Arctic assignment, p.1
Arctic Assignment, page 1
ARCTIC ASSIGNMENT
Simon Larren Espionage Series
Book Five
Robert Charles
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: AN AGENT VANISHES
CHAPTER 2: A JOB FOR SIMON LARREN
CHAPTER 3: CRASH LANDING
CHAPTER 4: DOCTOR MARGARET
CHAPTER 5: A SHOAL OF DEAD FISH
CHAPTER 6: NO CHOICE BUT TO KILL
CHAPTER 7: A DISTASTEFUL HALF-HOUR
CHAPTER 8: THROUGH FROZEN SEAS
CHAPTER 9: SNIPER IN THE SNOW
CHAPTER 10: DOCTOR NINA
CHAPTER 11: A SYMPATHETIC ALLY?
CHAPTER 12: STRANGE REUNION
CHAPTER 13: A WILD GAMBLE
CHAPTER 14: BLACKMAIL, BRIBERY AND THREATS
CHAPTER 15: BACK INTO THE NIGHT
CHAPTER 16: INVASION
CHAPTER 17: THROUGH THE BLIZZARD
CHAPTER 18: THE GREATEST SACRIFICE
CHAPTER 19: DUEL ON THE ICE
CHAPTER 20: THE SECRET OF BARREN ISLAND
CHAPTER 21: THE INTUITION OF A DEAD MAN
NOTE TO THE READER
ALSO BY ROBERT CHARLES
CHAPTER 1: AN AGENT VANISHES
The snow screamed into Cleyton’s face like a furious swarm of diving white hornets, attacking with merciless ferocity. His eyes flinched behind his protective goggles and regardless of whether he kept them open or closed he was still blind. There was nothing but the swirling white flakes ripping through the feeble grey swathe cut by the beam of the heavy torch in his thickly gloved hand, and beyond the howling blackness of the storm-lashed Arctic night.
He had to lean steeply forwards to stop the force of the blizzard from blasting him over on to his back, and he had the grim feeling that if he once fell then the weight of his thick snow-laden furs would never allow him to rise again in the face of the wind. The sound of the blizzard shrieked and stabbed at his eardrums as the wind gusts ricocheted among snow dunes and crags of ice. The unaccustomed snowshoes dragged clumsily at his feet as Cleyton endeavoured to lurch forward, but he was making a minimum of progress. In fact, he doubted whether he was making any progress at all. He knew he had to turn back.
The blizzard had blown up unexpectedly an hour after he had left the small settlement of Stadhaven on Dog Island, a small spot of land in the Arctic Ocean above Norway’s North Cape. He was only halfway to his destination, a deeply indented, frozen cove on the west side of the island, and now he bitterly resented the fact that he had to give up the attempt as a wasted effort. The fact that it was very unlikely that there would be anything left to see if he ever did reach the fiord did little to soothe his vexation, and even if there was he failed to see the connection between a shoal of dead fish washed up above the moving ice floes at the mouth of the fiord, a missing Eskimo and the recently reported Russian activity on the neighbouring Soviet territory of Barren Island five miles away. But he had to start somewhere, and now he hated to turn back only to face the gruelling trek all over again once the storm had ceased.
He stopped, with his shoulders hunched forward and his head bowed to let the storm batter the top of his hooded parka instead of hitting him full in the face, and reverted to what for him was a rare outlet. He swore, very slowly and precisely, with a deliberate pause between each sour word. Why, he asked himself disgustedly, did the blasted Russians have to start playing at “mysterious activities” in this freezing, God-forsaken speck of nowhere? Why couldn’t they play their silly bloody games somewhere where it was warm and comfortable? And why did Smith have to pick on him for this particular mission? He was beginning to wish that he had studied Tahitian or Swahili in his youth instead of learning Russian and Norwegian.
