The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Sixteen: COURIER

The TU-154 came out of the haze like an image taking shape on a negative, breaking through the low ceiling a mile from the end of the runway and flopping down only ten minutes late despite the weather: they said there was more snow coming in from the south-west.

People began leaving the observation deck, their faces pinched with the cold. I waited until the plane had turned at the end of its run and started rolling in this direction; I was frozen from the drive in the Trabant but there were other things to consider. I was getting to know Chechevitsin: his signals were brief and security-conscious to the point of being uninformative. This wasn’t typically Russian and I suppose he was probably someone out from London and worried about making mistakes. This time the rdv was for 3.05 at the airport, courier arriving Flight 96 from Moscow, recognizable on sight. No precise point of rendezvous. I was expected to pick him out of a hundred and fifty passengers. No specific instructions: I was to assume that he was to receive the films.

I’d say the problem had been the Trabant. It was the driving-seat that had broken away and I’d had to take the other one off its runners and use it as a prop, wedging it between the rear seat and the driver’s squab. But there’d been nothing I could do about the smashed windscreen except clear the rest of the glass away and drive with my eyes half-shut against the freezing blast of air. I’d told the man at the hotel there’d been an accident on the snow and he’d let me put the car into the yard at the rear and I’d left it there, walking around to the household store to call Kirinski and then Chechevitsin: I wanted it out of sight as much as possible because there couldn’t be too many dark blue Trabants driving around the city without a windscreen and I might just as well put my name on the bloody thing. I’d asked Chechevitsin to get me another one but he’d said it would take time and I couldn’t put any pressure on him because even a used car would cost the earth and he’d be lucky to find one.

Only a few of the people were left on the observation deck now: the 154 was swinging into the reception bay and the service vehicles were going out to it. I waited another two minutes and went through the swing-door and down the steps, moving a little faster than normal but not running. He was still behind me at the end of the passage and I turned sharply, using cover and going into the open again to watch him react when he saw me. He’d lost me for only a few seconds but it had worried him and he shrugged himself deeper into his coat as he walked on past the information desk.

There’d been nothing in the mirror when I’d driven here but the Trabant had a unique image because of the windscreen and I’d left it parked between a big Chaika and a wall and I’d walked into the main hall through the freight entrance and taken a lot of trouble with mirrors and mirror substitutes and drawn blank everywhere. That had been at 2.40 and I’d come up to the observation deck through a clean field but at 2.53 the man with the sloping shoulder had come through the swing-door and stood there for a couple of minutes making a lot of fuss about the cold, stamping his feet and blowing into his bare hands and going out again. A lot of people were doing that: it was the first big freeze of the winter and they were feeling it; but this man had kept his back to me and faced the line of windows at the right angle and I’d noted it but hadn’t been sure until I’d checked on him. So it had been the Trabant and he’d picked me up at some time after I’d turned into the car park and kept station on me and held back too long and lost me and looked for me and found me on the observation deck, going out again and waiting for me at one end of the passage, not a first-class tag but he wasn’t running any risk because the other one had closed in and was watching me now from light cover near the main entrance.

“Excuse me, comrade.”

A man with a bunch of faded carnations, God knew what they’d cost him but he had the eyes of a romantic and he was past the age when he could afford to lose a good woman even if he couldn’t afford the flowers either.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Is that the Moscow plane, just in?”

“That’s right, comrade. Flight 96. She’s a lucky girl.”

“They were all they had left.” He shrugged wistfully and walked off across the hall with both tags watching him and a man coming away from the newspaper stall on the far side, a third man, waiting to question him when the time was right.

Three.

It didn’t look good. There were things I wanted to know and there wasn’t time to think about it because the courier would now be coming through Gate 1 and I’d have to make a decision within the next minute and then act on it. But the same pattern was here: the second courier was moving straight into a trap and this time London hadn’t been on to it. Either that or Kirinski had thrown the whole thing at the fan: I’d called his apartment as soon as I’d got the Trabant stowed away in the hotel yard, but Liova had answered the phone and said he wasn’t there so I gave her the message: I’d taken copies of the material so if he thought he could blow me now he’d better think twice. But he must have triggered the KGB on his way home and when he’d got there it had been too late to do anything about it, and the Trabant must have become red hot within half an hour of my driving away from the waste ground he thought he’d got nothing to lose if the KGB put me through interrogation because I had no evidence and they wouldn’t take any notice of what I said: a man under interrogation will say whatever might save him.

