He Fell Among Thieves

CHAPTER I

NICK SKINNER buried his parachute just outside the city of Pinsk, which lies well within the Pripet Marshes, deep in Russian-occupied Poland and not a hundred miles from the Soviet border.

His mouth was very dry and his palms clammy, and for a moment he listened as the plane droned away overhead. From the direction of Pinsk, a big anti-aircraft searchlight stabbed up half-heartedly through the dense fog. When the drone of the engine faded away, so did the light.

And Skinner was alone.

The Pripet Marshes sprawl like a rotting carcass over the Russo-Polish frontier, dank and noisome, alive with the eerie night sounds of swampland. Soviet country…

Half a thousand miles to the West was the other side of the Iron Curtain, and safety. But Skinner knew it might be a long time before he could hightail it in that direction. Maybe never…

Me, Nick Skinner, he thought. Captain in the C.I.A. And because my mother was once a dark-eyed Russian beauty, because we had spoken the language of the Tsars as much as English in my Weehauken childhood, I was the man for the job.

Bedding down as well as he might in the inky night of the Pripet, Skinner found it hard to believe that the glistening halls of the Pentagon lay only forty-eight hours behind him. But that’s the way you had to work in the Central Intelligence Agency. Quickly, so quickly, that there isn’t time for anything to leak out.

Skinner could remember the grave, serious faces as they ushered him into the office of the five-star general. A tall man with a lined, work-weary face, the general had come right to the point. “Skinner,” he said, “what do you know about Russia?”

Skinner could remember the grave, general put him at his ease. He shrugged. “Not, a great deal, sir. I speak the language like a native. My mother came over right after their revolution in 1918. But I’ve never been closer to Soviet territory than a good-will tour in Czechoslovakia. They took some of us on that right after the war, before they started to get unpleasant.”

The general laughed softly. “All-right. You speak the language well, and that’s important! What part of Russia did your mother come from?”

“Tula, I think. Large town a couple of hundred miles south of Moscow. I’m almost sure it was Tula, General. My mother’s dead now.”

“Tula it, is then. That’ll be your home town, Skinner.”

“What?”

“Simple. Your identification papers will show you’re a native of Tula, one Nikolay Mironov. Occupation: transient worker. You see. Skinner, you’re going to Russia. You leave right after we’re finished here, as soon as they can give you the proper clothing.”

Skinner said he thought the general was joking.

BUT THE older man shook his head, making a bridge of his hands, interlacing the fingers and peering over them at Skinner. “Hardly. Skinner, do you know anything about Russia’s ability to produce, atomic weapons?”

“No, sir. Just what I read, that’s all. We know they set off at least one atomic bomb about two of three years ago. We know they’re hunting up uranium ores furiously—”

“They’re not! Up until a few months ago your account would have been perfectly correct. But doesn’t it

strike you as odd that they contented

themselves with merely that one explosion? Further, our underground contacts report a startling thing. The hubbub over uranium ores had died down completely inside the Iron Curtain. They extracted most of their uraninite in the Erz Mountains, where two rich veins meet at a town in Czechoslovakia called Joachimsthal. The town is now deserted, Skinner! For some reason, or reasons, the Reds have apparently lost all interest in the manufacture of atomic weapons.

“You’re going to Russia to find out why. We’ve got to know. Skinner. You figure it out: maybe, just maybe, the balance of power is still in our favor because of superiority on atomic weapons. And that’s holding the war-hungry Soviets on a mighty slim leash. Now they scoff at atomics….”

Skinner stood up. “Does Intelligence draw any conclusions?”

“Of course. The only conclusion we can draw. The Reds have something else, Skinner. They must have. Some secret weapon so utterly powerful they can forget all about their work with atomics. Frankly, Skinner, we’re afraid. And we’re sending you to find out what it’s all about. That is, if you’ll go….”

Skinner’s heart pounded furiously under his ribs, and his fingers trembled slightly when they took the drink the general offered. He even forgot to be surprised that liquor was present at these secret meetings, and he didn’t answer until he’d taken three stiff shots of bourbon. “Hell,” he said. “You don’t have to ask me. I’m in the C.I.A. and that’s that. You think I ought to go, and I’ll go. Don’t get me wrong. General. I’m no hero. But I didn’t enter this service to twiddle my thumbs. You got a job you think I can handle. I’ll go.”

After that, the General was apologetic. “There’s no plan, Skinner. Nothing. We don’t know enough of what’s going on to formulate one. You’ll be on your own, completely on your own. You’ve got to find that weapon—whatever it is that’s made the Russians throw their atomic preparations out the window. Then you’ve got to get that information back here. I’ll be frank, Skinner: I know a few people who’ll be surprised if you’re able to get back—with it.”

And that was that. Skinner could have no farewells, because you never knew when you’d say goodbye to the wrong person. He was clothed in a coarse wool shirt and a pair of denims. They gave him a .45 and enough ammunition to choke an elephant. They gave him identification papers, in Russian. Ration papers, travel papers, a transient’s visa, all in Russian. He wasn’t Nick Skinner any longer, he was Nikolay Mironov of Tula.

