The Oktober Projekt (4 page)

‘What’s happened?’

‘There’s been a spot of bloody carnage back there. His wife and
nephew are dead. Butchered, tortured, not what I’d call a pretty sight. Happy?
All the information you need? Now drive,’ snapped Nick his patience wearing
thin, a weariness settling over him.

Two

The Collapse of an Operation

London, October

Nick
Torr should never have been paired with Foula argued certain senior
dissident voices in the Service, not long after the dust had settled. These
wise men and women asserted, quite prosaically after the event of course, that
London should have foreseen that the Moscow operation was a tragedy waiting to
happen. Any intelligence branch officer worth his or her salt could have seen
that Operation Salvage was destined to go off the rails, and therefore, more
preparation ought to have been made to recover Viper’s material employing a
different method. The defenders of Operation Salvage pointed out with equal
fervour that no one was prepared for the speed at which events ran, and
actually, if they were being clinical, nothing could have prevented such a spectacular
unravelling or saved even one life, not even that of Torr’s wife. Of course, no
one could have foreseen Moscow’s brutal response, the tragedy waiting in the
wings, the personal cost to Nicholas Torr.
   

What both camps did concede however, was that once Nick had
committed to recovering Viper, it was inevitable events would run such a bloody
course. And neither the detractors nor defenders of Operation Salvage were
quite so ready to admit that they had the benefit of replaying events from the
security of their desks in the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross.
Whereas in CO8’s own satellite headquarters, which for obvious reasons was kept
at arms length from the Service’s modest, unassuming premises by the Thames,
Nick was regarded not as a villain, but a hero.

Nick’s CO8 Directorate was housed in a thin narrow building
tucked quite sensibly off Vauxhall Bridge Road. Possessing an air of stoic
resilience, the small ragged four-storey place of tired stone had long ago
accepted its fate as a government annexe, an Edwardian vision surreptitiously
avoiding the developers. Trapped between a fast copy shop and mortgage brokers
who could be relied on for Wimbledon tickets, it sat proudly aloof as though
better times were ahead. Along both floors the blinds were permanently drawn.
Traffic dust covered it like a cracked tarpaulin, while two solid doors that
had shed their varnish were electronically barred, deterring casual callers.

A
large
notice clearly printed and trapped behind cracked
perspex, declared it to be the SOUTHBRIGHT RESEARCH INSTITUTE, VISITORS BY
APPOINTMENT ONLY. And for anyone foolish enough to try the entryphone
overlooked by two severe CCTV cameras, they would receive a firm, but none the
less specious answer concerning statistical research. If that failed, a frank
exchange with two duty door staff usually did the trick; warrant officers from
the Royal Military Police not chosen for their conversational technique.

It was known simply to its officers as the Mad House, which
some unkind critics claimed symbolised Nick’s temperament. Trained in weapon
handling, close-quarter combat and other dubious dark arts by the Special Air
Service, CO8’s officers’ exemption to carrying arms under the 1994 Intelligence
Act provided the Foreign Secretary with powers to authorise operations that
would be illegal in Britain. A good many of which the Service classed as dirty
work, which no government saw fit to include in any of its statistics or annual
reports since the Directorate’s inception in 1978.

At six-thirty in the evening, Jill Portland settled in for her
second night as senior duty officer. Besides a computer, a television on a
stand tuned permanently to a news channel, the decoration in the DO’s office
ran to political newspaper cartoons haphazardly tacked to the rear wall above
fireproof cabinets. She flicked on an Anglepoise and a yellow tongue of light
spread out across the grey metal desk. From outside on the street against the
background hum of traffic, a motorbike sped along leaving a blur of noise in
its wake. Why was it always the sound of motorbikes that stood out at night she
wondered, always sounding so sad, so lonely? Maybe it’s only the sad and lonely
that pick up every sound, she told herself. Approaching her thirtieth birthday,
Portland’s appearance had a no-nonsense practicality about it; her mid-brown
hair swept at an angle off her forehead into a ponytail accentuated a slight
oval face with deep intense eyes. In her white shirt and dark business suit she
could have passed for an IT manager, and often did.

