The Kobra Manifesto Read online

  This chap’s going into Istres,’ he said, Local.

  ‘You know where that is?’ he asked me, ‘Bouches du Rhone.’

  ‘Yes. There’s an airfield there. Have you got a Michelin 84 in your car?’

  ‘I’ve got the whole set’

  ‘Well I never, they don’t do that at Hertz.’

  We stood for a minute watching the rollers breaking white across the stones, the spindrift catching the light of the tall Lamp-standards.

  ‘His name is Milos Zarkovic, and he-‘

  ‘Name, or cover name?’

  ‘What? I don’t know. I’m just repeating what they told me on the phone, so please try not to interrupt, or I might forget something.’ He gave a little smile with his chin tucked in. I’m only joking, of course. This chap is using a Pulmeister 101 single seat interceptor, which is apparently the longest-range machine he can pinch without anybody noticing too much.’

  ‘Where’s he coming from?’

  ‘One of the satellite air force bases near Zagreb. Ostensibly he’ll make for Madrid but the weather’s going to take him off course slightly and he’s going to run out of fuel and do a belly flop near the airfield at Istres.’

  We reached one of the car park kiosks and turned back, walking slowly. He was very good: he’d checked the two men over by the rail and the one sitting on the bench reading Nice Matin and they hadn’t made a move,, ‘How do I get him out of Istres?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’ He glanced at me sharply. ‘If you want any kind of backup laid on you’d better tell London right away. But they’re expecting you to handle it solo. Up to you, as I say.’

  I thought about it. London knew I didn’t want any backup: I work solo or not at all and they know that; but there were things like communications and alternative action and the availability of a safe house. The area around Istres was nearly all marshland and that made it perfect for the forced-landing cover story but Marseille was close and Marseille is one of the nerve centres for half a dozen major networks with permanent agents-in-place, and this was a daytime operation. It wouldn’t be more than ten minutes before the first people showed up to the landing site, but I didn’t have to get the aircraft away: all they wanted was Milos Zarkovic, ‘All right,’ I told him. They want him in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Soonest’

  ‘Will he be carrying papers?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yugoslavian passport. Communist Party membership, everything quite above board - I mean there won’t be any trouble from the local police if you can manage to get him out of sight straight away, not till the news gets around that he’s wanted in Yugers for pinching the plane. It’s the spooks, you see, that you’ll have to contend with; Marseille is rather like a flypaper, as doubtless you’re aware.’

  We waited by the traffic lights and he pressed the button.

  ‘What time is he coming in?’

  ‘As soon as it’s light enough for him to see the ground. The idea is that there won’t be a lot of people about at that hour.’

  ‘How far’s the landing site from Istres?’

  ‘I’m going to show you.’

  The little green man flickered into life and we went across and opened the Lancia and got in and took Section 84 out of the glove compartment. He had a red felt pen in his hand.

  ‘Just here, okay? A kilometre south of St-Martin-de-Crau.’

  The place would be visible from the tower at Istres airfield through a pair of 7X50s but that wasn’t critical because the minor road ran north and then west behind a low elevation and that was where I could lose people, ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘You want to recap?’

  ‘No.’ I wanted to find a phone and tell London they could screw the Pulmeister 101 and screw Milos Zarkovic because tins wasn’t a mission they were handing me, it was a contact and escort operation and they could have used Coleman or Matthews or Johnson or anyone from the general facilities pool: they didn’t need a first-line shadow executive for this thing and they knew it. But I was between missions and not far along the coastline from Istres and they thought they’d save the expense of flying someone else out from London and risking the operation through lack of experience so they’d winkled me out and sent this little jerk to local-brief me and sell me the thing about ‘handling it solo’ to give it the look of a first-line penetration job.

  His cologne was rather heavy and I folded the map and put it back with the others and got out of the car and stood watching an Air Force Boeing sliding down to the airport across the bay.

  ‘You don’t seem very happy, old boy.’

  Screw Steadman too.

  ‘If London wants this character, I’ll bring him in.’

  Soon after Aix-en-Provence I began hitting the Mistral, touching the wheel to correct the steering as the gusts came broadside-on. The Mistral is a strong and steady wind, blowing down the Rhone Valley and bending the cypresses and unnerving the people in its path; it blows for three, six or nine days and by Napoleonic law if it blows for longer than that, murder is not a capital charge.

  I didn’t know how long it had been blowing this time. If it hadn’t dropped by dawn, Zarkovic would have to make a half circuit to bring his plane up-wind because a belly flop would be tricky enough without dead-air conditions. The Mistral turns eastward when it reaches the coast, and that would be Zarkovic’s approach direction.

  By midnight I was in St-Martin-de-Crau and drove straight through and pulled the Lancia into cover alongside a vineyard, dousing the lights and sleeping on and off for the next five hours. The last time I woke up I was aware of the silence: the Mistral had died and the pre-dawn air was still.

  By 05:15 I was positioned to receive the contact, halfway along a narrow road that led south to the coast. The wind had got up again and I stopped trying to work out which way he’d be coming in. There wasn’t a lot of room between the railway to the east and the Rhone Basin to the west, but if he managed to come down precisely into the wind he’d be sliding towards me at this point and finish up within a hundred metres of the car.