They didn’t waste any time. Before he knew it he was on a plane winging over the Atlantic, and a dozen hours later he stepped out in Occupied Germany. A lot of back-slapping there, and wishes of good luck; a good night’s sleep and a day at the Officer’s Club in Bonn.

He knew he’d not be dropped in Russia itself, because there was no organized underground movement there to get him started. Outside of Pinsk, instead, in Eastern Poland. After that—well, he might have to plod all the way across the Eurasian land mass and back again, on foot if necessary. And at the outset he didn’t have the slightest idea where to go. No one did….

NOW, IN the Pripet, he waited for dawn. It came slowly, with great masses of fog billowing in with the wind from Russia. A Polish refugee in Bonn had warned him to stay put until the fog lifted from the surface

of the swamp because the bogs and quagmires could be deadly.

By the time the sun began to make inroads, in the smoking white haze, he was hungry—and drenched. He set out along a muddy road which skirted stinking pools of muck that almost smacked of the tropics. The shoulder-holster of his .45 and the two cartridge belts chafed his skin under the denim shirt, but there was something comforting about their presence as he loosened each of the buckles a notch.

He found the two-lane highway which led to Pinsk, turned East upon it. The way led to Pinsk—and to Russia.

An occasional car bumped past noisily, but horse-drawn wagons were more common, driven by old peasants in their simple rustic garb. Once a small motorized column of red troops sped by on motorcycles and old lend-lease jeeps, and Skinner watched the peasants pull their wagons off the road and into the swamps. One old fellow with a tired gray face couldn’t get his wagon out of the mud, and Skinner helped him.

He muttered his thanks in Polish—at least Skinner guessed it was thanks, because the seamy old face smiled at him. But the peasant grumbled and muttered to himself when he received an answer in. Russian. If this simple farmer were typical, the Poles lost no love on their Russian masters.

“Pinsk?” Skinner demanded.

When the peasant nodded sourly, Skinner climbed into the wagon beside him, and with much clearing of his throat and swearing, the old man drove his horses forward. The two scrawny beasts made almost as much noise as he did.

There were a lot of Red Army, men in Pinsk, wearing their bright gray uniforms. The town was a dirty, isolated place, seemingly, serving no other purpose than to attract all the horseflies and mosquitos in the area.

IN BONN they’d told Skinner, to seek out the Red Star Inn which, before the “Liberation”, had been called the Inn of Pripet. It turned out to be a weather-beaten old building that looked like a barn. Inside, the big room was musty, gloomy, foul-smelling. Off to the left, half a dozen Red soldiers laughed and joked at the bar, and one of them would make lewd gestures at the Polish barmaid every time she came past. She hardly seemed to notice him.

A man with a big, unkempt moustache that would have been Stalinesque had it not been iron-gray, was cleaning glasses at the other end of the bar. The girl’s father, Skinner guessed.

“Vodka,” he said, waiting while the old man poured the drink. Skinner had a money belt and a billfold, both given to him in Bonn, and both cram-full of Russian currency. The native vodka, Skinner realized after one choking swallow, bore the same relationship to the smoother United States product as corn-liquor bears to bonded bourbon, and sometimes the stuff ran as high as a hundred-fifty proof, or seventy-five per cent alcohol. The Red Army boys were getting a refill from the barmaid, and it didn’t look like their first. All of them seemed pretty gay.

“Why do you Pinsk people live out. here in the middle of the swamps?” Skinner asked the barman. That question would serve as identification; if he were a member of the Polish underground, the old man would know the right answer.

But he merely growled from behind his moustache: “The government was supposed, to drain these marshes, my friend. You know that. But then came the war.”

Skinner shrugged, ambling slowly down the length of the bar until he was in such a position that he’d get his next drink from the girl.

“Hey, Pole!” shouted one of the Red Army boys, a blond lad too young: to have seen action in World War II. He was grinning in expectation of some joke about to be perpetrated.

Skinner wiped his lips, tried to make his voice steady. Here was his first contact with the Reds themselves. “I’m no Pole,” he said quietly, in Russian. The soldier seemed very disappointed.

“Oh, Comrade. Well, then will you have some vodka with us?”

One of the others demanded: “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

“I served my time,” Skinner said. “Ninth Field Army and guerrilla work near Smolensk. I’m in the reserve now.”

“That’s a coincidence,” the blond lad told Skinner, slapping him on the back. “We’re from the Ninth. What do you think of General Roskinov’s new policy?”

Who the hell was General Roskinov?

SKINNER mumbled something about being out of the service for three years, and then he called loudly to the girl for more Vodka. “It’s on me, Comrades,” he assured the Red Army boys, and they were very pleased. All ordered double vodkas as Skinner asked the girl, a buxom thing in peasant garb, the same question he’d asked her father.

