Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  “I can’t help,” I said.

  “I believe you can. You can fill in the missing parts.”

  “I’m not psychic,” I pointed out. “Why not try Comrade Smith?”

  That was when Siezin began to lose his temper, and lashed out at me. My head rocked backwards but I stayed on my feet. “I am asking you. You will do as I say. First I wish to know to whom the signal is addressed.”

  I glanced down again at the transcript, what there was of it: even the addressee was corrupt, hence his first query. The body of the message contained a reference to myself and Miss Mandrake, only Siezin wasn’t to know that since Max, who would presumably have been the originator, had used code names. The place-name Braunlage had come across in the decyphering and there was a reference to Hans Schulz, to Greenfly, and to Moscow; also to the Supreme Soviet.

  That was about all. It foxed me as well as Comrade Siezin, and I said so. It crossed my mind that the message could have been addressed to Radley-Bewick, who had died only very recently. The news of his death wouldn’t necessarily have reached London yet. Or if it had, then the message might have been addressed to another of our men inside Russia and could have referred to the death. All that, however, was supposition. But I still wasn’t going to assist Siezin, even with guesswork. Frankly, I saw no particular reason for all the anxiety in Siezin’s vicious face. He held all the cards. He was set to take over. I didn’t imagine Max could do anything about that. No more than I could …

  Siezin said, “You know the mind of 6D2. You know the way your people work. You will interpret the signal.”

  Again I said I couldn’t. Something hard took me in the kidney region, and I doubled. I was brought upright again by a hard blow to the jaw. Then my legs were kicked away from beneath me and I went flat on the deck. Next my head was kicked and I saw bright lights, flashes, stars. When I tried to drag myself up by a hand on a metal shelf, the hand was almost squashed to bloody pulp by the butt of a sub-machine gun wielded by one of Siezin’s thugs. The gunshot wound in my arm opened up again beneath the bandage. In the end I was saved by the bell: more vital matters supervened when a telephone burred and Siezin himself answered it.

  The Iron Duke was going into exercise firing.

  I was taken back, almost carried back, to the control-room where I was thrown to the deck in a heap at Felicity’s feet.

  *

  Exercise firing was a lengthy process and a fraught one; no doubt exercises could always go wrong. Even from the screen I could feel the tension inside the Iron Duke. At first sight Comrade Smith had looked already dead. His face was white and strained, with black circles beneath the eyes, and his only movement was a facial twitch that began soon after I had been brought back. Then he started very heavy breathing, came out with abundant sweat that ran down his face and neck. He was like a leaf, shivering violently all over. He was covered with more electrodes now, some leading to the screen, others leading to Dr Kholov’s extra-sensory perception control box, for want of a better name. Another box, a largish cabinet in fact, stood ready behind one of the planesmen with Comrade Siezin in charge of it. On top of the box was a metal plate and in Siezin’s right hand there was a thin bar, also of metal, like a biro, connected at one end to a socket in the side of the box. From the box another electric lead ran to some of the submarine’s gadgetry. I made a series of guesses: when Siezin brought the biro-like bar down, touched it against the metal plate, the submarine would, using its own power and communications system perhaps, transmit to the Iron Duke. The transmission would interrupt the exercise at the critical moment, activating the firing lever of the pistol which by then would be held by the Iron Duke’s captain. From then on the exercise would be for real.

  Siezin glanced down at me and our eyes met. From the corner of one of mine I was aware of the man with the submachine gun, the latter aimed at me and held close. Siezin laughed. He said, “Perhaps you follow what is to happen.” He seemed to have forgotten about the signal now.

  I said, “Perhaps I do.” As that message came to mind I had a sudden flash of hope that something had leaked out of Russia, something that had caused Max to make the signal. If that was the case then he might even now be doing his best to persuade the fleet headquarters in Northwood to negate the exercise and bring the Iron Duke to the surface. But it was a very slim hope: the leak would have had to be very comprehensive to make Max connect a Russian submarine into the picture. I had another hope, an even slimmer one, that the Iron Duke’s missiles would not be armed with their warheads. Of course they would be; that was the whole point of the patrols – instant readiness for war. There were procedures to inhibit any accidental firings. And just then, as though in tune with my thoughts, Siezin went into some explanations as to what was going to take place.

