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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The Source
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“Teeth marks!” Khuv nodded.
“Eh?” Karl mumbled. He had come to see what
Khuv was doing. He spoke through a handful of bloody snow with which he staunched the wounds to his nose and lips. “What? Did you say teeth marks?”
Khuv showed him the rubber. “It's a makeshift gumshield,” he informed. “I'd guess he puts it in at night—to keep from grinding his teeth!”
They got down on their knees beside Simonov where Karl could work on his jaws. The unconscious man groaned and twitched a little but finally succumbed to the pressure of the Russian's huge hands. Karl forced his mouth wide open, said: “There's a pencil torch in my top pocket.” Khuv fumbled the torch out of the other's pocket, shone it into Simonov's mouth. Lower left, at the back, second forward from the wisdom tooth—there it was. A capped tooth at first glance, but on closer inspection a hollow tooth containing a tiny cylinder: Part of the enamel had worn away, showing bright metal underneath.
“Cyanide?” Karl wondered.
“No, they've got a lot better stuff than that these days,” Khuv answered. “Instantaneous, totally painless. We'd better get it out before he wakes up. You never know, he might just want to be a hero!”
“Turn his face left-side down on the ground,” Karl grunted. He had put both Simonov's and Boris's guns in a huge pocket; now he took them out and used the butt of Simonov's weapon as a wedge between his jaws. His dead comrade's gun had a barrel that was long and slender. “This is
not
going to hurt me more than it hurts him!” Karl grunted. “I think Boris would like it that I'm using his gun.”
“What?” Khuv almost shouted. “You'd shoot it out? You'll ruin his face and the shock might kill him!”
“I would
love
to shoot it out,” Karl answered, “but that isn't my intention.” He poised the heel of his free hand over the weapon's butt.
Khuv looked away. This part of it was for such as Karl. Khuv liked to think he stood a little above sheer
animal brutality. He looked out over the rim of the ridge, gritted his own teeth in a sort of morbid empathy as he heard Karl's hammer hand come down with a smack on the butt of the gun. And:
“There!” said Karl with some satisfaction. “Done!” In fact he'd got two teeth, whole, the one with the cylinder and its neighbour. Now he used a grimy finger to hook them out of Simonov's bloody mouth. “All done,” Karl said again, “and I didn't break the cylinder. See, the cap's still secure on the top. He was just about to wake up, I think, but that bit of additional pain should keep him under.”
“Well done,” said Khuv with a small shudder. “Pack some snow in his mouth—but not too much!” He inclined his head, added, “Here they come.”
Dim, artificial light washed up from the gorge like the pulse of a far false dawn. It brightened rapidly. With it came the slicing
whup, whup, whup,
of a helicopter's rotors …
 
Jazz Simmons was falling, falling, falling. He'd been on top of a mountain and had somehow fallen off. It was a very high mountain and it was taking him a long time to hit the bottom. Indeed, he'd been falling for so long that the motion now seemed like floating. Floating in air, frog-shaped, free-falling like an expert parachutist waiting for the right moment to open his chute. Except Jazz had no chute. Also, he must have hit his face on something as he fell, for his mouth was full of blood.
Nausea and vomiting woke him up from nightmare to nightmarish reality. He
was
falling! In the next moment, remembering everything, the thought flashed through his mind:
God! They've tossed me into the ravine!
But he wasn't falling, only floating. At least that part of his dream was real. And now as his brain got in gear and shock receded a little, so he felt the tight grip of his
harness and the down-draft of the helicopter's great fan overhead. He craned his neck and twisted his body, and somehow managed to look up. Way up there a chopper, its spotlights probing the depths of the ravine, but directly overhead …
Directly overhead a dead man twirled slowly on a second line, a hook through his belt, his arms and legs loosely dangling. His dead eyes were open and each time he came round they stared into Jazz's eyes. From the splashes of crimson on his white parka Jazz supposed it was the man he'd shot.
