Skydancer (31 page)

At that very moment, six miles above the decks of the Soviet ship the RAF Nimrod began to scatter millions of tiny strips of aluminium foil which fanned out into an enormous reflective umbrella. Deep in the bowels of the
Korolev
, the radar screens suddenly became a blur of false echoes.

The operators knew instantly what had happened, and cursed the British. For days they had sat in sweltering darkness, waiting for the test launch, and now it looked as if they were going to be cheated of their ability to track it. Frantically they flicked switches and spun control knobs in an effort to filter out the unwanted echoes from the ‘chaff' that had been scattered above them. The missile seemed to be aiming unerringly for the part of the sky that had now been obscured.

But their fury turned to delighted astonishment when they realised that the RAF had scattered its confusion in the wrong place. High-altitude winds were blowing the ‘chaff away from the line drawn by the trajectory of the rocket. The radar operators turned to one another and laughed at the incompetence of the British.

The missile's path had flattened out and they had seen the rocket section fall away from the ‘space bus'. Suddenly the echo from it multiplied into a score of blips, as the decoys were released and the warheads ejected in that vital but indecipherable pattern which would dictate where they would strike the earth.

In the radar control room, giant data-recorders spun their spools to soak up everything that could be detected. The full analysis of the results would take weeks to accomplish, though preliminary data samples would be transmitted to Moscow that very day.

As the cloud of echoes from space began to descend towards the atmosphere, the aluminium-coated balloons used as decoys began to fall back and burst on contact with the air. Then a new pattern of blips began to confuse the screens as electronic jammers projected echoes forward, giving the Soviet observers the impression that the warheads were much closer to the ground than they were in reality.

On the foredeck of the
Korolev
, a robot-like structure studded with ruby lenses had been uncovered at the last minute. This was an infra-red scanner, whose capabilities were highly secret and which Kapitan Karpov had been instructed to keep hidden from Western eyes.

The scanner searched for tiny pinpoints of heat in the sky, heat generated by the friction of objects falling from space at great speed. It locked on to the first target detected, while continuing to search for others. Soon it was tracking a second and a third, and every few moments another, until thirty or forty ‘targets' had been identified. The electronics specialists monitoring their computer screens sucked their teeth as they realised their equipment could not tell the difference between the warheads and the flares being released every few seconds to confuse them.

Two minutes later it was all over. The screens were blank; Skydancer had splashed into the sea.

Suddenly the Nimrod appeared from behind the stern of the Soviet ship, flying serenely at two hundred feet. It banked sharply across the bows of the
Korolev
, snapping a stream of pictures of the infra-red detector before the ship's crew had time to cover it up again.

Kapitan Karpov laughed as he watched the plane turn away and head back to Ascension Island. He nudged his first officer in the ribs.

‘One crumb! One crumb of comfort for those
British, that's what their pictures will produce!' he sneered, pulling a Cuban cigar from his shirt pocket and clamping it between his teeth.

‘They came here to stop us seeing what their missile could do, but they bungled it! What they've done – it's like losing the football match and then stealing the winner's champagne!'

The laughter that rang round the bridge was partly to humour the captain, but largely for a simpler reason: their work was over now and they could go home.

THE TELEPHONE BROKE
the edgy silence in the Defence Chief's office. The field-marshal snatched at the receiver. His eyebrows shot up as he listened to the message.

‘Well, I'll be damned!' he exclaimed. ‘At Heathrow Airport you say? Berlin! My God! Yes. Yes, he's here. I'll send him down right away.'

He slammed down the telephone.

‘Well, that's buggered it. Absolute bloody disaster! You'll never guess where your sodding blueprints have turned up now!'

Peter's heart sank. ‘Did you say Berlin?'

‘Berlin be buggered! No! In another bloody rubbish bin, that's where!'

‘What?'

‘That was John Black. A Special Branch chap at Heathrow found an envelope with what looked like your doctored Skydancer plans, in a rubbish basket in one of the departure lounges. Straight after a load of passengers had departed for Berlin. Black wants you to go down to the security office to identify them.'