Clearing a portion of the desk she flicked through the latest
edicts to come over the river from Vauxhall Cross, laying each page on the
sheet of glass covering the desk. All the duty officers used it for storing
bits and pieces; slipping timetables and memos under the sheet along with
theatre tickets and takeaway menus. The latest addition, a donation slip for a
marmoset someone had adopted at London Zoo. A soft distant laugh rippled
through the labyrinth of corridors as she ate a salad with no real appetite or
conviction. Returning to a wad of operational directives that should have been
filed, she looked up with a start as Ramsgill the IT team leader knocked and
strode briskly in.

‘We’ve got an emergency in Moscow,’ Ramsgill declared. ‘I think
you better come down to the cage.’

The cage was not a cage at all, but a long ugly basement room
at the back of the building, its barred windows turned dismally to Chapter
Street. Portland threaded her way through individual work bays holding flat
screen computers connected to their own large servers, electronic voice
transcribers, digital recorders, and CD recorders. All of it staffed by IT
specialists who only ever managed formative grunts, none of which Portland
acknowledged as she settled in a playback booth, slipping on a pair of
headphones as Ramsgill replayed the call Nick had made on his mobile
phone.
 

What she did next, she did very fast. Up in the duty room she
opened a safe with a key from the duty officer’s bunch, a small squat robust
cream Chubb mottled by many hands. A slim book no larger than a desk diary lay
by itself on the second shelf, along with manuals for handling a string of
different emergencies of varying magnitude. An emergency contact log, it listed
assigned mobile phone numbers to the worknames of specific senior SIS officers.
Returning the log she relocked the Chubb, and began to make a number of calls
on the encrypted landline. In order of importance five all told, ending with an
acrimonious exchange with a Foreign & Commonwealth Office night clerk.

By three that morning her work had begun to bear fruit.
 
Arriving in a foul mood, Paul Rossan,
Director of Intelligence Analysis, pitched his duffel coat across a chair. A
year shy of turning fifty, Rossan was much given to wearing comfortable
clothes, dressing with the expensive élan few people can afford. His face ran
to a point pulling shallow cheeks with it, forming a poacher’s face, full of
cunning. Pinched from the early morning cold it tracked Portland across the
room.

‘So what’s the damage?’
 

‘The Two Kings failed to make the collection in Moscow and
they’re bringing Viper back with them,’ she explained, passing over the decoded
printout.
 

‘Nothing else?’ Rossan demanded, bent over the desk, reading
the printout.

Portland shook her head. ‘Nothing, but it means the operation
has been compromised, and they were not in immediate danger but…’

‘It’s a probability,’ Rossan said, already ahead of Portland.
‘Who else have you notified?’ he wondered, sitting on the corner of the desk.

‘Director of Operations and Security, Director Corporate
Affairs and the Deputy Chief.’

‘Well, I don’t know if Jane’s going to be available, she was
attending some damn conference in Germany the last I heard. Roly, who knows, he
could be anywhere, and Teddy’s hardly likely to consider a failed collection as
an emergency.’ He straightened up rubbing his back, pulling his lank face at
the effort. ‘What other action have you taken?’

‘That’s just it, I wasn’t sure who…’ Portland trailed off but Rossan
waited, uncommitted, refusing to help her.

‘Then I suppose I’m in the hot seat,’ he snapped, setting off
to find an office he could call his own.

• • •

Nick would have willingly exchanged
Rossan’s dilemma for his own predicament. But as it was, he was stuck with
Foula and the little accountant, doing his damnedest to get them safely out of
Moscow. With Foula having selected his emergency escape route completely at
random, they lurched down side roads that offered bleary snatches of Moscow as
it gradually closed down for the night. A grey sky the colour of fog pressed in
low and squalls of snow reduced visibility by half as Foula hit reckless speeds
that reinforced Nick’s unspoken sense of urgency. As Foula nursed the Lada
towards the M-9, Nick fought the lure and pull of sleep. He shifted in his seat
already aware that the little accountant was a liability; a marked man and
they’d have only one chance of slipping him over the border.

‘Is this going to work?’ Foula asked petulantly, his Scottish
burr becoming more pronounced.

‘Don’t know, haven’t tried it,’ Nick replied, his breath a
misty hand climbing the door glass.

‘Yes, well…’ Foula broke off then regrouped for another charge,
changed his mind, the veins in his temple standing proud.

Nick tried to remain calm as Foula struggled to keep the car on
a straight line down the Baltic Highway, running for all they were worth for
the border. Squinting through the windscreen Nick could barely make out the
road as snow rushed at them distorting distance and proportion, swelling and
shrinking the tail lights in front.

