Outside the barracks' gates, as the light failed, Gabriel Locke sat in his car, wired in the secure system, and pressed the digits of his mobile phone. Behind the gates and the fences topped with razor wire he had been treated as a piece of junior garbage. They'd had fun with him. A sentry strolled with the arrogance of a Royal Marine towards him. The number rang. The sentry slipped a hand from his rifle stock and rapped on the window. Locke lowered it.
'Excuse me, sir, but this is a place for parking cars, not for sitting in them. If you want to sit in your car, please, sir, go do it someplace else.'
Locke, audibly, told him to go piss himself. The moment of astonishment on the sentry's face was his one small victory from the visit to the Special Boat Squadron's barracks at Poole. He hated this Dorset town and all who sailed in her. But a rifle was a rifle, and a Marine was a Marine, and there were more of them in the guardhouse. He turned on the ignition, put the car into reverse and backed away. He saw the smirk on the sentry's face.
He couldn't raise Bertie Ponsford. He tried Peter Giles, deputy director of Covert Operations, but the assistant said her man was out of the building and she didn't know when, if, he was returning. Was it important? Locke rang Alice North's number.
'Yes?'
'Alice, it's Gabriel…'
'Who?'
'Gabriel Locke.'
'Oh, right. How can I help?'
'I can't get Bertie, and Peter's gone walkabout. I—'
'Mr Ponsford's granddaughter is in the school concert, that's where he is—in Holland Park. Mr Giles is at his club with Mr Dandridge of Personnel.'
'I need to report on my session at SBS.'
The distant voice, a tinny resonance to it from the scrambler, replied, 'Well, you'd better tell me, then, hadn't you?'
'Yes, yes…' Locke had expected that Bertie and Peter would be beside their telephones, waiting for him to call. The scrambler seemed to him to give her voice a mocking tinkle.
'I'm waiting.'
'I suppose it's all right. You'll see they get it? Look, knock this into shape: I wouldn't say my welcome was overwhelming—anyway, the place was like a ghost town. They raked up the squadron's adjutant, a lieutenant and two sergeants. I don't know where the proper people were, swarming about in the Hindu Kush or writing synopses for their Afghan memoirs, I suppose. I told them it was Kaliningrad and they found a chart, then they all started falling about, like I was doing a comic turn. It's the chart for the naval base, the navigational approach to Baltiysk, and the Kaliningradsky Moskoy Kanal. Then they patched up on the computer the military force based on Kaliningrad—how many tanks, how many APCs, how many artillery regiments, how many naval infantry were there, and what airforce squadrons. I was supposed to be quizzing them…fat chance. The lieutenant said, quote, "We always ask three questions. One, where is he? Two, what's he doing? Three, will it work? Three answers. Answer one, he's in the middle of a protected Russian naval base. Answer two, he's mooching about under close surveillance. Answer three, can pigs fly?" A sergeant said, quote, "Fourth question, is he worth it?" I didn't see any point in taking it further. They didn't want to know. Are we up to it—what is basically an act of war? The fat lady's singing, isn't she? I mean, it's over, isn't it? I took on board everything they said, and agreed with it, but they didn't have to be so bloody superior. Is he worth it? That's what it boils down to. We're intelligence people, aren't we, not bloody cowboys? You'll see that Bertie and Peter get that?'
'I'll let them know.'
He cut the call. In his mirror, he saw a ministry policeman advancing on him reaching into a breast pocket for a notebook. Locke thought he was about to be booked for parking on the double yellow line. He identified the rainwater puddle nearest the policeman, swerved into it as he passed the man and saw that he'd splattered the uniformed legs. What annoyed him most was that the SBS men had thought the idiotic proposal to go starting wars was his idea. That annoyed Gabriel Locke badly.
Bikov led them out of the cave. The deal was made, freedom for freedom—the freedom of a warlord and his son for the freedom of a Brigadier and his escort.
There had been no symbolic handshake. Between two such men as Bikov and Ibn ul Attab the gesture was not necessary.
At the cave's entrance he offered his arm for the other man to use as a crutch to lift himself upright. The blood had drained from Ibn ul Attab's legs and feet, such had been the tightness of the thongs on his ankles, and the warlord staggered when he first stood. Then his weight went on to the low shoulder of his son and that was sufficient a prop to steady him. Bikov asked for the rifle to be given him. There would have been savagery in the eyes behind the ski-masks that the Black Berets and the Vympel men wore. He could not see them in the darkness but one of the men gathered spittle in his mouth and spat it noisily towards the warlord's boots. The barrel of the weapon brushed his sleeve and Bikov took it. He did not have to make a speech about the nakedness of a warrior without his weapon: it was implicit. Bikov heard Ibn ul Attab check the weapon's magazine, then cock the rifle, driving a bullet into the breech. And they were gone.
Bikov remembered the days he had fished as a child in the reservoir on the edge of the city of Gorno-Altaysk when he and his friends had caught large carp by the reservoir's dam, on worm baits. If they had not needed to take a carp home for a family's meal, they would release it. For a moment they would see the fish heading for the depths, then lose sight of it.