Peter snatched up his briefcase and hurried from the room. Heading down the corridors, he looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening. Anderson had promised to contact them long before this.

John Black's face expressed no emotion as he pushed a folder of papers across the table towards Peter.

‘Recognise these?'

Sick with apprehension, Peter turned the pages. They were the same ones he had spent Sunday preparing.

‘Yes. They're mine,' he sighed. ‘But what does all this mean?'

‘Don't know,' John Black answered flatly. ‘But Anderson boarded a flight to Berlin four hours ago. We sent a picture of him to the airport and one of the British Airways check-in staff identified him. He must have crossed over to the East as soon as he got to his destination.

‘We also know that he dumped these papers before he left. Now why? He must have been scared of something, scared that his people in East Berlin would recognise them as fakes, and carry out their threat to use the blackmail pictures. But he would hardly go off to Berlin empty-handed, would he now?'

‘Christ! You don't mean . . .'

‘Perhaps he didn't need your fake plans at all, Mr Joyce. Perhaps he still had a copy of the real ones . . .'

‘Oh, no . . .' Peter groaned.

‘Oh
yes
, Mr Joyce. Don't forget that because of this scheme of yours – a scheme which I never agreed with by the way – because of this scheme of using Anderson as a double agent, I was never authorised to set my boys on him. I never had the chance to do even something as basic as searching his house in case it alarmed his friend Metzger.

‘So we have no idea if it was just one page of the real Skydancer plans that he originally photocopied, or the whole lot. My guess is that he had them all, and in the end the fear of those dirty pictures being seen by his wife made him decide to betray his country after all!'

Peter stared, horrified. ‘I have to admit I can't think of any other explanation,' he answered. The strain of the past week suddenly began to crush him unbearably. ‘It looks as if we've just given the Kremlin the complete secrets of Skydancer!'

John Black could not resist twisting the knife.

‘The trouble is you lot just wouldn't leave security to the professionals! Insisted on plotting and planning all by yourselves, didn't you?'

His taunt stung Peter painfully.

‘The security service hasn't exactly earned itself a reputation for loyalty and reliability in recent years, has it?' he snapped back. ‘And if you
had
behaved like a professional, Mr Black, we might have had more confidence in you!'

The investigator's face hardened.

‘I take exception to that remark,' he murmured ominously.

Peter reached down to his briefcase and pulled out the photograph of Mary Maclean which Karl Metzger had taken from her flat. He pushed it across the table.

‘Remember this?' he asked sharply.

Black flicked the lid of his zippo lighter and took his time lighting a cigarette.

‘Ah! Now where did that come from?'

‘This was the picture you said never existed,' Peter pressed firmly. ‘But you recognise it, don't you? Only a few days ago you assured me that it hadn't been in Mary's flat on the evening she was murdered. You knew perfectly well it had, though, and that the murderer had taken it. Lying about that wasn't very
professional
, was it?'

The investigator took hold of the photo-frame and turned it over in his hands.

‘You'll have to put that down to foolish pride, Mr Joyce. Not very professional, I'll agree. To be honest, I hadn't noticed the photo was gone after she was found dead, and I should have done. When you remarked on it the other day, I just didn't feel like owning up. That's all there is to it.

‘Tell me though,' he went on, skating over the awkwardness. ‘How did you come by this?'

‘Metzger gave it to Anderson as a warning of what he could expect if he didn't do as he was told,' Peter explained, ‘and I got it from Anderson.'

Black fingered the photograph, pressing the glass against the backing to test the thickness. His forehead creased into a frown, and he placed the frame face-down on his desk.

‘When did you say Metzger gave it to Anderson?'

‘Last Friday evening,' Peter answered, irritated that his case against Black had been explained away so easily.

The investigator took out a razor-blade and carefully slit round the gummed brown paper holding the backing in place.

