Snow Falcon

PRELUDES

At the border between the Federal Republic and the DDR west of Eisenach, the E63 ceases to be an autobahn, and becomes merely a main road for the sixty or more kilometres through the Kaufunger-Meissner Wald to Kassel. At one specific point along that more twisting metalled strip, Kenneth Aubrey had decided upon a road accident involving a container lorry and three cars — one of them a Mercedes, the others Volkswagens.

He stood under the shelter of dark trees above the level of the road, the rain sweeping between him and the scene below. Behind and to his left, in a lay-by, the squat white shape of an ambulance waited, seemingly inappropriate to the erected carnage he was watching. The ambulance was still, its engine turned off, a fug steaming its windows.

Aubrey watched the mobile crane lowering the crushed bodies of the two Volkswagens painstakingly into the middle of the road. Small wet figures scurried around it, arranging the two wrecks as if in some display of modern sculpture. After perhaps twenty minutes, during which time he began to imagine the damp from the needle-coated earth under his feet was seeping into his Wellingtons, and he was resting on a shooting-stick, the Mercedes was towed up by a breakdown truck, unhooked, and men pushed it towards the two Volkswagens. Aubrey heard the rend of torn metal as it was edged into a grotesque three-pointed star against the smaller cars.

The German alongside him coughed. Aubrey glanced to one side, lowering his glasses, and said in German, 'Yes, that will do very well, Herr Goessler.'

'I am pleased, Herr Franklin,' the German replied without humour or enthusiasm. Punctilious, but reluctant, Aubrey decided. He smiled at the use of his cover-name. Silly — but new regulations at every turn. Goessler knew him as Aubrey had done for years.

He turned back to the road, gleaming like the PVC jackets and capes of the men down there.

The container lorry, SAUER AG large in yellow on its cab and cargo, was being driven slowly towards the mobile crane which hung above the wreck like a sinister carrion vehicle. One man in a cape was directing the driver with precise indications. Aubrey looked at his watch — plenty of time. Rain spilled from the brim of his hat as he bent his head. It wetted the knees of his suit, and he ducked his tongue in disapproval.

He watched as the mobile crane, gently at first, then as if delighting in its own strength, raised the body of the trailer, then jerked like an animal breaking its prey's neck, so that the container toppled upon the wreckage of the three cars.

The metal shrieked. Aubrey winced, as if he had seen the weight topple upon himself in some dream. When the great truck had settled, he nodded, satisfied, and looked again at his watch. Late afternoon, perhaps an hour more to wait, and the day drawing in under heavy grey cloud.

The wind changed, blowing rain into his face. He rubbed the wetness away.

'It appears to be very convincing,' he offered.

Goessler said, 'It's as good as you will get — without driving all the vehicles together at high speed.'

'A reasonable facsimile will suffice,' Aubrey said stuffily.

He watched the mobile crane move off, and the shiny figures of the men gratefully dear the road, heading for the mobile canteen he had ordered for the purpose. Their bent shoulders, ducked heads, suggested gratitude.

Then, suddenly, the road was deserted. Towards Kassel there was a diversion sign, and east down the road, two miles away, there was another sign directing traffic on to the 487. That sign would be removed quickly, when the time came. He could faintly hear the helicopter that was spotting for them. God knew what the visibility was like — but he had to trust…

He focused on a bend in the road, perhaps fifty yards away, towards the east. From there…

Less than an hour.

The driver of the container lorry travelling west from Jena and the Zeiss factory, carrying cameras and camera parts into the Federal Republic, was about to remark on the absence of traffic on that part of the E63 to the man seated alongside him — a man perhaps somewhat too old to be convincingly a driver's mate — when his truck rounded the bend on which Aubrey had focused his glasses.

The wreckage was bundled high in his vision like some grey bonfire ready to be ignited. He stamped down on the brakes, gripping the wheel as he felt the skid beginning. He eased off the brakes, eased them on again — but there was too little time and distance, and he knew it.

'Cover your face!' he had time to shout, and then the windscreen was filled and the cab dark with the monstrous heap of tangled wreckage.

Aubrey watched the impact shift the wreckage as if the oncoming truck were a bulldozer. The noise assailed him, tearing, crying sounds that belonged to no human experience. The whole mass of metal, to which he had now added perhaps three hundred and fifty pounds of human material, slewed across the road, almost into the ditch below him.