Cleyton turned wearily back. The moment he stopped leaning into the wind and twisted his ungainly feet around in the snow, the blizzard blew him flat on his face. He swallowed an almost violent swear word and struggled to his hands and knees. The driven snow hurled itself in tearing gusts at his back and threatened to push him down on to his face again as he raised one gloved hand to wipe the freezing slush from the eyepieces of his goggles. The over-hanging fur hood of his parka was flapping wildly, and the wind roared past him as though a continuous express train was thundering by on either side of his crouching figure. Cleyton fought his way gamely to his feet in the slipstream of the non-existent trains, and leaned his shoulders into the blizzard to prevent himself being blown forwards again. His feet were braced apart as he moved the grey beam of the torch that he still retained through the savage, swirling nightmare of darkness.
His footprints were already wiped out and the cold tightened around his throat. His numbed fingers moved the torch slowly but without hope. There was nothing to show him the way back to the settlement.
Cleyton knew that he should have taken the advice he had been given before he started out and allowed one of the short, wiry little Eskimo hunters to accompany him. But there had been no sign of a blizzard then, and he had been too uncertain of what he might find to welcome company. Now he knew that he had made a mistake. Dog Island was only small, a mere six miles by ten, but that provided sixty square miles in which to wander round in circles until he froze to death. It was true that he had a very efficient compass strapped to his left wrist, but in this howling muck he could pass within ten yards of Stadhaven and still miss it.
However, there was nothing he could do but start back and hope for the best. He shivered as he checked his direction with the aid of the torch and then headed south-east. He could quite easily have run all the way with the storm lashing his back to carry him on, but there were so many cracks and fissures across the ice that he dared not move too fast. He slid his snowshoes forward in clumsy steps, aiming his torch beam just ahead of his feet, and tried not to think of the biting cold that had cut through his furs and was now gnawing at his bones.
For a moment he wondered whether this might have been the way that Tunkut had disappeared, but then he remembered that the missing Eskimo had vanished at sea and not on land. And according to reports there had been no foul weather at the time. Tunkut had left Stadhaven in his kayak after announcing his intention of hunting walrus on Barren Island, and had not come back. Now Cleyton was beginning to realise that there were plenty of good reasons why a man should vanish in this inhospitable part of the world without blaming anything on the Russians at all. It was beginning to look as though he, too, was going to fail to return.
He wiped more slush out of his goggles and strained his eyes to spot any sudden gaps in the ice ahead, at the same time allowing his mind to concentrate on Tunkut in an effort to keep the awareness of the ever-increasing cold from taking complete domination.
Taken on its own, the disappearance of the lone Eskimo would most probably have been accredited to some natural disaster. He had gone on a walrus hunt, and walrus could become notoriously dangerous when wounded or enraged. Some of the bigger bulls weighed several tons and reached a length of twelve feet, and their savage tusks could quite easily smash a small kayak or gore a slow-moving man.
But Tunkut’s disappearance was not an incident on its own. The pilot of a small reconnaissance aircraft operated by the fisheries department of the Norwegian Government had reported a newly constructed landing stage on Barren Island, plus other slight but definite signs of occupation, only a few days before the Eskimo had vanished. And since then other hunters from Dog Island had been terrified by a great monster rearing up from the freezing seas between the two islands, described by the frightened islanders as a huge, blind, eyeless whale with a strange high hump upon its back. The monster could only have been a submarine. But what was a submarine doing in these waters? And what were the Russians doing on Barren Island? And, perhaps least of all, what had happened to the simple Eskimo hunter?
Cleyton had no idea — but he was supposed to find out. And so he had looked with interest upon another unusual event that had stirred the normally routine conversation of the island’s inhabitants: the discovery of a whole shoal of dead fish washed up on the west shore — the shoreline that faced the Soviet island across the straits.
The force of the blizzard had heightened now, and the wind screamed like a thousand tortured banshees in the black maelstrom of the night, the long below-zero night of the pitiless Arctic. The crippling cold beat all thoughts of his mission from Cleyton’s mind and he stumbled forward blindly, caring less and less about the danger of breaking an ankle or a leg in some concealed fissure in the snow and ice as he realised that if he failed to find Stadhaven soon then he would die. His fingers and toes were already numb and every muscle in his body ached. He cursed again at the startling speed and fury with which the blizzard had arrived.
