situation he’d given me wasn’t uninteresting as such: one of our people had picked up an isolated bit of info in Alexandria quite by chance and checked it with Shin Bet, the Israeli Intelligence Service, and drawn blank. Then he’d checked it with our top contact inside Sovinformburo and got an instant lead. Then there were a couple more blanks: the SDECE in Paris knew nothing, nor did KYP, Athens; but two separate sources in Berlin began putting odd bits of raw intelligence through the monitors and finally Egerton was told to send a man out there to try analysing it It took him six days.

  The picture was now reasonably clear. Five international terrorists had started making their way to a predetermined rendezvous from Taipei, Beirut, Cairo, Naples and Tangier, and they were taking a lot of trouble to cover their tracks, doubling back and feinting and leaping gaps. Egerton had now put four men into the field and was sending a fifth, and any number of them-from one to five-would show up at the rendezvous and keep very strict tabs.

  ‘My conjecture,’ Egerton had told me, ‘is that once the group has come together, it will then move directly to whatever may be the objective.’ He’d given one of his quiet sighs. ‘I had very much hoped you would want to join them there.’

  I saw the point but didn’t like it. I want to know what the objective is before I start because I’m a fast-burn operator and I can keep up a lot of heat for a short period but then I’m done. You can’t expect it both ways: some people are sprinters and some are long-distance; and I’m a sprinter. Egerton knew that, and he was trying to push me into a cross-country marathon and I wasn’t having any, ‘It’s not on,’ I told him.

  He stood up rather wearily and watched the rain trickling down the window above him. It wasn’t shifting any of the grime and it occurred to me that if the thing ever got cleaned he wouldn’t have to use his glasses any more. He didn’t say anything for two minutes but I didn’t fidget because that was what he was waiting for.

  He turned round and sat down again, piling himself behind the desk like a heap of dead sticks.

  ‘What you might care to consider,’ he said in hushed parson’s tones, ‘is being placed on a five-or six-day call, and-‘

  A phone buzzed and it was the one on the end and he picked it up without even finishing. It was the yellow one, direct from Signals.

  ‘Yes?’

  He listened while I shifted my haunches around on the seat of the Louis Quinze chair: there’s a spring that catches you, and one fine day I hope he’ll have the bloody thing re-stuffed.

  ‘I see.’ He sagged a little, gazing without any expression at all at the dented bugle hanging from the shelf of Coronation mugs. ‘Yes, very well.’ He put the phone down and picked up the one nearest him.

  I heard Macklin’s voice come on. Macklin is in Briefing, crack at his job. Egerton said in a still voice: ‘Harrison won’t be returning. Naples, yes - he got as far as Milan.’

  A chill came into the room and I looked away from him. He’d told me that Harrison was one of the four people he’d put into the field on the Kobra thing. Now there were three, Harrison had got too close.

  ‘I want you to send Moresby.’

  Macklin said something I couldn’t catch, but it sounded like an objection.

  ‘Very well,’ Egerton told him. ‘What about Perkins?’

  Something about ‘okay’.

  ‘Perkins, then. Brief him as soon as you can.’

  He put the phone down.

  They must be sensitive,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ He studied his knuckles, whose skin was calloused with the scars of winter chilblains. ‘The entire situation is sensitive.’

  I didn’t say anything else. He was a dismal man, a case of chronic melancholia, perhaps because his wife had taken an overdose during a seaside holiday, or perhaps because he was last born dismal, with some kind of acid in his soul. And he was ruthless, because his career demanded it: or possibly it was the reverse - he’d been attracted to this kind of work as la outlet for his ruthlessness. But he wasn’t totally without feeling, and I knew from experience that he didn’t like losing in executive. Even when it was their fault, through clumsiness or lack of judgement, Egerton saw it as his own failure, and was sobered.

  Harrison hadn’t been terribly good. He’d been short on nerve when it came to the crunch, and some of his security work was unimaginative (he seldom checked for bugs, and would open a parcel without getting it checked by Firearms first, that sort of thing). Without damning the man out of hand, I’d say it had probably been his fault, in Milan. But Egerton felt diminished, I had some thoughts of my own: he wasn’t exaggerating when he said this entire situation was sensitive. These days the major intelligence services were as impenetrable as anyone could make them, and we didn’t often try to get inside someone else’s preserves. If we had to, and if we succeeded, nobody took it too hard, because there’s a certain camaraderie among spooks and it keeps a lot of us alive, except of course when there’s a mainline operation in full swing and someone gets in the way.

