Assignment - Black Viking (10 page)

“Thank you,” Durell said dryly. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Talmage pushed up his glasses again. “We have reports from our weather satellites in north-south orb;t of considerable climatic disturbances in the heart of the Ukrainian wheat fields. These occurred at the time of similar disturbances in North Africa, when it was assumed that a vessel of some sort had penetrated the Mediterranean and caused these unusual effects. But there was great damage to the Soviet agricultural output in this—ah, breadbasket —in the Ukraine. Their concern may be genuine.”

Talmage riffled documents in his attache case, spilled a small avalanche on the sterile hospital floor, and stooped to pick them up.

“We do not know, of course, the source of your recent harassment, Mr. Durell. There is nothing out of the ordinary with the young lady, Sigrid, except for her trip to Hong Kong with her father, when he disappeared. As for Olaf Jannsen, he is a complete cipher in our files. But General McFee requests that I remind you, sir, to take all precautions when meeting with and cooperating with the Soviets in the Gulf of Bothnia. You are to remember that our national interest and security problems come first.”

Durell bit off his reply.

“Since your search for the weather control ship,” Talmage added, “will range near the Finnish shore and perhaps take you across Lapland to the Arctic, you may have to use RSFSR resources. Hence, the agreement to work with the Russians. I have their arrangements here.” Talmage shook more papers free. “Please follow the outlined instructions exactly according to the timetable.”

Durell crumpled the papers into his pocket, making Talmage wince. “Do you know,” Durell said quietly, “I have a red tab on my file at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“It means I’m to be eliminated, one way or another. Wiped. Zapped. Killed. Any time. Anywhere.” He paused. “Have they put a moratorium on that detail?”

“Nothing was said—”

“I’ll bet not.” Durell turned to Olsen. “Do I have to go on with this charade, Ole? You know me. You know I prefer to work alone.”

“Afraid you just have to follow orders, Cajun,” Olsen whispered. “McFee stipulated it.”

“So I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t?”

“It looks that way.”

Durell stood up. “Give me the dossiers on these two KGB men I’m to meet at Skansen Park. When is the time for it?”

Talmage looked at his complex Omega. “In one hour and twelve minutes, precisely.”

“I’ll look over the dossiers on the way then.”

“Good luck, Sam,” Olsen said softly.

Durell looked at the ruin of Ole’s face. “I’ll need it.”

THE dossiers had been typed on blue flimsy, on an Olympia typewriter, and followed K Section’s usual form:

CLASSIFIED A A—File Gamma 254/D—INT. 6

SOURCES 56, Dr. 7689, G-6 Epsilon 25_

SUBJECT: SMUROV, Nazar Antonovich No. 07249, Military 098222, Lt. Col. Missile Troops, candidate member Central Committee CPSU, commanded artillery 2nd Ukrainian Front under General Vatutin, recruited by GRU 1946, member Committee International Industrial Exchange, recruited by KGB 1952, posted Budapest, Ankara, Conakry, Mexico City. (See File Gamma 254/D12 history of above rezident intelligence activity. Age: 48

Born peasant stock Armenia, no known secondary education, attended 1st Kiev Artillery School, grad-

uated Frunze Academy and Military Diplomatic Academy.

Status
: Special Group Commander, Blue Section, KGB Directorate. Promoted to Colonel April, 1960. 

Operational Cover
: Expert, CUE (see above) for State Committee for Industrial Research.

Father:
 Unknown.

Mother
: Smurova, Vera Bokarovna, died 1950.

Marital Status
: Two marriages—one divorce, one suicide.

Children
: Unknown.

Party Record
: Komsomol 1935-1938, Party Card No. 02009296.

Awards
: Order of Fatherland War, 1st Class; Order of Red Banner; Order of Red Star, six Medals.

Durell skipped down to the narrowly typed paragraphs below the data to the material under the heading of “Comments and Appreciation.”

“Colonel Nazar Antonovich Smurov is known to have headed Blue Section of KGB. These personnel were once described by Marshall Ivan Tyudenko, Deputy Chief of the Fourth Directorate of the GRU, in a suppressed article in Pravda, as “scum and hooligans, professional murderers and assassins.” Under Smurov, the Blue Section developed a domestic as well as international apparatus for the “elimination of political opposition.” Smurov is believed responsible directly for disappearance and/or death of two members of our Rome Central, Kalborn in Ankara, and Greta Dineson in Copenhagen. His personal life is marked by two marriages (see Gamma 254/D-sub H file) and a weakness for very young women and an Armenian liquor,
starka
. Blunt, aggressive, uncouth. Known to be shunned by co-officers of other departments and barred from Desk Two at KGB HQ. His most common nickname is ‘The Muzhik.’

