Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  She put the tray on his desk and the admiral seemed not to see it, did not move.

  He called out, 'Admiral, is there anything I can do—should we talk about your diary?'

  Admiral Falkovsky's chair spun on its pivot, away. Viktor saw his back, the prickled cropped hairs on his neck.

  A shout answered him, pebbles in a concrete mixer, 'Go to your quarters. Get out…go!'

  The guardian came out, white-faced, and closed the door. Viktor stood. Every head was turned away. His desk was clear, as it had been the day before, when he had not run. He went to the stand by the outer door, lifted down his coat and slipped it loose to hang over his shoulders. He looked up at the clock on the wall. He was expected at the rendezvous on the eight-kilometre stone beyond Rybacij in five hours less twelve minutes. He would run. He straightened his tie, as if that were important, and brushed dust flecks off his epaulettes.

  He went down the stairs from the second floor. When he was clear of the building he would cross the base, take the ferry—whether he was followed or not—commandeer the first wheels on the far side, run, and hide up. He stamped across the lobby area. The military policeman at the table beside the door stiffened, stood, and waited for him to pass, but did not salute. The military policeman at the door always saluted. Viktor pushed open the door. A car was up close to the steps, and two men jackknifed out of it. The sun was in his face.

  The men came fast up the steps, one on each side of him and the car blocked escape. A flash of light on metal in the hand of the man on the left side of him. As he realized that the metal was handcuffs, his arms were grabbed. The click reverberated in his ear, and the pain was in his wrist. He lashed out with his shoe and caught a shin, then flailed with his free fist and hit a throat. One half down and one reeling away. He tried to run. His arm seemed to be wrenched from the socket at his shoulder, as though he dragged a hundred-kilo sack of sand. He stamped his feet to gain speed but could not loose the hold and the handcuff dug deeper into his wrist. The great broad arms of the military policeman encircled him from behind and suffocated his last attempt to run.

  In the middle distance, Viktor saw the conscript.

  He blustered once, 'What the fuck is…? Who the fuck do you think…? You know who I…?'

  He could think of nothing more to yell in protest. The man he was handcuffed to had worn the suit and carried the briefcase into the admiral's office.

  'Right, Captain Archenko. Unnecessary but understandable. I can put your teeth down your throat, or we can go with dignity. Which?'

  He was led the last steps to the car. The man to whom he was handcuffed slid in through the open door, then tugged Viktor after him. The second man retrieved his coat and threw it in after him. The door was slammed shut, and the car eased away.

  Viktor did not realize it, could not have analysed it, but a feeling of light-headed relief consumed him. It was over. At a stroke, the double life was gone. He sagged back in the seat. The car went past the slack-jawed conscript, past the senior officers' mess, the armoury, the non-commissioned officers' club and the workshop complex, past the landscape of his territory. He could see the upper outer walls of the fortress where his grandmother might have waited after the last boat had gone. He felt at that moment freer, more liberated, than at any moment since he had gone up the gangplank on to the trawler tied against the quay at Murmansk. A weight, which had lain there since his mother had told him how his father had been exposed to leukaemia, seemed lifted from his back, and with it went the burden of the last months of his grandmother's life. What price now, in the steadily driven car, his hate? When a man was in the waters of the Barents or on the glacier rocks of the Kola peninsula, above the Arctic Circle, they said all he wanted was to sleep, and if he slept he would die. He thought Alice North called him.

  He jerked up in his seat, then, and wrenched the handcuff fastening him to the man. He would fight, would not sleep, he would give them nothing.

  The car stopped outside the building that housed the office of the zampolit, Piatkin. He was led inside and up the stairs. Viktor tried to walk straight-backed, to set the pace, and made the chain taut between the handcuffs. He was taken through Piatkin's empty office, and in front of a closed door a key was used to unfasten the handcuffs. He rubbed at his wrist. His uniform jacket was pulled off him, his tie was taken, his pockets were emptied. His belt was dragged from his waist, the shoes off his feet, and his watch was snatched. The door was opened. He was pitched through it and it slammed shut behind him. He fell to the concrete floor and the darkness enveloped him.

