Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'The boy has a natural talent,' the captain, second rank, had said. 'See that it is encouraged.'

  After the officer had walked to his jeep and been driven away, the NCO had allowed him to fire again, another belt of ten shots. In those few minutes the wind had dropped, and he needed to allow for the reduction in its strength. He had fired, and the watchers had reported six hits out of ten shots.

  That spring morning Igor Vasiliev had insisted that he should carry the heavy machine-gun back to the lorry. The body of the weapon was 25 kilos, plus 9.2 kilos for the barrel, the tripod was 16 kilos, and the ammunition was 7.7 kilos. As he had struggled to lift 57.9 kilos, the full weight of the assembled weapon and its ammunition, on to the lorry's tail, he had asked one panted question of the senior NCO: 'Who was that officer?'

  'The chief of staff to the fleet admiral,' the NCO had answered sourly. 'Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko.'

  From that day on, Igor Vasiliev always fired the heavy machine gun on the range. He had shot in the summer for his platoon in the inter-brigade championships, and had won, and next year—the last of his conscripted service—it was expected that he would shoot in the inter-divisional championships for a silver cup awarded by the general of Naval Infantry. And when Captain Archenko needed a driver to take him to military headquarters in Kaliningrad city, it was Igor Vasiliev who was sometimes assigned, and they talked of the science of target shooting.

  After twenty-one wasted years, his life had started that April day on the firing range. Everything that made him proud, and the purpose of his life, was due to that day's intervention by Captain Archenko. The time spent with him and the knowledge gained from it provided the keenest pleasure he knew. And the heavy machine gun was his.

  Doubling away from the officer, hemmed in by the ranks of the platoon, and with the weight of the heavy machine-gun across his shoulders, Igor Vasiliev wondered if Captain Archenko had a head cold, a bad one…perhaps even an attack of the influenza virus. He had not seen him, before, so pale and so distracted.

  Every building, with one exception, in the naval base had been destroyed in 1945. Because it had offered the final escape chance for the tens of thousands of German civilians and military, the bombing by the Soviet airforce, and the artillery barrage, had been merciless and effective.

  The one building that had survived had been the two-centuries old castle fortress built by Gustav Adolph von Schweden. Viktor walked there now. The ramparts were faced with heavy stone and topped by uncut grass, and they had withstood the rain of high explosive. It was where his grandmother might have come for final shelter. She had not found a place on the boats making the last evacuations. The town that surrounded the castle, and was flanked by the canal and the dockyards, had held out for a full two weeks after the surrender of the city of Kaliningrad, after the last boat had gone. His grandmother would have been the luckier if she had found a place on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff because then her fate would have been fast and she would have drowned with seven thousand others when the torpedo struck, and luckier also if she had been on the general Steuben or the Goya when eleven thousand more souls had gone, struggling against death, into the Baltic when the submarines attacked. His grandmother might have been here, cowering, when the resistance had finally collapsed and the Red Army had probed over the bridge that crossed the moat and into the castle. Her death had been slow, humiliating, filled with shame…and that was the prospect beckoning to him.

  If he turned away from the sea, where patterns of buoys marked the approach channel to the canal and more buoys and lights gave warning of the wrecks, the extremities of old minefields and the probable location of long-ago dumped explosives, if he turned away from the limitless, white-capped sheet of water, his view would be over the canal, the shooting range and the lagoon. Viktor did not turn, did not look behind him. Had he done so, on this crisp afternoon with good visibility, he would have seen the wheeling gulls above the lagoon, and his eyeline would have drifted towards its far shore and to the needlepoint spire of the Holy Cross at Braniewo. By now the courier would be there, searching and failing to find the reason for his journey in the staking toilets beside the street market.

  Viktor Archenko did not know how the suspicion had settled on him. Had he made the mistake or had it been made in London, or on the Polish side of the border fence? He remembered what his friends had said to him: 'You must be constantly on your guard. It is difficult for us to determine what is dangerous to you and what is not.' At another meeting, his friends had said, 'God has protected you this far, but there is a limit to the chances you can take. Be careful, because God does not protect fools.' However hard he scratched in his mind he could not think of a conversation in which he had betrayed himself. At the third meeting, his friends had said, 'We want you to realize that the most basic consideration we have for you is humanitarian, irrespective of how important you are as an information source.' At each meeting it had been stressed to him that he should exercise the utmost care and not try to send out too much too quickly. He was, his friends always said, an asset for the long-term. Fine words, but not for a man who could not run.