The first of the passengers were coming through, all of them muffled against the cold and hurrying from habit, many of them with the slightly Mongol faces of the region, a group of children in red jackets, three youths with long hair and jeans getting attention from the provincials here, a man waddling alone with a ‘cello case, no one, recognizable on sight.

Alternatives: keep back and let the courier go by without seeing me and put it down as a missed rendezvous; let them trap him if that was what they’d come here to do. Or let him see me and let him go by and try to make a rendezvous later; this would depend on his degree of training and if he wasn’t any better than Gorodok he’d foul it up and blow both of us and therefore Slingshot. Or tag him and get him alone in a clear field and made the rendezvous then; this would call for miracles and I hadn’t got any because Kirinski had been very strong and my right bicep was still numb from one of his strikes and the neck-blow from the edge of the back seat had left me with nerve shock and I’d never had to tag a contact and throw my own tags, three of them, except in training at Norfolk — and a lot of the stuff they give us at Norfolk is too sophisticated to work in practice: it’s on the curriculum as a mental exercise.

Five Red Army officers in shiny boots and enormous greatcoats, one of them a general with his jowls overflowing his collar; three Tadzhik women in traditional costume; another man with a musical instrument and now a plump woman smiling over her bouquet of faded carnations while the man explained to her that they were all he could find.

Decision: I wouldn’t let the courier go by without seeing me. I would make eye contact and take it from there.

A group of men came past in black coats and Homburgs, most of them with beards and gold-rimmed spectacles, their Muscovite accents chipping at the air as they herded together towards the main doors. I glanced at their faces: I glanced at every face and looked away to the next, forming the habit. At this moment I was under close scrutiny and had to take the utmost care, because my eyes, staying too long on one face among all the others, could condemn a man to death.

It had happened in Oslo and it had happened in Singapore: an opposition-surveyed eye-contact situation can be the same as an identity parade and in Oslo the executive had taken the slightest step forward when he’d seen his cutout coming down the gangway and in Singapore a courier had glanced down quickly when his man came through the gate at the airport and we’d lost two good operatives because of it. For this reason it’s a situation we don’t get into if we can help it but today I’d arrived here shortly before a plane was due in and I’d left the observation deck shortly after it had landed and the first tag was already on to me and the only thing to do was to conform to the pattern: I was obviously here to meet someone off the Moscow flight and so I must stand here looking for him.

Five young girls in red woollen scarves and pom-pom hats, their arms interlinked as they came past me, singing and giggling.

A woman in a wheelchair, her face grey and her eyes already dead; a young man pushing her, watching the girls.

An Air Force captain, eating the last of an apple down to the core.

Ferris.

He was looking vaguely around him and our glances met for a half-second and passed on and this was when we could have blown Slingshot if we hadn’t worked together long enough to know each other’s style.

I went on waiting, watching the rest of the passengers as they came through and wishing to Christ that Chechevitsin had put a little more information into his last signal: I was in the target area with the KGB moving in and the last thing I wanted was a top field director dropping out of the sky to make a rendezvous. The signal had said courier and if it had been a courier I could have left him to fend for himself and take the risk that Gorodok had taken and I could have handled these tags on my own. If I’d known London was sending Ferris here I would have made damned sure of getting a different car and I would have waited outside this bloody place and watched from cover without even showing myself because Ferris is a veteran and knows precisely what to do.

He was doing it now, walking straight through the hall and out by the main doors, no hat, a light gaberdine coat, a tan brown overnight case. I was watching his reflection in the three glass panels along the wall beyond the stream of passengers and now he had gone.

When the last of them came through I gave it another minute, going up to the gate and looking along the passage and coming away disappointed, checking my watch and then going out through the main doors at a steady pace. This was when they would have made the snatch if they’d received the instructions and I was sweating because I had the films on me to give to the ‘courier’ and they were enough to get me a life sentence and those places aren’t easy to get away from because of the barbed wire and gun towers and guard dogs: Cosgrove had tried it six months ago at the Potma Complex in Chita Province and he was badly savaged because they couldn’t control one of the dogs. I hate those bloody things.