  He said, “When I transmit, which will be at a very exact moment, I shall by-pass the British procedures, the fail-safe interlockings that would normally prevent the discharge of the missiles. Do you understand?”

  “I follow the theory,” I said. “To put it into practice may be a different thing. Don’t you agree?”

  “There will be no hitch.” Siezin was very confident.

  I said from my position on the deck, “This’ll be for the first time – obviously. You haven’t done it for real before. With any luck, you’ll blow yourself up instead.”

  Siezin didn’t bother to answer that. He was concentrating on the screen now, on Comrade Smith’s transmitted revelations as the defector’s mind roved around aboard the Iron Duke. Smith was in fact doing well. The whole thing, the whole sequence of the exercise, was being shown to us in its entirety, and Smith’s voice, sounding hollow and detached, was repeating the orders as they came.

  I heard him say, “Authentication procedure.” I assumed that the cyphered exercise signal from C-in-C Fleet had come in whilst I was with Siezin in the wireless room and was now being checked out. Then the screen showed one of Iron Duke’s officers, a lieutenant-commander, manipulating the combination lock of a safe. The door swung open to reveal another safe, which was then opened by another officer. A card was withdrawn from each safe, and each was checked against the cypher from fleet HQ.

  Smith’s voice said, “Authenticated, both halves. Time, 0233.”

  Then the cards were replaced and the safes locked with twirls of the combination handles. I saw the officers walk away and then the scene shifted to the control-room. There was an officer wearing the three gold stripes of a commander: the Iron Duke’s captain. There was a quiet alertness, total calm, eyes watching dials and gauges, watching the trim of the boat. A rating was picking his nose, a reflex action as his mind concentrated. The captain stood motionless, watching everything, no idea in his mind as to what was going to happen as the exercise drew to its climax, what was going to take place in the world above the waves. As for me, I was fascinated to the point of being oblivious of my own surroundings. As I watched the screen the background shifted again, this time to the fore casing, and I saw the sixteen round hatch-covers over the missiles. They were still closed. I wondered if, under exercise conditions, they remained closed or whether to open them was part of the exercise routine, the whole thing running right through for test, right to the point just short of the actual firing. If they didn’t open … well, the world would be safe for a while longer and the 140 men of the Iron Duke’s company would never know what had happened when the whole lot blew inside the pressure hull. Fancifully I wondered what would happen to the detached mind of Comrade Smith. We might be left with a mindless body that still lived. Unless minds didn’t fragment like material …

  Back once again to the control-room.

  The two officers depicted earlier were entering the compartment and reporting to the captain that the Northwood signal had been authenticated.

  There was a nod from the captain. Smith said in that disembodied voice, “Missiles to full readiness.” One of the officers moved away and Smith tracked him to the Missile Control Centre. Here a third safe w
as opened. Out came the 64,000-dollar object: a revolver-like grip connected to a cable leading through to the back of the safe. Its trigger was painted red.

  The firing mechanism: suddenly, despite the warm fug inside the submarine, I felt deadly cold. Instinctively I lifted myself on an elbow. The man with the sub-machine gun pushed me down, brutally. The muzzle of the gun stayed close to my mouth.

  The control-room again: Smith’s mind was busy. I looked up at Comrade Siezin. His eyes were blazing, his face working with his excitement, his inner thrill that Greenfly was all set to go, that the Soviet would be finally forced into war, the prelude to total world control. I wondered if the Greenfly boys, spread out around the Russian land mass, many of them in positions of authority no doubt, were intending to let go the Russian missiles in retaliation, long before London and Washington had ticked over. It would be a case of pants well and truly round the ankles of the collective West. There was undoubtedly a rationale behind the mad-sounding schemes of Greenfly.

