'Family?'
'Know nothing.'
Vorontsyev persisted, as if he were interrogating the Deputy. Kapustin, hotter still it seemed in the airless room, aquiesced; as if it were easier for him to be questioned than to volunteer a briefing to a subordinate — and one in a hospital bed, at that.
'What else is there, Comrade Deputy?' Vorontsyev did not question his own eagerness — whether revenge, or in the burial of private worlds.
'Not very much. For the expenditure of so much effort, very little indeed. We have a dossier…' He patted the briefcase that rested by the chair, and to which he had not referred since his arrival. 'Of all movements and contacts of officers and bureaucrats under surveillance during the last year. All the teams are going through them, as you did with Ossipov, checking for some new lead, or some connection.'
'The — suspects? Are they confirmed, or not?'
'No. They are — everyone who might possess the power or the influence was put under surveillance. Automatically.'
'Power for what?' Vorontsyev asked after a while.
'Revolution. That is the broad picture. The assumption that a revolution is being planned…'
'Ridiculous!' was Vorontsyev's first reaction. Then he stopped short, abashed at his indiscretion.
Instead of anger, Kapustin said, 'I might agree with you, Major. If I knew as little as you do. But — fantastic as it is, I have to consider the possibility. So do you.'
'But — why? And how? With the Committee for State Security so effective. It would need cooperation — converts — in the Politburo, the High Command, the Praesidium, the Secretariat, the KGB itself.'
'I quite agree. As to why, I don't know. As to how — it could take ten years to plan, and execute. And it would need the army — and the navy, too, perhaps. Certainly elements in all the organs of government and control in the state. It would be — huge.'
'I can't believe it!'
'Perhaps not. But — something is going on. Generals don't have to have substitutes in order to visit prostitutes, of either sex. And the substitutes don't get killed on the merest suspicion that discovery may be just around the corner! Think of that when you're reading these files…' Again he tapped the briefcase with a hand that was backed with dark, curling hair — dark as the hair that curled from his wide nostrils. 'And think of this, too. If it would take say ten years — and it is happening — where are we in their timetable, at the present moment?'
Folley watched the guards carefully; it had become a habit so to do, as automatic as glancing in a driving-mirror at precise intervals. There was no possibility of escape connected with it.
The two young Red Army soldiers, a corporal and a senior private, seemed content with his company. During the hours of the short day, they seemed comfortable, even approachable — as if they had received no orders against fraternisation. Folley realised that it was an illusory state, and it was designed to make him less troublesome to his guards.
The small tent was cold, but he was still warmly clad in his winter combat clothing, boots and mittens — the Finnish uniform beneath it they had disbelieved, especially when his command of the language had been discovered to be rudimentary by a Senior Lieutenant who interrogated him in Finnish; but they had allowed him to keep it, and his supposed identity. Except for the papers, which had disappeared. They had spoken to him in English after that. His silence was a tacit admission. He had not answered their questions, but they knew his nationality. He had to ask for the toilet, for food and drink, in English, before they would respond. Yet still they had not beaten him.
The three of them sat round the oil-stove, feeling its warmth on their faces, the fronts of their legs. In the hours that he had been held in the camp, they had done little else. They had allowed him to exercise, of course.
They had interrogated him, but not physically. He had told them nothing; though he was evidence by his solitariness of the level of suspicion that had despatched him to Finnish Lapland.
They did not take him seriously. That was his impression of the regimental commanders, colonels both; and the impression given by the small, neat, precise man with the one large silver star of a major-general on his shoulder-boards. He had met the General only once, when he had been taken to be questioned in the wooden hut erected to serve as headquarters for senior officers.
During the night of his pursuit, another regiment had arrived; this time a Motor Rifle Regiment, comprising a tank battalion of forty older T-62 tanks, a battle recce company, three motor rifle battalions, whose vehicles were mainly BMP and BTR-60 armoured personnel carriers; field artillery and anti-aircraft batteries; the medics and technical support group. And a chemical platoon and its vehicles.
Folley had been unnerved by this latter more than the assembled firepower and personnel; it was the most real of the sights, the most vivid in imagination. For many hours afterwards, he was not sure that he had seen it. He tried to persuade himself that it was not the case; he had pieced together the skeleton of the major rifle regiment from the vehicles he had seen, and the men; and within that context, he knew he had caught a glimpse of the vivid yellow vehicles of the chemical platoon.
No one had explained the presence of the Russian armour in the forest south-east of Ivalo. And there was a comfort in ignorance — until what he knew of current war games, the conversation of a friend on the War Studies Team at Cranwell, and his own tactical sense, pressed upon him the conviction that he was amid only one spearhead. There had to be others, concealed on either or both sides of the Soviet border, along its length with Finland.
And the main armoured strike would be to the north, along the single main road to Kirkenes, into northern Norway. And that strike would be preceded by chemical attack; that much he could be certain of.
The Finnmark, therefore, was the target.
Russia was going to war in Scandinavia. It was a simple, brute fact.
Sitting there, watching the two guards, he sensed that he was still numbed by the fact; he had no urgent desire to return to Tromsø, then to MOD, with the knowledge of what he knew. He felt himself strangely identified with what was happening here, in this place. As if the events were those of a nightmare, and he could not quite believe in it; nor escape it. The nightmare was so real, but confined to these acres of forest and camouflaged vehicles and disciplined men, that he could not see beyond it. It was easier, much, simply to sit, to wait out the hours of daylight, sleep out the night; perform his bodily functions — exercise, urinate, defecate, and adopt the subdued, waiting tension of the camp.
He had heard how hijacked airline passengers identified with their captors, came to hate those outside who tried to help them. It had happened to him. He was almost one of these soldiers now — who questioned nothing, who simply followed orders, and left the niceties of Armageddon to their superior officers.
He guessed that this force was intended to take Ivalo, and its airfield, or perhaps to strike across the north of Finnish Lapland into Norway. All that he had ever understood of Soviet tactics was that some land of airborne assault would have to be made on selected targets — to hold them until armoured columns arrived. Perhaps, he wondered, these men were to hold Ivalo as a forward airfield for transports which would lift men into Norway.
Now, when he spoke to the guards, it was if no distinction of loyalties divided them. They were men in uniform; circumstances had thrown them together. He said. 'Can we walk for ' little?'