The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter One: ZARKOVIC

This year they'd added another layer of Armco on the outside of the bends and joined the two bottom rows with massive steel flitch plates to stop people forcing the rails apart and this must have saved a lot of injuries when Hans Strobel came round three laps from the finish and hit one of the uprights and bounced off it and spun twice and caught fire.

There wasn't a lot of noise from the crash itself, just a low roaring as the flames bannered back in the slipstream; but some people down there had started screaming and there was a kind of whimpering noise as the first of the emergency vehicles wheelspun on the hot tarmac as it pulled away from the pits.

'Oh God,' Marianne said and buried her face against me.

'He's all right,' I told her, but of course she knew he wasn't. He'd been hurled clear but the flames had caught him and he was rolling over and over like a small quiet fireball along the guard rails with no one to help him.

Up to now we'd all been cheering him on. This was Strobel's third year at Monaco and he'd been steadily getting the hang of the gear ratios and the characteristic front-end problem as the weight came off past the Casino, and in practice he'd notched up a diabolical 1 min. 25.35 sec. just before he came in, and for most of the time it had looked like his race and in another few minutes we would have heard the corks popping but now he was rolling along the guard rails, orange and black and flickering, le pauvre, the man next to me kept saying monotonously, oh mon Dieu, le pauvre, till he got on my nerves.

The B.R.M. wasn't in the way and the rest of the field were coming past in a strung-out line, slowing under the brakes and losing some of their traction on the hot tarmac. Rizzoli and Marks had begun shunting and one of the team Ferraris lost the back end and did a complete spin and tore off its nose aerofoil and that was about all I saw because Marianne had gone dead white and I wanted to get her away from the stands before the shoving and pushing began. People were standing on the benches to get a better view of the mess down there and that made it easier for me and we were going down. the steps to the harbour car park as the P.A. system began sending out its near-unintelligible echoes round the circuit.

They didn't mention Strobe! but just said the race was being abandoned and this wasn't surprising because even if he were still alive they couldn't bring the thing to a decent conclusion with wreckage and fire-foam all over the finishing-straight. A lot of people were already coming down from the stands, because there'd only been three laps to go and they wanted to avoid the traffic jam.

'It looked worse,' I said, 'than it really was.'

'Yes,' Marianne said, 'yes of course.'

She clung to me as far as the entrance to the harbour car park and then freed herself and walked, apart from me for a little way, as if ashamed of her behaviour. I didn't know her very well but I knew she had pride. She walked very straight but with her head down, the snakeskin bag swinging from her tanned hand, the gold bracelet sparkling in the sun. In a minute I put an arm round her and she brought her head up and we walked in step to the line of cars along the harbour's edge where I'd left the Lancia.

'Vous avez vos papiers, m'sieur?'

Two Monegasque motards, their bikes heeled over on their stands, one in front of the Lancia and one behind. I showed them my passport and driving licence and left them reading the things while I opened the door for Marianne. She looked up at me and managed a slightly lopsided smile.

'C'est la vie,' she said, and I nodded. She was talking about Hans Strobel, and she probably meant, c'est la mort. The loudspeakers were still echoing around the buildings but I couldn't make out what they were saying because the Radio Monte-Carlo helicopter was making some low passes across the circuit where the crash had been. A whole crowd of people were moving into the car park now and the traffic police were taking up stations.

'Merci, m'sieur.'

He gave me back my papers and it occurred to me that the whole thing was a bit odd because you can't break many regulations leaving your car parked in a nice neat row with the others; but I wasn't really interested because I wanted to start battling a gangway through the traffic till we got to a quiet bar where I could give Marianne a cognac.

'Eh bien, m'sieur,' the big one said, 'il y a un Monsieur Steadman qui vous attend a I'Hotel Negresco, a Nice. C'est assez urgent, et vous n'avez que nous suivre,vous savez?'

'Okay,' I said, and got into the Lancia.

'What is happening?' asked Marianne.

'They're going to give us a hand getting through all the traffic.'