Ferris had got it right: he’d had a rough idea of how many more passengers there’d been behind him and he’d known I’d have to wait till they were through and he’d used time outside the building and was now walking steadily north along the airport boulevard, his fuzz of thin hair blowing around his head. Most of the passengers were getting into the terminal bus or sharing cabs but a dozen or so were walking along the boulevard and Ferris was keeping pace with them, swinging his case and not looking around him any more. He couldn’t be feeling very happy: a rendezvous is normally secure and I hadn’t had time to warn him and he’d seen immediately that we had a problem when I let him go by.

I wasn’t very happy myself. Parkis had put an executive and a director into the field in Central Asia and at this precise moment they were in a KGB trap and I didn’t know if we could get out of it because this was the third alternative I’d begun working on and it was the one that needed miracles.

Ferris hadn’t been sent down here personally for nothing. I didn’t need a director in the field because the operation was close focus and London knew that: the target was one man, Kirinski. So Ferris was here to slam something new on the board for me to handle and I wasn’t ready for it but I had to know what it was and that meant I had to bring him to some land of rendezvous in a safe place and there weren’t any safe places in this city now that the KGB were into the action: they’d hold off until the point came when they could see they’d never drive us to ground and then they’d pull us in, finis.

I didn’t know how good his cover was but in a sense it was only as good as I could make it: at the moment there was no connection between us and technically he was in a clear field but as soon as I went too close to him they’d get the point and put the drop on us and start interrogating.

A black Moskwicz saloon went slowly past from the airport, chains biting on the snow and scattering it across the ruts, a face at a steamy window, featureless, the acrid scent of exhaust gas as the car gathered speed and turned the corner. Shoes crunched faintly behind me and on the other side of the boulevard a short dark figure walked in substantially through the reflections on the Intourist windows, a man with a sloping shoulder. Far ahead of me, Ferris.

He could only go on walking, or stop: he hadn’t got the training or the experience to take any kind of initiative and we both knew that. The one move he could make would be to hole up in public cover and wait for me there but it wouldn’t be easy and it might be impossible because this operation was based on geometry and involved angles, distances and vectors: we would be moving, he and I and these other men, across a chessboard as the light of the day began lowering across the streets.

He turned left and I stayed on this side of the boulevard and began looking for cover. This too might be impossible to find in time but it was my main concern. Without Ferris on the scene I could have flushed these tags within minutes because a city is a warren and I am a ferret who knows its way and who knows how close to go and how far: I’ve done it before, a hundred times, and I could have done it again today but there was Ferris and I mustn’t lose him.

I crossed at the intersection and for the first time turned my head to watch for the traffic and saw five of them among the people who were walking from the airport, five or conceivably more because I couldn’t see farther than the second group who were crossing farther down, hurrying before the bus came, one of them slipping and finding his balance again. They were men with coats and hats and gloves and they didn’t look any different from the others in actual appearance: I knew who they were because I’d seen them before, hundreds of them, Russian and Czechoslovak and Polish and French and Italian and Turkish, average and undistinguished men in respectable suits and worn shoes, their movements casual and their faces noncommittal as they worked their daily round like pilot fish. Of course they vary in their temperaments: the subtlest are the French and they’ll hang on whatever you try to do; the Italians will do well until they see a girl and then they’ll go off with her and leave you flat; the Turks will hound you to the ends of the earth and then drive you into the ground; and the Russians will keep their distance but never lose you unless you can pull something totally unexpected, because they are logical and trained to move in straight lines as these were doing now.

A hundred yards after I’d crossed at the intersection and started west along this street the black Moskwicz came past again, but faster this time: it had turned left along the side street parallel to the boulevard and come up and turned left again and found me crossing from the first to the second block and it would now make a series of right turns and come back and look for me two blocks ahead and that was all right, providing it went on doing the same thing and didn’t stop. I liked the pattern as it was, because at this stage I knew where people were and what they were doing.

