The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  Within half an hour of receipt of the message, however, the Bee was on his way to the Glorious Revolution in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  Moscow, 20 July; Tanzania 21 July

  From his window Deputy Director Andropov could see clearly across Dzerzhinsky Square. If he craned a little to his right he could almost see the Bolshoi Theatre in nearby Sverdlov Square, but the National Hotel and the Intourist Hotel were also hidden from view. Had the building behind the GUM department store been a little smaller, he thought, or his office a few stories higher, he might be able to see Red Square in the summer when it was not snowing, raining or foggy, and feast his eyes upon St Basil’s Cathedral.

  Dzerzhinsky Square was full of people. It was, after all, midsummer and the height of the tourist season. Yuri Andropov clasped his hands behind his back and studied the ant-like creatures scurrying below. It was easy enough to tell who the tourists were - when they thought their guides weren’t looking they directed half-fearful glances up at this building. Muscovites never bothered, even now - they knew all they would ever need to know about the Lubianka, once a feared prison, now a home for many of the Federal Security Service employees.

  Andropov was a big, square, brown man. A bear, his wife called him and a bear he seemed to be. But his heavy physique, his lined and lived-in face, his open, honest, twinkling eyes hid a razor mind. He had been Deputy Director of the FSS since the days of Gorbachev when it was still the KGB, a force to be reckoned with. And yet he was waiting, after his normal working hours, for a junior officer. Not just any junior officer: one of Department V’s vicious little thugs. In the bad old days Department V had been known as Department 13 of the Second Chiefs Directorate. Before that NKVD. What James Bond once called SMERSH in the days when the FSS had a department reading Bond books and experimenting with the secret weapons they described. Department V: the biggest army of thugs and assassins in the world.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come!” called Andropov. There was the sound of a door opening and closing. That was all. A tram threaded its way through the square, sparking like pale lightning, rumbling like an earthquake, past the empty plinth where the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky had stood five years ago. When Andropov turned round the man was standing to attention in front of his desk. The man looked, if anything, American. He had crew-cut light brown hair, a bland, open face, ingenuous blue eyes. He was wearing European casual clothes.

  “Name? Rank?” snapped Andropov.

  “Beria. Major. Department V, sir.” The change of title from KGB to FSS had not occasioned much internal restructuring - or much movement of personal, for that matter.

  Andropov pondered it for a while and then said, “Sit down please, Major.” Beria sat, still at attention. Andropov rested his bear’s body in the chair behind the desk and began to brief Beria on the situation as he saw it. “Some weeks ago, the Chinese border suddenly slammed shut. How many extra divisions they moved up no one could assess, but the activity there was considerable. We replied in kind, expecting some sort of incident. We even pulled some Spetsnaz out of Chechnya but there was nothing. Within a fortnight most of their men had vanished again, leaving extra guards at the more obvious crossing points. The inference is obvious: somebody was running and they thought he was running to us. Now we were not expecting any defections - even taking into account the number of people we trained, before your time, who were streamlined out of their jobs in January.

  “Under these conditions our obvious ploy was to alert our Far East networks to watch out for a runner - for clearly if he was not running to us, then he was running south. We did not get anything definite but there was a considerable stirring of activity in Hong Kong. Even more than we would have expected because of the handover. One of the CIA’s fleet of ocean-going ships appeared, waited for 36 hours, then sailed for Singapore. Several of the CIA Hong Kong Local Station appeared unexpectedly, then dropped out of sight. They do not seem to have gone back to Langley. They simply vanished. So what we obviously have is someone coming out of China and running through the New Territories during the last days before the handover.

  “It loses focus after that, I’m afraid, except that something of great importance must still be going on. Come.” He rose and walked to the wall opposite the window. On this there was pinned a large map of the Indian Ocean. “Look,” he said. He pointed to two brightly coloured pins. “This,” a yellow pin in the most northerly position, “is the Glorious Revolution, a Chinese freighter. This,” a blue pin away to the south-east, “is the CIA’s ship, the Lincoln.”

  “Yes sir?” Beria was not quite with him.

