Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'We don't have the time to piss about. If it's land, what do we need?' Billy asked.

  'Get off the road, go cross-country, cut the fence,' Wickso said. 'Then me and Ham either side of the fence in the treeline.'

  'Lofty's the driver, got the class act,' Billy said. 'So God Almighty's got to get us a car on the far side, and a driver—we can't, not on the way in. Lofty drives on the way out.'

  'What does "close surveillance" mean?' Lofty asked.

  'Means you got to drive like there's a bayonet, a sharp one, adjacent to your arse, when we've done the pickup.'

  'What do we call him?' Ham spoke.

  'He's Ferret, so we call him Ferret.'

  'He's got to be at the pickup, that's Ferret's problem.' Wickso said.

  Locke noticed that the one called Lofty had tilted his head back as if that might help him to understand a difficulty. His eyes were narrowed and gazed at the ceiling light and a frown creased his forehead. To Locke, Lofty was the slowest of the four and the one who had been hardest to recruit. The idea of any man wanting, volunteering, to spend his days at Tyne Cot was beyond his comprehension; it was an awful place, seriously awful. The conversation died, and Billy was folding away the maps of Kaliningrad, coastal and land. The singer belted on.

  Lofty said, all the time shaking his head, 'What bugs me—why us?'

  Ham grinned, without charity. 'You stupid, Lofty? More stupid than usual?'

  'Why not the Regiment or the Squadron?'

  Wickso said, 'Because, Lofty, we don't exist…'

  Billy said, 'Because, old cock, we're deniable.'

  Locke slipped out into the corridor, and none of them seemed to notice his going. He walked past Alice North's door. He was outside the loop, and he'd bloody well change that.

  He saw the cluster of men gathered at the wharf's edge.

  Viktor walked aimlessly. As the admiral's eyes and ears in the base it was known that he often prowled late at night to have the feel of the fleet's headquarters, to be able to report on moods and conditions. He was going towards berth number fifty-eight of basin number one in the naval harbour. It was past two in the morning. The floodlights shone down on the cranes above the berth and on the superstructures of the destroyers.

  All the fleet destroyers were in basin number one, and the frigates of the Krivak class, and would stay there through the winter because there was no fuel for them to go to sea. In basin number two were the submarines, one of the Kilo class, five of the Tango class and one of the Foxtrot class. It was something that concerned him. Since the first meeting in Gdansk at the Excelsior Hotel he had started to alter in his mind Russian class designations for warships to those of NATO. Sometimes a submarine was Kilo class and sometimes it was Vashavyanka class—and it was the little thing that could kill him. Shadows spilled between the light pools thrown down by the arc-lights. He walked because each night, now, it was harder to sleep alone in the silence of his room. If he walked he did not toss in his bed and kick against the cold around him. Sometimes he heard the following feet of the men who trailed him. He did not know how it would end, or when or where. He was close to basin number one, and to berth fifty-eight where the destroyer, empty and dark, was moored, and he heard the cry.

  It came like the shriek of a gull. At the cry the cluster of men seemed to dance in a frenzy on a one-metre square of concrete.

  He stopped, was dragged from his dulled thoughts of survival. The nearest of the arc-lights did not reach the group, but he could see the silhouette shapes of the men. His mind cleared and he gasped. The feet did not dance, they kicked. The cluster moved. It edged, as if that was the discipline of the music controlling the dance, towards the quayside and the black gap between the concrete and the hull of the destroyer moored there. There was a low moan, and he heard the sounds of the boots or shoes of the men as they thudded into what might have been a grain sack. In the middle was a shape and it moved without the energy of hope, slow and lethargic. The cluster of men, five or six, closed round it, kicked it towards the quayside's edge. He forgot himself, his own pain. Five or six men propelled another man, by kicking, towards the darkness under the destroyer's hull. He started to run.

  Viktor tried to shout but his voice died in his throat.