I suppose London had waited until I was down on Soviet soil and still alive before they’d pulled Ferris out of Furstenfeldbruck and shot him into Moscow with instructions to come down here; it’s relatively easy for the field directors to cross frontiers because they’re never in action and their cover is conservative: most of them double as cultural attache’s or commercial first secretaries as the major embassies and at least half of them are permanently down on the Intourist waiting lists for educational travel-group tours through Russia and the slave states: it’s infinitely easier to get out of a country if you can prove how you came in.

The Moskwicz was turning right.

Ferris was a good fifty yards ahead of me and I lost him sometimes because he was using the environment and doing it well, staying with a chance group of people and finding another before they split up, keeping to the right-hand side of the pavement and pacing his way steadily, sometimes looking at his watch to express purpose and a sense of destination: it was a model performance and it kept my nerves off the limit as we hauled the five men and the Moskwicz westwards along Lenin Prospekt and past the square.

It was now twelve minutes since we’d left the airport and there had been no chance of shaking off these people and I was getting worried because the longer Ferris and I remained in the same street within sight of each other the sooner they’d see the connection and start working on him too. At the moment he was perfectly clear and they weren’t taking the slightest interest in him, any more than they were taking an interest in the other twenty or thirty people moving with us along the Prospekt.

Moskwicz.

Its number was half covered in slush but there was a small triangular dent on the rear wing and that was good enough. It went past at the same pace as the traffic; it wasn’t observing me: it was standing by in case I decided to find a taxi or get on a bus. If that happened they -

Ferris had gone.

I kept walking.

Clothing store. Warehouse. Three unidentified offices in a row. Bus station.

The Inter-Kazakh State Lines, a vast roofed area with water puddling below the mud flaps of three long-distance buses that had just come in, one of them still discharging passengers in the blue-grey artificial light. No sign of Ferris: he was too good for that.

I walked steadily for three blocks and checked everything twice: every doorway, every parked vehicle, every wall, basement and side entrance to every building, and drew blank all the time. I didn’t want to alter the basic pattern but the time factor was now taking over: Ferris couldn’t wait for me indefinitely at the bus station and I had to get back there and locate him as soon as I could. His own timing might be critical: he was in this city to rendezvous with the executive but there could be other things he had to do here, involving Chechevitsin or a mobile Bureau cell or Kirinski himself through any one of a dozen Central Asian channels. I didn’t know the background and I wasn’t going to assume anything at this stage. The one thing I had to do was to get back to that bus station and if I couldn’t find a chance then I’d have to make one and risk blowing Slingshot.

This was normal. In any given mission you’re operating right on the very edge.

Three doorways, two deep, one shallow. A line of Red Army vehicles, one of them an armoured car with a gunner perched on the roof struggling with the antenna. I stopped and called up to him.

“Comrade! Is this the way to Central Station?”

He looked down, his eyes dark with frustration: it looked as if they’d hit the antenna on something hard enough to bend it at the base, and his hands were too cold to straighten it. “Where?”

“The station. The main station.”

“Straight on.”

I nodded and walked away, checking my watch and looking around for a taxi. The station was three miles from here and the first of the street lights were coming on and it was logical for me to hurry. They knew I’d abandoned the Trabant because of me windscreen and the railway station was a plausible destination and in any case they wouldn’t question it because they would go wherever I took them.

The nearest tag would now be questioning the soldier: what had I asked him, so forth. I’d done it to reassure them, and if I’d only succeeded by one degree my chances were by that one degree improved.

Doors, windows, railings, a parked truck, blank, drawing blank.

Three blocks and I was walking through the night, with the streetlamps taking over the evening sky. Three taxis had gone past and I’d tried to stop them because sharing was an established custom but they were obviously full.

Moskwicz.

This time it turned at one of the prescribed U-junctions and went back the other way, a blurred face checking me before it turned right and began working its way back to Lenin Prospekt.

One of the tags was quite close behind me: I’d seen his reflection twice in the past few minutes. The light was less reliable now and they were tightening their distances. I was getting a better look at them now because whenever I heard a car I turned round to see if it was a taxi and they knew what I was doing because I’d shown them.

Two more went past but I got the third and it was empty.

“Where to?”

“Central Station.”

