Rachel Angelika Piotrowska stifled a yawn.
She was still dressed in the over-sized, coarse, itchy battledress top she had been given the day before. She had since found a vest to wear beneath it and swapped her Army issue trousers for blue slacks she had seen lying on a pile of washed clothes at the Joint Interrogation Centre. She knew she must look odd wearing this particular trousseau with hopelessly impractical cork sandals on her feet and her hair a hopeless mess…
“I am an intelligence analyst attached to the C-in-C’s personal staff,” she parroted. It would not do to tell the commanding officer of a United States Navy warship that she was a spy working for, and only for, the Director General of MI6. “I speak many languages. Hopefully, I may be able to help.”
The one-legged man lying in the sick bay cot might have been in his forties or fifties. The hard faced woman with sun-bleached fair hair was a little younger. Both of the survivors realised immediately that Rachel walked into the sick bay alcove deep within the aft superstructure of the American destroyer that, at last, somebody was taking them seriously.
The woman was clutching the man’s right hand in both her hands like her life depended upon it. She instantly began to babble at Rachel and the bespectacled, studious looking man in his early thirties whom she had been introduced to as Lieutenant-Commander Felix Kocinski. Kocinski, Rachel had discovered was the son of second generation Polish emigrants to the United States; he spoke a little pigeon Polish and had a very limited ‘phrase book’ vocabulary of the sort of flowery old-fashioned Russian that might have been spoken in Leo Tolstoy’s time.
Rachel found herself staring at the man in the sick bay cot.
With an effort she clenched her teeth to stop her mouth hanging agape.
Disconcertingly, the man in the cot registered her momentary shock; but made no attempt to speak or remark upon it. Presumably, because like any apex predator he knew that the scent of blood was the first, not the last act in any hunt.
Rachel tried not to think about the long burst of fire from her Kalashnikov walking Arkady Pavlovich Rykov back across the room in the Citadel at Mdina; or how his broken body had jerked to a halt against the wall and slid down to the floor…
Her discomfiture was brief, fleeting; concealed in an instant.
She was fully in control by the time she settled on the hard chair Lieutenant-Commander Kocinski gallantly drew up for her. She held up her hand for the other woman to stop talking. After a few moments there was relative silence. Deep in the ship the hull gently hummed with the noise of distant generators and the rushing of the fire room blowers. The sick bay stank of disinfectant and outside the alcove — a small side compartment with three narrow cots — everything was bustling activity.
She pointed to herself and said in a random Russian dialect used throughout the Ukraine and in the border territories with the former Warsaw Pact allies bordering the Black Sea: “My name is Rachel. I am an interpreter. I speak Russki, English, Bulgarian, Rumanian, and a little Greek, but only of the islands…”
“I am Eleni,” the woman survivor of the sinking of the Yavuz blurted. “My family fish… We captured by Roma soldiers… We sunk by Turkish ship… We taken onboard…”
Rachel translated for the benefit of the Operations Officer of the USS Charles F. Adams.
“She is a Turkish Cypriot,” she explained in passing. “She was once married to a Greek fisherman from Samothrace who died some years ago in a storm…”
Lieutenant-Commander Kocinski wanted to ask a raft of questions but Rachel shook her head. Now that her initial shock had subsided she was studying the face of the man in the bed and he was returning her stare with a cool calculation that seemed wholly wrong.
Rachel felt as if she knew him and he was looking at her as if he knew her; and yet that was impossible and they both knew it.
His resemblance to Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was uncanny.
Do I know this man?
He seemed to recognise her and understanding this — intuitively, or by some unspoken sign between the two of them — the Greek woman instantly shut her mouth.
“Eleni is a little bit distraught,” Rachel said softly to Kocinski. “I’m sure you have a million things to do, Commander. Perhaps, if you left us alone? I’ll give you a full report of everything I learn later.”
The man hesitated.
“As you wish, Miss Piotrowska.” He departed leaving the hatch dogged open.
Rachel pursed her lips and tried to remember where she had seen the man in the bed.
“Russki?” She frowned. “Roma?”
The man who could have been Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s twin brother snorted a barely audible grunt of what his eyes told her was exasperated incredulity.
“The World has gone fucking mad,” he sighed in Rumanian in a hoarse whisper before he started coughing up the last dregs of the muck he had swallowed in all the hours he had been in the water.
Eleni babbled at him incoherently.
“What is she saying?” The man asked presently.
“She wants to know if you and I are old friends,” Rachel reported sourly.
The man in the cot vented a feeble guffaw of amusement.
For the benefit of his companion he shook his head.
My life is turning into a fucking comedy of errors…
He had no idea how he had found himself in the water a couple of hundred metres from the capsized hull of the Yavuz with a dozen other people; or how he and Eleni had ended up clinging to a raft, or later lashed together either side of a what must have been some kind of steel drum or buoy. He had wanted to succumb to the cold so badly but the bloody woman would not let him sleep…
And now he was onboard an American warship being interrogated by the mistress of the most dangerous man he had ever known, the former KGB Head of Station in Istanbul; the same man whose persona he had stolen to escape the retribution of his old Soviet friends…
Chapter 66
Seamus McCormick felt much safer on his own. Yesterday had been a nightmare; there had been no alternative to assembling the Redeyes in the back of the lorry parked between the abandoned farm buildings within sight of the main road just outside Redditch. Military convoys had trundled in and out of the town, twice aircraft had flown over very low. Miraculously, nobody had stopped to investigate the Bedford truck parked up in open view.
After dusk he had walked and talked the two IRA men through the basics.
Once primed the M171 shoulder launcher required to be pointed at the target and for the trigger to be pulled. However, nothing was ever quite that simple.
‘The missile acquires the target’s infrared, or heat, signature only after launch.’
He had had to explain in painful detail.
‘Even if the missile is pointing directly up the tail pipe of a jet engine it takes several seconds for it to acquire the target. This means you have to aim the launcher at where you judge the hottest heat signature will be in say, three or four seconds time after you fire the missile.’
Frank Reynolds had eventually cottoned on.