  'Heh, you! Yes, Vasiliev, you…'

  Vasiliev stood rock still, in shock. He had seen his friend, Captain Archenko, step through the doors and he had taken a half-step towards him. From that moment he had been rooted. The platoon, on their way to the gymnasium, marked time, stamped out the rhythm.

  'Vasiliev, what the fuck do you think you are doing?' the sergeant shouted.

  Half a step forward and the excitement welling in him—having rehearsed what he would say about his morning's shooting—then frozen as two men had rushed his friend.

  'Vasiliev, are you shooting or are you jerking off, or are you doing the gymnasium, like you're supposed to be?'

  He had seen a short, bitter little fight. The handcuff had prevented his friend's escape. Then the military policeman had intervened and his arms had smothered the fight. His friend, the chief of staff to the admiral, had saved his life, had brought him back the machine-gun he loved beyond any other possession.

  'Vasiliev—shoot, or the gymnasium? Which?'

  His friend was arrested, like a criminal would be taken by the militsiya, a thief. Other officers had been crossing the parade-ground and had seen nothing, and had gone on. The platoon and the sergeant had not seen it. Only Igor Vasiliev had been the witness.

  'Vasiliev, what's the matter with you? Are you an idiot? Do you shoot, or don't you shoot?'

  The chief of staff to the fleet commander was his friend and protector, was almost a father to him. In his locker, hidden at the back, was a simple chart on which were listed the dates of each month, and every day he crossed out another. That morning, after crossing out the day in October, he had counted the dates remaining of his three years of conscripted service—ninety-six. The sergeant stared at him. If he disobeyed his sergeant, when Captain Archenko was in handcuffs and no longer his protector or friend, they could stick on him five more months, or six, in the military gaol. His voice was strangled, 'Going to shoot, Sergeant.'

  'This is the sort of place that screws you up…know what I mean?' Billy was back. He had been gone a few minutes more than an hour. When he was close to the basher, he'd done the screech-owl and Lofty had answered him. He'd crawled into the dark space there'd been curses as his boots and body took space from them. He whispered, 'I went out west, about two hundred metres, and I've done a circle. You know what? This was a battlefield. In there there's trenches and bunkers—good trenches, in zigzags, and bunkers made with tree-trunks or concrete. They're everywhere. You find a bunker and go forward twenty-five metres and you find a trench, head on another fifty metres and there's another bunker, then another set of trenches—they're everywhere. There's old wire, I found ammunition cases, and a mortar but no bombs for it. It must have been fought over, yard on yard. And there's craters, bombs and artillery craters. And I found a skull…I suppose a fox had dug it up. There must have been poor bastards here with nowhere to go, blocked at each end, and no more ships coming to get them. I don't reckon, however hard you looked, you'd find ammunition. The sods would have used it up, each last round of it, maybe kept one back for themselves, or the last grenade. Don't mind admitting it, the skull spooked me. It was just stuck out of the leaves and the rest of him was covered. It still had the helmet on it, and two holes in it, straight through the eye sockets. He'd have been on his back and looking up at the night—or the day, doesn't matter—and last bloody thing he saw was a barrel aiming down on him. No more ammunitio
n, no more medics, no more evacuation boats—it's a shit of a place.'

  He'd quietened them, stilled them. He could hear their breathing.

  'OK…OK. North is the shoreline. The beach is clear. There are signs on it forbidding access. She's way out, the Princess Rose, anchored. The tide's down, maybe on the ebb, but the dinghy's fine, you can't see it. I worked from the west side to start with. There's one track and I'd say it's used by patrol vehicles. It's hard-packed so the vehicles using it can go fast. It'll go right up to the border. The forestry's not managed. No bugger's been in it. I don't think they come this far up for exercises. There's bramble and thorn in there. You wouldn't try to run through it, snags and snags, it's slow going. What would worry me, if the place was a battlefield then there'd have been mines. If there were mines put down, it doesn't look as though anyone's ever cared to come back through and clear them, but there's fox tracks and I saw deer prints—not that a fox would set a mine off, but a deer might, so where the deer have gone is our best route. I'm not big on mines but I think they'd last from the time this place was a battlefield.'

