Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  I didn’t ask Samuel what had been said, why he had shaken his head as if refusing something. I had to rest. My weight was against his shoulder and his arm was round me. I think I slept, and I don’t know for how long.

  I slept pure sleep. I forgot about hunger and tiredness. I had no dream. When I woke, it was the afternoon. It might have been rain on my face, dripping from a tree, that had woken me. They were going in a short column. The Russians were going. I didn’t see Pechersky and I assumed he was at the front. I started up. I knew we should follow them, but Samuel didn’t move. When I tried to stand he pulled me down roughly. It was the first roughness I had seen from him.

  I asked why we didn’t stay with them, go where they went.

  I could hear then the aircraft away to the west, more shooting. The last of them went. They disappeared into the trees. I lost sight of them.

  I asked Samuel why we were not with them. He told me they had gone to find food, and he said it in a clear voice, quite loud. He said that the Russians, led by Pechersky, were the fittest and strongest and would be more likely to find food. In ten minutes – it is difficult to have any real understanding of time, but it wasn’t long – Samuel helped me to my feet. For a moment we were at the edge of the group, and then we were gone from them. We slipped away. He led me by the hand and had that same secure, tight grip on me. We did not, either of us, look back. We left that clearing where the group was gathered.

  Why?

  The direction he took me was towards the fall of the light, towards the west. The Bug river was to the east, and the Russian army was in the east, but he took me west and deeper into the forest, almost, I reckoned, in the direction of the camp. We saw, on a wide track, four Germans on big horses – fine, well-fed and -groomed horses – and the Germans had rifle butts rested on their thighs. We watched, and were frozen against a wide pine’s trunk. A fugitive broke clear, came on to the track, saw them and started to run. I heard the shots and the laughter, but I didn’t see the death.

  Why?

  Samuel told me that Pechersky had not gone to get food. He had said he was going to get food, and to make his statement more believable he had collected money from the group and told them it would be used to buy food from farmers and woodsmen. Samuel told me that Pechersky did not believe so large a group had a chance of crossing the Bug, that he had achieved what he had hoped, had led the successful break-out. He had responsibility now only for his Russian comrades. Pechersky had abandoned the group with one rifle.

  I asked Samuel why he had not gone with Pechersky.

  He almost stuttered the answer. I promise, then, that blood ran in his cheeks. He could have gone. They would, of course, have taken him – but not me. It had been said to him that if one non-Russian was taken, because of a friendship, a hundred should be taken because of friendships. Only those who were Russians would go with Pechersky.

  I asked Samuel again why he had not gone with Pechersky and taken the best chance of living.

  The blush made his cheeks scarlet. ‘I refused to leave you. I told them I was with you and would remain with you. It was why they shrugged … but they wouldn’t change their decision and let us accompany them.’

  I had found love, and the ultimate moment of deceit. I believe I would have done it, told the lie and gained a better opportunity of survival. Samuel did not.

  That was love. We went far into the forest. We were together, only us two. The aircraft overhead seemed further from us, the gunfire more distant. We moved on.

  Carrick stood. Reuven Weissberg had hold of his arm, and there was venom in his voice. ‘I owe nobody anything. I have no responsibility, no obligation, to anyone. There was one love, but around it were the layers of betrayal. They rot in hell and they don’t matter to me, those of the past and those of today. For what was done here, for the lies spoken, I owe nobody anything.’

  ‘I think I understand, sir.’

  Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy and made gold pools on the leaves of the last autumn. He seemed to see them walking, the boy and the girl, and maybe – in that false brightness – they laid the trail of cotton thread. He was captivated by the place and the images of it given to him, as he was captivated by the presence, personality and almost manic intensity of the man who had brought him there. Always they were in front of him, the boy and the girl.

  It rang in his head. I owe nobody anything. He thought the birds sang prettily, but then, abruptly, their calls were overwhelmed by the distant whine of a chain-saw. He had crossed lines – demarcation strips of ethics and morality – had not seen them, would not have recognized them. He followed Reuven Weissberg.