She kept her green eyes on me for a moment and then looked down and didn't ask anything else. I'd told her I was in the diplomatic corps, one of the routine covers when we're hanging around foreign parts between missions. There was the prescribed plate on the back of the car and I'd telexed the number to London and that was routine too. We're never asked to report at intervals or tell them where we're staying because we're meant to relax between missions but we have to tell them the country we're in and the car we're driving, so that they can get their hooks on us if something blows up.

The two motards had got their hee-haws going and the whistles began shrilling ahead of us as the traffic police began pulling the line of cars to one side to let us through. Marianne lit a cigarette and leaned her head back and closed her eyes and we didn't talk until the cops had taken us in a loop along the Boulevard des Moulins to the frontier by the bus terminal. A pair of French motards were waiting for us there with their bikes ticking over and the Monegasques peeled off and left us to it. The main street through Beausoleil was almost deserted because everyone was down there by the sea, and the French cops put on a bit of speed, using their klaxons on the rising 'hairpin bends to the Grande Corniche.

'Will you have to go?' asked Marianne. She was leaning her dark head sideways, watching me.

'Probably.'

Because London doesn't grab you just for a giggle. I didn't know who Monsieur Steadman was because it'd be a code name and it could be Ferris or Loman or Comyngs or anyone at all: it didn't have to be a director in the field at this stage; it could simply be a contact. During the last few hours something had come up on the board and they'd flown this man out and asked Interpol in Paris to pick up the driver of the car with the number I'd given them and tell him where the rendezvous was: the Negresco, Nice, That is a shame,' Marianne said.

She always tried to speak English to me, because I said I liked her accent.

'Yes.' I turned to look at her, then away again.

We'd planned three more days together before she had to go back on duty handing out trays at thirty thousand feet and I wouldn't have let anything bust into a situation like that in the ordinary way, but this wasn't the ordinary way: it looked as if the Bureau had a mission for me and all I could think about now was what I was going into and whether I was going to get out.

They've got some trouble,' I told her, 'in French Guinea, and the UK has been asked to mediate.' We were going through La Turbie at the correct speed and there wasn't any traffic so they weren't using their klaxons, which was. a relief. 'It just means they'll want me back in Paris.'

'Merde,' she said.

'Are you on the metropolitan flights?'

'No. I will be in Durban.'

She opened her eyes and looked at me for a minute and then curled her bare brown legs up on the seat and closed her eyes again and we didn't talk any more till we were rolling along the Promenade des Anglais, one motard still ahead of us and one behind. They'd taken us through most of the Corniche at a hundred kph and all we'd met were the La Turbie bus and a couple of deux chevaux but they'd used their hee-haws on sight and the indications seemed to be that London had sent a real phase-one priority to Interpol with the end result that these two anges de la route had been given instructions to get me through fire and water if it were necessary. It hadn't been necessary but they'd at least tried to show they were right on the ball in case any questions were asked later.

London doesn't normally fidget like that.

Marianne had an apartment in the Gustave V and I turned off the sea front and dropped her there, the rearguard motard following up and the front one meeting us from the opposite direction when he found out we'd made a deviation. She told me not to come up.

'All right,' I said.

She'd been quiet for most of the time since we'd left the Principality, because the Strobel thing was still on her mind. Also I think she'd been looking forward to the three days in we'd planned, and probably thought I should ring Paris and tell them I was down with the grippe or something; and that was what I would have done, if it had been Paris.

I got out of the Lancia and opened the little rusty iron gate of the Villa Madeleine, breaking another tendril of the morning glory that was twined round the hinges.

'Are you ever in Durban?' She gave a little moue and turned away and went up the tiled steps, finding the key in her bag; and when I was back in the car she'd gone, Marianne, with her slim brown legs and her smoky eyes and the way she made you feel it was the first time and never-coding.

Steadman had left a message at the desk saying he'd be in the Rotunda, and I saw him on the far side sitting alone at a table with a tray of tea. He looked at me over the cup.

'Took your time,' he said.

