Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  I shrugged; she was probably right. The sticking out of heads didn’t always pay and there could be some information to be obtained from the body. I came back into the warmth and Ivan Melensky replaced the bar across the door. The ropes around the body were cut away with a long knife from the kitchen and the furs removed. I had been right enough: the man was dead, opened eyes staring up in the flickering light from the oil lamp and the fire. I had a moment of total shock, and this must have shown in my face, for Olga Menshikova, looking at me, said, “You know this man?”

  “I’ve met him,” I said. I had indeed: the corpse was that of Radley-Bewick, our man in Moscow. “You, too, know him?”

  “Yes. Comrade Radley-Bewick.”

  The name of Piers Radley-Bewick, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, scarcely went hand-in-hand with Comrade. But the Ladybirds might know him only as what he had been supposed to be – a spy for the Soviet who’d got out of Britain one jump ahead of M15. But I wondered if Olga Menshikova in fact knew he had been a plant, set to grow in Russian soil for the benefit of 6D2 and indirectly of Whitehall.

  I asked, “What do you know of Comrade Radley-Bewick?”

  She was still a stone wall. “What do you know of him?” she returned.

  I stuck to the cover story. “I know he spied for the Soviet Union.”

  “In Britain?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She nodded but made no comment. “We must examine the body,” she said. I believe she had had a notion similar to mine, that in death Radley-Bewick might reveal some sort of a clue. It was a long shot, of course, because his killers wouldn’t have been fools, but it was a routine to be gone through. The furs were removed and the clothing stripped away. Radley-Bewick had continued to dress like an elegant Englishman: well-cut grey pin-stripe suit, shirt from Jermyn Street, gold cufflinks, discreet socks, handmade shoes. He hadn’t been dressed for the snows and the wide-open countryside: he could have been killed in Moscow, in his flat. There was obvious significance in his having been brought here, to be dumped on the Ladybirds’ doorstep. We stripped the body right down to the bare flesh and made a minute examination. Or I did, while Olga Menshikova went through the clothing with Felicity’s assistance.

  Cause of death? Frankly, I had no idea. There were no marks of violence, no gunshot wounds, nothing of that nature. There had been no crucifixion. I suspected something like poison, but there was no agonised expression, no clenched teeth. Some sort of gas? There were plenty of ways. Greenfly would know them all. But so would WUSWIPP, and so would the KGB. Who was it that had got onto Radley-Bewick and discovered he was no comrade?

  My examination was very thorough but Radley-Bewick had nothing to offer. Not on his body, and not in his clothing either. His pockets had been meticulously emptied. There wasn’t even a handkerchief. We’d met a blank.

  Felicity asked, “What do we do with him?”

  “Put him out in the snow,” I said. “With Comrade Menshikova’s approval, of course?” I looked at the leader, and she nodded. Out there, he would keep if we wanted him again; the ground itself would be much too hard for decent burial. Inside, the warmth of the fire would get at him; I’m no doctor but I believed he’d been dead some time already, certainly more than just a day or two. Meanwhile there were other considerations and they had already occurred to Olga Menshikova as well as me.

  “Now there is danger,” she said. “Somebody knows of this place, of our presence.”

  “You have other safe houses?” I asked.

  “Of course, yes. But very far off.”

  “The weather’s pretty poor for movement – on both sides.”

  “The men who brought the body got here, and so can others, Comrade Shaw.”

  “Do you mean to move out, then, Comrade Menshikova?”

  She smiled at me. “What would you do in my place?”

  I said I’d move out. I also said that she’d been a shade over confident in calling the cottage a safe house in the first place. That was a little bitchy of me, really: nothing is ever a hundred per cent safe and the security tends not to last all that long. Moving on is always a good principle. But then she surprised me: she said the Ladybirds would stay put. I asked why and got another surprise: she said she was, as I knew, a Menshikov, a one-time aristocrat. The Menshikovs still retained some of the old ideas, notably that of noblesse oblige, a phrase I would never have expected to hear inside the Soviet Union. Old bent Ivan Melensky, a man of greater age even than I had suspected, was the son of an old retainer who had served a Menshikov in the days before the revolution. Ivan himself had been born in those days and Olga, last of the Menshikovs, regarded him as a responsibility and she would not let him down, would not leave him to the mercies of whoever might strike at the now very unsafe house.