  The castle, with its five angled bastions projecting out into the moat, had been repaired from the devastation of the bombing, not lovingly and in the way the Poles had rebuilt Malbork Castle, but crudely sufficient to make the interior a home for naval cadets. There were prefabricated huts in the courtyard and flat-roofed brick blocks, but he could see the old archways and the narrow windows that Gustav Adolph von Schweden had designed, and it was in one of those that his grandmother might have sheltered when the enemy came.

  The story of his grandmother, her life and death, had been one of the two reasons that had driven him towards betrayal. On the rampart of the castle, he thought that he walked with his grandmother. She gave him strength.

  He did not look back to Braniewo's skyline, where the courier would have been, would have searched, would have left.

  With a brisk stride he walked out of the castle and back in the direction of his office. He saw Piatkin near to the Sailors' Club, and walked by him as if the political officer did not exist. They were on opposite sides of the street, and neither seemed to notice the other. But on that day, Piatkin, the zampolit, was the most important person in Viktor Archenko's life.

  Every waking hour of Vladdy Piatkin's life was taken now by concern at the movements of Captain, second rank, Archenko. It ranked high enough for him to have used his mobile early that morning to cancel the visit to the base, through a back entrance, of the import-export dealer, Boris Chelbia. Chelbia imported new Mercedes cars, exported heroin from Turkestan and weapons from Kaliningrad. Through his contacts across the oblast, Piatkin could offer the full protection of the counterintelligence spider's web that was the FSB, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, and in return he was paid, cash, five thousand American dollars a month. The weapons came out of the armoury, a few at a time, and the paperwork was doctored to account for the missing automatic rifles. Only a matter of the gravest importance would have led Piatkin to cancel a visit from the prime organized crime racketeer in the city.

  And this was a matter of the gravest importance.

  A little thing had started it, a trifle.

  Trying to light a cigarette, a month back, on the naval harbour quay, failing and using the last match, then turning to the officer next to him, and being given a pretty, decorated book of matches with a hotel's name on them, lighting his cigarette at the second attempt, seeing the hotel's name and the city, passing them back to the officer who was responsible for fleet-munitions storage. Asking, with a smile, how the officer had obtained the matches. Being told, 'From Archenko—I think he stayed there when he was last in Poland, the visit to the shipyard, the dry-dock contract. Archenko gave them to me.'

  Being suspicious because it was his job, knowing that Archenko and the delegation had been booked rooms in the Mercure Hotel, not the Excelsior, which was on the other side of the old town district
of Gdansk, and wondering. His cousin was married to the FSB officer stationed in the consulate in Gdansk but came over the border and into Kaliningrad every two weeks to report, and it was natural that his cousin's husband should be given the spare room in Piatkin's apartment. The last visit had been twelve days earlier. Over beer and sliced peaches from the fridge, Piatkin had asked, 'The visits of the fleet delegation to Gdansk, the matter of the dry dock's availability, I am correct, they stayed at the Mercure Hotel?' That had been confirmed. Piatkin had then asked, 'Did the delegation visit the Excelsior Hotel on ul. Szafarnia?' They had not. 'Could any of the delegation have gone to the Excelsior Hotel for a meal, a drink or a meeting?' None of the four-man delegation, of two naval officers and two civilians from the defence ministry, had visited the hotel. His cousin's husband had escorted the delegation from early morning until late evening, he could vouch that the hotel had not been visited, and Piatkin was told that the prices charged at the Excelsior Hotel put it beyond the reach of the delegation's per diem expenses. He had asked, 'Who uses that hotel?' Foreigners—Germans, Swedes, Americans. A worm had crawled into Piatkin's mind, and after his cousin's husband had gone back to Gdansk the next morning, he had spent the whole day drafting a report for his seniors. He had agonized over it because of the extreme sensitivity of his naming a captain, second rank, who enjoyed the patronage and protection of the fleet commander.

