He also took care to check angles and bearings that would lead them to the Ice Palace. All the time he worked, Bond felt uneasy – a sense he had experienced more than once since the Madeira meeting. He was aware of the basic cause: from time to time he had worked in conjunction with another member of either his own, or a sister, service. But Icebreaker was different. Now he had been forced to act with a team and Bond was not a team man – especially not a team that blatantly contained grave elements of mistrust.
His eyes searched the map, as though looking for a clue and, quite suddenly, without his really trying to find it, an answer stared back at him.
Ripping off one of the flimsies from his small pad, Bond carefully placed it over the Ice Palace markings and traced in the pencil lines showing the extent of the underground bunker. Then he added in the local topography. When this tracing was completed, Bond slid the flimsy in a northeasterly direction on the map, covering the equivalent of around fifteen kilometres.
The diagonal move carried the Ice Palace across the frontier zone into Russia. What was more, the local topography fitted exactly, down to the surrounding ground levels, wooded areas, and summer river-lines. The topography in general was all very similar, but this was quite extraordinary. Either the maps had been specially printed, or there really were two locations – one on either side of the frontier – exact in every topographical detail.
With the same concentration, Bond copied the possible secondary position of the Ice Palace on to his map. He then made one or two further compass bearings. It was possible that von Glöda’s headquarters, and the first stage of the arms convoy, lay not in Finland, but still on the Russian side of the frontier. Even bearing in mind the similarity of the landscape at any point along this part of the border, it was a strange coincidence to find two exactly identical locations within fifteen kilometres of one another.
He now thought about the position of the main bunker entrances at the Ice Palace. Both faced towards the Russian side. If it was on the Russian side of the border, he had to remember that this section of the Soviet Union had once belonged to Finland – before the great clash of the Winter War of 1939–40. But either way, for the entrances of the original fortifications to face towards Russia was odd; particularly if the bunkers were built before the Russo-Finnish war of 1939; not so odd if they were erected after the peace, when large tracts of land, including much of this zone, were handed over to the Soviet Union, following the Finnish surrender of March 13th, 1940.
To Bond, it was a definite possibility that the Ice Palace was of Russian origin. If it truly was the headquarters of the Fascist National Socialist Action Army, then it showed two things: the leader of the NSAA was even more cunning than Bond had thought, and the coercion, and betrayal, within the Red Army, GRU and KGB, might be more widespread than anyone had first imagined.
Bond’s next job was to get some form of message out to M. Technically, he could simply dial London on his room telephone. Certainly it was now free of listening devices, but who knew if calls were also being monitored via the hotel exchange?
Quickly, Bond committed the compass bearings, and co-ordinates, to memory, using his well-tried form of mnemonics. He then tore up the flimsies from his pad – removing several of the back sheets at the same time – and flushed them down the lavatory, waiting for a few moments to make certain they had all been carried away.
Climbing into his outdoor gear, Bond left the room and went down to his car. Among the many pieces of secret equipment he now carried in the Saab, there was one only recently fitted by Q Branch. In front of the gear lever there nestled what seemed to be a perfectly normal radio telephone, an instrument which was useless unless it had a base unit somewhere within about twenty-five miles radius. But twenty-five miles was no good to Bond, any more than a normal telephone was any good to him, in the present circumstances. The Saab car phone had two great advantages. The first of these was a small black box, from which hung a pair of terminals. The box was not much larger than a pair of cassettes stacked one on top of the other, and Bond took it from its hiding place, in a panel behind the glove compartment.
Reactivating the sensor alarms, he trudged through the hard, iced snow, back to the hotel and his room. Taking no chances, Bond did a quick sweep with the VL34, and was relieved to find the room still clean after his short absence. Quickly he unscrewed the underside plate on the telephone. He then connected the terminals of the small box and removed the receiver from its rests, placing it close at hand. The advanced electronics contained in that small box ensured that he now had an easily available base unit from which to operate the car telephone. Access to the outside world, illegally using the Finnish telephone service, was assured.
There was, moreover, the car phone’s second advantage. On returning to the Saab, Bond pressed one of the unmarked square black buttons on the dashboard. A panel slid down behind the telephone housing, revealing a small computer keyboard and a minute screen – a telephone scrambler of infinite complexity, which could be used to shield the voice or send messages which would be printed out on a compatible screen in the building overlooking Regent’s Park.
Bond pressed the requisite keys to link the car phone with his base unit. Tapping the get-out code from Finland and the dial-in code for London, he followed on with the London code and the number for the Headquarters of his Service. He then fed in the required cipher of the day and began to tap out his message in clear language. It came up on his screen, as it would at the Headquarters building, in a jumble of grouped letters. It wouldbe deciphered rapidly to read out on the HQ screen in clear language.
The whole transmission took around fifteen minutes, with Bond bent inside the dark car lit only by the glow from the tiny screen, very conscious of the ice build-up on the windows. Outside there was a light wind and the temperature continued to drop. When the whole message had been sent, Bond closed up, reactivated the sensors and returned to the hotel. Once more, playing it safe, he quickly swept the room, then removed the base unit from the hotel telephone.
He had only just packed away the base unit in his briefcase – intending to return it to the Saab before the real business of the night began – when there was a knock at the door. Now playing everything by the book, Bond picked up the P7 and went to the door, slipping the chain on before asking who was there.
‘Brad,’ the answer came back. ‘Brad Tirpitz.’
‘Bad’ Brad Tirpitz looked a shade shaken as he came into the room. Bond noticed a distinct pallor, and a wariness around the big American’s eyes.
‘Bastard Kolya,’ Tirpitz spat.
Bond gestured towards the armchair. ‘Sit down, get it off your chest. The room’s clean now. I had to delouse again after we had the meeting with Kolya.’
‘Me too.’ A slow smile spread over Tirpitz’s face, stopping short, as always, at the eyes. It was as though a sculptor had worked slowly at the rocky features and suddenly given up. ‘I caught Kolya in the act though. Did you figure out who’s working for whom yet?’
‘Not exactly. Why?’
‘I left a small memento in Kolya’s room after the briefing. Just stuffed it down behind the chair cushion. I’ve been listening inever since.’
‘And heard no good of yourself, I’ll warrant.’ Bond opened the fridge, asking if Tirpitz wanted a drink.