Fire Hawk (44 page)

They climbed two flights of stairs, then passed through an open door into the flat. A long, dark corridor reached into it, half blocked with junk. An old bedstead and a mirror stood propped against the wall. Cardboard boxes full of yellowing papers were stacked from floor to ceiling. Every few paces there was a door, each with an electricity meter beside it.

‘One small room for each family,' she repeated in a whisper.

The third door they came to was open.

‘And here is kitchen.' She pointed in. ‘Wonderful, no?'

Five identical gas cookers. Five small tables cluttered with crockery and cooking utensils. Five small refrigerators that had seen better days. The blue walls were shiny with grease and the place stank of gas.

They reached the end of the corridor and Oksana tapped on the final door. From inside a thin voice asked who it was.

‘Ksucha.'

They heard something heavy being moved aside, then the door opened a crack, restrained by a chain. Recognising his niece, an elderly man in jacket and tie swung the door wide, standing aside to let them in. He eyed Sam with a deep suspicion.

The room was smaller than Sam's bedroom back in Barnes. Two single couches pushed against the right-hand wall were draped with rugs. Above them a dark oil painting hung from a picture rail. Against the opposite wall, bookshelves stood from floor to ceiling. At the far end a window was partly obscured by the short, sinewy figure of a man.

Major Mikhail Pushkin felt consumed by shame. Never had he imagined it could come to this. To be face
to face with an agent of a power that had been his motherland's
enemy
until just a few short years ago . . .

He watched his sister introduce the foreigner to his uncle, knowing that now the moment of truth had come he couldn't go through with bending his knee to this foreigner, begging him to save his life.

‘And this is Misha, my brother. My uncle he speak some English, but Misha not.'

Sam offered Pushkin his hand, but the Major wouldn't take it. Oksana scolded him for his rudeness, blushing with embarrassment.

‘I understand how difficult this must be for you, Major,' Sam told him. ‘I was a naval officer myself for many years.'

He glanced at Oksana and she translated.

Pushkin grunted noncommittally, then strode over to the door and wheeled the armchair barricade back in place. When he turned to face them again, he found he couldn't look them in the eye. His heart and his head were in turmoil. He felt ashamed at the ineptitude he'd demonstrated in the past ten days. It had been pure arrogance to question that spares order after his commander had ordered him to turn a blind eye. And, when the whole issue blew up in his face, it had been cowardly to run away. He blamed himself primarily for his string of misjudgements, but blamed Lena too. If she hadn't been constantly pressuring him, always demanding more . . .

‘Misha?' Oksana stared at him in horror. She could see what was going through his head.

Pushkin met his sister's gaze, searching for a way to explain that he wasn't going through with this after all the arrangements she'd made. And he definitely wasn't. He'd made up his mind. He simply couldn't. Couldn't flee to an alien culture, couldn't struggle with a language
he knew he would never master. Couldn't live as a stranger for the rest of his life.

‘
Nyet
,' he growled.

Oksana knew this pigheaded look. She'd known it all her life. She wanted to scream at him as she had when they were children, but no sound came.

Sam understood enough to realise his worst fears were being confirmed. That his journey would be a waste of bloody time.

‘Shall we sit down?' he suggested, exasperated.

The professor, who'd been watching the silent drama like a scarecrow, unfroze suddenly.

‘Sorry Mister Englishman . . .'

He removed a stack of jigsaw puzzle boxes from the small, square table in the middle of the room, dumping them on one of the few areas of floor that weren't already taken up with junk. The table was covered with a white cloth embroidered in red cross-stitching.

Pushkin remained by the door, his eyes cast down.

‘Like you some tea?' the old man asked his guest.

‘What a good idea,' said Sam. A good old cuppa to break the tension.

The professor whispered to Pushkin to let him out of the room. Sam watched as the Major wheeled the chair stolidly to one side, then shoved it back in place. His face could have been carved from wood, his eyes dull pebbles. A man on the edge. Sam knew well enough how that felt.

