Charlie M

(17)

Charlie had protested about the danger of attracting attention, but Ruttgers and Cuthbertson, in complete and unified command now, had insisted on final rehearsals, actually driving to within a mile of the frontier along the winding, tree- and meadow-edged road to the Czech border and then back again, stop-watching the journey and testing the surveillance over every mile.

Satisfied, they had toured first by car and then on foot the streets surrounding the secure C.I.A. house in Wipplingerstrasse, isolating the watchers and ensuring each team had the necessary and prepared back-up group to move on any emergency radio command.

To the safe house the Directors had then summoned the section leaders for a final briefing. An American marine commander, Gordon Marshall, was controller of the resistance team at the crossing point. Another American, named Alton, was responsible for the route security into Vienna and a Briton, Arthur Byrbank, was co-ordinator for the journey to the airport. A British commando, Hubert Jessell, was to supervise the house and grounds.

The Directors agreed the placings were perfect and then took the four men through the entire operation, checking and cross-referring the codes and call signs until they were completely satisfied.

Neither Ruttgers nor Cuthbertson was going to allow the slightest possibility of error reflecting upon their personal involvement, decided Charlie, wryly, sitting near the window while the four section leaders received their final instructions.

It was a perfect house for the operation, apart from the absence of a courtyard in which to conceal the car, thought Charlie. It occupied its own grounds; tree-dotted and easily guarded, and secure behind an electronically controlled gate opened by a command room console switch to a password known to only ten men.

The ground floor was given over to radio communications and staffed by three men. The lounge in which they were now gathered and in which they intended to greet Kalenin was a huge, first-floor room, illuminated by chandeliers that hung from the high, vaulted ceilings. Despite the obvious cleaning, the faint, dusty smell of disuse still clung to the over-padded Viennese furniture which had been arranged in a loose circle around the table.

If the crossing went without incident, there was actually talk of a snack meal before the flight to London, remembered Charlie, amused.

At 6 p.m, the section heads left to get into position and Cuthbertson and Ruttgers were alone with the two operatives. The American Director was chain smoking; the occasional jerk in Cuthbertson’s eye and the increased redness of his face were the only indications of his nervousness.

‘Well,’ asked Cuthbertson, confidently.

‘It was a mistake to have gone so completely over the route,’ criticised Charlie again, knowing Braley shared his view. ‘It created an unnecessary risk.’

Ruttgers sighed. Increasingly, the C.I.A. Director found himself agreeing with the view that Cuthbertson had expressed: the Englishman was losing his nerve.

‘It excluded the possibility of an error once the thing starts rolling,’ insisted the American.

‘Or created it,’ argued Charlie.

‘Are you frightened?’ demanded Ruttgers, aggressively.

‘Yes,’ came back Charlie. ‘Very frightened …’ he paused. ‘… Only a fool wouldn’t be frightened,’ he added, then concluded, pointedly, ‘or a psychopath.’

Ruttgers jerked up at him, sharply, and Charlie answered the challenge. It was Ruttgers who looked away first.

Cuthbertson shifted, embarrassed at the hostility that had grown in the room.

‘This isn’t going to help the operation,’ he complained. ‘We’re all on edge … bound to be. Let’s make allowances, for God’s sake …’

He moved to a side table and held up whisky.

‘A drink, Charles,’ he suggested, immediately turning back. ‘Charlie,’ he corrected.

He was trying very hard, thought Charlie, sympathetically, watching the British Director pour quickly and then hurry the glasses to each man. The four of them stood embarrassed, like abandoned strangers at a party seeking conversation.

‘To everything going well,’ toasted Cuthbertson, raising his glass.

Sir Archibald had usually given him a drink before the commencement of any operation, recalled Charlie. The hope had always been ‘a safe return’.

He drank self-consciously, then looked pointedly at his watch, wanting to quit the company of men whom he despised.

‘I think we should move,’ he said. ‘We can always stop en route if we make good time, but I don’t want to be late,’

Both Directors nodded agreement. It was going to be a diarrhoetic four hours for them, thought Charlie, waiting alone in the lofty room with only sporadic radio messages to tell them what was happening.

Ruttgers stopped them at the door.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Braley.

‘And you, Charlie,’ pressed the American, smiling at his acceptance of the other man’s affectation.

Charlie nodded, without replying, leading the way from the room.

