by Jeremy Duns
The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Then I climbed overboard and slipped down into the water.
*
It was much darker underwater but I saw the U-boat at once, lying like a giant wounded shark on the bed. I swam towards it, suddenly afraid I would be unable to carry the canisters up in the bag. How many would be enough to convince Sasha that this was the source of the ‘attacks’ in Estonia? Just one, or would I need more?
I hit a cold current and wondered if I were well enough protected in the diving suit. Was it thick enough? I thought of the tremors that had nearly killed me when I’d crashed in the helicopter with Raaitikainen. I dismissed it from my mind: there was no point in worrying about such things now.
I reached the boat and swam through the main deck, then down the flight of stairs and into the loading bay. The corpses of some of the crew were still there, sitting just as they had been when I was here twenty-four years earlier, and as I had seen them sporadically in my nightmares since. There was a rubber-soled shoe jammed against the furred-up pipes, and I remembered that crewmen had worn those during attacks so as not to alert the enemy. One of the men seemed to be looking at his wristwatch, but half his face had collapsed in on itself, and tiny fish were swimming through the crevices of his eyes.
I grimaced and turned away, then rounded the corner to the place I remembered the canisters had been. As I did, my forebrain began tingling before my eyes registered it. There was a hole where the steel hatch leading to the officers’ quarters should be. Something was terribly wrong. I swam through in a daze, but I already knew what I would find.
The canisters were gone.
XVIII
I let the waterproof bag drop from my hands, and swam through, seeing if perhaps they had dislodged somewhere. But they hadn’t – they were gone. There had been twenty or thirty of them here in 1945. If the hatch had burst open, they could all have tumbled out. But someone had been down here and cut the hatch open. It was a neat rectangular hole, and could only be man-made.
Who had done this, and when? And, more importantly, what had caused the leak to the bases? My stomach clenched, horrified I could have been so wrong.
It had been an attack all along.
Yuri had been right, back in the bunker in Moscow. Following the discovery that I was a double, the Service would have combed through every single document related to my career, both to assess the damage and to see if there was anyone else who had covered my tracks or turned a blind eye to my behaviour. And at some point someone must have come across Templeton’s report on my operation here in 1945, and that had revealed an unexpected prize: a lovely little chemical weapon sitting at the bottom of the Baltic.
This discovery would have woven its way through the in- and out-trays until someone at Porton Down had confirmed that Winterlost was extremely effective and was still very much worth getting hold of, and so they had decided to come back to see if the canisters were still here and could be retrieved. In 1945 I had had to come in by seaplane under cover to reach this wreck, but nowadays they could simply fly a team of divers to Helsinki via BEA. Under cover of a diving expedition or something similarly innocuous, they could have cut open the hatch, hauled the canisters onto a boat, and then slipped into the Gulf of Finland and released them into the water along the coast near Paldiski. Then they could have simply sailed away again, and waited for the stuff to seep onto the shoreline and do its damage. Personnel at two of the Soviets’ naval bases would then be incapacitated, and nobody could be blamed.
But it had gone wrong, because the Soviets hadn’t seen it that way. When they had discovered that the chemical wasn’t known to them, they had guessed the truth – that it was an attack by the West. And I had unwittingly confirmed it by telling them about my operation here in ’45.
All that remained to be discovered was whether the attack on the bases was isolated and had come coincidentally at the same time as the Americans were conducting some sort of an exercise in the air, or whether the two events were linked, and the B-52 flights weren’t part of an exercise at all, but the prelude to a nuclear strike. If that were so, Yuri and the others had read the situation correctly. The Service could have been called upon by the Americans to offer a diversion. The attack at Paldiski in particular would disrupt one of the Soviets’ nuclear submarine bases just as they would need it, but would also confuse and distract them while the Americans prepared to launch their surprise attack.
But in either case the injuries at Paldiski and Hiiumaa were not accidental, and that meant that I now had no leverage whatsoever – nothing with which I could convince Sasha, Yuri or Brezhnev not to proceed with their plans to strike. There was no way of getting around it now. We were heading straight towards a nuclear conflict.
Dazed by the realization, I swam towards the hatch, looking to go round it one last time before heading back up. As I passed the door, I saw something flapping against the lower edge of it in the current. The cut hadn’t been entirely clean, and something had caught on a tiny thorn in the metal. I leaned down and saw it was a small scrap of canvas, stringy and decaying. I recognized it as the same material that had been used to wrap the canisters – one must have torn when they’d taken them out, and this piece had been stuck here since. A fragment of text was still visible on it: ‘NTERLOST’.
It was in a black Gothic typeface, instantly recognizable as the one used by the Nazis. I stared at it, still stunned by the fact that Osborne or Innes or whoever it had been had sent a team here to get these canisters, all to attack the Soviets’ bases. It was madness – tantamount to provoking a nuclear war.
And then another thought struck me, and it sent an army of ants scuttling across my scalp. It hadn’t been Osborne and the others who had planned the attacks: it had been Yuri.
He also had files on me. He had interrogated me about them on a daily basis, methodically going through my career week by week, month by month. I had never told him about my operation here, but he’d known about it already. Lundström had just told me Yuri had been here in 1945, and had been trying to find out what had happened.