Then—
Shock returned with a vengeance, weightlessness and vertigo and cold, blasting air and noise combining to put him down a second time. The last thing he remembered as he fell into another ravine, the night black pit of merciful oblivion, was to wonder why his mouth was full of blood and what had happened to his teeth.
Mere moments after he'd passed out the helicopter lowered him to the flat top of the upper dam wall and yellow-jacketted men removed him and his harness complete from his hook. They took Boris Dudko down, too, a heroic son of Mother Russia. After that … their handling of Jazz Simmons wasn't too gentle, but he neither knew nor cared.
Nor did he know that he was about to experience the dream of every intelligence boss in the western world: he was about to be taken inside the Perchorsk Projekt.
Getting out again would be a different thing entirely …
Debrief
THOUGH LENGTHY, THE DEBRIEFING WAS THE VERY GENTLEST affair, nothing nearly so cold and clinical as Simmons had imagined this sort of interrogation would be. Of course, in his case it had to be gentle, for he'd been close to death when his friends had smuggled him out of the USSR. That had been several weeks ago—or so they told him—and it seemed he was a bit of a mess even now.
Gentle, yes, but on occasion irritating, too. Especially the way his Debriefing Officer had insisted on calling him “Mike,” when he must surely have known that Simmons had only ever answered to Michael or Jazz—and in Russia, of course, to Mikhail. But that was a very small grievance compared to his freedom and the fact that he was still alive.
Of his time as a prisoner he'd remembered very little, virtually nothing. Security suspected he'd been brainwashed, told to forget, but in any case they hadn't wasted too much time on that side of it; the important thing had been his work, what he'd achieved. Perhaps at one time the Reds had intended to keep him, maybe even try to reprogramme him as a double agent. But then they'd changed their minds, ditched him, tossed his drugged, battered body into the outlet basin under
the dam. He'd been picked up five miles down-river from Perchorsk, floating on his back in calm waters but gradually drifting toward falls which must surely have killed him. If that had happened … nothing remarkable about it: a logger and spare-time prospector, one Mikhail Simonov, falls in a river, is exhausted by the cold and drowns. An accident which could happen to anyone; he wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last. The West could make up its own mind about the truth of it, if they ever found out about it at all.
But Simmons hadn't drowned; “sympathetic” people had been out looking for him ever since his failure to return to the logging camp; they'd found him, cared for him, given him into the hands of agents who'd got him out through an escape route tried and true. And Jazz himself remembering only the scantiest details of it, brief, blurry snatches from the few occasions when he'd been conscious. A lucky man. Indeed a
very
lucky man …
His days were uncomplicated during that long period of recuperation. Uncomfortable but uncomplicated. He would wake up to slowly increasing pain, a pain which seemed to stem from his very veins as much as from any identifiable limb or organ. Immobile, his lower half encased and (he suspected) in some sort of traction, his left arm splinted and swathed and his head similarly wrapped, waking up was like moving from some darkly surreal land to an equally weird world of grey shadows and soft external movements.
Light came in through the bandages, but it was like trying to see through inches of snow or a heavily frosted window. His entire face had been very badly bruised, apparently, but the doctors had managed to save his eyes. Now he must rest them, and the rest of his body, too. Simmons had never been vain; he didn't ask about his face. But he did wonder about it. That was only natural.
His dreams disturbed him most, those dreams he
could never quite remember, except that they were deeply troubled and full of anxiety and accusation. He would worry about them and puzzle over them in the period between waking and the pain starting, but after that his only concern would be the pain. At least they'd given him a button he could press to let them know he was awake. “Them”: the angels of this peculiar hell on earth, his doctor and his Debriefing Officer.
They would come, shadows through the snow of his bandages; the doctor would feel his pulse (never more than that) and cluck like a worried hen; the Debriefing Officer would say: “Easy now, Mike, easy!” And in would go the needle. It didn't put him out, just took away the pain and made it easy to talk. He talked not only because the DO wanted him to and because he knew he must, but also out of sheer gratitude. That's how bad the pain could get.
