Ice of Diamonds

By John Walker Lee

Agent Red and Agent Blue are sent to intercept a Russian spy defecting to the West with details of a new type of weapon but the spy has plans of his own.
A new type of weapon can tip the scales of the cold war and the agents must track down the covert operatives seeking to unbalance the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Walker Lee
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005054496

John Walker Lee

John Lee was born in Africa but found the issues he wrote about were perfectly set in American towns A method writer, he acts out scenes in his books with actors and models to better understand the nuances of each character. John started writing as a young teen and published his first short story in the school newspaper at just 12. He loves novellas and short stories but occasionally delves into deeper topics in novels.

Book preview

Agents of PRISM Series

Ice of Diamonds

Agent Red in Russia

by John Walker Lee

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to a real person, place, or product is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition

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Laika

Laika!

Oleg pushed his way past a tight copse of Birch trees through newly curled undergrowth. The twisted, gnarled saplings grown tangled and yellow were unlike the forest of his last long and joyful walk not three months before. After turning thirteen it seemed the whole world had turned upside down. First the low-flying planes that rumbled him awake in the early hours, inducing nightmares, now this.

Laika! He put his fingers between his teeth and whistled, but not even the hardy birds replied. Not many animals dared the cold of the лес, a few lazy bears perhaps, coming up to replenish their winter stores. There were no patrols today, the cargo plane that droned up and down the military airstrip to the North conspicuously absent. Uncharacteristic silence blared from every empty tree.

Laika, here girl!

Even in winter the forest should be deep and alive. It moved with the seasons, and if a boy knew where to look he could find all manner of interesting adventures hidden in the trees and in the undergrowth. To an unwary hiker the forest could evolve into endless spiral pathways. Treacherous.

Every winter Oleg's father found the remains of some lost soul huddled in a flimsy city-tent with ice on their blue-purple lips and the remnants of a dead fire snuffed in the cold, wet wind. The wood here in Dyatlov looked dry, but was damp and rotten, crumbling to the lightest touch. There was no danger of forest fire, so it surprised Oleg to see charred scuffs on the trees.

His father promised to take him to the lake on the other side of the forest for his birthday, but his father was pre-occupied these days, or drunk. It didn't matter. One day, as soon as he turned fourteen, he would go on a long hike to see the great lake on his own. He would not even take his faithful Laika, it would just be him and the trees. Sure, he could drive around to the far side of the forest in his father's truck, but that was city-folk thinking. City-folk always worried about where they were going and how quick to get there and never took in the place where they were. Every year more city-folk cluttered up the graves. And they called him bumpkin!

He was only five miles from his home when the alley of trees became unfamiliar. The green leaves turned to yellow, then to a dull mess of oranges and browns. There was supposed to be a small lake here. What shouldn't be here was the great scar a hundred feet across. He approached the opening to examine the rip in the Earth's floor and stared into the angry face of a fiery abyss. A hundred feet of death.

Oleg took a step back. Laika! he shouted anxiously. Laika?

The trees near the scar were missing completely, yet there were no tracks, no mechanical paths; this was no department of forestry endeavour, no, the trees on the edges were knocked over, bent, pressed into each other where they lay tangled like lovers among twisted undergrowth. The centre of the clearing was black soot, the outskirts grey with ash.

A sign of life twitched under a coarse bush. Oleg knelt beside a fallen deer, still alive despite the skin torn from the side of its face and the edges cooked like steak. He choked down the sweet aroma and looked around for his dog, but she was nowhere. The deer panted in fear at his hand. It was too weak to move, but Oleg saw no cut in the bubbling wound, no charred signs of the fire, no hunter's mark. He leaned down and heaved up the deer and slung it over his shoulders, its hot chest beating rapidly against his back. He walked around the clearing to the path and heard a whimper. Laika girl? He dropped the deer into a soft patch of leaves and rushed to his dog. She lay on her side, panting like the deer, the spittled remains of half-eaten leaves falling from her churning mouth.

Oleg knew Laika since she was a pup, waking up one Christmas morning to find her snuggling against his toes. Laika was his oldest friend. He knew something deeply troubling was happening. By the time he had carried her home Laika was dead.

His father examined Laika's fur and told Oleg to bury the dog deep at the bottom of the garden, and to cover her with stones so that wild animals would not dig her out, then pour sand on top to outwit the bigger insects.

Litvenko knew, but he never told his son. He remained quiet and aloof and avoided eye contact with his boy. His Oleg.

