Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  A moment. Reuven Weissberg reached out, snatched at Carrick’s neck, held it and kissed him. They were in the boat. Then they were launched.

  Chapter 20

  16 April 2008

  Carrick clung to the rope, arms high above his head, hands clenched on it. Had his grip failed when they had pushed off, or when they were at the mid-point of the river, or at the moment when the boat’s front end hit the far bank, they would have been lost. He had taken the weight of the boat. In front of him, Reuven Weissberg was too short-built to use both hands on the rope and have his feet wedged against the sides. He had used the rope as kids did in an adventure playground, hand over hand and swinging, desperate to keep his feet in the boat and to guide it. The worst had been when a tree trunk – might have been thirty feet long – had hit the back end when they were beyond mid-stream but where the current had a fiercer thrust. The boat had rocked with the impact but stayed up.

  They had scraped against sunken branches, had had to heave on the rope to get through them, and had reached the bank.

  Weissberg skipped off. Carrick groped, found a tree root and heaved at it to test its strength, then used the cord hooked to the boat to moor – did that one-handed, then let the rope go free and swing up.

  He heard, ‘Stay close to me, Johnny.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You have your weapon?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Be careful of them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dangerous and desperate, these people, and thieves.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They went up the bank, Reuven Weissberg first, then Carrick. He was on his hands and knees, grappling with mud, when he came to the top. Branches slashed at his face. He crawled forward, then the foot ahead of him, unseen in the black darkness below a mat of branches and tall weeds, kicked against his chin. He did not call out.

  He cleared the rim of the bank, and the torch came on.

  Carrick blinked. For a moment he was blinded. He thought it was held less than fifteen feet ahead of him. He screwed his eyes shut to lose the brightness. The beam shook, as if the hand holding it could not keep steady. There was a bad cough from behind the torch, which made the beam shake worse. He heard a question called, and Reuven Weissberg answered it. The beam was lowered.

  Where was he? Where he had not been before. Why was he there? He had no idea. Who was he? He didn’t know.

  He saw them. Each had a hand on a young tree and used it as a support. The torchbeam flared out and showed enough of them. Two old men. Two old men with stubble and filth on their faces. Two old men with mud-smeared, torn clothes. Two old men, and one gasped for breath while the other was bent half double with coughing. He saw that one, the shorter, had lost a shoe. His sock was sodden and ripped, and blood seeped into the mud round it; it was the other who coughed and couldn’t spit out what was lodged in his lungs. He had thought they would be young, aggressive and athletic, the same as Viktor and Mikhail, would have the same flat, thin fair hair and smooth skins and … Between them was the canister.

  He realized then that two old men had dragged it across country to meet the rendezvous. Carrick thought it would have been the same on that side of the river as what they had trekked through, coming past the Sobibor camp, to reach the Bug. Already the canister was settled in the mud and had the weight to make a puddle round its base. The torchbeam shook because the hand of the taller man trembled. They were both, Carrick reckoned, on the point of collapse.

  It was like a dance, but the artists were exhausted and clumsy.

  Reuven Weissberg advanced on the canister and reached for one of its side straps.

  The taller one, holding the torch, used his second hand to pull the thing back.

  The shorter one inserted himself between Reuven Weissberg and the canister.

  Argument broke out. Reuven Weissberg told Carrick, low voice, that they wanted money. Where was it? Carrick was told there was no money until the content was verified. Had they not known there would be no money paid to them for delivery? He was told it didn’t matter what they had believed: they would get money on verification. They were two old men, not mafiya. They couldn’t have fought with Reuven Weissberg, and Carrick saw no weapons. He could tell from their faces that they had come expecting to be paid. He could see fragments of writing stencilled, black on olive green, on the canister’s canvas cover. The voices were raised but Carrick turned away.

  He went back down the bank to the water.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket, dipped it and felt the chill water flowing against his arm.

