Man From Barbarossa

THE HUSCARL

Boris Stepakov’s aircraft was a spacious variant of the Antonov An-72 with two huge turbofans, seating for fifty-two people and a STOL ability. It was the same kind of plane used by the President and the Chairman of KGB. Now he flew from Stockholm to a secret airfield west of Moscow where a car waited to carry him and the two bodyguards, Nicki and Alex, back to the dacha. There was news of yet another killing by Chushi Pravosudia while he had been in Sweden. A young woman, Nicola Chernysh, aged twenty-six, who held the coveted post of Supervisor to the President’s Secretariat, had left her work in the Kremlin at five that afternoon. She had driven straight back to the apartment building in which she lived with her elderly mother, a block from the Central Concert Hall. Two men had shot her as she left her car. They had pumped eight bullets into her from handguns, then escaped in an unidentified foreign car thought to be of British origin.

Nobody came forward as witness to the actual shooting. The car was seen by six people: ‘Driving away furiously,’ one said. ‘There were two men. They went very fast, nearly knocking down an old babushka who was crossing the road,’ another reported. ‘These men were hoodlums. One had a scar across his right cheek, the other wore a hat like in American gangster films,’ a third reported, but he was very drunk and five blocks away when it happened.

At six thirty, an unidentified male voice spoke to the duty editor at Pravda. He said, ‘Romany. Chushi Pravosudia have executed Nicola Chernysh, an enemy of the true revolution. We ask the authorities to take Josif Vorontsov off our hands and bring him to public trial. One member of the present regime will be executed each day, as promised, until some action has been taken.’ Romany was the code word the Scales of Justice had now established with the Soviet media.

Stepakov spoke for half-an-hour with Stephanie Adoré and Henri Rampart who were still held at the dacha. He then summoned his car and drove into Moscow. The President had arranged to see him at nine.

The interview began on a sour note. If General Stepakov had wanted to see the President urgently, he obviously did not know how urgently the President wanted to see him. For almost an hour, the man with the weight of Russia’s problems on his shoulders, upbraided Stepakov or fired questions at him like a heavy machine gun.

Why had these Chushi Pravosudia not been rounded up? Why had there been no progress? The comrade General had promised, nay, assured, the President that he had the real Josif Vorontsov in Russia and under lock and key. Why then had this situation not been exploited? When would these senseless killings stop? Heaven knew, he had treated poor little Nicola Chernysh – he fondly called her Nicolashenka – like a daughter. It was terrible and it must end. When, comrade General, would it end?

The President was exasperated, at the far stretch of his rope. The country faced grave new economic disasters every day, he did not know how long the army would remain true to the establishment, there were threats and he was being criticised every minute of every hour of every day. He was not a supernatural being. There were fresh problems showing their ugly heads in the Baltic States and in Georgia, not to mention other areas. If this were not enough, he was forced to play mediator between Baghdad and Washington. Thousands of American, British, French, Italian and Saudi troops stood at the borders of Kuwait, and the deadline of January 15th crept ever nearer. Did Stepakov not see that a truly bloody war might yet erupt in the Middle East? The conflict could be the long-promised spark that would set the Middle East ablaze. In the end it might be Arab against Christian and Jew. It could even be Arab against Arab. It was something for which the armed forces of the USSR had trained. Did General Stepakov not realise that the war planners had already spent months building plans and orders of battle for such an event? But the balance of power had changed. The whole sphere of Soviet influence had slid into a new order. Russia was now doing business with the United States. War between all the Western alliances, NATO, and Iraq had long been considered a strategic lever to be used by Russia against the other superpower.

‘Now, we don’t want this,’ the President stormed. ‘If we do the slightest thing which can be interpreted as an anti-American move, we lose the aid I have sweated blood to extract from Washington.’

Stepakov was an old hand in the Kremlin. He had seen powerful men come and go. There had been days, when, as a young man, he had even taken part in one palace revolution – that sorry time when poor old Brezhnev, still titular head of the Soviet Empire, embarrassed all around him as he sank to geriatric senility and had to be rescued by those who worked him like puppet masters.

He had been ranted and raved at before. It was like water off a goose. Stepakov closed his mind to the comrade President’s wrath, isolating only those pieces of information which might just require a coherent answer. Men in power hold forth, but there is always a limit, an end to the one-way street of their sound and fury.