  “Watch.” Andropov brought out two plastic discs. He put them with their centres on the two bright pins. The discs overlapped slightly. “These discs represent the extreme ranges of the radar equipment we could expect these ships to be carrying.”

  “I see, sir…” Beria almost understood.

  “At the point they overlap, here,” Andropov pointed with a great square finger, “there has been for a fortnight and more, a ship. The British merchant vessel Wanderer owned by J.J. Hyde of the South Indian Line. A powerful man, with powerful friends - but that is beside the point. Three days ago, to our best computation, that ship vanished.” “Vanished, sir?”

  “Pouf! Gone. Sunk. Vanished.”

  “But what has this to do with us, sir?”

  “This is obviously a major intelligence action involving the SAD and the CIA. The Chinese obviously expected us to be involved also. And something has clearly gone wrong anyway. So it is the will of our masters that we take a closer look. Perhaps the Chinese were correct: perhaps we should be involved. At the very worst we should be able to steal a crumb or two from the table…”

  Beria said, “I see, sir.” And at last he did.

  Just south of Dar es Salaam the coast of Tanzania bulges out and then swings in again just before the small town of Kisiju, some 40 miles from the capital. At 2230 local time on the evening of 21 July, two men stood on a low foreland at the outermost edge of this bulge looking out to sea. One was of medium height, a man of contained violence and quiet. The other was a great rumpled bear of a man, bigger but not so hard looking. The shorter man stood without moving, his cold blue eyes searching the moon-silvered water. The two men were obviously tourists and their colourful shirts and well-cut, expensive slacks proclaimed them to be Americans. The taller one looked at his American watch. “Half past ten, they said?” he asked in a gentle, mid-west accent.

  “Half ten,” said the other like a New Yorker. Both spoke English.

  Andropov nodded and went back to watching the sea. Yuri Beria was not a talkative man, he had discovered. There was nothing hostile about his silences, they were often friendly: but they were still silences and Andropov preferred to talk. This was natural of course for Beria was a field agent, given and trained to silence. Andropov was an intelligence officer trained to communicate and question. Each recognized the difference and respected it. “Hot,” said Andropov. Beria nodded, sweat glistening on his forehead.

  They had travelled here surprisingly quickly, thanks to British Airways. Immediately after Andropov had explained the position to Beria they had left the office, arriving at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport at 1640. At 1725 they were off to London on a BA Boeing. They arrived at London Heathrow at 1915, local time, just in time to change onto another BA Boeing which left for Dar es Salaam at 1945. Beria had slept, catlike. Andropov had chatted easily to the other passengers and the stewardesses. They arrived in Dar at 2140, local time.

  They had spent the next day looking at the city. At 2100 they had driven south. It had taken them just over an hour to make the rendezvous point and they had been looking out to sea ever since.

  “There!” said Beria suddenly, in Russian, “Tam!”

  A small dark boat on the silver sea, silently coming in. They went down to the water’s edge. Beria took out a torch and flashed it around as though he were looking for something.
It had been decided not to use a code or signal on the torch as this might easily be seen. The boat came onto the shore. Fat, black inflated rubber bows whispering onto sand. “We are looking for Dar,” said a voice in English.

  Beria said in English, “I believe it is ten miles to the south.”

  The man in the boat answered. “I heard it was ten miles inland.”

  Andropov: “No. It is on top of a hill.” Then they got into the boat and it put out to sea. Nobody said anything until the man in the bows said in Russian, “Stow your oars.”

  It had been decided that engines would be too noisy and might attract attention. They stowed their oars and slowly slid up beside a high steel conning-tower. There was a ladder. Beria climbed it. Andropov followed. The boat was pulled out of the water and deflated. The two agents climbed down into brightness inside the submarine.

  “Welcome Major, Deputy Director,” said the submarine’s captain. “I am Commander Markov.” They walked back down the submarine to let the crew of the boat come in. “I have received my orders. There is nothing for you to do. Yet.”

  Behind them the second officer said, “Dive,” and the deck began to cant beneath their feet as Markov led them aft.