He could see nothing now, surrounded by the roaring, rushing darkness of gale-blown snow, hearing only the wailing agony of the wind and feeling nothing but the vicious buffeting at his shoulders and the inexorable advance of the cold. He knew that it was time he checked his direction again and braced himself with difficulty as he fumbled to direct his torch at his compass. Fresh gusts of snow swept thickly across his line of vision, and Cleyton had to bow his head close to the face of the dial before he could read it. He saw with relief that he was still on the right course, and then a combination of swamped sound, vague movement and instinct made him suddenly realise that he was no longer alone.
He swung the torch away from his compass, arcing it through the racing grey snow-clouds as fast as his clumsy fingers would allow. He almost dropped it in his haste, and t hen the beam picked out a looming shape in encumbering furs: the short squat shape of an Eskimo.
Cleyton gasped a muffled sob of thanks into the thick coverings that protected the lower half of his face from frostbite and made to move forward. He was offering a silent prayer to the Counter-Espionage equipment officer who had provided him with the accurate compass to bring him on a straight line back to Stadhaven, and smack into the arms of a rescue party, when he realised that the islander was carrying one of the sharp bone-tipped hunting spears.
Cleyton was numb and frozen as well as being badly hampered by his thick furs, which had now doubled in weight with wet, clinging snow. He tried to avoid the quick, savage blow as the Lapp islander used his spear as a staff, but he was much too slow. The haft of the spear caught the side of his head and knocked him sprawling on to the snow. The ringing crack should have knocked him senseless, but a lot of the blow was absorbed by the thick fur of his parka and he lay there dazed. He was on his back and somehow the torch had still remained tightly clasped in his hand, its beam pointing up at an angle into the howling blackness of the night. He saw the hooded figure in furs looming over him again, caught in the grey glow of the torch with the black hell of the blizzard raging behind him. The man stood with his feet apart and his body braced, his face covered and his eyes hidden behind protective snow goggles. He gripped the hunting spear in both hands and strained his shapeless body into the storm to steady himself as he aimed to lunge at Cleyton’s throat. Despite a flurry of snow that practically smothered Cleyton’s face, the razor-edged bone tip of the hunting spear showed up clearly in the feeble torch light.
The wind gave its banshee howl, a shrieking cackle of deathly glee. The night was hideous with the blizzard’s roar and Cleyton passed out from the pain in his head with the spear only inches from his throat.
CHAPTER 2: A JOB FOR SIMON LARREN
The green neon lizard above the doorway of the Iguana nightclub was winking its one bright red eye repeatedly at the deserted street as the West End of London approached the end of its nightly cycle of noise and gaiety. A hundred yards away a last defiant reveller was in the process of being arrested for attempting to climb the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and only a few late-night taxis patrolled the main streets. Inside the Iguana the last cabaret performance had finished half an hour before, and Simon Larren was collecting his coat from the cloakroom.
Marylin Cross rejoined him a few moments later from the direction of the lady’s cloakroom, now wearing a dark red full-length coat above her evening dress. She put her arm automatically round his waist and snuggled close to his side as he bade a calm goodnight to an envious doorman.
The night air struck them with a cold chill as they walked briskly away from the night-club and Larren led her directly to his pure white MG sports that stood beside a parking meter in a nearby side-street. He helped her into the low passenger seat, then quickly circled round the sleek white bonnet to the other side. He had barely closed the door before she was pulling him close again, and her lips were infinitely soft as he raised them to be kissed.
At last he disentangled himself and started the engine. As the car purred into motion and he slipped it into gear, Marylin was gently tickling the inside of his left ear lobe with her little finger. “Where are we going now?” she asked in the kind of softly contented voice that already knows the answer.
Larren had already turned the car out on to Regent Street and was heading north. “My flat,” he said calmly. “Where else?”
