Prince Hunter

by Garrett Russell

  He had spent the whole of Saturday sparring with Kreuzer, slapping him down verbally time after time. He could only be thankful that he had Sullivan there to keep O’Hara bluffed, or they would have all been at each other’s throats by evening. They were like caged animals, only more dangerous because Kreuzer could think and O’Hara could hate with the passion of a fanatic.

  He tried to push the thoughts of those thugs and his wife and daughter to the back of his mind and make a mental picture instead of his target.

  Sub-Lieutenant HRH Prince Andrew, RN.

  Hawker had once met his older brother, the Prince of Wales, when Charles was serving in the Royal Navy. Hawker could remember being impressed by his sense of fairness and pragmatism, a trait he hoped was common in the family because he was certain that it would only be through royal intervention that he could ever be allowed back into Britain after all this was over.

  He rolled over and closed his eyes for what felt like the hundredth time that night, when he heard the faint click of the door being surreptitiously opened. He froze by instinct, his ears straining for more information.

  There was the faint swishing sound of the rubber strip on the bottom of the door brushing over the linoleum floor. Hawker edged one eye open without moving his head from where it was buried into the pillow and saw in the corner of his vision the change of light as the door was fully opened, bringing the light in from the corridor. A shadow fell in through the doorway and the room darkened again as the door was snicked carefully closed. Hawker tensed and commenced the series of long deep breaths the karate fighter uses to lead up to his strike. He heard the sound of bare feet sticking and unsticking to the cold lino floor as whoever it was moved slowly across the room and satisfied himself that there was only one pair of feet approaching. Then he heard the soft rustle of fabric against skin.

  Reaching into his shirt for a weapon?

  O’Hara?

  Hawker had seen him toying with a knife that afternoon, a fisherman’s knife that was sharp as a scalpel. O’Hara played with it easily, showing the skill of a long time expert, spinning it dangerously in his hands and throwing it with frightening accuracy into a target he scrawled on a scrap of timber out in their small garden courtyard.

  The intruder moved closer and Hawker saw, in the blur that was the only view he could allow himself without moving, a robe dropping to the floor near his bed. He flexed his hands ready to strike.

  The unknown figure was now standing over him and paused for what seemed an eternity to Hawker. Then he felt a hand stroke his hair with a gentleness that set the small hairs at the nape of his neck on end in a new and frightful alarm.

  Grivas?

  He felt the bed clothes slowly pulled away. A naked thigh brushed against his arm as the sheet slid down to reveal his own vulnerable nakedness.

  Now!

  Hawker sprang up and back with a force that made the bed creak violently. He spun around, flattening his right hand into a blade, grabbing with his left for the intruder’s throat. And he stopped in mid action, his body still poised, his brain struggling to come to grips with the new information it now received from his nerve endings. His left arm had struck the unmistakable softness of a female breast.

  ‘No!’ Linda Kelly called in a small strangled voice. She teetered over the bed, naked and pitifully vulnerable at the end of Hawker’s arm, before she fell weeping on his bed.

  ‘I … I thought you were asleep,’ she sobbed. ‘I wanted … I need the warmth of a man to prove that I … that I’m not …’

  She buried her head against his chest, clutching like a small girl at his shoulders. He could feel little warm rivers of her tears running down to his stomach and he put his arms out to soothe her.

  ‘Oh my God, Paul, I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to say. What to think. I came. I didn’t like it, but I came with a woman on me. With her tongue in me. I’m so ashamed.’

  ‘Sssh,’ he said gently. ‘You have nothing to be ashamed of. She was skilled enough to get a nun excited. If you and I were in a proper official force, I’d be proudly recommending you for a medal of valour for what you’ve done.’

  ‘Help me. Please help me,’ she cried and slid down onto the bed.