It didn’t matter precisely how he’d done it, but I knew he had. The Soviets had known about this secret all along. Perhaps they hadn’t known the precise location of the boat; perhaps they’d been searching for it for a while. Yuri could have sent a small group of divers to retrieve the canisters, and then had them leaked to Estonia. I wasn’t quite sure why yet, but it had to be something along those lines – because nobody in the West wanted to provoke a nuclear war.
I stared down at the scrap of material flapping from the door of the quarters for a moment. Then I leaned down and tried to prise it away with my fingers. It was caught fast. I tugged again, but realized that if I pulled too hard I might shred the surface even further and lose all remaining legibility of the fragment of text. Did I have enough oxygen in the tank to stay down here and unpick it? And what about Sasha’s deadline of three hours? That must have nearly gone by now. I decided I would have to take it slowly despite both of these factors, because if I did pull too hard and that sliver of text vanished, all was lost anyway. I tried to set my panic aside and focus, but it was like weaving a thread through a needle and my fingers had started shaking. I placed my left hand around my right forearm to keep my grip in place like a clamp, and forced my fingers as far as they could go down the scrap. Then, as forcefully but with as much control as I could muster, I pulled at it. Slowly but surely, it spooled away from the thorn of metal, and into my hand. I turned it over. Yes, the letters were still legible.
I clenched it in my fist and swam back through the hatch. But as I came out of the boat, I saw a figure waiting for me in the water: a man in a diving suit. Sasha’s dark beard sprouted from beneath the window of his helmet, and in one black-gloved hand he was clutching what looked like a pistol. He raised his hand and I jerked my body back without even thinking, only to see a plume of bubbles from the gun
and hear a thudding boom behind me. I turned and watched as a thin dart bounced off the hull of the U-boat and spiralled down to the bed. A part of my brain registered that the Russians were rumoured to be developing a pistol that could fire darts underwater, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. How many rounds could it fire? Was it four-barrelled? At this depth the aim would be compromised, as he’d just shown.
Sasha fired again, and this time the dart came very close to my feet, the force of the ripples spinning me away. I struggled to right myself but I’d lost orientation, and as I spun through the water I suddenly felt a blow to the back of my head. Had I hit the boat, or had it been Sasha? I flailed around, trying to lash out at him, but all I could see through my mask was a blur of movement and bubbles and then suddenly his eyes and mouth in the helmet. My oxygen was now getting close to running out, and I could feel my skull tightening under the pressure. I looked up and saw the surface of the water above me tilting with the waves, a separate reality from the world down here. I shut my eyes, feeling as though my head were about to explode, and swam upwards, praying I was moving away from Sasha.
I broke through the surface and gasped for air. I saw Lundström’s boat immediately, floating on the waves, and began swimming towards it, but then I felt something slap me on the back. A hand gripped the inside of my diving suit and I was being hoisted onto land, patches of ice visible among the dark rocks, the wind howling around me. I looked up through water-clamped lashes and saw a man in camouflage, blond hair and blue eyes, his mouth snarling from the effort of lifting me. I tried to lash out but my strength had gone. He didn’t seem to be trying to hurt me or shoot me so I let him pull me up. He dumped me onto a patch of ice as though I were a sack of coal, then moved away to some nearby rocks, and I saw that the case holding the transceiver was also there. He was the radio operator.
We were on a long, flat islet, and parked on it was the helicopter that had come for me earlier, squatting silently in the darkness. The radio operator shouted something and I looked over and saw that there was someone just a few yards away, standing by the water. He was wearing a leather coat. Yuri.
It took me another moment to register that there was a boy kneeling on the ice next to him and that he had the barrel of a gun pressed against his head, and a moment more to realize it wasn’t a boy, it was Sarah, her short hair matted with sweat and her dress sticking to her skin. She was shivering and whimpering, and my stomach started contracting and I retched.
XIX
I clambered to my feet, my chest heaving and my head numb from being underwater, and screamed out at Yuri. He looked up at me and I thought I saw him smile.
‘What do you have in your hand?’ he shouted out at me. I looked down and realized that my fist was still clenched around the scrap of material I’d salvaged.
‘Let her go!’ I yelled again.
He held out his free hand. ‘I would like you to bring me whatever you found down there. Or I will kill your girlfriend. Don’t make me wait too long.’
I could hear Sarah sobbing, and saw a stream of saliva dripping from her mouth. Christ knew what he had put her through in the last few hours, and indeed in the last few months. I should never have brought her with me in the first place – I should have found a way of getting her to safety in Italy, and none of this would have happened. Her life now hung in the balance, and the tiny strip of canvas in my hand was all the leverage I had. But I couldn’t give this to Yuri, because many more lives hung in the balance. Millions of lives, in London, Washington, Moscow…
‘One last chance!’ he called out. ‘Come over here and give it to me.’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ I said, and the tears came, finally – the tears for all the people I’d done this to.
Yuri fired, and I screamed as I saw the recoil and the impact. Part of me felt that if I made a lot of noise myself I could cancel out the sound of the shot and it wouldn’t have really happened.