Then it stopped. Silence. He was grateful for that; he could sense Goessler crouched into shock beside him. A whistle blew, and Goessler's team went into action.

The ambulance, headlights gleaming off the road, blue light flashing, siren wailing, turned out on to the road. A police car appeared round the bend in the road, and parked broadside-on, blocking oncoming traffic. Its red light swept continually across the road. A red fire-engine appeared from the trees, as if lost, then drew out alongside the container-lorry.

The cab door had to be cut open with torches which flickered blue off metal and wet road, sparked and blazed. When the first of the men, the driver, was lifted from the twisted intestines of the cab, it was evident he was dead. Aubrey did not need the white face of one of Goessler's men looking up towards them, and the shaking head.

'Why have they bothered with the driver?' he snapped. Then, raising his voice, he called, 'The other man — he is the one. Is he alive?'

A fireman had clambered into the cab, and now he appeared, his hand raised towards them. Aubrey could see the extended thumb dearly in the glasses. The man was alive. A shiver of success, and relief, possessed his old frame for a moment.

'We shall go down, Herr Franklin,' Goessler remarked, with the first urgency he had shown all afternoon. Aubrey raised himself from his stick, letting the glasses hang from their strap.

He was irritated by having to hold on to Goessler's arm for support as they descended the muddy slope.

The second man, the driver's mate, was extracted from the cab in half an hour. His legs were obviously crushed by the impact, and the German doctor continually shook his head. He administered morphine to keep the man unconscious. When he was finally lowered on to a stretcher, and the black bags had been inflated round the crushed limbs to form splints, the doctor glared at Aubrey with what seemed to him to be dislike, even momentary hatred.

'Don't waste your sympathy, Herr Doktor,' Aubrey snapped at him across the stretcher — its red blanket and white, strained face. 'This man is a senior Russian tank officer. Not a German — as you well know. Now, get him into the ambulance.'

When the driver's mate was loaded aboard, Aubrey climbed into the rear of the ambulance, Goessler following him. He slammed the doors shut behind them. A nurse, water from her wet cape joining the pool from the umbrella Aubrey had folded, began giving a transfusion to the unconscious man on the stretcher.

As he watched the tube redden through its length, reach the arm like a quick red snake, and the bottle begin to empty, Aubrey was suddenly afraid. It was as if a hand had swept down the house of cards he had built — or someone had laughed at something he had thought, or written or composed in secret.

'How bad is he?' he asked the doctor, sitting beside the patient.

'Bad.'

Aubrey tapped the floor of the ambulance as it jerked into motion, its siren accelerating up the scale as it headed for Kassel. His umbrella protested drops of water on to his trousers.

'He must live,' he remarked. 'It is imperative that this man makes a sufficient recovery.' There was a hissing, almost threatening urgency in his voice. The doctor was quelled, rather than resentful. 'The man must live — he must live.'

The Kaseler Zeitung carried a news item on the accident, and what it claimed were exclusive photographs. There was a vivid description of the wreckage, and the weather conditions. The main burden of the article seemed to be an attempt to reopen discussion on extending the E63 autobahn from Eisenach to Kassel through the Kaurunger-Meissner Wald, which stretch of road had proven once again fatally inadequate for the present volume of traffic A further item on the same page informed the readership of the death of the driver's mate, one Hans Grosch, of Stadtroda near Jena, after an unsuccessful operation at the Kassel Central Hospital. His body, the authorities had informed the Kaseler Zeitung, would naturally be returned to the DDR for burial, in due course.

That evening, twenty-six hours after the accident, an RAF Hercules took off from an airfield outside Hanover. When it landed at RAF Brize Norton, an ambulance was waiting for one of its passengers, who was then driven to a small private hospital outside Cheltenham.

Cunningham looked down at the red file on his desk, then up into Aubrey's habitually ingenuous blue eyes. The face round those eyes, once child-like and unageing, now appeared drawn caught a whiff of it earlier, I would have gone for it — as it was…' He lifted his hands in a shrug. 'Nevertheless, what Smoktunovsky considered most vital to conceal was encapsulated in those phrases, and that number. Group 1917 — Finland Station and the twenty-fourth. The last is presumably a date, though it might be something else. I am convinced that he thought it most important, and highly secret.'