This change in his father made Oleg anxious. His father would not tell him much, and forbid him to return to the clearing. After two days Litvenko's fears were realized as he watched his boy start to die. The radiation took the boy's sanity first, then the control of his breathing. He kept his son as comfortable as he could in his room, reminded of the days of sitting up with croup and steaming the boy's face in a bowl of hot water. Oleg had grown into a strong boy, but now so weak he could scarcely flail his hands at the imaginary flies he said buzzed around his face. Litvenko covered his boy's hands with cloth rags so that he would not contaminate everything he touched.

There was no one to contact out here in the great Russian лес. No doctor ventured through the two hundred mile ice-covered forest road and even if he could take his son to a town doctor there was certainly no remedy for this disease in a meagre first aid box. The nearest land telephone was two days slow drive, then another two days to the next town if he could find the fuel.

His son followed his mother into the long winter. A small mercy. That evening Litvenko buried Oleg next to his Laika and prepared to die himself, waiting through the long hours for the blisters to begin growing on his hands. Even though he had been careful to limit his contact he knew the radiation tunnelled its way through cells and fibres with no concern for the damage it created. Who radiation claimed was the draw of fate.

He pulled up the floorboard in the kitchen and from the cavity worked his rifle clear, checked the breach then collapsed into the tattered old chair by the fireside and waited for the first sign of the poisoning, his rifle cocked and ready.

But the first sign never came. Radiation was fickle.

He caressed his rifle wondering if he should not listen to the will of fate and pre-empt the suffering, for what was life now but endless waiting? He stroked his greying beard and pondered the mystery of life. His father had been bald, but he remained with a full head of grey hair that he tied back into a short tail like the men did in his childhood village. Such was life's fickle touch.

He wanted to join his wife and his son. Ludmilla had passed months before at the hospital and the worst part was the nurses would not let him see her. How bright she was! Quickly rising to senior researcher at Weaponik where he had worked years before. It was the job killed her, he knew it, but the doctor had told them the cancer was congenital and they should say nothing more about it. Ludmilla's mother and father had both died of old age.

He felt a pang of guilt; he had fought to get her the job. He had killed her, in a way, but he never told his son exactly what his mother did. As far as Oleg had known she was a researcher and that was the end of it.

Ludmilla wanted to work to support their family until he could get his broken life back. He missed their fights, and their rough love when they forgave each other, collapsing exhausted in each other's arms with all the worries torn from their bodies. The nights had been cold since.

He found the cabin in the forest and lived best he could away from the lies of technology and weapons plaguing the Soviet Union. Still fate had found him.

Litvenko gave up a brief prayer at Oleg's grave. The curse of loneliness his pension for serving the State before man.

The collective did not care for the individual, nor did it reach a helping hand to the individual who betrayed the group. The individual was meaningless. The collective was an amorphous being, all powerful. In the collective all individual sacrifices were justified. They called him Comrade until they didn't, and soon he was fired from his job of weapons analyst because he smelled of drink.

Time took revenge on all.

It was a surprise, then, when a car pulled up near his cabin. Not a Lada or one of the old farmers' cars one saw on the road in these parts, but a big and officious looking dark blue comfortable thing. It looked governmental. Litvenko's heart raced, he kicked the bottles aside and clutched his rifle close. He would have his revenge! The god of Fate had played one last trick, but he would damn Fate to Hell where she belonged!

Two figures emerged from the car – a man dressed in a dark navy jacket and black boots, and a woman in a red fur-lined coat and rust-coloured leggings. The glasses on the woman's face were not a Soviet style but something exotic from a French magazine. These were no Soviets. They smelled different, even from inside the cabin he could pick out their scent, a complex organic formulation, not the kologna of the farm store. Something French. There was no dark-fruit of winter kompot under their breath to ward off the chill from the inside, no haggard dirt under their nails or cigarette stains on their fingertips.

He was so caught up peering through the curtain he lost sight of them.

A knock.

Why would they knock? He again peered out the side window. A man and a woman. Either the man was short or the woman was tall, he could not tell through the gauze of the curtain, long dirty without a decent wash. They stood firmly upright, shivering against the cold.

What do you want? he said firmly through the door.

Mr. Litvenko? the man asked through the door in a bad Russian accent. We are from PRISM. We're an international agency. We're here to help.

Prism? His interpretation was not perfect. He wanted nothing to do with any agency any more. Litvenko crept to the back door and pried it open. He pulled his rifle over his shoulder and as he stepped forward he slipped on the cold ice. He turned to face Agent Red offering her hand to help him balance.

Call me Red.

*

What you are asking of me is worse than death! Litvenko cried out desperately, surprised by his own sudden lust for life. You don't understand what they do. They do not afford a man a comfortable prison like in Britain. A man who betrays his comrades is regarded by the political powers as worse than a rabid animal, something to be put down. They prove the certitude of their authority at every opportunity.