Sarah fell forwards, her body splaying out and the blood spreading across the ice. Yuri lifted his gun and turned to me, preparing to shoot, but there was a burst of noise behind me and I turned to see Sasha breaking through the surface of the water.
Yuri’s hand froze in mid-air.
‘Are you all right, son?’ he shouted, and he began to walk over the ice towards us. Sasha grabbed hold of the rocks and climbed ashore, gasping for air as I had done. I stumbled towards him and put out a hand to lift him up. He looked at me with shock, and as he came level with me I grabbed him with my other hand and passed him the fragment of the label.
He looked down at it, then peered at me, his eyes scanning my face. His expression turned from puzzlement to horror and then to slow realization. He looked up at his colleague, who was coming down to meet him. ‘Get the radio!’ he shouted. And then, to Yuri, who was now just a few feet away: ‘Don’t shoot him, Father – he was telling the truth. There was mustard gas down there. Look.’ He opened his hand to show him the fragment. ‘We must tell Moscow at once and make sure they cancel the command.’
Yuri stopped walking and stared down at his son. ‘You fool!’ he said. ‘It makes no difference if there was mustard gas down there – the British have taken it and used it against us.’
‘It’s over, Yuri,’ I said. ‘You may be able to pull the wool over Sasha’s eyes, but you can’t pull it over mine. I’m no longer the boy you met in Germany in 1945.’
He turned to me and sneered, his face creasing so that his eyes nearly disappeared in the wrinkles. ‘That wasn’t the first time we met, comrade. For a while I was even afraid you might remember it. I’ve been told I have a memorable face. But you never made the connection. Then again, you have missed rather a lot of connections.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
He looked out across the water, sniffing the sea air. ‘I’m talking about New Year’s Eve, 1939, in the Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo. You were fourteen. Your father introduced us, very briefly, and I asked you about school. And you were so pleased with yourself, because you were just about to enter a new one. Do you remember now?’
I remembered. It had been a wild party, one of the last before the war, and in some ways my induction into the adult world: I’d smoked my first cigarette and drunk my first cocktail that night, marvelling at the beautiful women in their evening gowns and the men chasing them around. I had danced in a heaving line to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and nearly been crushed during the countdown as the crowd had roared in the new year, followed by the flags waving, the confetti and everyone embracing each other in the hot sticky Egyptian night. And yes, at one point in the evening Father had introduced me to a funny little Russian who had leaned over and asked me about school, and I had proudly told him I was going to Winchester next term.
The funny little Russian didn’t seem so funny now.
‘So you knew my father in Cairo,’ I said.
‘Yes. That was where we met, in fact, and where I recruited both him and Colin Templeton. It’s a strange thing: I had hoped your father might become Chief of the Service one day, but in the end it was Templeton who did. But Colin was in the Army back then – how could I have guessed that things would turn out the way they did? Life has a strange way of working out sometimes, doesn’t it?’
Templeton a traitor. ‘Why?’ I said, my mouth trying to catch up with all the thoughts swirling around my brain. ‘Why?’
He tugged at his goatee as though I’d set him a mathematical puzzle. ‘Why did they decide to serve us, you mean? Well, as you are no longer a boy and we are now so close to the endgame, perhaps it’s time you learned the truth. Which is that they had no choice.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘have you still not joined the dots? I photographed them, you see. I kept the negatives and persuaded both of them to serve as my agents, or their wives and superiors would receive copies of them, and they would be ruined. But I did it separately with each of them, you
see. That was the genius of it! Neither knew I had recruited the other. Well, not at first. Your father eventually found out what I’d done, in Germany, shortly before I shot him.’
‘You’re saying he and Templeton…’
‘Yes.’
I stared at him, anger rising from my stomach to my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. Father had always been a man’s man: a record-breaking racing driver, a decorated commando. He had loathed ‘queers’, and that had been part of the reason I’d loathed him. But now I saw that this was precisely the cover he would have used if Yuri were telling the truth. Another thought struck me: Mother. Had he used her political views as a pretext to get her locked way, so that he could continue with his secret life?
No. It was unthinkable.
‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘For some sick reason, you’re lying.’
Yuri tilted his head to one side, amusement at my distress glinting in those evil little eyes. ‘I’m afraid not, Paul. It’s the truth, although they both did everything in their power to hide it from the rest of the world. You should know that many men suffer from this affliction, even those with families and children. Knowledge of this fact has served me well in my career, and that of several of my colleagues, for that matter. Burgess was always shameless about his disease, almost proud of it, but others have not been. I have found that men with secrets can be easily manipulated. Homosexuals also often make for excellent agents, because they have already spent years deceiving everyone they know – a lifetime of training, if you will. And your father and Templeton were not just casual lovers – they believed they were in love with each other, if you can imagine such a thing! Why do you think Templeton kept you so close to him after your father died, and nurtured your career as he did? You were his lover’s son. No doubt you reminded him of your father. Perhaps he even imagined…’
I lunged at him, but he took a step back and I stumbled and fell onto the ice, exhausted and defeated. Yuri raised his arm and aimed the pistol at me.
