Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  *

  When the door was unlocked daylight came in. I was brought breakfast and as soon as I had eaten I was taken out again to the car. There was sun now, not very warming but it was a change from the snow. The sky looked clear now. This time I saw Felicity; she was getting into the second car. There was no chance for us to speak and no chance even to catch her eye because she didn’t look round. Anyway, I was relieved to see that she was unharmed and to know that we were more or less together.

  With the same companions as the day before, we drove out of the gateway, through the town. Siezin had locked the house up on leaving, and once again it stood empty and anonymous. Coming out of Lyubytino we took the road signposted for a place called Nebolchi. For much of the way we ran close to a railway line. Behind the car’s glass the sun brought some warmth and the freeze in my bones began to thaw. There was plenty of lying snow and care was still necessary, hence we didn’t speed. That snow was piled thickly to the sides of the road: the snow-ploughs had been out before the last fall.

  From Nebolchi, which was north of Lyubytino as I saw from the sun’s position, we turned west again. West – nearer and nearer, but still so far … After Nebolchi the road signs were for Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland.

  I asked the question: “Are we heading for Leningrad?”

  “Yes,” Siezin said.

  I was struck by an idea, a theory. I asked, “Are we by any chance going to sea?”

  Siezin laughed. “You shall see,” he said. He said nothing further, but he murmured something to Dr Kholov, and again there was a laugh. We drove on beneath the climbing sun. The countryside was barren, desolate; under its blanket of snow it was featureless and depressing. Around lunchtime Siezin opened up a hamper that had been brought from the house in Lyubytino, and he and Kholov ate bread and sausage and drank some wine from a bottle. I saw that the driver and the guard were also eating, the latter feeding the former as he drove. Just a happy picnic scene, but I wasn’t invited.

  It was again dusk as we entered Leningrad. The loom of the city could be seen from far off, an immense spread of light. As we came through the outskirts my mind took a turn towards history: this had once been St Petersburg, capital of the Czarist Russian Empire, setting of the Winter Palace, magnificent even in a city of great palaces filled with treasures. All that glitter had been ended by the revolution; and in more recent times Hitler’s armies had come here and the Russians had put up their gallant defence against the Nazi legions so reminiscent of the hordes of Attila the Hun.

  As we crossed the Neva River I recalled that it froze from around November to the end of April, but of course there would be icebreakers to assist navigation. As the cars took our party through the streets of industrial Leningrad I could make out away to the right the big cranes and gantries along the loading berths in the port, many of them outlined, as the day darkened, by arc lamps, high-slung yardarm groups over the ships as they took their cargoes or discharged them. A busy scene, even at nightfall. No respite for the docker comrades.

  We were not making for the port. We were heading away from it. I felt the tension in the staff car now: Dr Kholov was tapping a hand on the arm rest at his left side and his face had tightened up. Siezin was lying back in his seat, hunched but watchful, eyes everywhere. There was very little traffic for a big seaport and quite soon I saw that we were beginning to come clear of the city, into the outskirts to the south of the Neva, and within the next half-hour we had left Leningrad behind.

  *

  It was cold again now, very cold with the onset of the night. I felt the bitter chill as I got out of the car. I stepped out onto ice and would have slid on my backside if the gunman behind me hadn’t made a grab in time. Ahead of me there was a bright light which vanished when a door was shut. I had no idea now where we were except that it had to be somewhere on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland since, in a shaft of moonlight, I could see the glint of water stretching a long way. I could also see Felicity being marched ahead of two men from the second car, towards where the lights had showed.

  “Into the building, please,” Siezin said from behind me. I moved on, cautiously. The building was long and low, rather like a customs shed. As I got nearer I could see that it was alongside a wharf and I saw also that there was broken ice around a small coaster made fast to bollards on the shore. I knew that the southern fringes of the Gulf of Finland were less susceptible to the freeze than those to the north. It began indeed to look like a sea journey after all. I felt something like a rush of blood to the head: at sea, we would at least be outside the land barriers of the Soviet Union and never mind that we would be aboard, presumably, a Soviet vessel.

