He paused, a little frown cut his brow, then he reached up to his shoulders and peeled off his colonel's rank insignia and gave them to the general. A fast grin opened his face. 'I doubt they'll help me.'
'That bastard,' the general spat. 'Take his balls off.'
'I'll do what I think necessary.'
It was complicated. It would be a business of delicacy and danger. The general's colleague was a brigadier in mechanized infantry and had been captured with three escorts, the rest dead, near the Argun gorge. The bastard was Ibn ul Attab, the warlord who held the eastern sector of the gorge. In the follow-up search for the brigadier, by good fortune, a six-man patrol of the special forces Black Berets had taken Attab and his son and had them trussed in a cave high over the gorge, but the location where the brigadier and his escort were held was not known, and the weather had changed. A blanket of cloud had settled on the forested rock faces, and the helicopters were grounded. If the brigadier was to be saved, and his escorts, then the warlord must tell where he was, in which cleft of rocks, in which fissure. Yuri Bikov, thirty-eight years old, no longer wearing his colonel's badges, was the interrogator with the reputation.
'We depend on you,' the general said hoarsely.
He shrugged, laid his hand lightly on the general's arm, then turned towards the helicopter's hatch. From a low-altitude landing strip, they would go forward in armoured vehicles, before trekking towards the location beacon of the Black Beret patrol, then. There were conscripts and grizzled ground crew all around him. He saw it in their faces: he was their icon, they had faith in him because his reputation as an interrogator went ahead of him. His briefings had told him that the Black Berets had already beaten Ibn ul Attab half senseless and that he had said nothing. Time was now critical if the lives of the brigadier and his escorts were to be preserved.
He climbed up to the hatch and one of the air crew helped him heave through.
Bikov settled into a canvas cot seat against the cockpit bulkhead, and when his four men were in with him, machine-gunners took their places at the hatches and armed the weapons. As they lifted off, and he looked around him, he saw the bloodstains on the cabin's floor. There was a piece of white bone near his feet. On the interior of the fuselage were plastic adhesive strips that covered incoming bullet strikes. His reputation said that he alone among the counterintelligence interrogators of the FSB was, perhaps, capable of extracting the information required to save a brigadier and his escort.
Soon, inside the rattling hulk of the helicopter, he dozed. He had no time for the porthole views of artillery-ravaged villages, or for the mountains ahead where the clouds shrouded the slopes. He did not open his eyes as the machine-gunners loosed off a few rounds to check the efficiency of their weapons. If the responsibility given him was a burden he showed no sign of it as his head lolled forward, his chin settled on his chest.
Viktor Archenko had never been to Chechnya and had never heard of Colonel Yuri Bikov.
'What is there that it would be impolite to talk of? What is their disaster area now?' Viktor was settled in the back of the car, the admiral beside him.
'Cheeky boy…' The admiral growled his trademark low chuckle. 'You gossip too much.'
Viktor was the admiral's man. He was his eyes and ears. He was expected to prise confidences from fellow trusted men of the other fleets, the army and the airforce. What he learned went not only to the dead drop at Malbork Castle for collection by the courier, but also was whispered to the Baltic Fleet commander. Knowledge was power. If Admiral Alexei Falkovsky knew the detail of another commander's problems, or what further funds and resources had been made available to others, then he had the native cunning to turn the knowledge to his own advantage. If the Northern Fleet was short of fuel for operational sailing then Falkovsky would feed into the high echelons of the ministry that he, at Kaliningrad, had managed to conserve sufficient diesel, and his star would shine. He thrived on the gossip that Viktor brought him.
'And how was your day among the ruins, Viko?'
'I didn't go,' Viktor said calmly.
A peremptory question. 'Didn't go? Missed out?'
'Actually I didn't go. Idiotic of me, I was on my way and then I remembered that Stanislaw — that is, the curator of works — was going to be on leave. I turned back.'
He looked sharply at his admiral in the car's interior gloom. He had learned over many years that this bluff, powerful, boisterous man had the innate cunning of a she-cat. But the admiral had his eyes barely open and his head was back against the seat. The questions had not been barbed probes but had been fashioned out of politeness. Viktor told himself that here, with his protector beside him, he was safe. If this physically huge and mentally muscled man had known that suspicion now rested on his protégé he would not have carried him in his car. They still searched for evidence, and without evidence they would not dare to approach a man of the authority of the commander of the Baltic Fleet and make their denunciation. But he did not know how much time he had, how fast the sand would run through the funnelled shape of the glass.
Except when he was ill, and the doctors had summoned the courage to issue an order to him, Admiral Alexei Falkovsky never took a day away from his work. All of his career, and more particularly now that he commanded a fleet of warships, he had been obsessed with the levels of control of the navy his adult life had given him. He had no holidays and he took no leave. His wife enjoyed vacations alone or with her female friends. If they took a week in a Black Sea resort, his wife was abandoned while he spent his days visiting other commands, and in the evenings they went to service dinners. But he accepted, with wry amusement, that his chief of staff should be allowed, under humorous and grudging sufferance, an occasional away-day to visit and study Malbork Castle, over the border in Poland. Why a naval officer of seniority should embark on a love affair with a medieval castle, and become an expert in its history and construction, get to the point of obsession, was to Admiral Falkovsky — as Viktor knew — strange to the limit of eccentricity. Viktor talked of the castle to him, lectured him on its magnificence till his eyes turned away and he feigned boredom. He would cry to be spared. Yet the dockets Viktor needed to cross the frontier and visit Malbork were always signed with a gruff snort but they were signed.
'So you have not brought back my cigarettes — how may I survive without my cigarettes?' The admiral struck Viktor's arm. The blow hurt. 'I will die without my cigarettes.'
The admiral smoked up to two packets of Camel, no filter, a day. Each time Viktor travelled to Malbork he brought back ten cartons or more, a minimum of two thousand Camel cigarettes. There was always tension in the admiral's office when supplies were dwindling and the next visit to Malbork was more than a week away. In Kaliningrad, at a price, it was always possible to buy Marlboro, Lucky Strike or Winston off the street stalls, but packets of Camel were hard to find.
'As soon as I can "escape", Admiral, I will go and work for a day with the archaeological team, scrape old stones, excavate decaying bones, and buy your cigarettes.'
'If I am not dead…' Falkovsky's voice softened. In the front of the car that flew the fleet banner on the bonnet was the driver and the admiral's personal uniformed bodyguard. He murmured, 'Tonight there will be present all of the airforce people. Are they going to get the new aircraft, MFI, or are they not? Are they, the pigs, ahead of us at the trough? I would hate to think so. I need to know. Also present tonight is that buffoon, Gorin, from Missile Defence, and I hear they spend every day and half of every night lobbying for money, money, money, and what they get is not available to me. I don't want you talking to them about fucking castles.'