  He heard the last scream, and the dulled splash. He ran as if his own life were at stake. There was laughter as the cluster peered down into the darkness. Now they heard him. As one, they spun. Viktor ran under a light pool. They would have seen an officer in best dress for dining in the senior officers' mess sprinting towards them. They scattered. Two or three went right, towards berth number fifty eight, and two or three went left and round the corner of the basin, towards berth number sixty. He saw the flashes on their arms that marked them as senior NCOs, but he did not see their faces, and he had no more thought of them. The edge of the quay was empty. He heard the thud of their feet. Viktor tore at the buttons, and when his tunic flapped away from his body he shook it off him. He was at the quay, level with the forward pod of missile launchers, and the boat above him was darkened. He yelled into the night, but there was no answer. A thickened black ink was below him and his eyes could not see into it. The answer to his yell was a faint thrashed movement under him.

  Viktor went in.

  He jumped, feet first, down into the void. For a moment he was clear, free falling ten metres, then the water met him. He went under. The sensation was of the numbing cold. He groped. His fingers caught loose material, then an arm, but he lost them. The oil was in his nose and the water in his mouth. He surfaced. Viktor trod water, reached in front and behind and to each side, and his hands did not find the man. He spluttered then breathed hard, trapped the air in his lungs and jackknifed his body so that he dived. He went deep. His eyes could not help him. The air dribbled from his lungs, the pain broke in his chest. It was at the end, the final gasps of air in him, that his outstretched fingers caught a plunging leg in the total darkness. He hung on to it, then kicked upwards. There was a moment when death seemed inevitable, then he broke the surface and he still held the leg. The man he gripped no longer struggled. On his back, holding the man's body on his stomach and chest, Viktor paddled the dozen strokes towards the quay.

  A torch shone down and blinded his eyes where the oil made fires of agony.

  He wondered, another drowning man's moment, if he were about to be shot. A boat hook stabbed at his shoulder and tore his neck, but he was able to hold it with one hand while he still clung to the man he had gone down into the sea to save. His eyes cleared but the pain came sharper and the ache in his lungs. Instead of the boat hook, hands now held him. He could see the face, young and pale, of Igor Vasiliev, the conscript boy. Rescuers were on the iron ladder flush against the quay's wall and they held him vice-like, and more hands reached to take the weight of the boy from him.

  He saw love and gratitude in the eyes of the conscript.

  They were pulled, together and coupled, up the ladder. Alone, Viktor would not have had the strength to climb the ten metres of the ladder with the weight of Igor Vasiliev. They were at the top and Viktor doubled on his knees and coughed, retched, spat out the water and the oil in it, and men were over the conscript and hammered at his chest until he coughed up what had lain in his lungs. Viktor knelt beside him. He shouted his name and rank to the men who had lifted him up the ladder and he ordered them back. There was a fury in his voice that none dare disobey. They made a circle around him. Far in the distance was the wail of an approaching ambulance. He crouched and bent his head so that he spoke into the conscript's ear.

  'I have to know, who did this to you?'

  No answer, only the fear in the eyes of Igor Vasiliev.

  'Don't fuck with me. Who did this to you?' He strained to hear the whined response.

  'My sergeant.'

  'And who? Your sergeant and who?'

  'Corporals.'

  'Why did your sergeant and the corporals try to kill you, drown you?'

  'I said I was going t
o report them.'

  'To whom were you going to report your sergeant and corporals?'

  'To you, Captain Archenko.'

  He held Vasiliev's hand. 'Why were you going to report them?'

  'Because they sold…' The boy's breath came in gasps.

  'What? What did they sell?'

  'With Major Piatkin, they sold from the armoury.'

  Viktor soothed him. 'All right, they stole weapons from the armoury for Major Piatkin to sell on. I hear you. What weapons?'

  'Rifles, mortars, ammunition and grenades—and all of the NSVs.'

  'Tell me.'

  It was the supreme effort of Igor Vasiliev. He tried to sit up. The ambulance was close. He clutched at Viktor's hand. 'All of the NSV heavy machine-guns. The one I fire with, and all the others. I could not shoot today, it was gone. The sergeant said it was sold. I found him tonight, I told him I was going to report to you, unless my machine-gun was returned. They were going to put me into the water. They said that because I was going into the water—and would not be able to report to you—they would tell me. They had loaded the weapons on to lorries at the direction of Major Piatkin. The weapons were for a man they called Chelbia. They all get a share from the sale, from Chelbia. It was my machine-gun, and they had sold it. They called him Boris Chelbia—they said he was more important than Captain Archenko, and even more important than Admiral Falkovsky. They sold my machine-gun.'