So Boris Stepakov waited out the storm and when it finally abated he spoke, giving the President a clear and concise picture of how he saw Chushi Pravosudia and how the matter should finally be dealt with.

‘Bory, you should have told me straightaway. We could have saved time. Let me put in a call to Kirovograd now . . .’

‘No, sir. No, please. You of all people realise how this must remain a closed book. Better I should have your express orders in writing. I will then present them to General Berzin personally. It is really the most secure way.’

So in the absolute privacy of the President’s office where no electronic devices could ever penetrate, Boris Ivanovich Stepakov dictated the order which the President signed.

It was now late. Stepakov needed sleep. He drove back to the dacha. If they left early enough in the morning, he could hand the orders to the Spetsnaz General Berzin by lunchtime and would expect the operation to move with speed during the following night. Things, he considered, were going very well.

In their handful of days together, Nina Bibikova had become almost a wife to James Bond. They worked side by side on the studio floor during the day, ate in a canteen, which looked like an old monastic refectory, each noon and when work was finished in the evening. More often than not they shared a section of one of the long scrubbed tables with Pete Natkowitz and their guide from the first morning, Natasha, the blonde with legs so long they seemed to reach to her navel.

Natasha did not share her surname with them, but Bond did not have to be blessed with superintelligence to realise she and Pete Natkowitz were becoming ‘an item’. He hoped Natkowitz knew what he was up to, and then immediately dismissed the thought. Any officer of the Mossad, especially with Natkowitz’s kind of experience, knew what he was doing.

The food served to them in the canteen was above average, considering they were locked away in impenetrable forests ringed by snow and ice. The speciality was a particularly good stew made from vegetables and reindeer meat which remained appetising for the first two eatings and from then went rapidly downhill. But the diet was augmented by smoked fish, plenty of black bread and large quantities of Kvas, the popular homebrewed beer of farmers and peasants.

Each night, Nina and Bond had returned to their room, showered and secretly discussed observations made during the day. On this, the third night, they collapsed into bed around nine o’clock and went straight to sleep, though Nina woke Bond later and proceeded to do things at which many wives would draw the line. They drifted off again, happy and sated, into a sleep not peopled by the ghosts of Sobibór.

Bond woke with a start, his hand snaking out to grip the wrist of whoever had their palm firmly over his mouth. He did not struggle, but twisted the wrist, and would have applied more fast and crippling pain had he not realised it was Natasha trying to rouse him noiselessly.

Still holding the girl’s wrist, he propped himself on to one elbow and peered through the gloom, trying to make sense of her signals. She was nimble and expert, her free hand moving in silent and precise gestures, as though making contact with some alien being.

Wake Nina, then follow me, she was signalling. It is safe, but please hurry.

Nina came out of sleep effortlessly and with that enviable immediate alertness achieved only by doctors, nurses, soldiers, and disciplined field officers of exceptional intelligence services. Bond’s feet had hardly touched the floor when she was already moving silently, fastening the tie around her towelling robe.

Natasha beckoned them, still using sign language, warning that it was important for them to make no noise. The corridor was empty and there was an atmosphere of almost holy silence as though the wooden building had been muffled by some vast blanket. The sensation was so acute that for a second Bond thought they must have been victims of an avalanche. In his mind, he saw the building shrouded in snow, then realised that this was impossible. The strange sensation remained, reminding him of being in some ancient sacred place where prayers and beliefs have seeped into the ground, trees, stones or structure, captured and locked for eternity.

Natasha motioned them to stay close to the wall, and she paused for a moment by each door they passed, checking to make sure nothing could be heard from inside the rooms. They knew these rooms were occupied by ‘witnesses’, though, apart from the three people who had stood near the elevators on the first morning, they had not set eyes on any of the other guests except on the sound stage and in the canteen.

Before they reached the elevators, the guide pushed open a door with an international emergency exit sign, a little stick man running down a staircase. Bond always thought it looked as though the primitive character was attempting to dash down an ‘up’ escalator.

On the other side of the door, a staircase led up and down, fashioned as ever in wood. He imagined it would burn quite well. For the first time, it struck him that the entire building would be a deathtrap in the summer when the wood became baked by the sun into dry tinder.

