“Difficult to say without tests,” said the metallurgist. “Look, I’ve got a dinner tonight and my daughter’s wedding tomorrow. Can I run them through some tests on Monday and call you?”
“Monday will do fine,” said Preston. “I’m taking a few days off, actually. I’ll be at home. Can I give you my number in Kensington?”
Dr. Wynne-Evans hurried upstairs, locked the disks in his safe for the night, bade good-bye to Preston, and hurried to his dinner. Preston drove back to London.
While Preston was on the road, the listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire picked up a single squirt from a clandestine transmitter. Menwith got it first, but Brawdy in Wales and Chicksands in Bedfordshire also got a trace and computed the crossbearings. The source was somewhere in the hills north of Sheffield.
When the Sheffield police got there, the spot turned out to be the shoulder of a lonely road between Barnsley and Pontefract. There was no one there.
Later that evening, one of the duty officers at GCHQ Cheltenham accepted a drink in the office of the duty director.
“It’s the same bugger,” the officer said. “He’s carborne and he’s got a good set. He only spent five seconds on the air, and it looks indecipherable. First the Derbyshire Peak District, now the Yorkshire hills. It looks as if he’s somewhere in the north Midlands.”
“Keep after him,” said the director. “We haven’t had a sleeper transmitter go suddenly active in ages. I wonder what he’s saying.”
What Major Valeri Petrofsky had been saying, although transmitted by his operator when he was long gone, was: Courier Two never showed. Inform soonest re arrival substitute.
The first bottle of Akhtamar stood empty on the table, and the second was well broached. Marchenko was flushed, but he could be a two-bottle-a-day man when the mood took him, so he was still well in control.
Karpov, though he seldom drank for pleasure, and even more rarely drank alone, had seasoned his stomach for years on the diplomatic circuit. He had a good head when he needed it. Apart from that, he had forced half a pound of white butter down his throat before leaving Yasyenevo, and though he had nearly gagged on it, the fat had lined his stomach and was now retarding the onset of the alcohol’s effect.
“What are you up to these days, Petya?” he asked, dropping into the diminutive and familiar form of the name.
Marchenko’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”
“Come on, Petya, we go back a long way. Remember when I saved your ass in Afghanistan three years back? You owe me a favor. What’s going on?”
Marchenko remembered. He nodded solemnly. In 1984 he had been heading a big GRU operation against the Muslim rebels up near the Khyber Pass. There was one particularly outstanding guerrilla leader who ran raids into Afghanistan, using as his bases the refugee camps inside Pakistan. Marchenko had rashly sent a snatch-squad over the border to get him. They had run into bad trouble. The pro-Soviet Afghans had been unmasked by the Pathans and had died horribly. The single Russian accompanying them was lucky to survive; the Pathans had handed him to the Pakistani authorities of the North-West Frontier District, hoping for some arms in exchange.
Marchenko had been out on a limb. He had appealed to Karpov, then head of the Illegals Directorate, and Karpov had endangered one of his best undercover Pakistani officers in Islamabad to get the Russian sprung and back over the border. A big international incident then could have broken Marchenko, and he would have joined the long list of Soviet officers whose careers had crashed in that miserable country.
“Yes, all right, I know I owe you, Zhenia, but don’t ask what I’ve been on for the past few weeks. Special assignment, very close to the chest. Top secret—know what I mean?” He tapped the side of his nose with a sausagelike forefinger and nodded solemnly.
Karpov leaned forward and refilled the GRU general’s glass from the third bottle. “Sure, I know, sorry I asked,” he said reassuringly. “Won’t mention it again. Won’t mention the operation again.”
Marchenko waved an admonitory finger. His eyes were blood
shot. He reminded Karpov of a wounded boar in a thicket, his brain dimmed by alcohol instead of pain and blood loss, but dangerous nevertheless. “Not operation ... no operation ... canceled. Sworn to secrecy ... all of us. Very high up ... higher than you could imagine. Don’t mention it again, okay?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, “ said Karpov, filling the glasses again. He was taking advantage of Marchenko’s drunkenness to put more brandy in the GRU man’s glass than in his own, but he was still finding it difficult to focus.
Two hours later, the last of the Akhtamar was a third gone. Marchenko was slumped, chin on chest. Karpov raised his glass in yet another of the endless toasts. “Here’s to oblivion.”
“Oblivion?” Marchenko shook his head in bewilderment. “I’m all right. Drink you FCD bastards under the table anytime. Not oblivious ...”
“No,” corrected Karpov. “Oblivion of the plan. We just forget it, right?”
“Aurora? Right, forget it. Bloody good idea, though.”
They drank. Karpov filled the glasses again. “Damn them all,” he proposed. “Screw Philby ... and the academician.”
Marchenko nodded in agreement, the brandy that had missed his mouth dripping off his jowls.
“Krilov? Asshole. Forget ’em all.”
It was midnight when Karpov staggered to his car. He leaned against a tree, stuck two fingers down his throat, and threw up what he could into the snow. Sucking in gulps of the freezing night air helped, but the drive to his dacha was murder. He made it with a scraped fender and two nasty scares. Ludmilla was still up, in a housecoat, and she put him to bed, terrified that he had actually driven out from Moscow in that condition.
On Saturday morning, John Preston drove down to Tonbridge to pick up his son, Tommy. As usual when his dad collected him from school, the boy was a torrent of words, memories of the term just past, projects for the term yet to come, plans for the holiday about to begin, praise for his best friends and their virtues, scorn for the infamies of those he disliked.