Viktor talked for a few moments about the condition of the Baltic Fleet, but his concentration was on memorizing what had been said. MFI was the Mikoyan Multifunction Tactical Fighter. NTOW was Normal Take-off Weight…it would be the successor to the SU-27 and MiG-29 fourth-generation fighters, and was designed to confront the Americans' Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. Viktor gestured discreetly at his admiral across the length of the room and muttered that 'the fat man' would appreciate an up-to-date paper on MFI and where the programme was going, for 'his eyes only', and was told such a paper would be sent.
Viktor moved on.
At that time, across the border, away to the south-west in the Polish city of Warsaw, on the embassy's second floor, behind a steel door, a signal was being enciphered.
Viktor reached his second target of the evening, a colonel in Early Warning Defence, who with his general was on a three-day assessment-of-capability visit to the Kaliningrad base. Viktor had noted that the colonel's glass was empty and brought a double replacement.
'It's hopeless, worse than ever. I've been in EWD for nineteen years. It's like our knickers have dropped to our ankles, the elastic's gone. You don't believe me? You should. The big word is deterioration. We follow the principle of "hair-trigger" reaction to threat, but that is based on comprehensive satellite surveillance of where the launch might come from, and we haven't replaced the satellites. They've passed their useful lifespan. And not only are my knickers down, I'm blindfolded. There should be nine satellites up if we're to follow "hair trigger", but we have only three. Three. We cannot monitor firings from the Tridents out in the Pacific, where they'd launch from. Because it's a high elliptical satellite system there are times when we have no cover for an eight-hour period. Eight. And we've lost ground radar — like the one in Latvia. They could shoot from Alaska and we wouldn't know we were under attack until the air burst. We have no shield, not any more. We scream for more satellites, and they are deaf to us. It's bloody freezing with your knickers at your ankles, I tell you.'
Viktor drifted away. He estimated that his admiral would be bored by now with the occasion. He left behind him two men who had each poured out a cupful of heartache about a new airforce programme and an early-warning shield that was a myth.
An enciphered signal would now be in London.
In the staff car he told the admiral what he had learned and won a steady succession of grunted expletives in return. He had not noticed them on the outward journey, but on the return leg there were vehicle lights behind them that kept pace with the admiral's driver.
By now the signal would have been read. Were his friends true to him? Was there anything his friends could do for him? Did they care?
The signal his friends would read would say: ferret: no show.
…Chapter Three
Q. In which Russian city in 1998 was a state of emergency declared because the majority of the population were in a medical condition of starvation?
A. Kaliningrad.
Every morning when he did not have a breakfast meeting, Viktor Archenko ran on the beach north of the base. He left the harbour, the castle, the barracks blocks and office buildings behind him, and Lenin's statue, which dominated the complex in stature and past authority, and the guarded gates. He had been tense as he had jogged past the sentries…the moment when his freedom would end? Would he be turned back? But the conscripts with their rifles on the barrier had saluted him, and he had made himself acknowledge them. The black van and the silver saloon had been parked outside the gates and when he was a hundred metres beyond them he'd heard, against the drumming of his feet, their engines start up. He hadn't looked back.
In the night he had lain on his narrow bed and he had cursed himself for the mistake he had made on the road to the border and Braniewo. The U-turn into and out of the side road had been a major error of judgement, and it would not be repeated. The run along the beach was his final throw to save himself. He had talked about it with his friends in the late-evening and early-morning sessions in the Excelsior Hotel and it had been stressed to him that he must make a habit of the morning run. At his age it was entirely understandable that he should seek to maintain his athleticism, so he ran on the beach every morning that he was free to do so, and the sentries on the gate were familiar with it, and so was Piatkin, the zampolit, and so would be the men who sat in the black van and the silver saloon. His friends had told him to make the habit familiar to anyone who watched him so that, when and if it mattered, the run did not create suspicion.
He wore heavy trainer running shoes and thick socks so that his feet would not blister, and lightweight shorts and an athletics vest that had the emblem of the Baltic Fleet front and back, and a red bandanna was knotted tight on his forehead so that the sweat did not dribble into his eyes. In the pocket of his shorts was a small piece of white chalk, no bigger than his thumbnail. His friends had told him he must always have the chalk there, however long he had no need of it.
The only approach road to Baltiysk, and the base, was along the spit from the north. At the town of Primorsk, the land mass shrank to a narrow finger peninsula, and the road ran beside a railtrack that served the fleet. The canal at Baltiysk cut across the peninsula that stretched south across the firing range and the missile batteries, then the frontier, where high wire and watchtowers guard the approach to Poland.
His trainers stamped on the dry sand above the tideline, and the give in it made for hard running. His target, that dawn and every dawn that he ran on the beach, was a water tower built on the upper point of the peninsula, its foundations some thirty metres above the levels of the sea and the lagoon. Running fast, like an automaton, he was soon clear of the base with nothing ahead of him except the sea, the beach and the tall pine trees that hid the road and the railtrack. His stride kicked up little clouds of sand, and sometimes he crunched on the amber pebbles that were washed on to the beach by the fiercer storms. In his dulled mind, he wondered if his grandmother had walked on this beach, in panic, had tramped on the same brittle sand and had carried the suitcase in which were all of her possessions. If she had she would have gazed out over the sea, far beyond the waves breaking on the sand and the little pieces of amber, and she might have seen the disappearing outlines on the horizon of the low, overloaded Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya, and she might have wept because she was not on one of them.
Slowly, as he willed himself faster, the water tower grew closer. The road was now close to the beach, but the trees shielded it. Often he heard the thunder of the lorries coming to the base or leaving it, but that morning he could only hear the lesser purr of the black van and the silver saloon tracking him.