They climbed up one flight, went through the door at the top into a corridor identical to the one they had traversed from their room. Now Natasha signalled for them to move faster. She crossed the space by the elevator bank and softly opened another door which had ‘Private. No Entry’ stencilled on it in Russian, English, French, German and Arabic.

They were in a small bare office. The blinds were drawn and the only furniture consisted of crates and packing cases strewn haphazardly over the soft pile carpet. A single brass student lamp with a green glass shade stood lit on a packing case in one corner, and Pete Natkowitz sat on a nearby crate, his legs swinging and his face flushed. Once the door was closed, he let out a long sigh and grinned at Bond.

‘They haven’t come yet?’ Natasha asked.

‘Well, my dear, if they have, you’ll find them hiding in one of these boxes. No, Tashinka, they have yet to arrive.’ He turned his attention back to Nina and Bond. ‘Sorry to get you up in the middle of the night, James. Natasha’s been trying to find a safe haven ever since we arrived.’ He told them the bedrooms were wired for sound, but the people who built the place had not got around to putting in video. ‘It appears we have to be heard but not seen, which I suppose means we’ve become adults of some kind.’ He slapped his right thigh in a gesture meant to convey amusement. ‘We’re not really certain if they have enough staff here to monitor the sound-stealing equipment, but the golden rule is . . .’

‘Assume they’re lifting the words out of your mouth,’ Bond supplied.

‘Naturally,’ Natkowitz nodded. ‘This room is free of any bugs. For the first time since we arrived we can talk freely.’

‘You’re absolutely sure about this?’ Bond eyed the room with deep suspicion. He was leery of talking in a place which, to his knowledge, had not been examined and swept. As he often told other people in the business, he preferred the Russian tradecraft of talking only in the open, and where they could not bring directional microphones to bear.

‘I’m certain. Three hundred per cent certain. But for you one-fifty.’ Natkowitz’s eyes danced with pleasure.

‘And Natasha?’ Bond was asking about her security clearance.

Natkowitz’s face went dead, the eyes suddenly becoming hard. ‘If I tell you she’s okay, you should believe me, James. To be honest with you, when she turned up in Moscow the other night – before they put us to sleep for a hundred years – I couldn’t believe my eyes. She’s with me, if you see what I mean.’

‘The Mossad has penetrations in Russia?’ Bond looked surprised, even a little awed.

‘You betcha.’ Natkowitz cocked his head to the left, as though to underline the statement. ‘The media in the West says the intelligence agencies of Britain and America are dinosaurs now that the Cold War’s over, that their minds are for ever frozen into the NATO-Soviet locking of horns in Europe. But they’re wrong, as we both know, James. Even the Mossad have kept a watch on the Volga, as it were. Too dangerous not to do so. Natasha and a couple of others have been here for some years. We implanted them in the early seventies when they were children. Them and their parents; and look where it’s got us. Really I . . .’ He stopped short at the noise which came from the far side of the door.

Bond moved like a cat, springing silently against the wall on the hinge side of the door, his right hand closed into a fist, thumb tucked into the palm and the knuckles of his first and little fingers protruding slightly, his arm bent at a right angle, making an L-shape, square with his body.

Natasha was flattened against the wall on the other side, ready, tense. Natkowitz and Nina did not move as the door handle slowly turned and a voice from outside whispered, ‘All families resemble one another.’

Nina drew in her breath, and the sound seemed to fill the whole room as the door closed behind the pair of tall figures who entered.

‘But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Nina’s voice broke as she completed the quotation from the opening words of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Then she flung herself forward into the arms of the elderly man and woman who stood silent and erect three paces inside the room.

The three of them embraced. Together. Their arms wrapped around one another so that they became a small tight circle of loving human beings – a little knot of love and comfort.

Bond took a pace forward, but Natkowitz slipped from the crate and restrained him. The trio remained, clinging to one another for several minutes. When they separated, each of them had cheeks damp with tears.

The man still had about him the stance of an old military officer, his back straight as a plank, the hair neat but iron grey. The moustache had gone, and his skin was like old, uncared-for leather, but the eyes still carried the missionary zeal he had practised all that time ago in the service of his country.

