‘General Bovary, Deputy Director,’ said the woman by way of introduction, then she shut the door behind her as she left.
The Deputy Director looked up, and the two men began to take the measure of each other. Each one might have been looking in a mirror. They were both square, solid Georgians whose thick hair and long eyes spoke eloquently of Cossack blood. There was only a year or two between them and it would have been hard to say which was the older.
‘What do you know about icebergs, General?’ asked the Deputy Director.
Bovary stayed where he was, so close to the door that his shoulders might have touched it had he not been at parade ground attention. ‘Nothing germane, Deputy Director.’
‘Germane,’ mused the KGB man. ‘A good word. Well-chosen. Please sit down while I consider its implications.’
Boris marched to the chair indicated. He bent his knees ninety degrees and his elbows one hundred and twenty degrees, allowing his hands to cross in his lap, but remained at attention as he sat. He refused to let his mind speculate, though this was now something of a strain.
‘By germane I suppose you mean in a relevant intelligence context. I see your point. How can icebergs be of any interest to the intelligence services? Well, I will tell you. Icebergs become relevant when they become politically important. You understand this?’
‘So, we are discussing the iceberg called Manhattan which is currently en route to Africa under the eyes of the world’s most powerful leaders and the United Nations, with the widely welcomed support of Premier Yeltsin and the merchant marine personnel he has graciously supplied.’
The Deputy Director’s eyebrows rose appreciatively. They were square, shaggy eyebrows, like those of the late Comrade Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.
‘Have you read the Red File on Chernobyl?’
‘It was one of the files passed to us during the internal perestroika phase. We passed many Red Files back to you. And, in any case, many of the facts in the Chernobyl file were originally supplied by us.’
‘I will accept that as a simple yes, shall I?’ There was an instant of silence. ‘I’m beginning to appreciate your use of language, General. Germane.. ’ The Deputy Director flicked open a humidor and the fragrance of Virginia tobacco filled the room. He gestured. Bovary accepted — American cigarettes were his only weakness. Well, perhaps not his only weakness…
The two men lit up, watching each other through the smoke.
‘You are speculating about the links between an iceberg called Manhattan and the disaster at Chernobyl,’ probed the Deputy Director.
As a matter of fact, Bovary was not. But the strain of keeping his mind blank was beginning to make him sweat.
‘They can be encapsulated in two words,’ persisted the Deputy Director as seductively as Mephistopheles whispering to Faust. ‘Leonid Brezhnev.’
Bovary jumped, struck against his will by the coincidence: he had been thinking of Brezhnev only an instant before — of his eyebrows.
The Deputy Director supposed that he must have struck a chord in his military audience. ‘I am surprised you realise the significance of the name,’ he said, piqued. ‘I had not realised that the loss of the Brezhnev had reached your ears. She was so carefully… non-military. Unusually so; that was her only flaw. Or so we thought.’
Bovary’s mind was no longer blank. It was making quantum leaps from one cryptic comment to the next, tying them together. How accurately he was making these links he had no idea as yet. He sat in silence, therefore, knowing how seductive that, too, could be.
‘There was pandemonium here when she vanished, of course. But then the received knowledge, the best guess, came to be that she was somewhere at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean near Novaya Zemlya. Which was where the black glass was supposed to be in any case. So. No harm done then, and everyone relaxed.’
But now things have started turning up. Bovary began to gain enough confidence in his understanding to predict the Deputy Director’s words.
‘But now one or two unusual reports have appeared in the Chernobyl file.’
Close. Black glass? On the iceberg Manhattan?
‘Firstly, we have a report of a death on the iceberg Manhattan, caused by the ingestion of radioactive black glass.’
‘Ingestion?’
‘A soldier swallowed it. He must have thought it was worth a lot.’
Bovary nodded once. Smuggling was not unknown among his own soldiers either.
‘It killed him of course. In the same report we have dental records from another corpse discovered on Manhattan, a very much older corpse whose dental records conform with those of the first officer of the missing ship.’
‘Pretty conclusive …’
‘And finally, we have a report from Washington that one of the scientists working on the ice seems to have an unusual radiation burn. It apparently looks like this.’ The Deputy Director pushed a piece of paper across to Bovary who instantly recognised the rough Cyrillic letters even though they were reversed.
He sucked his cigarette and allowed his mind full rein.
‘It was the computer,’ said the Deputy Director, his defences destroyed by wonder. ‘A couple of reports from opposite sides of the world. Nothing to do with each other. Nothing to do with anything. In they go to the computer and my alarm bells start ringing and the Director says, “Cancel your weekend, Dimitri!” Vodka?’
‘The implications of the situation seem obvious.’ Bovary’s words were distantly academic, but he nodded yes as he spoke them. The Deputy Director reached into his desk drawer as he listened. ‘The potential political damage is incalculable. If the situation is discovered and blame is apportioned here, then we will be drummed out of the United Nations.’
‘Out of the international community,’ supplied the Deputy Director over the sound of clinking glass and gurgling liquid. ‘Goodbye World Bank. Goodbye international aid. Goodbye economy.’
‘Hello revolution.’ Bovary tossed back the vodka and slammed his glass down on the desk. ‘Hello anarchy.’ The fiery liquid seemed to have taken his breath away.
‘Hello civil war,’ said the Deputy Director, sipping his drink more slowly.
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of vodka pouring and the scream of a siren from Dzerzhinsky Street.
“The iceberg must be stopped, lost or destroyed before anyone finds out.’ Bovary drank his second vodka.
‘It represents a billion cubic metres of water. Remember, the one-tenth above the water alone is the size of Manhattan Island.’
‘It is not a situation calling for subtlety, then.’
‘Which is why we have turned to the GRU, General.’
‘The Russian personnel already involved…’ The vodka was tempting Bovary into thinking aloud, something he rarely did.
‘A good thought, and one which is already being looked into.’
‘But also there is something else. Something military.’
‘Something relevant. Something elegant. You have a man out there. The right man. The relevant man. The man who started it all, so to speak.’
‘Gogol! Mother of God, you want me to send in Gogol!’
‘He is, as they say, in the right place at the right time.’
‘But he’s retired… Sick … Dying. He’s a salesman, not—’
‘He’s within five hundred kilometres of the point of reception with a division of main battle tanks and a squadron of heavily-armed helicopters.’