  It would be a kind of freedom.

  Currently there wasn’t much freedom aspect. I was marched into the shed, into the source of the bright light. There were packing cases around and about a dozen men waiting, wrapped to the eyeballs in warm clothing. Siezin went across and spoke to them. Some were wearing what looked like uniform trousers under the wrappings, others were not. Some wore high boots. I got the impression this was a mix of KGB, Soviet Navy and merchant seamen. Dr Kholov started checking the crates, numbering them off or something, accompanied by two of the waiting men. When he had finished he gave a nod and the men, those not in any particular uniform, began manhandling them out of the shed and into the open by the wharf. Soon after this I heard the sound of machinery, either a dockside crane or the ship’s winches putting them aboard, and when the sounds ceased one of the men came back inside and reported to Siezin.

  Siezin gestured towards me. “We go aboard now,” he said.

  I was marched with the others up a narrow gangway whence I dropped down to the ship’s foredeck. The crates, lashed down and covered with canvas tarpaulins, had been set on top of the hatches to form a deck cargo. I was taken into the after superstructure and pushed into a small cabin with no port, and locked in. I had seen Felicity go aboard ahead of me but had then lost sight of her. Soon after I had been locked up I heard the sounds of the ship getting under way, the ropes and wires being cast off and brought inboard, the ring of the engineroom telegraph from time to time as we manoeuvred off the berth, then ahead and on course through the sandbanks and the broken ice and the many, many islands that dotted the Gulf of Finland, heading presumably for the wider waters of the Baltic beyond Tallinn.

  Dr Kholov evidently meant to make his interception from seaward – I’d got as far as the obvious. But it wasn’t until the engines slowed and then stopped some hours later and I was taken on deck beneath a cold but calm dawn that I saw what Kholov’s transmission base was to be. We had stopped alongside a black shape low in the water, the conning tower rearing like an immense fin, sinister beneath that dawn that might well be the last before the northern hemisphere disintegrated, stopped alongside a nuclear-powered hunter-killer, one of the USSR’s attack submarines.

  14

  I knew that the Russian missile-launching submarines were based not in the Gulf of Finland but with the Northern Fleet at Murmansk on the Kola inlet; if they were anything like the British ones they would be immense: three-deck-level jobs, their displacement tonnage not far off that of the old World War Two cruisers. The attack submarines were a lot smaller, which stood to reason: I couldn’t be sure, but I doubted if the missile monsters would find an easy passage submerged through the narrows into the Kattegat and the open sea and in this connection I was making two logical assumptions: that Kholov wouldn’t be transmitting long distance from inside the Baltic, and that we were meant to proceed outwards submerged, both of which assumptions were later confirmed by Comrade Siezin.

  We all clambered aboard the casing, aboard the fore deck, slithering on the ice, holding tight to the lifelines that guided us towards a hatch in the base of the conning tower.

  We entered a warm world, a world that hummed electrically about our ears. Shining steel ladders, plastic-covered steel decks, steel bulkheads, alleyways shimmering into the distance beneath the glaring
electric bulbs, alleyways that were broken up by watertight doors currently standing open. The sub’s captain came down from the conning tower in person to welcome Siezin aboard. This was all very official, unless the captain had also been suborned by Greenfly and was willing to take the risk on something that he believed would be no risk at all once Greenfly won out. Another rat, leaving the sinking ship of state? Greenfly was probably the better prospect now.

  The moment all the crates had been transferred and brought down through a big loading hatch in the after casing, the submarine got under way and I was taken with Dr Kholov to what was plainly the control-room. There was a mass of computerised equipment, bank upon bank of keyboards, screens, dials, gauges … green flickering light and a continual ping-ping as a rating seated before one of the screens moved a milled-edged wheel.

  Siezin was currently absent. But Felicity was brought in and told to sit on a let-down stool. Then I was told to sit on a similar stool on the opposite side of the control-room from Felicity. At a word from an officer, two armed seamen moved in, one behind each of us.

