The Oktober Projekt (5 page)

Yelled orders from running figures echoed inside the Lada
through its shattered windows, followed by rapid flashes from automatic weapons
that punctured the rear glass. Punching the accelerator for all it would give,
Nick ducked down as bullets zipped in and out. He spun the wheel as the Lada’s
tyres screamed, burning for a grip on a reef of ice between the police cordon
and personnel carriers. With a jolt, the tyres snatched and held sending the
Lada forward, crushing a troop commander against a personnel carrier. Nick’s
jaw slammed shut, he bit his tongue and tasted blood. Banging into reverse, he
stamped on the power and skidded clear, only for the other troop carrier to
lurch forward ramming the Lada’s boot, tipping it at a crazy angle. Hitting a
rough strip between the highway’s shoulder and trees, Nick swung out and on,
not wanting to look behind, forcing his eyes ahead to where the highway
flattened out and the darkness stretched enticingly all the way to Latvia.

The UAZ-469 Jeep came straight out of the forest and veered across
Nick’s path, its wheels slapping on the highway like bare feet. Nick swung the
Lada hard to one side clipping the flank of the UAZ, regaining control he
pumped the accelerator again. The second UAZ hit him at speed. It caught the
Lada square on crumpling the passenger door, its headlights scorching Nick’s
eyes while the impact jarred his spine. A third UAZ broke from the forest and
rammed him, buckling the windscreen into a cloud of glass.
 

Smoke and hot diesel fumes filled Nick’s throat. Bounced, skewed
side-on, the UAZ flipped the Lada onto its side sliding it down the Baltic
Highway in a shower of sparks. Nick gasped for breath but something sharp had
jammed into his side. Creaking as it came to a rest by a drainage ditch, the
Lada rocked gently and Nick scrunched into a ball, reached into the back
shaking the little accountant, but he was already dead. Kicking open the rear
door Nick tried to stand; in his mind he was already zigzagging low and hard
for the forest, except his lungs wouldn’t cooperate and he’d a million miles to
cover. Far too easily for his liking his legs buckled and he hit the cold earth
ditch in a heap. With all the strength he could muster he raised his head,
vaguely taking in the fact that several pairs of military boots were pounding
straight at him.

• • •

In London the fate of Nick, Foula and
Lubov remained a matter of speculation and conjecture. Had they crossed the
Latvian border, if not, how far had they to go to reach it? All random factors
added to the permutations that Jill Portland, her head screaming with a
colossal ache, had to consider as duty officer, though it wasn’t Portland who’d
take a final decision or make a final call.

Around a quarter to four that morning, Jane Stratton, Director
of Operations and Security swept in, a large styrofoam coffee cup in hand. Once
engaged but never married, Jane had taken her thirties in a rush and her
happiness somehow never survived. Lean, pretty still at forty-four, there was a
sharpness about her as though inside she smouldered from a lasting hurt. Her
auburn hair nestled on her shoulders framing a face blessed by natural beauty
and strong green eyes. There was also a sense of aloofness that some men and
women find appealing; that of a sports mistress perhaps, the type who can be
both cruel and kind. Calm, her confident approach reassuring Portland, she
listened as the duty officer explained that GCHQ had picked up a burst of
traffic they said pinpointed a position on the Baltic Highway and a precise
location was being worked on.

Finally, at some point after five, Edward ‘Teddy’ Hawick,
Deputy Chief of the Service put in an appearance. Not a natural early riser
Teddy Hawick grunted all through Portland’s briefing, offering a discontented
sigh through his nose when she informed him that GCHQ estimated that a serious
incident had unfolded eighty kilometres outside Velikiye Luki, and this had
been confirmed by the Americans.

‘If that is the respected wisdom from the Cousins, then I
suggest we take appropriate action. You concur, Paul?’ Hawick said, nodding his
small head at Rossan.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’ll leave that in your entirely capable hands,’ Hawick
announced, more or less dismissing Rossan. Thin, quite tall, his pepper-seed
colour hair receding, Hawick had a silky gloss to his skin and prided himself
on being something of a fastidious dresser. Only having hit his early fifties,
his choice of hand-cut suits adorned with a watch-chain and fob gave him the
appearance of a sixty-year-old second-tier diplomat; a man somewhat musty round
the edges, though this was a deceptive foil to his very capable mind.