“See photographs appended.”

The two snapshots were blurred. The one taken from an official pass inscribed
State Committee for Industrial Research
was the better, showing both ears, as required.

One snapshot had a Vienna background, the Rathaus. It showed a blunt, blocky man in a wide-brimmed felt hat and double-breasted overcoat getting out of a black limousine. The profile was fiat and angry. The second snapshot showed a man in a rather old-fashioned bathing suit on a beach—Durell guessed it would be one of the USSR state resorts on the Black Sea, near Odessa— surrounded by three young women in the Russian version of bikinis. The round, dark peasant face was smiling, like that of a frog that has just swallowed an exceptionally tasty fly. The eyes were slitted, squinting into the sun. Despite the smile, the mouth was the cruelest Durell had ever seen.

The official photograph from the ID card was better, but washed out. It was a Tartar’s face. It was the face he had seen dimly through the storm on the trawler off Visby. And this was one of the men he was supposed to work with.

Durell turned to the second dossier. It made him feel a little better, but not much. He knew the second man. Another colonel, but not from KGB’s Blue Section. Vladimir Ivanovich Traskin had a distinguished war record at the Stalingrad front and afterward had taught artillery and missile technique at the Frunze Academy. After the war he had commanded a missile brigade in the Lvov oblast at Shklo Yar, then was posted to the Yauer IRBM firing range with its impact area in Poland. In 1962 he was posted to the nuclear warhead missile troop center in the far North, above the Arctic Circle, at Novaya Zemblya, for six months, and had gone on inspection tours to the other nuclear missile Arctic areas of Franz Josef Island and Vorkuta.

Colonel Traskin was of a different stamp from the Muzhik. He was tall and distinguished, with a professorial air, and a carefully trimmed beard. He was addicted to writing poetry and novellas as a hobby, and had a reputation as a naturalist specializing in Arctic fauna. He was married, with two sons also in the Army, and had kept himself aloof from the bitter internecine official strife among the hierarchy of the CPSU, although he had been a member, after the usual terms in the Komsomol and Party, for seven years. It was somewhat like hitching a lamb to a hyena, Durell thought, for Traskin to be Colonel Smurov’s partner. He knew they would instinctively detest each other; Smurov would have contempt and suspicion for Traskin’s intellect, and Traskin would view with aloof distaste Smurov’s vulgarities. Durell filed away the thought as something that might be useful in the near future.

THE WIND still rubbed like a polishing cloth over the hard blue sky above Stockholm as Durell left the hospital and headed for Skansen Park. He phoned for a taxi, and when it came told the driver to cross Staden Island and turn right beyond the National Museum onto the Strandvagen. Overhead, two Swedish Air Force Dragon jets, the most versatile fighter and attack planes in the West, bore across the blue sky. They turned east across the islands toward the resort of Saltsjobaden, and before they were out of sight they swung north again as if to cover the Finnish island of Aland that lay not far off the coast. The wind whipped away the Dragon contrails in seconds.

Some hardy tourists, advised by the TTF, the Tourist information Bureau, were crowded on a little white steamer doing the “Under the Bridges” routine. The boat splashed and struggled against the wind that make cold-looking whitecaps in the harbor. Durell looked across to where the
Vesper
was due to berth. The schooner hadn’t appeared, and few of the yachts moored there had ventured into the wind.

Skansen Park was a unique outdoor museum on a hilltop overlooking the waterways of Stockholm. It contained restaurants, historical exhibits, a zoo that specialized in Scandinavian fauna such as wolf, bear, hazel hen, reindeer, cranes, and ptarmigan. Near the Norska Museum was the Vasavarvet, where the Royal Flagship Vasa was displayed after having been salvaged from the bottom of the sea, where she had lain in the mud for three hundred years. The wind was bitterly cold. Not many people moved about on the exposed hilltop, although the restaurants and kiosks had a reasonable patronage. Children ran along the paths to the zoo. Durell dismissed his taxi and walked to the shore opposite the Skepps Holmen where the ancient
Vasa
was displayed.

