Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

“Which is why they ransacked my flat. They might have known, they might have credited me with a better awareness of security than that – don’t you think, Storvac?” To my surprise he agreed. “Greenfly are inexperienced, they are young tearaways as you would say, a thorn in the flesh of WUSWIPP. They wish to move too fast, sometimes too far as well.”

  I nodded. “I’ve been hearing rumours, not about Greenfly but about WUSWIPP … I’ve not come up against WUSWIPP personally for some time now. I’m told you’re moderating your views and aspirations, that you’re learning sense, learning at last what you’re likely to project the world into. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” Storvac said. “At any rate, you come close. There has been a shift – the world is becoming too dangerous a place as between East and West, and – ”

  “Thanks largely to WUSWIPP.”

  “I say again there has been a shift – ”

  “And the Greenfly faction are reactionaries?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  The girl came with the coffee and biscuits. A pot and two cups – I poured, and politely passed the plate of biscuits. Storvac’s hand hovered and then came down on a chocolate one. I saw for the first time that he had two false hands, very well constructed but too perfect, working on a system that I’d heard about, impulses and reflexes and so on. Looking at them I asked, “That bomb?”

  He nodded. He hadn’t got away totally unscathed, but it was a miracle he’d lived at all. I suspected further damage – his voice was higher than it had once been, which was why I hadn’t picked it up on the telephone in the Schulz house. Using restraint I didn’t ask embarrassing questions: no point in antagonising someone who might – just might – be, however oddly, on our side. I said, “All right, Storvac. Go on. Let’s come to Miss Mandrake. Where is she, and who’s got her?”

  “Greenfly,” he said. “In East Germany. For now.”

  “You mean she’s going farther east?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “A hostage,” he said, as I’d expected. “And for any information she might have.”

  “She hasn’t. And information about what, for God’s sake?”

  Storvac smiled that icy smile, a short summer briefly superimposed upon bleak mid-winter. “Since you do not know what about, you cannot be sure Miss Mandrake hasn’t got it!”

  I said, “Oh yes, I can. She knows nothing that I don’t, Storvac.”

  “If you say so, Commander Shaw. But this, Greenfly will not know, and they will probe.”

  “Torture,” I said flatly.

  “Yes, regrettably.”

  “Can’t you,” I said with heat and bitterness, “control your lunatic fringe, Storvac?”

  “No,” he said. “The bit between the tooth. Now, Commander.” He leaned across the table, his face close to mine. His breath smelled stale, betraying stomach trouble. Quickly I lit a cigarette. “Greenfly have got hold of something which we, the main body of WUSWIPP, do not know about. But we believe it to be lethal knowledge, lethal for peace – ”

  “You used not to worry about peace, Storvac, and never mind what WUSWIPP officially stood for.”

  “Did you not listen when I said that things have changed? There are so many developments – weapons in space, missiles and anti-missile missiles, lasers, germ warfare. Star wars policies. Both sides are as bad – ”

  “But WUSWIPP has always been firmly in the Soviet camp, Storvac.”

  “Yes. We still are. I am taking a risk in meeting with you here. Or anywhere. You see, we in WUSWIPP wish to restrain the Soviet leadership by wise counsel – ”

  “What a hope!”

  “No. Some of them understand only too well, but they find their voices silenced by the military, who are effectively in charge of policy behind the scenes.” Storvac waved an arm. “You may say, Commander Shaw, that it has been our own scientific research and development that has provided the military with its weapons of mass destruction. You are right. But it has overtaken itself now and there is a time to call a halt.”

  “But Greenfly doesn’t agree. Haven’t you any ideas what it is they’ve got hold of?”

  Storvac shook his head. He met my eyes. He said, “No, we have not.” I believed he was sincere; I asked him what he imagined I or 6D2 or even the British Government could do about something happening in Russia that wasn’t known even to the flapping ears and prodding noses of WUSWIPP. He said, “I cannot say. Perhaps nothing. But you have become involved now, Commander Shaw. You were here to meet the woman. That means your people are taking an interest.”

