Mazurka (58 page)

“With the Baits playing the fools,” Pagan said.

“That's your choice of description, Frank.”

“When you say
ourselves
, who are you referring to?”

The fat man fell silent now. Pagan knew his question was going to go unanswered. The fat man was something within something within something, connected to the US government, but tucked away, and well-hidden, and finally beyond the pale of the federal bureaucracy.

“And this plane?”

“It's going to cause a commotion, Frank. And we're gambling that it will bring down the present Politburo – leaving a nice empty space for some reliable old faces.”

“If I might use an Americanism – the whole thing sucks.”

“Pray tell.”

“It's a volatile plan. You don't know the precise consequences of it. If you attack the Soviet Union, if a NATO plane violates Soviet airspace and drops a bomb – how can you tell there won't be retaliation of some kind? Even if that doesn't happen, I don't like the idea of people needlessly dying, which I imagine will happen if this plane flies.”

“Needlessly, Frank?”

“I don't want to argue with you. Your outlook's unreal. The world changes, and you can't stop it. You can't interfere.”

“Oh dear,” the fat man said. “I thought you might reach a more balanced judgement than that, which is why I gave you the benefit of this nice little chat. Think again, Frank. I do wish you'd keep in mind the fact that an arthritic Russia is a containable one. Anything else is, well, a little too unpredictable.”

Pagan shook his head. There was nothing in the world so astonishing to him as the compulsion of organisations and fraternities and secret societies that think they can alter history, nothing that reduced him quite so quickly to speechlessness. Partly it was the conceit of it all, the terrible arrogance. Partly it was the desperation of these men, and their obsessions, which lay beyond reason. For Kiss and Romanenko it had been vengeance. For the fat man and his Russian cronies it was nothing less ambitious than trying to preserve a Russia to which they'd become complacently attached for their own reasons. Anything new, anything that might bring about a different Soviet Union, even a progressive one – God help us all – was not remotely acceptable.

“You think you can get away with it?” Pagan asked.

“Get away with it? We can get away with anything. Shuffling paperwork so that a plane can be taken without authority – by a former pilot who's utterly deranged, of course, as all the records will show – that's child's play. Don't worry about us.”

Pagan was quiet a moment. “I don't walk away from here, do I?”

“Frank, really. Step out of my life. I never met you. You never met me. And you never will again. Simple. I love Scotland Yard, and I wouldn't dream of harming one of its people. But I do wish you'd stay a little longer and chat some more with me. I'd like to talk about more pleasant things. London, for example. Tea at the Ritz. Dinner at the Connaught. The South Coast. I have so many fond memories. There's a small town in the West Country, Bideford, and I recall –”

“Some other time,” Pagan said.

The fat man smiled, looked at his watch. Then he shrugged. “Goodbye …” He snapped his fingers in frustration. “Christ, I've already forgotten your name.”

Pagan stepped away from the man. He felt tense, dehydrated. The fat man returned to the big black car, stepped inside along with Blue Eyes. The car pulled away, vanished. Pagan moved back in the direction of the station entrance. Back to the telephones.

But he knew he wasn't going to be allowed. He wasn't going to make it that far. He sensed it. Even the morning air around him was charged suddenly with the electricity of fear. He moved slowly towards the station, passing under the shadows of the building, turning his face from side to side, seeing nothing, but knowing, just
knowing
that somebody was about to prevent him from reaching the phones.

He didn't see the sniper on the roof of the station. He didn't know he was being closely observed through a telescopic lens by a sharpshooter, a former Marine champion, who held a Weatherby auto rifle. Pagan only knew that as he walked towards the entrance he was exposed and vulnerable, but at the same time didn't want to break into a run, he wanted to look totally calm. Halfway towards the station entrance he paused, looked from left to right, saw nothing unusual, nothing concealed in shadows, nobody seated in parked cars. Just the same,
he still knew
.