  Viktor stood. The water dripped from him. He waved the stretcher team forward.

  When the ambulance had gone he walked back to his quarters. His feet squelched in the sea-water. He accepted neither help nor a blanket nor a lift in a vehicle, merely picked up his discarded jacket. A blinding anger consumed him. There was little enough of the night left, and in the morning he would act. He would not count the cost of it—he was doomed. What was the importance of the cost? He wondered where Alice was, where she slept, whether she thought of him and what she wore at her neck.

  He walked past the dormitory blocks of the conscripts, and the fleet commander's headquarters, and across the parade area and past the armoury from which all of the NSV heavy machine-guns had been taken for sale. He said Alice's name quietly and no one was there to hear him.

  ... Chapter Seven

  Q. Of what Russian city did a European Union report state, 'Organized crime has a pervasive negative effect on the business and investment climate'?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  The team moved, but not quickly. Its speed was dictated by the number of nautical miles covered each hour by the coastal cargo ship, the Princess Rose. She cleared the Kiel canal, emerged from the lock gates separating it from the Baltic, and gathered what power she could muster for the initial journey between the German mainland and the Danish islands. She made good progress away from the canal's mouth and there was a south-westerly behind her that helped push her along.

  When the industrial chimneys of Kiel were behind them they were some 279 nautical miles from their destination. If the engine did not play tricks with them they would be in the channel approaching that destination within twenty-four hours. The mate was on the bridge. The master had faith in the Croatian, though Timohir Zaklan was twenty-one years younger than himself. The master had more faith in his engineer, Johannes Richter, far down below in the sweat-making engine room. He fed his dog, Feliks, on the cabin floor. When the bowl was licked clean, the master called on the internal telephone down to the engine room and requested the presence of the engineer, in five minutes, on the bridge.

  The master was Andreas Yaxis, fifty-two years old; he had been at sea for thirty-six of them. He had found time, on shore leave, to marry, but the union with Maria had not been blessed with children. She lived near to the home port from which he had first sailed as a teenage boy, Korinthos. In her letters and when he rang her from a faraway port, she didn't seem to miss him as he missed her. Only the dog seemed to pine when he was off the ship and it was left behind for a few hours. He was away from his wife for months at a time, and now he wanted an end to it. He wanted money in the bank and a grove of olive trees, and another of lemon trees, and occasional work skippering the inter-island ferries when a regular master was sick or on leave. He yearned to feel the warmth of the sun on his walnut tanned face as he sat on a lounger on a villa's terrace. He nearly had the money in the bank, in an interest-bearing deposit account, to fulfil his dream but he could not quite afford to make the break. In the safe was, perhaps, the difference between a dream and reality. Andreas Yaxis was a loner, a man who did not seek out friends, but those who did business with him—owners, agents and officers from the building in which Rupert Mowbray had worked would all have said that the taciturn Greek was a man of his word. For money, for the chance to fulfil his dream, he would take the risks that were asked of him. He allowed no moralities to interfere with his quest for cash. In his day he had ferried narcotics out of Palermo and cigarettes from Brindisi and had brought a host of refugees from Istanbul to Venezia. He also carried 'materials' for men such as Rupert Mowbray. He did not own a conscience, so the account at his investment bank was almost filled. Time was running short. The next year the Princess Rose would need to pass a rigorous test of seaworthiness, the Special Survey for Classification. If she failed she was dead and set for the breakers, and her owners would not find another command for him.

  He took the brown envelope from his safe. It held ten thousand pounds in fifty- and twenty-pound notes. He counted out two thousand five hundred pounds, put that sum back into the safe, spat on the gum of the envelope and resealed it on the rest of the money.

  They were waiting for him on the bridge.

