Most of the genuine journalists remained calm, though agreeably shocked; their only real concern was the frustration of having to share such an experience with so many rivals. The Russian contingent looked either angry or glum; but no one appeared particularly worried, except the little Russian girl who now dashed past two of the French gunmen and clutched the arm of the English journalist, Fielding. Her apple cheeks were colourless, her eyes wide and wet, and she began babbling to him, first in Russian, and then, when he cut her short, in a burst of English: ‘Oh no, no, no! They take you! They take you!’
Fielding turned to her with a look of tired resignation, and muttered something, patting her hand. She began again in Russian, and stopped only when one of the gunmen approached; then wiped her eyes, turned and walked bravely back up the gangway to her seat next to the two air hostesses, who sat mute and nervous, like waitresses during an embarrassing scene in a restaurant.
Fielding’s neighbour, Ken Roskoe, had been listening alertly. ‘You know that girl?’ he asked, his face forked with puzzlement.
‘We know each other,’ the Englishman replied, with the same indifference that he’d shown to the girl.
‘What did she mean — asking if they were taking you?’
‘My dear fellow, I haven’t the f-faintest idea.’
Roskoe sat tight in his seat. ‘All those Intourist girls work for the KGB,’ he said after a pause. ‘You’re not involved in all this, are you, Fielding?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Fielding. ‘Unless you’re implying that I’m involved in this hijacking, in which case I suggest you take a grip of yourself and stop panicking. We’re all in this together, remember.’
‘But the girl?’ cried Roskoe.
‘The girl,’ said Fielding, ‘is an entirely private affair.’ And he closed his eyes.
From the back of the plane Pol had watched this episode between the girl and the English journalist with benign amusement. He now turned to her, in her seat opposite him, and repeated what Fielding had already told her. She still looked tense and pale, but the fear was leaving her eyes. ‘They won’t take him away?’ she murmured, in French.
‘There is no cause for alarm, ma petite,’ Pol said, rocking gently forward in his seat. ‘No one will be hurt, if they do as they are told.’
‘But why? Why?’
Pol leant across the aisle and gave her knee a little squeeze. ‘I promise that you will be back in Leningrad tomorrow.’
‘But these men with guns?’ she cried; and at the same moment the floor lurched steeply and Pol, who had not yet fastened his seatbelt, had to grab the corner of her seat to prevent his great weight from toppling to the floor.
The plane was losing height rapidly. There came a series of bumps, and several of the passengers winced and began blowing their noses to relieve the sudden change of pressure. In the control cabin the blond man was balancing on the sloping, shuddering floor, while a thick skein of blood jerked and zigzagged obscenely round his feet. Both pilots were braced against the controls, and the navigator was busily taking measurements off the plastic overlay. The blond man now took from his pocket a second chart and spread it out beside the one on which the Russian was working. It had 1:100,000 scale, and showed the Finnish coast spattered with tiny islands, lakes, and lakes within lakes, and bulging peninsulas joined to the mainland by thin causeways. The area was full of villages linked by twisting roads to the coastal highway from Helsinki to Leningrad.
He laid a lean finger on a deserted point along the coastline midway between Helsinki and the Soviet-Finnish frontier town of Vaalima — a distance of some hundred kilometres. ‘We fly towards Lovisa, to this point between Borga Porvoo and Karhula. When we have reached latitude 62.5 you will commence a descent to one thousand metres. Understood?’
The navigator nodded, white-lipped. His hands shook as he picked up the pair of dividers, but the blond man took them from him and stabbed one of the points into the centre of a ragged bay.
‘This is the spot.’ He beckoned to Capitaine Duhamel and nodded down at the chart. ‘You will land precisely here, Capitaine. The ice will be up to a metre deep and covered with hard snow. You should have no problem.’
The French pilot was smoking again; he said, without removing the cigarette, ‘We will be landing in the dark, blind.’
‘There will be flares.’
‘And the Finnish radar?’
‘On your approach you will identify yourself to Helsinki and tell them you are losing height and may have to attempt an emergency landing. With luck we will be flying too low for radar.’ He looked at the altimeter needle and watched it creeping back round the dial — 2000, 1500, 1200. ‘What is our exact position now?’ he asked, turning back to the navigator.
