Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  The truck driver collected the container’s shipping papers from the site office, then with a final inspection of the trailer to ensure the load was secure, he swung up into the cab and drove out of the gates. At this hour of the morning he expected no delay at the port. There’d be a glance at his papers at the customs barrier, then straight onto the quay and the berth where the ship for Haifa was waiting. At noon the container with its unpleasant cargo would be on its way to its final destination.

  There had been no need for Viktor Rybkin to be here in person to watch this final stage of the Cyprus operation. To do so would have risked drawing attention to himself. And there was nothing he could achieve in person here that money hadn’t already secured for the organisation. Nowhere in the world were there businessmen who couldn’t be bought.

  It would have been impossible anyway for Rybkin to be here. His flight to Odessa had just lifted off the runway at Larnaca. The Ukrainian passport he’d been travelling on had been issued in a false name. The grumpy policeman who’d made a special inspection of the departing passengers’ documents on instructions from his chief in Limassol had not given him a second look.

  09.15 hrs

  The RAF flight carrying Chrissie’s coffin back to England was due off the ground at midday, but to satisfy the RAF’s procedures Sam needed to be at Akrotiri an hour earlier, Mowbray had told him. He was on his way already however, by taxi, well ahead of time, because he had something important to do at the air base before the flight. The car took the ring road north of Limassol, heading west.

  Mowbray had driven down from Nicosia at dawn. Over bacon and eggs in Sam’s hotel room, his parrot-grey eyes had examined Sam’s photographic evidence with solemn concentration. Then, choosing his words with care, he’d admitted that it did give some weight to the idea that if an Iraqi group was preparing a biological weapons attack, then it could be being helped along the way by criminal elements from Ukraine.

  Mowbray had put both the original photograph and the computer-enhanced print of Saladin into his briefcase so that he could transmit them to London as soon as he got back to Nicosia. Then Sam had handed over Chrissie’s ear stud, but Mowbray suggested he put it with the rest of her possessions which he would find at the RAF base.

  He’d surprised Sam by saying he wasn’t intending to pass on any of what he’d just learned to the Cypriot police. ‘To be frank, their “accidental death after a night out” explanation suits us well, Sam. Amazingly the press seem to be prepared not to speculate on the exact circs of Mrs Taylor’s demise, out of consideration for her family back in England.’ Mrs Kessler’s funeral would take place tomorrow, he’d added. Quick and quiet before some scoop-hungry hack made a connection.

  As soon as Mowbray had left, Sam had phoned the car hire company to tell them where to find the crippled Toyota. Then he’d gone downstairs to pay his bill. While waiting at the front desk, he’d noticed the travel trade reps filing into the conference room for their morning session. He’d kept an eye out for Sophie, but had seen no sign of her. Feeling guilty about not checking how she was this morning, he’d taken a quick peek into the room.

  She’d been sitting on a podium at the front watching the delegates take their seats, with her laptop PC beside her. For someone who’d done a good impression of a rag-doll a few hours earlier, she’d looked remarkably fresh. Though pale, her blonde hair had shone. Dressed in a crisp, pale-blue two piece suit she was attractive again.

  She’d caught sight of him standing in the doorway and blushed, covering her face with her hands to signal her shame. Then she’d removed them and smiled. She’d seen he was carrying a bag and gave a sad little wave, then touched her fingers to her lips.

  The taxi left Limassol town behind it, cutting through estates of citrus. Five miles further on at the tip of the Akrotiri peninsula, the gates of the RAF base loomed ahead, the skyline beyond them scarred with antenna masts.

  In a few minutes’ time he would be confronted by Chrissie’s corpse. He wondered how he would cope when the moment came, faced with such visible, tangible proof of her death. Also at the back of his mind were Rybkin’s words, his cryptic warning that the more he asked about Chrissie the less he would like.

  The taxi stopped in a visitors’ bay by the gates to the base and Sam called into the guardroom, giving his name as Terry Malone. A clerk phoned through to Squadron Leader Banks. It was ten-fifteen. Five minutes later a grey Vauxhall Astra sped up to collect him. Banks was a short, slightly built officer in a uniform that had seen better days. And he was in a hurry.

