by Adam Hall
‘If he is, he didn’t book right through.’
‘Oh bloody hell,’ he said quietly and I knew what he meant. Most of the South American countries need a visa and medical certificate with smallpox on it and a subsistence attestation and anything up to four passport photos and Ferris was going to have to get them for me in New York and do it fast enough to make sure I didn’t lose Zade at Belem Airport.
I wondered if he could do it. The Travel people in London are first class but if the director in the field has to use local facilities there’s always a risk and you can blow a complete mission with a suspect border-franking if you’re forced into frontier-jumping by the opposition: it’s one of the objects of making a feint.
‘Listen,’ Ferris said. ‘Brazil is a signatory to Interpol.’
‘Fair enough.’
But it doesn’t always work and he knew that, ‘What about signals?’ I asked him.
Through the consulate. Booth Building, Avenue 15 de Agosto.’
Repeat.
‘I’ve got two minutes,’ I told him. The boarding call was coming over the speakers.
‘I think that’s everything.’
He sounded rather vague.
Ferris is never vague.
‘What happened,’ I asked him, ‘to that other tag?’
There was time now to think about that. I still didn’t want to, but there was time.
‘He was called off,’ said Ferris.
‘What the hell for? You had both of them running when-‘
‘Orders from London. He -‘
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I want to know.’
Brief pause.
‘It’s not your concern.’ His tone had gone cold. ‘You are now locked on to the objective in a clear field and you know I what to do and we expect you to do it. Questions?’
Quite a lot but he was right: it wasn’t my concern.
In any given mission London knows as much as there is to know: as much as Briefing can get out of their files and as much as Signals can get out of their network and as much as Codes and Cyphers can get out of their computers. London gets all there is. But they don’t pass all of it on. They give the director in the field precisely as much as it’s essential for him to know; and out mere in the field where the pattern is changing rapidly from phase to phase the director uses his own discretion as to how much his executive needs to know in order to work at his full potential.
The executive is a ferret. They put him down the hole and he doesn’t ask any questions that don’t concern him. All he’s I got to do is stay alive and come up with the goods and the only way he can do it is by trusting London. If they don’t I tell you everything you’ve got to believe it’s for your own good ad eventually your own salvation, ‘No questions,’ I said.
The line went dead.
‘Would you like something to read?’
‘Please.’ New York Times, This was the edition Zade had bought.
He was sitting twelve rows behind me in the coach class:’ I’d gone into the forward toilet and swung the catch and shut the door against the lever, using one eye at the three-millimetre crack until I picked up his image as he passed through the front-end compartment.
Since we shall be flying for most of our journey over water, so forth.
The whine of the reactors increased and we began moving across to the runway.
I knew what they’d done with the tag. The other one.
Those four men on Broadway and West 69th Street had been local hirelings, like the man reporting on the Secretary of Defense in Washington. Two of them had still been in fit condition When Zade had left the Lulu Belle Hotel and they might have given him mobile protection on his way to the diner in Queens: I didn’t know because I wasn’t there. But I’d been there when Zade had driven from the diner to the airport and there hadn’t been any protection and there still hadn’t been any protection at the airport itself and I could think of only one reason.
London had in fact used the tag as a disinformation tool.
The girl with the limpid brown eyes was showing us how to put on the oxygen mask when it dropped out of the panel.
At the diner I’d signalled Ferris I was locked on to the objective. The tag in the dark blue Pinto was still working but Ferris couldn’t call him off because the only way to do that would be by asking me to tell him and I couldn’t do it: there was to be no contact. So the Pinto had been with us to the airport and when the man had reported location Ferris had called him off and I’d watched him go.
The field was at that time clear.
But except for the Pinto tag it had been clear since we’d left the diner and it shouldn’t have been.
Somewhere in the area where the executive isn’t concerned. Control or Ferris or our man in Washington had rigged a bug or bust a code or in one of a dozen ways had found out that Kobra were getting worried and were ready to snatch and interrogate if the chance came: and the chance was given them. The disinformation had been pushed across to the Kobra intelligence and they’d believed the field to be clear and they’d dispensed with any protection cell for Zade at some time between his leaving the hotel and reaching the diner.
A disinfo tool doesn’t always survive. Statistics at the Bureau put it at fifty-fifty. But it’s no good thinking about that sort of thing or you’ll jar the nerves and finish up making mistakes.
We were standing at the end of the runway, ‘May I get you something to drink?’
A lock of dark hair swinging as she leaned over.
‘Some milk.’
Suggest 100 mg daily.
London must be getting bloody-minded about this one. But that tag hadn’t been sacrificed out of hand: Egerton was controlling the mission and his work was always calculated. He’d pushed the opposition to the point where they’d started counteracting in Milan and Geneva and Cambodia and then he’d pushed them to the point where they were so worried that they were ready for disinformation and he gave it to them, despite the cost From New York and into Brazil the single remaining executive was to have a clear field and open access to the Kobra rendezvous and Control had provided them. The rest was up to the executive.
The sound of the jets lifted to a scream and the brakes came off.
I began drinking my glass of milk.
Chapter 12
LAGOFONDO
‘Where are you from?’