  Carrick climbed the bank and walked back to them. The dispute cascaded around him. The old men couldn’t win it. Each would be broken, as a matchstick was snapped after use. He pushed past the one who blocked Reuven Weissberg, bent in front of the canister, wiped hard and saw the letters and numbers. He couldn’t read Cyrillic. He cleared the dirt off the canvas. It was obvious to him that the letters and numbers represented a batch number, or a serial number, or designated a weapon type. Two old men had gone through hell, many shades of it, to bring the thing to the Bug. Reuven Weissberg had come from Berlin and Josef Goldmann had travelled from the soft comfort of London to collect it but Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor had copped out, as if the thing were too big, too dangerous … He saw them. They were crowded into the long cabin of the narrowboat. They had lassoed and corralled him, then bloody exploited him. Wouldn’t have done it for a sack of grenades, wouldn’t have hazarded him for a drum of Kalashnikovs, RPGs or even Stinger ground-to-air jobs. Carrick looked up.

  He was near to the one without the shoe. He saw the face, its weariness and despair. He broke into the argument. ‘How much do they get?’

  Surprise at the boldness of his demand for an answer. ‘What? Not your business.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘They get a million American when it is verified. It is a good price – but not your business.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He knew what was that size, what was worth two old men carting a canister to the Bug river, what a weapon worth a million American could do to a city. Carrick hung his head and the argument resumed.

  ‘We were never told. I was not, Igor was not.’

  ‘If Oleg had known, and I, we would never have come.’

  ‘You’re a cheat.’

  ‘It’s trickery, deceit. We were told we would be paid.’

  Molenkov led. He had no fear, which surprised him. ‘We did everything as we had said we would. We’ve come, we’ve brought it. We were promised we would be paid when we delivered. We have delivered. Do you have no honour? Does your word mean nothing?’

  Old sensitivities ran through him. In front of him was the squat little bastard in the old leather jacket, a mafiya tsar. He thought of how it would have been for this pig if he had worn his uniform and been in his office, had owned the power and influence that sustained a ranking political officer. He tried to ape who he once was, who he had once been. The bastard, the pig, did not react. The torchbeam shone into the man’s face. Alongside him Yashkin babbled in near-incoherence. Lightly, but with malice, he kicked Yashkin’s ankle. There was more chatter about a ‘new life’, about ‘sunshine’ and about a ‘future’, so Molenkov kicked Yashkin again, harder, and it was sufficient to silence him. He had no fear, not after what they had endured – the trauma of the frontier, the beating by the thieves, the exhaustion of dragging the canister through the forest – but he had a view of reality. So many of the scientists, chief technicians and prominent engineers at Arzamas-16 had been Jews, and at other secret cities where there were fewer of them the complex was called – had the sneered name – ‘Egypt’. He had never been able to read them; they were separate, apart and aloof.

  The mafiya Jew heard him out, then snapped his fingers. ‘It will go for verification. If it is what you say, it will be paid for. You will be told the address of a bank and an account number. It will be in Cyprus. My word is as strong
as my arm.’

  Finish. What could he do? End. Could he and Yashkin fight for possession of it and take it back? It was the moment that a dream ended. The torchbeam showed the strength of the Jew, the muscle power of his shoulders and the great size of his hands. Another man hovered behind him, but had not intervened and watched, observed, but when the light fell on his face, it was impassive.

  Molenkov made the gesture. He took out his wallet, shone the torch on to it, showed it was empty and replaced it. Then he put his hands into his trouser pockets and pulled out the insides to show what they held: a sodden handkerchief, a ring with keys, a few coins that were almost worthless. He had tried to fight and failed. He pleaded. They had been robbed. They had no money. They had no fuel in the vehicle. He had imagined they would be big men, each with a half-share of a million American dollars, each able to purchase a view of the sea. They had nothing.