  Four days later, eight days ago, the signal had come back from the Lubyanka in Moscow that discreet surveillance should be mounted on Viktor Archenko, chief of staff to Admiral Falkovsky. The next day, a week back, with full authorization for his journey to Malbork Castle, Archenko had driven towards the border but had unaccountably turned back fifteen kilometres short of the checkpoint. And that day the same team in two different cars but using the command vehicle had reported Archenko's second abort. Piatkin could not know where the worm's tracks would lead, and it was inconceivable that an officer of such seniority should be under suspicion.

  The response from Headquarters to his report on that morning's abort came as a moment of great relief to Piatkin. It was now out of his hands, a matter for Moscow. By the Sailors' Club, as he had passed Archenko, he could not bring himself to shout a warm greeting to him, but he had noticed what seemed severe strain on Archenko's features. It was now for Moscow to take it further.

  Viktor passed the towering statue of Lenin, fashioned in grey stone. There were few enough of them left, but in the naval base in Kaliningrad oblast, one had survived. The great man was sombre and his eyes, gouged forward in the granite stone, seemed to peer at Viktor and strip him of the lie he lived. His friends were far from him. He went up the steps to the fleet headquarters building. In the hallway the sentries saluted him and the clerks snapped to stand behind their desks as he passed. His friends were beyond reach. He did not know how to counter the suspicion arraigned against him, or who would be thrown against him to turn suspicion into proof.

  He was a man of little stature, but his reputation went before him. His shoulders were slight, his body was lightweight, his dark hair was tousled into untidy curls, and his walk was without the loose, flowing stride of an athlete. The smoothness of his cheeks under a two-day stubble made him seem too young for the rank displayed by the faded cloth insignia on his shoulders. It was his eyes that upheld his reputation. They were slate grey and the light seemed to burn keenly from them. They had a peace about them that came only from his supreme confidence in his ability: they were those of a hawk, a predator.

  He had many homes, but none was important because he had laid down no roots. His upbringing had been in the city of GornoAltaysk, capital of the Altay region far to the south, his postings had been to Moscow, Novosibirsk and Kursk, where he had left the family he never saw, never wrote to and never heard from. There was a desk in Moscow, in the Lubyanka, that was nominally his, and a one-roomed apartment four streets away where two suitcases of clothes lay under the bed, but home now was the principal barracks in Grozny, some 1450 kilometres to the south-east of his few possessions.

  He had flown in from Moscow the day before, had been briefed through the night, and now the helicopter awaited him. He ambled across the tarmac, a general beside him and four men laden with weapons behind. The engine of the MI-8 transport helicopter whined towards full power and the rotors made a sweet, clear-cut circle above it. He walked easily and there was a calm about him, but the general's face was puckered with anxiety and the four men, whose eyes shone through the slits in their face masks, betrayed a hint of fear in their gait.

  He wore heavy boots of brown leather, not military, and the laces were only loosely tied. His thick hiking socks were around the ankles of his heavy jeans, and protecting his chest from the weather was a grey T-shirt, a maroon wool jersey, a blue fleece coat and the military tunic. At his waist was a belt from which hung a holster and an automatic pistol and in the small of his back, on the belt, a personal first-aid kit.

  The general fussed beside him as the engine whine grew. 'You'll do what you can.'

  'Of course I will.' The voice was soft, almost gentle.

  'He's one of my oldest colleagues, valued.'

  'They're all equally important, to someone.'

  The general persisted, raising his voice against the engine. 'We were in Afghanistan together, two tours—Jalalabad and Herat. We were in the last brigade out. It's the third time we've been here, this shit-hole.'

  He paused, a little frown cut his brow, then he reached up to his shoulders and peeled off his colonel's rank insignia and gave them to the general. A fast grin opened his face. 'I doubt they'll help me.'

  'That bastard,' the general spat. 'Take his balls off.'

  'I'll do what I think necessary.'