  Lawson had an eye half open.

  He heard Deadeye quiz Bugsy, ‘That thing still working?’

  ‘Mind your manners. Of course it is. Good signal, clear and strong.’

  ‘What’s he doing, the subject?’

  ‘Not doing anything.’

  ‘Come again?’

  Bugsy said, ‘He’s not doing anything because he hasn’t moved. The location is at the side of a lake south-west-south of Okuninka, about a klick out of the place, and he hasn’t shifted. A ten-metre move’ll register, but nothing has. Must be sleeping.’

  ‘Funny place to sleep.’ Deadeye shrugged.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t moved, that’s for certain.’ Bugsy was defiant, always would be if his gear’s capability was in question.

  Lawson intervened. He had arched his back, stretched out his legs and coughed a little. He said, ‘Chuck the item out of the car, Deadeye. Put yourself in it with Bugsy – please, my friend, if you don’t mind – and drive into the metropolis of Wlodawa. I doubt there are croissants on sale, but some rolls and cheese, perhaps a bag of apples, coffee if you can find it – yes, and toilet rolls, some pairs of socks, if there’s a shop. I would suggest the Okuninka road into Wlodawa. Well, don’t hang about, Deadeye.’

  He watched Deadeye go, and Bugsy follow him. They did, indeed, chuck the item out of the car, Davies from the front and the girl from the back, which was hardly red-blooded of either, and the car was driven away from the camping area. He could always rely on Deadeye, and he valued that man’s abilities above the rest of his team – and needed the abilities. A phrase that had come from Clipper Reade, was trotted out in moments when crisis seemed to loom: an agent not showing, a covert observation post identified overlooking a dead-drop, a tail in place and seen. Clipper Reade would say, ‘I think we have, Christopher, an IAP moment, don’t you?’ Clipper Reade was rarely vulgar. Lawson thought he now faced an Intensifying Ass Pucker moment, and felt that tightening of those muscles.

  He kept it to himself, didn’t show his increasing anxiety to the rest of them. And he thought time was ebbing, went fast through his fingers … and it would happen, yes, and very soon, but his control was slipping.

  The Crow stared ahead, and had no wish to talk.

  ‘Shouldn’t they have been here by now?’ The man had come to his car, opened the door and slid into the vacant passenger seat. He had looked with growing frequency at his wristwatch, and it was the third time he had asked that question. The first time the Crow had shrugged, as if that should have been enough of an answer. The second time, he had gestured with his hands, outstretched above the steering-wheel.

  Now, the Crow said, ‘There will have been a delay.’

  ‘What sort of delay?’ There was a squeak in the voice, apprehension and nagging worry. ‘How can there be a delay?’

  The Crow carried many burdens. He thought then that, chief among them, dealing with novices, those with necessary expertise but without experience, was the most taxing. Kids who had not been on the front line of the struggle stretched his patience and calm exterior almost to a break-point. They wanted chatter, demanded to belong, had no sense of being a mere valve in a great engine, needed to talk.

  ‘There might have been a delay in the collection or in its transshipment. There are many reasons for a delay.’

  ‘How long do we s
it here? I’ve never slept in a car. I haven’t eaten. How long?’

  But they couldn’t be ignored, slapped down, insulted to silence and left to sulk. So often an amateur from outside the inner tested circle of activists was needed – an engine didn’t function without a ‘mere valve’. A mighty sum of money, ten million American dollars, was to be paid over if this gabbling, fearful little idiot gave the assurance that the device indeed contained a core in spherical shape – the size of a moderate orange – of weapons-grade plutonium. He, the Crow, could not give such an assurance. Neither could the men who had planned his journey, nor those at the container port in Hamburg’s harbour who would move the device on, nor those who would take it from another dockside and carry it to the target area, nor those who would bring it the final metres of its journey and detonate it. None could give the assurance that the damage created would be worth the expenditure of ten million American dollars. When he had fought in Afghanistan, where he had been wounded in the throat and his voice changed by the Soviet artillery shrapnel, there had been similar kids who had talked too much, had wanted comradeship, and their bones were whitened by the ravages of the winter gales on the mountains. They had died because they had lacked the strength to endure silence; it was the hard, quiet men who survived, that war and this struggle. He did not show his exasperation, or his contempt.