  No one would normally despatch a surveillance man. They’d flush him, bring him in, rough him up a little, try to get something out of him, then let him go. They wouldn’t kill him, as these people had killed Harrison. So the Kobra group must be operating wildcat, without any kind of intelligence support or directive. They must be precisely what Egerton had called them: terrorists. They’re not usually our game.

  ‘So be it,’ he said at last, and got out of his chair and looked at a moustache cup and blew the dust off it and put it back on the shelf.

  I didn’t know whether he was talking about Harrison or my refusal to take on the mission, and I wasn’t interested.

  ‘Do we have a man in Milan?’ I asked him, He turned a blank look on me.

  �
�I mean,’ I said, ‘in place.’

  ‘Oh. No.’

  ‘Christ, you mean you’ve got directors in the field looking after those people?’

  It was the only way Signals could have known about Harrison.

  ‘Of course.’

  He went on looking at me.

  I got up again, feeling restless. I knew he was trying to trap me, get me into this bloody thing, and I wasn’t having any. He was trying to sell it to me on its size alone: it had to be something pretty massive for the Bureau to put local directors out there with the executives before they’d even found out the objective. But it was the size of the thing that was turning me off: I’ve told you, I’m a ferret and I want them to put me down the hole and leave me alone.

  ‘What the hell are you trying to sell me, a world war?’

  He tilted his head, regretfully.

  ‘In any case, I appreciate your having considered the mission.’

  ‘Hope it goes off all right’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  I went to the door and a phone rang and he stretched his thin hand down to take it. I could hear the voice at the other end, but not the words. It wasn’t a voice I knew. Egerton glanced at me once, then looked away again. When they’d finished he sat down slowly with the phone in his hand. His tone was courteous, as always.

  ‘Quiller is at present engaged in my services, and is unable to report to you. Please allow me to add that the Directorate would appreciate being left to pursue its affairs without interference of this nature from the Administration.’

  He lowered the phone and looked at me.

  ‘I assume you unwittingly offered some kind of - provocation.’ He gave a wintry smile.

  ‘They got it ballsed up,’ I said. ‘Someone in Room 6 thought I was a trainee.’

  ‘In that case the provocation was surely theirs,’

  ‘No hard feelings.’

  I turned to go again.

  Sometimes you do things you never mean to do. You work it all out, size it all up, make a decision and then go and do the very opposite, either because you’ve got some kind of obsession or because you’re being run by gut-think instead of brain-think or because some totally irrelevant factor gets suddenly in the works and sends you the other way.

  He needn’t have done that. He could have just said: ‘They want to see you in Administration.’ Their lordships had sent for me because an executive doesn’t just turn his back on them and walk out and leave the door open: he’s expected to say excuse me, sir, but I think there’s some little mistake, so forth. They’d wanted me up there for a lecture. But Egerton hadn’t known that. He didn’t care in the least what they wanted me for. He’d just realized they wanted me on the carpet, and he doesn’t like his executives interfered with by the non-active staff.

  So he’d told them to go and screw themselves, And this was a totally irrelevant factor.

  I came away from the door.

  ‘I forgot to ask. Who was Harrison’s local director?’

  He lifted his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘Dewhurst’

  I stood looking at one of the mugs. God Bless Our Glorious Queen.

  ‘Who are the others?’ I asked him. ‘You don’t mind if I -‘

  ‘Not at all. They are Hunter, Brockley and Smythe. I’m sending Ferris out to look after the fifth executive,’

  In a minute I said: ‘All top rankers.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He looked slightly deprecating: there’s a degree of modesty about this ruthless and brilliant man that almost shocks you, sometimes. ‘As I explained, this is quite a substantial undertaking.’

  I sat down slowly in the Louis Quinze chair.

  ‘Feel like telling me a bit more?’

  Macklin got up and wandered across to the cabinets and got out a file and kicked the drawer shut and came back, lighting another cigarette, ‘Didn’t imagine you’d be accepting this one,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not quite your style, is it?’

  That’s none of your bloody business,’

  He gave a lopsided smile.

  ‘Fraction touchy today, are we?.’

  ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake get me briefed.’

  Now that I’d made up my mind, I wanted to get out of here.

  Macklin opened the file and I waited, trying to cool down. He wasn’t going to let me rush him so it was no good trying: he was a topliner at this job and when he sent me out of here I’d be briefed to perfection.