  ‘Expected you twenty minutes ago,’ he declared, accelerating away with Sam beside him. ‘Not much time for you to view the body now. A couple of minutes at the most. Needs to be packed up for the flight.’

  ‘But that doesn’t take off for another hour and a half,’ Sam protested, annoyed at having his wrist slapped by an Air Force man. In the Navy they’d called them crabs.

  ‘Cypriot customs, Mr Malone. Anything unusual and they make a right meal of it.’ Banks cleared his throat uncomfortably at his unfortunate choice of words. ‘Here we are. The base hospital.’

  He stopped the car outside the low, modern building and led the way inside and down an ether-smelling corridor.

  ‘In here.’

  Banks pushed open a door labelled with a NATO numerical code and introduced him to a youngish ginger-haired Scotsman in a white coat.

  ‘This is the MO. He’ll show you Mrs Taylor’s body. I’ll come back in ten to pick you up again.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You okay Mr Malone?’ the medical officer asked, noticing his pallor.

  ‘Yes.’ He steadied himself. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Take no notice of busy-busy Banks,’ the MO confided, leading him through a pair of rubber swing doors. ‘There’s no great rush. Take your time. The Squadron Leader’s a bit of a wanker, between you and me. The RAF’s admin ranks are full of them.’

  ‘I know. I used to be in the Navy.’

  The Scot stopped for a moment, looking at him quizzically.

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Sam didn’t understand why, particularly. ‘And er . . . you’re a relative of the deceased?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘No. Just a friend.’

  ‘A friend.’ The MO narrowed his eyes conspiratorially, as if using the word in its euphemistic form. ‘Tell me something. Do I deduce from the fact that the RAF is repatriating Mrs Taylor’s body that she was of rather more significance to HMG than an ordinary businesswoman would be?’

  ‘I . . .’ Sam was thrown by the directness of the question.

  ‘I apologise for being blunt. People are where I come from.’

  ‘Look, I can’t tell you what you should deduce,’ Sam answered obscurely.

  ‘No. Of course not. Perhaps I could put another question to you. And, believe me I do have a reason for asking.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Is your interest in seeing the body just personal? Or professional as well?’

  Sam answered with a nod.

  ‘Fine. Just so as we understand one another.’

  The doctor pushed through a second set of swing doors, holding them open. They were now in the antechamber to a small operating theatre. Sinks and autoclaves to one side, shelves of sterilised instruments on the other. And in the middle of the floor, a steel trolley.

  On it lay Chrissie, her body covered with a sheet, but her face exposed.

  Sam faltered. She was so yellow already, her cheeks so hollow, her hair so lank. He stood stock still, half looking for some movement – the flutter of an eyelid or a tremor of the lips.

  After a few moments her absolute stillness began to calm him. He could see no sign of suffering here. Whatever agony she’d gone through had left no lasting mark on her.

  He was aware of the MO watching him closely.

  ‘You know the circumstances of her death?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘The police pathologist ca
lled it accidental.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I assume she knew she was allergic to peanuts?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then she wouldn’t have touched the things, would she? So it couldn’t possibly have been an accident.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’

  The MO folded his arms. His opinion of the local police pathologist had just been confirmed.

  ‘It would have been over quite quickly,’ he went on, comfortingly. ‘Anaphylactic shock sets in within minutes. There’d have been a bronchospasm. She would have fought for breath for a bit then her blood pressure would have dropped dramatically. A matter of minutes before unconsciousness – and then death.’

  ‘I see. Thanks.’

  The clinical description had helped. Sam kept thinking how still she was, and how gone. No feeling of her presence, nothing of the spirit which had inhabited this body.

  ‘Forgive my asking something else, but it is important,’ the MO ventured. ‘Were you . . .?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you intimate with the deceased?’

