Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  He moved very close to the prone man and opened his handkerchief to show the teeth lying in its folds. 'That should not have been done. I regret it. I am returning your teeth to you.'

  Ibn ul Attab's boots lashed at him. Bikov took the force of them on his shoulder. The sudden movement dislodged the child, who cried out in fear. Bikov did not think Ibn ul Attab would care again to frighten his child. He rode the blow of the boots. A full minute they stared at each other, prisoner and captor, then Bikov turned and shouted towards the entrance of the cave that he wanted a bar of chocolate and that it should not be brought but thrown to him. He knew that the Vympel men had chocolate with them, that its possession would be important to them, and they would curse him for asking it of them. The chocolate was heaved down the length of the cave. It was a small bar, two hundred grams, but for Bikov its value was greater than if it had been a gold ingot. He unwrapped it so that the chocolate was exposed and the child could see it, then laid it on the stone of the cave floor. For two minutes they watched each other and the man made no move, but the child whimpered and stared at the chocolate.

  Bikov broke the silence. 'Because I respect you as a freedom fighter, Ibn ul Attab, I apologize to you. The war my government wages against the Chechen people and their faith is indefensible. My apology is sincere and from my heart.'

  No other Russian officer that Bikov had ever met would have apologized to Ibn ul Attab. After his teeth had been beaten from his mouth, after he had been kicked with steel-shod boots—if he had still not talked—every other Russian officer would have sent for a length of fuse cord and a detonator, would have tied the cord around Ibn ul Attab's penis, with the detonator, laid out the cord's length and lit it so that he saw the sparking fire come close to the detonator, and they would have shouted their questions. And what would they have done when the detonator had fired and the blood had spattered? They would have done it to the child and made Ibn ul Attab watch the child's terror. And there would be two more martyrs and no answers to the questions. It was not the way of Yuri Bikov. He talked for two hours and was never rewarded with a response, but the chocolate was in front of the child. He spoke of Saudi Arabia and its food, of his daughter whom he missed and who did not write to him, of sunsets over the Black Sea and the dawn light spreading on the Siberian tundra, of the majesty of nature, and the glory of God…and the child's eyes never left the chocolate. He had an inexhaustible reservoir of patience, and it was only the beginning.

  Wages were not paid, the military did not have the fuel to mount exercises, privation in Kaliningrad was widespread, the hospitals were not supplied with sufficient quantities of drugs, the water in the city was not drinkable, but the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti had not gone short. On the flat roof of their headquarters in the city, backing on to the Pregel river, was a mass of aerials and dishes. The listeners in the FSB complex would not have been able to decipher a scrambled signal from Daphne Sullivan, but they would have picked up the high speed and encoded transmission had she made it, and that would have alerted them to the fact that an intelligence operative was loose in the territory. The instructions she had received in Berlin had been explicit—that she was to carry nothing sophisticated on her person.

  A sudden and violent stomach pain crippled her as she left the concert. The courier was sympathetic. Nobody in their right mind would volunteer for Russian medical attention in Kaliningrad, the courier opined. Was the lady well enough to get to Poland or, better, to Germany? Her face apparently creased in pain, and her back bent from the spasms, Daphne Sullivan said she was. She was booked a single cabin on the night sleeper train from the southern station. She carried onto the train, with her a note in the Russian language that would explain to the border authorities why she was breaking away from her tour. When the train rumbled, late at night, into Braniewo she was sufficiently recovered to make a guarded telephone call to Berlin.

  Deep into the night, in the cave, Yuri Bikov kept the torch beam on the chocolate bar.

  The child, Ibn ul Attab's son, peered at it with longing and tears ran down the smooth cheeks. He was not a soldier. He yearned for the sweetness of the chocolate, but could not reach forward for it because his father's body blocked him. Everything Yuri Bikov did was planned ahead. He did not know where the child's mother, Ibn ul Attab's wife was. She might have been in one of the remote farming villages on the level ground below the gorge. Perhaps she had fought her man when he had taken her son to the mountains, perhaps the child had been torn from her grip. He did not think the wife would have been in Saudi Arabia with her family, or left in a safe village in the Yemeni valleys. She would be close, and Ibn ul Attab would be thinking of her.