  The fluorescent tubes sizzled faintly across the ceiling, casting an ashen light and leaving a tracery of shadow across his face where the tissue didn’t quite match. He’d been one of our best executives until a couple of years ago, when something had blown up; and now he was one of our best briefers.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and squinted at me through the smoke of his cigarette. ‘How much did Egerton tell you?’

  ‘Not much,’ I went through it for him.

  He nodded, spreading the file flat These five men. One: Ilyich Kuznetski, freelance saboteur, mercenary, guerilla. Set up the bombing of the Simplon Tunnel, worked three months with French counter-espionage, arrested last June in Rome and shot his way out of gaol, disappeared. Smythe is now with him, last reporting from Cairo. Two: Carlos Ramirez, terrorist, explosives expert, worked for half a dozen groups and now takes on anything that appeals to him politically. Three: Satynovich Zade, undercover agent for Palestinian factions, once ran with a group affiliated to the Fourth International, at present wanted by the Dutch police on homicide charges. We have Brockley with him. Four: Francisco -‘

  ‘Harrison was watching Ramirez, is that right?’

  He looked up, ‘You didn’t tell me Egerton had briefed you on that.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  I suppose you don’t talk about what you’d rather forget He looked down.

  ‘Number Four is Francisco Ventura, once a member of the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna, now operating freelance for anyone who’ll pay him enough, including Black September and the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes of Guatemala. Connections in Moscow and strong sympathies with the Arabs. Hunter is local-controlling the surveillance, last signals from Geneva.

  Chapter 4

  SABRI

  Sassine, trained in Palestine and now an international, twice called in by the FLQ in Canada, spent five years in prison in Argentina until released as a political prisoner in exchange for a Ford Motor Company vice-president. Ferris will local-control Perkins on that one,’

  He picked up a telephone.

  ‘Who kidnapped the Ford man?’ I asked him.

  ‘Splinter group, believed to be the Argentine Trotskyite Organization.’ He said into the phone: ‘Have you located Perkins yet?’

  I couldn’t see how any group made up of these widely differing agitators could find a common cause - or seek a common rendezvous. There’d have to be something that triggered an identical response in all of them.

  ‘It’s no good beating your gums about it,’ Macklin said into the telephone. ‘He’s down for priority briefing and I want him, so please get him.’

  He put the phone down and looked at me, ‘Who would he be with, do you think?’

  ‘Corinne. Or maybe Laura.’ Possibly both, knowing Perkins.

  He scribbled their names down.

  ‘Okay so far?’

  ‘Satynovich Zade,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t he the one they found in Paris a couple of weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes. Shot an informer and two Deuxieme Bureau men when they knocked at the door. Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He went into the routine phase of the briefing: probable access, communication modes with agents-in-place, signals facilities through Crowborough, liaison with directors in the field, fallback systems, security, suggested cover, suggested identify, so forth. He’d be passing a lot of this on to Clearance, as soon as I’d indicated preferences where the area was flexible: the drawing of weapons, agreement
on codes and things like that. He already knew most of my preferences but he wouldn’t take anything for granted because we’re a nervy and superstitious lot and have a tendency to change our minds about something quite radical: Perkins is a case in point - for a long time he never drew a cyanide capsule because it gave him the willies just to think about it; then he saw what they did to Fawcett under interrogation in Leningrad prison hospital and he’s drawn a capsule ever since, won’t go into the field without it.

  ‘We come to general theory,’ said Macklin, and shut the file. ‘As Egerton told you, we believe the Kobra group will start moving in a specific direction soon after it’s come together. Excuse me.’

  The yellow telephone was buzzing and he took it General theory my arse. They don’t put out five executives into the field and five top rank controls to run them unless they’ve got a pretty accurate idea about what’s going to happen. Possibly Macklin didn’t know but if he knew anything he wouldn’t necessarily pass it on to me. Except for operations with strong political overtones the executives are sent in without a lot of material stuffed into their heads, and this is particularly the case with penetration agents: we want to go in and do the job and get out so fast that nobody has time to stop us, and we can’t concentrate if we’re thinking about all the ramifications in the background: it’d put us right off our stroke.

  ‘What time was that?’

  He was talking to Signals. Every senior member of the active staff has a yellow telephone on his desk, among others, and he always picks it up the instant it buzzes.

  ‘All right, will do.’

  He put it down.

  ‘There’s another one.’

  ‘Another what?’