Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  Pushkin remained by the door, his eyes cast down.

  ‘Like you some tea?’ the old man asked his guest.

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Sam. A good old cuppa to break the tension.

  The professor whispered to Pushkin to let him out of the room. Sam watched as the Major wheeled the chair stolidly to one side, then shoved it back in place. His face could have been carved from wood, his eyes dull pebbles. A man on the edge. Sam knew well enough how that felt.

  Suddenly Oksana let rip with a torrent of Ukrainian. Pushkin folded his arms and ignored the tirade. He’d started to make up his mind a few hours ago, during the sleepless hours before dawn. For much of the earlier part of the night he’d even been considering suicide – shutting himself in the communal kitchen along the corridor and opening the taps on the five cookers. But that, he’d concluded, would be the ultimate act of cowardice, for which Lena and Nadya would never forgive him.

  Having excluded death by his own hand, and having ruled out flight to England, a new way out had come to him just as the first birds began to sing in the trees outside the window. He would take his family back to the area where he’d spent his childhood in Ivano-Frankivsk. He had family there still. Uncles, aunts, cousins. They would find a deserted dacha to hide in and they’d live off the soil. They’d change their names. Cease to exist as far as the authorities were concerned. And if the Mafiya ever caught up with them, he would by then have demonstrated beyond any doubt that he had no intention of betraying their secrets. And they would spare him.

  ‘Misha!’

  Her eyes like ice picks, Oksana lashed at him with the flat of her hand. The smack to the face shook Pushkin to the core. His own sister. Never, ever had she dared . . .

  ‘Please. Friends.’ Sam pointed to the table. ‘Let’s all sit down and talk it through in a calm, rational—’

  ‘Huh! You think you can make my brother rational?’ Oksana snorted.

  Sam pulled out one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs and indicated Pushkin should take the other. The Major stepped forward one pace then stopped at attention and began to speak. His voice was a slow monotone.

  Sam understood enough to know he was apologising for the trouble he’d caused, but not the reasons why. He needed a translation.

  ‘Oksana?’

  She stood with her hands on her hips, her upper body canted forward.

  ‘My brother very stupid man,’ she spat.

  Pushkin stared over Sam’s head towards the light.

  ‘He say he will not talk with you.’ Oksana began looking for something heavy. ‘I think I knock some sense into him.’ She snatched up one of the professor’s bulkier tomes from a stack on the floor.

  ‘Hang on a minute. Tell your brother to sit down. I want to explain something to him.’

  Reluctantly Pushkin pulled out the chair and sat on it. The man’s eyes were like brick. This bastard would have been a tough nut to crack if they’d ever gone to war, thought Sam.

  ‘Major Pushkin. My name is Commander Packer.’ He would try the old one-officer-to-another trick. ‘I understand you have information you intended to pass to the British government. I’ve no idea whether it’s important or not, but it may be, for reasons you are unaware of. In fact it may be so important that thousands of people could lose their lives if you keep it to yourself.’

  He paused for Oksana to translate. Her eyes widened as she spoke.

  ‘I could be shot for treason for doing what I’m about to do,’ Sam declared, exaggerating wildly. ‘Because what I’m going to tell you has been classified ultra top secret by the intelligence agencies of Britain and America. But I’m quite prepared to risk being shot, if it means that you understand the importance of my mission here.’

  Oksana translated again, her voice breathy and tense. Pushkin was now listening attentively, but with suspicion.

  ‘Major Pushkin.’ Sam leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘In the next few days, the West expects Iraqi terrorists to launch a biological weapons attack. The Iraqis have paid five million dollars to Ukrainian criminals to help them carry out that attack.’

  Sam watched the blood drain from Pushkin’s face and realised his journey mightn’t be wasted after all.

  ‘Major Pushkin,’ he continued, more urgently. ‘You wanted to tell us about a missile I believe. Sold to the Mafiya a few days ago. If that weapon is capable of delivering anthrax, tens of thousands of people may die. Do I make myself clear?’

  In Pushkin’s mind a light had appeared in the fog.

  ‘If you have information that can prevent that attack and you decide to keep it to yourself, then you would share responsibility for those deaths. Get it?’