She didn’t bat an eyelash. She said, “After you live in the Pripet for a time, you get to like it. The life is so quiet.” And that, precisely, was the answer Skinner sought.

He smiled at her, casually. “Are you doing anything tonight, miss… uh…”

“Natasha.” She smiled, making eyes at Skinner in such a way that all the Red Army boys turned to watch, “No, I’m not doing anything.”

“Well, would you like to spend the evening with an ex-officer of the Red Army—?”

“Officer, eh?” the blond Red demanded, respect in his voice.

Skinner shrugged. “Just a lieutenant. But, Comrades, you’re interfering with an operation of love.”

They laughed at that, and one of them muttered the Russian equivalent of the idiom about their not being able to get to first base with the girl. Skinner told them it was superior-technique, and they laughed again.

Natasha said, “Yes, I’d like that. Did you say seven?”

“I didn’t say. But seven is fine, Natasha. You can call me Nikolay—and I’ll see you then.”

“Yes, Nikolay,” she agreed demurely, and blushed.

“Yes, Nikolay,” one of the Reds mimicked her speech. “I don’t know how you do it, Comrade Nikolay.”

Skinner had a few more drinks with the Reds—their treat this time—and then his head began to swim. He’d eaten nothing for close to twelve hours, and now he ordered some sausage and black bread, the middle-European equivalent of a hamburger.

After that he excused himself and went to one of Pinsk’s three barber shops, which was a bathhouse as well. While he was shaved, he heard water splashing in the ancient metal tubs in a rear room. Like barbers anyplace else—from Ancient Greece to the present—Skinner’s man deluged him with a constant flow of chatter, half in Polish which he did not understand, half in a very badly spoken Russian.

Shave concluded, the barber began to finger the buttons of Skinner’s shirt. “You’ll want a bath, of course.”

Skinner shoved his hands away. “Of course not.”

“But, sir, everyone who shaves here also bathes here, and for so little extra money. Come—”

SKINNER had to push the dirty hands away again. A bath would feel mighty good to his cramped muscles, but he could just see himself stripping off the shirt, and exposing his .45 and cartridge belts. He’d be in the hands of the Secret Police before he had time to put his shirt on again.

“No, thanks,” he said, this time more firmly. He paid the man, who was talking to himself as he made his way back to the bath room, doubtless to check upon the aniount of soap his bathers were using.

Skinner wandered around town idly, chafing at the delay. The robust good health of Natasha’s red cheeks and buxom figure was an exception. Most of the people of Pinsk were thin and undernourished here in this dirty little city which was the focal point of Russo-Polish trade across the Pripet Marshes. The trade was one-way, of course—all to the advantage of the overlords, and you could see that in the people’s faces.

By six o’clock a change came over the town, and Skinner was nervous because he couldn’t put his finger on the reason, for it. The streets became almost deserted, and that didn’t seem right, not now, just at the close of the working day. Those people he did encounter were fearful, suspicious, alert—and more than once he saw some of them detained and questioned by gray-uniformed Red Army men.

One of the soldiers laid a big hand on his shoulder, and Skinner felt the fingers scant inches from his holster-strap. It was the blond boy from the Red Star Inn.

“Comrade Nikolay,” he said, not friendly now, “just what is it you’re doing in Pinsk? What brings you here?”

Skinner smiled. “Why?”

“Answer the questions, please.” He was alarmed about something, but at the same time he was a cocky, arrogant new member of the army which, not too many years before, had shattered the German Wehrmacht. He could be dangerous.

Skinner said he was a transient worker out of Tula.

“Is that so? What brings you to Poland?”

Skinner mumbled something about a vacation, and the soldier snickered. Probably it was a mistake. As if anyone would want to take a vacation in this poor conquered land.

“Your papers, please.”

Skinner removed the identification card and travel visa from his billfold, showed them, to the soldier, who was very surprised. But the travel visa proclaimed that one Nickolay Mironov, of Tula, could travel with impunity any place in Russia or Poland. That was an unusual thing in a land where a man sometimes had to wait months to receive permission to leave his home town.

Skinner winked. “Comrade, I told you I was an ex-officer.”

“Secret mission, eh?”

Skinner winked again. “Something like that. I can’t talk—”

“Well, then let me see your discharge papers, Comrade Nikolay.”

Damn! Skinner had invented that story about the Ninth Field Army on the spur of the moment, but in a country where service was both universal and drawn out, a man would not travel without his discharge certificate or a photostat of it.

Skinner wished he knew what the hell was going on, what had caused all the trouble. And the blond lad of the Red Army held his hand out, waiting for the papers Skinner didn’t have.

There was a rumpus down the street. It looked like an old peasant, probably as innocent as Adam before Eve, couldn’t answer all the questions thrown at him. The blond soldier ran to join his companions, calling over his shoulder that he’d see Skinner later. Not if I can help it, Skinner thought grimly.