  Washington D.C., Indian Ocean, 21 July

  When the light above the open door changed from red to green and the British Flight Lieutenant struck him on the shoulder screaming, “GO!” over the devil’s roar of the slipstream, Lydecker closed his eyes and took a good leap forward into space. The thunder of the RAF Nimrod fell away above him in the windy dark. He thought, I must count to three and then pull the ripcord: three!

  “One!”

  Twelve hours earlier Abe Parmilee had slammed his great square, freckled hand against the top of his desk. It was a gesture of frustration tinged with guilt. There had been no sign of Wanderer for nearly four days. Parmilee had known that something was wrong, and hadn’t covered it sufficiently. If people were dead then he bore some responsibility because he hadn’t done enough. He was not going to make the same mistake again. “On your way, Ed,” he said.

  0405 Eastern Standard time, Lydecker had slammed the door of his classic red Stingray, reversed it out of his parking place in the Langley complex and roared out towards the George Washington Memorial Parkway. At 0417 he came off the Capital Beltway burning rubber and watched the lights of Dulles Airport streaming towards him like a tidal wave. A minute later he heard the roar of immensely powerful engines illegally polluting the soundwaves above his head. At 0426 he got out of the Stingray, jammed his identification under the nose of the parking attendant and raced onto the main concourse.

  “Paging Mr Lydecker. Mr Lydecker. Would Mr Lydecker please come to the static, would Mr Lydecker please come to the main Information Desk …”

  At the information desk was a young airforce pilot. “This is supposed to be secret,” said Lydecker.

  “Sorry, sir: Couldn’t think of a quicker way to get you.”

  Lydecker looked in faint disbelief at the tall, angular twin-tailed shape of the USAF F15C Eagle two-seater standing on the apron like something out of Top Gun. “Limit to how secret you can be in one of these anyway,” said the pilot. In five minutes, Lydecker was crammed uneasily and very uncomfortably into the back seat: 0445 the Eagle leaped into the air and broke the law once more over the Arlington National Cemetery, the Pentagon and the Jet Foundation.

  “Two!”

  Over Dover, Delaware, they broke the sound barrier. Lydecker was still trying to pull his mind up off the runway, and the runway was a long way behind. By 0515 Eastern Standard Time, the East was long gone. By 0525 they were at 40,000 ft and it was dawn up here. Lydecker tried to sleep, but the noise kept wakening him, FI5s are not made to be slept in. Nevertheless, he missed the Atlantic in a fitful doze.

  Over Casablanca it was 1145, though Lydecker’s watch still only said 0645, when, incredibly, a huge shadow passed over the Eagle. Lydecker jerked awake. All he could see at first was the sky, steel blue darkening to cobalt at the lower edge of space. Then, with terrifying suddenness, there was a great silver jet so close that he felt he could reach out and touch it. Behind the jet, looming in front of them, was a long tube with a cone on the end trailing out into the air like a strange kite. The Eagle nuzzled up to this, a baby at the breast, supped its fill and fell away. For a moment Lydecker saw the Sahara like a child’s sandpit far below. “Next stop the Omani Airforce Base at Masirah. We’ll start down in an hour,” said the pilot.

  “Three!”

  At 5,000 ft the FI5 had gone over on its side on the final approach to Masirah, and Lydecker watched the unsteady Persian Gulf with the angle of Muscat and Oman wobbling in the distance, then they levelled off and swooped down. The landing gear went out. The nose came up. The ground thumped Lydecker in his numb backside.

  The parachute brake slammed taut behind them and the world slowed to a stop, at long last.

  Lydecker looked at his watch. Coming up for 0800, only here of course it was eight hours later than that. He wound it on until it said 0455. The cockpit opened. Heat came down on him like a blanket soaked in boiling water. A young man leaned in. He had a freckled face, flaking with sunburn.

  After all the frantic speed there was a hitch - the tail-end of a typhoon in the area. Lydecker got three hours’ unexpected but very welcome, sleep, then they led him to the RAF Nimrod on a training mission with the Omani airforce. He climbed aboard, waving to the F15’s pilot whose voice drifted lazily across the runway, saying, “It’ll never fly.”

  In the big old aircraft he fell asleep once more in spite of the Rolls Royce engines pulling the modified Comet into the air. He just curled up on one of the basic, skeletal seats and let the fatigue claim him.