  He soothed her, mumbling meaningless phrases to fill the gaps of silence between her sobs until her body had stopped heaving and her breathing became shallow and regular. He thought she had fallen asleep. He pulled the sheet and blanket up over her, covering her to the shoulder. He was pondering on his own prospects for sleep when she suddenly reached up and pulled his head down by the back of the neck close to hers. She kissed him, first on the cheek, then on the mouth with passion bursting like water through flood gates.

  Her lips bruised against his. Her tongue probed moist and urgent. He felt himself rising with hard, strident lust.

  Within seconds she was all around him with her legs, the bedclothes kicked quickly aside, sliding their bodies together, holding him tight to her so he could feel her warm soft moistness rub hard against his thigh. He kissed her back, hard, his hands moving unconsciously to fondle her buttocks and breasts. Her own hand came down and with a squeeze of delight guided him into her.

  They pumped and writhed wildly, locked in an animal embrace that blocked out all conscious thought. They squeezed themselves so close together, their bellies were stuck with warm smears of sweat, as salty as Linda’s tears that still tingled on Paul’s tongue.

  The joy, when it came, was a white explosion that wiped away all the frustration, the anger, the fear and the aggression that had been bottled up inside him.

  ‘Anne! Anne!’ he called out as he felt the throb of her tightness around him and heard the rattle of release in her throat.

  And they both sell fast asleep locked one in the other, physically and emotionally spent.

  At almost exactly the same time Linda Kelly and Paul Hawker fell asleep, a clumsy looking dark shape shot past the stars directly overhead the Falklands Islands and the British taskforce fleet. It is doubtful if anyone on the islands or aboard the ships would have been aware of its passing. In the first place, the dense dark cloud cover of late autumn in the South Atlantic had completely blocked out the sky. No one in that part of the world had seen the stars or the sun for days.

  In the second place, this particular shape was a new Soviet satellite. It had been rocketed into orbit through the shimmering spring haze of Southern Siberia less than 24 hours earlier.

  It was the eighth spy satellite to be put in orbit over the South Atlantic by the USSR since the 31st of March. The first had been Cosmos 1345, a satellite which picks up radar transmissions from ships at sea. The second, Cosmos 1347, eavesdrops on radio communications in the area under its orbit.

  The Russians, with a vital interest in the food bowl of Argentina, were obviously keen to follow the course of the looming battle. But the British commanders at sea, with years of NATO experience under their belts, were well familiar with this type of spy satellite and the procedures to foil it. All they had to do was maintain radio and radar silence for the times the satellites were overhead.

  Knowing this from their own experience with NATO, the Soviets had launched Cosmos 1350 and 1353. These are high resolution photographic satellites, producing images so fine that individual aircraft can be defined on the flight decks of their carriers. They are impossible for a ship at sea to hide from and at the same time Hawker was first caught by Grivas’ men they were taking pinpoint accurate photographs of the British fleet. The satellite would lumber on through the vastness of space, its internal mechanisms winding the film on as it continued to photograph other routine surveillance targets in the Pacific Ocean and Asia, until its orbit brought it back across the place where it began in the wild wastes of the Soviet Union. There, with clockwork regularity, it would mechanically drop the cassettes of film to be retrieved by technicians on standby in the drop zone. Crisp, deadly accurate photo-transmitted prints would be on the desk of the military atta
ché in the Buenos Aires embassy within hours of being shot.

  It was a brilliant intelligence gathering system, matched only by the 16 ton Big Bird the Americans had orbiting over the same critical area and dropping its own photographic cargo down to the seas off Hawaii. But then both were beaten by their only enemy. The weather. The British fleet was lost to the watching world under a blanket of total cloud.

  The new Cosmos 1354, now making its second pass over the conflict area, was Russia’s answer to that. Its nuclear-powered radar scanners could pierce the gloom and fix the fleet as effectively as a rabbit caught in the hunter’s spotlight. It beamed its electronic pictures back to the motherland, from where they were in turn beamed back, as a series of cryptic codes, towards the South Atlantic and into the cypher room of the USSR embassy less than five kilometres away from the Naval School of Engineering.