He told them they would stay at the cave for the night then make their descent in the morning.
His voice was hoarse, little more than a murmur. 'You can judge me, and it is your right to do so. All I can ask of you is that you suspend your final judgement until the end of this business. When it is over you will be entitled to make whatever judgement of me you wish.'
He crawled back into the cave. He was so tired, so cold, and the hunger lit a fire in his stomach. Only the child had eaten. He found his handkerchief but the teeth were not in it. Then he curled in a corner, and slept. He slept without a dream.
There was not another interrogator in the ranks of the military counterintelligence officers of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti who could have achieved what he had. His quiet snoring filled the cave.
Like an owl in the night, watching and waiting, Rupert Mowbray hovered for four full minutes at the outer gate of Vauxhall Bridge Cross. It was never right to be early. Precisely at the moment he was due in the building, as Parliament's clock chimed the late hour, he presented himself at the security check.
'Hello, Mr Mowbray, funny old time to come visiting. How are you keeping, sir?'
'Not too bad, Clarence, mustn't complain. And you're looking well, very ship-shape. The Director General's expecting me.'
... Chapter Five
Q. What is the birthplace of Max Colpet, the Jewish composer, who wrote 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone' for Marlene Dietrich?
A. Kaliningrad.
Mowbray used the status gained in a lifetime with the Service shamelessly. 'If you abandon the agent, Codename Ferret, then you might as well pin up a scribbled message on the front door that says, "Don't risk your lives for us, we're not concerned what happens to you." You could broadcast on the BBC's World Service that every agent we run is left bare-arsed and on his own…'
He was formidable. Rupert Mowbray stood at his full height while the others sat and flinched, and his voice carried the resonance of certainty. The meeting was in an anteroom off the ground-floor atrium. His audience was the Director General, Bertie Ponsford, Peter Giles, and the youngster Locke, and by the door on a hard chair sat Alice North. He had not been in the building at Vauxhall Bridge since his retirement party. It was exceptional for a former employee to be allowed access past the front-door security checks, but for him the rules had been violated and the room made available. It was because of the respect that had been awarded the old warrior that the Director General had cancelled a dinner engagement after taking Mowbray's call, and Ponsford and Giles had been summon
ed.
'I ask, does the life of a spy matter? We use him, bleed him, keep him in place even when the alarm bells are ringing, and—of course—we make a few idle promises about going down to the line to save him if the going's rough, but are we prepared to be bold? We should be. Not for emotion, but for the reputation of our Service.'
Mowbray centred his argument on the Director General. Every word, dramatic pause and glowering glance was directed at the DG. He had never had time for the man who had been his immediate junior during the Bonn posting twenty years before. The Director General had ambition, though, had mastered the network of the administrative departments of the Service, and had never stayed long enough in any of them for his shortcomings to be exposed. He had a knighthood, the ear of the Prime Minister, travelled with the head of government on all foreign visits, and he was weak. Mowbray despised him, despised him enough to make an argument for the glory of the Service. He reckoned he had fifteen minutes to make his pitch.
'We go in. We take him out of Kaliningrad, and we let the message be filtered around the world that the British Service looks out for those who risk their lives on its behalf. It would be a powerful message. It would be heard in Asia and on the sub-continent, in the Middle East and throughout Europe. It would be a magnet for the disaffected who are the very men on whom we rely. I urge you to send such a message.'
None of the men around the table met his eye. They fiddled with their handkerchiefs, locked their fingers and cracked them, studied the ceiling, the far walls and the shining table's surface. Ponsford he thought to be a journeyman who would wait on his Director General's opinion and would then endorse it. Giles had the guts of a neutered family cat, and the imagination to go with such a spoiled beast. But Mowbray was now armed with the transcripts of two meetings. He had rifled through the second meeting's typescript, given him to glance at by Alice as they had loitered in the corridor before being called in. He needed an additional target. The Director General would have read the same transcripts. He broke his walk, which had carried him back and forth in front of the Director General, and now stayed, poised as a cobra would be, behind the young man. A smile of contempt played at his mouth and he took his hands from behind his spine, rested them easily on the back of Locke's chair.
'I accept that we should not be governed by raw emotion, but loyalty should dictate our actions. A powerful word, maybe fashioned for the lexicons of old men, but loyalty gives us the right to stand with dignity, to walk with honour. It would be a sad day, not just for me but for all of us, if dignity and honour were discarded for a misplaced creed of pragmatism. Show me a pragmatist and I will show you a coward.'
He saw the back of Locke's neck reddening. It was a ruthless demolition and one over which he had no qualms. He had met the rookie once, at his retirement party, after he had been delivered the set of decanter and glasses, and he had tried to sober himself sufficiently so that he could talk for some brief minutes of the value of Ferret, but he had seen the young man's blatant lack of interest as he had muttered through the tradecraft of the dead drops. He mocked Locke, then resumed his pacing walk.