He'd been told this much: that while he was badly banged about he wasn't beyond repair. There'd been some surgery and more to come, but the worst of it was over. The pain-killer they'd used had been highly addictive and now they had to wean him off it, but his dosage was coming down and soon he'd be on pills alone, by which time the pain wouldn't be nearly so bad. Meanwhile the DO had to get everything he knew—every last iota of information—out of him, and he had to be sure he was getting the truth. The “damned Johnnie-Red” might have inserted stuff in there that wasn't real, “don'tcha know.” With the methods they used these days they could alter a man's memory, his entire perception of things, “the damned boundahs!” Jazz hadn't known there were people who still talked like that.
And so, to ensure they were digging out the “gen stuff,” they'd started right back at the beginning before Simmons had ever been recruited by the Secret Service, indeed before he'd been born …
 
 
Simonov hadn't been such a hard name to adopt, for it was his father's name. Back in the mid-1950s Sergei Simonov had defected to the West in Canada. He had been a trainer with a team of up-and-coming young Soviet skaters. A disciplinarian and cool head on the ice, off it he'd been quick-tempered and given to hasty and ill-considered decisions. Afterwards, in calmer mood, he'd often enough change his mind, but there are some things you can't easily undo. Defection is one of them.
Sergei's love affair with a Canadian ice-star fizzled out and he found himself stranded. There had been offers of work in America, however, and total freedom was still something of a heady experience. Coaching an ice-troupe in New York, he met Elizabeth Fallon, a British journalist in the USA on assignment, and they fell in love. They had a whirlwind engagement and got married; she arranged work for him in London; Michael J. Simmons had been born in Hampstead nine months to the day after the first meeting of his parents in a wild Serbian restaurant in Greenwich Village.
Seven years later on the 29th October 1962, a day or so after Khruschev had backed out of Cuba, Sergei walked into the Russian embassy and didn't come back out. At least, not when anyone was watching. His elderly parents had been writing to him from a village just outside Moscow, where they'd been having less than a grand time of it; Sergei had been in a mood of depression over his marriage, which had been coming apart for some time; his belated double-defection was another typically hasty decision to go home and see what could be recovered from the wreckage. Elizabeth Simmons (she had always insisted on the English version of the name) said, “good riddance, and I hope they send him where there's plenty of ice!” And it later turned out that “they” did just that. In the autumn of 1964, the week before Jazz's ninth birthday, his mother got word from the government department responsible that Sergei Simonov had been shot dead after killing a
guard during an attempted escape from a prison labour camp near Tura on the Siberian Tunguska.
She cried a few tears, for the good times, and then got on with it. Jazz, on the other hand …
Jazz had loved his father very much. That dark, handsome man who used to speak to him alternately in two languages, who taught him to skate and ski even as a small child, and spoke so vividly of his vast homeland as to seed in him a deep-rooted and abiding interest in all things Russian—an interest which had lasted even to this day. He had spoken bitterly of the injustices of the system, too, but that had been in the main beyond Jazz's youthful understanding. Now, however, at the age of only nine years, his father's words had come back to him, had assumed real importance and significance in his mind, conflicting with his thirst for knowledge. The father Jazz had loved and always known would return was dead, and the Russia Sergei Simonov had loved was his murderer. From that time forward Jazz's interest became centered not so much in the sweeping grandeur and the peoples of his father's homeland as in its oppressions.
Jazz had attended a private school since before he was five and his special subject, requiring private tuition as well as his father's constant guidance, was of course Russian. By the time he was twelve it was obvious that he had a linguist's grasp of the language, which proved to be the case when he obtained almost 100 per cent marks in a specially set examination. He attended university and at seventeen held a first in Russian; by the time he was twenty he'd added to this a second in Mathematics, a subject towards which his brilliantly clear mind had always leaned. Only a year later his mother died from leukemia; uninterested in an academic career, he took a job as an industrial interpreter/ translator. After that all of his spare time was spent in winter sports, which he would pursue world-wide wherever the climate and whenever the financial situation
permitted. There were several girlfriends, none of them serious affairs.