  That was where Olga Tsenyenko sat, alone, at 0800 local time this Sunday morning, waiting for the next shift clerk to relieve her.

  She had done some juggling with the rosters as soon as she had got back from her fateful meeting with Grivas, still trembling with rage and fear. But not before she had burned the photographs in the privacy of her tiny flat within the embassy compound, flushing the ashes down the toilet, and with no doubt in her mind that Grivas would leak a second set to her superiors in an instant if she failed to meet his demands.

  There had been no difficulty in finding someone to swap rosters with to give her the midnight “graveyard” shift, eight hours alone to assemble the information. She thought of giving Grivas the wrong data, but he had anticipated that. He said he would know within 24 hours if she had lied. She had no idea of why he wanted the position of just one ship in the fleet, and not the flagship at that, but she knew her career, her entire future depended on it.

  The clerk for the new shift arrived at 0805. He was a podgy, pale faced man in his 20s, a boy Olga had never liked much.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said testily as he shuffled into the room, rubbing a trace of toast crumbs from his wispy moustache.

  ‘Sorry, comrade,’ he said without looking the least bit apologetic.

  They ran through the routine of the day, signed and countersigned the duty sheet, and Olga was free to leave the room by 0815. She gathered up her handbag and walked out without even a goodbye nod to the young man now adjusting the chair to his height.

  ‘One moment please, comrade.’ Another voice echoed with authority in the hall outside the cypher room. Olga turned from the direction she had been walking and came face to face with Captain Grigoriy Kasatkin.

  ‘Good morning, Captain,’ she smiled. ‘It is unusual to see you around the offices so early on a Sunday.’

  ‘Security is a 24 hour a day matter. Can I see your bag please?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A spot check. You are familiar with the procedure. It is part of our standing orders. Your bag, please.’

  Olga passed him her handbag, which he opened roughly and rifled through with the efficiency of a man who has made a career of prying into other people’s affairs. Olga knew the procedure, sure enough. She also knew the rumour that Kasatkin, nominally in charge of embassy office security, was their resident KGB officer. That was why she never carried anything in her bag which would raise the faintest trace of suspicion.

  Kasatkin finished with the bag and thrust it brusquely back at her. He seemed dissatisfied.

  ‘Put your hands up against the wall,’ he growled.

  ‘What on earth for?’ Olga was startled. But she knew exactly what it was for.

  ‘I must search your clothing.’

  ‘Like hell you do,’ she growled back, mustering as much indignation as she could to cover her terror. ‘This is not part of any standing orders I have seen. On whose authority is it?’

  ‘Mine.’

  He pushed her against the wall and held her there with one huge meaty hand while he patted over her body with the other. He felt all her pockets, paid particular attention to her bra and briefs, and found nothing. He still looked dissatisfied but dismissed her with a grunt and strode off down the hallway.

  Olga remained propped against the wall for a moment until her heart rate dropped back to normal. She said a silent prayer of thanks to the panicky instinct which had prompted her to take a small plastic bag into the cypher room that morning. A sheet of paper with a cluster of dots and numbers showing the precise disposition of the British taskforce and its direction of heading at 0530 Universal Time Code was folded and rolled into a tight little wad, packed in the plastic and now securely nestled inside her vagina.

  Something was wrong, she was sure. She had better leave the tiny package where it was until she met Grivas. She had better also make sure that no one followed her away from the embassy to that appointment, or she knew she would be dead.

  This time Olga arrived at the Palermo restaurant first. She left the embassy well ahead of time and took a bus to the city centre. She wandered among the Sunday crowds, turning sharply into arcades and alleys and stopping abruptly to catch anyone coming quickly around the corner behind her. Eventually satisfied, she worked her way to Plaza San Martin and the Retiro subway station. She waited until a train packed with families and racegoers was about to leave, jumped aboard the last carriage, just scraping through as the pneumatic doors sighed closed at her back, and replied with her own sigh of relief. She was sure no one could be following her after the station.