The Russian indicated a point on the large-scale chart within a couple of centimetres of the dotted line marking the limit of Soviet territorial waters. The blond man turned to Captain Prokovsky.
‘Captain, the moment you are contacted by Soviet ground or air reconnaissance, you will inform them that you are performing low-altitude exercises, and will shortly be heading south for Estonia. If you attempt to signal your destination, or raise the alert, you will be killed.’
The Russian pilot nodded to show that he had understood, and hitched on his earphones. The blond man now turned to Capitaine Duhamel: ‘We are still flying parallel with the territorial limit?’
‘Within less than ten kilometres of the military zone.’
The blond man moved back to the chart and pointed to a complex of tiny off-shore islands called the Haapasaari. ‘When we are exactly parallel with this spot, we will descend to two hundred metres and proceed due east and fly straight to the destination.’
‘And if we are intercepted?’ said Duhamel.
‘Do you think they will shoot down a planeload of their own Government officials?’
There was a pause. ‘We are now within restricted military airspace,’ Duhamel said, squashing out his cigarette under his heel. There was a quick crackle from Prokovsky’s earphones. The Russian adjusted the mouthpiece, and the blond man leaned over him as he began to speak, holding the barrel of his gun along the edge of the Russian’s cheek.
Prokovsky repeated his message three times, then said in French, ‘I am being instructed to alter course immediately.’
‘How far are they?’
Prokovsky nodded at a flickering screen beside his knee, where two tiny green dots were beginning to appear. ‘Perhaps thirty kilometres,’ he said. ‘They are closing at over a thousand kilometres an hour.’
‘Turn due east,’ said the hijacker, ‘and drop to two hundred metres.’
The Russian hesitated. Duhamel shouted: ‘This is madness! We cannot even see the water.’
‘Go by the altimeter,’ said the blond man; there was a note of bored contempt in his voice. ‘These planes are built to fly at a minimum of fifty metres — without radar. Tell your Russian colleague to inform the planes that we are having navigational problems.’
The radar specks had grown into two bright green blobs that were now converging on the centre of the screen. The floor bucked downwards and sideways, the blond man braced himself against the back of Duhamel’s seat and studied the second-hand of his watch. He glanced at the navigator. ‘Twenty seconds. How far now?’
The navigator frowned. He was very pale. He said something in Russian, and Prokovsky repeated, ‘We are in Finland water in ten or fifteen seconds.’
The green radar blobs had swollen into a large amoeba, and the first MIG 23 flashed overhead a couple of seconds later, followed by the other in close dovetail formation. Their lights broke apart, swirled upwards in opposite directions, and vanished.
This time there was a furious crackle from Prokovsky’s earphones, and the blond man ordered: ‘Tell them we are losing height and have engine trouble. But no Mayday. Just break contact.’ His gun still rested against the Russian’s cheek, as the man spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece,
this time with what sounded like a note of panic; then he wrenched the earphones off his head, switched off the R/T, and lay back against the headrest. He was grey and sweating.
‘We are in Finnish territorial waters,’ said Duhamel, as the lights of the two MIGs came swooping down again, very close this time, and peeled away in the last second. The Troika-Caravelle’s altimeter needle was trembling on the 200-metre mark. ‘We will be over Haapasaari in about thirty seconds,’ Duhamel added. ‘If we keep at this altitude, we have a good chance of hitting one of the islands.’ His face was suddenly taut with anger. ‘How many milliards of francs are you asking, you dirty gangster?’
The hijacker nodded at the controls: ‘Pay attention to your work. As soon as we are over Hudofjörd, take us down to one hundred metres.’ He went on, grinning: ‘I heard that you are one of the best there is, Capitaine. You can do it. They might even give you the Order of Lenin.’
Duhamel sat very straight, staring through the Perspex shield into the blue-black darkness. There was cloud now, and a trace of ground-mist; but still no wind.