We went through the code-intro for the month, inter-national and unspecified, and he ordered me some tea.

'I had a fast police escort,' I said, 'what more do you want?'

He looked faintly surprised. 'I was just joking.'

He was a small man with sideboards and a huge tie and suede shoes and I wondered where they'd got him from. He wasn't Bureau. I looked around and saw it was all right: there aren't any bugs in the Rotunda at the Negresco and the dome doesn't throw any echoes because of the carpet and all those gilt-framed copies of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

'Where are you from?' I asked him, 'Liaison 9.'

That explained it: we call them the Wet Look. The thing is they spend their time liaising with the major services and therefore know a lot more than we do and we resent that Our only consolation is that we know one or two things they can never hope to get their hands on because they're filed in a heat-proof box with an all-eventualities cutout circuit and a bang-destruct and they'd never get near the thing, even if they took off their little suede shoes.

'All right,' I told him, 'what's the form?'

We spoke just above a whisper, because people could go past on the other side of the pillars to look at the onyx ashtrays in the display windows.

'There isn't any.'

He sipped.his tea, I didn't say anything. If I said anything it would get his back up and there wasn't any point in doing that because he wasn't anyone important: he was just a contact thrown in to early-warn the executive, that was all; and once the mission was set up they'd give me a first rank director in the field I'd have to live with and like it He'd have to be different from Steadman.

'You're on stand-by,' he said, and brushed his lips with the napkin.

'What phase?'

He gave a little laugh, displacing a lock of hair, 'Oh, it's nothing like that.'

Sometimes they try and shove a between-mission executive straight into a middle-phase or an end-phase assignment that's come unstuck and we all squeal like hell but never refuse it because we can hear the sound of distant bugles and we want to get in there where the bloodied banners are reeling through the fray. And there's another reason; we know there's always the chance that someone's managed to put most of an important mission in the bag before he caught a stray shot or hit a wall, so we can go in and tie up the end-phase and reach the objective and come out alive and take the glory for the poor bastard who couldn't quite make it-listen, if we weren't people like that we wouldn't be in this trade, work it out for yourself.

My tea came and when the boy had gone I said:

'Is it a mission?'

'It has all the earmarks, old boy.'

So he'd been getting the lingo wrong, that was all: trust Liaison 9. He'd told me I was on stand-by and they only use that term when they want to throw you into the fire to look for the chestnuts and that's why I'd asked the obvious question, to find out what phase they'd got the thing running at. When you're down for a mission they don't put you on stand-by, they put you on call; and maybe it doesn't sound very different but it is: a full-scale mission is your very own little toy to play with and you take it very seriously indeed and that was how I was taking it now.

The nerves were on edge.

'What time are they, calling up?'

He sipped his tea.

'No special time.'

I sat back and looked at Little Lord Fauntleroy. Under the big glass dome of the Rotunda the silence was peculiar, made up of tiny sounds that ticked or scratched or bumped and then died away before you could place them; but they weren't the ones I was listening to. Up there on the far side of the Channel there were doors opening and closing along those dim-lit passages, and the gibberish was crackling through the static and out of the scramblers in Signals while a phone rang and was picked up and someone in Monitoring sent a memo to Egerton or Mildmay or Parkis and everyone waited for the word that would start this whole thing running. Somewhere in Beirut or The Hague or the Azores they were looking for the hole, and when they'd found the hole they were going to put the ferret down, and the ferret was me.

From where we sat in our plush chairs in this sepulchral calm we could hear the telephone, faintly, at the desk in the foyer. I listened to that sound, too.

'You must have some idea,' I told Steadman.

Sat cursing myself. Perfectly normal for the executive to be on edge when he's on call but we always try not to show it and we always try not to show it especially to little ticks like this one.

He looked at the shine on his nails.

'There's someone trying to get across.'

I sat forward an inch, 'Where from?'

'We don't know.'

'Oh for Christ's sake, you must know where the-'

Stopped.

He looked around him, terribly casual, hamming it. The executive is requested to keep his cool and not shout the place down so that strangers can hear.