  He had a grating voice, as if it were rarely used and then only on a matter of importance. 'You, Johannes, are paid a monkey's wage by our owners. You, Tihomir, are treated worse. I am an old man who is not treated with the respect a lifetime at sea deserves. Occasionally a chance comes to make good our owners' parsimony. For a British agency we are carrying materials to Gdansk for offloading before we take on our fertilizer cargo and sail for Riga. When we leave Gdansk another man, perhaps two, will be on board. They will be described as representatives of the owners, and it may be necessary, off the coast of Kaliningrad and in Russian territorial waters, for the engine temporarily to fail. Such matters come with rewards.'

  When the Princess Rose trafficked in narcotics, cigarettes or people, there were always similar rewards, but there had been none recently. Andreas Yaxis made the big gesture and ripped open the sealed envelope. He laid the bundle of banknotes on the ledge in front of the bridge window. He counted it into three piles, note for note, so that each had an equal share. The master saw their faces glow as the piles of banknotes grew.

  'We are equal in the eyes of God, and in each other's eyes. I don't think what is asked of us is dangerous. We will be well offshore, if the engine problem is required of us, and safe. This is half what is offered us, the rest we receive in Riga when we offload the fertilizer.'

  Tihomir Zaklan put his money into the breast pocket of his jacket, and the oil-grimed hands of Johannes Richter slid his into the hip pocket of his engineer's overalls. Andreas Yaxis asked his mate to send the radio signal from the Princess Rose, call sign 9HAJ6, to the port of Gdansk that would confirm their arrival in twenty-four hours, and to request the services of a pilot. He went below.

  It was about the past, and the dignity of the past, and about the self esteem that he nurtured for himself. As a good meal could settle his stomach, so the view of the Glienicker bridge settled the mind of Rupert Mowbray. It spanned the narrow point of the Wannsee lakes and carried the main road from old western Berlin to Potsdam. It had two traffic lanes, two cycle lanes and a pavement for pedestrians on either side. Built on two sunken concrete sets of supports, the gently arched steel girders that took its weight were painted a pallid green.

  He had slept well because he was, at last, back on familiar territory in the Charlottenberg pension where they knew his name and treated him as a
guest of importance, one whose return was welcomed. He had showered, shaved, had eaten a good breakfast of fresh baked rolls, ham and fruit, and then he had set out from the Zoo station, taken the train to Wannsee, and then the bus to the bridge. At the bridge's head he lingered by the gardens of the hunting lodge, the Glienicker Schloss. The bridge was a part of his history: it was a small symbol that had fuelled his determination to see Viktor Archenko, his man, successfully exfiltrated and not left to die.

  Already, though it was still early, the boys were out with their fishing-rods on the banks beside the lake. He barely noticed them. He stared at the bridge and the hump in the middle of the traffic lanes. The highest point in the hump had been, for half a century, the line dividing East from West, a crossing point between the American zone and Russian-controlled territory for the clandestine business of intelligence officers. He had not been at the Glienicker bridge in 1962, his first year with the Service, when the pilot, Gary Powers, had walked towards the hump in the centre and had passed without a glance the spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel. Nor had he been there when the dissident Anatol Scharansky had gone past Karl and Hana Koecher and into the care of their respective officers; he had been in South Africa. Other occasions, not documented and left unreported, had brought Rupert Mowbray to the bridge, at the invitation of Agency colleagues. The Americans liked to do it, for a favoured few Britons, as if it were corporate hospitality at a golf tournament—a good view from a crouched grandstand behind the bushes of the Glienicker Schloss park, then a good breakfast in a restaurant. He had never tired of watching small figures come at dawn towards the hump and walk at the same rehearsed speed as the man or woman released from the opposite end. He had never seen these early morning shadowed figures exchange a word or a grimace as they passed, each to their own version of freedom. There had been a crossing point, a footbridge, in the British sector where he had been more often but that place, to Rupert Mowbray, had never had the same spine-tingling emotion as the Glienicker bridge. The code of loyalty was built into the fabric of the bridge, loyalty for an agent who had been a good servant.