The Princess Rose ducked, climbed, and the waves' swell battered them. None of them cursed it.
Wickso added to the piles around the sleeping dog. He had little to offer, but none of them cared to gaze at what he placed on their pile: an olive green package holding a first field dressing, what they called a 'sanitary towel', with the Cyrillic stamped print of the Serbian army, enough for one wound, but Wickso kept four for himself. A morphine syringe for each of them, but five more for Wickso. A single bootlace for each pile, but three more for Wickso, for tourniquets, and an indelible marker pen, which Wickso also retained. The others didn't look at the medical gear Wickso gave them; there was so little of it, and the creed of the Squadron had always been that first aid came second to carrying ammunition.
Billy went out into the night to do a final check on the dinghy that had been brought deflated and trussed to the Princess Rose off the Devon coast, the outboard engine and the gas bottles. The others would pack the bergens and the inflatable bags. They would be gone in an hour.
He clawed his way along the deck, above the holds loaded with fertilizer sacks, towards the stowed dinghy. By now they would be over the line on the chart that divided Polish waters from Russian sea space. Where they drifted, rising and falling, with the spray climbing to the deck, was marked on the chart as formerly mined, and they would be marked on the scanners of Kaliningrad radar. Above him, from the mast, behind the bridge and before the funnel, two red lights shone. They would be visible through the whole 360 degrees, and gave notice that the Princess Rose was NUC. They were Not Under Command, their engine had failed, they drifted, and he heard the master shouting into the radio that if he did not quickly regain power he would need to anchor. The white wave crests were bloodied where the red lights fell on them. It was the best of weather, enough to confuse the shore's radar. In the 'poppling' water, a dinghy with a low profile would not be seen.
Gabriel Locke slept, his arm around a girl and a youth's arm around him.
Alice looked down on him. The first of the fast-food kiosks in the tunnel were opening, the shutters coming down. The waft of new bread and fresh pastries filled the tunnel and overwhelmed the stench. She would not have known him if she had not recognized the blanket from the hotel. The tunnel was filling with the early rail passengers, and the vagrants, for whom it was a night home, were scattering.
He woke when Alice put her toe against his shin and prodded him.
He blinked at her. He loosed the girl and shook off the youth. The sides of the girl's scalp were shaved. The youth's hair was overgrown and tangled but his beard had only a flimsy strength, and a ring was set in his lower lip. Alice held out her hand and Locke took it. As soon as she felt the clasp of his fist, she jerked him up. He rubbed his eyes.
'I was waiting upstairs, where you were supposed to be,' Alice said. 'I waited ten minutes. I thought you might have come down here for a coffee, or a roll. What the hell are you doing here?'
Locke's eyes flickered nervously. He arched and stretched.
'Well,' Alice said, 'if you can bear to wrench yourself away from your friends, perhaps we can get on with our lives.'
She walked off, fast, towards the far tunnel exit. It was the sort of place, with its stink of shit and urine, that she hated. He must have run to catch her. Her arm was taken. She turned and saw his anger. 'Yes?' She could not break the hold he had on her coat sleeve.
'Don't play the bloody madam with me. Actually, they're rather nice people. I was alone, they talked with me—have you ever bloody talked with me? They wanted to share with me, their lives and their kindness…'
'Let's hope the needle was clean,' she said evenly.
He was shrill. 'It's charity. They found me. I was in crisis, they got me through the night. That I came through it is thanks to their charity. From you, Miss Fucking Organized Perfection, I get no charity.'
'Why do you need charity, Gabriel?' she asked, with mock gentleness.
'Why do I need charity?'
'That's what I asked, Gabriel.'
'I need charity because of you…because…'
On the steps up from the tunnel, he loosed her arm. They spilled out into the smeared dawn light. Train passengers buffeted them. She walked ahead of him. Across the station's forecourt the headlights of the old Mercedes flashed them. The wind was up. Leaves and rubbish were blown low and hard across the cobbles and bounced on I her shins. She realized he had left the blanket for his charity workers. He was changed. Locke was different, altered, sculpted in a new way, and he had told her that she was responsible, and Alice did not know what she had done.
