Man From Barbarossa

of the machines dropped neatly from the sky and settled on the pad.

About a dozen men emerged from its body and were met by men in uniform who rose up out of the ground and ran forward to help them. As soon as this group had disembarked, the helicopter took off, to be replaced by a smaller machine from which three men climbed and walked briskly towards another knot of figures who seemed to be a special reception committee. Just before the lights flicked off, Bond saw men exchanging salutes. The leader of the arriving group was tall, silhouetted for a moment. There was something forbiddingly familiar about him, even at this distance. Throughout the night his shape returned again and again to Bond’s mind, but he could not think who the man might be. He was certain of one thing, that should they escape it would not be through the trees, for they were a killing ground.

In the early hours, Nina cried out, coming to the surface from some dreadful nightmare. She clung to Bond as though the spectres from Sobibor were at her heels. ‘James,’ she whispered in terror, her body soaked with sweat, ‘I dreamed we were all there. You understand? All?’

He shushed her, making the noises with which one calms a child.

‘Bory was sending us all to the showers,’ she sobbed. The showers were the gas chambers. The victims were told they had to shower before being given camp uniforms. Inside the showers they were gassed. In the first year or so of Sobibor’s macabre history, they had used primitive methods and the gas had been carbon monoxide produced by a 200-horsepower engine in a shed near the showers. Later they progressed to the lethal Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, manufactured in Frankfurt and Hamburg.

There was a different atmosphere about the sound stage when they were taken down on the following morning. For one thing there were more uniforms, extra armed men at the doors and a smarter military ambience which had been missing for the past two days.

Behind the camera, Bond heard Clive speaking into his earphones. Even his usually languid voice had a clipped tone to it. ‘We’re going to do the Judge Advocate General’s opening speech, first,’ he said. ‘I want you to focus on the doors to the right of the tribunal’s stand. They’ll bring the prisoner into the dock. Then the JAG will enter and address the tribunal. I’ll be cutting you between him, the tribunal and the prisoner.’ Then he began speaking to Pete about sound levels.

The prisoner was instantly recognisable, even in the grey, drab, shapeless jacket and pants, even with the shaved head of a convict. Bond had studied his photographs in London and again outside Moscow. He had no doubt that the man they were calling Vorontsov was, in fact, the hapless Joel Penderek from New Jersey. But Penderek behaved like a guilty man. He did not act like someone wrongly accused. His eyes constantly moved around the set which was the courtroom, and his demeanour was that of a man guilty of terrible crimes. The shifting eyes did not hold fear, but a kind of arrogance, as though he were saying, you have caught me, now do your worst.

Then the doors again opened and a tall figure in the uniform of a Red Army general strode into shot. The general looked more like a scientist than a soldier, slim and tall, with an almost ascetic, scholarly face. Clear blue eyes traversed the courtroom from behind heavy rimmed spectacles.

It was the man whose silhouette Bond had seen on the previous night, but now he recognised him. The supposed Judge Advocate General was Yevgeny Andreavich Yuskovich, Commander-in-Chief of Rocket Forces, Red Army.

As he kept the general in shot, closing on him, Bond wondered if, at last, they were getting close to the real leadership of Chushi Pravosudia, the Scales of Justice.

Yuskovich, the man known to be a cousin of the real Vorontsov, turned, looked at the prisoner and then at the tribunal. When he spoke, it was not the voice of a parade-ground slave-driver, nor of a man who commanded thousands of troops by example, coupled with an authoritative manner. His voice was soft, almost gentle, and mild in quality.

‘Comrades, we are here to listen to stories of dread, for we are here to sit in judgement over a man who assisted in, and carried out, heinous and deplorable crimes. These are crimes against humanity itself, crimes carried out to the relentless drum beaten by an enemy some fifty years ago. But this man, Josif Vorontsov, this old man we see before us today, was born of Russian parentage. The soil of this country, the very roots and seeds, were part of him. Yet when the enemy came, when the Nazi tanks rolled on to the beloved Motherland, for what Hitler called Operation Barbarossa, this Russian, born of Russian parents who were the children of Russian parents, decided to throw away his glorious birthright and join the ranks of the infamous Adolf Hitler’s war machine. Not only that, but Josif Vorontsov also turned coat and allied himself to the most barbarous of Hitler’s troops, the SS. This pitiful object we see before us, this apology for a man, should terrify us. He comes to us, comrades, like an apparition from the past. He is, verily, a man from Barbarossa.’

The speech was so quiet and gentle that its impact became all the more menacing. Bond felt the short hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and as he looked into the wide frame of the viewfinder, he saw that General Yuskovich’s eyes seemed to be staring directly at him, as though boring into his very soul. The calm stillness of those eyes was more frightening to Bond for deep within them he saw a burning coldness and recognised it as mighty ambition. Though there was no way for him to know what plan had already been set into action, Bond could be sure that this man alone was the central organ, the pumping heart of Chushi Pravosudia, the Scales of Justice. It is difficult to fight an enemy you do not know, Bond considered, realising with the thought that he knew nothing of Yevgeny Andreavich Yuskovich except the bare facts in a dossier read far away in London.

14

THE HUSCARL

Boris Stepakov’s aircraft was a spacious variant of the Antonov An-72 with two huge turbofans, seating for fifty-two people and a STOL ability. It was the same kind of plane used by the President and the Chairman of KGB. Now he flew from Stockholm to a secret airfield west of Moscow where a car waited to carry him and the two bodyguards, Nicki and Alex, back to the dacha. There was news of yet another killing by Chushi Pravosudia while he had been in Sweden. A young woman, Nicola Chernysh, aged twenty-six, who held the coveted post of Supervisor to the President’s Secretariat, had left her work in the Kremlin at five that afternoon. She had driven straight back to the apartment building in which she lived with her elderly mother, a block from the Central Concert Hall. Two men had shot her as she left her car. They had pumped eight bullets into her from handguns, then escaped in an unidentified foreign car thought to be of British origin.

Nobody came forward as witness to the actual shooting. The car was seen by six people: ‘Driving away furiously,’ one said. ‘There were two men. They went very fast, nearly knocking down an old babushka who was crossing the road,’ another reported. ‘These men were hoodlums. One had a scar across his right cheek, the other wore a hat like in American gangster films,’ a third reported, but he was very drunk and five blocks away when it happened.

At six thirty, an unidentified male voice spoke to the duty editor at Pravda. He said, ‘Romany. Chushi Pravosudia have executed Nicola Chernysh, an enemy of the true revolution. We ask the authorities to take Josif Vorontsov off our hands and bring him to public trial. One member of the present regime will be executed each day, as promised, until some action has been taken.’ Romany was the code word the Scales of Justice had now established with the Soviet media.

Stepakov spoke for half-an-hour with Stephanie Adore and Henri Rampart who were still held at the dacha. He then summoned his car and drove into Moscow. The President had arranged to see him at nine.

The interview began on a sour note. If General Stepakov had wanted to see the President urgently, he obviously did not know how urgently the President wanted to see him. For almost an hour, the man with the weight of Russia’s problems on his shoulders, upbraided Stepakov or fired questions at him like a heavy machine gun.

Why had these Chushi Pravosudia not been rounded up? Why had there been no progress? The comrade General had promised, nay, assured, the President that he had the real Josif Vorontsov in