Marylin smiled and allowed her head to fall to one side and rest on his shoulder, her soft blonde hair brushing against his throat. She unfastened the large buttons of her coat so that he could slip one arm inside to encircle her slim waist and generally made herself comfortable. Larren’s mouth registered a slight smile as he concentrated on the road.
He turned left into the wide, brightly lit length of Oxford Street. The richly dressed plate-glass windows cruised smoothly past on either side; there were still lights high above in the top-floor windows of some of the taller office blocks. A lone constable moved at stolid regulation pace along the otherwise empty pavement, and there was very little traffic. Larren felt Marylin’s hand close over his own where it spread around her waist, and then she moved his hand upwards to press it firmly against her breast. He could feel the desire-hardened point of her nipple pressing through the material of her dress against his palm and looked down slowly. Marylin smiled up at him, somehow contriving to make her wide blue eyes appear naive and innocent. She rubbed his hand gently against her, and almost automatically his foot rested more heavily upon the accelerator and the needle on the speedometer dial flickered well past the legal limit.
He turned off Oxford Street and a few minutes later the needle dipped back below the speed limit again as he entered Rushlake Terrace. He braked the sports car smoothly to a stop outside the four broad steps leading up to number twelve, and deftly shut down the engine. Marylin murmured his name in a dreamy whisper and this time tickled her tongue in his ear. Larren decided to leave the side-lights burning rather than waste time driving the car round to the garages behind the haughty Victorian-styled houses that had now been transformed into neat flats.
He disentangled himself for the second time, told her to button her coat up before she caught cold, then hurried round to the other side of the car to help her out. She shivered as she stepped out on to the cold pavement, and Larren closed the door with a sharp thrust of his foot and practically ran her up the steps and through the glass-fronted door into the hall.
They moved more sedately up the staircase now that they had shut the sharp night air behind them, and Larren led the way along the short second-floor corridor to his rooms. He unlocked the door, reached one hand inside to press down the light switch and ushered Marylin in ahead of him. She smiled up at him as she passed, impressed by his manners, but it was not the desire to be polite that caused him to stand aside while she entered but simply the trained caution of long experience. Simon Larren had long since learned to be wary of walking first through any doorway, even in the supposed safety of his own home. He had once walked through this very same door and found himself looking straight into the ugly bulbous eye of a silenced automatic.
The flat was comfortably furnished and Larren had left one electric fire burning so that it was already pleasantly warm. Now he switched on a second fire to provide another welcome glow. A thoughtfully placed tray of bottles, glasses and a soda-water syphon stood upon a low coffee table, and two or three pre-selected records were all ready to be dropped on to the turntable of the large oak-panelled radiogram.
Marylin looked around appreciatively, then turned to face Larren as he took off his coat and dropped it across the back of one of the two big armchairs. “You think of everything,” she said demurely.
Larren came forward and helped her out of her dark red coat, placing it on top of his own. “I was once a boy scout,” he said. “All I ever learned was the motto — ‘Be prepared.’”
Marylin smiled, making an attractive shrugging movement of her shoulders, which were now smoothly bare above a low-cut evening dress of salmon pink. “I was never in the boy scouts,” she said. “But I’m prepared too.”
She waited expectantly. Larren regarded her for a moment, his gaze assessing the smooth curve of her hips and the inviting stance, then moving up to meet the level blue of her dark-lashed eyes. Then he reached out to plant one hand firmly on each of her hips and drew her against him.
Her eager body arched slightly backwards from the waist as her arms fastened about his shoulders and her mouth trembled helplessly under his own. Her body moulded shamelessly against his and her lips parted in a low moan. For a moment she was completely submissive, and then she responded by answering the fierce pressure of his mouth and tightening her arms about him with all her strength.
After several minutes Larren raised his head and remarked calmly. “Music and liquor should have been part of the seduction treatment. Do you want a drink first?”
Marylin pulled his tie away from his neck. “Damn the drink,” she said huskily. “I want you.”