  There are never clouds when the Mistral blows, and I could make out the tower at Istres, black against the pale dawn sky. Within minutes the reeds at the edge of the marshland were turning from blood red to silver as the sun lifted from the low horizons, and the wind tugged at them, curving them into scimitars. Gusts hit the side of the Lancia, shifting it on its springs; I leaned away from it and settled the binoculars on the skyline in the east.

  06:00.

  He was overdue because Steadman had told me he was coming in at first light and the sun was already five or six diameters high and the waves of heat were floating horizontally across the lens where the railway embankment made the skyline. He could have mucked it, of course. I didn’t know anything about his background: he could be a major element in something big the Bureau was running or he could be coming across with the blueprints of the Russian fleet, but even if he were only a contact or a courier he had to get a front-line interceptor airborne out of a military base and he had to go like hell through a gauntlet of radar stations that would trigger off signals to every air police unit along the north Mediterranean before he was across the Italian Alps. He could be chased and intercepted and ordered to turn back by pursuit squadrons of the Yugoslavian air arm, and if they managed to interest the Italians in this thing he’d have to move faster than the decision-makers at a dozen military airfields along his course.

  That was his problem, not mine.

  06:30.

  The heat shimmered against the lenses. I lowered the glasses to rest my eyes and then put them up again. The sky to the east was a blinding sheet of white.

  It occurred to me that I’d missed a couple of points because it had looked as if they’d thrown a full-scale mission at me and it had triggered .the normal degree of first-night nerves and I’d been jumping gaps. The thing was this: there hadn’t been any need for Steadman in this picture. London could have
just signalled Interpol to get me into communication, and all those Monegasque cops had to do was tell me to phone the Bureau; then the Bureau would have told me to go and pick up this character at dawn, Bouches du Rhone, so forth.

  But they hadn’t done that. They’d sent Steadman. Or Steadman had been down here in the field and they’d told him to stand by and brief me. One possible answer was that some ether service like DI6 had got on to this Zarkovic thing and found it too hot to handle and shunted it through Liaison 9 for the Bureau to look after, because the Bureau doesn’t exist. Another possible answer was that London was still in the middle of sorting out a mass of raw intelligence that had started hitting the fan up there, but there wasn’t time for me to think about that because a quick black dart was crossing the lenses and I swung them to keep it centred.

  He was moving from east through south and standing on his starboard wingtip as he came round again and dropped very fast across the skyline to the west. I began running because his approach path looked like half a kilometre north of the mark Steadman had made on the map and I couldn’t get the Lancia there. The only available detour would take me five or six kilometres and rather close to the airfield buildings and I didn’t want to expose the image because in an hour from now the Lancia with the CD plate could be the subject of an all-points bulletin if the gendarmerie decided that Yugoslavians ought not to drop out of the sky and jump into cars and disappear.

  The ground was soft and I kept away from the reeds and the bright areas where the sun was reflecting off stagnant water but it was sticky going because the surface was inconsistent and I kept stumbling over firm patches and then wallowing in the troughs. A lot of white birds were crowding into the air not far away because they’d seen the plane. Vision was jerky and I stopped and stood still and tried to get some kind of fix on the spot where he’d be coming down. From this oblique angle the front-end configuration was like a bent dart, with a very small wing area that would make for a high stalling-speed: he couldn’t stay airborne much longer and I worked it out that if I ran like hell I could finish up at a point where I’d be close enough to make the rendezvous without fetching the thing on top of me.

  Began running again. Heard the whine of the twin jets, then they cut off and there was only the buffeting of the wind: he was keeping to his cover situation and going through the motions of running out of fuel; either that or for some very good reason he’d been loafing about over the sea to use up the reserve tank to the point where he’d have to come in, to give the whole thing credibility if anyone decided to take a look at the fuel gauges.

  He was coming in very low indeed and I had to veer a bit without breaking my run because he wouldn’t be able to avoid me if I got it wrong. There was the smell of kerosene as the wind shifted and the light shone bright on the silver-grey fuselage and I could see the nose wheel turning very slowly as the airstream caught it, then he was alongside and I veered again into the wind and got a rear-oblique view of him as he reached the stalling-point and dropped tail first and bounced and tilted and bounced again and then bucked forward and dug the nose in and flipped over in a wave of mud. I kept on running.

  Chapter 2

  LONDON

  The momentum hadn’t been completely exhausted when the Pulmeister had nipped over, and the razor-thin trailing edges of the tail unit had been thrust into the soft earth like a dart driven backwards with force. The front end of the thing was sticking up at something like twenty degrees from the horizontal and of course it was upside down. It looked as if he’d tried to get out because the cockpit hood was open and I could see part of his head and one elbow.

  The wave of mud had sloshed upwards into the cockpit and it was difficult to see any detailed objects against the glare of the sky but I knew one thing: if I couldn’t pull him out very soon the weight of the front end would prise the tail unit out of the mud and bring the cockpit down on both of us, so I crawled underneath and felt for the release clip of his helmet. He didn’t move.