  “Take him with you,” I said, but that she scorned. Ivan Melensky was too old. This was his home, which he had never left, which he had clung onto right through the collectivisation and other trials and tribulations of the peasantry under communism. Olga Menshikova and her Ladybirds would remain to protect him and his home, even at the cost of their own lives. I said I could appreciate her feelings but she was acting like a lunatic in the circumstances. All that the Ladybirds had stood for – whatever that might be – was at stake. How could she, in effect, back out now?

  She had an answer to that too. “There are other Ladybirds in Russia. And our part is very nearly played,” she said. “Now it is up to you and Comrade Mandrake.”

  I looked at Comrade Mandrake in bewilderment. I spoke again to Olga Menshikova. “What is up to us?” I asked her. “You’ve not been very forthcoming, have you? Isn’t it time you came clean – told us what’s going on?”

  She shook her head. The fanaticism was in her eyes again, the fanaticism that was keeping her to her family’s concept of concern for old retainers, the fanaticism that had driven her to lead the ambushes and explosions in factories and so on that Arthur Webb had told me about. I lost my temper when she shook her head so adamantly and, I thought, so stupidly. I charged her with the ambushes and killings and asked her what the point of that had been, what she was hoping for, what all this business was about and where did Britain come into it – where did I come into it?

  I got a partial answer only. The explosions had been confined to property managed on behalf of the Soviet Ministry of Defence; when I asked why the Ladybirds had attacked their own country’s defensive potential she commented that the Soviet build-up was for offence and I couldn’t disagree with so very Western a sentiment. I said, “So you’re not acting for your country, Comrade Menshikova.”

  “I am,” she answered. “Our people do not wish for war. We do not wish to see our land attacked with nuclear weapons.”

  “You speak of your people. What about your leadership, the men in power in the Kremlin?”

  “They are of two minds, Comrade Shaw. It is Greenfly that is for war, and Greenfly has support in the Kremlin, among the wild men.”

  I felt maybe we were getting somewhere at last, and I pressed, but she would say no more on that point. She turned the subject onto the ambushes in which troops had been killed. “The Ladybirds did not do that, have never done so. We were tarred with someone else’s brush. We are easy scapegoats.” She gave a rather bitter smile. “We are women. For women, it is much the same whether you are East or West.”

  “Who do you suspect, then? Greenfly?”

  She shrugged. “I do not know. I think not Greenfly. And it is of little consequence … it could be the KGB, using all means of discrediting us.”

  “Have they ever used more direct means, Comrade Menshikova?”

  “Oh, yes. Many times. Killings, arrests with no trial, banishment to Siberia … we have lost so many of our number.”

  I carried on probing, or trying to. Olga Menshikova stood firm. All she would say was that I must leave the cottage: I was the important one. I had come into Russia. I must leave again with the information that was to be got safely into Br
itain. I could do no good by remaining with the Ladybirds now. I had to move on. To move was going to be dangerous, she said unnecessarily. That was why the information could not be passed to me yet. In any case there were documents that were not in her possession. I asked her where these documents were. She refused to say precisely; I was angry but I understood. That was the way things worked, in the interest of security for all. As for contacts, you knew two people only: the man – or woman – ahead of you in the hierarchy, and the one behind. The Soviet Union was no easy place in which to live, still less in which to oppose the State or a part of it.