  It was complicated. It would be a business of delicacy and danger. The general's colleague was a brigadier in mechanized infantry and had been captured with three escorts, the rest dead, near the Argun gorge. The bastard was Ibn ul Attab, the warlord who held the eastern sector of the gorge. In the follow-up search for the brigadier, by good fortune, a six-man patrol of the special forces Black Berets had taken Attab and his son and had them trussed in a cave high over the gorge, but the location where the brigadier and his escort were held was not known, and the weather had changed. A blanket of cloud had settled on the forested rock faces, and the helicopters were grounded. If the brigadier was to be saved, and his escorts, then the warlord must tell where he was, in which cleft of rocks, in which fissure. Yuri Bikov, thirty-eight years old, no longer wearing his colonel's badges, was the interrogator with the reputation.

  'We depend on you,' the general said hoarsely.

  He shrugged, laid his hand lightly on the general's arm, then turned towards the helicopter's hatch. From a low-altitude landing strip, they would go forward in armoured vehicles, before trekking towards the location beacon of the Black Beret patrol, then. There were conscripts and grizzled ground crew all around him. He saw it in their faces: he was their icon, they had faith in him because his reputation as an interrogator went ahead of him. His briefings had told him that the Black Berets had already beaten Ibn ul Attab half senseless and that he had said nothing. Time was now critical if the lives of the brigadier and his escorts were to be preserved.

  He climbed up to the hatch and one of the air crew helped him heave through.

  Bikov settled into a canvas cot seat against the cockpit bulkhead, and when his four men were in with him, machine-gunners took their places at the hatches and armed the weapons. As they lifted off, and he looked around him, he saw the bloodstains on the cabin's floor. There was a piece of white bone near his feet. On the interior of the fuselage were plastic adhesive strips that covered incoming bullet strikes. His reputation said that he alone among the counterintelligence interrogators of the FSB was, perhaps, capable of extracting the information required to save a brigadier and his escort.

  Soon, inside the rattling hulk of the helicopter, he dozed. He had no time for the porthole views of ar
tillery-ravaged villages, or for the mountains ahead where the clouds shrouded the slopes. He did not open his eyes as the machine-gunners loosed off a few rounds to check the efficiency of their weapons. If the responsibility given him was a burden he showed no sign of it as his head lolled forward, his chin settled on his chest.

  Viktor Archenko had never been to Chechnya and had never heard of Colonel Yuri Bikov.

  'What is there that it would be impolite to talk of? What is their disaster area now?' Viktor was settled in the back of the car, the admiral beside him.

  'Cheeky boy…' The admiral growled his trademark low chuckle. 'You gossip too much.'

  Viktor was the admiral's man. He was his eyes and ears. He was expected to prise confidences from fellow trusted men of the other fleets, the army and the airforce. What he learned went not only to the dead drop at Malbork Castle for collection by the courier, but also was whispered to the Baltic Fleet commander. Knowledge was power. If Admiral Alexei Falkovsky knew the detail of another commander's problems, or what further funds and resources had been made available to others, then he had the native cunning to turn the knowledge to his own advantage. If the Northern Fleet was short of fuel for operational sailing then Falkovsky would feed into the high echelons of the ministry that he, at Kaliningrad, had managed to conserve sufficient diesel, and his star would shine. He thrived on the gossip that Viktor brought him.

  'And how was your day among the ruins, Viko?'

  'I didn't go,' Viktor said calmly.

  A peremptory question. 'Didn't go? Missed out?'

  'Actually I didn't go. Idiotic of me, I was on my way and then I remembered that Stanislaw—that is, the curator of works—was going to be on leave. I turned back.'

  He looked sharply at his admiral in the car's interior gloom. He had learned over many years that this bluff, powerful, boisterous man had the innate cunning of a she-cat. But the admiral had his eyes barely open and his head was back against the seat. The questions had not been barbed probes but had been fashioned out of politeness. Viktor told himself that here, with his protector beside him, he was safe. If this physically huge and mentally muscled man had known that suspicion now rested on his protégé he would not have carried him in his car. They still searched for evidence, and without evidence they would not dare to approach a man of the authority of the commander of the Baltic Fleet and make their denunciation. But he did not know how much time he had, how fast the sand would run through the funnelled shape of the glass.