  “The woman,” I said. “Who was she? Not that it’s important. She was just a messenger. But what do you know of the Ladybirds, Storvac?”

  He shrugged. “Mere dissidents.”

  “They seem to know more than you or your WUSWIPP comrades.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you direct your efforts towards the Ladybirds? Or have you done just that – without success?”

  “Yes,” he said again. “They are dedicated. They refuse to speak, either to us or to the KGB. Some have gone to mental institutions. Some have gone to Siberia. Many have died.”

  “More torture,” I said, and thought about Felicity. I looked beyond Storvac, out through the window. The sun was shining now but it was late in the day and soon the dusk would come, and then perhaps more snow. The Harz region was beautiful, impressive, but the approach of night once again gave it menace and foreboding, it became again the kind of region where anything could happen. I wondered where Felicity was: it wouldn’t have been difficult to smuggle her across the border, at any rate with East German connivance. I cursed myself for not having contacted the army authorities, say at Minden, and reported her missing. I’d been in too much of a hurry to follow up Storvac’s telephone call … and anyway Max wouldn’t have thanked me for bringing in the military in the middle of an undercover assignment. 6D2 doesn’t work that way. Agents are out on a limb, always, and don’t run for help. Once in the field, they are no longer recognised. But I thought, now, that I’d owed it to Felicity to go against Max for once. Too late, however.

  Storvac was speaking again. “You have come here to West Germany to find out the same information as I. Why should we not work together?”

  “Why should I trust you, Storvac?”

  “Because you have no option, I think. And time, for all we know, may be short.” He paused. “This much we know – that there has been much coming and going at the Defence Ministry in Moscow for some days past, with high-ranking officers and Party members attending.”

  “So? Is that unusual?”

  Storvac said, “This time we believe it may be significant.”

  *

  I paid for the coffee and biscuits and left the restaurant with Storvac. For good or ill I had made my decision: I was putting myself in his hands. It was the only way I saw of carrying out my assignment, of making contact with the Ladybirds, the eaters of greenflies, and of following up the only lead I had to Felicity Mandrake. Storvac was insistent that something was brewing inside the Soviet Union, that matters were coming to a head and that Greenfly was deeply involved. All that, of course, accorded with what Arthur Webb had told me only yesterday in Focal House. To get at any information, now that the border crossing had ended in failure, I had to put myself the other side of the Iron Curtain. Storvac didn’t foresee any difficulties so long as I travelled with him. His WUSWIPP papers would see his car through all the check points on the Corridor. With those papers, as an Eastern Bloc VIP, there would positively be no East German boot inspection at Checkpoint Charlie, and I wouldn’t, he said, need to be in discomfort for long.

  We left the car park in the two cars, Storvac’s Volvo following my Volkswagen. The light was going now and the temperature was already dropping; the roads would be tricky as the slushy snow began to freeze. Some distance beyond the ski lodge, Storvac had said, there was a lay-by half way down a steep and winding hill where my car could in the prevaili
ng weather conditions be convincingly disposed of. That, he said, and I agreed, would be the best. Afterwards, people could read into it what they wished but there would be no proof of anything one way or the other.

  We took the first part of the journey fairly fast. My headlamps picked out the lay-by round a bend, a wide space with a wooden fence. Beyond, Storvac had said, was a long drop, with thickly-growing pines on the other side. He had also said there wouldn’t be much traffic around and he was right: we had scarcely passed a single car. As I approached, I threw the Volkswagen into a skid that churned up the snow nicely, and stopped some yards short of the fence. Behind me, Storvac slowed. I put the car in neutral, headed it for the far end of the fence, released the handbrake, got out into the snow, and pushed hard. The Volkswagen gathered speed down the slope of the lay-by and crashed through the fence, hurtled down that long drop and, as an added bonus, caught fire. I saw the flames, small at first then shooting up into the trees. Storvac came up as I began scuffing the snow about to obliterate my footprints, though with any luck more snow would soon come to do its own work on them. This done, I got into the front passenger seat of the Volvo and with no more time lost Storvac headed away north to slot himself into the Corridor for Berlin.

