'That was where young Yanni turned up,' Litsas put in. 'He said he didn't want to be sent to bed like a child before the trouble had even started. He wanted to help. So he went to his bunk and got out his knife and stood on the little ladder that comes up from the fo'c'sle. When the first bad man was knocked over, the second bad man was getting ready to shoot at Despinís Ariadne. But unluckily for him his back was to Yanni. The distance isn't more than about a yard and Yanni can walk like a cat. He came up from the fo'c'sle and shoved four inches of the best Sheffield steel under our friend's left shoulder. He gave no trouble after that.
'I asked Yanni if he wanted some brandy and he said no, thank you, he thought he mustn't start drinking at his age. After knifing a man with a gun!' Litsas laughed heartily. 'He's back on the job now, washing down the deck. It did get rather messy.'
Bond shuddered. He had had to get used to the idea of involving innocent outsiders in the kind of savage, unpredictable violence he traded in, but to have brought about the initiation of an adolescent into the ways of killing was something new to him. He hoped desperately that the relative unsophistication of Greek youth would protect Yanni from the progressive intoxication with lethal weapons that, in an urban British lad of this age, could so easily result from such an episode. The alternative was not to be thought of. He asked with assumed eagerness, 'What happened at your end, Niko?'
'Oh, that was nothing at all. My chap had had the common sense to get his revolver out, but when the Thompson started up the poor devil couldn't help moving his eyes off me for a second. I kicked his gun half out of his hand and then shot him in the face. Child's play.'
There was a call from Yanni amidships. They turned and followed his pointing finger. But there was nothing to see. Steel-coloured water, lightly touched with the lilac of the opening dawn, stretched unbroken over the place where the cruiser had been.
Chapter 12
General Incompetence
IT WAS a beautiful morning. Out at sea the rising _meltémi__ was blowing the tops off the waves, but off the southern shore of Vrakonisi it did no more than impart a pleasing sense of motion to the slightly flawed surface of the water, as if a giant mirror of liquid blue stone were perpetually moving south and perpetually renewing itself from the edge of the land. And on the land, in the house on the islet, all that could be felt was a mild breeze, gusting a little at times and fluttering the natural-coloured linen curtains, raising the corners of the papers on the long pale Swedish desk by the window, but cool and delicious.
Sitting at the desk with a glass of tea before him, Colonel-General Igor Arenski felt comfortably relaxed. This was his first undercover assignment outside the Soviet Union, though as a high official of the KGB (Committee of State Security) he had naturally made frequent trips to foreign countries in the guise of trade delegate, manager of cultural mission and the like, and had worked for over five years as a counsellor at the Russian Embassy in Washington.
Arenski folded his hands behind his bald head and gazed out over the placid stretch of the Aegean. Supervising the security arrangements for this conference had been a simple matter to a man of his experience. All the real work had been done weeks before in his Moscow office. Coming all this way merely to witness the operation of the foolproof machinery he had devised was, between himself and his professional conscience, quite unnecessary. Half a dozen of his subordinates - that charming dark-eyed lad Gevrek from Soviet Armenia, for instance - could have done this part of the job equally well. That was the sort of thing these _yobannye__ politicians never understood. They thought in terms of rank, of roubles, of protocol, of producing senior Security officers when senior diplomats were being taken under protection. As if these Arabs and Levantines would know the difference between a distinguished higher member of the _apparat__ and a provincial area-controller!
Still, he must not complain. It was a good thing to have got away from Moscow for a time; even a short trip like this helped one to maintain an international outlook. And, although not up to the climate and standard of comfort to be enjoyed at his villa outside Sevastopol, this was an agreeable enough location. The inhabitants were a barbaric lot in general, uncouth and suspicious, but his contact with them for intelligence purposes had had to be no more than minimal, and it was true that his contact with one inhabitant - a fisherboy or something of the kind from the port - was turning out to be unexpectedly interesting. Life was treating Igor Alexeivitch well.
Though he would have denied it strenuously, Arenski was himself a politician of the most durable sort. Under Beria in the MGB, the old Security Ministry, he had conducted himself with a sort of inspired circumspection, making neither friends nor enemies and yet avoiding the dangerous status of the individualist. His sexual tastes had paradoxically stood in his favour - the consensus in the corridors of the Kremlin had been that someone as obviously vulnerable as that was no danger in any quarter. When Beria fell, when the fat baron and all his vassals went down in the bloody aftermath of Stalin's death, Arenski had moved a major rung up the ladder. He was nobody's man, anybody's man, safe, silent and slow, the perfect politicians' choice, and therefore unqualified to rise to the occasion in any real emergency.
At last, bored with the play of sunlight on the most beautiful water to be found off any European coast, Arenski sighed and glanced at the file that lay open in front of him. It was necessary to go through the motions of work in order to preserve good habits. His small blue eyes moved idly over the topmost sheet, although he knew its contents by heart. The closing lines ran: DAY 4 _Time__
_Event__
_Remarks__
1200
Degree of readiness yellow
Cordon round house
1600
Arrival of Ministerial group
Sea patrol begins
1700
Degree of readiness red
1800
Arrival of delegates
Identity checks
-1930
2000
Speech of welcome, toasts
Check on cordon
2030
Conference in session
Land staff fed in shifts
2330
Dinner
DAY 5 0030 Conference in session
0300 Refreshments, rest period
Check on cordon
0400 Conference in session
0530 Speech of thanks, departure
-0600 of delegates
0630 Degree of readiness yellow
Sea patrol returns
1200
Departure of Ministerial group, degree of readiness blue
Cordon withdrawn, close down radio links
1700
Departure of staff
Arenski himself would not be departing with his staff. He had ten days' leave coming to him and proposed to spend as many of them here as he felt like. At the moment he felt like spending them all here. There was something about that boy's way of laughing...
A knock at the door brought him out of his reverie. '_Da?__' he called irritably.
One of the two men who had first occupied the house entered and spoke in an appalling Ukrainian accent.