  ‘We wait through this day and into the evening. If they are delayed and are coming, I will be called and we will stay here until they reach us. If they do not call we will know it has failed. Later, I will get some food. You are a stranger to me but I regard you as my friend. And you should know that there are those senior to me who know your name, the sacrifices you make and the dedication you show. They have very considerable respect for you.’

  He could lie, in his hoarse, rasping voice, with ease. The Crow excused himself, left the car and walked off into the bracken and gorse. He searched for a hidden place where he could defecate, and be free of the idiot’s interrogation.

  Molenkov still had that foulness in his mouth. It burned and his gums were raw.

  They came to Kobrin, a small town. Molenkov knew that, because Yashkin had informed him that the population at the last census was fifty-one thousand. It was a mercy to Molenkov, as he nursed the poison in his mouth, and almost in his throat, that Yashkin knew little of the place, only its population and a brief history: in the eleventh century it had formed part of the Volhynian Vladimir, in the fourteenth it had been annexed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then had been part of Imperial Russia, then a part of Poland, then had been a battlefield fought over by the Polish Army and the XIXth Panzer Corps of General Heinz Guderian, occupied by the Germans until liberation by the Soviets, a part of Belarus since 1991 and … It was a great mercy to Molenkov that Yashkin had not dug up more information from the library in Sarov. It appeared to him a dismal town, and without virtue. He coughed, spluttered and spat out of his open window, but couldn’t free himself from the awfulness of the taste in his mouth. He watched, when not coughing and spitting, the needle of the fuel gauge, which did not leave the red zone, was trapped there.

  ‘How much further?’ The same repetitive question.

  ‘Through Kobrin, then eight or nine kilometres.’

  They crossed a canal bridge. The waterway was weeded up, its use as a navigation route destroyed by disrepair. Yashkin said it was a section of the waterway linking the Dnieper river to the Bug.

  ‘I don’t fucking care. I care about the fuel, what’s in the tank and what’s in my throat.’

  It was early morning in Kobrin. The first stalls in an open market beyond the bridge were being set up, clothes hung out and vegetables stacked. The sun was shining, low, milky, unmistakable, and shadows were thrown from the stalls and reflected back from the mirrors that were the puddles. In the night, they had tried to get fuel in Pinsk.

  Pinsk, then, had been a sleeping town, battened down for the darkness, the streets deserted. They had rested on that bench beside one of the old churches, and no police had come to question them, no bastard skinheads had made footballs of them or punchbags. They had driven away, then started to search. Had had to search because Yashkin, the clever one who knew every moment of history on this great route from Sarov, fifteen hundred kilometres of it, had not thought to include a length of rubber piping in the back. In a suburb of Pinsk, outside the old town, there had been a house with a tap attached to the front wall, and a hosepipe coiled round it. On the short driveway, near to the tap and the hosepipe, was a gleaming Mercedes, apparently washed the previous afternoon. Molenkov had eased his old penknife from his pocket, climbed over the wire fence beside the gate, scurried to the tap and had been sawing at the hosepipe when the house security lights had come on. He had fled with the length of pipe back to the car and Yashkin had driven off.

  ‘Are you an idiot, Molenkov?’ Yashkin had asked him. Through his broken mouth and split lips, he had denied it. Yashkin had said, ‘Did you not look at the type of Mercedes it was? You did not? It was a diesel.’