She left the back to him, took the front passenger seat.
'Right, Jerry, let's go. Sorry about the little delay. Let's hit the Mierzeja Wislana.'
The dry sand, lifted by the wind, pricked against Roman's clothes and found the folds, the tears in the trousers and the long-used jacket of the fisherman. It stung his eyes, although he had his hand raised to shield them.
The Mierzeja Wislana was his home, his life, his place. The sea, the beach, the pinewoods, and the lagoon behind were his birthplace and would be where he died. He swore a fisherman's oath, which he would not have dared to utter within the hearing of the Father who led the community of Piaski from the new village church. Time was running out and the autumn rushed to engulf them. Very few fishing days remained, and without them his income dried up; the winter's months were long and the strain of providing for his wife and five children, without money, was a burden.
He had risen at five, from habit, and had pretended to himself that he did not hear the wind singing in the electricity cables. His two bedroom home overlooked the lagoon and was not exposed to the worst of the wind. He had left his wife and children asleep, and had walked through the forest, across the dunes and down on to the beach.
He swore because the weather that morning made fishing impossible. And Roman swore again because all of his fellow fishermen in Piaski village had read the singing cables better than him and had stayed in their beds. The yellow- and white-painted boats were high on the sand, above the tideline, and would remain there that day. His eldest girl, the Father said, was talented at the piano and would benefit from lessons—which cost money. His eldest son, the Father told him, had a brain for science and mathematics and should go abroad to university, perhaps to Canada—which cost more money. It was impossible for a fisherman to earn the money necessary to pay for piano lessons and to send a student to Canada.
The sand stung him. He squatted down in the lee of his own boat, slipped a first cigarette of the day from the packet and cupped his hands to light it. He dragged on it, and a small spasm of pain fired in his lungs. The sea thundered on the sand. When there was a big storm, small pieces of rough amber were left on the beach and he, his wife and the children would walk in a line to collect them, as would the families of other fishermen, and what they had collected in a plastic bag was sold to a shopkeeper in Krynica Morska, which was west along the peninsula, but the shopkeeper paid only a few zloty, not enough.
Far out in the darkness and to the east, beyond the dawn's throw, Roman saw two faint lights, red, one above the other. He knew all the laws of the sea. Beyond the surge on the shore, the breaking waves and the white caps, a ship drifted and signalled that it was Not Under Control. It was in Russian waters, close to the old minefield that was said to have been cleared but was not trusted by the Russian fishermen who came out from Kaliningrad. If the growing storm did not soon drop then his boat and the other boats would be hauled higher on the beach for the winter. He would earn no money for five months or more. He laughed.
It amused him that the Russians would panic if a ship, Not Under Command, edged closer to their military shore where the missiles were and their fleet. He laughed until his throat hurt.
In a black 7-series BMW, Boris Chelbia was driven along the dual carriageway and into Gdansk.
At the Russian border posts that straddled the road between Mamonovo and Braniewo,
his driver had powered past the waiting queues of vehicles to the front. Word had gone ahead. The inspection of documents was cursory: he was saluted and waved through. Boris Chelbia was a man of the highest importance, the mission entrusted him was of extreme delicacy; he was not Piatkin's man: Piatkin was his.
In the world of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, as it had been in the former times of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, informers ruled. Piatkin might have regarded Chelbia as his informer, and would have deluded himself: the reality was that the racketeer, who now called himself a businessman in import and export, sucked information from the FSB major, just as in the old days he had squeezed it from KGB officers. What he learned he paid for in cash and by carrying out small missions, for which there was great gratitude. The payments to Piatkin, and Piatkin's superiors, guaranteed that the opportunities of rivals were checked and that his own trade flourished. Out of Kaliningrad's docks and through its frontier posts, Chelbia exported narcotics from Afghanistan, refugees from Iraq and Iran, and weapons from the Russian Federation—the same docks and posts were the import point for whisky from Scotland, luxury cars from Germany, newly printed dollar bills from the United States of America and computer software from anywhere. He preferred to pay in cash, from the roll of banknotes that bulged his hip pocket, but occasionally a small task was given him which was in lieu of cash.