'Correction,' he said blandly, his gaze passing across my face as if by accident 'For «we» don't know, read "I" don't know.'

He let three seconds go by and added gently: 'Possibly that's why they're going to phone.'

It was twenty-five past six and at ten past seven the little bastard got up and wandered about looking at the costume jewellery in the display window and the brass plates at the bottom of the picture frames and then came wandering back. I'd counted twenty-three calls to the desk out there, 'M'sieur Steadman?'

'What? Oh, yes.'

They never got used to their cover names.

'A telephone call for you.'

'Thanks.'

The waiter took him to the foyer and came back to get our trays.

'Vous avez termini, m'sieur?'

'Bien sur. Dites moi, il y a des nouvelles de ce pilote, Hans Strobel, a Monte Carle?'

His waxed eyebrows lifted slightly in a gesture of desolation.

'Il est mort. Dans l'ambulance, vous savez. Eh, oui.' The delicate porcelain tinkled as he stacked the cups, gilt and rosebuds and tea-leaves. 'Je crois que c'est le destin qu'ils cherchent, hein, ces types-la?'

'C'est possible.'

A fireball rolling along the guard rail. Death or glory, make up your mind because you can't have both.

I got up and went over to the line of windows, Cartier, Chanel, and then some Hermes scarves like the one Marianne was wearing, reminding me of the bars of sunlight and shadow thrown by those peeling Venetian blinds across the white carpet, across her gold body. But already she seemed a long time ago and in a distant place, because the moment you know they've sent for you it's like dropping over a brink and into a void, and the memory tends to blank off.

His reflection came against the window glass.

'What about a little stroll along the promenade?'

'All right.'

When we left the hotel I checked and got negative and checked again after we'd crossed the two roads to the sea front and got negative again and felt totally satisfied because anyone trying to tag us across that hellish traffic would never make it alive. He'd probably picked up some ticks in London because the Liaison 9 people can hardly avoid it: their routine travel pattern takes them from one intelligence base to the next and they're fair game, and when they board an aircraft for anywhere abroad they're liable to be overtaken by signals and find someone on the peep for them wherever they land. But he'd obviously flushed them, and I could believe he was clever at it because people like Steadman dislike human contact.

'It's for tomorrow morning,' he said.

'They can't do that.'

'I think they can, old boy.'

There was something wrong and I didn't like it because there just wasn't enough time to set me up overnight: they had to brief me and push me through Clearance and drop me into the target zone and set me running with everything I needed — communications, access channels, escape lines, so forth. And there wasn't enough time for that: I couldn't even make London before midnight unless there were a flight with a delay on it Then I saw I was missing the obvious, too bloody impatient to think straight. This was local.

'This chap's going into Istres,' he said, Local.

'You know where that is?' he asked me.

'Bouches du Rhone.'

'Yes. There's an airfield there. Have you got a Michelin 84 in your car?'

'I've got the whole set.'

'Well I never, they don't do that at Hertz.'

We stood for a minute watching the rollers breaking white across the stones, the spindrift catching the light of the tall Lamp-standards.

'His name is Milos Zarkovic, and he-'

'Name, or cover name?'

'What? I don't know. I'm just repeating what they told me on the phone, so please try not to interrupt, or I might forget something.' He gave a little smile with his chin tucked in. I'm only joking, of course. This chap is using a Pulmeister 101 single seat interceptor, which is apparently the longest-range machine he can pinch without anybody noticing too much.'

'Where's he coming from?'

'One of the satellite air force bases near Zagreb. Ostensibly he'll make for Madrid but the weather's going to take him off course slightly and he's going to run out of fuel and do a belly flop near the airfield at Istres.'

We reached one of the car park kiosks and turned back, walking slowly. He was very good: he'd checked the two men over by the rail and the one sitting on the bench reading Nice Matin and they hadn't made a move, 'How do I get him out of Istres?'

'That's up to you.' He glanced at me sharply. 'If you want any kind of backup laid on you'd better tell London right away. But they're expecting you to handle it solo. Up to you, as I say.'