  The torch beam was failing and the chocolate bar was harder to see; the light was dying on the silver tin foil that wrapped it. Bikov talked in his soft and measured voice—not about the war and not about Islam—of the beauty of the mountains, the majesty of the deer and the wild goats, the bears and the eagles that soared above the gorge. He won no response, but that did not concern him because his greatest virtue was his patience, and in his mind the strategy of his attack was mapped.

  As the light slipped from the torch, Bikov eased his weight forward, picked up the chocolate and broke it into small pieces, then laid it back on the cave's floor exactly where it had been before, within the child's reach.

  'I said, Ibn ul Attab, you are a fighter I respect. I also want to respect you as a father. Whatever the differences between you and me, two men thrown against each other by your God and my government, your son is not a part of that. I ask you to allow him to eat. And it is not right that your son should see you trussed, a chicken waiting for its throat to be slit. Your son should see you free. I don't know his name, but he looks to me a fine boy and proud of you. I request that you give me the chance to remove what is round your wrists—and to let your son eat.'

  He switched off the torch and the darkness cloaked them.

  The luminous dial of his watch told him that half an hour had passed. Then the weight of Ibn ul Attab's body shifted slightly, and he heard the rustle of the tin foil, then a small mouth chewing, and then there was more movement. Bikov knew that the father had rolled from his side to his stomach. He groped forward and crawled closer to the stinking shape of the man he could not see. His hands clawed over Ibn ul Attab's shoulders and reached down to the pit of his spine. The previous evening, this man would have killed him and thought nothing of it. He found the wrists and the damp cord that bound them, and with his fingernails he began to unpick the knots.

  He ran on the beach. The fog of the previous day had lifted in the night.

  At a distance everything seemed the same, unchanged. He knew every stride he made across the dry sand. The buoys rocked on their anchorages, where there were minefields, sunken ships and explosives dumps, the water tower dominated the dunes, and ahead of him was the wrecked fishing-boat. Nothing was different. For two days he had stayed away from the beach because that was what his friends had told him he should do. Now he pounded on the beach towards the wreck. And in the distance, against the wind and the rumble of the sea breaking on the shoreline, was the murmur of vehicles driven slowly on the road in the trees.

  Viktor came to the fishing-boat.

  As he slumped down he saw the neat footprints of a woman's shoe close to the resting place in the sand of the keel. He could see the rubber tread left in the sand made moist under the shelter of the planks. For a moment his eyes were closed and his back was against the coarse wood of the boat's hull. His heart was a drumbeat. He saw them, two orange chalk crosses. He reached up and used the heel of his hand to erase the chalk marks. They had come.

  He took the full three minutes then levered himself up and began to run back. He had been heard.

  At first, as he ran into the wind, he believed himself saved.

  Later, as he became tired and his legs hurt and his lungs ached, and he was nearing the base, the elation and the relief seeped from him. What could they
do? The vehicles were on the road that was hidden in the pines, shadowing him. He still saw the distant figures on the dunes, and the whiff of their cigarette smoke curled over their heads. His legs might as well have been in the teeth of a mantrap. The border fence was guarded, he was followed, the sea stretching to the far horizon was raked by the beams of radar and patrolled by fast ships; he was watched inside the base and outside it. He could not see what his friends could do for him. They had heard his cry, but they had given him no answer. Their fine words echoed in his mind: We'd go to our graves rather than hang you out to dry, Viktor. You're the best we have. It would be shameful for us to abandon you. You're one of us. Words were easy…he knew what would happen to him if his treachery were proven, if his friends could not answer his cry.

  The grey light crept into the cave's entrance. Bikov sat with his legs crossed and his arms around his chest, watching Ibn ul Attab, who held his son tight against his body. The interrogator, the child and the warlord shivered together and their bodies shook in unison. Bikov talked.

