Sacrifice
Page 41
Charles screeched at him, a long, long screech of hatred and revenge, and sprayed the remainder of his machine-gun ammunition up and down his body.
Novikov jerked, trembled, and fell. He lay on the concrete burning, and Charles walked right up to him and watched his flesh blacken and his fingers curl.
It was then that one of the Soviet officers stepped up to him, unfastening his leather holster, and taking out his pistol. He shot Charles once in the chest, without even breaking his stride, and then shot him again in the side of the head.
Charles heard a thundering noise. It could have been the 747; it could have been the sound of his own blood, rushing through his brain. It could have been his accumulated memories, released at last. He opened his eyes and saw that the world was sideways, and very shadowy. He must be lying on the ground, with his face against the earth. He wondered why he was here, and why he couldn’t breathe.
He didn’t think about Agneta. Instead, he thought about his mother, tucking him up in crisp white sheets, and the pale light of winter shining blurrily through his nursery window.
Somebody was kneeling beside him, a white-haired woman.
‘Mother,’ he said, with lips that could scarcely move.
Twenty-Eight
David Daniels was finishing his coffee when the Canadian detective inspector came into his cell, and stood there frowning thoughtfully, jingling his keys. The detective inspector had a ruddy face, the face of a man with incipient heart disease, and a gingery moustache. He said nothing for a very long time.
‘Are you going to charge me?’ David asked him.
The detective inspector shook his head. ‘I’ve been given other instructions.’
‘What other instructions?’
‘I’ve been instructed to hand you over to two gentlemen from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They’re waiting for you outside.’
David put down his coffee. ‘But this is Canada. The FBI have no jurisdiction here.’
‘All the same, that’s what I’ve been told.’
‘But you don’t understand,’ said David. ‘They’re going to kill me.’
The detective inspector rubbed the palms of his hands together as if he were rolling out tobacco. ‘I’m sorry, my friend. Those are my instructions and I have to obey them.’
‘I want to see a lawyer!’ David demanded.
‘You haven’t been charged.’
‘But if I haven’t been charged, you can’t hand me over to the FBI.’
The detective inspector smiled, faintly. ‘You want to try me?’
They brought David his jacket, and returned his wallet to him. He stood in the entrance hall of the police station, which smelled strongly of lavender wax, and signed a form to say that all of his possessions had been returned to him. The desk sergeant had made two crosses on the form where he should sign.
Two constables escorted him out of the glass swing doors, and down the steps into the sunshine. There was a light wind blowing from the west. Across the street, a grey Buick was parked, and two men in sports coats and grey slacks were waiting beside it.
‘Get into the car, please,’ one of them instructed David. He had a face like a liquor-store manager, and a voice to match. David climbed into the back seat of the car and sat there without saying a word. The FBI men got into the front, and slammed the doors, and started up the engine.
They drove out to the shore of Lake Ontario, not far from Bronte. It was deserted here; the lake lapped noisily against the shoreline. They took David out of the car and made him kneel on the ground, facing the water. One of them said, ‘You want to say anything?’
David said hoarsely, ‘No. No, thank you.’
The one with the face like a liquor-store manager pressed the muzzle of a Colt.45 automatic right up against David’s ear, and fired without hesitation. David’s head burst apart like a bucket of scarlet paint.
The FBI men walked back to the car, buttoning up their coats. One of them was whistling Friendly Persuasion.
*
During that same Tuesday, the Soviet Army advanced through the whole of Western Germany, and by late evening had penetrated into Holland as far as Groningen, and into Belgium as far as Liege. In the south, they had encircled Switzerland, and had crossed the Alps into northern Italy. General Abramov expected to be in Rome by eight o’clock the following morning. After a slow start Operation Byliny was progressing well, and the push to the Channel would be completed by Thursday evening, half a day ahead of schedule. Already, the airborne assault force which would land in Britain on Friday was being driven through to the front, so that they would be ready to take off from Calais as soon as the port had been secured.
General Abramov had learned from Hitler that to hesitate in his attack on Britain would be fatal. Mind you, he thought to himself, things had been different in those days. He had already received a ‘categorical assurance’ from the British TUC that all of their members would be out on strike when the assault force first landed, and would give the occupying forces their ‘best co-operation’.
*
In Washington, at lunchtime, the President called for Morton Lock, his National Security Adviser. The President was eating a desktop lunch, a tuna salad with refried beans on the side.
‘Sit down, Morton,’ he said. Morton sat.