Unchallenged, Charlie took the driver’s seat and began moving the car along the now familiar route towards the Marien Bridge. Within fifteen minutes he had picked up the road to Langenzerdorf and had begun to relax. The traffic was comparatively light and it was a warm, dry evening with clouds, which would reduce the light during the cross-over. Perfect, thought Charlie.

As they passed each monitoring point, Braley depressed the code key on the radio, signalling their progress. Ruttgers and Cuthbertson would be in the control room now, guessed Charlie, charting their route on the map that had been laid out there.

‘There’s no reason why you should like them,’ said the American, after a while. ‘But equally there’s no reason why you should be so bloody rude.’

‘They’re fools,’ judged Charlie.

‘That’s ridiculous and you know it,’ rejected Braley. ‘Fools can’t hold down the positions they do.’

Charlie shrugged, unwilling to pursue any argument. As they approached the border, Braley’s breathing became more difficult, he noticed. When they got on the outskirts of Ernstbrunn, their radio clattered briefly as the units in Stockerau and Wolkersdorf identified themselves.

‘It’s working well,’ said Braley, nervously.

‘Traps always do until they close around you,’ said Charlie, unhelpfully.

There was hardly any traffic on the road and they cleared Ernstbrunn in minutes. At the junction with the road to Mistelbach, Charlie slowed and then halted, knowing he was well ahead of time.

‘It’s a terrible road for a chase,’ he assessed, professionally.

Braley nodded agreement.

‘I’ve been thinking that for miles,’ replied the American, miserably. ‘Let’s hope to Christ we can hold anything sufficiently long to make the decoy work.’

Charlie looked sideways at him, questioningly.

‘Just how hard do you think the Russians and the Czechs would go to get Kalenin back?’ he demanded, rhetorically. ‘There’s hardly a man in the Soviet Union more important to them. If they come, they’ll cross that border like a steamroller, flattening everything in their path.’

Braley slumped in his seat.

‘Let’s get going,’ he avoided. ‘I don’t want to be late.’

They reached the back-up cars, parked two miles from the border, at 9 p.m. Braley and Charlie stopped and crossed to the lead car, where Braley stared in momentary amazement at Cox sitting in the front seat.

‘Jim,’ he exclaimed. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Part of the team,’ said the athlete, happily. ‘Recalled from Moscow a week ago. I’m handling the decoy car. Think it’ll work?’

‘We hope so,’ replied Braley. He wondered what real diversion had been planned to involve Cox: certainly there would be no question of his getting captured. Poor bastard: still, he wasn’t a very good operative.

Marshall, the section leader of the resistance group, was a crew-cut, taut man of sharp, abrupt movements. He sat alongside Cox, flexing and shrugging his shoulders, like a boxer Umbering up before a bout. He’s hoping there will be a chase, so he can involve himself in a fight, assessed Charlie.

‘No last-minute snags?’ demanded the Briton.

Marshall grinned sideways at the question, as if the idea were unthinkable.

‘No last-minute snags,’ he echoed. He looked at the heavy Rolex watch that had been part of the elite snobbism of the Green Berets in Vietnam.

‘The team are setting off in fifteen minutes to take out the border post,’ he reported.

‘No one is to be killed,’ said Charlie, immediately. Marshall worried him, he decided. The marine was the sort of man who enjoyed killing.

‘My men know what to do,’ snapped the American, gazing at the unkempt Briton as if he’d trodden in dog droppings.

‘They’d better,’ reminded Charlie, unperturbed. ‘The object is to avoid trouble, not cause it.’

Marshall turned to look at him fully, his face inches away from Charlie’s.

‘You trying to tell me how to do it?’ he demanded.

He would keep his voice very low because he would have read in books that it was how men spoke in such circumstances, thought Charlie. The marine’s breath smelt of mint and he wore a heavy cologne, Charlie detected.

‘No,’ he said, not moving his head away. ‘But if it becomes necessary, I shall. And I’ll pull rank, gun or whatever other crap is necessary to ensure that my instructions are followed. The war in Asia, commander, is over. And your lot made a balls of it.’

The man’s control was remarkable and Charlie was glad of it. There would have been no way he could have physically confronted him, Charlie knew.

The departure of the assault group broke the tension between them. Their faces were cork-blackened and they moved without sound. Complete experts, thought Charlie. And killers.

‘I’ll be in the lead car, fifty yards from the border,’ reported Cox, speaking to Braley.