  'I don't have a name for him, you know that—I will call him Sayyed. I think you will allow "Sayyed" to grow up to be a man. A child, such as he is, can only promise fulfilment. It is why we have children, yes? I think you will ensure that he has a chance, not to be only a statistic of death but to become a hero in his own right. I can feel your child's breath on me and I know he had his father's love and his father's protection. Am I right? "Sayyed" is not a soldier—that does not make him a lesser child. He could go to the university in Cairo, Damascus or Sana'a, and I think he could become a teacher. Not a warrior like his father, but a teacher of science, or of music, or of the great heritage of Islamic architecture. On all his family, long after this war is finished, "Sayyed" could bring distinction. There are too many soldiers and not enough teachers. It is in your hands, Ibn ul Attab, what future you give to "Sayyed".'

  'He is called Ahmed. My son's name is Ahmed.'

  Bikov heard the thin voice, weak from hunger and thirst, and knew that success was close.

  It was after their second debrief at the Excelsior Hotel. Mowbray had left in the small hours of the morning, before dawn, gone back to his hotel where the others in the delegation stayed. Later, he would have another meeting at the dry dock then return over the border.

  The airliner rolled at increasing speed down the runway at Gdansk on the short-haul flight back to Warsaw.

  'What would they do to him?' Alice had leaned across to Rupert Mowbray and had whispered her question.

  'I think, Alice, that you already know the answer to that.'

  'Already know but need to have it confirmed.'

  'On the chin?'

  'I don't want cosmetics—yes, on the chin.'

  The plane had lifted off and Rupert Mowbray had stared straight ahead at the cockpit door and spoken so softly that she had had to strain to hear him.

  'Colonel Pyotr Popov was fed, alive, into the central-heating furnace in the Lubyanka basement in front of all of his colleagues, and his agony was filmed.'

  'That was a long time ago.'

  'Perhaps, but the mentality will not have changed. Penkovsky was taken out at dawn and shot in the yard of the Butyrki gaol.'

  'Again, Rupert, a long time ago/

  'The men betrayed by Aldrich Ames—that's only yesterday in this game—were tried in secret and executed.'

  'Today—what would they do today?'

  'Today is Robert Hanssen, another American arrested fourteen months ago—is that recent enough? You don't have to be told, Alice.'

  'Tell me.'

  'Named by Hanssen, in camera court, shot in the back of the neck. They're the same men, different uniforms and names, but the history is in their bloodstreams. There's only one penalty, Alice, for a man of such importance. It's a dirty business, but it's what keeps the roof over our heads.'

  'But we'd help him…?'

  'What I said to Ferret, Alice, was "We'd go to our graves rather than hang you out to dry." I meant it, my dear. But from the moment he walked in he placed himself under sentence of death. Why don't you try to doze?'

  She hadn't slept on that flight. The whole length of it, she had fidgeted and fiddled with the new gift of the amber pendant. Her fingers had never been away from it. She had promised herself then that she would wear it always.

  It was wet in London that morning as Alice North laid out the places for the meeting in the fifth-floor conference room. Half a dozen sheets of paper for each of those attending and two sharpened pencils, cups and saucers. She plugged in the percolator, filled a little bowl with sugar cubes and laid a silver spoon on them. Last she moved a chair to the corner, where she would sit, where she would not be noticed.

  She'd read the signal, sent from Braniewo and relayed on by Berlin.

  Clattering his cup down on to his saucer, for emphasis, Locke said, 'We now have a truer picture but that doesn't take us an inch further forward. One cross would have been "surveillance", right? Two crosses is "close surveillance", correct? Codename Ferret is under close surveillance. I'm not a rocket scientist but I can see that means he is beyond reach. Surely it's bring-down-the-curtain time.'

  Never lifting his head, Bertie Ponsford remarked quietly, 'Thank you, Gabriel, most concise. Peter, what would be the position of Covert Ops? How does this run past you?'