He kept moving. He didn't see the glint of the rifle as the early sun struck the walnut stock, or the way the sharpshooter took out a pair of dark glasses and pulled them over his eyes. Pagan had to stop because several cars blocked his way into the station. But he didn't think to look up, he was concentrating on the station entrance, the idea of making it as far as the telephones. When the traffic passed, he stepped off the pavement. He had perhaps fifty yards to go. He hurried now for the first time, unaware of the fact he was trapped in the dead centre of a lens, a moving target neatly bisected by crosslines.

And then something, an inexplicable impulse, made him raise his face and look up, and he saw the way the sunlight caught the weapon, although for a second he wasn't absolutely sure of what it was that glinted high above him, and he thought of a bird carrying a piece of silverfoil, or a sliver of broken glass. When he understood what it was he knew the realisation had come a little too late for him.

He barely heard the voice from behind.

“Frank!”

He did the only thing he could think of. He threw himself forward, hearing the noise of a gun, realising it was too loud to have come from the roof, that it originated from a point just behind him. It was followed by a second shot, then a third, and the sound echoed around him. He raised his face and gazed up at the roof, but the gunman was gone, scrambling out of view, leaving behind him only an expensively modified weapon that bore no registration number, no marks of ownership, and no clue to the identity of the person who'd altered the weapon.

Pagan rose slowly to his feet, aware of cars crowding around him, irate drivers, delayed commuters, the screaming of horns. And there, standing alongside her idiotic little car, her Pacer, stood Kristina Vaska, looking very solemn and quite lovely in a pale, tired way, one hand on her hip, the other wrapped loosely around her pistol, a tiny smile on her face – enigmatic, and quite unfamiliar to Pagan, but nevertheless at that moment the most welcome gesture he'd ever received from another human being.

He returned the smile and then he went inside the station and walked towards the telephones.

Moscow

Deputy Minister Tikunov, who hated to admit he was ever wrong about anything, and who thought crow the most disgusting taste a man could carry in his mouth, spoke into the telephone. “It appears that your information is genuine, General. An F-16 was stolen from a NATO base in Norway. It's heading for Russia.”

“Stolen?” Olsky asked.

“That's the official NATO statement. I've just had their Commander on the line from Brussels.”

“Then do what you have to do,” Olsky said. “But do it quickly.”

Tikunov flicked a switch on a communications console on his desk. He ordered a top priority check of every radar installation between Moscow and the Baltic. He also ordered squadrons of MIG-29s and MIG-25 Foxbats to fly immediately on a seek and destroy mission.

21

Saaremma Island, the Baltic

When he saw the F-16 go flying past in the far distance, Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov hurried in the direction of the beach. The falsified maintenance order he'd issued meant that any radar sightings, which would normally have been relayed to his control centre and from there to Moscow, were effectively contained inside the computers under Uvarov's command. Because technicians worked on the computers, the line of communication from Saaremaa Island to Moscow was severed for the hours of their labour. Uvarov had short-circuited the system, and since no sightings could be reported to the Ministry in Moscow, no order could be given to destroy the intruder. Only the Minister, or the Deputy Minister, or somebody authorised by them, could issue such an order.

Uvarov reached the beach and ran towards the stone jetty, looking for the launch. There was no sign of the vessel. Panicked, he raced to the end of the jetty and scanned the water. There was a faint haze rising off the sea. He thought he could still hear the roar of the F-16 as it raced – barely above sea-level – towards the coast, but he couldn't tell since the plane was out of sight.

Where was the damned launch? Uvarov anxiously scanned the water. Nothing. No sight of anything. What if he'd been tricked? What if there was no such vessel? What if Aleksis had been lying all along? Uvarov, so panicked he could barely breathe, peered out into the haze, his eyes stinging from salt spray. He looked back the length of the jetty, seeing the barbed-wire strung around the control centre and the radar dishes that turned ceaselessly, probing the sea and the sky.
Where was the fucking launch?