Suddenly Oksana let rip with a torrent of Ukrainian. Pushkin folded his arms and ignored the tirade. He'd started to make up his mind a few hours ago, during the sleepless hours before dawn. For much of the earlier part of the night he'd even been considering suicide – shutting himself in the communal kitchen along the corridor and opening the taps on the five cookers. But that, he'd concluded, would be the ultimate act of cowardice, for which Lena and Nadya would never forgive him.

Having excluded death by his own hand, and having ruled out flight to England, a new way out had come to him just as the first birds began to sing in the trees outside the window. He would take his family back to the area where he'd spent his childhood in Ivano-Frankivsk. He had family there still. Uncles, aunts, cousins. They would find a deserted dacha to hide in and they'd live off the soil. They'd change their names. Cease to exist as far as the authorities were concerned. And if the Mafiya ever caught up with them, he would by then have demonstrated beyond any doubt that he had no intention of betraying their secrets. And they would spare him.

‘Misha!'

Her eyes like ice picks, Oksana lashed at him with the flat of her hand. The smack to the face shook Pushkin to the core. His own sister. Never, ever had she dared . . .

‘Please. Friends.' Sam pointed to the table. ‘Let's all sit down and talk it through in a calm, rational—'

‘Huh! You think you can make my brother
rational
?' Oksana snorted.

Sam pulled out one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs and indicated Pushkin should take the other. The Major stepped forward one pace then stopped at attention and began to speak. His voice was a slow monotone.

Sam understood enough to know he was apologising for the trouble he'd caused, but not the reasons why. He needed a translation.

‘Oksana?'

She stood with her hands on her hips, her upper body canted forward.

‘My brother very stupid man,' she spat.

Pushkin stared over Sam's head towards the light.

‘He say he will not talk with you.' Oksana began looking for something heavy. ‘I think I knock some sense into him.' She snatched up one of the professor's bulkier tomes from a stack on the floor.

‘Hang on a minute. Tell your brother to sit down. I want to explain something to him.'

Reluctantly Pushkin pulled out the chair and sat on it. The man's eyes were like brick. This bastard would have been a tough nut to crack if they'd ever gone to war, thought Sam.

‘Major Pushkin. My name is Commander Packer.' He would try the old one-officer-to-another trick. ‘I understand you have information you intended to pass to the British government. I've no idea whether it's important or not, but it
may
be, for reasons you are unaware of. In fact it may be so important that thousands of people could lose their lives if you keep it to yourself.'

He paused for Oksana to translate. Her eyes widened as she spoke.

‘I could be shot for treason for doing what I'm about to do,' Sam declared, exaggerating wildly. ‘Because what I'm going to tell you has been classified ultra top secret by the intelligence agencies of Britain and America. But I'm quite prepared to risk being shot, if it means that
you
understand the importance of my mission here.'

Oksana translated again, her voice breathy and tense. Pushkin was now listening attentively, but with suspicion.

‘Major Pushkin.' Sam leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘In the next few days, the West expects Iraqi terrorists to launch a biological weapons attack. The Iraqis have paid five million dollars to Ukrainian criminals to help them carry out that attack.'

Sam watched the blood drain from Pushkin's face and realised his journey mightn't be wasted after all.

‘Major Pushkin,' he continued, more urgently. ‘You wanted to tell us about a missile I believe. Sold to the Mafiya a few days ago. If that weapon is capable of delivering anthrax, tens of thousands of people may die. Do I make myself clear?'

In Pushkin's mind a light had appeared in the fog.

‘If you have information that can prevent that attack and you decide to keep it to yourself, then
you
would share responsibility for those deaths. Get it?'

Obsessed by his own safety and that of his family, Misha had almost forgotten the dangers to the outside world. And now he knew those dangers were real . . .

His back straightened and his chin rose. Perhaps he
could
take pride in what he had done. He opened his mouth to speak, but then the doubts flooded back. What if the British took his information then refused to help him escape? What if they
did
give him the visas but he was arrested trying to leave Ukraine? For communicating military information to a foreign power the state would kill him just as surely as the Mafiya.