Four minutes later a cluster of lights swept up into view, alarmingly high on their port side. Duhamel pulled back the stick and the floor rose with a shrill screaming vibration. For a moment the blond man almost lost control, lurching back against the French gunman who had not stirred from the rear wall of the cabin. The gun in his hand scarcely moved; it remained pointing between the heads of the two pilots.
A red glow now appeared directly ahead; then another; and beyond, a double row of orange flares, dully reflected off the frozen water. There were more lights from a village, racing past almost level with the plane as Duhamel now edged the stick forward, then pulled a lever and there was a shuddering howl as the nose-cone came into line with the centre of the flarepath, with the ground glowing red and green under the landing lights.
There was a bump and a soft scraping sound as the wheels ploughed into the fresh layer of snow, then gripped the ice with a grunt, slewing to both sides as the weight of the aircraft settled, before pulling up with a long roar within less than a hundred metres of the last pair of beacons.
‘You will remain here, you will not move,’ said the blond man. Duhamel was still staring stiffly ahead, his hands moving levers, touching switches, as the engines died with a slow moan through the Arctic night. The blond man turned and went back into the passenger-cabin.
One of the French gunmen had already opened the outside door at the rear of the plane, and a draught of freezing air swept up the cabin. Another of the gunmen had stopped beside Fielding, who had undone his seatbelt and was already pulling on his coat and musquash hat. The American, Ken Roskoe, stared up at him: ‘Hey, you going?’
‘Yes, I’m going,’ said Fielding. He stepped into the aisle, with the gunman behind him, and walked down towards the open door. Five rows from the end there was a tiny click through the silence. A man in a suede jacket had snapped a Minox camera. He was just dropping it into his side-pocket, when the blond man leapt out and seized it from his hand, and in the same movement slashed the barrel of his gun across the man’s mouth. The man screamed something that sounded like German, and sat down holding his face in both hands, with blood seeping between his fingers.
The only people in the cabin who now moved were Fielding and the French gunman. They reached the door where the emergency chute had already been dropped out. The gunman was the first to go, holding the canvas taut, at a gentle angle, to take Fielding’s weight. But at the last moment Fielding hesitated; he glanced at Pol, sitting almost opposite him, and the Frenchman gave him a quick grin, covering it almost at once with a red silk bandana with which he began to mop his face.
Fielding turned and clambered into the mouth of the chute. A moment later he slid out and sat down heavily in the snow. As he did so a pair of headlamps flashed on and off out of the darkness, then came crawling towards them with a clank of snow-chains. Behind them, beyond the last flares, lay a second pair of lights, dipped and stationary.
The car was a Volvo saloon with Swedish number plates. There were two men inside. They drew up just beyond the wing-tip and one of them got out. He was tall, in a fur hat and herringbone overcoat, and came walking briskly towards them. Fielding started to walk too. The gunman followed a couple of feet behind, his hands thrust in the pockets of a quilted windcheater.
Fielding stopped and said, ‘Good evening. I’m Fielding. Glad you could come.’
‘Geoffrey Donaldson,’ said the man. ‘It was no trouble at all.’ He was middle-aged with a thin moustache and a generally military demeanour. He looked briefly at the gunman, then back at Fielding. ‘It’s rather chilly — I suggest we get straight into the car.’
Fielding glanced back at the plane, which was now in darkness, with the chute hanging limp from the door. Donaldson added, ‘We haven’t got a lot of time.’
Fielding followed him to the Volvo. Donaldson opened the front passenger door for him, and got into the back. The engine was running and the inside of the car was very warm. The man at the wheel nodded to Fielding and said, ‘I’m Brian Hughes. Hope you had a good journey.’ He had a smooth round face with tortoise-shell spectacles and an accent that at once suggested to Fielding more the commercial traveller than the officer and gentleman.
From the back seat Donaldson said, ‘I’m afraid our friend Worrnold hasn’t been having much luck with his vacuum-cleaners. He’s been meeting a lot of sales resistance.’
Fielding smiled to himself: it must have rankled with London when he’d made them draw on Graham Greene’s savage satire on the Service. Yet Donaldson had spoken without any irony or embarrassment. Perhaps he didn’t have a sense of humour — or maybe he just wasn’t much of a reader?