  And then suddenly the Flight Lieutenant was shaking him. Together they forced his stiff body into a black wetsuit and fitted a parachute to his back as the jet swept low and the cabin de-pressurized. They smeared shark-repellent onto the black rubber. The Flight Lieutenant opened the door and yelled above the hurricane slipstream, “When the light changes you jump. Count three and pull the cord. Got that? THREE!” Lydecker nodded. The light changed. Lydecker jumped and started counting: “ONE! TWO! THREE!”

  “Now!” He pulled the ripcord. The night jerked upright. He looked down. The Lincoln lay quite stark in the white light of the RAF’s flares. Hannegan’s helicopter like a toy on her foredeck. The wind was pushing him towards her. A small boat slid away from her side unsteadily in a fairly high sea. When he hit the water, Lydecker slapped the chest release of the parachute harness (“HMG would like it back if possible, sir,” the Flight Lieutenant had said) and swam free. It sank like a stone. Then the boat was beside him.

  “You Lydecker?” asked one of the junior officers who had not met him in Hong Kong.

  “You want to see my card, mister?” snarled Lydecker. He was on board in 20 minutes, drinking rye and stinking of shark repellent in the Captain’s cabin with Hannegan as the Lincoln butted north towards Socotra.

  London, 22 July

  The two young men almost danced around each other, striking and parrying, stabbing and dodging. The tall, dark one had the reach but the shorter blond had better technique. They were evenly matched. Their loose white shirts were marked with sweat, their hair flat, their faces glistening with it. The swords rang like bells and the daggers hissed. They grunted and mouthed and danced and dodged but Nash was watching the King.

  The King looked carefully around his court: they were all watching the bout. The King leaned forward and his left hand stole over the goblets before him. White powder drifted down into one like snow.

  “One!”

  “No!”

  “Judgement!”

  There was blood on the dark man’s sleeve. A courtier minced forward and looked: “A hit, a very palpable hit.” The King’s hand was back in his lap snatched away at the first hoarse call. The wounded duellist shrugged the courtier off. “Well - again.”

  The King rose.

>   Nash came forward in his seat, as he always did, sweat upon his own brow, anticipating…

  “Stay,” said the King. “Give me a drink. This pearl is thine. Here’s to thy health.” To the panting blond duellist. Then an impatient gesture with the left hand to the goblet poisoned with the powder: “Give him the cup.” But the blond man shook his head and spoke in beautiful resonant measured tones. Nash hardly listened, slumped back in his seat, lost in frustration with the King until the swords began to ring once more. And then a pause. More dialogue. Nash opened his eyes. The Queen was on her feet now, dark, feminine, gentle and beautiful.

  “The Queen carouses to thy fortune,” said the Queen. The King, whose eyes had been elsewhere, looked fondly round upon her. Then his face went white. His eyes widened. His lips parted, trembling. His left hand stole to the great jewel at his throat. He half rose and stood silent, watching the bright goblet in her hand and riven with horror. “Good madam,” said his nephew-son, enjoining her to drink.

  The King’s voice was rain on dead leaves, it was wind in old bones, it held infinities of agony in its whisper: “Gertrude, do not drink.”

  But she laughed. Her laugh was everything of life that the King’s voice was of death. She raised the goblet to her eyes and mocked her husband lovingly. “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me.” Nash held onto the arms of the seat as he always did now. He closed his eyes because he did not want to see the King’s face but he saw it in his mind more clearly, wrenched away from his wife’s warm gaze and touched already with death and with damnation saying, “It is the poisoned cup. It is too late.”

  A hand took Nash gently by the shoulder. Nash got up. They went slowly down the darkened aisle. The swords were ringing and hissing with a more deadly purpose now. A pause, and then again. Nash looked at Greenglass, “Part them, they are incens’d!” cried someone distantly.

  They reached the tall dark wood doors. Nash reached out and stopped, frozen by a scream: “Look to the Queen there, ho!” Then he swung the door open, Greenglass huge behind him. He half closed his eyes against the brightness of the foyer lights. The doors were swinging closed behind them. One last despairing cry: “Oh my dear Hamlet - the drink, the drink!”