The President chewed and swallowed, and then set down his fork and said, ‘These are great times, Morton.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I almost wish that I could live for another hundred years, just to read what the history books have to say about these times.’
Morton didn’t reply; he could sense that the President had something else on his mind.
At last, with that characteristic little nod of his head, the President said, ‘I have to tell you that Senator David Daniels died this morning, unexpectedly.’
‘They caught him?’
The President didn’t answer that. He picked up his fork, and unsuccessfully pursued a radish around his plate, and then he said, ‘A man in my position, a man of my responsibility, always has to take care that he never exposes himself to pressure, do you know what I mean?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Well, in the case of David Daniels, you might have been able to say that if anyone had linked his connection to certain leaks in national security with the fact that he once used to date my daughter, then that person could have used that connection, no matter how tenuous it might have been, to their own advantage.’
Morton made a baffled sort of an expression, and shrugged. ‘I guess so, sir.’
The President gave up chasing the radish. ‘Let me just say this, Morton. David Daniels is now the late David Daniels. Nobody can prove anything about anything. For your own sake, let it stay that way.’
Morton looked at the President closely. For the first time since his appointment, he saw the face of a man of infinite callousness; a man without conscience or sentiment. Perhaps, these days, that was the way a President had to be. He had always said himself that this wasn’t a world for losers.
He left the Oval office, and went back to his own office. He locked the door, went to his desk, and opened the bottom drawer. He took out a fifth of Old Crow and a heavy-based whiskey glass, and poured himself a large drink. The company of thieves, he thought to himself. Yet, in a curious way, he respected the President for having outsmarted him. He lifted his glass in a toast to all the world’s outsmarters.
*
The rest of what happened can only be found in the history books; because those who knew the truth about the Copenhagen Agreement and Operation Byliny – those who survived, at least – were never able to tell publicly anything about what they knew. Probably the least distorted account can be found in The Soviet Liberation of Britain, by P. Budenny and Walter Greene. The military side is admirably described in Byliny! The Bloodless Revolution, issued by the London office of the Politburo Information Service.
Marshal Golovanov was retired, and now l
ives with his wife Katia in a small village outside Moscow. There have been photographs of him feeding pigs and mending fences, and smiling into the late autumn sunlight.
What happened to Inge Schültz, nobody knows. Nor was there any trace of Rufina Konstantinova. Some stories say that Miss Konstantinova was promoted. Others say that she was shot. After the annexation of Europe and Scandinavia, there was a total clampdown on military and political information, which has yet to be lifted.
John Bishop, after three months back in England, was found in a garage in West Croydon, sitting in the front seat of his six-year-old Ford Fiesta, dead from inhaling exhaust fumes. Michael Townsend now works for the Soviet Computer Complex at Hemel Hempstead.
Perhaps it is Michael Townsend, however, who should have the last word. On the last weekend of May, he returned home and wrote in a small notebook the following words, and then hid the notebook in the chimney-breast of his son Duncan’s bedroom in Sanderstead.
‘Today we drove to the Hog’s Back, to watch the Soviet airborne assault troops parachute down over Aldershot. The Prime Minister had already agreed to a “no-hostility” pact with the Soviet Union, and so there was no real need for the drop, not as a military strategy, but I suppose there was something to be said for it as a propaganda spectacle.
‘The roads were jammed all the way from Kingston; and when the first Soviet transport planes came over, everybody stopped and got out, and just stood there in the road and on the verges, watching them, silent. Hundreds and hundreds of huge planes, thundering so loudly you couldn’t hear yourself think. Then the parachutists came out, by the thousand. They looked like the seeds of dandelions, blown all over the countryside, thousands of them. When the last of them had landed, everybody got in their cars and went home. Margaret was crying.’
In November he wrote:
‘I thought about what I had seen for a long time afterwards, and I still think about it now. I think I understood that what I was seeing was the final triumph of lies over the truth; the final triumph of indifference over active decency; and the folly of giving away even an inch for the sake of a quiet life.
‘I walk home now, of course (can’t afford a car) and as I come up the road and see the lights in all those suburban sitting-rooms, and hear the televisions gabbling in Russian; and as I turn around and look at the valley behind me, prickled with lights, and hear the commuter trains rattling back from London, well, I feel sad for all of us; and not even particularly glad to be alive.’
About the author
Graham Masterton trained as a newspaper reporter before beginning his career as an author. Graham’s credits as a writer include the bestselling horror novel The Manitou, which was adapted into a film starring Tony Curtis. He is also the author of the Katie Maguire crime series, which became a top-ten bestseller in 2012. Visit grahammasterton.com
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