  ‘I don’t see that that’s anything to do—’

  ‘Forgive me, but it is. You see there’s a mark. On the body. There’s no mention of it in the Cypriot autopsy report.’

  ‘A mark?’

  ‘Yes. Now, I don’t know if it has any bearing on the circumstances of her death or not. But somebody connected with the case ought to know about it. What worried me was that the body would go straight to the undertakers back in England and nobody in authority would ever see it.’

  Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘What sort of mark?’

  ‘A tattoo.’

  Sam felt a shiver down his back.

  ‘It’s on the lower abdominal area. The reason I asked whether you and she had been intimates was that if the answer was yes you would presumably already know about it. Should I show you?’

  ‘I think you’d better,’ Sam breathed, his heart thudding.

  The MO lifted the sheet at a point midway along the body. There was a smell of surgical spirit and something sourer.

  ‘Did you know she was pregnant?’ the MO asked.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Sam, biting his lip.

  He looked down at the narrow hips whose contours he knew so well. Next to the compact bush of light-brown hair a small blue globe about two centimetres across had been etched into the soft yellow of her belly just below her bikini line. The design was complete with equator, lines of longitude and some unrecognisable land mass in red. Beneath it was the letter B.

  Sam stared dumb-founded. He’d never seen it before. The tattoo was like a brand. A company logo.

  ‘I thought you ought to see it,’ the doctor whispered.

  ‘Yes. You were right.’

  He felt transfixed. He knew every handbreadth of her skin and this mark was new. Tattoos were in fashion – a butterfly on a shoulder blade, a swallow on an ankle – but why a mark like a product label, hidden where only a surgeon or a lover would find it?

  Viktor Rybkin’s warning rumbled in his head. It’s better for you that you forget her.

  He looked at her peaceful, innocent face once more. A waxwork face. He had the weird feeling that this wasn’t Chrissie lying here at all. Some other woman. Someone he didn’t know. Like she’d pretended to be on that narrow child’s bed in Amman. Keeping him blind so he wouldn’t see the brand mark on her groin.

  22

  07.45 hrs

  Magerov, Southern Ukraine

  MAJOR MIKHAIL PUSHKIN watched his wife prepare breakfast for himself and their daughter, his face pinched by a night of little sleep. He was dressed in freshly pressed uniform trousers and a crisp pale-green shirt.

  The kitchen of their sixth-floor, two-room army flat was just long enough to accommodate the sink, the cooker and a small fridge, its width barely allowing space for the three of them to squeeze round the small table where they ate. At one end, a window overlooked the well-used children’s playground wedged between the two bleak blocks of officers’ apartments. At the other, a door opened into a narrow corridor which connected with the small box-room where their daughter slept, and a slightly larger space that served as their living room and as a bedroom for Mikhail and Lena. A tiny bathroom with rust stains on the tub and many of its wall tiles missing completed the sparse accommodation which, despite its deficiencies, they were fortunate to have. Thousands of Ukrainian officers were still homeless following the splitting up of the Red Army five years earlier into independent Russian and Ukrainian forces.

  Mikhail Pushkin was a short, sinewy man with neatly trimmed dark hair and the sort of well-chiselled, honest face that Stalin’s artists used as the model for their revolutionary heroes. He had little stomach for food this morning. The past eight days had made a nightmare of his life, torturing him with anxiety, guilt and anger. Today, unknown to Lena, he was primed to do something he would never have considered just a week ago – going over the head of his commanding officer.

  Opposite him sat ten-year-old Nadya, chattering about her school-friends while her mother cooked. The curd cheese which was their breakfast staple had started to go off, so Lena was mixing it with a beaten egg and some sugar, then pressing it into pancakes and coating it in flour to fry as syrniki.

  Lena had a pale, oval face. Naturally pretty like most Ukrainian women, her neat mouth was bracketed by lines of sadness, etched there by the misery which had dogged so many Ukrainians’ lives in the years since independence. Salaries unpaid and devalued by inflation, a national economy in free-fall, the former bread-basket of the Soviet Union had crumbled into a nation of paupers.