  Obsessed by his own safety and that of his family, Misha had almost forgotten the dangers to the outside world. And now he knew those dangers were real . . .

  His back straightened and his chin rose. Perhaps he could take pride in what he had done. He opened his mouth to speak, but then the doubts flooded back. What if the British took his information then refused to help him escape? What if they did give him the visas but he was arrested trying to leave Ukraine? For communicating military information to a foreign power the state would kill him just as surely as the Mafiya.

  ‘Misha!’ Oksana was on her feet again, her voice a rasp and her right hand balling into a fist.

  ‘Da.’

  He nodded. Yes. He would talk. He told himself that the man sitting opposite him was not a NATO vulture here to pick over his country’s corpse. It wasn’t dishonourable what he was doing. The oath of loyalty he’d sworn all those years ago was to a culture, a set of principles, not to a body of corruptible men.

  ‘We don’t have much time with this, Major,’ Sam warned.

  Pushkin began to talk. He spoke in short, clipped sentences, pausing between them for Oksana to translate. He told his story from the beginning – his job at Magerov, his initial suspicion about the orders for VR-6 spares and the murder of the driver who’d delivered them to a warehouse in Odessa. He explained about the shock of realising that his own commander was involved in the illegal sale, and his nearly fatal decision to take the matter to a higher authority.

  As the translations fired out, Sam’s pulse quickened. They were onto something. The man was talking about the sort of unmanned air vehicle Dean Burgess had described at the Lodge on Sunday. How big? That was the key issue; some drones were very small. Before he could ask, there was a tapping at the door followed by the uncle’s thin voice.

  Not now, thought Sam. Fuck the ruddy tea.

  Pushkin stood up and wheeled the heavy armchair aside. The old man entered, carrying a wooden tray laid with gilded porcelain cups and saucers and a matching teapot. A tin mug would have done Sam just as well, but he mumbled some compliment about how elegant it all was.

  Pushkin took the tray and set it on the table. Then, with due deference to his uncle’s age and status, he asked very courteously for the old man to leave them alone again. As the door closed and the armchair slid back in place, Sam finally asked the vital question.

  ‘This VR-6, Major. What’s its range and what could it carry?’

  Pushkin quoted what he’d memorised from the technical manuals.

  ‘He call the VR-6 Yastreyo. In English you say “hawk”, I think.’ Oksana translated. ‘He says is like cruise missile but carries a camera. Length seven metres. Short wings.’

  ‘And how’s it fired, this Hawk?’

  ‘Launched by rocket, he says. From . . .’ She hesitated, searching for a word. ‘From lorry. Eight wheels.’

  Plenty big enough to carry a canister of anthrax in its nose instead of a camera.

  ‘After launch by rocket there is jet engine,’ she went on, fired up by Sam’s interest. ‘Some computer in it for guiding. Misha say radio control also. He say it fly maximum ninety kilometres. Fuel for fifteen minutes flight, no more.’

  Fast, Sam calculated. Damned fast. He knew exactly what this thing would do. He felt the ski
n crawl on the back of his neck.

  ‘So, where did they go, these spares?’ he demanded. ‘Who’s got them now?’

  Pushkin shrugged.

  ‘You said the Mafiya, Major. But which gang? There’s over six hundred in Ukraine.’

  Pushkin was clamming up again. The man knew all right, but he wasn’t bloody saying. He’d turned to face his sister and was talking earnestly, in Ukrainian this time so Sam wouldn’t understand.

  Oksana sighed. ‘It like I tell you. He want to know about visa for him and for Lena and for Nadya.’

  ‘Not now, Ksucha. In a minute.’

  ‘He say now,’ she insisted.

  Sam looked from one face to the other. He could see the family likeness. The broad, flat forehead, the blue eyes that looked benign enough but were bloody stubborn when the chips were down.

  ‘He say he must know if you give visa for all of them.’

  ‘Yes.’ He tapped his fingers together. No more prevarication. He had to commit. ‘Of course they’ll get their visas.’

  Pushkin whipped three passports from the back pocket of his trousers and laid them on the table.

  ‘Misha he ask when?’

