by Tom Black
“And ‘Buster’...?”
“A nickname. After the American fellow. A bit of silliness that I actually quite liked.”
“So, what changed?”
“Excuse me?” laughed Crabb.
“You said people know who you were. I remember the Crabb affair – there isn’t a man in Whitehall who doesn’t – but,” Harold paused as the penny dropped, “ah. I think I understand now.”
“I did think it was all a bit obvious,” Crabb mused, “one of the country’s most skilled frogmen just disappearing while diving around a Soviet cruiser? Come off it.”
“People have a tendency to steer clear of conspiracy theories, Mr Crabb,” Harold pointed out, “it’s something I managed to use to great success until two weeks ago.”
“So we noticed,” Crabb nodded, “and we’re ever so good at keeping track of things.”
“‘We’?” asked Harold, “so you work for State Security now?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. When the Red Navy brought me back, I was in a terrible state. Drinking far too much, smoking four packs a day – it was a miracle I didn’t die on that dive, if I’m honest. I was no spring chicken!”
“And yet here you are, twenty years later.”
“Sixty-six years young, Mr Wilson. I personally requested the honour of picking you up. If it weren’t for the workers and peasants of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I wouldn’t be here today. Thanks to them, I am a new man. They showed me the light, and they will always have my undying gratitude.”
Wilson nodded, noting the absence of any trace of irony in what Crabb was saying. He seemed to be the real thing. Before he could say anything, a rougher wave than usual rocked the boat, and both Harold and Crabb were tossed about.
“Probably time to get going, surely?” Harold asked. Crabb checked his watch.
“No, we’ve got another half an hour until the sub is back in position – she’s on the move to avoid patrols.”
Harold nodded and rubbed his hands together.
“Well, we’d better find a way to pass the time. Tell me, Buster – if I may call you that – how exactly did the KGB- sorry, State Security, help you become ‘a new man’?”
Paddy Ashdown had not slept in more than thirty hours, but right now he felt more awake than he had in weeks. As more police cars and military vehicles assembled on the docks every minute, he checked his watch again. It was twenty minutes past midnight.
“We have to assume he’s gone out to sea. Local plod have just reported a boat theft tonight thanks to the high alert. Gentlemen,” Paddy continued to the crowd of officers of various agencies gathered around him, “this is most likely our last chance to bring Wilson in. I do not have to tell you the catastrophic consequences that would unfold if he is not caught.”
There was a murmur of foreboding agreement.
“The Navy have been contacted and are now on high alert. I understand HMS Fife is going on manoeuvres, and that any smaller craft that can perform searches of their own are already doing so. Make no mistake, gentlemen – we need every resource we can conceivably lay our hands on. If this is ends up looking like Dunkirk, we will still only have done half as much as we need to. Now, I’ll see you all when Wilson is in handcuffs!”
The attempt at a rallying cry fell somewhat flat, but Paddy walked away satisfied with the orders he had given. He just hoped the egos with pips (and chips) on their shoulders would follow them.
Fipps, who in the absence of anyone remotely talented had gone from Paddy’s police liaison to de facto adjutant, jogged towards him.
“Sir,” he called, “we’ve got anyone who can walk looking for anything that can float. But none of these things are fast enough.”
“Have you contacted the Section?”
“The Major over there,” Fipps pointed to the huddle of officers standing next to a recently arrived Land Rover, “says he radioed command about getting the SBS over here.”
“And? What’s their ETA?”
“Between 0230 and 0300, sir. They won’t be here in time, surely?”
“Damn,” Paddy cursed, looking around. In the absence of anyone senior from MI5, as the highest ranking intelligence officer attached to Operation Woodrow he still had operational command. He wished he didn’t. Fipps interrupted his thoughts.
“Sir, even if he is out there and not already in some Bolshie u-boat, I don’t think we’re going to be able to catch up with him.”
But Paddy was not looking at him. He could hear a pleasingly familiar noise, and the wind suddenly seemed to be blowing rather strongly from directly above him. A smile crept across his lips as he looked up.
