John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

‘Out of Russia? Somewhere not far from here? One of the Scandinavian countries?’

Stepakov shook his head. ‘No, they are in Russia. But only just. In the forests close to the Finnish frontier. In the Arctic Circle.’

He told them the exact location. Two years ago, he continued, the Red Army had started to build a luxury hotel protected by forest high in the Arctic Circle. It was to have been used for officers of the special forces who do much training there under harsh winter conditions. ‘It was never completed – one of those things phased out even though a fortune had been spent, and many people had been relocated to work in the place. The army calls it the “Lost Horizon”. Intourist didn’t really want it, but it was passed to them. They did nothing. The staff lived there, but it was not a functional, going concern. Then Mosfilm asked to use it for a movie. They had many technicians flown up. A few stayed. I suspect these people are still there. Some , I believe, are controlled by Chushi Pravosudia. It makes a wonderful safe house. I should imagine they’re holding the poor Mr Penderek up there.’

‘Can we mount any kind of rescue from here?’ M asked, as though he already knew the answer.

‘I doubt if we can mount a rescue from anywhere. The only way in is by helicopter until the spring. The place is isolated. It looks like a monastery from the Middle Ages, but built of wood, not stone.’

‘Have you no way?’

Stepakov shrugged, tossing his head, holding it against the breeze as though to let the wind run through it to tame the unruly lock which fell across his forehead. ‘Only if I can convince some Spetsnaz senior officer to go – how do you say it? Out on a limb?’ The Spetsnaz are the Soviet Troops of Special Designation. The real élite, equal to SAS or Delta. Once more, Stepakov tossed his head in the wind. ‘But they are controlled by GRU, Military Intelligence.’

‘You have no levers?’ M’s voice was suddenly urgent. Stepakov shook his head.

‘I might be able to help you there.’ This time M sounded almost self-satisfied.

Several years before, James Bond had travelled to Los Angeles with orders to kill a man. This was both unusual and highly illegal in the great game played by superpowers. Contrary to popular belief, intelligence services are not in the assassination business, for it is counter-productive. If you know about an agent, or the leader of some network, there are more sophisticated things you can do to neutralise the threat. The first rule, however, is, better to live with the enemy you know than remove him with violence and risk a more cunning, undiscovered person succeeding him.

Certainly there have been revenge killings, but they are squalid affairs. Yes, there was foolish talk by officers of the CIA, putting up many ridiculous ways in which Fidel Castro could have been assassinated. But, in the main, killing is not an option.

The man Bond was sent to kill had been run as a double in London for nearly ten years. His demands had become more grandiose as each year went by. He gave less and wanted more. He had started to display all the symptoms of folie de grandeur.

When, at last, the storm was about to break and threaten him, he had been pushed over the edge by a woman. The beautiful girl with whom he had been living in London left him and ran to America, to LA. The man followed her and was doing foolish things, like creeping up to the house in which she sheltered, leaving flowers in the dark on the doorstep, telephoning her in the middle of the night. He was also telephoning the British Embassy in Washington, demanding to talk with the chief spook, making threats which would have caused much embarrassment to the British intelligence community. So Bond was dispatched to operate, without American sanction, in the United States.

He tracked the man down and killed him by running his car off the road in the Hollywood hills. He could still recall that night – the car turning over and over, its headlights strobing the darkness before it landed against rocks and blew up in a fireball.

On the following evening he engineered a casual meeting with the man this spy’s girl had run to. His name was Tony Adamus and he was a professional TV News cameraman. They dined together, and Bond made certain that neither he nor the girl suspected foul play in the spy’s death. He already knew the LAPD regarded it as an accident. They talked for a long time about Adamus’s work.

During the conversation, Adamus told him, ‘There’s nothing difficult about a studio cameraman’s job. He has to have a good memory and excellent reflexes, he must have a good eye so that he can focus the camera quickly and correctly, good hearing to obey the orders that come from the director and he must be strong enough to move the ped or pedestal on which the camera is mounted.

‘The real skill in being a news cameraman is when you work in the field,’ Adamus had said. He was, naturally, a field man.

Bond was obsessed with the detail of other professional people’s lives. He also knew that it was best to know everything about journalism, for journalistic cover is often the most secure. On returning to the UK, he had gone out of his way to learn more about TV crews, cameramen and those who worked alongside them.

Now, on the large sound stage, the knowledge bore fruit. On the first day, Clive instructed them that they would be taping many people giving evidence, though the accused would not be present. The court was soon revealed to be a kind of military tribunal. Three senior officers sat in judgement while a prosecuting officer took turns with a defending officer in questioning clouds of witnesses.

Bond was amazed to see that Pete Natkowitz appeared at home with the sound equipment, swinging the big overhead sound boom on its silent mechanism and fine-tuning the words which came from the witnesses. Most of these were Russian, though there were some who were questioned and cross-questioned through interpreters. Clive said the final cut would be in Russian, though subtitles would be added so that the non-Russian people’s replies would be clear to an audience.

The first half-dozen witnesses were German. Each identified the absent accused as Josif Vorontsov. They all said that, in 1941, he was an SS-Unterscharführer in the Waffen-SS Special Duties Brigade, just as they evidenced the fact that on September 29th, 1941, he had been at the Babi Yar massacre. They had been there also, as soldiers. The prosecuting officer told the court these men had all been purged of their sins. No action would be taken against them. They had been given immunity.

These old soldiers of the Third Reich gave ghastly details of the massacre. Two of them wept as they told the story and one fainted and had to be revived by medical orderlies. They were shooting the video in black and white. Clive said it would give more credence to the final result. People remembered the Nuremberg trials when the Nazi leaders were accused, filmed in grainy black and white. Also the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann had been relayed to the world mainly in black and white. It was fitting. Psychologically the impact would be strong.

It was also horrific. Bond watched Natkowitz and Nina Bibikova and saw that, in spite of the fact they realised this was all a performance, they were deeply moved and disgusted by what they saw and heard. It was all convincing. You could hear the screams, the pleading and the bullets.

They completed the ‘testimony’ of the Germans by late afternoon. Then came the other witnesses – Jewish people, either very old or middle-aged, who had, supposedly, come up against Vorontsov in the death camp at Sobibór. If the Germans’ evidence had been harrowing on a scale of one to ten, the new evidence rated sixty.