  ‘When he’s told me everything. You’ll have to trust me, Ksucha.’

  Pushkin’s face had set like cement. He’d been cheated once too often. The names Sam sought were the only cards he had left.

  ‘He ask is it sure they will be allowed to stay in England?’ Oksana whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam growled. No way he could promise that, but he needed the names.

  Pushkin stuck out his chin. For a moment Sam thought he was digging in still further. Demanding an audience with the bloody Queen, perhaps.

  ‘Voroninskaya.’

  Sam held his breath.

  ‘Anatoly Voronin,’ he added.

  This was it. He’d struck gold.

  ‘And? Some other names,’ Sam demanded. ‘Who runs Voronin’s businesses in Odessa? Who was it who actually bought the drone?’

  Pushkin’s eyes filled with a bitter hatred for the former Spetznaz Captain First Rank who’d brought such devastation into his life and into that of one of his closest friends.

  ‘Grimov,’ he hissed. ‘Dima Filipovich Grimov.’

  32

  The British Embassy, Kiev

  ‘WE’VE GOT TO get ’em out tonight, Gerald,’ Sam insisted, slapping the three passports down on the desk of the SIS station chief. ‘They’re in huge danger. Grimov’s a man who kills as easily as he farts.’

  ‘Point taken. We’ll do our best.’ Figgis gathered up the passports and placed them to one side. He opened his desk diary. ‘When did Pushkin say this all happened?’

  ‘It was on Friday twenty-seventh September that the spares were delivered to some warehouse or other in Odessa. He doesn’t know where exactly. But he thinks there’s a yard there owned by a shipping company called Hretzky Transport which is controlled by the Voronin group.’

  ‘And how easy would it have been to turn these spare parts into a working missile?’

  ‘Pushkin says the Hawk parts were all subassemblies. Reckoned that with the right skills they could plug the bits together in a matter of hours. It’s not a very complex piece of equipment. And there’s no shortage of unemployed ex-military men around who’d be ready to deliver those skills if the price was right.’

  ‘The most likely way out of the country would be in a shipping container,’ Figgis concluded, half to himself. ‘So the first thing we need is a list of sailings from the Odessa region from the twenty-seventh onwards. Shouldn’t be hard. Ukrainian Customs must have a record of exports. There won’t have been many. Most of the containers go back empty to the place where they came from.’

  Sam fretted that Figgis’s enquiries might pose a risk to the Pushkins.

  ‘How will you handle this without revealing to the Ukrainians where we got the tip-off from?’

  ‘No problem. We’ll do it through the drugs team. We’ve a man in Warsaw who liaises on narcotics issues with all the agencies of the former eastern bloc countries. It’s a well-oiled machine. We’ll get him to say we’re trying to identify a container shipped out of the Odessa region with heroin in it.’

  ‘How long to get an answer?’

  ‘Could be a day or two. The customs service is new and small in Ukraine. Depends on how much of a squeeze the SBU can put on them.’

  ‘Meanwhile the Pushkin family will be on their way to London tonight?’

  ‘On the eight o’clock British Airways. Shouldn’t be a problem. Unless, that is, the army’s already reported him as AWOL. If they’ve alerted the border guards, that’ll be tough titties. For him and for us, because they’ll want to know why we gave the family visas.’

  Figgis did a quick tot-up in his diary. ‘God! It’s eleven days since the VR-6 went to that warehouse! That Hawk could be almost anywhere on the planet by now.’

  He scribbled a few notes.

  ‘Right,’ he breathed. ‘Time I talked to London.’ He disappeared into the secure communications chamber.

  Sam stood by the window with his hands in his pockets. A Land Rover Discovery had just driven into the courtyard at the back of the embassy, pulling up in one of the marked spaces. When the driver got out, he saw that it was the ambassador. The man didn’t know it yet but he was about to walk into a storm.

  A day or two, Figgis had said. Two days to get to first base on the question of where the VR-6 was shipped to. Official channels were slow channels. Too damned slow. Thousands of people might have gone down with the early flu-like symptoms of a pulmonary anthrax infection by then, with death following within days. There had to be a quicker way.