  I wondered how long it would be before the wreckage was found and how long it would be before Max in Focal House, hearing that I was now out of contact and that the Ladybird had failed to get through, would start putting two and two together and getting it wrong.

  It was a lonely feeling.

  *

  You can’t deviate from the Corridor. It was Berlin or nothing. I’d known all along that Storvac’s concept of ‘not long’ in the boot wasn’t mine. By the time I was released I was more than boot weary; I was cramped into immobility and we were safely through Checkpoint Charlie and right out of the eastern sector of Berlin. I didn’t need Storvac to tell me that even for non-VIPs Checkpoint Charlie presented few problems nowadays when going from west to east – it would have been a different matter the other way round, but these days plenty of tourists went through and things were more relaxed than a few years ago. Now we were heading for Russia via Poland – Poznan, Warsaw, Minsk in the Byelorussian Socialist Soviet Republic – a long drive, something over 700 miles from Berlin, and then perhaps some more since Minsk wouldn’t be journey’s end – or not necessarily. It seemed Storvac had a handy stopover there. I could use it as a base of operations if I wished.

  I said, “It might be as good as anywhere.”

  I thought about the huge vastness of the Russian land mass and had to admit to myself that I hadn’t any notion of where to begin. Or how. Felicity could be anywhere. The one hope was that WUSWIPP would have some information as to the whereabouts of its Greenfly faction – and even they would presumably be pretty widespread. Indeed, Storvac had already said as much. After Berlin he had handed over the driving to one of his thugs, a taciturn Russian who didn’t appear to have much if any English and sat glaring through the windscreen like an angry bear and gripping the wheel as though his life depended on it. Talk about tension, I thought – and the tension, as we penetrated deeper into Poland, had gripped me as well. This was the land of Walesa, of oppression of trade unions, of priestly murder, of the sudden visit in the dead of night, and somehow it managed to feel like it. I had been behind the Curtain before now, many times, but never quite like this, in a WUSWIPP car and not knowing what the next step might be. I looked out at a wintry landscape, snow as far as the eye could see, and at bleak industrial complexes as we came through or past towns, towers and chimneys rising into an iron-hard sky. Storvac seemed happier than he’d been in West Germany – after all, he was homeward bound and already in friendly territory. Even though he hadn’t been a wanted man in West Germany, he must have felt uneasy. We chatted; he wasn’t an unfriendly man. I remembered that he had been married. I asked about his wife. She had died two years ago and he had been very lonely. He had immersed himself in his work for WUSWIPP and the Party. He had, he said, two children, a boy and a girl, both now married and living far from his home, so he didn’t see much of them. He sounded sad; it may have been his sadness at that moment that struck me as particularly un-WUSWIPP-like: I’d never associated that bunch of bastards with domesticity or love of children, even their own children. But now, it seemed, they’d at last begun to be sickened by their own rottenness, by all they’d done in the past to make the world potentially a more dangerous, a more lethal place if war should come.

  Minsk is situated in old White Russia; the area around is fairly open country, traversed by hills that form the watershed between the Baltic and Black Sea basins, though part of it is flatter and well wooded, with extensive marshes. Minsk itself, Storvac told me, had a flourishing industry – cars and commercial vehicles, machine tools, radio and TV equipment, foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, general consumer goods. There had been growth in recent years and there had been a lot of new building. As we drove into the outskirts I saw this new building for myself: it was grim and characterless, row upon row of workers’ dwellings, high-rise flats for the most part, and barrack-like factories, and a dead cold wind blowing and bringing snow, a heavy fall that started just as we approached the city, and began to settle on the buildings so that by the time we had reached Storvac’s stopover a good deal of the ugliness had been overlaid.

  Storvac’s driver pulled the Volvo into the side of a street of warehouses and Storvac got out, motioning me to follow.