  From his hip pocket, the Jew took a wad of notes, peeled some off and gave them as though it were a charity thing. Molenkov took what he was offered and hid the anger. The Jew waved for the man behind him to come forward. Each took a holding strap, and they turned their backs. They went past the point where the hook was lodged secure among a mass of birches, went under the rope that stretched away over the water and down to their boat.

  He felt, almost, an affection for the fucking thing. They carried it easily as if the weight were a trifle. He had the torch on it. It was lifted into the boat. There had been no handshake, no hug, no kiss. They were gone and with them was the dream. It was hoisted into the boat.

  ‘Can you do without a shoe, Yashkin?’

  ‘I can,’ Yashkin said. His voice was a murmur under the roar of the flooded Bug. ‘Perhaps, in a week, they will tell us that the money is lodged.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ Molenkov said. ‘Perhaps they will tell us.’

  Neither looked back as they took their first steps into the darkness of the forest.

  A few feet from the bank, Lawson stood erect, tall and proud. Beside him was Deadeye who had his rifle up to his shoulder and whose right eye was lodged against the aperture of his image-intensifier sight. Deadeye gave him the whispered commentary. Lawson had no need of it now. All he had required to know was that an object, near to waist height and with the thickness of a stout torso, had been manhandled aboard. The boat and the two figures were a dark blur against the silver of the water. There were soft voices behind him. He could imagine the triumph awaiting him. Might just, and he’d fight damn hard to achieve it, get the covering off the thing – after the boffins had cleared it for contamination – and walk it back along the corridors of VBX and show it to them in Non-Proliferation, then take it up in the lift, dump it on the floor of Pettigrew’s office and have a drink with him. Yes, he allowed himself the luxury of imagination.

  Rather them. The black shape of his agent, his target, their boat and its cargo inched out towards the river’s main flow. The rope that was tied to the tree root was near to him and shivered with the strain it took. He fell back on more immediate imagination. Two men stood upright in that small battered craft and dragged themselves across, hand over hand, on the rope. He could see, now, the white water swept back from the shape and it poisoned the cleanliness of the silver. He thought that every muscle in their bodies was strained with the effort of holding the rope and bringing the boat across.

  ‘How are they doing?’

  ‘So far so good, Mr Lawson, is how they’re doing.’

  ‘No misunderstandings, Deadeye. The target comes ashore, is bumped and taken.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Lawson.’

  ‘If he fights, he’s dead.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lawson.’

  Always a regret, never a life without a regret to harbour. He wished Clipper had been there. Clipper Reade might have enjoyed this rather substantially. He thought they were close to halfway across and the wind sang on the rope’s tightness. When it bucked, Lawson saw that one or other of them was changing hands and pulling harder to make progress against the flow. It would be a triumph, his vindication.

  The rope burned Carrick’s palms. He thought his arms were being dragged slowly, inexorably, from his shoulders. He took more of the strain because he was taller than Reuven Weissberg.

  He had been the confidant who was told the story of the extermination camp and of an escape from that place. Had been the chosen man of Reuven Weissberg when the other rats had fled. Had been the bodyguard of Josef Goldmann, money-launderer. Johnny Carrick had been, also, an officer of the Serious Crime Directorate 10, and had sworn the oath. His knees were clamped on a weapon of massive killing power. He took the Makharov pistol out of the pancake holster, clung one-handed to the rope, twisted and called for Reuven Weissberg to watch him. There was sufficient moonlight. He held up the pistol, where it was seen. He waved it in front of Reuven Weissberg’s eyes, a few inches from them. He threw it, and white spray bounced from the silver, feathered up, then was lost. Again, both hands were on the rope and he dragged the boat closer to the black wall that was the bank. He thought he had seen, against the trees, a man standing but could not have sworn to it; thought he had seen the moonlight flash momentarily on metal, a rifle’s barrel. It was a nuclear weapon and it had jolted the skin off him.

  Carrick shouted, ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Why you do that? Why? I hear you.’

  ‘I am a lie, live one and act one. Time for truth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wearing the gun was a lie.’