  Four roads away, they had found a car parked at a kerb, and the house beyond the garden was in darkness. It was an old car, a Moskva, petrol-driven. Molenkov had said that he didn’t think such an old car as a Moskva would be alarmed. Yashkin had stayed at the wheel, had pulled up close to the Moskva, had switched off the Polonez’s engine. Molenkov had gone, a thief in the night, to the back of the Polonez and had unscrewed the fuel cap. He had placed it on the roof, then had gone to the parked car and unscrewed the Moskva’s cap after breaking its feeble lock with his penknife. He had inserted one end of the hosepipe into the hole, had gone to the Polonez, had stood at the back and put the other end of the hosepipe into his mouth and sucked … His mouth had filled – and the Rottweiler had thrown itself at the gate of the house. Fucking great animal, fucking great teeth. Gaped and gasped, and swallowed before he had spat. His mouth filled with petrol. Then lights were going on upstairs in the house, the Rottweiler was scrabbling with its front paws at the top of the gate, and he’d had a sight of the brute’s teeth.

  They had driven away.

  It was now four hours since the petrol had swamped Molenkov’s mouth, and the taste had not lessened. More had gone into the cuts in his lips and the abrasions on his chin.

  Yashkin said, ‘I hope we have enough. This town is—’

  ‘Not another fucking history lesson.’

  Yashkin grimaced. ‘Kobrin is a frontier town. The frontier zone of a pitiful country, such as Belarus is, will be heavily policed. There will be State Security men as close to each other as the mosquitoes around the Pripet marshes on a summer evening. We cannot “borrow” fuel here, and we have no money to buy it. If we beg we draw attention to ourselves. We can only hope we have enough.’

  ‘Suppose we get to the Bug and deliver. How do we move on to wherever?’

  ‘You are an idiot, Molenkov.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Yashkin laughed. ‘We buy the fuel station. We have a million American dollars. We can buy—’

  ‘Do we have sufficient to get to the Bug?’ Molenkov refused to laugh.

  He saw the smile stripped from Yashkin’s face. The lips pursed, and the frown cut deeper. ‘I don’t know. Could we fail for a shortage of one litre of fuel? How far into the last litre are we? The gauge won’t tell us.’

  They drove on slowly, to conserve what fuel remained, and Molenkov did not look at the road ahead but at the needle that was steady at the bottom of the red area.

  On the map, ahead of them, only the village of Malorita was marked, then the open space of forest, wilderness and marshland, the blue line of the Bug river.

  Molenkov asked, ‘Will you allow an idiot one more question? We’re late. We lost the schedule searching for fuel in Pinsk. Will they wait for us?’

  ‘Yes, they will. You worry too much, Molenkov.’

  Molenkov heard the reassurance, the confidence, and didn’t know whether his friend lied. He thought of them, together, o
n the bank of the Bug, flashing their torches in the evening dusk – being where they should have been in the last hour before dawn – and not seeing a light on the far side. It might be that his friend lied, and that no one would be there because they had lost time.

  The call came.

  Lawson fumbled through his pockets, found the damned thing. Only a handful of people had that number – Lucy, of course, and an assistant director, Lavinia, who had been given it years before but had probably lost it by now or shredded the paper it was jotted on, an engineer in the speciality workshops that did the gizmos, a couple more who were scattered in that building by the Thames, and the director general. It had been Clipper’s joke, the ringing tones were of the anthem ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, but there was much of Clipper Reade’s that Lawson had made his own.

  The chimes rang through the forest. He saw the astonishment spreading as he came clear of the minibus and the call tune continued. Must have woken the surveillance people, and Shrinks had the look of one who thought that this was a man around whom a serious case study could be built, but his young man, Luke Davies, eyed him as if the gesture of the anthem was not amusing but pathetic. Did it matter to Christopher Lawson? It did not. Did it matter that a bug had not moved in hours, not even by a few metres, and that the sun was climbing above the forest? It did. He pressed the ‘connect’ button.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christopher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Francis – are we on “secure”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His tone was brusque. Even a contact from the director general was treated as an intrusion. The voice was distant, tinny when filtered through the encryption and scrambler chip built into the phone. Of course they were on secure speech. He listened. ‘I’ve been off base for the last twenty-four hours, but I understand you haven’t called through. Where do we stand?’