Northlight

25 CHECKPOINT

I was getting used to the thing. Most of the time I carried it across my shoulder, and I was taking more care with it now when I passed people on the pavements. ' Watch that shovel, you stupid whoreson!'

And a happy Christmas to you too, comrade. But he was perfectly right: I'd slipped on the slush and nearly clouted him with the edge of the blade.

In the last two days there'd been three more signals from Fane. The first was to the effect that Ferris had confirmed by a radio message from the flight deck of a British Airways plane that he was prepared to local-direct me and that he needed all facilities made available to him. London would have already begun work on that, the moment Ferris had agreed to switch his operations. I didn't know who was going out to replace him in Tokyo but I hoped for the sake of the shadow there that it wouldn't be Fane.

The second signal reported that Ferris had landed in Karachi and had received Telexed briefing material from our consulate there, sent from London through Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham.

The third signal had been to the effect that Ferris had raised questions concerning the courier who had purportedly been sent to rendezvous with me in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha at the time when the KGB had moved in. Had they arrested the courier following the explosion and had they interrogated him and if so horn much did he know of the executive's operations in Murmansk? That was a good question and I'd asked Fane for the answer. He said the courier hadn't been seen since the explosion and might in fact have been arrested and put under intensive interrogation. The last part of the question was therefore important. Perhaps crucial.

In the two days before the fourth signal came I had time to surveille the environment and try to find out how to move across the city without running into a checkpoint or a militia patrol. By the end of the second day I'd begun to see that it was impossible. The KGB had relied on taking Karasov and putting him under interrogation as soon as we'd flushed him for them but he was dead, and their one last chance of allowing the Kremlin to send the President of the Presidium to Vienna without making critical concessions to the West was to find Captain Zhigalin and obtain his absolute silence with a bullet through the brain. Even though they had no idea that at this moment a British Secret Service agent was flying in to Murmansk to direct an operation specifically designed to get Zhigalin over the frontier they were throwing a security net across the city to make certain that if he emerged from ground they would seize him and that if he remained there they would eventually find him and drag him out.

If they had known that he had already contacted a Western embassy and requested transit across the frontier and subsequent asylum and that his request was being given immediate and active response they would have called out military reserves to augment their efforts to find him. If Ferris actually found it possible to put me into contact with Zhigalin and arrange and somehow protect a rendezvous it was my opinion at this time that it would be impossible for him to move us as far as the frontier, let alone across it, simply because the search for Zhigalin would extend and intensify towards that frontier on the assumption that he would try to reach it. We would be going into increasing KGB and militia activity at every hour and we had no papers that could get us through any checkpoint.

It's possible to represent any given mission schematically on graph paper and these days it's put through the computers before the monitors at the board over the mission control desk are allowed to make any report or recommend any decision, and at this stage my operation in Murmansk would look like a V configuration narrowing to a point in the direction of the future, since the more effort we made towards achieving our goal the more risk there would be of exposing the operation, be it given that the environment was at the same time being brought under increasing KGB surveillance.

This was my view, as the shadow executive in the field, of the status of Northlight at noon of January 18th, and it was reported in essence to London by Fane, the outgoing local director.

Nothing would appear on the operations board in that anonymous building, in Whitehall to show that in point of fact the focus of the mission was at this moment a man lurching over the snow drifts of Murmansk with a shovel across his shoulder.

At 20:00 hours the telephone rang in the lobby of the hotel and the concierge fetched me to take the line. It was the last time I ever spoke to Fane. He reported that Ferris was due to land at Murmansk airport from Leningrad and that I was to meet him there as soon as I could. The precise rendezvous was arranged for 22:00 hours without further alternatives Ferris would wait for me if he reached there first.

Checkpoint.

It was two blocks ahead of me at the intersection of Lenin Prospekt and North Harbour Street. They were setting them up everywhere now and at shorter intervals, bringing in the militia from their barracks and substations in dark green vans and posting them at strategic locations. The moment they began spilling out of the van they called on anyone in the street to halt and show his papers.

I turned into a side street and climbed the virgin drifts that the ploughs and work gangs hadn't had time to deal with. Half an hour ago I'd seen a checkpoint being set up four blocks away to the west and from my observations during the past two days I'd noted that the average period of checkpoint left operating was one hour, depending on the importance of the street traffic.

Light snow had started falling again but most of the main streets were clear now except for ruts of frozen slush and gravel. In the side street where I was moving the lamps had gone out, and in the faint light from the aurora that was seeping through thin cloud banks the snow had a bluish tinge like an overcoloured Christmas card. My shovel was over one shoulder, part of my identity. The militia were checking the snow-clearing gangs as well as other pedestrians but it gave me a slight edge: they were to an unknown degree less likely to shout at a distant figure if he looked like a volunteer worker than if he lacked an instantly identifiable image. It was now 21:00 hours and I'd been moving for thirty' minutes towards the airport, doubling on my tracks and making detours to avoid the main intersections where the checkpoints were set up. I didn't know whether I could reach the rdv on time in these conditions but that wasn't important because Ferris would wait for me. The real question was whether I could reach it at all.