  She gave me an address in Moscow, and a password; also a name – Katrina. It was a code name. I must make contact with Katrina, of whom she gave me a description. She’d be found at the given address. Olga Menshikova would provide us with one of her women as a guide to the main road that led to Moscow and then we would be on our own. After this we made immediate preparations for departure. While I’d been talking, the two women whose skis we had borrowed had returned from across the ice and old Ivan Melensky had served the food and primitive though it was, it was good and nourishing and it gave us as good a start off as possible. Of course, my revolver had been removed from me back at the house where the ESP sessions had taken place; Olga Menshikova offered us a couple of small, strippable sub-machine guns, machine-pistols would have been a more accurate term. They were reasonably light and concealable and I said I would take them gladly but would ditch them if they looked like compromising us and we would go unarmed thereafter. She gave us some ammo and then as we were strapping on the borrowed skis, the Ladybird leader spoke of the dead man.

  “Comrade Radley-Bewick,” she said. “He had, I think, come close to the facts perhaps – ”

  “Which was why he was killed.”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded; I’d got her point. “He’ll have had friends. Do you know who they are?”

  “No,” she said. “Except Katrina.” Again I understood. You had to be very careful about friends. But there were, nevertheless, friends and friends. Radley-Bewick would have had some, women perhaps, who were apart from his work. They could be useful to me now, but Olga Menshikova still had no more names to offer.

  *

  The journey was a daunting prospect. Moscow, I was told, was around two hundred miles to the east. But for one useful fact it would clearly have been an impossibility, for we couldn’t hitch lifts even if any traffic was moving; and we couldn’t walk it within the shortening time-scale. But, Olga Menshikova said, a little over a mile to the east along the main road to Moscow we would pick up the railway line that ran from Biala Podlaska in Poland, through Minsk and Smolensk and Gagarin to Moscow. There was a bridge where the line crossed the Dneiper; and because of work in progress all trains slowed to a crawl as they made their approach. Each night a goods train ran and would reach the bridge at approximately three a.m. We would have plenty of time to reach the bridge before the train. It should not be impossible for us to swing ourselves up onto one of the couplings and then find a way into a truck, some of which would be open ones with tarpaulin covers. We would have to disembark before arrival in the Moscow terminus but that also, if risky, should not be impossible. In any case, it was the only way. Before we left the cottage, Olga Menshikova provided each of us with a heavily quilted anorak, light but warm. Then she took us each by the hand and wished us luck. We were going to need both that and the anoraks. The cold was wicked as we went out into the snow, a cruel contrast to the warmth in that old-world, lamp-lit room. The snow had stopped again, but the last fall had been heavy, and Radley-Bewick was no more than a slight hump in the white. I thought of him as I had known him: I’d not seen much of him but I’d liked him well enough – a sad man, as such expatriates as he always are, with a trustful look about him, not unlike a favourite spaniel. Maybe he had been trustful once too often …

  We slid over the snow, pushing on our skis and ski sticks, following the guide. We reached the road quite soon, and took off the skis and handed them back: we wouldn’t want to be cluttered with them when we reached the railway line. The guide waved a farewell and turned away, back to the cottage. I was sorry to see her go: it was a lonely feeling, in the heart of Soviet Russia, in the snows of winter.

  We crunched east along the road. Felicity was shivering; I could almost hear her teeth chatter.

  “Keep moving as fast as you can,” I said. I was thankful for the hot soup that was inside us but its effect wasn’t going to last. The only hope was that, if we picked up that train, we would be able to get into a truck. If we had to cling to the couplings for long, we would freeze, literally. Olga Menshikova had said the train was due into Moscow at 6 a.m. We would hope to get off in the outskirts and walk into the city. Unmolested? By the time we got there we would very likely be dirty and bedraggled, but the idea, to cover my rudimentary Russian for one thing, was to pass ourselves off as English tourists. If anyone asked for identification, we would have had it.

  It seemed a hell of a long way to where the road picked up the rail track, much longer than Olga Menshikova’s estimate. However, we made it and found the workings, the repair job, as deserted by any living thing as we’d been told to expect. There was just a set of signals: single track bridge-crossing was in operation, and the signal for Moscow stood at clear. I looked at the luminous dial of my watch: Senyavin’s men had left me with that. It was only 2-05 a.m. Almost an hour yet to go. We crept into the shelter of a workman’s hut and Felicity collapsed onto dirty wooden boards. It wasn’t really very much warmer than the outside air but it least it would help if the snow returned. As it happened, it didn’t.