Twenty minutes later, Roland ‘Roly’ Blackmore, Director
Corporate Affairs, strolled in. Blackmore could have been conceived and born as
Hawick’s natural antithesis, his very own walking binary contradiction. Small,
wiry, and compact, he moved as if he meant business. There was cunning in his
ruddy weathered complexion; a fighter’s face balanced by eyes bright and fresh,
though for those unfortunate to cross him, of which there was a considerable
number, they could only recount Roly’s barbed wire stare. His hair had started
to shrink at the temples so he brushed the whole lot back and this, with its
streaks of grey, gave him a raffish, alluring air. A sharp, very elegant
dresser, Blackmore signified his power through his wardrobe, which even at that
early hour, had produced a dazzling white shirt and plain blue tie, all squared
off inside a handsome chalk-stripe suit. Bluff and to the point, Blackmore
alerted departments and placed people on stand by that Portland had never heard
of, commandeering a secure briefing room for his base.

Taking time to make a furtive tour of what he termed Torr’s
tawdry empire, Hawick eventually called a full council of war and declared that
damage limitation must be the priority, the order of the day, he told them in a
hundred different ways. At the same time they dare not lose any advantage, so
Special Branch teams were prepped for immediate strikes on soft Russian SVR
targets flagged by the Security Service, better known as MI5.
 

As the regular day shift arrived, Portland still had not signed
off and managed to corner Stratton and Rossan as they rushed from meeting to
meeting. Go but don’t go, they both said in agreement, then changed tack, until
Portland came close to pulling her hair out. A yes or no, she demanded. But
Rossan, erring on the side of caution, requested she remain to personally
handle anything else coming out of Latvia or Moscow. Anything to confirm Nick
and Foula’s status or condition, he demanded. ‘You stick to Palmer-Fenton from
Monitoring like a leech,’ Rossan ordered. ‘Like a leech, you hear,’ he shouted
to her retreating back.

But when Portland went down the corridor she found
Palmer-Fenton’s office empty, a coffee hardly touched, a jacket hanging
lopsided from a chair, a flashing row of lights signalling in-coming calls on
four secure phones, all symbols of a crisis yet to hit. On her way back to
Rossan and Stratton, Palmer-Fenton almost knocked her off her feet; his slack
face red from the climb out of the basement lair where a direct feed from GCHQ
was monitored round the clock. Cheltenham had snatched a live stream of mobile
phone traffic coming out of Velikiye Luki, Palmer-Fenton said, between catching
his breath. What they had and it didn’t constitute much, but apparently it’s a
coded confirmation of five casualties, three of them dead.

Returning to Rossan and
Stratton, Portland delivered what she just had gleaned from Monitoring. The
details of which, Portland told them, were obviously vague, but they would
continue to listen for more.

‘If it isn’t too much trouble,’ snapped Stratton, turning
briskly on her heels.

Rossan sniffed and blew his nose. ‘Jane and Nick were really
very close,’ he disclosed.

‘You’ve done quite enough,’ he added. ‘Get off home and take a
rest.’

For Portland, it was more than enough.

• • •

Impatient, disregarding tired moans,
the glances of frustration, Jane Stratton stalked the corridors as a woman
possessed in the hours following Nick and Foula’s unconfirmed status as
missing. Urging, coaxing, demanding and bullying for more results, she left no
one in peace in CO8’s domain. Fatigued and utterly dejected, she had even tried
to take a couple of hours of sleep as the shifts changed, as the briefings, up-dates
and rumours wound inexorably on, but sleep, like Nick Torr and Alistair Foula
was elusive. Bloody Nick Torr she thought, aiming for some distraction by
sorting through FCO demands for ‘further clarification’.
 

On an ash filing cabinet in Nick’s office, a spider plant was
slowly dying. Laying claim to the office as her own this side of the river,
Jane carefully fed the plant a dose of water. Each CO8 team had monitored its
progress every time they passed, taking bets on how much more of Nick’s tender loving
care it could handle before finally wilting. Now it seemed past caring and
leant drunkenly to the left.