Cunningham was silent for a moment as he re-read the underlined passage. When he looked into Aubrey's face again, it was evident he was sceptical. There was sympathy in his eyes that could only be for Aubrey's tiredness.

'Wasn't the man just rambling — his prayer-beads, perhaps?'

'I considered that. No, there is a later stage when he does that — a dead wife, I gathered, sons, his own father. His wanderings around himself were personal, not political.'

'And you want—?'

Aubrey rubbed his eyes, as if assailed by the weariness of the interrogation again. He saw his suspicions with Cunningham's eyes, momentarily.

'I — should try to explain my feelings about this, Richard. I don't want to be accused merely of a womanish intuition.' Aubrey smiled briefly. 'It's the language that's being used. The whole revolutionary evocation—'

Cunningham smiled.

'I see. This is a semantic intuition, then? We are to be concerned with language, with meaning?'

'You're dismissing the whole thing — but you weren't there, with him. He was down in his belly, escaping me in screams, Richard!' Aubrey shuddered, as if someone had opened a door and let in cold air. 'No, you weren't there. This was so important to him, he had to hide it. Wainwright and the Soviet First Secretary are to sign the SALT3/MARS agreement early next year. The Red Army is, we are certain, violently opposed to the Politburo over the whole package — they've even gone into print arguing for an increase in defence spending.'

The words tumbled out now, as if he had struck some rock in his mind and a long-carried cargo was being spilled. The and thin. Age, Cunningham decided, did not become Aubrey. It seemed to have wasted him more than others. Unless the weariness, the stretched skin, could be put down entirely to his interrogation of Smoktunovsky.

'A great pity the man died,' he observed. It was not a criticism.

Aubrey looked at the bright wintry day outside in Queen Anne's Gate, over Cunningham's shoulder.

'I quite agree.'

The warmth of the room was stuffy, dry, belying the weather, which possessed such an agreeable sharpness that Aubrey had walked part of the way to his office that morning. 'However, perhaps convenient, since his body may now be returned to the DDR, in compliance with the official request by the family Grosch.' He smiled thinly. 'Colonel Smoktunovsky of Group of Soviet Forces Germany — I wonder how he liked playing the part of driver's mate? I quite forgot to ask him.'

Cunningham flicked open the file. Aubrey was always bitter after a prolonged interrogation; as if hating something in himself.

'Satisfied — in broad terms, Kenneth?'

'I think so. In broad terms. Colonel Smoktunovsky knew a great deal.'

'False alarm, then?'

'I think so. The military analysts are taking their time coming to the same conclusion — but I think they'll get there. No, the sending of perhaps the most senior tank officer ever into the Federal Republic to do his own routine reconnaissance was — well, perhaps an expensive luxury, or a piece of bravado. An old warhorse, feeling his oats… ? 'Rather an expensive jaunt — for him.'

'Quite. No, for the moment I don't think we have to worry about GSFG starring the next war just before this Helsinki business reaches an admirable conclusion. However, with Smoktunovsky coming over to survey the Federal road system disguised as a driver's mate of humble origins — one can't take chances.'

'And you enjoyed your elaborate trap?'

'A hit — I do confess as much.' Aubrey nodded. The gesture was almost sanctimonious, certainly smug; yet there was a flash of something Cunningham almost described as self-disgust, just for a moment. 'However, perhaps you would turn to page thirty-six of the interrogation transcript. I have marked the passage.'

Cunningham took his spectacles from his breast-pocket, then nipped through the typed pages. Typescript, done with Aubrey's neatness of touch, on an old manual machine. A Russian had lived and died in those pages — Aubrey himself his only comforter and confessor; perhaps the most successful and remorseless interrogator Cunningham had ever known. There was nothing of the cramped, dose intensity of those hours and days suggested by the double-spaced type.

As if reading something in Cunningham's face, Aubrey said, 'I could admit that the whole thing was quite awful, if you wish.' Cunningham looked up sharply, 'But it is over now. And there may be something of interest for us.' He nodded at the typescrpit and, as if bidden, Cunningham began to read. When he had finished, he looked up again.

'Mm. I am to make something of this?' He sounded as if he thought Aubrey was making the false judgement of a tired man.