I was now operating in the uneasy twilight zone between clandestine and the final security status they haven't actually got a name for: on the board it would simply show the symbol of a crooked cross to denote that the executive was operating in hazard. But that might not be accurate. I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd shed my identity as Clive Gage, journalist, and adopted the identity of Petr Lein, engineer, and if I now pushed those papers among the tea-leaves and tin cans and fish-heads of the nearest rubbish dump I would technically be operating in hazard: without papers and without any chance of surviving if a single militiaman checked me in the street. It had happened in Warsaw: I'd turned a corner and walked straight into a routine police patrol and they'd asked for my papers and I hadn't got any and they'd put me into a cell and started work.

What I didn't know, as I climbed the drifts and lurched through the freezing ruts of this city's streets, was whether the papers I carried would get me through or trap me. I didn't know whether they had made the connection yet between the dead Lithuanian and the freight-yards bombing and the man who'd been taken to the General Maritime Hospital. They could still be sifting through the routine reports and questioning the last of the passengers on that train and watching the computer screens as they punched the data in. Two things were certain: they were doing that now and they were inevitably making progress. It was like a slow-burn fuse that would at any hour, any minute reach the papers I carried in my pocket and blow my operation the instant I fell foul of a random check and had to show them.

There was only one thing more dangerous: not to show them at all. It was a matter of time, and in the diminishing time frame available to me I had to reach the rendezvous before one of the computers threw the name of Petr Lein on the screen and the KGB operator flashed an immediate all-points bulletin to have me picked up.

Checkpoint.

I turned into a side street and saw two militiamen on routine patrol coming in this direction at a distance of a hundred metres and there was no cover except for a sandbin half-submerged under a snow drift so I turned back and waited for the shout but it didn't come, though I might not have heard it because one of the civic transport trucks was getting up speed along the main street and I started running — Halt! but only in my mind — Halt, that man! but only in the nerves as I slung the shovel high and one of the men caught it and gave me a hand as I clambered onto the truck and hung jack-knifed across the side until they hauled me aboard.

'One more for the cattle-yards!'

'Run out of snow, comrade?'

Packed, yes, like cattle in the open truck with the slipstream cutting our faces as it got up speed again with the gears jerking and a shovel clanging against the back of the cab.

'Is this a work party?'

'No, comrade, we're off to a bloody circus!'

In the last two days I'd seen that the checkpoint militiamen had let some of the trucks through if they were on their way to a clearing site but it wasn't a hundred per cent predictable and the situation now was strictly Russian roulette because the work truck ahead of us was being waved through the intersection but it didn't mean they wouldn't stop this one — they could be checking them alternately to keep the traffic moving.

'Which gang are you with, comrade?'

'Number 5,' I told him.

'Five's been sent home. This is the night shift.'

Slowing towards the intersection.

'I'm volunteering.'

'Glutton for bloody punishment!'

'No,' I said, 'it's just that I've got a nagging wife.'

Raucous laughter and the whiff of alcohol in the air-rush: for the past two days the snow-clearing gangs had been sent to the workers' canteens for free soup and a vodka ration.

Speeding up again with the green-lit batons waving us through and the eyes under the peaked caps checking us without much interest and the hope now, the definite hope that within another half an hour they could change the signals data on the board for Northlight to read Rendezvous made.

'From Moscow?' a man asked me.

'Yes.' We had the same accent.

They were letting the truck ahead of us through the next intersection, the illuminated batons waving. In the far distance I could see the lights of the airport control tower.

Is Air Croder there?

He went home.

Call him up for me. Our chap's made the rendezvous.

Much rejoicing because our first objective had been killed and the executive was operating in hazard and his local control had been changed at his own request and that had shaken the network because it's like switching partners on a trapeze but soon there would be much rejoicing, yes, and the monitors at the signals board would make some fresh tea.

'You like it in Murmansk?'

'Not in winter.'

He laughed briefly. 'No, but the sea air's pleasant, after the Moscow smog. I'm a lawyer.' He reached inside his coat and brought out a card. 'If you ever need assistance, let me know.'

The truck was slowing again. The one ahead of us had turned left along Lenin Prospekt. There weren't any green-lit batons this time: they were red.

'All right,' I said, and put the card in my pocket. 'I'm an engineer. Lein, Petr Stepanovich.'

Slowing hard now as the red batons began waving and spreading out as the militiamen moved across the road. The truck's brakes locked and the tyres slid across the slush, no rejoicing, no you won't have to call Mr Croder, the brakes coming off and the tyres finding grip but we were still slowing. I do, as a matter of fact, need your assistance, comrade, but I doubt if this is a matter you can do much to help me with, the brakes coming on again and sending us into the piled snow at the roadside, the rear of the truck clouting a sandbin with a scream of tearing metal.

'Bloody militia check again! Haven't those whoresons got nothing else to do?'

Grinding to a halt now at the intersection as we lurched into each other and grabbed for support, a shovel clanging down and the diesel exhaust gas clouding across our faces.

'Security check! Get your papers ready!'

Floodlights came on, freezing the truck in a white glare, making us shield our eyes.

'One at a time, come on?

The gas was sickening and we stood choking in it until the driver switched off the engine and there was silence except for the thud of our boots as we dropped one by one on to the roadway. 'Your papers.'