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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497697003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 12/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 434 |
| File size: | 514 KB |
About the Author
W.T. Tyler (pen name of Samuel J. Hamrick, Jr.) drew on a twenty-year career as a US State Department analyst in Africa and the Middle East for his novels of Cold War diplomacy and disillusionment. With a gifted ear for dialogue and an artist’s eye for painting a scene, Tyler’s novels chronicle ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. He died in 2008 at the age of seventy-eight.
Read an Excerpt
The Man Who Lost the War
By W. T. Tyler
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1980 W. T. TylerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9700-3
CHAPTER 1
Early snow fell in the Alps that autumn and blocked the Grand St. Bernard Pass between Switzerland and Italy. There were blizzards along the southern Swiss plain, freezing rain over the meadows of the Piedmont and Lombardy. On the slopes of the Carpathians, Polish herdsmen watched the wolves withdraw with their half-grown cubs to the lower ranges and prepared for an unseasonable winter. By the first week of October a light frost lay over the Berlin Wall, barely two months old. The freeze had cracked its footings and fissured its mortar joints. Technicians from the East German construction industries inspected it in the bitter morning wind, standing huddled in cheap overcoats and machine-made hats, ashamed at what the frost had done to that clumsy, scab-built abomination, a scandal to their trades. They were accompanied by armed units from the East German Volksarmee. Across the frontier, in West Berlin, young American platoon leaders from the first US Battle Group watched them suspiciously through binoculars, and afterwards reported their presence, describing them as Russians, probably from the Twentieth Soviet Guards Army. They thought the Reds were searching for weaknesses in the US salient.
In Moscow real Russians worked all day and all night within the Kremlin walls near the old captured Napoleonic guns, trying to complete the new Palace of Congresses in time for the Twenty-second CPSU Party Congress at which Khruschev was expected to deliver a new ultimatum on Berlin. The milky pylons and the slabs of pine-green marble were already mortised in place. Under the skeleton of wooden scaffolding inside, metal salamanders smoked throughout the night to dry the walls so that the platoons of painters and lacquerers could finish their work by October twenty-second.
In the basement of the White House carpenters and electricians were working too, expanding the rabbit warren of offices where President Kennedy's newly enlarged National Security Council was working. Tarpaulins and canvas drop-cloths were hung from the doorways to keep down the dust. Senior staffmen moved carefully between sawhorses, acoustical-tile setters, and electricians moving telephone outlets and mysterious ropes of rubber-insulated communications conduit.
New intelligence key words had appeared. New intelligence monitoring systems were beginning to produce a new conceptual consciousness. At the CIA, the DIA, and in the State Department, a few key officials recognized Khruschev's limitations. There was uncertainty in Moscow, despite the ultimatums, despite the recent success at Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic, where a one-hundred-megaton weapon had been tested, despite the reappearance of Soviet power in the Pacific, where Russian ICBM launchings had begun, contrails of frozen crystal feathering as silently as sharks above the reefs of cumulus over the blue-green waters of the northern Pacific. Soviet industrial growth had slowed. Khruschev's liberalization had produced internal strains. The Chinese were hostile. The missile gap had perished as a credible fact, dissolved under the peregrine eye of Samos, the US spy satellite launched in January to replace the U-2 surveillance which had come to an ignominious end over Sverdlovsk. Panning across tundra, white fields, the blue nugget of Lake Aral, the lonely track of the Trans-Siberian, Samos had betrayed an already moribund technology, a scattering of missiles as clumsy and irrelevant as prairie dinosaurs concealed under thatch and greenery too meagre to hide their prodigious obsolescence—reptile brains unable to transform the four-year-old Sputnik head-start into a strategic advantage in the pax ballistica.
The Soviet military cartographers knew. They had already begun to change the maps of Estonia and Latvia—shrinking coastlines, falsifying distances, obscuring details ... like the breath of the hare contracting under the shadow of the droning hawk.
Fog had cruised the Baltic coast of East Germany northeast of Rostock since before dawn but now had begun to lift from the dunes, from the marsh flats, and the sea itself. Nothing was heard but the wind, the shriek of the gulls, and the sweeping of the waves against the beach. Storm clouds were driven like chimeras from the sea, blown through the tops of the pines and stunted cedars, and lost again against the gray overcast. Reefs of paper-thin ice lay in the stiff grasses beyond the slope of sand and shingle. A solitary wagon road wound along the beach between the trees and the dunes and disappeared in the distance.
The two men moved across the dunes, faces bent into the cold. The wind howled as they walked, licking at their ears, lathering the surf to milk and driving the last of the morning fog into the inland meadows. The smaller man struggled to keep up. The wind bit at his coattails and his gum boots hobbled him in ankle-deep drifts of sand. He was winded and stopped at the top of a dune, breathing heavily as he looked out at the infinite expanse of gray beyond him. He was thin but wiry, as small as a jockey. A shadow of beard lay over his bony cheeks like soot on a chimney sweep. A coarse woolen muffler was pulled about his neck; his ears were red from the wind.