And then he heard it. He heard it! It appeared through the haze, a small vessel that churned up an enormous wake as it speeded towards the jetty. Uvarov raised his hand, waved impatiently. Hurry, he thought. Dear God, hurry. He glanced back at the control centre once more. There was another sound now, and one he couldn't altogether identify because he was concentrating on the launch, which had cut its engine and was drifting towards the quay.
Hurry, hurry
. Uvarov started down the steps, seeing two figures on board the small green craft. One of them was preparing to toss a rope towards Uvarov, uncoiling it. And then Uvarov felt it, the turbulent passage of air, the breeze that swept his face and ruffled his hair, and he looked upwards, drawn to the great turning blades of the helicopter. The rope came towards him and he clutched it hastily as the launch drifted nearer to him – ten feet, seven, five – dear Christ, he'd have to leap. He braced himself, jumped, clutched the side of the launch and was hauled on board even as the helicopter descended like some predatory creature and the man who appeared in the open doorway of the chopper started firing at the launch with a machine-gun. On and on and on, blitzing the deck of the small craft, a crazy kind of firing that seemed to have no end to it. Uvarov fell, conscious of a wound in his side – a distant awareness, beyond any immediate pain. What he felt more than anything was sadness and regret.

He shut his eyes and even though he didn't see them he experienced the heat of the flames that had begun to billow out of the launch's fuel system, which had caught fire during the machine-gun assault. The launch smoked and smouldered before it finally exploded, sending debris up and up into the salt air.

Tallinn, Estonia

In the middle of the afternoon, the man known as Marcus met three other men, each of them carrying a concealed weapon, outside the Hotel Viru. At the same time another three men assembled near the Tallinn Department Store on Lomonossovi Street. The Viru Hotel, a modern twenty-two storey construction on Viru Square, could be seen from the department store. Marcus and his companions crossed Estonia Boulevard where the afternoon traffic was dense and the pedestrians, swollen by hundreds of tourists, created a slow-moving crowd that made progress along the pavement difficult. Marcus looked once at his watch as he reached the corner of Lomonossovi Street. Thirty minutes.

The three men who had gathered outside the department store were following some yards behind. Marcus had the thought that they all looked suspicious, that anyone observing them would notice that they all carried hidden weapons, but this was the result of his own tension and fear. In fact they looked just like anyone else strolling through the afternoon sunshine under a blue Tallinn sky.

Marcus paused, lit a cigarette, caught the eye of a pretty girl moving past. Her ash-coloured hair, tugged by an ocean breeze, blew playfully up around her cheeks and she pushed it aside in a gesture Marcus found unbearably sweet. In thirty minutes he'd probably be dead. In thirty minutes, simple things, beautiful things like the girl's hand caressing her own hair, would be beyond his experience.

He thought of the girl Erma and the old man Bruno, who were part of a second group forming on Suur-Karja Street, some distance from the old Town Hall. This unit, consisting of twenty people, would enter the Central Post Office and order the clerks to close the doors for the rest of the day. In Latvia and Lithuania similar insurrections were taking place simultaneously. In Riga, groups were scheduled to seize the Post Office on Lenin Street, the Latvian State radio offices, and the TV tower located on one of the islands on the Daugava River. In Vilnius, the targets were the Central Post Office on Lenin Prospekt, the State Television studio, and the railway station. From the post offices in all three cities, telegrams would be sent to a variety of cities in the West – including Stockholm, Paris, London and New York. These messages would be the same in every case – a declaration of Baltic independence, evidenced by this robust resistance, no longer passive, no longer a matter of mere flag-waving, to Soviet occupation – and by the daring flight of a patriot into the heart of Russia itself. A message was being delivered to the world, and it was one of freedom.

Marcus stopped on Lomonossovi Street. He checked his watch again. Synchronisation was important. He would deliver his own message at precisely the same time as the aeroplane launched its attack. There was impressive power in such orchestration. Chaos would convince nobody. Who would respond to a disorganised rabble? If there was to be a general revolt throughout the Baltic countries, those who decided to participate in it had to be convinced that the leaders were proficient as well as patriotic. They had to have confidence in the organisation. Everything had to be done the way Aleksis had planned it, with attention to detail, to timing. Aleksis had once said that revolutions often failed because they weren't punctual, a statement Marcus had thought amusing at the time. Not now …