‘London.’
‘London England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never been there.’
He took out a cheroot and bit the end off.
‘Wanna smoke?’
‘No.’
‘Keeps the bugs out.' He gave a sudden loud laugh, for no reason, and lit the cigar.
‘Your first time out here?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I was thinking about Satynovich Zade, ‘You ain’t no tourist, I guess,’
‘Shipping agent.’
‘With Booth Line?’
‘A subsidiary.’
The last time I saw Satynovich Zade was at Belem Airport and if I didn’t see him again then the whole thing was wiped out. Extended surveillance is always nerve-racking but when you have to do it during the end-phase it induces a kind of numbness. Extended surveillance is when you’re tagging a man and find out he’s got a fixed destination, and instead of keeping him in view you decide to jump ahead of him into his destination and wait for him there. He’s still technically under surveillance but it’s extended, not constant.
There are a lot of advantages: you avoid the risk of his discovering you in his immediate area and you give yourself time to signal base or change your image, or simply catch up on sleep. The obvious disadvantage is that you’re relying on his going to that fixed destination and he can change his mind and you’ve lost him for good.
‘You get anything to eat down there?’
‘Yes, I had time for a hamburger.’
‘At that joint? Then you got the ears and eyeballs thrown in for free I’ He gave
another loud laugh.
I watched the two King KX 175 Navcoms.
This was the end-phase and normally I wouldn’t have let Zade out of my sight but I’d had to: the authorities at Belem threw me straight into quarantine for twenty-four hours while the objective walked away. Ferris knew it might happen and he got at the local police through Interpol and they put a tag on Zade and that was how we knew he’d booked out on Panair do Brasil Flight 540 in two days’ time. The destination was Manaus, on the Amazon. We’d missed the Loide Aereo flight by three hours because of radio trouble and there are only three flights a week from Belem to Manaus at this time of the year.
So we were running the objective on extended surveillance and it had a numbing effect and I wished Chuck Lazenby would stop talking.
‘You know something? That jungle’s goin’ to eat up that whole damn place one day an’ all you’ll see is the trees, like it was before.’
There was a blinding flash and the windscreen went opaque as we hit the wall of rain.
‘Okay,’ Chuck shouted, ‘here it comes!’
He pulled a knob and the windscreen wipers started waving around but the force of water was too strong and they stopped halfway.
The instrument panel blacked out as the next flash came and then started glowing again and I took a few readings. This was a Twin Beech and the avionics were basic but adequate - the two King Navcoms, an ADF, a Narco transponder, Century HI autopilot, a DME and a ten-year-old RCA radar unit - and they were behaving normally and stayed illuminated when the next flash lit up the cockpit. The altimeter was at a steady ten thousand feet ‘It’s okay when it’s kinda yellow-coloured, Chuck called out. ‘When it turns white it means it’s real close.’
He blew out cigar smoke and adjusted the throttles.
Ferris had found him for me. Ferris had worked non-stop for thirty-six hours and I don’t think anyone but a first-class director in the field could have done it and that was why Control had pulled him in from Tokyo for the Kobra mission. He brought my forged papers with him from New York and spent half an hour talking icily to the Immigration officers, hinting at ‘obstruction’ and ‘incompetence’ and using the Interpol connection until they got the message and let me through.
He also switched my cover because of the Burdick situation: the journalist image was no longer appropriate and I was now a shipping agent’s representative looking for small-boat charter franchise along the Amazon between Manaus and Itacoatiara.
‘Gonna ship a little water,’ said Chuck. ‘She always does. You know what they stuck this windshield in with? Horse shit!’
A trickle was beginning along the left edge of the panel and I kept my legs out of the way. The windscreen wipers were now on the move again and we could see patches of cloud whipping past.
The Burdick situation was now very interesting.
Ferris had seen the same report in the New York Times as I had, and Satynovich Zade had probably been on the lookout for it when he’d brought a paper from the box outside the Varig Airlines area at Kennedy.
Yesterday Pat Burdick, daughter of the Defense Secretary, left Washington for the isolated river-village of Lagofondo near the Amazon in Brazil, with a small party of fellow-adventurers and two experienced guides. ‘It’s to be an entomological field study,’ she told reporters before she left, ‘and I guess the bugs out there in the jungle ought to be pretty impressive. It’s also to get me away from the intense political atmosphere here in Washington for a while, because I’ve been finding it very confining and - you know-claustrophobic.’ There was no truth whatsoever, she added, that there was any rift between herself and her family. For security reasons the names of her companions are not presently being revealed.
A flash lit the cockpit again and then the din of the rain on the windscreen stopped abruptly as we ran into clear weather. The pale blue ring of Saint Elmo’s fire vanished from the propellers and the full moon drifted above the skyline.
‘Easy come,’ said Chuck, ‘easy go!’
He got out another cigar and lit up.
‘Was that a bad one?’
They’re all bad, if you wanna worry. Me, I shut my eyes till I’m out the other side.’ He laughed noisily and blew out a cloud of smoke.
The second report in the newspaper had been a syndicated piece on the Defense Secretary’s brief speech at the Quaker House Hotel in Washington on the increasing need for sophisticated armaments. In the last few lines of the report it was stated that ‘Mr. Burdick was seen to be suffering from the strain of his many recent engagements.’