I thought about it. London knew I didn't want any backup: I work solo or not at all and they know that; but there were things like communications and alternative action and the availability of a safe-house. The area around Istres was nearly all marshland and that made it perfect for the forced-landing cover story but Marseille was close and Marseille is one of the nerve centres for half a dozen major networks with permanent agents-in-place, and this was a daytime operation. It wouldn't be more than ten minutes before the first people showed up to the landing site, but I didn't have to get the aircraft away: all they wanted was Milos Zarkovic, 'All right,' I told him. They want him in London?'

'Yes.'

'How soon?'

'Soonest'

'Will he be carrying papers?'

'Oh yes. Yugoslavian passport. Communist Party membership, everything quite above board — I mean there won't be any trouble from the local police if you can manage to get him out of sight straight away, not till the news gets around that he's wanted in Yugers for pinching the plane. It's the spooks, you see, that you'll have to contend with; Marseille is rather like a fly-paper, as doubtless you're aware.'

We waited by the traffic lights and he pressed the button.

'What time is he coming in?'

'As soon as it's light enough for him to see the ground. The idea is that there won't be a lot of people about at that hour.'

'How far's the landing site from Istres?'

'I'm going to show you.'

The little green man flickered into life and we went across and opened the Lancia and got in and took Section 84 out of the glove compartment. He had a red felt pen in his hand.

'Just here, okay? A kilometre south of St-Martin-de-Crau.'

The place would be visible from the tower at Istres airfield through a pair of 7X50s but that wasn't critical because the minor road ran north and then west behind a low elevation and that was where I could lose people, 'All right,' I said.

'You want to recap?'

'No.' I wanted to find a phone and tell London they could screw the Pulmeister 101 and screw Milos Zarkovic because tins wasn't a mission they were handing me, it was a contact and escort operation and they could have used Coleman or Matthews or Johnson or anyone from the general facilities pool: they didn't need a first-line shadow executive for this thing and they knew it. But I was between missions and not far along the coastline from Istres and they thought they'd save the expense of flying someone else out from London and risking the operation through lack of experience so they'd winkled me out and sent this little jerk to local-brief me and sell me the thing about 'handling it solo' to give it the look of a first-line penetration job.

His cologne was rather heavy and I folded the map and put it back with the others and got out of the car and stood watching an Air Force Boeing sliding down to the airport across the bay.

'You don't seem very happy, old boy.'

Screw Steadman too.

'If London wants this character, I'll bring him in.'

Soon after Aix-en-Provence I began hitting the Mistral, touching the wheel to correct the steering as the gusts came broadside-on. The Mistral is a strong and steady wind, blowing down the Rhone Valley and bending the cypresses and unnerving the people in its path; it blows for three, six or nine days and by Napoleonic law if it blows for longer than that, murder is not a capital charge.

I didn't know how long it had been blowing this time. If it hadn't dropped by dawn, Zarkovic would have to make a half circuit to bring his plane up-wind because a belly flop would be tricky enough without dead-air conditions. The Mistral turns eastward when it reaches the coast, and that would be Zarkovic's approach direction.

By midnight I was in St-Martin-de-Crau and drove straight through and pulled the Lancia into cover alongside a vineyard, dousing the lights and sleeping on and off for the next five hours. The last time I woke up I was aware of the silence: the Mistral had died and the pre-dawn air was still.

By 05:15 I was positioned to receive the contact, halfway along a narrow road that led south to the coast. The wind had got up again and I stopped trying to work out which way he'd be coming in. There wasn't a lot of room between the railway to the east and the Rhone Basin to the west, but if he managed to come down precisely into the wind he'd be sliding towards me at this point and finish up within a hundred metres of the car.

There are never clouds when the Mistral blows, and I could make out the tower at Istres, black against the pale dawn sky. Within minutes the reeds at the edge of the marshland were turning from blood red to silver as the sun lifted from the low horizons, and the wind tugged at them, curving them into scimitars. Gusts hit the side of the Lancia, shifting it on its springs; I leaned away from it and settled the binoculars on the skyline in the east.