One of them had broken into a short run but the Moskwicz had made its circuit and come back into the Prospekt and he left it for them to take up the tag in its mobile phase and we moved off with the black saloon a reasonable distance behind and with one small Syrena between us.

It was no use relying on the traffic lights: the Moskwicz would cross on the red if it had to, even in snow conditions. Unless I did something to change the pattern we’d head slowly for the station and with every yard we’d be heading away from the bus depot where Ferris was waiting and I couldn’t let it go on for too long because the Moskwicz had a radio and they’d bring in mobile support: they’d have to.

I didn’t want to wait for them to do that.

“Are we going to get more snow?” I asked the driver.

“What was that, comrade?”

There was a glass division, grimed and cracked and repaired with adhesive tape, and he cocked his head towards the opening.

“Is there more snow on the way?”

“It says so, on the radio. From the south-west. But I can tell you, we don’t need it!”

Checking, checking. Blank.

Of course if you wait for a chance you may never get it but if you decide to make one for yourself you can often use the environment even if it presents only one positive feature. The alley was on the right as he braked for the lights and when I looked round I saw there was still another car between the taxi and the Moskwicz so I waited another two seconds for the speed to go down to a crawl and then I hit the door open and got out and swung it shut and the driver didn’t start shouting before I was across the pavement and into the alley, running some of the way and sliding the rest. A flare of headlights came and my own shadow flew ahead of me: they’d slung the Moskwicz across the pavement and lit up the scene and I heard a door snap open and then another one and there were three shadows now, two of them enormous and flitting like giant bats across the face of the building as I got half-way and tripped on something frozen under the snow and went headlong, sliding head-first and hitting the wall with my hands and bouncing away, get up, sliding across to the other side while the bats hovered in the dazzle of the lamps and I hit out with one hand to stop the momentum, get upthey’re coming, another door banging and a shadow bigger than the others and the sound of running feet.

Got up and got going and found sand near the end of the alley but the shadows were smaller now and therefore closer and I knew I’d blown it because the terrain was the biggest hazard and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, their footsteps very close in the confines, thudding behind me, no go, it was no go.

Ferris. They didn’t get Ferris. I’d kept him clean.

Feet flying and the street empty when I got to the corner and turned to the right, slithering and fetching up against a lamp standard and using it to change direction, empty except for a car moving towards the intersection and a bus starting off within a few yards of the alley, its doors shut against the cold and its windows steaming and not a hope in hell of jumping on, but the rear wheels were spinning on the snow in spite of the chains and I let my own momentum take me across the kerb and then I had to be careful because if I got it wrong it was going to be nasty: the rear end of the bus was sliding into the gutter and the wheels were churning for grip in the piled snow and I had to throw myself flat on my back and kick at the kerb and slide underneath the thing before it got under way, hooking my hands upwards and hitting the muffler and burning them, hooking again and finding a strut running sideways across the chassis, a strut and a brake rod that flexed under my weight but held me until I could find a purchase on one of the cross-members, my feet dragging now as the wheels got a grip and the bus moved faster, swinging out from the kerb and getting into second gear and accelerating again, the heat of the exhaust pipe against my face and its sound throbbing, beginning to deafen me.

I didn’t know what the chances were: either they’d seen me or they hadn’t. They might have shouted to the driver but I wouldn’t have heard them because of the exhaust and the driver wouldn’t have heard them because the doors were shut and his window would be up; in any case it was academic: if they’d seen me they’d go back to the Moskwicz and head off the bus and I couldn’t drop off now because I could hear traffic coming up from the rear and it sounded like a truck or an army transport with heavy-duty tyres and no chains, keeping pace and sending a flush of light reflecting upwards from the snow against the mud caked chassis just above my head.

It was a strictly shut-ended situation because I didn’t know how much traffic there was behind the bus and it was going to depend on how long I could hang on like this: given a run of three or four green lights I’d have to drop and if I dropped I might just miss the wheels of the truck behind but there might be a whole line of traffic and sooner or later there’d be a blood-red smear on the snow, finis.