  There was silence except for some distant banging: the crates, I supposed. The control-room itself, apart from the pinging sound, was extraordinarily quiet, almost a cathedral hush, and somehow antiseptic. You couldn’t imagine a good old seafaring British cockroach having the temerity to butt in. I thought of what I’d heard about the old conventionally-powered submarines, tin cigars with all hands living cheek by jowl in what you would now call squalor, in dim and fetid air and clothing that wasn’t changed for the duration of a whole patrol. And every smell imaginable: oil, battery acid, cooking, grease … it had been pretty abominable really but the atmosphere, if thick, had always been cheerful. Or so I’d been told. I wouldn’t have called this cheerful: the faces were grim and tense, the eyes watchful. They couldn’t, I supposed, be blamed: when you were about to start a train of events that would shatter more than forty years of peace you were bound to tense up a little.

  There was a clatter on the ladder. Siezin came down. He gave me a speculative glance. A second man came down behind, and Siezin turned towards him, then spoke to me.

  “This is Comrade Smith,” he said.

  Comrade Smith: the name meant nothing to me. He was a nondescript little bloke who grinned, rather sheepishly I thought, and said, “Cheers.” Then I ticked over: the name of the defector of whom Katrina had told me had not in fact been Smith; but any name would do if you wanted to make the change and I guessed that Comrade Smith was the scientist from the Ministry of Defence, the man with personal and detailed knowledge of the missile-firing submarines of the British Navy, the man who was going to do his screen-test stuff. I would have thought his presence rendered my own obsolete, but supposed they had to do something with me now they’d got me back. I couldn’t have been allowed to wander off and alert the West, after all.

  I nodded at Comrade Smith’s greeting but didn’t say anything in response. A few moments later orders came down from the conning tower and the submarine increased speed, the hum of the motors rising to a high whine for a while before settling down. Soon after that a number of ratings were to be seen moving along the alleyway from for’ard, manhandling Kholov’s crates into the control-room, a proceeding which the doctor watched over with an eagle eye, clicking his tongue at intervals and urging, as I took it to be, care. Once the heavy crates were positioned he began unpacking and arranging his set-up. Out came a screen and a bird’s-nest of electric leads, a square metal box with a number of dials and knobs, and an assortment of other gear. The medical side was there as well: hypodermics, phials, electrodes, sachets and so on. But this time no nurse. Comrade Smith was looking at the hypodermics and I fancied there was a worried aspect, and I laughed.

  Comrade Smith looked at me. “What’s funny?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Oh, nothing. But it won’t hurt. And I’ll tell you something else for free: it won’t work either.”

  “Perhaps it didn’t, with you.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You know about that, do you?”

  “Yes. But I know more than you do. Up to a point, it did work. With you.”

  Maybe he was right; there had been that weird semi-dream and then Senyavin’s, or had it been the doctor’s, subsequent satisfaction with my performance under deep drug therapy, if such was the word. I still didn’t know how I’d reacted, not for sure. I looked at Comrade Smith again. I asked, “So now it’s your turn to go into a trance, is it?”

  “It’s not a trance exactly.”

  “Well, never mind the precise term,” I said, and looked him up and down. “What about the moral aspect?”

  He flushed a little. He was a pale-faced man, spotty, and the flush showed. He said, “How moral is political life in the West, for God’s sake?”

  “I wouldn’t link God with this, Comrade. You’ve gone over to anti-Christ. I won’t insult your intelligence by asking you if you really understand what the result’s going to be. Have you any family?” I recollected from the press reports at the time that in fact he had: elderly parents and a sister. Never been married.

  He said defensively, “Yes, I have.”

  “But you didn’t consider them.”

  “Family feelings can’t be allowed to stand in the way. It was the same in wartime, wasn’t it?”

