an ally. But an order was an order, and much as he detested the increasing power and influence of the KGB in military matters, to defy a command was to place his own life on the line.
He glanced at Piggy. It was a mistake which was to cost him his life. For in that fleeting look, Piggy saw something beyond the expression of respect for a fellow soldier. He saw regret, and he saw pity. Even as Zhann’s hand twitched at his side in a prearranged signal, Piggy’s highly tuned senses were already primed. That very special instinct was alerted, and his body tensed to respond.
Ninety-nine soldiers out of 100 would have missed the faint, muted click of a dozen PPSh sub-machine-guns being cocked simultaneously. Piggy did not. More importantly, he pinpointed the exact source of the sound immediately: third lorry, fifteen degrees to his right.
‘Shake out,’ he screamed at the top of his voice. Even as he yelled, the Vickers in his hands was pumping out its devastating 500 rounds a minute – a lethal cocktail of tracer, armour-piercing shells, incendiary and ball. Beside him, Wellerby had already dived over the side of the jeep, retrieved the Thompson and rolled back under the vehicle, from where he began raking the legs of the Russian soldiers who had been standing in line.
Piggy swung the spitting machine-gun along the side of the third lorry from the cab to the tailgate, concentrating his fire at the level where the side panel met the canvas cover. The fabric of the canopy shredded away like mist evaporating in the sunshine, whole sections of it bursting into flame and drifting into the air on its own convection currents. The side panel disintegrated into splinters of wood and metal, finally revealing the inside of the truck like the stage of some monstrous puppet theatre on which life-sized marionettes jerked and twitched in an obscene dance of death.
Caught on the hop, the rest of the Russian troops had reacted with commendable speed. Leaving their unfortunate colleagues who had caught Wellerby’s raking ground-level burst from under the jeep writhing on the ground with shattered legs and kneecaps, those who could still move threw themselves down and rolled for what cover they could find.
The second set of Vickers never had a chance to open up. Pat O’Neill took a chest full of rib-splintering 7.62mm slugs which lifted him out of the jeep and threw him several feet behind it. He was dead before he hit the ground. Seconds later, Mad Dog caught it in the gut and slid lifelessly down in his seat, his head bowed forward like a man in prayer. Beyond the arc of the sub-machine-guns, two surviving Russian soldiers had rolled into a position from which they had a clear line of fire to the underside of the lead jeep. Andy Wellerby did not stand a chance as a deadly cone of fire from the two guns converged on his trapped and prone form.
Piggy had only the satisfaction of seeing Colonel Zhann’s upper torso dissolve into a massive bloody stump before the Russian fire came up over the side of the jeep and caught him in the thighs and groin. He fell sideways, landing half in and half out of the jeep as the clatter of gunfire finally ceased.
Pain swamped his senses, but his eyes were still open and his brain could still register what they saw. Just before the blackness came down, Piggy saw the lorry containing Leveski and Mencken dwindling into the distance.
‘We owe you one, you bastards,’ he grunted from between clenched teeth just before he collapsed into unconsciousness.
Miraculously, Piggy survived. But he was to hobble for the rest of his life on a pair of crutches and one tin leg. Just one year after leaving the military hospital, he joined the Operations Planning and Intelligence Unit at Stirling Lines – ironically enough, nicknamed ‘The Kremlin’ – and had a distinguished career until his retirement in 1986. Throughout his service years, his colleagues would come to know him for one particular conviction, which became almost a catch-phrase.
‘Never trust a fucking Russian,’ Piggy would say. ‘Never trust a fucking Russian.’
Puerto Gaiba, Bolivia – May 1951
The man who called himself Conrad Weiss watched the two strangers walking along the shabby riverside and knew that the day he had feared and dreaded for six years had finally arrived.
They were coming for him; of that Weiss had absolutely no doubt. The two men were smartly dressed and obviously Europeans – both extreme rarities in a little Bolivian backwater town on the River Paraguay. He assumed that they had been to his house and extracted directions to the boat from his wife. He hoped that they had not tortured or hurt her. Although he had originally taken Conceptua in bigamous marriage purely for reasons of political expediency, Weiss had grown genuinely fond of her and the two olive-skinned sons she had borne him.
The two men strolled unhurriedly towards the luxury motor cruiser, which stood out like a sore thumb among the jumble of dilapidated river fishing craft. Weiss thought, momentarily, of the loaded Luger he kept in his cabin locker, quickly dismissing it. If the men were coming for him they would be trained agents, armed and alert. Besides, even if he did manage to kill them both, others would follow. They knew where he was now.
It seemed best to play innocent, attempt to bluff it out. There was at least a reasonable chance of getting away with it, Weiss reasoned. His false Swiss identity papers were the flawless work of a master forger, and his assumed identity was rock solid. And, even if that failed to impress his investigators, he had distributed vast sums in bribes to corrupt Bolivian officials in high places. That should protect him against an official attempts at extradition. Of course, they might have plans to smuggle him out of South America forcibly. Or simply to kill him where he was. In which case, his six-year run of good luck would have finally run out.
Weiss had developed a philosophical attitude to what had basically been a second life for him. He had been incredibly lucky, and more than a little cunning. When the Allies had liberated Auschwitz, he had managed to slip through the net disguised as one of the Jewish prisoners. Undetected even after six weeks in a temporary transit camp, he had finally managed to buy his ticket to freedom from an American sergeant for a handful of gold nuggets. Whether that sergeant had ever known that those nuggets came from the dental fillings of murdered Jews, Weiss had never known, or cared. He had evaded everybody – even the British SAS units on special duty to round up and arrest known and suspected war criminals. At the time, that was all that had mattered.
For the gold itself, Weiss had cared even less, for it had represented but a small fraction of the fortune in stolen jewelry and valuables he had amassed during his four years in the death camp. It was that fortune which had bought him the identity of Conrad Weiss, a retired Swiss watchmaker, and his passage to Bolivia.
But luck was at best a temporary phenomenon. The two men now mounting the gangplank of his boat both testified to that.
Bluff it out, then. Play the cards you held and hope for the best, Weiss decided. Propping himself up against the stern rail, he tried to look innocently surprised.
The first man aboard had a smile on his face, but his eyes were cold.
‘Herr Weiss?’
The reply was non-committal. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘Ah, you are worried, cautious. As of course you should be,’ Tovan Leveski murmured in good German. His hand dropped slowly and gently towards the front of his well-cut jacket, slipping open the buttons. He studied Weiss’s eyes, following every move.
‘Let me assure you, Herr Weiss, that we mean you no harm. We are not what you probably think we are. For a start, both of us are completely unarmed.’