06:00.

He was overdue because Steadman had told me he was coming in at first light and the sun was already five or six diameters high and the waves of heat were floating horizontally across the lens where the railway embankment made the skyline. He could have mucked it, of course. I didn't know anything about his background: he could be a major element in something big the Bureau was running or he could be coming across with the blueprints of the Russian fleet, but even if he were only a contact or a courier he had to get a front-line interceptor airborne out of a military base and he had to go like hell through a gauntlet of radar stations that would trigger off signals to every air police unit along the north Mediterranean before he was across the Italian Alps. He could be chased and intercepted and ordered to turn back by pursuit squadrons of the Yugoslavian air arm, and if they managed to interest the Italians in this thing he'd have to move faster than the decision-makers at a dozen military airfields along his course.

That was his problem, not mine.

06:30.

The heat shimmered against the lenses. I lowered the glasses to rest my eyes and then put them up again. The sky to the east was a blinding sheet of white.

It occurred to me that I'd missed a couple of points because it had looked as if they'd thrown a full-scale mission at me and it had triggered.the normal degree of first-night nerves and I'd been jumping gaps. The thing was this: there hadn't been any need for Steadman in this picture. London could have just signalled Interpol to get me into communication, and all those Monegasque cops had to do was tell me to phone the Bureau; then the Bureau would have told me to go and pick up this character at dawn, Bouches du Rhone, so forth.

But they hadn't done that. They'd sent Steadman. Or Steadman had been down here in the field and they'd told him to stand by and brief me. One possible answer was that some ether service like DI6 had got on to this Zarkovic thing and found it too hot to handle and shunted it through Liaison 9 for the Bureau to look after, because the Bureau doesn't exist. Another possible answer was that London was still in the middle of sorting out a mass of raw intelligence that had started hitting the fan up there, but there wasn't time for me to think about that because a quick black dart was crossing the lenses and I swung them to keep it centred.

He was moving from east through south and standing on his starboard wingtip as he came round again and dropped very fast across the skyline to the west. I began running because his approach path looked like half a kilometre north of the mark Steadman had made on the map and I couldn't get the Lancia there. The only available detour would take me five or six kilometres and rather close to the airfield buildings and I didn't want to expose the image because in an hour from now the Lancia with the CD plate could be the subject of an all-points bulletin if the gendarmerie decided that Yugoslavians ought not to drop out of the sky and jump into cars and disappear.

The ground was soft and I kept away from the reeds and the bright areas where the sun was reflecting off stagnant water but it was sticky going because the surface was inconsistent and I kept stumbling over firm patches and then wallowing in the troughs. A lot of white birds were crowding into the air not far away because they'd seen the plane. Vision was jerky and I stopped and stood still and tried to get some kind of fix on the spot where he'd be coming down. From this oblique angle the front-end configuration was like a bent dart, with a very small wing area that would make for a high stalling-speed: he couldn't stay airborne much longer and I worked it out that if I ran like hell I could finish up at a point where I'd be close enough to make the rendezvous without fetching the thing on top of me.

Began running again. Heard the whine of the twin jets, then they cut off and there was only the buffeting of the wind: he was keeping to his cover situation and going through the motions of running out of fuel; either that or for some very good reason he'd been loafing about over the sea to use up the reserve tank to the point where he'd have to come in, to give the whole thing credibility if anyone decided to take a look at the fuel gauges.

He was coming in very low indeed and I had to veer a bit without breaking my run because he wouldn't be able to avoid me if I got it wrong. There was the smell of kerosene as the wind shifted and the light shone bright on the silver-grey fuselage and I could see the nose wheel turning very slowly as the airstream caught it, then he was alongside and I veered again into the wind and got a rear-oblique view of him as he reached the stalling-point and dropped tail first and bounced and tilted and bounced again and then bucked forward and dug the nose in and flipped over in a wave of mud. I kept on running.