  I said, “Not quite, but I get your point. You’re going to be a big boy in the Soviet Union, aren’t you? The man who gave communism its biggest boost … you’ll never starve, will you, Comrade Smith? Hero of the Soviet Union, along with Dr Kholov. Red carpet treatment here on out. Taking the salute from the Kremlin wall, with all the ageing brass. That’s if it all goes according to plan. What if it doesn’t, Comrade Smith?”

  He said, “Oh, it’s not going to fail, believe me,” and then he turned away, back to Kholov, who was showing signs of impatience at our conversation. Left to my thoughts again, I tried to make an assessment of where we might be heading and when we would get there. The speed … thirty knots probably – they wouldn’t be lingering at this stage. I believed thirty knots to be the maximum available to the British nuclear-powered submarines either surfaced or submerged, but possibly the Russians had more. Anyway at thirty knots for most of the way, and allowing for a probably slow and careful passage of the narrows, and assuming we were currently somewhere off Tallinn, I reckoned that inside forty-eight hours we could be somewhere off the Western Approaches above the Bay of Biscay. We would have all Biscay and the North Atlantic as a hunting ground, the objective being, obviously, one of the British submarines on its sixty-day patrol, the one that was going to be made to loose off its missiles.

  Of course, the patrol areas were top secret: weren’t they? I gave a hollow laugh. Comrade Siezin looked round, lifting an eyebrow but not commenting. Comrade Siezin would have all the answers. I wondered once again if anything at all was secret now. In the Kremlin, or in the heart of Greenfly, they probably knew how many times the British captain in the target submarine changed his socks …

  I wondered which of our submarine fleet it would be. Renown, Repulse, Revenge, Resolution? Oldies now, but those were the names that came to mind. I wondered what confusing thoughts I might dream up if I was connected again to the screen.

  *

  It was an hour later when the captain came down from the conning tower and the two planesmen took up their stations for controlling the depth and angle of the boat. The ship’s company went to diving stations; the periscope was sent up and the captain put his eye to it. Now the course was SSW. We would be moving down past the islands off the coast of Estonia to come between the USSR and Gotland and on to the narrows and the Kattegat. The Swedes or the Danes, probably both, were bound of course to pick us up on their detectors; I asked Comrade Siezin about that and he laughed: they wouldn’t interfere, he said, but didn’t go into any explanation and I was left with the reflection that the USSR was a very big, powerful and angry neighbour. I remarked that the passage of the narrows would be tricky.


  “Not so,” Siezin said. “Our navigators know the area well. So much practice.”

  I nodded. “Sure. You’ve never given a damn for the sanctity of territorial rights, have you?”

  “There is no sanctity of these waters, the passage is free – ships of many nations enter the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland through the Kattegat.”

  But, I thought to myself, war vessels on clandestine missions are a different kettle of fish … as if anticipating my next query Comrade Siezin went on, “You may think it would have been easier if we had used a missile-firing submarine from Murmansk.”

  “The thought did cross my mind. Freer waters and all that. More direct.”

  “Yes. Navigationally … not politically.”

  I got his point. “You mean the Murmansk naval command is with the official Kremlin, not with Greenfly?”

  “For now yes. Afterwards it will be different.”

  “You hope,” I said. Nothing more from Comrade Siezin. The submarine was now down to the depth setting ordered by the captain and was away through the Baltic for the narrows and eventually the Skagerrak and the North Sea and the final act. Food was brought for us soon after this. We sat there in the control-room and ate, Felicity and me, Dr Kholov, Comrades Siezin and Smith, and the guards who had come in the car from Moscow. I had little appetite even though I was in fact in want of food. Siezin went into an expansive mood; it was partly his confidence that put me off thoughts of eating.

  “It will not be long,” he said, as satisfied as a happy cat. “Not as time goes.”

  “And afterwards you’ll have all the time in the world.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Plans already made, of course,” I said. “I refer to the situation in Moscow – in the Kremlin. Your lot takes over – right?”

  Again Siezin nodded. “When the reports come in from the north. As soon as the missiles strike, the Soviets will be ready under their new leadership.”