A second Volvo, this time with Finnish registration, drove past and stopped in front of the French gunman. Hughes had slipped into gear and they began to move forward.
‘Did you get the Birkenheads?’ said Fielding, turning to put his hat and coat on the back seat beside Donaldson.
‘I’m sorry,’ Donaldson said, ‘but Robert Lewis tell me they can’t get them anymore. The Cuban government is standardizing all their brands of cigar.’
Fielding nodded. ‘How long till they find the plane?’
‘Not long. They’re giving us a five-minute start. As soon as Pol’s men are taken off, the pilot will raise Helsinki and they’ll get the police out from Lovisa and Borga Porvoo. We’ll no doubt pass the ones from Borga.’
‘What d-danger of someone identifying the cars?’
‘Almost none. We were too far for anyone to read the numbers, and in this country almost every other car is a Volvo.’
‘Unless they set up road-blocks at once,’ Fielding muttered. He gripped the armrest as the car bounced up a steep slope off the frozen bay, the chains screaming and churning a spray of snow and powdered ice, the back wheels sliding on to the level of a narrow track. ‘So what’s the programme?’ he asked.
‘The ferry leaves Helsinki in just over two hours,’ said Donaldson. ‘We should do it nicely.’
‘What ferry?’
‘The overnight car-ferry to Stockholm.’
‘That wasn’t the plan,’ said Fielding. ‘They promised a direct flight to Stockholm, then a car to meet me and take me to a safe house.’
‘That is precisely what is planned,’ said Donaldson; his voice was exasperatingly calm. ‘Only it was decided against a flight, because of the highly changeable weather conditions at this time of year. You could be kept waiting at the airport for as long as it takes the ferry to cross. I suppose no one recognized you on the plane? None of the journalists, I mean?’
‘I don’t think so. But they’ll remember me. And they’ll remember the gunmen. Only knowing Pol, he’ll have laid on a private plane to collect them.’ He laughed bitterly: ‘I suppose that was too much for London? A false passport’s routine stuff, but hiring planes costs money.’
‘It would also involve infringing Finnish air-space,’ said
Donaldson; ‘and London does not want to compromise the Finns more than is absolutely necessary. These things are very delicate.’
‘Don’t flatter yourselves,’ said Fielding. ‘Delicacy doesn’t come into it. It’s just the old business of having to go through the proper channels.’
‘There were no proper channels,’ said Donaldson. ‘There never have been. If you must know, quite a few people in London are still very unhappy about the whole business. And a lot of others couldn’t even be told. At one point London was insisting that the whole thing be handled by Pol.’
‘What made them change their minds?’
‘London still has an interest in all this,’ said Donaldson stiffly. ‘Even you might appreciate that.’
‘Personally,’ said Fielding, ‘when it comes to the crunch I’d as soon deal with an honest crook like Pol than a bunch of deskbound hypocrites in Whitehall.’
‘As you please,’ said Donaldson, and lapsed into silence. Fielding groped for his hip-flask, shook it, and found it was empty. Instead, he took out some cigarettes — a blue and white packet of Kazbeks. He tapped one out and was just pinching the hollow cardboard stem, when Donaldson leaned over and said, ‘Try one of these.’ He offered him a packet of Rothmans. ‘And better give me that other one,’ he added. He took the Kazbeks from Fielding and opened his window just enough to throw the packet out. ‘A small detail,’ he added, ‘but it’s so easy to become careless.’
‘Quite.’ Fielding smiled. ‘And it’s nice to be looked after. But of course, you have to, don’t you? Because London knows that if anything goes wrong, I can always break my side of the bargain too.’
Donaldson did not reply. They had left the narrow track along the peninsula, with the snow banks reaching above the roof of the car, and now came out on to the Helsinki-Leningrad highway. The snow-ploughs had recently been along it, but there was still a danger of black ice, and the chains kept their speed down to less than fifty miles an hour. There was no other traffic and no sign of the second Volvo. Hughes had made good time. ‘We should have nothing to worry about,’ Donaldson said at last. ‘The ferry is Swedish, and passport control will be a mere formality.’
Gentleman Traitor Page 17