  There were not many people around – it was evening now and the weather was no doubt keeping the Russian workers indoors – but such as there were stared curiously at the expensive car and its obviously well-fed occupants. Foreign cars were uncommon inside Russia to say the least, and the faces of the onlookers showed envy and a degree of hostility, not too overt in case the occupants should be KGB. As we moved away Storvac said, “We are conspicuous, you see.”

  “So you don’t take the Volvo all the way?”

  “That is so, yes.” We walked on, crunching over snow frozen from an earlier fall, coat collars pulled up against the fresh blizzard; it wasn’t far short of that. We left the main thoroughfare and turned off to the left, past two more turnings, then left again, then right. Ahead I saw a tall block of flats, with lights coming on behind thin curtains. Storvac made for this. I followed behind him into a sort of lobby, a square place of bare and dirty concrete covered with graffiti as to the walls, with what appeared to be a depiction of President Reagan ahead of a monstrous penis rudely aimed – to the charitable it could have been a missile but I wasn’t feeling charitable. Storvac led the way up a flight of concrete stairs: there were two lifts, but both were out of action. “Vandalised,” Storvac said.

  “So you have them too.”

  “Yes. The discipline is not good now. Not what it was, as regards the young, though Gorbachev does what he can.

  “Sad,” I said, tongue in cheek. Storvac turned and gave me a dirty look.

  “You in the West,” he said, “are worse. Strikes, always strikes. And everyone taking drugs. And the police being viciously against the workers.”

  I shrugged; there was no point in arguing, in making comparisons with the KGB for instance. From now on, for the foreseeable future, Storvac was a mate. So I followed my old mate up seven storeys and there he stopped at a scuffed door and banged twice. There was no answer and he gave the door a push, a shake and a rattle. It didn’t seem to be bolted, just held on something like a Yale lock, not all that secure.

  “Yasnov must be out,” he said. “That is tiresome.”

  “So what do we do, Storvac?”

  He seemed uncertain and much put out. He dithered; and as he dithered I heard something. It was a low groan; low as it was, it carried an immensity of pain. I said, “Yasnov could be out, I suppose. But someone isn’t.”

  4

  At Storvac’s request I put my shoulder to the door and butted hard. The lock broke away and the door flew open and we crashed in. We heard the groans
again, coming from a room opening off to the right of a narrow hallway, and we went in fast. Never had I seen anything like the scene: I was confronted by a rough cross screwed into a wall, a cross with the naked body of a young woman hanging from it with blood coming from the outstretched hands and from the crossed ankles. It took me several seconds before I realized I was watching a crucifixion, even though I knew crucifixion had by no means died out with the diabolical earthly death of Jesus of Nazareth. They still make use of it today in some of the Middle Eastern countries and there is quite a sale for crucifixion equipment. I had read somewhere about the process and until I’d read it I’d simply had no idea, no possible conception of what a terrible death crucifixion is. The nails themselves, driven through some particularly agonising nerve, bring ceaseless pain; but death occurs by strangulation, oddly enough to the layman. Not so much strangulation as suffocation: the way the body’s weight falls lifts up the lungs or diaphragm so that breathing becomes almost impossible. In the early pre-Christian days, nails were not in fact driven through the ankles: the body hung directly from the hands so that the suffocation process was faster; then some bright bastard dreamed up the nailed-ankle idea. A real brainwave; with the weight to that extent taken off, the agony of dying lasted much longer.

  All this passed through my mind as Storvac and I went into action. The idea, I said, was first to lay the body flat so that its weight came off; and we were tugging at the cross when some of the retaining screws gave way too suddenly, pulling out from the wall behind, and cross and body crashed down on us, spattering us with blood. We struggled clear, turned the cross over so that the body was laid on its back, and Storvac went on a hunt for something with which to pull out nails. And now I saw that in falling the girl had struck her head on a metal bracket looking as though it had once held a washbasin. The metal had penetrated the skull and had broken the bone away as the body had gone on down. There was a lot of mess and the girl was out of her misery.