The Fourth Protocol (49 page)

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.

Barney, standing beside Preston, followed their progress out of sight. “Noisy sods,” he remarked.

“Ah, they always be coming over Thetford,” said the local cop. “Hardly notice them after a while. Come from Lakenheath.”

“London Airport’s bad enough,” said Barney, who lived at Hounslow, “but at least the airliners don’t fly that low. Don’t think I could live with that for long.”

“Don’t mind ’em, just so long as they stay up in the air,” said the policeman, unwrapping a chocolate bar. “Wouldn’t like one to crash, though. They carry atomic bombs, they do. Small, mind.”

Preston turned around slowly. “What did you say?” he asked.

At Cork Street,
MI
5 had been working fast. Dispensing with the usual liaison from the legal adviser, Sir Bernard Hemmings had personally called both the assistant commissioners (crime) for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The officer in Norwich was still abed, but in Ipswich his opposite number was already in his office because of the demonstration that was tying up half the Suffolk force.

The assistant commissioner for Norfolk was reached at the same time as the call to him from Thetford police station came through. He authorized complete cooperation; the paperwork could follow later.

Brian Harcourt-Smith was chasing up a helicopter. Britain’s two intelligence agencies have access to a special flight of helicopters, which are held at Northolt, outside London. It is possible to call one up in a hurry, but normally advance arrangements are made. The Deputy Director-General’s urgent inquiry brought the answer that a chopper could be airborne in forty minutes and could land at Thetford forty minutes after that. Harcourt-Smith asked Northolt to hold on. “Eighty minutes,” he reported to Sir Bernard.

The DG happened to be talking to the assistant commissioner for Suffolk, who was in his Ipswich office. “Would you have a police helicopter available? Right now?” he asked the officer.

There was a pause while the ACC for Suffolk consulted his colleague in traffic control on an internal line. “We have one in the air over Bury St. Edmunds,” he said.

“Please get it to Thetford and take aboard one of our officers,” said Sir Bernard. “It’s a matter of national security, I assure you.”

“I’ll give the order now,” said the ACC for Suffolk.

Preston beckoned the Thetford policeman over to his car. “Point out the American airbases around here,” he said.

The patrolman put a thick finger on the road map. “Well, they’re a bit all over, sir. There’s Sculthorpe up here in north Norfolk, Lakenheath and
Mildenhall
out here to the west, Chicksands in Bedfordshire—though I do believe they don’t fly out of there anymore. And then there’s Bentwaters, here on the Suffolk coast, near Wood-bridge.”

It was six o’clock. The marchers swirled around the two cars parked in front of the Church of All Saints, a tiny but beautiful building, as old as the village, thatched with Norfolk reed and without electric light, so that evensong was still held by candlelight.

Petrofsky stood by his car, arms crossed, his face bland, watching them amble by. His private thoughts were venomous. Across the fields behind him, a traffic control helicopter clattered north, but he failed to hear it for the chanting of the marchers.

The driver of the other car, who turned out to be a biscuit salesman returning home from a seminar on the sales appeal of Butter Osbornes, walked over to him. He nodded toward the marchers. “Arseholes,” he muttered above the chant of “No to Cruise—Yanks out.” The Russian smiled and nodded. Getting no verbal reaction, the salesman wandered back to his own car, climbed in, and began to read his stack of promotional literature.

If Valeri Petrofsky had had a more developed sense of humor, he might have smiled at his situation. He was standing in front of the church of a God in whom he did not believe, in a country he was seeking to destroy, giving passage to people he heartily despised. And yet, if his mission was successful, all the marchers’ demands would be fulfilled. He sighed as he thought of the speedy way his own country’s MVD troops would deal with this march before handing over the ringleaders to the lads in the Fifth Chief Directorate for an extended question-and-answer session down at Lefortovo.

Preston stared down at the map on which he had circled the five American airbases. If I were an illegal, living in a foreign country under deep cover and on a mission, he thought, I would want to hide myself in a large town or city.

In Norfolk there were King’s Lynn, Norwich, and Yarmouth. In Suffolk, Lowestoft, Bury St. Edmunds, Colchester, and Ipswich. To get back to King’s Lynn, close to USAF Sculthorpe, the man he was chasing would have driven back past him on Gallows Hill. No one had. That left four bases, three away to the west and one in the south.

He considered the line of the ride that had brought his quarry from Chesterfield to Thetford. Due southeast, all the way. It would be logical to site the point for switching from motorcycle to car somewhere along the line of travel. From Lakenheath and
Mildenhall
to the transmitter house at Chesterfield, it would have been more logical to rent a garage in Ely or Peterborough, en route to the Midlands.

He took the line southeast from the Midlands to Thetford and extended it farther southeast. It pointed directly at Ipswich. Twelve miles from Ipswich, in a dense forest and close to the shore, was Bentwaters. He recalled from somewhere that they flew F-5s out of there, modern strike bombers with tactical nukes, designed to halt an onslaught by twenty-nine thousand massed tanks.

Behind him the policeman’s radio set crackled into life. The man walked over and answered the call. “There’s a helicopter coming up from the south,” he reported.

“It’s for me,” Preston said.

“Oh ... ah ... where do you want it to land?”

“Is there a flat area nearby?” asked Preston.

“Place we call the Meadows,” said the patrolman. “Down Castle Street by the roundabout. Should be dry enough.”

“Tell him to go down there,” said Preston. “I’ll meet him.” He called to his team, some of whom were dozing in the cars. “Everybody in. We’re going down to the Meadows.”

As they piled into the two cars Preston took his map over to the patrolman. “Tell me. If you were here in Thetford and driving to Ipswich, which way would you go?”

Without hesitation the police motorcyclist pointed to a spot on the map. “I’d take the A1088 straight down to Ixworth, over the junction, and on down to cut into the A45 main road to Ipswich, here at Elmswell village.”

Preston nodded. “So would I. Let’s hope Chummy thinks the same. I want you to stay here and try to trace any other garage tenant who might have seen the missing man’s car. I need that license-plate number.”

The light Bell helicopter was waiting in the Meadows, by the roundabout. Preston climbed out of the car, taking a portable radio with him.

“Stay here,” he told Harry Burkinshaw. “It’s a long shot. He’s probably miles away—he’s got at least a fifty-minute start. I’ll go as far as Ipswich and see if I can spot anything. If not, it’s up to that license-plate number. Someone may have seen it. If the Thetford police trace anyone who did, I’ll be up there.”

He ducked under the whirling rotors and climbed into the narrow cabin, showed his ID card to the pilot, and nodded to the traffic controller, who had squeezed into the back. “That was fast,” he shouted to the pilot.

“I was airborne already,” the pilot shouted back.

The helicopter lifted off and climbed away from Thetford.

“Where do you want to go?” the pilot asked.

“Down the A1088.”

“Want to see the demo, eh?”

“What demo?”