Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

The men in the yard could only stare. The motorcycle was positioned on its stand in the center of the garage. From a hook hung a set of black leathers and a crash helmet. A pair of jackboots stood near the wall. In the dust and oil on the floor were the tracks of automobile tires.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Harry Burkinshaw, “it’s a switch.”

Joe leaned out of his window. “Cork just came on the police network. They say they have a full-face picture. Where do you want it sent?”

“Thetford police station,” said Preston. He gazed up at the clear blue sky above him.

“But it’s too late,” he whispered.

At just after five that morning, the marchers were finally in a column that was seven men abreast and more than a mile long. The head of the column began to move up the narrow road from Ixworth junction called the A1088, their destination the village of Little Fakenham and thence down the even narrower lane to the Royal Air Force base at Honington.

It was a bright, sunny morning and they were all in good spirits, despite the early hour that had been decreed by the organizers so as to catch the first arrival of the American Galaxy transports bringing in the Cruise missiles. As the head of the column began to surge between the hedgerows flanking the road, the body of the crowd started the ritual chant: “No to Cruise—Yanks out.”

Years earlier,” RAF Honington had been a base for Tornado strike bombers and had attracted no attention from the nation as a whole. It was left to the villagers of Little Fakenham, Honington, and Sapiston to tolerate the howling of the Tornadoes over their heads. The decision to create at Honginton Britain’s third Cruise missile base had changed all that.

The Tornadoes had gone to Scotland, but in their place the peace of the rustic neighborhood had been shattered by protesters, mainly female and possessed of strange personal habits, who had infested the fields and set up shanty camps on patches of common land. That had been going on for two years.

There had been marching demonstrations before, but this was to be the biggest.

Newsmen and television reporters were in heavy attendance, the cameramen running backward up the road to film the dignitaries in the front rank of the column. These included three members of the Shadow Cabinet, two bishops, a monsignor, various luminaries of the reformed churches, five trade-union leaders, and two noted academics.

Behind them came the pacifists, conscientious objectors, clerics, Quakers, students, pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninists, anti-Soviet Trotskyites, lecturers, and Labour activists, with an admixture of unemployed workers, punks, gays, and bearded ecologists. There were also hundreds of equally concerned housewives, workingmen, teachers, and schoolchildren.

Along the sides of the road were scattered the resident female protesters, most sporting placards and banners, some in anoraks and crewcuts, who held hands with their younger lady friends or applauded the approaching marchers. The whole column was preceded by two policemen on motorcycles.

By five-fifteen Valeri Petrofsky was clear of Thetford and as usual was motoring sedately south down the A1088 to pick up the main road to Ipswich and home. He had been up all night and he was tired. But he knew his message must have been sent by three-thirty; by now Moscow would know that he had not let them down.

He crossed the border into Suffolk near Euston Hall and noted a police motorcyclist astride his stationary machine at the side of the road. It was the wrong road and the wrong hour; Petrofsky had driven along this road many times over the previous months and he had never seen a motorcycle patrolman on it.

A mile farther on, at Little Fakenham, all his animal senses went to full alert. Two white Rover police cars were parked on the northern side of the village. Beside them a group of senior officers were in consultation with two more motorcycle patrolmen. They glanced up at him as he drove by, but made no move to stop him.

The move came later, at Ixworth Thorpe. Petrofsky had just cleared the village itself and was approaching its church on the right-hand side when he saw the motorcycle leaning against the hedge and the figure of the patrolman in the center of the road, a radio held to his mouth and an arm raised to stop him. He began to slow, his right hand dropping to the map pocket inside the door panel where, under a rolled woolen sweater, lay the Finnish automatic.

If it was a trap, he was boxed from behind. But the policeman seemed to be alone.

There was no one else nearby. Petrofsky slowed to a halt. The towering figure in black vinyl strolled to the car window and bent down. Petrofsky found himself confronting a ruddy Suffolk face with no hint of guile in it.

“Could I ask you to pull over to the side of the road, please, sir? Just there in front of the church. Then you’ll come to no ’arm.”

So it was a trap. The threat was thinly veiled. But why was there no one else about?

“What seems to be the trouble, Officer?”

“ ’Fraid the road’s blocked a bit farther down, sir. We’ll have it clear directly.”

Truth or trick? There might be an overturned tractor down there. He decided not to shoot the policeman and make a dash for it. Not yet. He nodded, let in the clutch, and pulled over in front of the church. Then he waited. In his rearview mirror he could see the policeman taking no more notice of him, but signaling another motorist to stop. This could be it, he thought. Counterintelligence. But there was only one man in the other car.

It pulled up behind him. The man climbed out.

“What’s going on?” he called to the policeman. Petrofsky could hear them through his open window.

“Ain’t you ’eard, sir? It’s the demonstration. Been in all the papers. And on the telly.”

“Oh, hell,” said the other driver, “I didn’t realize it was this road. Or at this hour.”

“They won’t take long to pass,” said the policeman comfortingly. “No more ’n an hour.”

At that moment the head of the column came into sight from around the bend. With disgust and contempt, Petrofsky gazed at the distant banners and heard the faint shouts.

He climbed out to watch.

The hollow square of tarmac off Magdalen Street with its thirty garages was becoming crowded. Minutes after the discovery of the abandoned motorcycle, Preston had sent Barney and the second car racing up Grove Lane to the police station to ask for help.

There had been a duty constable in the front office at that hour, and a sergeant having tea in the back.

Simultaneously Preston had called London on the police network, and even though it was an open circuit and he would normally have used the cover parlance of a car-rental agent, he threw caution to the winds and spoke in clear to Sir Bernard himself.

“I need backup from the police forces of Norfolk and Suffolk,” he said. “Also a chopper, sir. Very fast. Or it’s all over.” He had spent the last twenty minutes studying the large-scale road map of East Anglia, spread on the hood of Joe’s car.

After five minutes a Thetford motorcycle patrolman, raised by his station sergeant, drifted into the yard, shut off his engine, and parked his bike. He walked over to Preston, easing off his helmet as he did so. “You the gentlemen from London?” he asked.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Not unless you’re a magician,” sighed Preston.

Barney arrived back from the police station. “Here’s the photograph, John. Came through while I was talking to the duty sergeant.”

Preston studied the handsome young face photographed on a Damascus street. “You bastard,” he muttered. His words were drowned, so no one else heard. Two American F-111 strike bombers raced across the sky in tight formation, low, heading east. The howl of their engines broke the calm of the waking borough. The policeman did not glance up.