  Lofty murmured that if ordnance was still live from 1915 at Passchendaele, it would be live from 1945 here.

  'Just so, Lofty…and you'd bloody know. Going south, there's the lagoon. The beach is different. Good ground for running on, but the lagoon side is a waste of time. Bog and reed beds. You wouldn't want to be in there, couldn't move fast or quiet and they've the track to get behind you, if it comes down to that. I'd write off the lagoon. Tell you what, though, you remember Braniewo? You can see Braniewo straight across the lagoon, only seven or eight kilometres. You can see the church, but I didn't see any boats on this side. The lagoon's a non-starter for us. It has to be the beach.'

  It was just like the old times, with Billy as the team leader. Going up the anchor chains to board tankers for anti-terrorist exercises, getting flushed out of a submerged submarine, then paddling to the towering supports of oil-rigs in the North Sea for more exercises, stalking the foreshore of Carlingford Lough when it wasn't playtime, holding the team together in silence in the Crime Squad's interview rooms when it was for real. Like old times…

  'So, I'm going east, and I can tell you what we didn't know. I have the GPS plot on Rybacij, and I can take myself to eight kilometres this side of it, down to the last five metres, the pickup point. It's marked on the map as forest. No, no, too easy. The map's out.'

  His father, disabled by heart trouble, had sat in his chair to the right side of the shrine and blinked to hold back tears; his mother, who was the earner and who left the maisonette at four thirty a.m. each weekday to clean offices, had gone into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. He had told them that 'something in Ireland went wrong', that he was washed up, finished. The photographs were on a table and the cups were on shelves above it. He'd not stayed long, less than half an hour, and after he'd gone his father had been free to weep and his mother would have brought through the pot of tea from the kitchen. He knew they were alive still because on their birthdays and at Christmas he telephoned the neighbour across the landing and learned what little was new—and in each phone call he asked the same question. Were the photographs and cups still in place? They were, and each call hurt him worse.

  He had seen the camera in the drawer by the wheel when the master had opened it to produce a chart. They would stand on the deck of the Princess Rose—Billy, Ham, Lofty and himself. They would be wearing their wetsuits or the camouflages, and Mr Mowbray would hold up the camera, and they'd josh him about his focus, his aim, and they would all be laughing, and the pride would be on their faces. Their arms would be round each other. The same photograph was in the shrine. They were on the upper superstructure of a rig, or forward on the deck of a tanker, or on a submarine ploughing the Clyde, or in the barracks hut at Ballykinler a month before the last patrol. Four photographs of the team were in the shrine, and there would be a fifth. He would take it back himself. He would collect the enlargement from the chemist, and a frame, and would go back to the dreary red-brick building under the flight path. He could not go back without the photograph. 'Just something we did for government, Dad—all a bit hush-hush, Mum. Good to see you're keeping well.' It was Wickso's dream.

  From the doorway of the room she'd chosen, Locke watched Alice unpack. Her back was to him. She took out her wash bag and laid it on the bed.

  In the village of Piaski there was a church, a café, the homes of fishermen and a caravan site. There had been an arrow pointing to the shore for the campers. Jerry the Pole had driven them through the village, then Locke had ordered him abruptly to stop. He and Alice had quit the car, taken the bags and the gear from the boot, and he had told Jerry the Pole that he should find himself a table in the café and stay there until they came for him; he should not leave the café. They'd walked up the street, on the tarmac of the one street in Piaski, past the turning to the new church, past dogs rearing and barking behind fences. They'd gone on till the street petered to a dry, sandy track, and kept walking. Where the track ended, became a footpath, there was a pink-painted bungalow, all the windows closed, no washing on the line, no dog throwing itself against the gate. No recent tyre tracks indented the turning up to the gate or the ground inside it. Spent honeysuckle climbed the bungalow walls, but a red rambler rose meandered in the boundary hedge. The bungalow would be dry, and the owners—from Germany or Warsaw—would not miss a few kilowatts of electricity. The gear always received and transmitted better when on mains power. They'd crept through birch trees and scrub on the far side of the bungalow to the village, then slipped over a low fence. A cat, on its stomach, had scowled at them, then fled. They'd taught property entry on the IONEC course at Fort Monkton, but Locke had never before put it into practice. It was a simple lock on the back door, and his credit card did for it. The living room was all closed down for the winter and dust-sheets covered the chairs. It had been a long day, would be a long night, and Locke had suggested Alice might catnap for an hour or two while he rigged the gear and ran the aerial into the kitchen, which had a flat roof. The first drops of rain pelted on to it.

