Target Page 2

  The earliest satellite pictures had made it possible for a map to be drawn showing almost to the meter the size and the position of the installation, so Edgar Williams estimated he couldn’t be more than a mile away. Maybe two at the most.

  He knew he had not been the first sent in, so it was logical to deduce that the others had been seized and probably killed. He had proceeded very carefully, sacrificing speed for caution, aware of the importance of the mission and determined to succeed. The nearer he got, the more difficult it had become. The jungle petered out into scrubland and the scrubland gave way to savannah; the previous night he had had to retreat to the protection of trees and undergrowth.

  He was awake early, waiting for the first light of dawn, gauging it the best time to move. Through the field-glasses he could see the observation towers. His training had begun with a Green Beret attachment in Vietnam and so he was an acknowledged expert in jungle movement. If he attempted to approach through the grassland, he would leave the wake of an ocean liner. Which meant that he had to find a path. This took him an hour, time well spent, because when he finally located a trail it was clearly one created not by humans, but by animals. He started out cautiously, in the initial stages risking his head above the brushline to check that he was not leaving any indication of his progress.

  The tortoise shell came first, and had he not by now been travelling at a crouch he might have missed its significance, dismissing it as nothing more than the skeleton of a chelonian. But he was almost on all fours, with his face comparatively close to the ground, so he saw the spike protruding from where the reptile’s head would have been. It would be poisoned, he knew, recognizing the witchcraft symbol; he had been briefed very fully by African experts before leaving Washington. Cautiously turning it over with the tip of his knife, he saw that it had been carefully stuffed with unguents and red seeds. One side of the shell was marked with white, the other with red. Part of Williams’ equipment was a radio fitted with a transmission device, enabling him to send messages at least thirty times the speed of normal relay, thus reducing the risk of detection by any listening device. He described his findings, unknowingly initiating a later operation, then depressed the despatch button, clearing the information in less than thirty seconds.

  Over the next half mile, he identified three more shells, one with the white and red covering turned upwards, so that even if he had been walking upright he would have seen it. Soon afterwards he came upon the hyena figure, roughly fashioned from clay and with the feet inverted in the usual manner of the occult throughout Africa. For a man who had been schooled in Vietnam, where ground sensors had been made in the form of grass stalks as early as 1972, it was an almost inconceivable mistake for Williams not to recognize them as easily as he had done the witchcraft talismen, but then he had existed for a week with little more than three hours’ sleep a night, his nerves were tense with anticipation as he grew closer to the objective and the muloi figures of the tortoise and the hyena had actually lulled him away from any thoughts of scientific detection.

  Their approach was very quiet — much better than his. But then they were Africans and used to the savannah. He was aware of them only when they wanted him to know of their presence and when they emerged he reacted well, pretending that he was stooping to recover a dropped water-bottle and greeting them in French, knowing it to be the second language of the country, and confident that their ability to speak it would be insufficient for them to detect any fault in accent or pronunciation.

  “Observation des oiseaux,” he said. He carried papers stating that he was an ornithologist attached to the World Wild Life authority; they also provided, for any casual examination, an explanation for the cameras, binoculars and even the radio he carried.

  There was no response. At least twenty Africans were grouped around him, their faces devoid of any expression.

  “L’oiseau,” he tried again, as if he imagined they had misunderstood. “Je suis un observateur scientifique.”

  The blow came not from the point of the spear but the shaft, so that the wind was driven from him and he doubled up, gasping with pain and surprise.

  Intense though the agony was, he still managed to depress the despatch button and transmit the account of the latest witchcraft symbols. He operated the emergency switch, relaying a repeating signal from which Langley would know he had been identified, seconds before the second blow, across the back of his head this time, sent him into the blackness of unconsciousness.

  His first impression, on recovery, was of skin irritation, and he realized that there were ants and other insects covering him. He tried to shift, to dislodge them, and became aware that he was tethered to the ground, spread-eagled between four stakes and secured to allow some movement in both his arms and legs but to prevent him from freeing himself.

  Shadows from the savannah grass told him it was already late, perhaps an hour before sundown; he would not have expected to be unconscious for so long. He strained upwards, lifting his head from the ground and shaking it as wildly as he could, trying to unsettle the things crawling and sucking at him; the ants were even exploring his nose and he had to snort to free them from his nostrils.

  Staked out as he was, it was difficult for Williams to obtain any view except that of the increasingly darkening sky, but he forced himself up again, screwing his head around at the sound from behind. An animal stood at the water-hole, statued with the immobility that comes just before flight — squat and tusked. Some kind of pig, he guessed. He was suddenly conscious of the sounds all around him as the jungle stirred with the movement towards the drinking place, and he opened his mouth and screamed a wild, almost insane howl. The pig burst away in immediate fright and he yelled again, knowing it would keep them off for some time. But he would grow tired, Williams knew. And the animals’ thirst would increase, making them braver.

  “Help!” he screamed again, his voice breaking with the beginning of panic, because he knew there was no one to hear him. “For God’s sake help!”

