John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

‘Now, we don’t want this,’ the President stormed. ‘If we do the slightest thing which can be interpreted as an anti-American move, we lose the aid I have sweated blood to extract from Washington.’

Stepakov was an old hand in the Kremlin. He had seen powerful men come and go. There had been days, when, as a young man, he had even taken part in one palace revolution – that sorry time when poor old Brezhnev, still titular head of the Soviet Empire, embarrassed all around him as he sank to geriatric senility and had to be rescued by those who worked him like puppet masters.

He had been ranted and raved at before. It was like water off a goose. Stepakov closed his mind to the comrade President’s wrath, isolating only those pieces of information which might just require a coherent answer. Men in power hold forth, but there is always a limit, an end to the one-way street of their sound and fury.

So Boris Stepakov waited out the storm and when it finally abated he spoke, giving the President a clear and concise picture of how he saw Chushi Pravosudia and how the matter should finally be dealt with.

‘Bory, you should have told me straightaway. We could have saved time. Let me put in a call to Kirovograd now . . .’

‘No, sir. No, please. You of all people realise how this must remain a closed book. Better I should have your express orders in writing. I will then present them to General Berzin personally. It is really the most secure way.’

So in the absolute privacy of the President’s office where no electronic devices could ever penetrate, Boris Ivanovich Stepakov dictated the order which the President signed.

It was now late. Stepakov needed sleep. He drove back to the dacha. If they left early enough in the morning, he could hand the orders to the Spetsnaz General Berzin by lunchtime and would expect the operation to move with speed during the following night. Things, he considered, were going very well.

In their handful of days together, Nina Bibikova had become almost a wife to James Bond. They worked side by side on the studio floor during the day, ate in a canteen, which looked like an old monastic refectory, each noon and when work was finished in the evening. More often than not they shared a section of one of the long scrubbed tables with Pete Natkowitz and their guide from the first morning, Natasha, the blonde with legs so long they seemed to reach to her navel.

Natasha did not share her surname with them, but Bond did not have to be blessed with superintelligence to realise she and Pete Natkowitz were becoming ‘an item’. He hoped Natkowitz knew what he was up to, and then immediately dismissed the thought. Any officer of the Mossad, especially with Natkowitz’s kind of experience, knew what he was doing.

The food served to them in the canteen was above average, considering they were locked away in impenetrable forests ringed by snow and ice. The speciality was a particularly good stew made from vegetables and reindeer meat which remained appetising for the first two eatings and from then went rapidly downhill. But the diet was augmented by smoked fish, plenty of black bread and large quantities of Kvas , the popular homebrewed beer of farmers and peasants.

Each night, Nina and Bond had returned to their room, showered and secretly discussed observations made during the day. On this, the third night, they collapsed into bed around nine o’clock and went straight to sleep, though Nina woke Bond later and proceeded to do things at which many wives would draw the line. They drifted off again, happy and sated, into a sleep not peopled by the ghosts of Sobibór.

Bond woke with a start, his hand snaking out to grip the wrist of whoever had their palm firmly over his mouth. He did not struggle, but twisted the wrist, and would have applied more fast and crippling pain had he not realised it was Natasha trying to rouse him noiselessly.

Still holding the girl’s wrist, he propped himself on to one elbow and peered through the gloom, trying to make sense of her signals. She was nimble and expert, her free hand moving in silent and precise gestures, as though making contact with some alien being.

Wake Nina, then follow me, she was signalling. It is safe, but please hurry.

Nina came out of sleep effortlessly and with that enviable immediate alertness achieved only by doctors, nurses, soldiers, and disciplined field officers of exceptional intelligence services. Bond’s feet had hardly touched the floor when she was already moving silently, fastening the tie around her towelling robe.

Natasha beckoned them, still using sign language, warning that it was important for them to make no noise. The corridor was empty and there was an atmosphere of almost holy silence as though the wooden building had been muffled by some vast blanket. The sensation was so acute that for a second Bond thought they must have been victims of an avalanche. In his mind, he saw the building shrouded in snow, then realised that this was impossible. The strange sensation remained, reminding him of being in some ancient sacred place where prayers and beliefs have seeped into the ground, trees, stones or structure, captured and locked for eternity.

Natasha motioned them to stay close to the wall, and she paused for a moment by each door they passed, checking to make sure nothing could be heard from inside the rooms. They knew these rooms were occupied by ‘witnesses’, though, apart from the three people who had stood near the elevators on the first morning, they had not set eyes on any of the other guests except on the sound stage and in the canteen.

Before they reached the elevators, the guide pushed open a door with an international emergency exit sign, a little stick man running down a staircase. Bond always thought it looked as though the primitive character was attempting to dash down an ‘up’ escalator.

On the other side of the door, a staircase led up and down, fashioned as ever in wood. He imagined it would burn quite well. For the first time, it struck him that the entire building would be a deathtrap in the summer when the wood became baked by the sun into dry tinder.

They climbed up one flight, went through the door at the top into a corridor identical to the one they had traversed from their room. Now Natasha signalled for them to move faster. She crossed the space by the elevator bank and softly opened another door which had ‘Private. No Entry’ stencilled on it in Russian, English, French, German and Arabic.

They were in a small bare office. The blinds were drawn and the only furniture consisted of crates and packing cases strewn haphazardly over the soft pile carpet. A single brass student lamp with a green glass shade stood lit on a packing case in one corner, and Pete Natkowitz sat on a nearby crate, his legs swinging and his face flushed. Once the door was closed, he let out a long sigh and grinned at Bond.

‘They haven’t come yet?’ Natasha asked.

‘Well, my dear, if they have, you’ll find them hiding in one of these boxes. No, Tashinka, they have yet to arrive.’ He turned his attention back to Nina and Bond. ‘Sorry to get you up in the middle of the night, James. Natasha’s been trying to find a safe haven ever since we arrived.’ He told them the bedrooms were wired for sound, but the people who built the place had not got around to putting in video. ‘It appears we have to be heard but not seen, which I suppose means we’ve become adults of some kind.’ He slapped his right thigh in a gesture meant to convey amusement. ‘We’re not really certain if they have enough staff here to monitor the sound-stealing equipment, but the golden rule is . . .’

‘Assume they’re lifting the words out of your mouth,’ Bond supplied.

‘Naturally,’ Natkowitz nodded. ‘This room is free of any bugs. For the first time since we arrived we can talk freely.’