  Sighing as if the weight of the world rested on him, Peter Giles launched in: 'Well, we have to make a decision, don't we? Do we recommend exfiltration, with all that such a course of action entails, or don't we? I mean, thank God, ultimately it's not our call, but masters and ministers will expect guidance from us. The difficulty I'm in is that, put simply, we don't do this sort of thing any more—it went out with the Ark. We've not attempted it since the Wall came down. And reading the files that Rupert left us—and they're thin, so thin—I can't find a specific guarantee that was given by us to Ferret. That's important. We're not under a formal debt of honour, or any such nonsense. I can't see what we can do, not if it's "close surveillance"…'

  His fingers running up and down the length of his pencil, Bertie Ponsford turned in his chair. 'Succinct, Peter, and I'm grateful. Geoff, if we were to go for broke and successfully lift out Ferret, what would be our rewards?'

  The officer of Naval Intelligence shrugged. 'Hardly a sack of Christmas presents. I'd say we'd sit down with him for a month, but by the second week we'd be struggling. His value has been in the paperwork he's sent over and most of it is not the material that a man holds in his head. It's been very precise blueprints—submarines' speed, depth, counter-radar, hull specifications and so on. We need detail. Take the pressure hulls' outer coating—what is the mix of glass, ceramics and plastics? Generalizations don't help us. We need the paperwork and then we can develop the necessary radar counter-measures. It's exact work—I can't imagine he'd have it in his head.'

  Laying down his pencil and reaching for the coffee, Bertie Ponsford smiled, then grimaced. 'I'm hearing a profound lack of excitement. You were downbeat at our last session, Bill—has anything changed Hereford's mind?'

  The Special Forces officer shook his head. He wore the same sweater and jeans as before. 'No enthusiasm from our crowd. The guidance I have can't go as far as refusal, but we'd lay trip-wires and difficulties in the way. Bluntly, we could start talking about planning time, recce time, up-to-speed time, we could spin it out, and then we could say, after we've wasted a couple of weeks, there's the good old ocean involved, miles of Baltic coastline, and it's probably better handled by the "Boaters". I wouldn't recommend that you rely on us.'

  The scratch of a pencil on a notepad was behind him. It never entered Ponsford's mind that he should ask Alice North's opinion. 'Well, I don't want anyone to gain the impression that I'm about to wash my hands of Ferret, but I have noted the positions taken by colleagues. My assessment: at the moment the FSB will be engaged rather frantically in collecting what evidence they can, and they will then make it available to a most skilled interrogator. Th
ey like things clear-cut over there, a detailed confession with ribbons on it will be what they seek, and it will be the interrogator's job to get it. Right now, the agent is boxed in by "close surveillance", stressed and close to panic, but were he to make a run for it he would merely play into their hands, give them the evidence that would kill him. We may have a few days to play with, but only a few. I note Hereford's hesitations and their suggestion that a possible, not probable, exfiltration of Ferret would be best tasked to the Special Boat Squadron. I'm going to ask Gabriel to go directly to Poole and sound them out. Then, I hope, we will be in a position to recommend to the DG a future course of action. I have to say, and I hope fervently I am wrong, that I see no light at the end of this particular tunnel. Of course, it's Rupert's baby but he's not here to rock the cradle.'

  The meeting was concluded. Gabriel Locke hurried down to the car pool.

  His voice had found a decisive strength. Bikov fought the tiredness as he told the warlord what he wanted and what would be given in return.

  In the late afternoon, Bikov crawled on his hands and knees to the cave's entrance and asked the Black Berets and the Vympel men what food they could spare for himself, the prisoner and the prisoner's child. A collection was made of dried, frozen lentils, one apple, some rice and what remained of a Meal Ready to Eat. There was so little food between all of them and they gave it grudgingly. If it had not been for Yuri Bikov's reputation, and his authority, they would have given nothing. They could light no fire, they would have been more cold and more soaked at the entrance to the cave than he was in its interior. He had been in the depths of the cave for more than twenty-four hours and they would have heard the murmur of his voice as they had dozed between watches. They knew that Ibn ul Attab's men would be searching for them. When they had given him the food they could spare, he passed to the senior sergeant a small piece of bright metal, rounded to the shape of a screw's head and four millimetres in diameter and said what he wanted done with it. Then, with the food, he disappeared back into the depths of the cave.