John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

Soon, Yuskovich thought, soon, his part of the operation would be over. He would return to Moscow and oversee the final days before taking absolute control.

Forty-eight hours later they were within sailing distance of Bandar-e Pahlavi. Yuskovich had been down to see the prisoners whom he described as ‘unco-operative, but what can you expect? The sooner we get the symbols of Western decadence out of Russia, the better. I, for one, do not wish to be part of a society which produces Coca-Cola cans that dance when you clap your hands. For a country that’s so advanced, America, and, by inference, all the Western countries, are backward.’

He ordered dinner early. ‘By midnight we shall be starting to surface the first missiles. The signals have already been sent and the Iraqi Mi-10s should be here by two in the morning,’ he told them. ‘I suggest food and then a little rest. It will be a busy night for everyone.’

They ate large plates of Shchi , a spicy cabbage soup, which had been almost their staple diet since setting sail from Baku. After the meal, everyone did as the marshal had suggested, except Lieutenant Batovrin. ‘I’ll take a turn around the deck, sir, if I have permission.’

Yuskovich nodded. ‘Go ahead, Sergei, but not for long. You also need rest.’

Lieutenant Batovrin went out on deck, the hood of his camouflage combat suit turned up against the cold air. He thought it smelled like snow. Someone had once told him that in this region during the winter you could get hailstones the size of tennis balls. People were killed by them every year.

He walked aft and went down the companionway to the compartment where the prisoners were being held.

The soldier on guard duty came to attention. ‘At ease,’ Batovrin told him. ‘I’m going to see if I can talk these people into being more co-operative. If you want a smoke, you have my permission to go up on deck.’

‘Thank you, comrade Lieutenant.’ The man smiled and Batovrin nodded. Sliding back the dead bolt, he opened the hatch and stepped inside.

Stepakov lay on his back drinking from a bottle of wine, one hand secured to a metal stanchion. The man they called Pete had his eyes closed and the Frenchman glowered. It looked as though he would like to tear his handcuffs from the rail to which they were attached and rip Batovrin’s throat out.

The Frenchwoman, one wrist chained to another stanchion, looked up. She seemed to be taking it very well, for there was hardly a hair out of place. The marshal had said she insisted on being taken to the heads at least six times a day, and once there, spent much time in front of the mirror. Even though she had no cosmetics, they allowed her a comb for these excursions.

Lieutentant Batovrin threw back the hood on his combat suit, touched his waxed moustache, then chuckled.

‘Well, what a sorry sight you are,’ said James Bond. ‘We’re all going to have a long night’s work, I fear. So rise and shine.’

19

IN THE WOODSHED

On the night Boris Stepakov arrived at the Red Army Senior Officers’ Centre with General Berzin and the Spetsnaz October Battalion, Bond had managed to make his way to the main lobby without being recognised.

There were two soldiers in the foyer, armed to the nostrils, with grenades hanging dangerously, Rambolike, from the webbing over their combat suits. He thought briefly he should wipe them out but it would be a foolish piece of macho exhibitionism.

Bond looked them in the eye, his gaze running from head to foot, then from foot to head. He walked at speed, like a man with a mission. ‘ Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye ,’ he barked, telling them he was GRU. The tone of his voice was such that not even these trained Spetsnaz questioned him.

The transition to the cold outside almost winded him. Away in the distance among the trees, there was the occasional shot, hyphenated by a blast of guncotton. There was also a good deal of shouting. Berzin’s troops had obviously been instructed to make it all sound warlike. They were doing well. So were the soldiers in steady employment under the tall, hawklike, ascetic Yuskovich. It sounded, he thought, like a good old-fashioned war film.

He had no idea where he could get the privacy he needed. Maybe he would find another entrance, go back inside, do what had to be done, then destroy the micro notebook computer and transmitter. After that, he might even give himself up. There were sillier alternatives, like being shot to pieces by the troops outside.

He stayed close to the wall for a full two minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. On the perimeter, figures moved under the small spotlights. They looked like battleground scavengers, and in his mind, he saw an ancient field littered with dead. There were horses and knights, bodies everywhere and women bending over the corpses. Men scuttled among the dead, removing weapons or anything of value. He remembered there had been a time in history when the gallant knights had decided to ban the crossbow as being too terrible an instrument of death, and he wondered what those gallant men would think of flamethrowers, machine guns, rockets or the AK-47.

The picture changed. Now he saw the trusted prisoners in the Nazi death camps rooting through the piles of luggage, then pillaging the bodies for the gold in their teeth, the SS men watching, smiling. If men like Yuskovich gained control in Russia, half of the world might sink back into those dark ages. Churchill had said something like that in World War II. Nothing really changed.

His thoughts overcame any cold or fear.

With one hand flat against the wall and the other gripping the pistol, he began to inch his way along, his feet placed flat, carefully, so that he neither slipped nor hit any projecting object. He hugged the wall in this fashion for about twelve feet, then froze as he heard noise from the main doors to his left. A long shaft of light broke through on to the ornamented porch-way and a shadow printed itself on the frozen snow.

One voice was raised and angry, ‘You fool! Idiot! It was the English. We’re looking for him. I could have you shot!’ Berzin, enraged, stamped out into the night.

‘Gleb, the boy couldn’t help it. The Britisher’s clever as a snake.’ The calm, soft voice of Yuskovich chilled more than Berzin’s anger.

From the entrance porch, General Berzin shouted again. ‘Sasha! Kolya! The damned English is out here somewhere. You see him? Kolya! Sasha!’ It was as though he were calling a pair of gun dogs.

A voice floated back from the perimeter. ‘He can’t get out, comrade General. We’ll pick him off.’

‘In the name of Jesus, don’t do that!’ Yuskovich, even with his voice raised, sounded calm, like a whisper on the wind. ‘We want him alive. It’s essential.’

Why? Bond wondered, pressing himself harder against the wall, as if trying to become part of the building’s fabric.

‘We’ll bring him back alive, comrade General. Don’t concern yourself. There’s no way he can get out. The place is sealed up like a virgin.’

Someone closer laughed.

‘If they lose him, I’ll have them all flogged. It was a hard day for Russia when they did away with the knout.’

Bond winced at Berzin’s barbarity. The knout was the ultimate in flogging instruments, worse even than the old British cat-o’-nine-tails. He had seen one in some Scandinavian museum, Oslo he thought, a lash of leather thongs, twisted with sharp pieces of wire. For a second, his mind was filled with streaming blood.

‘Calm yourself, Gleb. It will be. It will all happen.’ Yuskovich began to talk, as though telling a story to a child who could not sleep. Bond heard it all – the Scamps and the Scapegoats, the submerged containers and the minesweeper, the arrangements in Baku and in Iran. The pick-up point, the Mi-10s and the final horror if the coalition forces so much as dropped one bomb within the Iraqi border. As he listened, he thought his bones would make icicles of his blood. He thought of a great wasteland with a hurricane sweeping over it, and he knew the picture was of the world.