“I don’t know about that, Fipps. Now, hand me that flare.”
Despite the cold, Harold Wilson and Buster Crabb were getting on like a house on fire. Harold had quickly deduced that the ‘help’ the Soviets had given him after his capture was more than square meals and regular exercise. Crabb exhibited the tell-tale signs of brainwashing, and Harold suspected he had undergone more than his fair share of electro-shock ‘therapy’ in the care of his new masters. Still, in the here and now, he was pleasant and lucid enough. He was just finishing a story about a particularly debauched night in a Black Sea dacha with the East German women’s swimming team. Harold, however, was not fully concentrating. He was thinking.
“...so I said, ‘I’ve no idea where it can have got to – but I suggest you ask your sister!’” Crabb burst into a hacking, smoker’s laugh. Harold threw back his own head and guffawed.
“That’s really quite extraordinary. Clearly I chose the wrong career. Mr Crabb, allow me to shake your hand once more.” Harold held out his hand. After a beat, Crabb shook it.
After releasing the hand, Harold allowed his smile to fade.
“Buster, may I say something?”
“Fire away.”
“You’re not going to take me anywhere, are you?”
Harold had expected Crabb’s own grin to disappear, but it did not. If anything, it grew.
“They told me you were perceptive.”
Wilson said nothing, his gaze steel. Crabb cocked his head to one side.
“What gave the game away?”
Harold placed his cigar back between his teeth and lit it with the strike of a match.
“Well, first and foremost, you don’t appear to have any spare respiratory equipment. And besides, I doubt any rational plan involved putting me into a wetsuit and expecting me to swim to a waiting submarine.”
“Granted. But–”
“Secondly,” Harold continued forcefully after a drag on his cigar, “when I asked whether we should get going, you checked your watch and said we still had half an hour to wait.”
Harold leant forward, putting his face as close to Crabb’s defiant grin as it could be.
“Your watch isn’t waterproof, Mr Crabb. It stopped working when you entered the water – presumably when you left the submarine.”
Crabb raised his eyebrows, then closed his eyes, his smile still etched on his face.
“The handshake,” he exhaled. Harold gave a curt nod.
“Indeed. Were it a moonless night, I never would have known.”
There was a long, poignant silence. Crabb’s grin finally disappeared, and he tightened his grip on the harpoon gun.
“You’re very good at reading people, Mr Wilson.”
“I learned from the best.”
Their metaphorical poker game now at an end, both men simply stared at each other for a very long time. Crabb broke the silence.
“I’m afraid that particular skill won’t help you now.”
Harold looked down at the harpoon gun and swallowed. His veneer of bravado was beginning to crack. Crabb continued.
“It’s all politics, Mr Wilson. You should understand that better than anyone.”
“I don’t follow,” Harold replied, his voice shaking.
“Why do you think State Security, an organisation capable of getting a fool like you into Downing S
treet, would send two numpties to pick you up? And, knowing full well they’d run into trouble and get killed or captured, equip them with Russian-language documents and Soviet weapons?”
Harold’s mouth fell open. A lot of things were, all of a sudden, making a horrible amount of sense.
“They wanted me to get caught.”
“Heavens, no. Who knows what you’d tell MI5? Agents Tulip and Lily were meant to kill you in the event of meeting any resistance. Evidently they were too dim even to do that. No, Mr Wilson, the aim was to prove beyond all doubt that you were a spy – and to force the British state to admit it.”
“But I was… I was warned – Gromyko’s handkerchief—”
“Mr Wilson,” Crabb said again, even more disdainful than before, “the top brass realised you could no longer be left in play. But you understand your value as a propaganda tool, don’t you?”
Harold grimaced as Crabb launched into his smoker’s cackle again. His eyes were bulging now, bright white in the moonlight.
“It would be no good quietly getting you out by letting everyone think you’d gone for a swim and drowned. And—” he interrupted himself, reading Harold perfectly, “I’m not saying Holt was anything to do with us. As far as we can tell, the poor beggar just drowned. Though it may have been the Chinese.”