The matter entrusted to him now was so delicate, of such sensitivity, that counterintelligence officers of the FSB had not travelled from the Warsaw embassy, the Moscow headquarters or the Kaliningrad outstation…and it would cost them a high price. The cost to Piatkin, and Piatkin's people, would be heavy. He had never been involved in the movement of radioactive waste, weapons-grade enriched uranium or plutonium, and he understood there were many buyers. With the increasing gratitude of the internal security agency, that trade would come.
Boris Chelbia had his villa in Kaliningrad and an apartment block on the Cote d'Azur in France and a four-star 300-bed hotel on the Black Sea. He had investment accounts in the City of London, in Nassau and on the Caymans. Cash oozed from every orifice of his body, but he still went after it, with a ruthless drive, because money was as addictive to him as the refined heroin from Afghanistan that he shipped through the docks and over the frontier. Money was his Christ. A naval officer had come to his villa with a grenade in his hand and with the pin pulled. He had taken back a single heavy machine-gun, and ammunition. On the open market, Boris Chelbia would have received a hundred US dollars for the machine-gun, and the ammunition would have rounded its value up to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But the whole shipment of arms from the base, going out buried beneath a timber cargo from the docks the next week, would fetch him two hundred and ten thousand dollars from the Lebanese. He had not understood the naval officer, had thought him a crazy man, but he had been cheated of a hundred and twenty-five dollars and that stung him. Piatkin had said that if he fulfilled his mission, he would earn the FSB's gratitude and would hurt the naval officer. No man cheated Boris Chelbia lightly…yet he had liked the naval officer's boldness, had admired him.
The car wound its way through the old streets of Gdansk. He had allies, associates, affiliates in the city, but this was work for himself. With his jet-black dyed hair and his black Italian suit, Chelbia came like death's angel over the bridge crossing the Motlawa river.
The car stopped within easy walking distance of the hotel, near to the quayside and close to the marina.
As he stepped from the car, Chelbia saw a young woman bend at a bollard at the edge of the quay. Her hands held a small but bright bunch of flowers. Two children clung to her legs. He glanced at the sight, then turned away. It was of no interest to him. He walked to the hotel.
He was smartly dressed. He was the sort of customer the hotel craved. How could he be helped? Chelbia spoke fluent German to the young woman at reception. He had been a guest at the Excelsior a month before—and she was too polite to admit she did not remember him. The night porter had done a service for him, and had not been paid for it; regretfully he would not be in the city at the time the night porter came back on duty. It was irregular, of course, but could he be given the man's address so that payment and thanks could be made in person?
He was so grateful and his smile was so sweet. Boris Chelbia went to wake the man who had worked all night.
Without glancing at him, they walked past Viktor's desk.
Piatkin, the stoat, led and two men followed. One was middle aged with his hair carefully combed, wearing a good civilian suit, carrying a briefcase of polished leather. The second man was younger, shabby to the point of scruffiness; stubble carpeted his chin and cheeks and he wore old jeans and a sweater on which strands had snagged and been pulled. There was long-dried mud on his walking-boots.
They passed Viktor's desk, and the communications clerk's, those on either side of the liaison officers and of the headquarters staff's specialists, and went to the final desk that guarded the fleet commander's door.
The second man, the unshaven one, the one who looked as though he had slept in his clothes, had a strong face. He was Viktor's age, not more. He had a hawk's eyes and a jutting, beaked nose, and he walked after Piatkin with supreme confidence. Viktor, involuntarily, shivered. Piatkin spoke, out of earshot, to the fleet commander's guardian—a severe woman, grey hair gathered in a meticulous bun, without humour and without emotion. She had been with the admiral for years before Viktor had become a chosen man. Viktor could not read her face, which was expressionless as she put down her pencil and, for a moment, tidied her desk. Then she was on her feet and knocked quietly at the door she protected. She went in and closed it after her.