  “This is bloody impossible,” Felicity said with feeling. “We’ll never make it.”

  “We’ll make it all right,” I said, trying to convince myself. “When we get to Moscow – ” I broke off.

  “When we get to Moscow – what?”

  I laid a hand on her shoulder and whispered her to keep quiet. I’d heard a sound, faint, but unmistakable. Not the train’s approach: someone was outside.

  9

  Felicity whispered, “The men who brought Radley-Bewick, do you think?”

  I said, “Probably.” Before leaving the cottage and the Ladybirds I’d had in mind the chance that the corpse bringers could be somewhere around still and I’d determined that if we were attacked then I would use the guns Olga Menshikova had given us and thereafter take my chance of leaving possible KGB operatives for dead inside Russia. As it had turned out, there had been no sign of anyone en route. Now it began to seem as though they’d bided their time, seeing the railway bridge as a likely enough contact point. But it didn’t have to be them. All I could do was wait and see.

  After that first faint sound there was silence for a while, the silence of the grave under the lying snow. I wondered, as I waited for something to happen, how the snowfall would have affected the train schedules. All the engines would be equipped with snow ploughs as a matter of routine in the Russian winter; and since the Russian winter was an annual event, each year as harsh as the next, due account would always be taken of the snow, unlike in England where everything went haywire at the first hint of freezing conditions. It would have paid better for Senyavin to have taken the train, if only he could have done so with Felicity and me as his prisoners …

  The sounds came again: nearer this time. I slid my gun forward, covering the entry to the workmen’s hut, covering the wooden door. I could not identify the sounds: obviously not footfalls, which would never have been audible on the thick snow. The squeak of a boot was the best I could think up – something leather, anyway. But if whoever it was knew we were in the hut, surely he wouldn’t just fling the door open so that he would be silhouetted against the snow’s white, the perfect target for anyone inside? He could be relying on the element of surprise, now lost though he wouldn’t know it. That, and a fast traverse of a sub-machine gun to fill the hut with a lead spray.

  I looked again at my w
atch: 2.15 now. If the originator of the sounds just stayed outside until the Moscow-bound goods train was heard, that would be all he needed to do. No risks for himself: he would simply bring us down after we emerged, lying hidden and firing at our backs, as we made for the bridge.

  I whispered these thoughts to Felicity, my lips close against her ear: her hair tickled my nose. I said, “I’m going to sneeze.”

  “Oh God, no!” It was a prayer.

  I held onto that sneeze; the effort was superhuman. I shoved my handkerchief against shut lips and pressed with my tongue against the roof of my mouth, the latter ploy an old trick taught me by my mother when as a child I was seized with sneezing fits in church. When the sneeze subsided I whispered, “I’m going for the door, Felicity.”

  “Do I come too?”

  “No. Stay right where you are.”

  “Watch it,” she said. I moved away from her, very slowly, very carefully, feeling my way with one hand while I held the machine-pistol with the other, reaching out with each foot in turn so that I didn’t knock over any of the clutter inside the hut. The door was shut, not locked of course, on a sort of latch, a wood batten held at one end with a screw and the tongue slotting into a recess in another piece of wood, workable from inside and out. I reached, or rather fumbled in the dark, for this batten, all set to fling the door open and use my own surprise tactic.

  As I touched it, I felt it rise against my hand. I’d had half a hope that the intruder might turn out to be some kind of animal seeking food or shelter but now that hope was gone, and there was only one thing for it.

  I stepped aside and with my free hand flung the door open then fired a burst into the night, weaving the gun from side to side. At first I saw no man but then I saw the indentation in the snow and the black thing filling it. Then I heard the chatter of an automatic weapon away to my right, and I flung myself down. I heard bullets thud into the wooden walls of the hut. I used the gun again, weaving to the right, a long burst and then another just to make sure.