or so we now are led to believe, his grandmother. His best bet would be to travel by train to Baku and then up the Caspian coast. Trying to find him on that route would be a long shot, so we decided to settle on Kizlyar as the target. I’m afraid that’s all we can tell you. Any questions?”
“Supposing we find this man, sir-”
“There will be no supposition in the matter, Lieutenant Haselden. I picked you because I want the man found. Period.”
“Very well, sir.” Haselden stood a bit taller. “What’s our route home with the prisoner?”
“The same way you came in. Get him east to the coast any way you can. If you have to commandeer a vehicle, all the better. We’ll have some help waiting there for you, and then you cross the Caspian again to Fort Shevchenko. Easy as pie. Here is your target, gentlemen: a man named Gennadi Orlov. Have a good look at those photos taken of the man when we had him under the Rock, and note the description. He’s a big fellow, not hard to pick out in a crowd I’d imagine. He may be traveling with an older woman, so keep that in mind. This man is most likely NKVD, but those three dead men in Poti lead us to suspect he may be a rogue agent. That said, the NKVD will certainly be looking for him as well, and there may be a cadre there you’ll have to deal with. The Russians are our allies, but your Lend-Lease cover will take you only so far in this matter. Don’t rely on it. Remember you are British serving officers and the Queen’s strong right arm if things get difficult, and act accordingly. But we want this man Orlov, and very badly.”
“Very good, sir,” said Sutherland. “We’ll handle the NKVD.”
“We’ll call the whole operation Escapade. Appropriate enough, eh? Ah… One other small detail,” said Fleming, lighting another cigarette. “The Germans have been going at it like bats out of hell. You may just get there and find you have some unexpected company. Not much, just the whole bloody 16th Motorized Division.”
He exhaled, looking the men over and smiling.
Chapter 24
Kizlyar was a small hamlet on the borders of the newly declared Chechen state in 1942. The old town there was once called Samandar, an ancient site first established by the Huns, and known for its good wines and spirits that were still produced there, and for the making of knives, daggers and the curved sabers the Cossacks made famous in their rampage across the steppe lands. The vineyards outside the town would at least give them some means of cover and concealment.
That was all Haselden and his men could learn about the place from the Escapade briefing file as they made the long flight north. At Tehran they boarded an old British Mk IV Avro Anson, a stubby twin engine plane that was now mostly used as a trainer for bomber squadrons. A few of the old planes had found their way into Iran when the Allies invaded there a year earlier, and now they served for short run operations like this, their two Wright Whirlwind engines giving the plane just enough range to make the flight up to Fort Shevchenko.
Two planes would fly that day, one with the men and basic supplies they would need, the other with their rubber inflatable swift boat, communications equipment, tents, extra aviation fuel and other necessities. They would land at an old airfield there that the British had stocked up with additional fuel for the long flight back to Tehran.
When Haselden first saw Fort Shevchenko from the air it looked like the maw of a great seabird, with a great reddish lake for the bird’s eye and a long isthmus of land jutting out into the Caspian parallel to the main coastline that looked like the top of the beak.
“What have we gotten ourselves into this time,” he muttered to Lieutenant Sutherland. The lean SAS man was also peering out the window, noting the shoals and murky greenish water, especially north of the harbor where the Caspian was very shallow.
“My Lord, there’s nothing here,” said Sutherland, “not a tree to be seen in any direction for miles.”
Eighty years on there would be much more to see. Tall oil platforms and off shore rigs would stand in tall brooding clusters over the water, their umbilical pipelines slithering down into the silted earth beneath the sea to seek out the precious commodity of oil. In Fedorov’s day a big Chevron operation would be right beneath their feet, with officers and installations right there in Ft. Shevchenko and further up the coast at Buzachi. The Kashagan superfield would be just north in the dull blue waters of the Caspian, but now the place was empty and forlorn, a vast vacant wasteland under a mackerel sky.
“That’s no bother,” said Haselden. He had been accustomed to places like this, wide open tractless stretches of desert that went on and on for hundreds of miles and took a man nowhere if he ever found himself lost there.
“Well it doesn’t offer much cover, “ Sutherland complained.
“We won’t need it here,” said Haselden. “Remember, we’re just Lend-Lease survey officers on this side. We don’t have to become commandos until we get over the Caspian.”
“What did you make of that bit at the end about the Germans?”
“What of it? Did you think this was going to be a joyride, Davey boy? We’ll move all night, two days in, a couple days to find this man, and then back to the coast.”
“Sounds wonderful, unless there’s a armored car or two at our backside. Then what? We’re not packing any heavy weapons, eh?”
“I’ve one of those new popguns Seventeen talked about if we need it. A prototype. They give our sort all the new things for testing. Sergeant Terry will do the honors.” He was referring to the new British AT weapon introduced that year, the PIAT, which stood for Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, a hand held mini-mortar of sorts that could propel a 2.5 pound bomblet a little over a hundred yards. It would not see widespread use until the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, but Seventeen-F had a way of getting his hands on all the latest tools of the deadly trade he and his men practiced.
“Today we play our little ruse on this end,” said Haselden. “We walk about with clip boards and field glasses and survey equipment while the flight crews set up our base camp and get the wireless sorted out. Then a few hours sleep, a good meal and it’s off in your swift boat we go.”
“Best to cross by night,” Sutherland agreed.
“Right, then we set up on the far side with Corporal Severn seeing to the boats and all, and the three of us, you, me and Sergeant Terry, make the trek west tomorrow night.”
“Splendid,” said Sutherland. “We’ll see what we can learn on the radio tomorrow before we leave. And let’s hope the Russians don’t give us any trouble and remember who’s side they’re on.”
“Count on trouble, Davey. Count on it. That way when it comes you’ll be more than ready for it. The NKVD obviously want this man as badly as we do. They yanked him right out from under our noses and shipped him thousands of miles to get him here. Now we’ve got to bring him back, and they won’t like it. Mark my words. They won’t like it one bit.”
They played their roles admirably, speaking with the local authorities and hearing their requests for supplies, trucks, cranes and other equipment, and strutting about the port area with clipboards and surveying equipment. That night their supply team had set them up on the coast on the small peninsula that Haselden took for a bird’s beak from the air. They had their two inflatable rafts deployed just after dark and the four men slipped silently into the Caspian, paddling west to get well away from the shore before they would risk starting their small motors to make the crossing. Their supply team covered for their absence with a clever story about survey work up the coast. The Caspian was 140 miles wide at this point, much too far to cross without a motor assist, and soon they were cruising on the dark waters of the sea, lit by a waning gibbous moon.
Sea conditions were calm, with only a light breeze and mild temperatures. The warm summer days were cooling into autumn, but still comfortable. At times they would see the distant shadowy forms of other boats on the sea, small steamships towing what looked to be long lines of grayish metal oil tanks, gleaming in the pale moonlight. These were actually oil cisterns that had been filled and floated for just this purpose, linked together by long rusty chains and then slowly towed north towards Astrakhan.
These encounters would often force them to turn their motor off and stop for a time, laying low in the black rubber inflatables until the distant traffic passed. Sutherland coordinated their movement stealthily, sending hand
