Target 5 (5 page)

Winthrop's heart skipped a beat but he maintained the
same pace. It had happened - the unforeseen factor which
could ruin everything, make the contact impossible. A fresh fear tingled Winthrop's nerves - was the policeman follow
ing Gorov? It didn't seem likely: it was too open a tag. Get a
grip on yourself, man! Helsinki, Finland - safety - is only a
hundred miles away. It wasn't a thought that gave Harvey
Winthrop any comfort as he walked steadily towards the seaman approaching him: he might just as well be in Kiev,
in the heart of the Ukraine where Gorov had just come from
after meeting his brother, Michael.

It was getting darker every minute. The seaman came closer, trailed by the policeman who wore a dark blue greatcoat and kept an even distance of fifty yards behind the seaman. Was this another coincidence - that the policeman was maintaining exactly the same walking pace as Peter Gorov? If this was Gorov - Winthrop still couldn't see the button. He could see the red band on the policeman's peaked cap but he couldn't see Gorov's goddamned button. The seaman, less than thirty years old, was staring straight ahead and Winthrop fancied he saw strain in the stiffened jaw muscles. The poor devil must be close to screaming point: he hadn't been trained for this kind of tension. Then Winthrop saw the lighter-coloured button at the top of the coat.

•
Winthrop slipped on the ice in front of the Lenin statue,
slipped while the seaman was only feet away with the police
man still fifty yards to his rear. As the American fell the
coloured catalogue dropped to the ground and an illustration of a Rubens painting stood out on the darkened snow
like a bloodstain. The catalogue was his positive identifica
tion. In the most natural way the seaman
paused while
Winthrop was trying to get back on his feet and spoke
swiftly and softly in Russian.

'He is coming out on 20 February
...
to the American research base Target Number Five
...
20 February ...' He
repeated the date in an even lower tone and Winthrop knew
he was terrified about two things - that the American might
not have heard the vital date, that the policeman might
overhear him.

Winthrop was on his feet now, brushing snow from his coat. The seaman shrugged his shoulders as though people
were always slipping in this weather and continued through
the park towards the Nevsky Prospekt and the docks be
yond. Winthrop picked up his catalogue, tried to walk,
limped badly, then leaned against the railings round the statue. The policeman reached Winthrop and asked his question in Russian. 'Can you walk? Have you far to go?'

'I'm OK. I reckon I twisted my ankle a bit - but I'm
OK.' Winthrop had carefully replied in English - no one
knew that he understood any Russian, no one except Gorov who was already
outside the park. The policeman stared at him without understanding as Winthrop smiled painfully -he really had twisted his ankle. 'I'm from the Europa Hotel,' Winthrop went on, anxious to get rid of the man. He waved a hand. 'Not far to go.' He smiled again and began walking slowly back the way he had come.

Winthrop limped painfully through the park, really wor
ried now about slipping. He simply had to make it back to the hotel, and even in his pain the American's brain was
working. Maybe this twisted ankle could be used to get him
out of Russia.

Winthrop was due to leave for Helsinki the day after
tomorrow - on the early Sunday morning flight. But that
was the day Michael Gorov was starting his run for
Target-5. The Soviet authorities knew his exit date, knew
that he was in Leningrad to view the wonderful collection of
Rubens paintings in the Hermitage in his capacity as a
writer on art, so normally they might think his early de
parture strange. The genuinely-sprained ankle gave him his reason for catching Saturday's Finnair flight to Helsinki -
then the signal could be sent to Dawes in Washington a day
before Gorov fled from North Pole 17.

As Winthrop limped out on to the Nevsky Prospekt it began to snow. He observed the situation along the street automatically, noticed that the leather-jacketed youth was still arguing with his red-haired girl. They must be in love,
he thought ironically. No traffic was coming. He still hadn't
glanced back to see if the policeman was following. He stepped off the kerb.

It was probably the fresh fall of snow which caused it to happen. The leather-jacketed youth must have been frozen and the snow broke up the argument. He climbed in behind
the wheel of his car and the red-haired girl got into the front
passenger seat beside him. The youth switched on the ig
nition, gunned the motor, pulled away from the kerb with an
exhaust burst like a bomb detonating, accelerated, then remembered to switch on his lights.

Even then Winthrop might have jumped clear had he
been faking the limp, but the car was screaming towards
him as the lights flashed on, blinding him. In the headlight
glare Winthrop's limping figure hurtled towards the car,
filled the windscreen, then the radiator lifted him and hurled
him a dozen yards. He crashed down on the kerb with the impact of a man falling from a great height. He was dead
before the car swept away round a corner as a woman on the
sidewalk began screaming.

A hundred yards further down Nevsky Prospekt the sea
man, Gorov, had stopped to cross the avenue. He saw
Winthrop limping over the highway, saw the car strike him,
saw the body curving through the air before it dropped and
he knew that the American was dead. He crossed the avenue
and went on towards the docks where the trawler
Girolog
was waiting to depart in three hours.

Gorov walked like a man in a dream, hardly able to grasp
what had just happened. It was a total
disaster: the message would never get through to Washington and now there was
no way of warning his brother. Michael would start out
across the ice and the Americans wouldn't know he was coming. Crushed, Gorov walked on through the snow, his feet leading him along the familiar route. God, what could
he do?