  The whole thing was smothered in mud and I couldn’t find the clip, partly because my fingers didn’t know the precise shape to feel for. Some kind of fluid was dripping from a severed pipe somewhere behind the instrument panel and the wind kept slapping the side of the fuselage: I could bear the sucking sound as the tail unit flexed in the mud. I didn’t think I had more than a few seconds to get him clear. My hands began moving in a kind of controlled frenzy, feeling for whatever they could find: clips, buckles, fasteners, anything they could release, worming their way in the mud and the half-dark while the tail unit flexed, steadied and flexed again.

  ‘Zarkovic,’ I said to the helmet.

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Zarkovic.’

  A basic form of communication designed to inform him that his identity was known and that I must therefore be an ally, even a saviour. He didn’t answer.

  The restrain harness seemed to be free and it looked as if he might have released it too early, having to make a critical decision between staying in place with the harness on to minimize the impact forces, and trying to jump clear. It couldn’t have been easy to make up his mind because a lot of the data was unavailable: he didn’t know what the Pulmeister was going to do when it hit the ground. If he stayed in place with the harness still on he could be trapped upside down in the cockpit in total darkness and with no incoming all and the risk of something catching fire; and if he tried to jump clear he -could get fouled in the loose harness and risk the edge of the cockpit coming down on him.

  ‘Zarkovic.’

  My voice was beginning to have no more meaning than the wind.

  The buckles seemed to be free but he wasn’t able to drop out of the cockpit and I squeezed my body higher, making a decision of my own that was as critical as his because I was too far inside the thing now to get clear if the tail came out of the mud. It wasn’t possible to work out what would happen if six tons of metal came down on us but I didn’t think there’d be enough room to stay alive.

  The wind buffeted, screaming faintly through the reeds outside. I could feel the movement very distinctly as the aircraft yawed to the gusts, and my hands slowed, taking their time, because in a shut-ended situation the organism must resist panic if it wants to survive. The harness was indeed free but his legs were twisted awkwardly and his feet had got trapped by some sort of equipment that had come unshipped on impact: the whole thing had taken somewhere in the region of fifty or sixty g’s and it was now clear that he’d decided to jump and hadn’t been able to.

  My leg was against the padded edge of the cockpit and I could feel it lift and fall every time the tail unit flexed, lifting a little less, falling a little more, till the point was reached when I had to ask whether London wanted one live agent or two dead ones because if the thing came down on me now I was going to get crushed and so was Zarkovic. But I’d started something and I wanted to finish it, so I decided to give it sixty seconds more and then get out.

  Bloody stuff was oozing down from the cockpit floor, some of it running into my eyes before I could shut them and wipe it away. Some kind of instrument ticking steadily in the quietness, the chronometer or a timed alert system; with one eye I could see the ghostly phosphorescence of the instrument dials. Still couldn’t free him because his flying-boots had been wrenched around as his body had twisted, and I thought that if I ever got him out of here he might not walk again, ‘Zarkovic.’

  Nothing.

  Zarkovic, my friend, will you ever walk again?

  Oh come on for Christ’s sake, the whole bloody thing’s going to blot us both out and you’ve given yourself sixty seconds and you’ve got thirty left so come on for Christ’s sake, get this poor bastard out.

  Unlace the boots. Get his boots off.

  Another thing was that they must have seen the Pulmeister from the tower at Istres and if there were anyone on duty at this hour they’d send emergency crews and the distance was less than four kilometres by road and I didn’t want any emergency crews or gendarme
s or anyone like that-all I wanted was to get this man’s bloody boots off.

  A wind gust came and the whole thing shuddered and I worked very hard and he dropped half across me as I got the first boot off but he didn’t say anything or make any movement because he’d taken a beating through those fifty or sixty g’s and he’d been hanging here with the blood accumulating in his head and maybe I was wrong: maybe we did want the emergency crews here and as fast as they could make it Another wind gust and then everything happened at once: the Pulmeister shook itself as the tail unit began coming out of the mud and I ducked low and pulled him down with me and tried to roll him clear and didn’t manage it because my feet and knees were slipping across the mud and I couldn’t Sad any purchase, it was no go. Tried again and got my beds dug in and pulled him backwards like a rope in a tug-o-war and kept on going while the fuselage came slowly down till the edge of the cockpit reached the mud and the thing became a trap but that didn’t matter now because we were clear and I saw where She clip was and snapped it open and took off the helmet, easing it gently, easing it, because he must have suffered some degree of whiplash, ‘Zarkovic.’

  The wind blew across us, whining faintly through the reeds. It was a good face: young, sharp, with a hooked nose and thick dark eyebrows and a scar running from one ear to the chin. His eyes were coming open but there wasn’t much intelligence in them.

  Emergency klaxons, from the direction of Istres. They were closer than they sounded, because of the wind. I knelt in the mud beside him, watching his eyes and waiting; but their dull glaze remained. One leg was badly twisted and he was holding his head awkwardly and it occurred to me that he’d broken his neck. The blood was slowly receding from his face, leaving it translucent white, like the flesh of coconut Klaxons.