  He twisted again, towards the water. One animal hadn’t been frightened off. It had settled comfortably on its haunches, with the patience of a carrion hunter. It was a hyena, Williams saw. Waiting.

  2

  General Dimitri Petrov was sparsely tall, well over six feet, and fine boned, his features more Western than Slavic. His hair had gone completely white overnight during the horror of the Stalingrad siege, and what had looked unusual in his youth now gave him a courtly, patrician appearance. It was an impression he cultivated. His bachelor apartment within the shadow of the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square was lavishly equipped with a stereo system for his enjoyment of both Russian and Western music. The walls of his study were lined on three sides by classics in French and English, both of which he read fluently, as well as Russian originals.

  He imported French wine for his table and Western cloth for his civilian suits and his uniforms. He preferred the quality. His position accorded him automatic seating at the Bolshoi; he was one of the few in the ruling élite of the Soviet Union who used the privilege for genuine enjoyment rather than for a demonstration of his power.

  Petrov still went regularly to the Bolshoi, despite what had happened with Irena. In fact, not to have gone would have heightened the suspicion among those who opposed him in the Soviet hierarchy. A man constantly involved in secrecy, Petrov knew he had kept their affair discreet, but inevitably there had been rumors. It was fortunate that the opposition to him at that time had not been as concentrated as it was now, so that the innuendo had never grown into a positive accusation that he had assisted in her defection. Poor Irena, thought Petrov. Poor Valentina, too. It had been a bizarre period in Petrov’s ordered, regimented life — a madness. He had loved, passionately, his wife. And loved, with equal passion, Irena. She hadn’t wanted the affair, in the beginning. She had talked of the betrayal of Valentina and hated the lies and the deception — and then, he thought, she had grown to love him as much as he had loved her. r />
  She had been selected as principal dancer for the Bolshoi’s tour of America. Petrov could still remember—and he had to remember, because to have kept newspaper cuttings would have been dangerous — how she had been honored and feted in the West. He could remember, too, the numbed, disbelieving shock of her defection.

  It had been almost six months to the day after Irena had slipped away from the final triumphant performance in California and sought asylum from the American authorities that Valentina, always so bright and so vibrant, had been given a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Six months later she had died.

  Petrov knew that Irena Sinyavsky had not defected because of any ideological doubt. She had fled rather than continue in what they both knew to be an impossible triangle and now they were separated by five thousand miles and two separate cultures.

  In the beginning, when the shock and remorse at Valentina’s death had eased, Petrov had sometimes thought of trying to contact Irena. But he had never done so. Even his position couldn’t have protected her, had she returned. To imagine the controller of the KGB marrying a defector was an absurd, laughable fantasy, as inconceivable as his following her into exile. But he missed her, just as he missed Valentina. He had almost completely reconciled himself. No one else knew of his aching loneliness. Certainly not the critics. They would have liked to have known, of course, because it would have presented an advantage and the opposition within the Politburo were increasingly seeking advantages over him.

  Because his existence depended on such knowledge, Petrov was aware of the criticism, not of the brief, insoluble tangle of his marriage, but of his life-style. It was not difficult to appreciate their misunderstanding. His grandfather had been a nobleman attached to the court of Nicholas II, with estates at St. Petersburg and Moscow and Perm. It was simpler for them to believe that the way he lived represented nostalgia for the past, rather than to remember how truly revolutionary his ancestor had actually been.

  Petrov was alert to the dangers of the talk about him, but not frightened by it. Providing he remained efficient — and he knew himself to be overwhelmingly efficient — then it could only be malicious gossip. Which was why Africa worried him. He should have had more success by now and the Politburo committee knew it. Petrov hunched forward over his hand-tooled leather desk, sifting yet again through the photographs and satellite pictures, as if another examination might give him the solution. Although he had the appearance and behaviour of an aesthete, Petrov was really a man of calloused emotions and he regarded without any revulsion the shots of the two agents who had apparently starved to death. There was a great deal of animal damage, but it was still possible to see how emaciated they had been allowed to become before being cast into the jungle. Both were practically skeletons. They must have been subjected to severe dehydration to achieve that state in so short a time. Both of them had come from one of the best of his deep penetration units and were agents who should have been able to find food and water in the middle of the Sahara desert, let alone in a jungle teaming with wildlife. He moved on to the photograph and report of Laventri Malinkov. He had personally briefed Malinkov before sending him in, could still recall the controlled confidence of the man and his own subsequent conviction that they were going to penetrate the complex and discover the truth about it.

  “Irretrievable,” the psychiatric report said. Only three days earlier they had isolated the drugs that had taken Malinkov’s reason, before he had been set down for their discovery in N’Djamena. Petrov turned to the photograph. Malinkov gazed out with empty, unfocused eyes, his tongue lolling between slack lips. It could have only been a challenge — or maybe a warning — for them to have reduced the man to that catatonic condition with the sulphur-based drugs that they knew the Soviet psychiatrists used on the dissidents incarcerated in the Serbsky Institute.