  Dima Filipovich Grimov had the answers they needed, of course. Engraved in Sam’s mind was that heavy, lecherous face in the Mondiale Hotel photo. If the world were a just place, that man’s head would be squeezed in a vice until he talked. But not in Ukraine. Here officialdom protected him, because officialdom had been bought.

  And Viktor Rybkin? Rybkin too would know the current location of the VR-6. Sam thought back to his first mistrustful acquaintance with the former KGB man here in Kiev a year ago. There had been something likeable about him then. A rogue with a soul, Chrissie had called him, words she must bitterly have regretted in the moments before she died.

  Sam remembered how in Cyprus Rybkin had distanced himself from her death, insisting he wasn’t involved in it, as if it were an act he was ashamed of. But did that mean Rybkin had a conscience? Was it just possible that the thought of thousands dying from anthrax was causing him sleepless nights? Speculation ran riot in his head. Rybkin could have killed him in Cyprus, but he hadn’t. Could it be that he’d wanted Sam alive – to have a fighting chance of preventing the massacre from taking place?

  Figgis re-emerged from the communications ‘box’.

  ‘All squared,’ he announced, flopping into one of the leather easy chairs. ‘Visa clearances will be through by telegram within the hour. And they’re booking the flights. Three seats in the name of Pushkin and one for you.’

  ‘Me?’ Sam spluttered.

  ‘Yes. They want you to nanny the Pushkins back to Blighty. Orders from on high. A three line whip.’

  It was after midday by the time Sam met up with Oksana back at the Metro station by the Technical University. She’d been waiting for him on the edge of the park and he noticed a puffiness around her eyes as if she’d been crying. They set off through the trees to deliver the news about the visas to her brother. He told her about the flight that evening. This time she made no attempt to link arms with him.

  ‘So,’ she sighed, ‘your visit to Ukraine will be very short. Even shorter than last.’

  ‘Yes.’ In theory.

  ‘Pity. I would like so much to talk with you. Last time we had such nice little chats, remember? You even pay me big compliment about how I look – but you don’t remember that,’ she laughed throatily.

  ‘Yes I do. And I meant it,’ he answer
ed, not remembering at all, but knowing that he would have done. It was hard to understand why a woman like her should have failed to find a partner to replace the husband who’d died.

  ‘Well, I don’t think so. But one question you can answer me.’ She looked at him coyly. ‘I very curious. What about Essex?’

  ‘Essex? Why on earth do you ask about Essex?’

  ‘Because I hear it very nice place.’

  He laughed briefly. ‘Depends on your tastes. Lots of good-time girls. Some fine sailing in the estuaries. And Constable country.’

  Why the hell was she interested in Essex?

  ‘Constable?’

  ‘English landscape painter. Very famous.’

  ‘Ah yes. There is picture by him in entrance to embassy. Copy, of course.’ She began to wonder which of these aspects of Essex life so appealed to the security man there.

  The university campus came in sight through the trees. At the edge of the woods was a children’s playground, which Sam hadn’t noticed before. Three infants were being pushed on a roundabout by a weary-looking young mother in jeans and an anorak.

  Oksana stopped him with a hand on the arm. ‘I think maybe you hungry, yes?’

  Food was the last thing on his mind.

  ‘We stop here. Just few minutes.’ She pointed to a bench. ‘This morning six o’clock I make some sandwich for you.’ She dug into her black nylon shopping bag and pulled out a package in grease-proof paper.

  ‘I hardly think there’s time . . .’

  ‘Oh yes. Enough time. Misha can wait few more minutes.’

  There was a look on her face that said, Just do this for me please. Lonely and vulnerable, he reminded himself. They sat down, briefly attracting the bored attention of the woman minding the children. This is bad, thought Sam. Bad to be sitting here in the open where he could be picked off. For one paranoid moment he wondered if he was being set up.

  Oksana handed him two slices of pale brown bread with something white wedged between.

  ‘Fresh cheese from dacha,’ she explained. ‘Neighbour at country house has cow.’

  He bit into it. ‘Very nice indeed.’ He wasn’t going to make the running in conversation. Leave it to her to say whatever it was she wanted to say.