overbooked, and they were shedding the least important. A sour-faced woman behind the counter examined their tickets, looking at them as if to ascertain whether they could possibly be forgeries. They were checked once more by a bored militiaman at the gate, who then took an age studying Holt's and Jane's Foreign Ministry permission to leave the Moscow environs zone. They went on to the security barrier. Two more militiamen, an X-ray machine, and a metal detector arch to pass under. Jane had a camera, a palm-of-the-hand-sized Olympus that she took out of her handbag before it went on the belt. The ambassador's spectacle case, attracted the flashing red light and earned him a cursory body patting.
They were in the departure lounge. Holt and Jane went off in search of coffee for themselves and an orange juice, diluted, for the ambassador.
'Bit heavy, wasn't it, the security?'
'They've their quota of nasties just like the rest of us.' He'd noticed, since reaching Moscow, how much she enjoyed filling him in on insider detail. Couldn't have happened in London, when he was doing his initial FCO time and she was just a secretary in Whitehall.
'Georgians and Jews and Estonians and Ukrainians, they've all got grievances, they all foster little cells that want to get out. Not easy. They've sent up fighters to shoot down aircraft that have been hijacked in the past.
And if there's half a chance of settling the problem on the ground then they go in firing. Happened last year.
They don't play about here, none of your patient negotiation. Storm and shoot is their answer. Not that they admit there's a political problem. It's always drug addicts and delinquents. I laugh like a drain each time I hear of a hijack. It's the biter bit, isn't it? That little shit Carlos was trained at the Patrice Lumumba University right here in down-town Moscow. And he's only the tip of the iceberg. They train them to do horrible things to us, and we broadcast on BBC World Service and the Voice of America what they've done, and the folks back home pretty soon get into the same act.'
'Is that what you specialise in?' Holt asked.
She smiled at him, a big and open smile. She said,
' 'God knows why Ben wants orange juice, it's quite foul here.. . There's a fancy dress party at the dacha next Saturday, what'll we go as?'
'I'll go as a boar with a ring in my nose, and you can go as a farmer and lead me round, and show everyone who's boss.'
They both laughed. She thought it was funny and he thought it was sad, and the ambassador's orange juice looked as awful as their coffee tasted.
They boarded, and take off was only 25 minutes late.
The ambassador was behind them, in the aisle seat, and next to a man in a dark suit with a bulging briefcase.
Before the belt sign was off the ambassador was booming out his conversational Russian, angling for a rapport. A one-class aircraft, a Tupolev 134, rear engines and 72 passengers. He had hardly slept, not after she'd run him back to the embassy, and he'd been plagued with the niggling worries about getting the trip moving well – he started to doze. There was the drone of the voice behind him, and he was wondering how the ambassador managed to test the waters of Soviet opinion when he talked so much that the fellow next to him barely had the chance to get three consecutive words up his gullet.
He'd sort it all out. He'd sort it all out with Jane in time, because he had to, because he loved her. Up to cruising altitude, and he was nodding, eyes opened then collapsing shut, so damned tired. He was a wild pig, and she was pulling him round, and they were all laugh ing, all the Second and Third Secretaries and their wives, and all the personal assistants, all laughing their heads off because his girl had him on a leash.
Flying due south. A journey of 750 miles. A route over Tula, Kursk and Charkov. Cruising at 29,000 feet, ground speed 510 miles per hour.
He felt her pull him forward, and then to her. And his eyes were closed, and he waited for the soft brush of her kiss behind his ear, where she always kissed, and he waited. He opened his eyes. She was looking down at her watch, concentrating. His head was forward, as if guarding her, hiding her breasts and her hands and her lap. Away from her watch, looking through the porthole window, the visibility was stunning and the daylight spreading, the fields sharp and the roads clear and a city laid out as a model. She took three photographs quickly, and the camera slipped back into her bag, and she grinned at him and eased him back so that he was fully into his seat. Then she kissed him, behind the ear, a fast peck.
He was a pig on a lead, and he didn't have the strength to argue.
The vapour trails of the airliner were brilliantly clear five and a half miles above the ground surface. The first airliner of the day, and a lorry driver leaned from his cab to watch the slow progress of the puffy white scars in the blue skies. The lorry driver was delivering prefabricated walls for a factory development on the east side of Charkov. The factory development was an extension of 260,000 square feet, and when in production would manufacture one-piece cast turrets for the T-72 tank.
It was the evaluation of the boffins in British and American Intelligence who concerned themselves in such studies that the T-72 main battle tank was technically superior to those of the NATO forces. The factory, when enlarged, could greatly increase its output of the low silhouette turret, so low that the crews fighting in them could be no taller than 5' 4'. To have a photograph of the tank turret factory extension would not be an Intelligence coup, but it would be useful. There were few coups in that painstaking world, but much that was useful. The size of the extension would enable the analysts to calculate the increased output of new T – 7 2 S.
The vapour trails bowled on. The lorry driver reached the building site gate.
At a military airfield west of Moscow, an Antonov transporter bearing the insignia of the Air Force of the Syrian Arab Republic was in the final stages of loading. The manifest listed a cargo of MiG interceptor spares, a sizable cargo, but not enough to fill the aircraft because space had been set aside for basic seating forward in the hold. The pilot was engaged in his final checks before take off clearance and the start of a filed flight plan that listed a brief stop at Simferopol to take on personnel and then a direct onward flight to the El Masr base close to Damascus.
On that Saturday morning in the Yalta spring, a major had command of the city's militia force. His superiors were at home in their gardens, or in the shops with their wives, or in the mountains with their children. This particular militia major, 49 years old and twice passed over for promotion, sipped a poor imitation of gritty Turkish coffee and cast his eyes wearily over the backlog of reports on his desk. He was responsible for the Department for Combating Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation, for the Department of Criminal Inves tigation, for the Internal Passport Service, for the State Automobile Inspectorate, for the Patrol Service and the Preserving of Public Order in Public Places, and for the Department of Visas and Registration of Foreigners.
His in-tray contained the overnight reports of apartment block caretakers, reports on the hunting of draft dodgers, an essay on the failure of the traffic lights on Botkin Street, a surveillance report on two Latvians who would be arrested in the following week to face charges of leading an Anti-Social and Parasitic mode of life.
The radio in the control room spluttered occasionally to life to disturb his half-hearted concentration. He had to last until six o'clock in the late afternoon, and then he could take off his uniform tunic, put on a sweater and go home to his family.
Deep in his in-tray was a memorandum stating that the British ambassador was arriving in Yalta in company with his private secretary and an interpreter for a semi-official visit, and would stay at the Oreanda Hotel. He was not required to furnish the delegation with a militia car escort.
It was the militia major's belief, for what little that was worth, that unless the traffic lights on Botkin Street were repaired their failure would lead to an accident, but there was nothing he could do. A waste of his time to try to dig out an engineer from Roads and Transport at a weekend.
In his briefcase was a book that would help him through the afternoon.
He was held up at the lights at the junction on Botkin.
A main intersection and all the lights showing red, and the dumb fools waiting as if they had a day to kill.
Could not have happened in Moscow. Could only happen in this second-class junk yard to which he had been consigned. After eleven months in the backwater of Yalta it still burned in him that he had been dismissed from the capital and posted to oblivion.
He had been a captain in the Organ of State Security.