Harold wasn’t listening. Staring queerly into the middle distance, he spoke again.
“You needed the world to know that I was… who I was.”
“Exactly, chum.”
“But,” Harold said, trying to play down his desperation, “I could – I could be useful. Radio broadcasts. Appearances in Red Square. Philby! Burgess! Maclean!”
“...were all low-level diplomats no-one gave two hoots about once they were gone,” Crabb interrupted, exaggerating slightly, “think it through, Mr Wilson. The Workers’ State will have to deal with this godforsaken isle diplomatically. It can’t very well do that while publicly harbouring its most notorious fugitive.”
“But – but privately—”
“They’d know. You know they’d know. And even if they didn’t know for sure, they would suspect it for every day they didn’t find a body. Which reminds me…”
Crabb raised the harpoon gun.
“I’m afraid this is it, Mr Wilson.”
Harold was struggling to control his breathing. For the first time since all this began, he was completely at a loss.
“Y-you’re going to just leave me here?”
“That’s the plan, yes. Someone will find you. Your former subordinates may be alarmed by the harpoon, but my superiors will be able to chalk it all up to a rogue operation that they’ve taken action against. I understand big changes are afoot in the Kremlin as we speak. But enough talk. Time to–”
“Wait!” pleaded Harold. Crabb paused, the harpoon gun now level with Wilson’s chest.
“Will you at least grant an old man a moment to make peace?” Harold said, as pathetically as he could. Crabb scowled, muttering something about the opiate of the masses. But then he nodded, not lowering the harpoon for an instant. Wilson closed his eyes and lowered his hands, clasping them together in front of him. Feeling his heart beating hard against his chest – now would be an ironic time to finally have that heart attack – he squeezed his palms together, tightly. He had to get this right. He would have no second chance.
The fact he had a chance at all was unknown to the leering brainwashee sat opposite him. Thanks to the low light, Crabb had no idea that trapped between the hands of the man sat opposite him was the grip of the outboard motor’s starter rope. Before Wilson had finished mumbling whatever pseudo-religious nonsense he had chosen to use to fill the time, he thrust his fists sharply upwards and away from himself with every ounce of force he could muster.
The engine spluttered, then roared to life. The boat surged forward, but only for a moment. While Crabb was taken by surprise, Wilson turned and gripped the rudder, turning it sharply to the right. The rear of the boat lurched to the right and it began to go round in circles. Crabb having now completely lost his bearings, Wilson threw caution to the wind and launched himself at his would-be executioner, thrusting his hands upward to point the harpoon gun up into the sky.
Without the advantage of surprise, it would have been a hopelessly one-sided fight. Crabb was a few years older than him, but had spent his adult life making sure his body could cope with deep sea diving. Wilson, on the other hand, had visibly ballooned during his second stint in government, but now, on top of his assailant, his weight was something of an advantage.
With an animalistic cry, Wilson forced his shoulder against the harpoon gun and used his whole weight to push Crabb down to the bottom of the boat. Any nearby observer would have been baffled by the sight of two men in their sixties, one dressed in full diving gear and the other a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, grappling in a motorboat. Crabb, hampered by his cumbersome clothing, cried out as his shoulder gave way. It had been dislocated by the force of Wilson’s desperate assault. Harold finally wrested control of the gun and held it in place. The protruding harpoon pressed against Crabb’s throat.
“Damn you,” the turncoat snarled at Wilson, “why can’t you just be a good boy and take one for the Motherland?”
Crabb stared defiantly up at him. Wilson grimaced.
“Motherland, comrade?” he spat, “I’m from Yorkshire.”
As Crabb’s face turned white, Harold pulled the trigger.
Officially, Submarine K-25 of the Baltic Military Maritime Fleet of the USSR was undergoing repairs somewhere outside Leningrad. Unofficially, it was floating deep underneath the North Sea.