My heels were dragging on sand now and I kicked upwards with one foot and hooked it sideways and felt nothing and kicked again and got it lodged across a brake rod but it slipped off and I tried the other foot, feeling for a cross-member and not finding one, trying again and hitting the open propeller-shaft and letting it drop back to the roadway. Technically my heels were taking some of the weight and relieving the strain on my fingers but there was sand along this stretch and my shoes could wear through and I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next fifteen minutes: I might have to run for my life and I could lose it if a shoe came off.

Tried with my hands next, feeling for a girder where I could hook one arm through and hold the wrist to lock it in position, but I was too far forward and my face was just to the rear of the gearbox with one of the universal joints spinning within an inch of my head and if I moved too much the bolts would cut into the skull like a circular rasp: it wasn’t worth risking so I let my body hang limp and began waiting out the time, it was all I could do.

Oil was dripping against my face and I turned it slightly to let it run downwards, clear of my eye. There was a leak in the exhaust pipe and the fumes were acrid and sickly, setting up an irritation in my throat that I tried to control by swallowing. The deep-cut tyres of the truck behind us were sending out a moan as they ran across the hard-packed snow and I could see other lights now, showing beneath its silhouette: there was a line of traffic, possibly a military convoy, and somewhere in the din of the exhaust pipe I could hear their chains jingling on the snow.

My fingers were burning now with the strain of hanging on.

Ignore.

The oil dripped again and I turned my face away, feeling it creep down to the lobe of my ear. I was taking shallow breaths to keep the carbon monoxide out of my lungs but the muscles were working hard from the ringers to the shoulders and demanding oxygen and I began breathing more deeply because I couldn’t help it: there was no equation possible and at some distant point my hands would lose their grip because the gas had swamped the brain or because the muscles ran out of oxygen, one way or the other. If I could -

Slowing, we were slowing.

No brakes yet: the rod against my shoulder hadn’t moved. Just a gradual deceleration with the exhaust note snarling lower on the over-run as the cylinders went dead.

Assume traffic lights.

Fingers burning but hanging on. If I dropped too soon there’d be nothing to save me: the truck couldn’t pull up on this kind of surface even if the driver saw me and if I tried rolling to the kerb I could get it wrong and his front wheel would -

The exhaust was throbbing again and the whine of the universals rose to their normal pitch and I saw the faint green spread of light on the snow along the gutter as the bus got up speed and the traffic behind followed suit: the lights had been at red and the driver had started slowing and they’d changed to green and I’d have to keep hanging on and I didn’t think I could do it now because a muscle is electro-chemical and the will can push its limits but not to infinity.

My fingers are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

We were going faster than before and the gas began fluttering against the side of my head and I turned it the other way and felt the heat on my hair but that was all right, I could stand that, I could stand anything that didn’t increase the strain on the fingers because they’d got to hang on.

They are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

But the throb of the exhaust was vibrating inside my head and the stink of the gas was sharp and sweet and permeating, stinging my eyes and making them water, making them close, making my thoughts drift, steel hooks, until my body sagged lower and the heels of my shoes began skating from side to side as the thigh muscles loosened, nothing, from side to side on the sand and the snow, nothing can break them, side to side, wake up or you’ll -

Tighten the fingers: tighten.

And be aware of the gas because it’s lethal. Christ’s sake cerebrate:

necessary to stay conscious, essential to review the situation and get it into normal perspective because it was simply a question of time. Soon the bus would stop and I could drop and roll clear and all I had to do until then was maintain the tension in the finger muscles and concern my mind with nothing else, nothing at all.

My fingers are steel hooks.

Nothing can break them.

Sweat pouring over me and cooling in the freezing air, my hands burning, my arms burning, my shoulders, burning, steel hooks, and the sound of the drumming in my head and the sweet tang of the gas swirling inside and my body swimming, slowing, we were -

Slowing again.

Hooks.

Slowing.

The truck was still behind. I could hear it and see its lights. Its lights were yellow on the snow. Slowing. My feet dragged on the sand, from side to side, side to side, slowing.

Hooks.

The traffic shunting behind us, a bumper banging: they couldn’t pull up on the snow.

Slow.

A Mush of red somewhere below me, coming from a light.

I watched the light on the snow, holding my breath because of the gas.

My head was full of it.

Slowing.

Stop.

Drop and roll clear.