PG: He was, wasn't he, Rupert's man?
AP: Rupert's gone — sadly missed. [Irony] Don't know how we manage without him, a wonder the building still stands.
She heard the little ripple of laughter around the table.
WC: What's the exfiltration plan?
He'd waited for his moment. In the past two years Alice had twice met William Courtney. He'd be a few years older than herself, might be thirty-eight, and she thought that the best years of his soldiering were behind him. His reward, for ageing, was a transfer from Hereford to liaison work with the Service. It was a part of the Service's glory legacy that a troop was permanently on standby down at Hereford for the rougher end of the Service's work. He wore his grey-flecked hair long on his shoulders, and she thought a ponytail would have been smarter, but it was apparent to her that smartness did not fit the hippie/traveller image he cultivated. No jacket, a thick sweater that looked to have been worn that week in a sheep-pen on the Brecons and had unravelling wool in the elbows and at the cuffs, and jeans that were clean but had not been pressed after an obligatory run through a launderette. He had on trainers that were faded but had probably shared space in the same wash as the jeans.
Alice knew Ferret's file backwards. She could turn up any page without going to the index. She had never seen an exfiltration plan, only an 'alert' procedure of chalk signs on a beach. Her pencil was poised. Her eyes rose and she saw Ponsford look away, and Giles stared down at the blank paper in front of him then reached for his glass of water. A smile, fading towards impertinence, wreathed the Special Air Service major's mouth.
WC: Sorry — am I being dim? There is a plan to lift him out, take Ferret out — or isn't there?
PG: Actually written down? No, there isn't.
AP: Never seemed necessary — or Rupert never got round to it.
WC: No plan? No recce been done, no dry run, right? Starting from scratch, yes? Time not on our side? I read up on Kaliningrad last night, briefed myself. It's a bloody fortress. Naval infantry, marines, mechanized regular army. Other parts of good old Russia might have had the capability degraded, not this place. Quite frankly, and it's my job to ensure there are no misunderstandings. I don't think my people would be that keen on a trip in there, not to Kaliningrad.
GL: These people make their own beds, and then they have to lie on them.
AP: Sad, it goes without saying, but that's the life of an agent. Gabriel has put it bluntly but quite fairly — and there is no room for sentiment in these affairs, even if it's the death of an agent.
Alice said softly, 'Bertie, your last remark, is that for the record?'
A flush of colour to the man's cheeks, blood running in the surface veins. 'No, I don't think anything of my last little contribution was made for posterity — just thinking aloud. Thank you, Alice.'
None of that speech would be erased with her India-rubber, however; none of it would be crossed out. When she typed up the record it would be there, and she'd make damn sure it went to the top-floor suite where the Director General held court. And then she had gone back into her corner shadow. It was to be Alice's only intervention. No one around the table would have seen it, but her eyes watered. They didn't know him, didn't want to, didn't care what he went through — stress, strain, pressure — to provide the damn detail on hull coating, diving depths, propeller noise. Alice knew. She flipped the page over and wrote on.
AP: We're not quite yet at doom-and-destruction mode. God knows, Rupert's notes were thin enough — I don't think he trusted any of us, you know — but there is a final dead drop available to Ferret, were he to believe himself under surveillance. What I'm suggesting for now is that Gabriel takes on a role as factotum…
Alice knew her medieval Latin. 'Fac' was 'do', 'totus' (adj.) was 'all'. She looked at him and thought he was weighing up whether this was good for his career's future, or whether he might be damaged by it.
…pulls the committee's decisions together and gives teeth to them. First things first, the last dead drop. Stay behind, would you, Gabriel, please?
Alice put her notepad and pencils into her bag. As she walked to the door she heard Courtney, the Hereford officer, saying conversationally to Giles, 'Don't get me wrong — who dares wins and all that crap — but I meant what I said. We're hardly going to volunteer to go into that rat's nest, Kaliningrad. Don't even think about it — count us right out.'
Ponsford said, 'Like everything else in this life, it was good while it lasted. I have to say it, if an agent misses two dead drops, and has never missed before, then he's in trouble. Poor bastard…but that's the way it goes.'
As she went out through the door she heard the naval intelligence man ask Giles, 'What would be the form on their side?'
And she heard Giles say, 'They'd call up an interrogator, a very high-quality man…'
She closed the door, and thought none of them saw her leave.
Guided by a flare of red smoke, the helicopter put down in a field close to a burned-out farmhouse. The thrash of its rotors lifted up what was left of the farmhouse's roof and tossed aside the corrugated-iron sheets, like paper flaking over a bonfire.
A reception committee of men and officers stared at Bikov and his escort as they jumped down from the hatch. He looked around him. A half-dozen armoured personnel carriers were drawn up in a line surrounded by the treadmarks of their tyres where they had manoeuvred to make the line. They were blank and expressionless faces, the faces of men who fought a war they had realized long ago lacked the possibility of victory. He understood why the helicopter could not take him further forward — the cloud ceiling was low. Only the base of the hills was visible to the south. The snow fell lightly on his shoulders as he walked forward to meet the men who waited for him. If it had not been for the officer and the men who were captured and held in the high ground that was covered by the cloud's fall, and if it had not been for the patrol of Black Berets who were hidden in a cave with their prisoners and, most importantly, if it had not been for the reputation that travelled fast ahead of Yuri Bikov, then no man sane or lunatic — would have gone up into the killing ground around the Argun gorge.
He was briefed. He took a mug of lukewarm coffee, looked at the maps on which the snow fell, and said little. The four men charged with the immediate protection of his life were from the Vympel unit, controlled by Directorate V of the FSB's Special Operations Centre, and they said less. While he went over the maps and the pitifully small amount of recent intelligence, they checked their gear, weapons and medical equipment. Bikov had not been given their names, and if he'd asked for them he would not have been told. He couldn't read their faces because they had masks over them through which only their eyes were revealed, but their breath came through the cotton and he sensed that they, too, thought this an idiot place to be. But he trusted them, as he had to. He was put with his men in the third of the six carriers, and he fastened the studs of the bulletproof jacket, felt the warmth of its weight, and was given a helmet, which he wore.
They had driven for eighty-seven minutes, were already high in the dense clouds and on a hairpin track of slushy ice and snow, when the first RPG-7 shell hit the carrier in front.