Then, holidaying in the Harz when he was twenty-three, Jazz had met a British Army Major on a Winter Warfare course. This new friend was a member of the Intelligence Corps serving in BAOR and the meeting proved to be a big turning point. A year later Jazz was in Berlin as an NCO of that same low-profile corps. But Berlin and BRIXMIS hadn't suited him, and by then the Secret Service had its eye on him anyway and didn't want him over-exposed; he was field agent material and should now start to learn the real tricks of the trade. His demobilization was arranged, as would be the next six years of his life, all greatly to Michael J. Simmons's satisfaction.
From then on it had been training, and training, and more training. He trained in surveillance, close protection, escape and evasion, winter warfare, survival, weapons handling (up to marksman), demolition and unarmed combat. The only thing they couldn't give him was experience …
Jazz had been all set to fly to Moscow as a “diplomatic interpreter” when PiII came up, or “went down” as the CIA had it. His original task was reassigned (it had in any case been little more than a training exercise) and he was given Operation Pill. The Service had been setting it up ever since the Soviets got the Perchorsk Projekt underway, and “local services” were all well established and in full working order. Jazz was briefed from head to heels, went out to Moscow 2nd Class as Henry Parsons, an ordinary tourist, got issued with his Russian ID within an hour of de-planing. An intelligence agent already in the USSR would assume his Parsons identity (along with his passport, etc.) and use his return flight back to London. “One in, one out, and shake it all about!” as Jazz's Chief Briefing Officer had explained. “Like the hokey-cokey except there are no left feet, only right ones.”
Jazz hadn't known much about the Moscow end of the network; he'd been deliberately kept in the dark on that, just in case. Ditto for the Magnitogorsk set-up, which had a line on shipments by rail destined for the Perchorsk Projekt. He hadn't quite been able to figure out why his DO should feel peeved that he didn't know more about these things. That was definitely the impression that came over: that even though he'd given as much detail as he could, still the DO would have liked him to have known more. But the simple fact was that all of that stuff had been on a need-to-know basis, and Jazz hadn't needed to know.
As for “local services”: he'd known all about them! And during the many debriefing sessions, Jazz had told everything.
Back in the 1950s Khruschev had broken up a politically suspect pocket of Ukranian Jewish peasants and “resettled” them from an area near Kiev to the eastern slopes and valleys of the upper Urals. Maybe he'd hoped the cold would kill them off. There they'd been allocated land and a work quota. The business: logging, and in winter trapping, all generally to be carried out under the supervision and guidance of old-guard “Komsomol” officials from the West Siberian oil and natural gas fields. It wasn't quite a forced labour camp, but in the beginning it wasn't a hell of a lot better.
But the Ukranian dissidents were a funny lot; they stuck it out, filled their quotas, made a going concern of it and actually settled the district. Their success, coupled with the rapid expansion of the far more important oil and natural gas industries in the east, made strict control of the Jewish settlements unwieldy, even unnecessary. Their overseers had better things to do. It could plainly be seen how a previously untamed region was now productive of timber and skins, making good use of natural assets and giving work to the people; Khruschev's ploy had apparently worked, making good conscientious Russian citizens from what had been an
idle pack of troublesome political pariahs. He should have been so lucky in other fields! Anyway, visits from controlling officialdom fell off in direct proportion to the scheme's success.
In fact, all the Jews had wanted was a little peace to follow their own whims and ways of life. The climate might change but they never would. There in their logging camps at the foot of the mountains they were now more or less content. At least they were not pestered and there was always more than enough left over to make the living good. Hard but good. They had all the timber they needed to build with in the summers and burn through the winters, meat aplenty, all the vegetables they could grow for themselves, even a growing fund of roubles from forbidden trading in furs. There was a little gold in the streams, for which they prospected and panned, occasionally with some success; the hunting and fishing were good, flexible work rosters ensured a fair distribution of labour, and everyone had a share in what was available of “prosperity” and the good things of life. Even the cold worked in their favour: it kept busybodies out and interference to a minimum.

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