‘And when did you get it from Anderson?'

‘Saturday evening.'

‘Ah,' Black murmured softly, lifting the rectangle of card from the frame. ‘Look at this now!'

He tilted the frame towards Peter; a small electronic circuit had been sandwiched between the photograph and the backing.

‘Good grief!'

Black touched a finger to his lips, and opened the desk drawer again to take out a soft leather pouch containing a radio mechanic's toolkit. He lifted the circuitry from the photo-frame, examined it cautiously, then snipped free the connections to a small flat battery.

‘Microphone, transmitter, and battery. Standard issue East German bugging device,' he explained. ‘Very clever.'

He slipped a miniature test meter from the pouch, and touched its probes to the wires still connected to the battery.

‘Dead as a dodo now. Probably only lasted forty-eight hours, if that. But for two days or so this little device was listening in to everything within earshot. The transmitter's only short-range. Anderson's friend Karl probably had someone parked outside his house with a receiver.'

Peter was lost for words.

‘Now let's see how good your memory is, Mr Joyce. See if you can remember everything you said to Anderson in the presence of this picture.'

Peter sighed, daunted by the prospect, but he realised the importance of what Black was asking him.

‘Well, that first day, the Friday, he told me everything. It was like a confession! So Karl would have known immediately that Anderson had given him away.'

The MI5 man listened with pursed lips.

‘Then on Saturday, I saw Anderson again, and told him he was to hand over the doctored blueprints to the East Germans; I told him he had to help us deceive the Soviets if he was going to save himself! I said all that while this bug was sitting on his desk.'

‘So the Comrades were
expecting
to be given fake plans for Skydancer,' Black mused.

‘But Anderson is giving them the real ones!'

‘Now there's a turn-up for the books!' the MI5 man said facetiously. ‘But will they believe him, that's the question?'

Peter's thoughts raced ahead. He closed his eyes to concentrate. Now more than ever he needed to think himself into the mind of ‘the Russian', but it was like trying to break through an impenetrable wall.

‘If only I knew exactly who was running the Soviet BMD improvement programme, it might make it easier to gauge their reaction.'

‘Does the name Oleg Kvitzinsky mean anything to you?' the MI5 man enquired casually.

Peter was surprised.

‘Oh, yes. He's pretty well known. A very clever man. He's been pushing the use of computers and robotics in their consumer industries. Making better washing-machines for the domestic market, that sort of thing.'

‘He's not doing that any more. I had a note from MI6 this afternoon. Their men in Moscow have been doing a little overtime. Apparently Kvitzinsky switched to a secret military project over a year ago. They'd been having trouble integrating their radars with the new anti-missile missiles, and drafted him in to sort it out.'

‘I met him once,' Peter said, his spirits reviving. ‘At an international computer conference in Geneva. Can't say I got to know him well – we talked a couple of times, but at least I can put a face to him. Sadly it doesn't mean I can read his mind, though!'

The phone on the desk rang, and Black picked it up. Peter could hear Field-Marshal Buxton bellowing at the other end.

‘Yes. Yes, he's confirmed it, sir. We'll come up right away, then,' Black replaced the receiver.

‘CDS wants a conference – just the three of us – to put everything we know on the table. Looks as if we're all going to co-operate for once. Make a nice change, won't it?'

The field-marshal had set a cut-glass decanter on the table in his office, along with three glasses.

‘Sorry there's no ice,' he said briskly, ‘but I thought we could do with a drink while we sort out our differences. The past week has been marred by excessive secrecy between departments and even suspicion about each other's loyalty. Well, we now face a bigger crisis than ever before, so we've got to put our differences
aside and pool information. All agreed?'

His bluntness took them both by surprise.

‘Well, of course,' Peter acknowledged.

‘Better late than never,' Black added, considering himself the aggrieved party.

‘Right. Let's get on with it, then,' Buxton continued, pouring large measures of whisky into the glasses and nodding towards a low table.