"Perishing cold! What'd we come here for?" Bryce shouted towards Strekov, who turned and looked back, his face neutral below the windblown blond hair. He was wearing a blue corduroy shooting jacket and gum boots, his gray trousers tucked away at the knees.
"Would you like to go back to the car?" Strekov asked. Bryce shook his head, his eyes searching the beach road suspiciously for the Mosca that had brought them from the safe house that morning. Strekov knew he was still wary. He was troubled, unable to account for it.
"It's easy for you, isn't it?" Bryce shouted when he caught up and they resumed their walk. "Used to this filthy weather, ain't you. Not me. It's a whiskey I need, that's all."
"We'll have a whiskey soon."
"I'm not complaining. You never heard me, did you? Walk these ruddy boots off if I had to. What's that?" He looked out to sea where the lifting fog had revealed a few gray ships inbound to Rostock. They rode high in the swell before they were blasted down again by the hammer of the sea, foam breaking over their bows, blue water disgorging from the icy fathoms below. Strekov saw the fear in Bryce's eyes and knew that whatever else might explain it, it was also irrational. He had begun to despair of learning anything from him.
"An East German fishing fleet," Strekov replied easily.
"No warships—Q-boats? Breaks your bones watching it. Sods, all of them. Living on swill. Brine-sodden rashers and roach meal for grub. Bloody fools."
"They're used to it," Strekov said.
"Who's used to it?" Bryce said viciously. "Bloody sickening, it is. It's what the captain tells the crew when he tells them to fuck off. 'You'll get used to it, lads!' Used to what? Used to getting drowned? Shag him, lads!" he yelled suddenly towards the ships. They sailed on. Bryce stood watching them helplessly.
As the two men moved forward again, Strekov said, "How was London? How did you find it?"
"Rotten. Nothing I couldn't manage, though."
"You were tired of it? You wanted to go someplace else?"
"Who wouldn't if the money's there," Bryce said elusively. He lifted his boot over a piece of driftwood scrolled like a scrimshaw, carved bone-white by the salt wind. His foot came down heavily, smashing it. "More money than this frigging place," he complained bitterly. "Siberia is what it is. Not like Brighton now, is it? As different as chalk and cheese, your sea and mine. Frozen sea. Frozen sand. Call it tundra, they say. Siberia's a rifle shot away ... where we all get to, eh? Dig your grave with an ice pick. It's money I need. Do you handle the finances? They never paid me enough." He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
"We can talk about the money," Strekov said. "Why did you leave London so suddenly?"
"I told them," Bryce said sullenly. "I told Kirilen first night I got here."
"Tell me."
"Money," Bryce said emphatically. "Not enough of it. I couldn't get on. Then they were going to pension me off. I was twenty years in the Forces and the wireless service was going to pension me off. Didn't say a dicky-bird about the work I'd done."
"When did you learn that?"
"The day before I left. I went to the pension office, see. Wanted to see what the future might give me. Then I'd been under the doctor with my nerves, see. Sick as a dog."
"You went to the pension office?"
"The day I left."
Strekov stopped. "You told Kirilen that you were thinking about going to the pension office. You didn't tell him you'd gone."
"Maybe I forgot," Bryce said. "Don't get smart. Don't get pushy, see. I'd shut up now and you'd never get another word."
Strekov let it pass. He walked on, studying the sand at his feet. "What else would you want beside money?"
"Just money. A flat too. A place to work. Once a Marconi man, always a Marconi man. I'd work. I never said anything different, did I?" He sucked at the cigarette hidden in his cupped fingers. "Does Kirilen work for you or do you work for him?" he asked slyly.
"We work together." Strekov watched the inhaled smoke dissolve the suspicion in the small, spade-shaped face, filling the undernourished body with warmth and light, like gas expanding in a beaker. The smell of the cigarette reminded Strekov of England again—and of light, too, in the darkest of collieries, in damp pubs among pints and bitters, in sweltering movie houses with fog on the streets outside, in lifts lowering to the floors of Welsh mines, among dustbins, frozen canals, and piled scrap iron, in the cold back yards of Birmingham, below yellow chaffinches in plaster medallions hanging over rain-rotted flock wallpaper, and wind disintegrating ceilings in Notting Hill, blowing through the sawtooth slag heaps, over the gummy lino in Cheapside grocery shops, among trodden parsley and smashed quinceberries, blowing embers nursed by old soldiers with black teeth and orange fingers on the pier at Brighton.
This was Bryce's world as well and Strekov knew it. There were few in Moscow who did.
"You were frightened in London," Strekov said. "That was it, wasn't it?"
The eyes showed the fear momentarily as they looked away but then dimmed and were empty as they contemplated the infinity of the gray sea beyond the beach. "Not frightened," Bryce answered softly. "It was dodgy but I wasn't frightened. Not me. But I'm finished now. All the ruckus they're raising in London. Couldn't manage London now, could I? They'd nick me in a flash. Coppers swarming over me like a widow's broom over a street turd quick as me feet found the pitch. A nutcase, they'd say—drowned in class hatred. Dirt to them, I am now—common as dirt. No, I couldn't manage."