'I'm not that tired, Richard,' Aubrey said softly. 'You may understand better, with a little perspective. Smoktunovsky was almost certainly GRU, Military Intelligence, as well as senior GSFG tank tactician. His rank at fifty-two was an affectation. As such, he was hard to crack, despite his injuries and poor morale. What I have underlined there came only towards the end, when he had broken almost completely, was rambling, trying to cover tracks, that sort of thing. But still he tried to hide this from me. I formed the distinct and certain impression that he thought it was what I was after all the time, and he certainly did not render it without the fiercest struggle.'

'So?'

'Ciphers — code-words. Little else. If I had so much as last hours with Smoktunovsky had been desperate, wearing,' he had shortened the Russian's life by perhaps more than a day because he would not let him rest. In the end, he had had to lock the door against the medical staff while he went after what the crazed mind was still trying to keep from him. Cunningham was shaking his head.

'Opposed, yes. That is to be anticipated—'

'Richard, I put Smoktunovsky in the bag because we were afraid of what Exercise "1812" could mean on the NATO central front. It turned out to be a false alarm. But that snatch was the result of well-founded suspicion on our part that the Army was engaged in a bitter quarrel with the Kremlin. Smoktunovsky didn't tell me that they'd kissed and made up.'

Cunningham rubbed his chin for a while, then nodded. 'It all seems very slim to me, Kenneth. Perhaps you were in there too long with him—' Aubrey's old blue eyes flared. 'No, I withdraw that. Very well — talk to people, send in a man if you wish. Where might you begin?'

'I'll talk to a couple of people at MOD — the less dense among them. As to a penetration mission — I accept that I have nowhere to send someone at the present. But, the Red Army is not going to lie down and let its balls be cut off by Khamovkhin and the rest of the Politburo. I'm quite certain of that.'

'Kenneth — I do hope you're wrong about this.'

'Exactly my own sentiments. Exactly.'

'Very well, play it back. If it's any good, then we'll send it upstairs for analysis.' The tape-operator made as if to rewind the spool of the tape on the recorder, then his team-leader stopped him. 'Who did you say this old man was?'

'His name's Fedakhin — Bureau of Political Administration of the Army.'

'Are we interested in him for any reason?'

'No. He just used a Secretariat telephone, that's all. He wouldn't have expected it to be tapped, but it was. I was just playing through last night's efforts after I came in, and I heard it. He's talking in code.'

'OK, Misha, the floor is yours. Impress me.'

'Captain.'

The younger man switched on the rewind, and they watched the spools changing their weight of tape, and the numbers rolling rapidly back. Misha stopped the tape, checked the number with a list at his elbow, then wound back a little more. Then he switched to 'Play' on the heavy old German recorder.

The captain noticed that, as usual with taps done as routine, the installation, and quality both left much to be desired. The voice was tinnily unreal, and distant.

'Our man for Group 1917 is in place,' the old voice said.

'Good. But you should not have called.'

'I apologise. Let the illness of an old man excuse me.'

'Very well.'

'You need have no worries concerning Finland Station, my friend. It has been settled, in terms of personnel, and it can now proceed satisfactorily. I shall be able to retire a happy man, and await the great day.'

The captain's nose wrinkled at the cliches, and he tossed his head, Misha being invited into the contempt he felt. He knew with certainly that contempt for the old fart on the tape was driving out curiously, but the knowledge didn't worry him. Old men — his wife's father — talked endlessly of great days, and happy retirement, and golden ages, come to that 'Thank you, old friend. Take care of yourself.'

Misha let the tape run for a few seconds, then switched it off. He looked up eagerly into the captain's broad face, so that the older man felt obligated to feel interest 'Well, sir?'

'Yes — tell me, then. Who was the other man?'

'Unidentified.'

'What number was dialled?'

'Wrong sort of tap — no record.'

'A name was asked for?'

'No. I'll play it, if you like—' The captain shook his head, lighting a cigarette. 'Only an extension. Could've been anyone.'

'So — what's the excruciating importance of all this, Misha?'

'I don't know, sir. But he was talking in code, obviously and people who do that have something to hide, don't they?' After a silence, the captain said, 'Usually, they do.'

'Stig, old boy — it's you.'

The heavily-built, florid Englishman who never spoke Finnish if he could avoid it, looked up from the newspaper he was reading, recognised his visitor — unsurprising since he had been waiting for him in the bar on the Mannerheimintie for half an hour — and gestured him to another seat at his table. The bespectacled, fur-hatted Finn sat down, briefcase across knees pressed primly, and tightly together. The Englishman watched him peer nervously into the less well-lit corners of the bar — a nervous tic that Stig always demonstrated, at every meeting — over five years now, too. He'd probably done it with his predecessor, Henderson. Poor little sod.