The fat American nodded.

‘If there’s no chase, I shan’t bother to stop. I’ll leave you to follow automatically,’ Charlie told the marine commander.

Marshall nodded, tightly.

Charlie turned as Braley nudged him. The man was offering the luminous dial of his wristwatch to him.

‘Time to go.’

His breathing was very bad now, Charlie realised.

The Briton let himself quietly out of the car, returned to the Mercedes and sat for several seconds, hands gripping the wheel.

‘You all right?’ asked Braley, worried.

Charlie released a long sigh, then started the car.

‘Yes,’he said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘That was unnecessary, back there,’ said Braley, nodding over his shoulder to the car where Marshall sat.

‘I know,’ conceded Charlie, embarrassed now.

‘Then why do it?’

Charlie shrugged in the darkness.

‘You’ve got to buck everyone, haven’t you, Charlie?’

The Briton said nothing. It had been bloody stupid.

‘You shouldn’t do it, Charlie. There’s no need for you to keep proving yourself.’

‘Forget it,’ said Charlie, irritated.

Braley stopped talking, looking sadly at the Englishman, and they made the two-mile drive enclosed in their separate fears. The road bent immediately before the border and Charlie stopped just short, so that the car was hidden. Braley’s protest in Prague had been right, thought Charlie. Despite the clouds, it was hardly dark.

‘Let’s check on foot,’ he suggested.

They got carefully from the car, easing the doors open so there was no sound. Charlie led, keeping against the bank where the shadows were deepest. He’d moved like this with Snare he recalled, all those months ago in Berlin. And there’d been a trap for him at the border. And now Snare was mad.

The Austrian border post was completely quiet. Through the window of the tiny office, they could see one of Marshall’s assault group. The man sat next to a telephone that kept liaison between the stations. He appeared relaxed and very comfortable.

‘Do you think they’ll have killed the guards?’ asked Charlie.

‘Yes,’ said Braley, immediately. As if it were justification, he offered: ‘It’s the only way they’re trained.’

Charlie looked beyond the post, across the twenty yards of no-man’s-land and into Czechoslovakia. There was no sign of activity from the communist side.

‘We’ll drive up,’ decided Charlie.

He took the car slowly, stopping against the customs office and dowsing the lights.

‘It’s too quiet,’ started Braley, worriedly, staring through the barriers.

‘We’re three minutes ahead of time,’ reminded Charlie.

Inside the customs post the telephone rang and one of Marshall’s commandos answered, the dialect perfectly modulated. Ruttgers and Cuthbertson had considered every detail, conceded Charlie, listening to the exchange. The telephone call was a routine time check and the receiver was replaced within seconds. Beside him, Braley was dragging breath into his lungs, his shoulders rising and falling with the effort.

‘Come on!’ demanded the American, gazing over the border, hands clenched against his knees. ‘Come on!’

Charlie checked his watch.

‘10.35,’ he recorded.

‘Shall I radio the delay?’ enquired Braley, quickly.

‘It will have been done already,’ soothed Charlie. ‘If we make contact as well, it will create panic’

‘Where is the bloody man?’ asked Braley, irritably.

‘There,’ responded Charlie, pulling forward in his seat.

Two hundred yards across the border, a set of headlights had flashed, once. It was not possible to discern the outline of a car.

‘What now?’ asked Braley. His voice was uneven, the words jumping from him.

Charlie sat momentarily uncertain. The lights flickered on again, briefly.

‘I go across,’ said the Briton, simply.

He tried to get quietly from the car, but this time the sound of the door opening seemed to echo in the quiet night. From the back seat he hauled the bugged money-bag, hefted it in his right hand and looked briefly back into the vehicle.

‘See you in a few moments,’ predicted Charlie.

The American stared back at him, but didn’t reply.

The men in the border posts were watching him, Charlie knew, as he began to walk towards the barrier; the signal indicating contact would have already been flashed by one of Marshall’s men to the secluded house in Wipplingerstrasse. He wondered what Cuthbertson and Ruttgers were doing.

Around him the sounds of the night chattered and rustled and he started looking into the darkness ahead, trying to detect movement. It was a warm, mellow evening: ideal for walking, reflected Charlie. At the Austrian barrier he paused, then ducked beneath it. He hadn’t realised the money would weigh so heavily. He stopped, transferring it to the other hand. It was the unexpected weight of the bag that had made his hand shake, he decided.