Flags were streaming, for some reason or other, and the wind was busy chewing the bunting to shreds. One of the streamers to Drottningholm, site of the King’s summer palace, moved crabwise against the tide. Durell found a path bordered by tulips and walked under beech trees to a small refreshment kiosk. The tall spars of the ancient sailing warship loomed high above the budding tree limbs.

He bought coffee and looked at his watch. He was precisely on time. A governess with three blond, cherubic children was eating ice cream, there were three tall men in unsmiling conversation, with topcoats whipped about their legs, two girls who immediately eyed Durell speculatively—and no sign of the Muzhik or Colonel Traskin.

He went inside the glass-enclosed booth and sipped his coffee at a table where he could see the path that led down to the Vasa exhibit. The old warship was still being worked on to restore hex former gilded splendor. Workmen had rigged a scaffold on the lee side and were caulking her planks. The sounds of their mallets came as small muffled thuds.

“Herr Durell?”

A small boy stood at his table. Durell nodded. The boy pointed. “Your friends, sir, they wait over there. They sent me to tell you.”

“Thank you.”

He went out into the wind again, down the path where the boy had pointed. A statue of a grotesquely stout woman stared from her reclining position over the choppy channels. Two men stood regarding the modern sculpture with disapproval. It seemed safe enough. No one else was near. But Durell felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather when he met the Muzhik’s eyes.

“So you are the Cajun,” Smurov said thickly. His small cruel eyes regarded Durell as if he were a prime slab of beef in the butcher’s shop. “You came alone?” He spoke English with an atrocious accent.

“According to agreement,” Durell said.

They did not shake hands. Durell did not offer to. Smurov was thick-lipped, and built like a beer barrel, with heavy hands hanging loosely at his sides. Durell was not deceived by the man’s apparent clumsiness. He knew that Smurov could move with lightning speed and massive strength, if necessary. The Muzhik’s eyes gave plain evidence of his hatred. Then he smiled, a grimace like a crocodile’s yawn. “You know my associate, Colonel Vladimir Ivanovich Traskin?”

“I have heard of him, of course.”

The second man was tall, with a sensitive face, intelligent eyes; he looked uneasy beside Smurov. There was tension evident between the two Russians, bearing out Durell’s estimate of their partnership.

Traskin offered his hand. Durell took it. Smurov rasped, “Comrade Colonel Traskin does not know you, Cajun, as I do.”

“And I know you, Muzhik,” Durell said.

Smurov’s face went blank. Traskin spoke in a cultivated Oxford accent. “Gentlemen, we are here together concerned with a problem of common interest. Our orders are to put aside the past and cooperate with each other.” Durell said to Smurov: “Is it possible?”

“I am obedient,” Smurov said. “But I am not a fool. I do not trust you. At any other time and place—” 

“Yes.” Traskin intervened again. “But the situation is different. We are allies, as in the Fatherland War.”

“We shall see,” said Smurov.

“Shall we move out of the wind?” Durell suggested. Traskin said smoothly, “We could drink to our bargain —-and discuss the—ah—weather, yes?”

They fell in on either side of Durell. He did not object. There was a large restaurant, heavily patronized by visitors to the zoo, up the hill near the center of the park. A table waited for them, and Smurov ordered
starka
. Traskin chose
aquavit
and Durell managed to get American bourbon.

“Sk
ál," Durell said.

“Sk
ál
,” Traskin replied, and smiled gently.

Smurov downed his liquor with a greedy gulp, then leaned over the table and breathed onions at Durell. There was a quiet murmur of voices around the smorgasbord table, shafts of sunlight from the high windows that yielded a magnificent view of Stockholm’s Old Town and wide boulevards and modern apartments. Smurov spread some papers on the table. They were typewritten in Russian.

“We will get right to work. These are the latest reports from our Moscow Bureau on meteorological phenomena in the North.”

“And what do you hear from Nova Zemblya?” Durell asked quietly.

Both men stiffened. “That is restricted matter.”

“It’s in the heart of the affected area. Do you pick and choose the information we share? We ought to settle the ground rules now,” Durell said.

“Nova Zemblya is a sensitive area.”

“It’s where you have nuclear missile bases,” Durell said. “Let’s not be stupid about it. Are they in serious trouble up there?”