  Pushkin observed his wife at work. Lena had kept her figure as the years had passed. As he watched her twist between the stove and the table he remembered uncomfortably that just the sight of her leaning forward in a close-fitting skirt used to get him aroused. But a back-room posting in a bankrupt army had become bromide for him, in the same way that depression about the way they lived had for her. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love.

  The flat was cold. Autumn was biting but the communal heating had not yet been turned on. In the room where they lived and slept, condensation had smeared the windows that morning as he’d looked out onto the grid of roads and buildings making up the Magerov Depot of the 39th Supply Regiment. Here in the kitchen the air was steamy from the kettle, boiled first for their breakfast tea and now to provide drinking water for the day.

  ‘Here, love.’

  Lena placed a plate of syrniki in front of him, her birdlike voice little more than a breath. She handed him an open jar of runny jam made from pears picked at her parents’ dacha last autumn, then turned back to the stove and shovelled fritters onto a plate for her daughter.

  ‘And you?’ Pushkin asked, knowing what she’d say.

  ‘Later. I’ll have something later.’ She hovered over them as they began to eat, sipping at a mug of tea.

  The crisis of duty and conscience that had taken hold of Major Pushkin had mushroomed to a point where he now feared for his own life. It had begun with a normal enough act for him – the routine checking of a request from an artillery regiment for spare parts that looked somewhat irregular. But with that simple act of dutiful vigilance he’d lifted the lid on a crime against the state. And by doing so he’d inadvertently caused a tragic death which he knew to be murder.

  The 39th Supply Regiment for which he was the second-in-command had taken control of Magerov in 1992 after the relocation of the tactical bomber squadrons that had been based there as part of the Soviet Naval Air Force. The huge hangars formerly used by the Tu-22s had been converted into stores for a broad range of non-explosive military hardware. Magerov now served as a central spares depot for the four corps in the Odessa District of the Army of independent Ukraine.

  The spares request that had caught his eye had been a large one: eight pages of part numbers, all stamped and countersigned by the quartermaster of an art
illery regiment that was armed with multiple rocket launchers. The parts were for a small reconnaissance drone known as VR-6 or, more colloquially, Yastreyo, which was used as an airborne camera platform to spy out targets for the regiment’s long-range rocket batteries. There was no logistical problem with the order; the computerised inventory system showed a fair stock of everything that was being asked for. Most military training in Ukraine had ground to a halt for lack of fuel, so the VR-6s were seldom flown and the spares in question had been gathering dust on the shelves.

  The aspect of the order that had caused Pushkin to investigate was its extraordinary completeness. It wasn’t just spare wings or a replacement nose cone that the 166th Rocket Regiment had ordered, but an entire set of parts. Every single item that was needed to assemble a brand-new, fully operational, turbine-powered pilotless plane, complete with launch rails and rocket booster. The only items not included were the drone’s photographic equipment.

  His first guess was that the 166th were trying it on. That they’d destroyed a drone in a training accident and had their request for a replacement refused by the Odessa Military District on grounds of cost. He’d suspected some opportunist gunner CO was simply trying to sidestep headquarters by obtaining a new drone in kit form.

  Pushkin had referred the matter to his own commanding officer, a man he’d known and trusted for many years. But instead of advising him to return the paperwork to the Rocket Regiment for verification – the reaction he’d expected – Colonel Komarov had ordered him to process the spares request without further delay.

  It was then that his crisis of conscience had begun. He knew that his suspicions merited further investigation, yet to do anything about it meant disobeying a senior officer, something outlawed by the principles instilled in him by his five formative years at the Kievskoye Military Aviation Engineering school.

  His dilemma had been compounded by the fact that Colonel Komarov was a friend as well as his CO. Eight years earlier they’d served in Germany together. Of equal rank then, and still so four years ago when religion had returned to fashion in Ukraine, Komarov had become Nadya’s godfather. With that honour a kym had been established between the two men, a personal bond that gave them the closeness of brothers.