The Deceiver

one captain, all “declared,” meaning they admitted they really were from Military Intelligence; a colonel of the Airborne Forces at whose open-necked combat blouse could be seen a triangle of blue-white-striped singlet, the insignia of Spetsnaz, or Special Forces; a colonel and a captain from Infantry and the same from Armored. In addition there was a half-colonel from Ops Staff, plus a major and two captains; and a colonel and major from Signals.

The Soviet Military Intelligence Corps is known as the GRU, and the three “declared” GRU men wore their proper insignia. They alone knew that the Signals major and one of the captains from Ops Staff were also GRU but undeclared. Neither the remainder of the Russians nor the British knew this.

The British, for their part, had not felt it necessary to tell the Russians that twenty operatives from the Security Service were posted around the officers’ mess at Tidworth and would remain until the Soviet delegation departed for London and the Moscow flight on the morning of the third day. These watchers were now tending the lawns and flower beds, waiting table, or polishing bits of brass. Through the night they would “spell” each other, taking turns to keep the mess building under observation from vantage points scattered in a wider ring. As the Chief of General Staff had mentioned to the OC Southern Command at a ministry briefing several days earlier, “One really would prefer not to lose one of the buggers.”

The war game began on schedule at nine o’clock and proceeded throughout the day. The paratroop drop by Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment, took place just after lunch. A major of Two Para found himself standing next to the Soviet Airborne Colonel, who was watching with the keenest inter­est.

“I see,” observed the Russian, “that you still favor the two-inch company mortar.”

“A useful tool,” agreed the Britisher. “Effective and still reliable.”

“I agree,” said the Russian in slow, accented English. “I used them in Afghanistan.”

“Indeed. I used them in the Falklands,” said the major from Two Para. He thought, but did not say, “And the difference is, we won in short order in the Falklands, and you are losing badly in Afghanistan.”

The Russian permitted himself a grim smile. The Britisher smiled back. “Bastard,” thought the Russian. “He’s thinking how badly we are doing in Afghanistan.”

Both men kept smiling. Neither could have known that in two years the remarkable new General Secretary in Moscow would order the entire Soviet Army to withdraw from the Afghan adventure. It was early days, and old habits die hard.

That evening the dinner at Tidworth barracks was more relaxed. The wine flowed; vodka, which the British Army rarely drinks, was in evidence. Across the language barrier an element of jocularity raised its head. The Russians took their cue from their senior general, the Motorized Rifles one. He seemed to be beaming at the translated conversation from the British general, so they relaxed. The major from Ops Staff listened to a British tank man tell a joke and nearly burst out laughing before realizing he was not supposed to understand any English and had to wait for the translation.

The major from Two Para found himself next to the declared major from Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. He thought he would practice his smattering of Russian.

“Govoritya-vi pa-Angleeski?” he asked.

The Russian was delighted. “Ochen malinko,” he replied, then dropped into halting English. “Very little, I am afraid. I try with books at home, but it is not so good.”

“Better than my Russian, I’m sure,” said the paratrooper. “By the way, I’m Paul Sinclair.”

“Please, I am so sorry,” said the Russian. He reached around and held out his hand. “Pavel Kuchenko.”

It was a good dinner and ended with songs in the bar before the two groups of officers trooped off to their rooms at eleven o’clock. A number of them would appreciate that the follow­ing morning would permit a lie-in— the orderlies were in­structed to appear with cups of tea at seven o’clock.

In fact, Major Kuchenko was up at five and spent two hours seated quietly behind the lace curtains that covered the win­dows of his bachelor bedroom. He sat with all his lights out and studied the road that ran past the front of the officers’ mess toward the main gate leading to the Tidworth road. He spotted or thought he spotted three men in the half-gloom of very early morning who might be watchers.

He also spotted, precisely at six o’clock, Colonel Arbuthnot appear from the main doors of the mess almost beneath him and depart on what was apparently his regular morning jog­ging run. He had reason to believe it was a regular habit—he had seen the elderly colonel do exactly the same the previous morning.

Colonel Arbuthnot was not a difficult man to spot, for his left arm was missing. He had lost it years earlier while on patrol with his levies in that strange half-forgotten war in the hills of Dhofar, a campaign fought by British Special Forces and Omani levies to prevent a Communist revolution from toppling the Sultan of Oman and taking control of the Straits of Hormuz. A sentimental Army board had permitted him to stay on in the Army, and he was by then the catering officer at Tidworth officers’ mess. Every morning he kept in trim with a five-mile jog down the road and back, an accepted figure in white tracksuit with cowl hood and blue piping, the loose left sleeve neatly pinned to the fabric by his side. For the second morning, Major Kuchenko watched him thought­fully.

The second day of war games passed without incident, and finally all the officers of both nationalities agreed the umpires had done a good job in awarding a technical victory to the Greens, who had finally dislodged the Blues from their posi­tions on Frog Hill and secured Fox Covert from counterat­tack. The third dinner was very jolly, with copious toasts and later a much-applauded rendering of “Malinka” from the young Russian Ops Staff captain, who was not a spy but had a fine baritone voice. The Russian group was due to congre­gate in the main lobby after breakfast at nine A.M. the next morning to board the coach for Heathrow. The coach would come from London with two embassy staff on board to see them through the airport. During the singing of “Malinka,” no one noticed that Colonel Arbuthnot’s room, which was not locked, was entered by someone who left sixty seconds later as quietly as he had come and who later rejoined the group at the bar, coming from the direction of the men’s toilet.

At ten minutes to six the next morning a figure in white-cowled tracksuit with blue piping, the empty left sleeve pinned to the side, trotted down the steps of the mess and turned toward Main Gate. The figure was spotted by a watcher behind the glass of a window in an upper room of another building two hundred yards away. He made a note but took no action.

At the gate the Corporal of the Guard came out of the guardroom and threw up a salute to the figure as it ducked under the barrier. The runner, not wearing a cap, was unable to return the salute but raised a hand in salutation, then turned in the usual direction and jogged toward Tidworth.

At ten past six the corporal glanced up, stared, then turned to his sergeant.

“I’ve just seen Colonel Arbuthnot go past,” he said.

“So?” asked the sergeant.

“Twice,” said the corporal. The sergeant was tired. They would both be relieved in twenty minutes. Breakfast awaited. He shrugged.

“Must have forgotten something,” he said. He would regret that remark—later, at the disciplinary hearing.

Major Kuchenko ducked into some trees beside the road after half a mile and slipped out of the stolen white tracksuit and hid it in deep undergrowth. When he went back to the road he was in gray flannel slacks and tweed jacket over a shirt and tie. Only his Adidas running shoes were at odds with the outfit. He suspected but could not be sure that a mile behind him jogged an annoyed Colonel Arbuthnot, who had wasted ten fruitless minutes searching for his regular tracksuit before coming to the conclusion that his orderly must have taken it for laundering and not returned it. He was wearing his spare, and he had not yet noticed he was also missing a shirt, tie, jacket, slacks, and a pair of running shoes.

Kuchenko could easily have stayed ahead of the British colonel until Arbuthnot turned around to make his way back, but he was saved the trouble by a car that came from behind him and stopped at his wave. Kuchenko leaned toward the window on the passenger side.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “but my car seems to have broken down. Back there. I was wondering whether I could get some help from a garage in North Tidworth?”

“Bit early,” said the driver, “but I can run you up there. Jump in.”

The paratroops major would have been amazed at Kuchenko’s sudden mastery of English. But the foreign accent was still there.

“Not from these parts, are you?” asked the driver by way of conversation. Kuchenko laughed.