  On the screen I saw the captain again. Smith’s voice came: “Stand by to hover … stop engines.” There was a pause then he uttered again. “Hull-valve open.” There was something about auto, and reference to a computer, but I didn’t catch it all before Smith switched us back to the Missile Control Centre, where a rating was seen making what looked like a series of checks, pressing a number of buttons. As he did so green lights came up and he reported, to someone not in the picture, “Gyros, battery, power and alignment correct. Spinning.” More checks, and then we were given another sight of the fore casing. Out there in the water, I thought to myself, Smith’s mind might drown, but no such luck. And I saw the sixteen hatches: the covers were open now.

  All ready. And back to the control-room. An officer wore a headset and was listening intently, his face taut, almost as if he’d sensed the reality behind the exercise. After a moment this officer made a report.

  The captain responded, as relayed by Comrade Smith: “Permission to fire.” He reached into the neck of his white uniform shirt and pulled out a key on a length of codline. The key was painted red, like the trigger of the firing pistol. With this he moved across the control-room towards a board set overhead. He locked the key into a slot in this board.

  This, I believed, was it. Or almost it: it was, I believed, the moment when the exercise would end, the moment when reality would supervene. Kholov was watching closely. Smith’s mind, aboard the Iron Duke, next depicted a panel with a red light and some words stencilled onto it. As I watched, the light and the words turned green. They were the final permission to fire. I saw Siezin’s hand hovering with the metal pointer, and starting to bring it down on the circular plate above his control box.

  Siezin had to choose his moment exactly, very precisely right – so he had said. But I believed that he had enough leeway, just so long as he made his firing contact, sent it out through the depths of the ocean to penetrate the hull of the Iron Duke and complete the circuit by interference, before the captain brought the exercise to a stop. I, too, chose my moment – better late than never for a desperate last throw that had all the odds against it.

  I made a fast squirm sideways. The man guarding me was intent, like all the others, on the screen as the last few seconds fled away, and he wasn’t quite fast enough to stop me as I flung myself on Comrade Smith. Even so there was a degree of speed about him and he did my work for me. I felt the heat of lead passing close, nipping my left ear-lobe to bring a downpour of blood. It was Comrade Smith who took that burst of sub-machine gun fire, most of it in his head. As the compartment filled with the acrid stench of the gunsmoke the screen went blank and in the same instant Siezin touched his metal biro down onto the circular plate.

  *

  We were out of all contact now; dead Smith’s mind was gone, had maybe rejoined his body at the last all ready to part company again in the normal fashion of death, en route for the next world. Or perhaps it was still out there in the ocean depths, trying crazily, vainly, to transmit more messages that now would never be received. Aboard the Russian submarine there was anger and confusion and I had been knocked about rather more than a bit, but I was alive and kicking still though I couldn’t have said for how much longer. Comrades Siezin and Kholov, however, were not despondent: the contact, they believed, would have been made in time. Maybe it had: we would find out in due course. I looked down at Smith’s body; he hadn’t done himself much good by his defection. I watched him being carried away to the cold store and wondered how long he would lie there with the food for the submarine’s company. As I had thought earlier, we might remain submerged for weeks; or we might move far to the south, down beyond the equator, looking for somewhere free of the fall-out. Or again, would Comrade Siezin risk it and make around the North Cape to enter Murmansk, or to lie perhaps for a while submerged off the Kola inlet as a very present challenge of Greenfly to the official naval command in case they should have ideas of remaining loyal to the Kremlin? I knew he would want to be in the vicinity if at all possible, ready to disembark and head with all speed for Moscow and the final takeover. If Greenfly had gone into immediate retaliation after the British missiles had landed, it was perhaps possible that only those parts of Russia that had taken those missiles would have been affected by the fall-out – the Russian missiles, so many of them available and ready targeted, could have obliterated the West’s strike-back before it went into action at all.

