Northlight

7 KILL

'Come in.'

He stood aside for me.

There were six men in the room and none of them looked at me. This was Room 382 at No. 24 South Eaton Place, the office of the Chief of Political Liaison Section, the cover tide for the head of the CIA station in London.

Kinsley didn't introduce me. It was the same situation as the Downing Street thing and I assumed it was the quickest way of getting strict-hush information to me: briefing would have taken much longer. I was still wearing the cheap denim slacks and polo sweater I'd bought in Berlin: my own clothes had been soaked and the trouser legs charred by the fire and I wouldn't have got near a plane before the KGB surveillance team there put two and two together. The report on the Brekhov incident would have reached their local network in a matter of minutes.

'Have a chair,' Kinsley said.

Croder was here, glancing over me with a faint light of approval in his eyes. I don't suppose he was terribly pleased that I'd let the opposition spring a trap and get the courier killed but the main thing appeared to be that the product was here in this room, presumably intact.

The US ambassador was here, brooding massively near the desk: I'd seen him at Downing Street. I didn't know who the others were but obviously one of them was the head of the CIA over here and the two odd-looking types must be the technicians looking after the tape-deck and the sound spectrograph on the desk. They were fiddling with it while Croder talked quietly to the CIA chief and Ambassador Morrison stared at his large veined hands. I remembered he'd had a nephew on board the submarine.

'Sorry about Brekhov,' Kinsley murmured. 'Are you okay now?'

'Everything's relative.' They think you only bring back physical scars.

He watched me with his unsurprisable eyes. 'We may be sending you out again.'

Croder had warned me about that. Whoever we send out to meet Brekhov, it would be logical to think that there will indeed be more for him to do, a very great deal more.

'All right,' I told Kinsley. My eyes were still sore from the heat of the fire and my hair still smelled of smoke and I kept on seeing Brekhov with his head like that. But given enough incentive I'd feel mission-ready again.

'We're not sure yet,' Kinsley said, 'when we-' then he broke off as one of the technicians started talking.

'What we're going to hear is the actual tape recorded at the time of the incident. Then we'll listen to a tape taken from the file on routine audio-surveillance in the Murmansk area.' He wiped his thin red nose and looked at Croder.

'Very good.'

I turned my chair round the other way and leaned my arms on its back; I hadn't slept on the flight out to Berlin or the flight home and there was the whole night still heavy on me.

The man slipped the tape into the deck and set it to play. There was silence for five or six seconds and then some kind of background interference; then two voices began speaking in Russian, in between intervals of what sounded like grid hum.

I have a weak signal on No. 12.

The technician spoke in the intervals. 'That's one of their sonobuoy monitoring stations.'

And we have another signal on No.. 3. Stronger.

Canyon triangulate?

The background hummed.

Yes. We have a velocity of 15 knots. The position is 17-E on the east grid.

'They'll be watching these readings on a computer screen,' the technician said, and wiped his nose again. It had been freezing outside when I'd got here.

It's moving out of range on No. 12. The course is 119 degrees.

How close is it to my No. 4 battery?

Less than half a kilometre, and closing on it.

How fast?

I don't know. Wait.

There was a long silence except for the hum.

'He's getting some trouble here. He's either picking up a stray bleep from a different sensor field, or the computer's asking for more data.'

The other technician, a man with a humped back and grey smoked glasses, said to nobody: 'We're not sure whether they've got a Magnetic Anomaly Detector.'

'If they have,' the CIA man said, 'they got it from us.' I thought it was meant to be a joke but no one laughed.

All right. All right. It's now 760 metres from your No. 4 battery. Course is now 121°, position 17-F.

It's isolated?

Yes. I have a kill ready.

Silence again.

The ambassador moved heavily to the door and went out. No one looked anywhere but at the tape-deck.

Confirm you have a kill ready.

I confirm.

Other sounds came in now, with voices in the distant background.

Keep me advised.

Something like a minute went by and there was nothing we could hear that told us anything. Croder glanced across at the CIA chief, who was sitting with his elbows on the desk and his face between his fists, stretching the skin into furrows. He was watching the tape-deck; he didn't catch Croder's glance.

I didn't know the figures involved in that area: the depth or salinity or current or the cruise speed of a torpedo.

Advise me. Did I make a hit? Did I make a hit?

The voice was excited now.

Wait.

Croder took out his cigarette-case and lit one of those black-tipped things he smoked, but he didn't look away from the tape-deck.

No. You did not make a hit.