‘Keep cool, Charlie,’ he advised himself. ‘Don’t ruin it all now.’

He could make out the outline of a car, a small, inconspicuous shape hah* hidden by the Czech border installation. Barbed wire stretched from either side of the barrier posts and he could just identify the triangular shapes of tank obstructions. There would be mines, guessed Charlie, and electronic sensors. Just like East Berlin.

At the Czech barrier, he stood still, right hand resting on the pole. The shaking had stopped, he saw, gratefully. The impatient light burst from the darkened car, urging him on.

He hesitated several seconds, then ducked beneath it. The Czech border posts were completely deserted, he saw, yellow lights pooling into empty rooms. Beyond the control houses, he walked through a cathedral of tall pines which made it completely dark. It was still and quiet, like a church, he thought, extending his metaphor.

Gradually the whiteness of a face registered through the windscreen of the car he was approaching and when he got nearer he saw the figure move, winding down the driver’s window.

‘You appear very nervous, Mr Muffin,’ greeted Kalenin.

‘Yes,’ agreed Charlie.

The General got from the car, smiling up at him. He opened his coat, disclosing civilian clothes.

‘I had intended to wear my uniform and medals,’ he said, calmly. ‘But then I decided it might have created difficulties in Vienna.’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie, ‘it might have done.’

Around them the night was wrapped like a blanket. There was no sound from the forest, realised Charlie, suddenly. Which was wrong. There should have been animal movement, as there was on the Austrian side.

‘I’ve a great many medals,’ said Kalenin.

‘I know,’ said Charlie.

The Russian nodded towards the bag.

‘Is that the money?’

Charlie lifted it on to the bonnet of the car.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I suppose I should examine it?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘It was bloody heavy carrying it all this way.’

Kalenin unsnapped the fastenings and ruffled the notes.

‘So much money,’ he said, whimsically.

‘Enough for a lifetime,’ assessed Charlie.

Kalenin jerked his head back across the border.

‘They’ll be watching through infra-red nightglasses,’ he guessed.

‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘The advance party will have them. The message will have already been sent to Vienna that we’ve met.’

Kalenin nodded. He seemed reluctant to move, thought Charlie.

‘The whole border seems deserted,’ pressed Charlie.

‘Yes,’ said Kalenin, easily. ‘I’ve got very great power in all the satellite countries. Whatever I say is obeyed. It was really very easy.’

Charlie looked back into Austria.

‘There’s a man back there who hoped you’d be pursued by armed guards,’ he reported.

‘Sometimes I feel sorry for the Americans,’ said Kalenin. ‘There’s so many who’d like still to go West in covered wagons, shooting Indians.’

The two men stood for several seconds looking at each other.

‘Well,’ said Kalenin, finally, ‘shall we go?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

‘I think I should carry the money,’ said Kalenin, reaching out.

‘Of course,’ agreed Charlie.

Wilberforce remained on duty in the Whitehall office, waiting for the message from Vienna that Kalenin was on his way. He had delayed until late in the evening seeing Janet, hoping a signal would make the encounter impossible, but no contact had been made and now he sat gazing down into his lap, embarrassed by the completeness of the girl’s account of the previous night. He’d already listened to the recordings of the tapes of which she was unaware and knew she had omitted nothing. Involving her had been an offensive mistake, decided Wilberforce.

‘In many ways,’ he said, apologetically, ‘I regret the decision to ask you to inform upon the man. It’s proved completely unnecessary. And distasteful.’

‘I know,’ said Janet.

Wilberforce looked up at her and for the first time she realised how pale his eyes were. They gave his face an unreal, frightening expression.

He smiled, kindly.

‘You’ve grown very fond of him, haven’t you?’ he probed.

‘Yes,’ admitted Janet, immediately, ‘which makes what I’ve done even worse.’

‘You’ll have to get over it, you know,’ advised the civil servant. ‘Nothing can possibly come of any relationship.’

‘I know,’ accepted the secretary.

She moved forward in her chair.

‘Tell me,’ she demanded, ‘he’ll be all right, after this, won’t he? I mean the Director won’t dump him, like he was planning to, all those months ago.’

Wilberforce took several minutes to reply.

‘I don’t know,’ he lied, finally.

The telephone made them both jump.

‘They’ve met,’ reported Wilberforce, replacing the receiver. ‘Kalenin and Charlie have met.’