Again a silence, broken by Bond. ‘And I’m to join the team.’
‘Yes.’ M seemed to have gone a little absent-minded. ‘Yes, yes. They’ve all pulled out. You’re to meet them as soon as possible. I’ve chosen the rendezvous, incidentally. How do you fancy Reid’s Hotel in Funchal, Madeira?’
‘Better than a Lapp
‘Good. Then we’ll give you a full briefing here, and if you’re up to it, we’ll speed you on your way tomorrow night. I’m afraid the Arctic’ll be your next stop after Madeira, though. Now, there’s a lot of work to be done. You must realise this thing’s not going to be a piece of cake, as they used to say in World War Two.’
‘Not even Madeira cake?’ asked Bond.
M actually gave a short laugh.
5
RENDEZVOUS AT REID’S
In the event, Bond did not get away from London as quickly as expected. There was much to be prepared, and the doctors also insisted on a complete check-up. Then, too, Bill Tanner appeared with the trace results on Paula Vacker and her friend, Anni Tudeer.
There were a couple of interesting, and troubling, pieces of information. As it turned out, Paula was of Swedish birth, though she had assumed Finnish citizenship. Apparently her father had at one time been with the Swedish Diplomatic Corps, though a note listed him as having ‘militant right-wing tendencies’.
‘Probably means the man’s a Nazi,’ M grunted.
The thought worried Bond, but Bill Tanner’s next words disturbed him even more.
‘Maybe,’ the Chief-of-Staff said, ‘but her girlfriend’s father certainly is, or was, a Nazi.’
What Tanner had to say made Bond yearn for an opportunity to see Paula again quickly, and, more particularly, to meet Anni Tudeer.
The computers had little on the girl, but they disgorged a great deal about her father, a former high-ranking officer in the Finnish Army. Colonel Aarne Tudeer had been, in fact, a member of Finland’s C-in-C’s – the great Marshal Mannerheim’s – staff in 1943, and, in the same year, when the Finns fought side by side with the German Army against the Russians, Tudeer had accepted a post with the Waffen SS. Though Tudeer was a soldier first, it remained clear that his admiration for Nazi Germany, and, in particular, for Adolf Hitler, knew no bounds. By the end of 1943 Aarne Tudeer had been promoted to the rank of SS-Oberfuhrer and moved to a post within the Nazi fatherland.
When the war ended, Tudeer disappeared, but there were definite indications that he remained alive. The Nazi-catchers still had him on the wanted list, for among the many operations in which he played a prominent part was the ‘execution’ of fifty prisoners of war, recaptured after the famous ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III, at Sagan in March 1944.
Later, Tudeer fought bravely during the historic, bloody march of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (‘Das Reich’) from Montauban to Normandy. It is well-known that, during those two weeks in June 1944, acts of unbridled horror were committed which defied the normal rules of war. One was the burning of 642 men, women, and children in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Aarne Tudeer had more than a hand in that particular episode.
‘A soldier first, yes,’ Tanner explained, ‘but the man is a war criminal and as such, even though he’s an old- age pensioner now, the Nazi-hunters are still after him. There were confirmed sightings in South America during the 1950s, but it’s pretty certain he came back to Europe in the 1960s after a successful identity change.’
Bond filed the information in his head, asking for the chance to study any existing documents and photographs.
‘There’s no chance of me slipping back into Helsinki, seeing Paula and meeting the Tudeer woman, I suppose?’ Bond looked hard at M, who shook his head.
‘Sorry, 007. Time is of the essence. The whole team’s come out of its operational zone for two reasons – first, to meet and brief you; second, to plan what they reckon’s going to be the final stage in their mission. You see, they think they know where the arms are coming from, how they’re being passed on to the NSAA, and – most important – who is directing all NSAA ops, and from where.’
M refilled his pipe, settled back in his chair and began to talk. In many ways, what he revealed was enough to make Bond’s hair stand on end.
They stayed at HQ until late that night, after which Bond was driven back to his Chelsea flat and the tender mercies of May, his redoubtable housekeeper, who took one look at him and ordered him straight to bed in the tones of an old-fashioned nanny. ‘You look washed out, Mr James. To bed with you. I’ll bring you a nice light supper on a tray. Now, away to your bed.’
Bond did not feel like arguing. May appeared soon afterwards with a dish of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, which Bond ate while he looked through the pile of mail that had been waiting for him. He had scarcely finished the meal before fatigue took over and, without a struggle, he dropped into a deep refreshing sleep.
When he woke, Bond knew that May had allowed him to sleep late. The numbers on his digital bedside clock showed that it was almost ten. Within seconds he was calling for May to get breakfast. A few minutes later the telephone rang.
M was shouting for him.
The extra time spent in London paid dividends. Not only was Bond given a thorough rundown on his partners for Operation Icebreaker but he also had an opportunity to talk at length with Cliff Dudley, the officer from whom he was taking over.
Dudley was a short, hard, pugnacious Scot, a man whom Bond both liked and respected. ‘If I’d had more time,’ Dudley told him, ‘likely I’d have sniffed out the whole truth. But it was really you they wanted. M made that clear to me before I went. Mind you, James, you’ll have to keep your back to the wall. None of the others’ll look out for you. Moscow Centre are definitely on to something, but it all stinks of duplicity. Maybe I’m just suspicious by nature, but their boy’s holding something back. He’s got a dozen aces up his sleeve, and all in the same suit, I’ll bet you.’
‘Their boy’, as Dudley called him, was not unknown to Bond, at least by reputation. Nicolai Mosolov had plenty of reputation, none of it particularly appetising. Known to his friends within the KGB as Kolya, Mosolov spoke English, American-English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Finnish fluently. Now in his late thirties, the man had been a star pupil at the basic training school near Novosibirsk, and worked for some time with the expert Technical Support Group of his Service’s Second Chief Directorate, which is, in effect, a professional burglary unit.
In the building overlooking Regent’s Park they also knew Mosolov under a number of aliases. In the United States he was Nicholas S. Mosterlane, Sven Flanders in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. They knew, but had never nailed him – not even as Nicholas Mortin-Smith in London.
‘Invisible man type,’ M said. ‘Chameleon. Merges with his background and disappears just when you think he’s bottled up.’
Bond was no happier about his American counterpart on Icebreaker. Brad Tirpitz, known in intelligence circles as ‘Bad’ Brad, was a veteran of the old-school CIA and had survived the multitude of purges in his organisation’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia. To some, Tirpitz was a kind of swashbuckling, do-or-die, hero: a legend. There were others, however, who saw him in a different light – as the sort of field officer capable of using highly questionable methods, a man who considered that the end always justified the means. And the means could be, as one of his colleagues put it, ‘Pretty mean. He has the instinct of a hungry wolf, and the heart of a scorpion.’
So, Bond thought, his future lay with a Moscow Centre heavy and a Langley sharp-shooter who tended to shoot first and ask questions later.
The rest of the briefing, and the medical, took the remainder of that day, and some of the following morning. So it was not until the afternoon of this third day that Bond boarded the two o’clock TAP flight to Lisbon, connecting with one of the Boeing 727 shuttles to Funchal.
The sun was low, almost touching the water, throwing great warm red blotches of colour against the rocks, when Bond’s aircraft – now down to around 600 feet – crossed the Ponta de Sao Lourenco headland to make that exhilarating low-level turn which is the only way to get into the precarious little runway – perched, like an aircraft carrier’s flight deck, among the rocks – at Funchal.