Saturday, 19 February

It was eight o'clock on Saturday morning inside the Lenin
grad headquarters of the Special Security Service.

'This American, Winthrop, who was killed on the Nevsky
yesterday - I smell something funny about him ...'

The Locomotive - this was the nickname they used in
Leningrad for Colonel Igor Papanin, chief of Special
Security for the Arctic Military Zone. The dictionary
definition of the word is'... having power... not stationary ... constantly travelling ...' It is as good a description as
any of Col Papanin. For many the word suggests a huge
engine dragging hundreds of people behind it at speed - and
this also is a good description of the Siberian.

'Get me a full report, Kramer! Bring in that damned
Intourist nursemaid, Vollin, or whatever her name is! Bring
in the policeman who saw it happen. Find any other witnesses and parade them here by noon. I'll question them
myself!'

Strictly speaking, the headquarters of the Special Security
Service for the Arctic should have been at the port of
Murmansk, but when Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary,
appointed Papanin to the post he ordered that the head
quarters must be in Leningrad. And this was a matter of power, too.

Like Hamburg in Germany, like Quebec in Canada,
Leningrad is a maverick city. It was in Leningrad that
Communism was born when the cruiser
Aurora
fired the gun
which signalled revolution. It was to Leningrad that Stalin, fearing the city's independence, sent his most trusted op
pressor, Kirov - and Kirov died from an assassin's bullet. So
Brezhnev sent Papanin to Leningrad.

'And, Kramer, contact the airport where Winthrop came
in. They will have made a note of this man's arrival. Did he
come in alone - that's what I want to know. By noon!'

Unlike Kirov, the bloody-minded citizens of Leningrad didn't try to shoot Papanin - they nicknamed him the Locomotive instead. A familiar figure striding down the Nevsky Prospekt, no Russian could miss him in the densest crowd - Papanin towered above the crowd. Six foot four tall, wide-shouldered, heavily-built, his large Siberian head was shaved almost bald and he had a mouth as wide as a carp's. And when he raised his drill-sergeant's voice they swore you could hear him in Murmansk.

'Get down to police headquarters and fetch me Win
throp's personal possessions, Kramer. Go yourself! An
American tourist in Leningrad in February? I tell you,
Kramer, I smell stinking fish ...'

Walther Kramer, forty-five years old, a short, stout Communist Bait from Lithuania who moved with the agility and
silence of a cat, didn't believe a word of it. As Papanin's
assistant he had a certain latitude in talking to his chief, a
latitude about as wide as the edge of a razor blade. He
voiced his disbelief cautiously.

'There's no evidence that this American was anything but
what his passport says ...'

'Haven't you gone yet?'

As the Bait left the second-floor room Papanin stood up and went over to the window, then he took out a pocket chess set from his jacket and stared at it. The window a foot from his smooth-skinned, hard-boned face was rimmed with frost as he studied the tiny board. At eight in the morning it was still dark outside and he could hear below the shuffle of footsteps on the cobbled street as people hurried to work. An ancient green-tiled stove he had recently lit stood in a corner behind him and its warmth hadn't yet penetrated the chilled room. Only one wall away the most modern American teleprinter was chattering non-stop, but Papanin warmed himself with a stove as old as the revolution itself.

It was the Jewish problem which had aroused Papanin's
suspicion of Winthrop, and the Jewish problem was another
reason why Leonid Brezhnev was glad he had put Papanin inside Leningrad. On top of all his other duties it was now Papanin's responsibility to find out how finance was being
smuggled in to help Jews emigrate to Israel.

As he stared at the chess board Papanin grunted to punctuate his thoughts. Winthrop could have been a courier, a contact man with the Jewish underground, so Winthrop -even though he was dead - was going to be investigated up to his eye teeth. Literally. The Siberian had already ordered an intimate examination of the naked corpse. He frowned, decided on his move, shifted a pawn. He was sure he was right: there was something very odd indeed about Mr Harvey J. Winthrop.

At eight o'clock on Saturday morning Papanin still had
no idea that he was engaged in a race against time - to solve
the Winthrop mystery before Michael Gorov fled from North Pole 17 at midnight on Sunday.

In Washington it was still only midnight, Friday. Beaumont was still inside the sleeping-car aboard the Florida
Express. At the Soviet base North Pole 17 it was four in the morning and Michael Gorov had only recently arrived from
Murmansk.

Michael Gorov, forty years old, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and the Soviet Union's most distinguished oceanographer, was almost ill with the strain, sick with the tension of waiting, of counting away the hours to Sunday.

At four in the morning he stood in the moonlight at the edge of the recently-swept airstrip which bisected the ice
island, North Pole 17. He was very carefully gazing towards
the east, not to the west where the American research base,
Target-5, lay twenty-five miles away. Beyond the island the
tumbled pack glittered in the moonlight like a vast endless
heap of frosted glass, smashed frosted glass. Behind him lay
the huts which formed the base, their flat roofs deep with
snow. It was from that direction that he heard the footsteps
coining, the steps of Nikolai Marov, the security man. Marov
came close, stopped and watched the stooped back of the
oceanographer. 'Are you feeling all right, Academician
Gorov?' he inquired.