'I — you always choose these public places, Luard. Do you have to?'

The Finn's English was excellent; unlike Luard, he had no distrust of a foreign tongue, speaking four languages other than his own. Luard's Finnish was improbable at best, Stig considered.

'Sorry, old boy. Standard procedure. And no one follows you about, old boy. No one has done for years—' It was as if Luard suddenly became irritated with his companion. 'Everyone lost interest in you years ago, Stig. They wouldn't care if they knew you passed stuff on to my lot — I should think Finnish Intelligence hopes someone does, just in case they ever get hold of something of importance.'

Stag's narrow, tired face with its doughy complexion suddenly sharpened, took on a vivacity of anger.

'You need not insult me, Luard. I asked merely on this occasion because I have something that you must see — and this is not the place to start passing round infra-red photographs.'

Luard's narrow eyes slid into their creases of fat. Then his features went bland as the waiter approached. Stig ordered a beer, and Luard another Scotch. When the waiter had brought the drink, and Luard had made a patronising show of paying, he said, 'Infra-red. They must be good. What of?'

'The Finnish-Soviet border area, south-east of Ivalo.'

'Oh — those.' Stig appeared puzzled, bemused. 'Are your lot still taking them from those high-wing monoplanes, so the Russians don't suspect they're doing something your government has agreed there's no need to do?' Luard was smiling broadly, his face seeming to be enveloped by the fat cheeks, the heavy jowl — nose, eyes being pushed into a little fist of lumps in the centre of the globe of fat pink flesh. Stig hated him.

'They are still using private aircraft, if that is what you mean.' Luard laughed, raised his glass, his little eyes twinkling, and presumably drank the health of the Cessnas and their pilots from Finnish Intelligence. He watched the antagonisms chasing themselves across the Finn's features, and decided to give Stig a rest.

'All right, old man. Let's see them.'

'Here?' The Finn appeared outraged, violated.

'We're in an alcove, aren't we. Don't be such a virgin. Holiday snaps, dirty pictures — doesn't matter. No one's going to care.'

'Perhaps you could explain, Shelley, why this has taken two months to reach me?'

Kenneth Aubrey looked at the sheaf of infra-red photographs fanned open on his desk, then up at his aide. The young man appeared disconcerted, but confused more evidently than distressed.

'Sir, it was passing through my hands as routine. I didn't think you needed to see it.'

'Very well.' Aubrey sighed. 'I accept that I was being inordinately curious when I removed them from your tray. But — now that I have them, pray enlighten me.'

'They came in the Bag from Helsinki. With a note from Luard designating his contact as usual, and making light of these.'

'And what are they meant to represent?'

'I checked with Helsinki, because the explanatory note was unsatisfactory.' Aubrey nodded in compliment. 'Apparently, it's a practice roll from one of their covert border-checks. We don't have the later rolls they took of the Russian side of the border. This lot was on its way to the shredder when our contact sidetracked them.'

'Why should he do that?' Aubrey picked up one print, and Shelley another, in order to direct Aubrey's attention. He knew that his superior disliked anyone who stood at his shoulder to draw attention to something he was studying.

'The smear of infra-red sources in the top left-hand corner is Ivalo, the cold spot beyond is Lake Inari — apparently.' Aubrey nodded, impatiently, it seemed to Shelley. 'Towards the bottom, the other smear is the small town of Raja-Jooseppi. The mystery resides, apparently, in the fact that there should be another, smaller smear, down near the bottom right-hand. A village called Rontaluumi.'

'Yes?'

'The practice roll appears all right — except that there is no heat-source whatsoever from the village.'

'What?'

'Our contact's superiors rejected the film as partially damaged, or wrongly developed. The rest of the film, the over-the-border stuff, was quite satisfactory.'

'What other explanation might there be?'

'Luard said, with scarcely disguised contempt, that it frightened the life out of our contact.'

'And is he a man given to panic?'

'No.'

'Then what is his explanation.'

'He says that not to make an infra-red impression of any kind means that the village was empty of life — human and animal. And must have been for several days before the film was taken.'

'Sir, there's no contact from Brunton.'