'If you tell me that the Service I left with such pride, after a lifetime of endeavour, is now run by cowards then I will be saddened—I don't believe it. The history of the Service demands better rewards. If the nerves are in your veins then leave the business to those who are not frightened—me, and a team I will put together and head. I will deliver.'
He spoke with confidence and certainty. He had no plan for exfiltrating an agent from Kaliningrad. It was what the old Service would have done, in the sixties and seventies. As clearly as if it were yesterday, he could remember the little moments of excitement that had winnowed through the corridors at Broadway, then at Century House, as rumour of triumphs spread in the corridors, canteens and bars. And he could remember also the frisson of helpless despair that had moved in the same corridors, canteens, bars, when the news had reached them that the life of the agent, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, Codename Hero, had been ended by a bullet in a prison yard. A secretary who had worked on that handling team had wept openly over her typewriter, and his debriefers had gone to the pub at lunchtime and not returned in the afternoon. The triumphs he could recall had never matched the sadness of the day the big man, Penkovsky, had been reported dead. Mowbray had never forgotten that mood of shame. Nothing had been done to save the agent, Codename Hero. He focused again on the Director General.
'Not that it matters, not to the pragmatists, but Ferret is as brave a man as I know of. For four years, day after day, he has hazarded his life, looked execution in the face. For what? For his belief in us as men of our word? It is difficult to imagine the terrifying burden that rests on his shoulders…but that's not important, only incidental. What is important is that we show the world that we look after our people, we reach out to protect them.'
Easing up his cuff, Mowbray glimpsed the face of his watch. Never go on too long, he had learned. Never bore an audience. He spoke with a new quietness so that his audience leaned forward, all except Locke, to hear him.
'So, is it to be the day of the faint hearts? Impossible. To lift out Ferret would be, in the old vernacular, a "piece of cake". If we do nothing, allow events to run their course and wait for the echo of that bullet or sit on hands until it is reported that a young man has been thrown out of a helicopter or has "died in a road accident", then all of you, gentlemen, might as well draw your pensions and eke out your lives in retirement. Would the Service have a future—other than feeding from the crumbs dropped off the Americans' table? I doubt it. I expect you'd like me to withdraw?'
With a grand gesture, as if he could do no more, he spun on his heel, went to the door and slipped from the room.
Twelve minutes later, Mowbray was called back in.
The Director General said, 'The loyalty bit did it, Rupert.'
They had come down off the mountains above the gorge and reached the command post. The other passengers were already there, as Bikov had known they would be, and the helicopter pilot was anxious to be off and up because the snow was settling on the rotors and fuselage of his machine. They had flown low, on instruments, above the rooftops and skimmed the power cables hung between pylons; the war's devastation had been laid out beneath them.
Yuri Bikov was not a man to milk a moment of triumph. When they landed at Grozny military airfield he stayed in his canvas seat with the restraining harness still buckled over his shoulders and across his chest. He could see the welcoming party, headed by the general, but he kept back. The brigadier was down the steps first, needing to be helped because he had received four days of beatings, followed by his three escorts who were young conscripts and who had the fear still implanted in their faces along with the scars and abrasions from their own torture. They had been a full load on the helicopter. Next out were the six Black Berets, who would have achieved near hero status among their colleagues because they had tracked, trapped and held Ibn ul Attab and his son, then the four Vympel men, who could reasonably expect high decorations for the skill with which they had crossed the bandits' country on foot.
He watched through the porthole window. The brigadier was held and kissed by the general, then passed to the care of medical orderlies. The hands of the conscripts, whose faces had the pallor of the young who have been close to death, were shaken with vigour. They had the wet of tears in their eyes. Bikov watched. He saw others of the Black Beret unit, ground-crew technicians and troops gather close to the survivors who had been on the journey to hell and who had, against all the wisdom of experience, returned from it. There was a short impromptu speech from the general, then guttering applause from the men who had pressed close to be part of the celebration.
He was still frozen when he lowered himself gingerly down the rickety steps from the fuselage hatch and his clothes clung, still soaked, to his body. He staggered the few steps away from the dying swing of the rotors as the engine was shut down. The brigadier turned away from the
fussing orderlies, lurched to Bikov and clung to him, but the interrogator eased him away politely. He arched his back, stretched himself, and the pains and aches in his limbs were made more acute. The general came to him and saluted flamboyantly, but Bikov barely had the strength to raise his arm in response. The Vympel men had half dragged and half carried him down the long descent from the high ground to the farmhouse where the helicopter waited. He looked around him. Standing as a beacon in the first spread of dawn, bright among the uniformly-softened shapes of the camouflage-painted bunkers and aircraft was an executive jet. It had a shining silver underbelly, its superstructure was a brilliant white and its wings and tail carried the markings of the airforce. Its navigation lights, green and red, flickered in the early light. It was the transport of an officer of stature. The general took his arm. 'You have my gratitude…'
'Thank you. I did what I thought necessary.'
'But it came, Bikov, at a price.'
'I was asked to bring him home, your colleague, and I did that.'
'You made a deal with Ibn ul Attab, Bikov. You gave him dignity.'
Gerald Seymour Page 11