  Nonetheless, to add a further assurance of certainty, she took the far distant exit at the Palermo underground station and lost herself in the crowds of people strolling through the huge, rambling park.

  Feeling a silly pride in her elusiveness, she walked into the restaurant with one last surreptitious glance over her shoulder and asked for the table Grivas had booked. She had never been trained for this sort of thing, she congratulated herself. But if she had been trained, she would never have failed to notice the black Fiat 130 with darkened windows parked in the street less than half a block away from the restaurant.

  Olga went first to the door marked Senõras and withdrew the package. It was the first time in her life she could remember being happy to have a vagina, a thought that made her laugh out loud as she disposed of the plastic bag.

  By the time Grivas arrived Olga was reasonably well composed. The exhilaration she felt at her wild goose chase through Buenos Aires offset the fear she had felt before.

  Grivas found the booth she was sitting in easily. He knew it because he had booked it specifically yesterday. He had not yet fully sat down when she pushed the wad of paper across the table at him. He unfolded it, studied it, and she saw his eyebrows arch.

  ‘It is what you wanted?’ she asked.

  ‘That depends. How current is this data?’

  ‘It was gathered early this morning local time.’

  ‘Then it is what I need.’ He pulled a small packet from his coat pocket. He pushed it across the table and watched Olga as she opened it.

  She smiled coolly. Inside was a handful of celluloid strips, perforated along both edges. She held them up to the light. They were 35mm negatives of her and Linda in bed, their positions and expressions rendered bizarre by the weird reversal of the film. This was what she wanted. But if she had known anything of photography, she would have recognised these as dupe negatives, copies made off the originals.

  ‘So, we are even again,’ she said.

  ‘It appears that way,’ replied Grivas. ‘Now I will buy you morning coffee to mark the occasion.’

  ‘You will not, thank you.’ She put the packet of negatives in her bag and stood up.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Grivas. He was already opening the menu and did not bother to look up again as she turned and walked away to the door.

  She was free. She felt so light-hearted with relief as she sniffed the fresh air of the street that she took no notice of the thickset man browsing in a shop window next to the restaurant. But she felt his sudden grip like a vi
ce on her arm as she turned to walk towards the park.

  ‘You are going the wrong way, comrade,’ he said in Russian.

  Olga’s blood turned to ice. She was too stunned to struggle as he turned her around and walked her casually towards the black Fiat.

  ‘Good morning again, Comrade Tsenyenko,’ Captain Kasatkin opened the rear door from inside the car.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ she said, her mind racing now she had got past the first shock.

  ‘We are taking you home.’

  ‘To the embassy?’

  ‘To the motherland. You will be less of a security risk in Siberia.’

  The man still gripping her arm pushed her into the car beside Kasatkin, slammed the door behind her and took his place in the front seat beside the driver.

  ‘You have nothing to accuse me of,’ she protested. ‘You proved with your own hands at the embassy this morning that I pose no security risk.’ She tried to sound challenging, but her voice was weakening and cracking.

  ‘You accused yourself with your own subterfuge,’ Kasatkin looked bored, as if all this was beneath his dignity. ‘An intimate medical examination at the embassy will provide all the necessary evidence if you insist in your pretence. But it is not needed in the end.

  ‘We know you have just met with Commander Raoul Grivas of the Argentine Navy. You have provided him with certain satellite intelligence regarding the British taskforce. You probably did it because he threatened to expose your homosexual activities, which is a joke on you because I have known about you and your girlfriends for several months now. Keeping you under particular surveillance has been a pet little project of mine this year.’

  ‘But you did not follow me here today.’ Olga stood, trembling, on the only ground she was sure of.

  ‘I did not need to bother,’ Kasatkin said dismissively. ‘Your Commander Grivas may be a good naval officer but in espionage he is an amateur. Meeting at the same place twice in a row is the most basic of blunders. And making a booking!’ He chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

  ‘What will you do about him?’ Olga asked because she wanted to hear that they would hunt Grivas down. At least she could have that much revenge. But she was destined to be disappointed.