  Petrov got up from the desk and wandered over to the window. His office was at the back of the rambling Lub-yanka, on the top floor from which he had an uninspired view of other office blocks. They must be very confident, to behave like this, Petrov thought. Very confident indeed.

  He sighed, reluctantly turning back into the room, aware that it was time for the interview. There was a dressing-room off his main office, with a full-length mirror set into the door. He studied his reflection critically for several moments, adjusting the tilt of his cap and the shoulder setting of his topcoat before descending into the basement garage where his driver was waiting. His car was recognized as an official vehicle and the streets cleared for the short drive to the Kremlin.

  Sergei Litvinov was waiting, as Petrov knew he would be: the man would imagine a psychological superiority. In confirmation of the thought, the man appointed as liaison with the committee gave a shift of impatience, as if Petrov had kept him waiting.

  “Noon,” reminded Petrov, refusing to recognize this stupidity. As he spoke, some distant clock began chiming the hour.

  “Thank you for being on time,” said Litvinov. He was a pince-nezed bureaucrat with thinning hair. There was even the inevitable pen in the pocket of the jacket. Petrov decided that the man would have been a very minor clerk before the revolution.

  “I have been asked to give an account to the Politburo,” announced Litvinov.

  “Yes.”

  “The reports are insufficient.”

  “Yes,” agreed Petrov. “It’s gone very badly.”

  “We didn’t expect that,” confessed Petrov. He knew Litvinov was one of his strongest critics.

  “You underestimated,” corrected the man.

  “Yes,” admitted Petrov.

  “Is there thought to be any West German government involvement in this?”

  “Only indirectly,” said Petrov. “They are aware of the consortium, as they are of the companies which form it; all of them have been involved at some time or other on government defense contracts. But the whole operation appears to be one of private enterprise.”

  “To build a rocket which is available to any country without the research facilities or time to manufacture their own?”

  “As far as our knowledge goes, yes.”

  “How far does our knowledge go?” seized Litvinov.

  “Not far enough, I’m afraid.”

  “I am afraid, too,” said the clerk-like man, turning the expression. “I am very much afraid that we are on the edge of a whirlpool, being drawn in towards the center.”

  Petrov frowned at Litvinov’s verbosity. He wondered why he felt it necessary to talk like that; perhaps it was something that clerks always did, like carrying pens and pencils in their outside pockets.

  “We will discover more,” he said, trying to force some confidence into his voice. He didn’t think he had satisfied the man.

  “Our satellite pictures don’t show the degree of construction on any one rocket?”

  “No,” said Petrov. “But there are several silos.”

  “Will they be spy satellites? Or nuclear?”

  “There appears to be the capacity for both,” said Petrov. “But the difference is really academic — we can’t allow either.”

  “What about the Americans?”

  “They’ve attempted to infiltrate, as we have.”

  “With success?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you can’t be sure?”

  “No,” concluded Petrov. “I can’t be sure.”

  “It would be embarrassing to lose anything more to the Americans, wouldn’t it?” demanded Litvinov.

  Petrov made no immediate response, caught by the ambiguity of what the other man had said. Was it clumsy phrasing? he wondered, or a hint that Litvinov knew about his involvement with Irena? To over-respond would be a mistake, he decided.

  “Yes,” he said. “Very embarrassing.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  He didn’t know, Petrov realized. He felt a tinge of uncertainty, a rare sensation for him.

  “Attempt to discover more from Germany,” he said
. “Until we have better information, there’s little point in risking additional people on the ground.”

  “We’re in a bad position, aren’t we?” pressed Litvinov.

  “At the moment, yes.”

  “I want it improved,” insisted the politician. “I want us to know everything about that installation and I want a guarantee that we are not lagging behind the CIA.”

  “I understand,” said Petrov. He found it difficult to show respect to the other man.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This isn’t going to make a very satisfactory report.” Litvinov stared at Petrov, enjoying the confrontation.

  “We want more,” he demanded. “Much more. We want it quickly and we want it without the degree of failure that you’ve shown so far.”

  Petrov glared back at the challenge, meeting the man’s eye and refusing to be intimidated. “You’ll get it,” he promised.

  “We’d better,” said Litvinov, determined to be the one who ended the exchange.

  Litvinov clearly saw the affair as the opportunity he had been seeking — the oppoicunity to bring about Petrov’s downfall.

  The two Russians sat at the far end of the gay bar, from where they had a good view of the West German Defense Ministry employee they knew to be Otto Bock and Jurgen Beindorf, an eighteen-year-old clerk in an export office. To prevent approaches from anyone else, the Russians feigned interest in each other, one sitting with his arm loosely around the other’s shoulders.

  “Arguing,” said the larger of the two.

  His companion nodded, looking down the bar. “Love never runs smooth,” he said.

  Bock was pulling at Jurgen’s sleeve, but the youth was shrugging him off, moving his body in time to the music from the jukebox. After several moments, the older man got up from his bar stool and confronted the youth, gesturing angrily; Bock appeared embarrassed. Again Jurgen shook his head and Bock paused for a moment as if making a decision, then turned and hurried away.