Advise me.

Wait.

The hump-backed technician drew in his breath suddenly and turned to Croder. 'Can I have one of those?'

He lit up and turned away from the desk, so as not to watch the tape-deck.

New position: 17-G on the east grid. 540 metres from your No. 4 battery. Profile is broadside on. You have a kill.

Keep me advised.

We had to wait again. The CIA man had closed his eyes now, his fists kneading his face into a loose mask. Croder glanced towards the door and away again. The silence drew out.

Advise me. Did we make a hit? Did we make a hit?

The grid hummed. There were other sounds, vague and intermittent, and a quick beeping began. It lasted a minute, maybe more.

The hump-back had turned round to watch the tape-deck.

Confirm. You made a hit. I repeat: You made a hit.

The thin technician used his handkerchief again.

'We made modifications to this model so we could extract parameters from the speech waveform. That gives us a better speech recognition performance. What's happening is that the variable electronic filter is moving to higher and higher frequencies while the stylus is moving parallel to the axis of the drum. What we're getting from this pattern are the dimensions of time, frequency and amplification.'

The voice was almost continuous on this second tape..No. 5 sonobuoy responding. Object at 43-A. Speed of movement constant. Approach to No. 6 sonobuoy at steady 68 degrees with appropriate response. Transducers running in No. 1 bay.

Tape gap.

All configurations are normal. Bathythermograph average is 42°. Total east grid surveillance is now ten buoys.

Tape gap.

I'm now triangulating on S-35. It's 12-B on the east grid, course 76°. Depth now 70 metres.

'S-35 is one of their diesel subs,' the technician with the cold said. He let the tape run on for another two or three minutes and then the CIA chief asked him to shut it down. He took his face out of his hands and got up and went out of the room, coming back with the ambassador.

'So tell us,' he said to the technicians.

The hump-back prodded his cigarette out. 'All we can say for sure is that the voice on the second tape is the same as the one on the first tape that was doing the advising. He's one of their sonar operators. The other man of course was in charge of a torpedo battery.'

The CIA chief dug his hands into his pockets, putting his head back, speaking to the ceiling. 'That was the actual attack on the Cetacea we were listening to? The actual sinking?'

'Yes.'

'Bastards. Bastards'

No one broke the silence for a while. It was a silence for the one hundred and five crew of the SSN Cetacea, missing on patrol.

Croder said quietly to the technicians: 'What you're saying, then, is that the voice of the man advising is genuine — a genuine naval officer working the sonar unit.'

'Right. Look at this spectrogram. Identical patterns in every single speech mode. Same man.'

'And from this we can assume,' the CIA chief said in a flat tone, 'that the tape you people just brought back from Murmansk is a genuine recording of the incident. Is that right?'

'Not quite,' Croder said. 'On the face of it, we don't really doubt that it's genuine. This is because our agent in Murmansk has been installed there as a sleeper for nearly five years, and has been sending back the most valuable material. He realized the enormous significance of this particular run of tape, and had it duplicated. He then signalled us and told us he was sending it by courier.'

I watched the two technicians for a moment. They weren't just boffins: they must have been security-screened on the highest level.

'We know, of course, that the Soviets will deny the whole thing and say that we've faked this tape ourselves. Our answer to that is that the voice on the recent tape tallies precisely with one of the voices the CIA has been recording as a routine acoustic surveillance operation for a very long time. There's a second point. If anyone — meaning, I don't doubt, the Soviets — faked this tape and deliberately allowed us to get hold of it, then we can say with absolute certainty that they had to persuade or order an actual naval officer to speak on that new tape, acting out the despatch of those torpedoes. They-'

'Why in hell would they want to do that?' Ambassador Morrison asked him.

Croder spread his hands open. His smile was almost apologetic. 'I've no wish to complicate things, Mr Ambassador. It's simply that we want to have every answer ready.'

'We're talking about Russian double think,' the CIA chief nodded.

'It's that convoluted?'

'Not really,' Croder said. 'What I'm saying now is that if, for example, the Soviets wished to scuttle the proposed summit conference for whatever obscure reason, they couldn't do it more simply than by faking this tape and allowing us to come by it.'

'You believe that's what they did?'

'I believe it's most unlikely. We're just covering the contingency. Most unlikely of all is the idea that a naval officer could lend himself to the deceit, however threatened or cajoled or bribed with honours and promotion.'