  ‘You talk shit.’

  ‘Truth says I’m a police officer. I’m a police officer seconded to an intelligence agency. I targeted Josef Goldmann for criminal investigation. I came here to live a lie, to betray you.’

  ‘Not you, Johnny – not you?’ He thought he heard agony, as if a scream was raised, like the owls’ shriek, like branches grating together when a gale blows. ‘Not you? Tell me, not you?’

  They were at the mid-point where the strain on arms, shoulders, hips and knees was greatest. The boat juddered and was turned half round. The big log hit it, seemed to snag it, brought water in and freed itself. He pulled the boat nearer to that bank, yard by yard.

  ‘It’s the truth. When we get there you’ll be arrested. Men are there who have tracked you. I’m bringing you to them, Reuven Weissberg. If it hadn’t been for the weapon it wouldn’t have happened, but the weapon’s there. It’ll be cordoned and there will be guns. Sir, I understand about the camp and I’m sorry.’

  The yell cut the night, was over the Bug’s roar. Reuven Weissberg shrieked, ‘We owe them nothing. Everything was betrayal. An officer rode a horse beside them and said they would be shipped to the east. It was betrayal. An officer in a white coat pretended to be a doctor as he led them to the death chambers and betrayed innocence. A man seemed to come from God and led them from the camp, then abandoned them and betrayed trust. A child found them and betrayed them to his father. Nobody, because of what was done, is owed anything.’

  I had been in the forest for two weeks and had eaten only decomposing berries, chewed roots, and drunk rainwater from puddles. I was deep in the forest and heard no man, nor saw one. It was because I was asleep that I hadn’t run. I was found by men from a partisan unit. They were Jewish, of the Chil group, and their leader was Yechiel Greenspan. When they woke me, I thought at first they were Polish Christians and tried to fight them. There were too many and I was too weak. They took me back to their camp, far into the Parczew forest.

  When we came to where the sentries were they gave a password. It was ‘Amcha’, the password of our people when they fought the Syrians two thousand years before. I learned that it had survived, used through history by Jews in flight. I learned also that their principal enemy was the men of the Armia Krajowa. They said that more of the escapers had been killed by the Armia Krajowa than by the Germans.

  I lived with them.

  I became a fighter with them.

  I killed with them and hunted for food with them.


  They were people I trusted, but no other man or woman.

  The child grew in me.

  My son was born on 22 July, two weeks late. The pain of the birth was worse than anything I had experienced. I called him Jakob, which was the name of our sub-unit commander. The same day that I gave birth we heard the sounds of artillery and tank fire. The noise of the fighting came from outside where we were, in the most dense and remote part of the forest, but still within six hours’ walk of where the camp had been.

  It was impossible for me to go. Others went.

  On the day after the Red Army had gone through Sobibor and had advanced towards Chelm, Hask, Sawin and Cycow, a patrol of the Chil partisans set off to find out what had happened at the camp, to make contact with the rear echelon of the Red Army, and to beg for food.

  They were gone at dawn and were back in the long evening before the late dusk. They had not met Russians but they had seen men of the Armia Krajowa strutting in the street at Suchawa and Okuninka. They had hidden from them. One sat down with me and told me of what he had found at the death camp of Sobibor. He said there were many Poles there.

  There were farm peasants, forest workers and women from Osowa and Kosyn. There were shopkeepers from Wlodawa, and some had brought their families. They were all Catholic Poles. With them they had carried abandoned shells and mortar bombs, which had been left by the Germans as they had retreated back from the river Bug, and they had brought a very small amount of dynamite from a quarry, only a small amount was necessary, a few grams, and fuse cord. While I suckled my baby, he told me what he had seen from the cover of the trees.

  In the hours after the escape, the Germans had shot dead all the prisoners who had not escaped, shot dead all the wounded and all of those recaptured in the forest. They were shot, in their clothes, above a pit and their bodies fell into it. The Germans covered the pit.