‘
Misha!
' Oksana was on her feet again, her voice a rasp and her right hand balling into a fist.

‘Da.'

He nodded. Yes. He would talk. He told himself that the man sitting opposite him was
not
a NATO vulture here to pick over his country's corpse. It
wasn't
dishonourable what he was doing. The oath of loyalty he'd sworn all those years ago was to a culture, a set of principles, not to a body of corruptible men.

‘We don't have much time with this, Major,' Sam warned.

Pushkin began to talk. He spoke in short, clipped sentences, pausing between them for Oksana to translate. He told his story from the beginning – his job at Magerov, his initial suspicion about the orders for VR-6 spares and the murder of the driver who'd delivered them to a warehouse in Odessa. He explained about the shock of realising that his own commander was involved in the illegal sale, and his nearly fatal decision to take the matter to a higher authority.

As the translations fired out, Sam's pulse quickened.
They
were
onto something. The man was talking about the sort of unmanned air vehicle Dean Burgess had described at the Lodge on Sunday. How big? That was the key issue; some drones were very small. Before he could ask, there was a tapping at the door followed by the uncle's thin voice.

Not now, thought Sam. Fuck the ruddy tea.

Pushkin stood up and wheeled the heavy armchair aside. The old man entered, carrying a wooden tray laid with gilded porcelain cups and saucers and a matching teapot. A tin mug would have done Sam just as well, but he mumbled some compliment about how elegant it all was.

Pushkin took the tray and set it on the table. Then, with due deference to his uncle's age and status, he asked very courteously for the old man to leave them alone again. As the door closed and the armchair slid back in place, Sam finally asked the vital question.

‘This VR-6, Major. What's its range and what could it carry?'

Pushkin quoted what he'd memorised from the technical manuals.

‘He call the VR-6 Yastreyo. In English you say “hawk”, I think.' Oksana translated. ‘He says is like cruise missile but carries a camera. Length seven metres. Short wings.'

‘And how's it fired, this Hawk?'

‘Launched by rocket, he says. From . . .' She hesitated, searching for a word. ‘From
lorry.
Eight wheels.'

Plenty big enough to carry a canister of anthrax in its nose instead of a camera.

‘After launch by rocket there is jet engine,' she went on, fired up by Sam's interest. ‘Some computer in it for guiding. Misha say radio control also. He say it fly maximum ninety kilometres. Fuel for fifteen minutes flight, no more.'

Fast, Sam calculated. Damned fast. He knew exactly what this thing would do. He felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck.

‘So, where did they go, these spares?' he demanded. ‘Who's got them now?'

Pushkin shrugged.

‘You said the Mafiya, Major. But which gang? There's over six hundred in Ukraine.'

Pushkin was clamming up again. The man knew all right, but he wasn't bloody saying. He'd turned to face his sister and was talking earnestly, in Ukrainian this time so Sam wouldn't understand.

Oksana sighed. ‘It like I tell you. He want to know about visa for him and for Lena and for Nadya.'

‘Not now, Ksucha. In a minute.'

‘He say now,' she insisted.

Sam looked from one face to the other. He could see the family likeness. The broad, flat forehead, the blue eyes that looked benign enough but were bloody stubborn when the chips were down.

‘He say he must know if you give visa for all of them.'

‘Yes.' He tapped his fingers together. No more prevarication. He had to commit. ‘Of course they'll get their visas.'

Pushkin whipped three passports from the back pocket of his trousers and laid them on the table.

‘Misha he ask
when
?'

‘When he's told me everything. You'll have to trust me, Ksucha.'

Pushkin's face had set like cement. He'd been cheated once too often. The names Sam sought were the only cards he had left.

‘He ask is it sure they will be allowed to
stay
in England?' Oksana whispered.

‘Yes,' Sam growled. No way he could promise that, but he needed the names.

Pushkin stuck out his chin. For a moment Sam thought he was digging in still further. Demanding an audience with the bloody Queen, perhaps.