He had shivered because he knew.
She came out and stood aside for the two men to go into the admiral's inner office. The door closed on them, and Piatkin stood, arms folded, in front of it.
Eleven o'clock in the morning. Always at eleven o'clock a trolley was pushed into the outer office, and the pretty young girl with the ponytail of blonde hair came with tea, coffee, hot chocolate and biscuits. Mugs and plastic plates for the outer office, bone china for the fleet commander. He had primed himself for his day, but was suffering. Work, the minutiae of it, and the glances at his watch were not filling the time he needed to pass until the late afternoon when he would make the journey to the rendezvous. Endlessly, that morning and through the last night, he had covered that journey.
Viktor scraped back his chair as the pretty girl put hot chocolate—the drink he had every day—in front of him. He advanced on Piatkin. 'Excuse me, Major. I had not been informed that you had made an appointment to see the fleet commander. I—'
'Captain Archenko. I have no appointment to meet Admiral Falkovsky.'
'You should have told me.' Viktor attempted to stifle the choke in his throat. 'I always sit in on meetings attended by the fleet commander.' Piatkin smirked. Viktor was a half-metre from him. They were chest to chest, chin to chin. It was Piatkin's grin, that of a stoat, that destroyed him. All eyes were on him. In such a moment, power was transferred. All of them in the outer office would have seen the way Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko—who had the admiral's ear—deferred authority to a major of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. He should have run when he was in the zoo park, should have run when he was last at the castle at Malbork and making the dead drop, should have run when he was with Alice on the promontory by the monument at Westerplatte. Should have run; but he had not.
He turned his back on the closed door and went to his desk. He had to hold the mug of hot chocolate with both hands to drink from it.
'I find it very hard to believe—no, impossible to believe…' Had there been a mirror in his office, and had he looked into it, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky would have seen the pallor of his face and the shock that widened his eyes. 'If what you say is true, then it is incredible, too incredible for me to comprehend.'
He could not doubt the man. In front of him, held tight in
his fists, was a single sheet of paper from the Lubyanka that served to introduce Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Bikov of Counter-Intelligence (Military), and to order his full cooperation with the FSB officer. He could have blustered, shouted, but it would have achieved little and damaged him more.
'I have treated him like a son, trusted him.'
Damage was the key to it, the limitation of damage was the only sure route to his survival. He had had, throughout his thirty-eight years in the navy, acceptable relations with the men of the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. He had played the game with them, had never sought to frustrate them. He understood their power, had recognized it when he was young and knew it now. Twice a year in Kaliningrad he met with an FSB general, took lunch with him, and wine, and they would gossip together about subordinates and rivals, the tittle-tattle of who slept with whom, who drank too much, who rifled his garrison of building materials for sale to the mafiya, and they would embrace at the end of the lunch. By the time his staff car was half-way back to Baltiysk he would have forgotten what he had said and what he had been told. But the power of the FSB was ever present. At each stage of promotion a serving officer would be vetted. If the vetting was negative that officer would not gain access to classified material. Without the access to secret files there would be no possibility of promotion. They did not have to love each other, but to live together as fleas and dogs.
'I don't doubt what you say, Colonel Bikov, but it is hard, very hard, to accept. I think it would be easier to believe my wife is being fucked by a conscript. The bastard…'
Only on one occasion in his life had he deliberately refused an order from the old KGB. After he had taken control and ordered the stopping in the water of the Krivak-class destroyer, the Storozhevoy, on its flight to Swedish waters, he had led the boarding party that retook the ship from the nest of traitors, and had brought them back to Riga. Then, he had been ordered to hand his prisoners to the KGB's investigators, and he had refused. He had, himself, brought them down the gangway, taken them to the military prison and thrown them into the cells. Only then had he given the key to the investigators. It was the one time. Not for a moment did he consider that he should defend Viktor Archenko.
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