The ambassador watched Croder with his large head lowered and his eyes level. 'Then you believe this tape is genuine, and that it gives us irrefutable evidence that the Soviets in fact ordered the attack and sinking of the submarine. Is that correct?'

A faint apologetic smile. 'Not quite. I don't believe in the least that the Soviets — by which you mean the Soviet authorities — ordered the attack on the Cetacea. I believe that when she was discovered either close to the twelve-mile limit or actually within Soviet waters, the officer in command of No. 4 torpedo battery made the attack and sank the boat.'

'Without getting permission?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'For one of several understandable reasons. He's young, keen, ambitious, perhaps. What a bone to bring to the mat of his superiors! The hero of the hour, destroying in the nick of time an American nuclear submarine in the act of spying on the Soviets' most important naval base — the gateway to the Atlantic, bristling with the most highly secret technology.'

The ambassador went on watching him, his eyes narrowed now. I didn't know if he knew who Croder was, other than a key man in the Foreign Office. 'He didn't think there was time to get permission to do this thing?'

'Oh, he knew there was time. The boat was moving very slowly, and they were keeping track of it. We heard that.'

'Then why didn't he call up a superior officer?'

'I believe he thought they might deny him permission.' Croder spread his hands again, shrugging.

'I don't understand.'

Croder took a pace or two. 'There was once a wealthy widow who placed all her money in a phoney investment that looked highly attractive, and when she lost it all her accountant asked her why on earth she didn't consult him first. She said rather sheepishly she was pretty sure he wouldn't have let her do it.'

'My God. He was out to get that sub on his own initiative?'

'It's what we believed,' the CIA chief said reasonably, 'when the KAL plane was shot out of the sky. At first, anyway.'

Croder looked down at his shoes. 'It's what I still believe, despite a great deal of fanciful evidence to the contrary.'

The CIA chief glanced at him. 'You don't think there's any kind of connection?'

'Not in a sequential sense. I think it's a repetition of the same basic situation.'

'Okay,' Morrison said finally. 'I can report to my president, then, that the British government believes, on the evidence of this tape recording, that the Cetacea was attacked and sunk by a Soviet naval officer, without prior warning. Is that right?'

'Very nearly.' Croder. 'Those in the British government most able to analyse the raw intelligence data believe it, yes.'

'Bob?' The ambassador was looking at the CIA chief. 'That's your opinion too?'

'I guess it has to be.' He gave a shrug, tilting his head. 'In my field we tend to look for skeletons in all the cupboards, but in this case I think that's very simply what happened. A United States submarine was found too close to the Russian coast and they sank it. And we have the evidence on tape.'

There were five of us when we came into the street: Croder, Kinsley, the two boffins in their white lab coats and me. The political people stayed behind to go on with the meeting at a higher level, I suppose. But even if they'd left the building at the same time I think they would have been all right, unless they'd been too near the boffins as they climbed into their cars.

The blast tore the nearside door away and I didn't see anything more because I was spinning round and going down flat onto the pavement while the echo of the explosion started coming back from the houses and glass tinkled as the windows blew in. I wasn't close enough to feel anything more than the shock-wave, and as soon as the worst of the debris had come down I got onto my feet and turned round and took a look at the car. There wasn't anything we could do for the two men because they'd been inside when the thing had gone off, triggered by the ignition switch or a rocker mechanism or something like that.

I was a bit deafened but I could hear Croder asking if we were all right and Kinsley called out yes, then I went up the steps to the house to use a telephone as the last of the dead leaves came floating down in a moment of unnatural autumn.

The only clear thought in my head was that the actual target hadn't been the two boffins. It had been the tape, and now we'd have to start all over again.

'What?'

'How long have you slept?'

Kinsley was standing in the doorway looking down at me. I'd holed up in one of the soundproof cubicles where you can catch some sleep or just get away from the din outside when there's a big operation on and everyone's showing their nerves.

'An hour,' I told Kinsley.

'How are you feeling?' He looked very tight-faced, and kept prodding his fingers through his stiff black hair.

'I'm feeling all right.' I put my shoes on and got off the bunk, finding my jacket. 'Have you got something else for me?'

'Yes.'

'Where?'

'Moscow.'

'When?'

'Tonight.'

'What's happened?'

'They're on to Karasov.'

'The sleeper?'

'Yes. Someone found he'd made a copy of that tape.'

Everything became suddenly still.

'Was he blown?'

'No. He got out in time.'

'Where is he now?'

'God knows. But we've got to find him, before they do.'

'Yes, I see.'

Somewhere there was another man running.