Ferris hadn’t picked this up because he’d been working the clock round. I didn’t know if Zade had noticed it. By itself, it wasn’t significant.
‘I been runnin’ the night-mails a couple of years now, you know that? Start at nine at night, finish around four in the mornin’, maybe five.’
‘You must know Manaus pretty well.’
‘Sure do.’ He cranked his seat up an inch and adjusted the soiled belt. ‘Like I say, that place is goin’ to get eaten up by the jungle one day. Industry’s dying, ‘cause they won’t take the export tax off of electrical goods, an’ what else’ve you got? Bit of rubber, maybe some gold in the mines, animal trapping. Listen-‘ he took the cigar out of his mouth and jabbed it in the air- ‘that place is a thousand miles from the nearest city an’ there’s no roads in or out, y’imagine that? Okay when the rubber boom was on, but now there’s no real money around anymore.’
‘No tourists?’
He jerked his red crew-cut head to look at me. ‘You kiddin’? You know what the Brazilians call this jungle? The Green Hill - I guess you must’ve heard that.’ He pointed with his cigar again, downwards. ‘We run outta gas or blow an engine or what the devil an’ we go down there an’ can’t get up again, that’s it - you know what I mean? The trees’d just close over this crate like we’d never existed.’
He went on for a while and I thought about Burdick.
In Washington Ferris had told me that Robert Finberg was the only man in the United States who knew about Kobra and knew about our counter-operation but we now assumed Burdick himself had also known and was using Finberg as his representative. We also assumed that at this moment Burdick alone knew, and that with half a dozen major agencies including the FBI and the CIA at his disposal he was keeping strict hush.
Ferris had told me nothing beyond that. London may have told him nothing beyond that, or he might know some of me background but felt it wouldn’t concern the executive. Fair enough, but a ferret can think.
Theory: somewhere among the networks of international intelligence an agent had run slap into some highly explosive information - someone like the late Milos Zarkovic -or they’d asked Zarkovic to bring it across to the West. It had been for the eyes of the Bureau only and it had personally concerned the US Secretary of Defense. He could have called in the CIA and he hadn’t: he had asked the Bureau to handle it for him with no one else involved and to handle it with the highest possible discretion.
Facts: I’d discovered a tag on Burdick in Washington. He had used his rank to bring me out of Cambodia. His daughter was on an insect-hunting expedition along the Amazon but not on account of a ‘family rift’. He himself was seen to be suffering the strain of his ‘many recent engagements’.
These facts taken separately were not significant. Put them together and it didn’t seem terribly illogical that Satynovich Zade was now on his way to the Kobra rendezvous somewhere along the Amazon.
Question: how much were they asking of James Burdick?
It wouldn’t be money.
‘Oh holy cow, we got some more shit comin’ at us!’
Chuck adjusted the mixture handles and I saw the flame from the port exhaust change to a bluish pink. Ahead of us the broken stratus deck was beginning to pile up into thunder-heads.
‘How far are we out, Chuck?’
‘Huh? Twenty minutes, I guess. Take thirty, through that stuff.’ A distant streak zig-zagged across the mou
ntainous dark of the clouds. ‘Don’t mind flyin’ through it but I don: like landin’ in it, know what I mean?’
I said I did.
We began going down and I watched the altimeter, already feeling the warmth of the lower air. Manaus was three degree? below the Equator and the humidity was in the eighties at this time of the year and the man in the outfitter’s in Belem had suggested light-weave tropical kit and I’d dumped the New York suit into a rubbish bin together with the rain-cape There’d been time to book out on the same Panair with Zade but we’d have risked blowing the mission and losing the executive because this was the penetration phase and I had to go in very close to the target and the target was Kobra and the Kobra people were now ultra-sensitive about surveillance: their operation was almost certainly centred on the entomological study group along the Amazon and they would be wary of strangers, so I had to jump in ahead of Zade and establish myself as a new image instead of a passenger who’d followed him in from Belem.
‘Jesus, look at this!’
Rain hit the windscreens with a white explosion.
Chuck adjusted the set and I heard Manaus Approach Control come in, clearing him down to two thousand feet.
I sat back and went over the mass of data Ferris had given me to study in Belem: the layout of Manaus, location of consulate, airport, police headquarters, so forth. I’d dumped the set of maps when I’d got the essential topography into my head because I was going to present the image of somebody who knew the place well: somebody in other words who hadn’t followed any of the Kobra cell to Brazil.
I didn’t know if the Pat Burdick party were in Manaus itself or somewhere along the river so I’d gone over the out-lying terrain rather thoroughly. It consisted of two elements the river and the jungle.
Okay 9 Whisky, please turn left heading 200.
Water was trickling again down the side of the windscreen.
Three very bright flashes in quick succession.
‘An’ screw you too, baby!’ Chuck shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and cranked his seat down an inch.
The starboard wing dipped suddenly as I looked past the pilot’s head, and the moon lifted out of sight above us. The altimeter was down to a thousand as we intercepted the final approach course a mile out with the airspeed on 90.