"But others can, is that it?" Strekov said quietly, looking out to sea as he recognized again what made Bryce unique. He wondered how well Moscow understood that. Bryce had stopped in his tracks. Strekov looked back.
"I didn't say that!" Bryce shouted. "Never. You can't make me, see!"
He was terrified. "Make you what?" Strekov asked, surprised.
"You're trying to trap me, you are!" Bryce cried. He was livid.
"I'm trying to understand why you left London so suddenly," Strekov said patiently. "This is important to us. Moscow wants to know. If something has gone wrong, we want to know that as quickly as possible."
"I told Kirilen. I told him—the first night!"
"You told Kirilen you'd been betrayed. Betrayed by whom? Now you say it was the money, that there wasn't enough money. Was that what you meant by betrayed—that your handler in London wasn't giving you enough money?"
"Wouldn't give me the drippings from his nose," Bryce remembered bitterly. "It was dodgy, what I was doing," he continued sullenly. "Then there was my nerves, see. I told Kirilen, that first night. Had a bottle of rum, too. Too much, maybe. Just talking, I was. That first night with Kirilen. Just blathering, see. Nowt wrong in talking now, is there? Fair been bathing in rum too, see." It was a scullion's voice taking refuge in its class: a sort of stage Cockney more cunning than Strekov expected from someone of Bryce's meager gifts.
Strekov's gray eyes puzzled out a line of combers as he walked, listening to Bryce's dissembling voice at his shoulder. The white-capped combers moved like sea serpents towards the beach as the wind picked up.
Bryce wasn't a code clerk. When he'd been recruited in Berlin eighteen months earlier, he'd been working in the pouch room, with only limited access to classified documents. He was still angry about his recall from the British embassy in Moscow, where the KGB had had its first contacts with him. In Berlin, Bryce's sole value was in providing information on visiting British intelligence officers and the gossip of the mission family, much of it malicious, some of it misleading. An ex-serviceman and wireless operator with the RAF before he joined the diplomatic wireless service, he had shown an enlisted man's misperception of the sexual life of his superiors. Much that he'd identified as promiscuous was not; much that he found aberrant was merely eccentric. His professional problems, like his insights, were rooted in his class. In Berlin he'd had trouble with his supervisors, was often rowdy, sometimes drunk, and constantly in debt. After eighteen months he'd been reassigned to the UK at the Diplomatic Wireless Station at Hanslope Park outside London. A month after his return his handler from the Soviet mission contacted him and told him to buy a Hallicrafters radio and install it in his newly purchased detached house in the suburbs. He gave him the money for the radio. A month later Bryce bought the radio and installed it in his attic. At the second meeting with his Soviet handler he was provided with two crystals and a high-speed keying device. Three weeks later Bryce had fled.
The radio hadn't yet been placed in service, and Bryce had received no further instructions from his handler. He'd emptied his bank accounts, left the crystal and antenna loop, together with the high-speed keying device, in a locker at Liverpool Station. He'd taken the train to Harwich, where he'd boarded a boat for Holland. Once he was on the continent, his behavior proved as inexplicable as before. He spent two drunken days in his Copenhagen hotel before getting in touch with his Soviet contact, who knew nothing about Bryce's flight. The following day the Soviet intelligence officer gave him an accommodation passport and a plane ticket to Warsaw. At the airport Bryce changed his mind and asked to be sent to East Berlin instead. He claimed he had a German fiancée in East Berlin and that they'd planned to be married. Bryce drove to Gedser on the coast in a rented car and caught the ferry to Warnemunde in East Germany. Kirilen had been sent from Soviet intelligence headquarters at Karlshorst to meet him. The address of Bryce's East German fiancée was a false one. Kirilen escorted Bryce to a safe house in the country, where his debriefing commenced. The first night Bryce told Kirilen that he had been betrayed in London. The following morning he denied it, as he also denied giving the Soviet contact in Copenhagen the address of his East German girl friend in Berlin. Two nights later he slipped away from the safe house. The guards found him in the woods near the main gate. He told Kirilen that he was on his way to the pub in the village. Kirilen thought Bryce was attempting to escape from the house and return to Warnemunde. Apart from concluding that Bryce was terrified and a hopeless alcoholic as well, Kirilen could make no sense of his story. From Moscow, Orlov had asked Strekov to fly in from London to interrogate him.
"Did your handler in Berlin talk to you about money?" Strekov said, searching the beach road ahead of them for the car. "Did he promise you more than you received?"
"He gave for what he got," Bryce answered. "Boris was his name. Boris and Vasily. They worked together. Easy to get on with. Treated me like a perishing nursemaid. Anything I wanted. Booze, fags, a bit of crumpet now and then. German lasses, too, they were. Not tarts. Young ones. Not those old trots you pick up on the streets." He lit another cigarette and shivered from the cold.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man Who Lost the War by W. T. Tyler. Copyright © 1980 W. T. Tyler. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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