The woman had not stood the test of time as well as her husband. Gone was the beautiful jet black hair, replaced now by a short, pure white cap, still silky but thin. Her hands were those of an old woman, stained with liver spots and loose skin. There were cracks around her mouth, and her eyes spoke of a hard life since she had left the relative comfort of London. She looked, in effect, far older than her years, but, when she spoke, her voice was strangely young. ‘You think we’re traitors, I suppose, James? I know who you are. Known of you for a long time,’ Emerald Lacy said.

‘Dead traitors at that.’ Michael Brooks still had his charming smile. In the old days they said Brooks could charm scorpions with his smile.

Bond shook his head. ‘No.’ He moved closer to them. ‘No. I know that you’re the Huscarl. I’ve known for some time.’ He turned to Nina, ‘That’s why I wasn’t surprised at your parents being alive. When I told you last night, you didn’t question me, but you looked a little frightened.’

‘Because she doesn’t know quite everything.’ Brooks put out a hand and fondled his daughter’s shoulder.

The name Huscarl went back to the eleventh century, during the time England was ruled by the Danes, paying the iniquitous tax, Danegeld, which some students claim still smarts within the Anglo-Saxon collective consciousness, thus provoking the British to find more and more ways around current tax laws.

For years the English suffered Viking raids which decimated entire communities, but they fought on, led by a succession of kings, such as Aethelred and Edmund Ironside. Then, in 1016, the country was finally overcome by the Danish king, Cnut.

Cnut made some changes in the kingdom’s military structure, including the introduction of a kind of ‘Home Guard’ – the Huscarl, the professional household warrior, armed with the great two-handed Danish axe, ready to do battle with any possible commando raid launched by other Scandinavian countries.

It was this weapon which prompted those who chose pseudonyms – cryptos for agents, or operations – to name Michael Brooks and Emerald Lacy the Huscarl, for they were a new, two-handed assault upon the reigning regime at Moscow Centre.

With the scandals of the first British traitors undermining both effectiveness and morale in the mid-1960s, Bond’s Service had planned a fast counterstrike. Michael Brooks had long been involved with the brilliant cipher wizard, Emerald Lacy. Now, the Service let him go, dropping veiled hints that he was under a cloud, hints which paid off handsomely.

Brooks severed all his Service connections with the exception of Emerald. He also made oblique comments to people who were suspected of being close to KGB sources in the Russian Embassy. Then he sat back and waited. Eventually, KGB took the bait and he disappeared. In fact they had only taken him to Denmark where experienced KGB inquisitors gave him what they termed ‘deep analysis’. In plain language, they were drying him out, but Brooks had been very carefully briefed before leaving the Service. He had been seeded with what appeared to be first-rate intelligence concerning the NATO forces and the various connections they had with the main intelligence communities. The Moscow Centre inquisition was impressed by the ease with which Brooks passed on the information and finally they asked him to defect to Moscow.

Once the offer had been made, the trump card was played. Brooks said he would come to them only if his fiancée were included in the deal. When Moscow realised his fiancée was Emerald Lacy, they leaped at the prospect.

Emerald had also been prepared. Skilled psychiatrists had blanked out whole sections of her mind which held vital information. They did this over a lengthy period using the latest hypnotic techniques. After this, they gave her other information, what they called ‘costume jewellery’, because it looked real and glittered in the kind of gaudy manner beloved of KGB intelligence gatherers.

So Emerald Lacy had ‘defected’ to Moscow, where she had married Brooks, remaining to do much good work for the British until 1989, when their deaths were faked in a car crash. But that was another part of the story and their secret presence in Russia since their ‘deaths’ had been of major importance to the NATO countries.

In the small room at the top of the strange wooden building they had been told was the Hôtel de la Justice, they sat down to speak of this seemingly insoluble, inexplicable operation in which they had now become joined.

Michael Brooks began with a raw statement, arctic in its bleakness. ‘This business: the trial, the taping, the whole thing about this war criminal Vorontsov,’ he said, ‘is a blind, a sleight, a way to throw the Kremlin and the President off-balance. It’s only part of something greater, an evil which will have appalling consequences. We know some of it but not all. The gist is that hardline military people are about to launch a plot which will destroy America and probably Britain also. And I mean destroy. When the influence of those great nations has gone, the Old Guard will once more seize control of the USSR. They will have the ability to plunder the West and rebuild Russia as the only major power in Europe and the Middle East – a power more repressive than it was even in Stalin’s day. If this works, they will eventually overcome the entire world.’