  Locke had played back the recorded message, transmitted thirty minutes before: 'Delta 2 to Havoc 1—in place, site recce completed. Out.' He had sent his own: 'Havoc 1 to Havoc 2—Delta in place and site recce completed. Out.' The signal from along the peninsula was strong, but the possibility of it being intercepted was minimal. His transmission out to the Princess Rose was adequate. Using the dogleg from the team to Mowbray reduced the interception potential. She'd shown him the picture, and in the picture Ferret's arm was round her.

  'Did you sleep with him?'

  She turned to face him.

  'Slept with him, didn't you? Was it Mowbray's idea? Doing your bit for Rupert bloody Mowbray. Got the nod and wink from Mowbray, did you? "Our boy's stressed up, Alice dear, might crumple, needs a bit of comforting." Couldn't ring down from the room and tell the porter to send up a tart, could he? How did you feel about playing the whore, or was it just duty? "Don't think of him as a traitor, Alice dear, think of him as a colleague." But he's not a colleague, he's not one of us and never will be—am I right? He's a traitor, and he'll bring us all down. Christ, Alice, you didn't think, did you, that he loved you—you were just getting rid of his fucking stress. You didn't, did you? Alice?'

  She no longer looked into his eyes. She took the picture from her handbag, opened its clasp and laid it on the bed beside the washbag. As she bent the pendant hung free from her throat. She smiled at him, a little grin of mischief. It was her answer. She was beyond his reach.

  He blundered back to the kitchen.

  The room was in Piatkin's palace.

  There should have been a pile carpet and furniture. Without his watch, Viktor did not know how long he had been in the room before, at last, he sensed the movement. The darkness was too dense for him to see. It had been a long time, because his mind had throbbed, before he had known he shared the room. A man breathed somewhere. Somewh
ere in the room was another man. His knees scraped the concrete and the palms of his hand were gouged by its roughness. He thought the darkness was like the moment after death.

  Viktor crawled towards where he thought he might find the man. His head hit the wall. He went right. There should have been chairs and bookcases, filing cabinets and table legs. They had made a cell for him of a room that had been a king's quarters. He came to the wall's end and twisted, felt a power socket but no flex led from it. He had told himself he would fight. He would not cry out. His fingers touched a boot. The fingers worked over its laces and a sock, then skin, then the material of rough jeans. A match was lit. It was cupped in hands and the palms took its light away from the face of the man. Viktor let go of the jeans. The match's light moved to the centre of the room. A candle was lit. Its flame grew in the still air. The man sat cross-legged on the far side of the candle. Viktor saw a face, younger than his own, and he thought it humble, that it showed him respect. 'It's the sort of shit they teach these days at the Lubyanka, Viktor. Disorientation, that sort of crap. I am Bikov, and now we can talk. I think we will grow to like each other…I sincerely hope so.'

  ... Chapter Thirteen

  Q. What Russian city was occupied by Napoleon for thirty-nine days as a springboard for his advance on Moscow?

  A. Kaliningrad.

  'I cannot speak for the State, Viktor. I am not responsible for it. What I see of the State, Viktor, makes me ashamed to be its servant: it is a cesspit of corruption. Criminality, organized and spontaneous, is out of control. The State, Viktor, is sick. Any man of sensitivity and of dignity has complete justification in rejecting it. I accept that. If I possessed your courage, I would have done what you have done. I am your supporter, Viktor.'