In the back, Lubov remained quiet and alert wishing every
kilometre to be five, or ten, anything to hasten his departure from a country
he had been proud to serve and call home. It took twenty minutes to put Moscow
well behind them leaving nothing but a tedious drive to the Latvian border, and
each stroke of the wipers beat heavy snow into ice ridges. With the city in
their wake Foula fiddled with the radio, his idiosyncratic choice filling the Lada
with AvtoRadio, broadcasting a disconcerting mix of Russian classics, Western
pop and dreary chat. There were few vehicles around at this hour and Foula hit
the accelerator until there were no other lights, just the Lada walled in by
the night on an open stretch of road making for home.

How far into the night, how far from Moscow, or how near to
Latvia they had travelled, Nick could barely tell on the 610 kilometre highway
as it cut its way through a forest. Nick swore that it felt as though they had
driven to the border and back at least twice. In actual fact they had barely
gone over two hundred kilometres, Foula humming some obscure tune under his
breath, the little accountant asleep in a twisted heap. With the wipers
struggling against the heavy snow, a skin of ice formed against the screen, the
heater offering a frugal portion of warmth. Stubbornly refusing to play
anything but a severe crackle as tuneless as Foula’s humming, the radio had
gone mute. Ahead of them the highway disappeared into a long curve. Scattered
along its rough bare emergency shoulder, a trail of blown out tyre shreds poked
through the snow. Then as they rounded the bend, the glow from the backed-up
tail lights gave the snow an uncanny red hue.

‘Shit,’ said Nick as Foula slowed to a crawl.

‘Accident?’ Foula asked, half in hope.

‘Roadblock,’ said Nick, reaching for his Yarygin.

Dropping through the gears Foula slowed, pulling up behind a
Mercedes. A couple of hundred metres ahead, trucks, vans, cars and everything
with an engine were being funnelled through a checkpoint. Nick ticked off the
details: warning triangles, red and blue flashing strobe lanterns, marked and
unmarked police cars and two BTR-80 armoured personnel carriers facing nose to
nose, providing the final gap in the checkpoint chicane for the cleared
vehicles to pass through.
 

‘We must turn round,’ Lubov plaintively urged from the
back.
 

In their customary disregard for lanes, Russian drivers were
jockeying for position with cars and trucks on both sides blocking the Lada in.
Foula was left with no choice but to crawl inexorably forward.

‘We do what?’ Foula desperately wanted to know, yanking on the
handbrake, avoiding a trucker’s mean stare.

‘Climb out, move slowly around, stretch your legs and we’ll
change places,’ said Nick.

‘And give me a rough count of numbers manning the checkpoint.’
Nick’s guts twisted into a complicated knot as Foula stepped quickly into the
snow. Nick slid over into the driving seat, the Yarygin in his lap.

Sliding down the windscreen, snow dissolved in sizzling patches
on the warm bonnet. Nick sat hunched behind the wheel, an inscrutable Buddha
watching as Foula nodded and grinned to other drivers in the queue. Gunning the
engine Nick wound down his window, but could only hear a woman’s shrill laugh.
Passing around the Lada’s bonnet, Foula took the precaution of making an
exaggerated stretch as he surveyed the checkpoint.

‘Maybe twenty, maybe more,’ he said, getting in next to Nick.

Slowly the line moved forward each vehicle and its occupants
thoroughly questioned, searches made, papers checked and double-checked. There
were four cars to go before it would be the Lada’s turn. Nick’s foot hovered
over the accelerator pedal, his strategy played through twice in his head.
 

‘Get down and stay down,’ he told Foula and Lubov, tucking the
Yarygin under his seat.

Nick waited for the truck in the checkpoint to start to move,
the car behind to set off and take its place. Timing was everything and Nick
almost got it right. Slamming down hard on the gas he swung the Lada out of
line, going for high revs as he went up through the gears, the back end
swishing in a cloud of rubber as he ran at full speed towards the checkpoint.
The car waiting to go next never knew what hit it as Nick rammed it, careering
it into one side of the checkpoint, using the momentum to force his way
through. Long bursts of automatic fire lit up the tree line lifting Foula off
his seat. Lobbed sideways he rolled into Nick, his arms flapping inanely
around.