  I asked Siezin about this. “Yes,” he said. “I believe so. I believe your country, and all the NATO countries, will be no longer viable. It will be very widespread.”

  I thought of London, of all the likely targets. I thought of the survivors, the still-fit ones desperate to get away, of a fearful exodus, perhaps, along the M1 for the north, a seeking of hideouts in the isolated areas of North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Northumberland, or west into north Wales. “You bastard,” I said flatly.

  He shrugged; he said nothing further to me but there was a conference with the submarine’s captain and the vessel, which had lain stopped throughout Kholov’s interference routines, got under way again. The course, I saw, was westerly: out of the Skagerrak, into the North Sea. Which way would we turn from there – north or south? I reckoned we’d be unlikely to continue west for long, heading more or less towards the Firth of Forth and the patrol area where the Iron Duke had gone into her involuntary firing.

  As it turned out, we did head west for some while; and then the course was altered to north-west and then north, presumably as we made around the butt of Norway, past Kristiansand and the Naze and up towards Stavanger.

  So it was to be the North Cape and the Kola inlet: Comrade Siezin was impatient for world power. But, as time passed and another meal was brought, I began to sense something: I fancied Siezin was losing some of his confidence. There was a good deal of nail-biting and hurried, whispered conferences with Dr Kholov and the captain and Comrade Siezin’s face assumed an anxious look. So did Kholov’s, and the captain’s.

  Then I ticked over.

  I laughed and said, “No signal – right? No Greenfly congratulations coming in along that trailing wire?”

  “There is time,” Siezin answered savagely.

  “Is there, Comrade? I’d have thought – ”

  “Shut up,” Siezin said. His temper was going fast now and his anxiety was clearly increasing. As for me, I was beginning to find a little hope: I met Felicity’s eye. I believed she was feeling something similar. And it was just half an hour after this that a report came in from the sonar cabinet: there were engines in the vicinity, closing from the south and east. Siezin’s mouth was set hard, his face had lost all its colour now. It was obvious that he didn’t think those engines were Russian. Neither did I; only a matter of minutes after the sonar report there was a shattering explosion close at hand, then another and another, right and left and slap overhead. The submarine’s hull rang like a bell and all the lights flickered madly, and then went out, all but one on the deckhead of the control-room. There
was chaos, utter confusion, men shouting and running about like scared rabbits. Things fell about, metal becoming detached everywhere, and water spurted in under immense pressure. The boat took an upward slant, very fast and steep: there was a violent argument between Comrade Siezin and the captain. From a self-preservative instinct the captain, I gathered, wished to come to the surface pronto: with matters obviously gone awry he may also have wished to do what he could to re-establish himself with the official Kremlin leadership. Not so Comrade Siezin, who would be seeing the loom of Siberia or worse …

  It was the captain who won out. His face livid, he drew a revolver. Siezin screamed out at him but the captain fired point blank and Comrade Siezin’s face disintegrated into a bloody mess.

  *

  Within twenty-four hours Felicity and I were back in Focal House, closeted with Max himself, who’d lost track of both of us from the time of the abortive crossing near Braunlage – the wreckage of my Volkswagen had been found ultimately and had left a large question mark. Our journey back from northern waters had been by courtesy of the Danish authorities: it had been an escort group of the Danish Navy that had forced Siezin’s submarine to the surface. I could still see the ring of armament and automatic weapons that had covered the Russians as the conning tower hatch had been opened up. The NATO chain of communications had worked with full efficiency.

  Max said, “Iron Duke’s captain had noted some unexplained interference with his firing procedure. Your Dr Kholov, presumably. After that he decided to use his initiative, thank God – he surfaced and reported in defiance of patrol orders. His sonar, by the way, had picked you up – you weren’t all that far off his submerged position.” He gave me a thoughtful look. “D’you believe it would have worked, if you hadn’t got Smith killed? Was it viable?”

  I could only shrug. “I don’t know. I think it could have been. But we’ll never know now.”