Placed by the telephone she found a meeting request chit sent
by Ruth Parfrey to Nick, the priority box ticked urgent, the time and date set
for two hours before Nick’s departure for Latvia. But for some reason Nick had
not acknowledged it, leaving the response boxes blank.
 

‘You’d better bloody come home, Nick Torr,’ she said aloud,
fury churning away inside her. Suddenly she had an overwhelming desire to close
her eyes, run and emerge into strong sunlight far, far away from this madness.

Restless, unable to settle, she set off in search of more
updates and it was while she organised this, that Palmer-Fenton discovered her;
on a meagre landing between floors delivering a severe upbraiding to a junior
administration officer on the importance of following file search requests.

‘Ah, Jane, you asked for the last position on Nick and
Alistair,’ Palmer-Fenton said, watching the officer scurry away. ‘It’s not the
news we hoped for,’ he said turning smartly, his brogues retorting off the
polished stairs as he skipped down to his domain.

Following on behind, Jane passed floors where the night always
made itself at home. She’d done enough late stints over here to know how it
felt as a shift dragged on for what felt a week, most floors dormant with only
the odd voice carrying along soulless corridors; whispered secrets from a
secret world huddling in corners. Picking up speed she almost ran the final
couple of metres down the long corridor, unable to stop herself overtaking
Palmer-Fenton.

Palmer-Fenton took inordinate pride in his monitoring empire; a
windowless vault jammed with plasma screens, computers and a team of intense
men and women in their twenties who rarely mixed with the infidels from other
CO8 sections. On one wall a set of screens providing satellite support above
countries where CO8 teams were actively deployed. Alongside the screens
transparent plotting panels held each commander’s name, scribed in blue marker
to denote their very own operational patch.

‘Here,’ said Palmer-Fenton, pointing Jane to a panel allocated
to Operation Salvage.

‘We’ve created a timeline by calling up and assembling the most
recent satellite images to provide a working scenario,’ Palmer-Fenton
explained. ‘Though it cannot be classed as definitive by any means of the
imagination, but we did have a tracker in the vehicle they took over the
Russian border when they started out.’

Some of Nick’s early movements including the drive in from
Latvia were highlighted in yellow, others circled in red; none of them looked
particularly good from where Jane stood.

‘They must have known something was up after the collection
from the way that damned car went round Moscow in circles. See how they were
sat in that suburb of Golyanovo for more than twenty minutes. As far as I’m
aware there ain’t no Little Chefs in that neck of the woods or if it’s a halt
for a pee, someone has a serious bladder problem.’

‘And?’ Jane wasn’t in the mood for improvised laughs.

Palmer-Fenton scrunched up his nose and turned to one of his
team.

‘Bring up the full sequence, Lucy, if you will.’

Lucy hit a command on her keyboard and went back to monitoring
a different screen.

‘The tracker stopped there, right in the middle of the city, so
I assume they bailed out and lost the car. Must have picked up a new vehicle,
which was very little help to us,’ Palmer-Fenton explained as the first image
appeared.

‘I can imagine,’ snapped Jane.

‘We do our best,’ retorted Palmer-Fenton, grievously wounded.
‘All we can confirm is from what we managed to pull down a few hours ago. We
concentrated on the reports of a rumpus near Velikiye Luki, that is all we had
to go on you know,’ he reminded her crossly.

‘And?’

‘This was the last pass we could manage and the satellite won’t
be over that position again for another fourteen hours,’ he said, his earnest
face assessing Jane.

‘That’s the best you’ve got?’ She demanded of the blurred image
filling the screen.

‘It’s not like using a digital camera,’ Palmer-Fenton said in
defence of a grainy image that had been magnified to its maximum limit. ‘And,’
he added, lowering his voice, looking around, ‘we have been encountering
problems. I don’t mean jamming, or interference, but some glitch in one or two
of the systems that’s been plaguing us for a considerable time. We report it of
course, tell them we think we have a ghost in the machine, but nothing’s done.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Jane, studying an enhanced
satellite frame revealing a car on its side. Leaning forward, she could just
make out three body bags by the side of a military vehicle.

‘Casualties, I’m afraid.’

‘There’s a chance that one of them could be alive,’ said Jane.