For Captain 2nd Rank Kiril Mikhailovich Myshkin, it had been a remarkably uneventful trip, despite taking him far closer to the British coastline than he had ever been before. He was no stranger to reconnaissance missions, but after a fortnight of taking the boat in circles, back and forth from Jutland, he had become increasingly on edge. After so long in one place, it was only K-25’s small size and quiet engines that were keeping the crew from being dragged aboard one of the dozen or so frigates that were currently forming a security net from Dundee to Dover.
Despite all that, it was actually the absence – rather than the presence of – an English accent that most concerning him.
“We never should have sent that old fool out alone,” he said to his Lieutenant, breaking the silence.
“He claimed he knew these waters—”
“I know what he claimed,” Kiril snapped, “but we have been waiting far too long now. Ready the secondary team.”
The adjutant nodded and ducked out of the cabin as he made to ready the secondary team who – in total contrast with the irritating Englishman – actually seemed healthy enough to swim more than a few meters.
Captain Myshkin shook his head and walked back towards the front of the bridge, noting that the Sonar Officer had suddenly taken on a greyish hue.
“What is it, Officer Petrovich?” he found himself saying, already well aware that the news was not going to be positive.
“Convergence,” the engineer said, sweating, “the three nearest ships have started moving towards our position.”
Kiril swore.
“Are we detected?” he found himself saying, wondering if the British still beheaded people at the Tower of London, “if we started to make our escape now…”
“Their current position would actually take them a half-klick to the North-North-West, Captain,” the Officer replied, “but that could just be a way of cutting off our escape route.”
The Captain, who had not even bothered to hear the rest of the sentence, was already running towards the conning tower.
“Leave him,” he shouted down towards the fin, “we are leaving!”
As Harold Wilson watched Buster Crabb’s body sink into the black of the North Sea, he pondered following the late frogman-turned-traitor. He stared and weighed up his options.
What options? Harold scowled at his own
dim reflection. These past two weeks had been predicated on the never-wavering belief that he had somewhere to go – a safe haven. Now that was gone, up in smoke in less than thirty minutes of conversation with a mentally unbalanced frogman. It sank with him to the bottom of the North Sea.
Harold continued to stare and reflected on what else he’d lost. A sense of belonging was, by far, what he would miss the most. His place in the workers’ state, earned and assured through years of service in spreading the revolution, had never been a reality. He was just another pawn in their great chess game with the West.
No, he was a queen. He’d put so many others in check – and mated even more. But, throughout it all, he had believed himself a player. A master sat at some ivory set, carefully weighing each move before it was taken. The realisation that he was merely a piece – albeit a powerful one – was what hurt him the most.
He supposed that made him arrogant. Throughout his life, people who didn’t know the half of it had called him ‘ruthlessly self-promoting’ or even ‘powerfully obsessive’. But he was brilliant, after all. His talents had been recognised by the powers-that-be of one great superpower and the masses of another. He’d led an extraordinary life. So, actually, perhaps this was the right time to go. His career trajectory had come to a juddering halt, and he had no home any longer.
As he leaned slightly further out of the boat, it was this last thought that made him pause. He had no home. The home he had pledged his allegiance to wanted nothing to do with him – indeed, it wanted him to be able to do nothing at all – and there was no chance of a place in the home he had rejected-
“Betrayed,” he said out loud, correcting himself at last. All this time, with all this blood on his hands, he’d allowed himself moments of remorse for the people he’d killed. Fleeting moments, yes, and never particularly seriously, but they were remorse nonetheless. But the country he was born to, the people he was elected to represent and fight for – he had burned his bridges with them in a spectacular fashion. He wondered whether the regret he felt now was moral as well as practical. His last quip to Crabb must have come from somewhere. Yorkshire was in his blood, and had defined him in so many ways. So had England. Indeed, so had Britain. His whole adult life, he told himself as he looked up at the stars, he had striven to bring socialism to the people of his homeland – in a roundabout fashion, of course. Whether by proving the inherent failures of reformism or by weakening Britain’s decadent defences against the workers’ armies, he was trying to make his country a better place.