It is an interesting moral conundrum, isn't it? mused Red, holding the cup of bitter coffee as far from her nose as possible. She did not want to refuse the putrid brew, but there were more important things in the world than the flavour of government-issue coffee. Your actions will save the lives of many, but your government has you believe your own life is not worth the effort, and the lives of people born in a different place worth even less.

Blue lit a manilla-tinted cigarette filled with a carefully selected rich pipe tobacco. A casual luxury. Let me give you an assurance, he said through a mouthful of smoke, making sure Litvenko observed the decadent guilty pleasure before offering him one, "that we will extract you as soon as the plans are secured. Your expertise in your field is too valuable to go to waste out here in the endless white cher."

"I like the endless white cher, Mister Blue, Litvenko lied with conviction. A man is reminded the value of his life surrounded by six feet of snow." If his boy had still been alive, if these agents had arrived just one week earlier, he would have shouted them away, taken Oleg and fled into the forest, but there was nothing left but the cold and looming numbness, and even the forest of his childhood was attacking now. Perhaps they had an answer. He had to move on, one way or another. He knew what had ultimately caused the explosion, knew because of his hand in the act of destruction. His life's work at the university, his work at Weaponik in Nuclear Thermobarics that he wanted to turn into a source of power for the people, but his government was more interested in its uses abroad than locally. They produced weapons a thousand times stronger than the puny bombs the Americans dropped on Japan, but still his government wanted more. Bigger. More deadly. They called it the cold war, but it was really just a group of boys trying to prove to each other who had the bigger rocket.

We saw the test site when we flew in, said Red, as if reading his thoughts. Our sensors picked up the radiation, not a difficult feat given the magnitude. This weapon has power beyond comprehension. It will give Russia an unfair advantage over the West. The temptation for your government to wage war and expand its territory will be too great. Imagine the millions of souls lost! The Russian army were held at bay in Vietnam, but now their plans have grown more ambitious. Too many generals want more power, though why they need more is beyond me. Russia has all she needs. All the wood and steel a nation can stand, and with Korea's coal surplus feeding the Soviet demand the motive can be only greed. They want more.

You recite the lines from a textbook. I love my country, Miss Red.

I am certain you love more than the soil of Russia.

Litvenko's eyes narrowed. What did these foreigners know about soil? Their fingers were manicured, even the man's. They had likely never touched soil, only documents.

Red picked up on Litvenko's distress. I don't mean to offend, Mr. Litvenko, I mean that soil is just soil, and soil is the same everywhere. I think a country is an abstraction, no? An idea. It is the people within the country that we fight for. Their happiness. If a person is not happy, what is the point of the country?

I don't agree with you. I have little care for people these days. Or happiness. Litvenko looked solemnly out the window. I just want the rivers to run clean again. Everything is polluted now. There are too many of us. Maybe another great war would not be such a bad thing.

Red and Blue exchanged glances. Litvenko, perhaps, had only scant appreciation of his value. Whoever got him first would have a significant advantage.

Blue leaned forward. You know what that would mean these days, there is no clean war, not any more. Let me tell you, I know the frustration when a man is unable to voice his own ideas, when individual opinion is met by the hand of a great oppression. I am not going to convince you that our country is better than yours, but I can assure you that your voice can be heard, and that you can even pursue the advances in science you are looking for in our country. Just like German scientists who objected to their situation were given opportunity in America, you can have the same freedom.

You make it sound simple. The logistics of travelling to Britain are impossible. There are borders, guards at every gate.

Our agency does not use gates. We go where we need to go. Your immunity is guaranteed.

Litvenko stared in confusion. How? You are government diplomats?

Red shook her head. Far from it. I was shocked too when I first experienced the depth of our scope, but I quickly learned PRISM has extensive arrangements for private transport of a political nature. Private airports, private cargo. For us to take you to Britain would be straight forward. No red tape, not even a passport. We have a nice place reserved for you in Brighton beach, close to the university.

You make it sound too easy, and that raises my concern.

It's a detail, Blue interjected. The important question is do you still have access to the engineering department at your old job?

Litvenko smacked his lips. The taste of vodka had recently become more like paraffin, one of the victims of the never-ending budget cuts. He longed for a decent Scotch, though to admit this to his smattering of friends would be social suicide. A Soviet drank Vodka. It was virtually law. I can get access if I can lubricate the right hinges. I'll need two bottles of excellent Vodka, some smokes. He nodded appreciatively at the cigarillo in his hand. Just visiting old friends at work, you understand. He allowed himself a smile at the deceit as a plan formed in his mind. Yes. He could take his revenge! I'll slip out to use the restroom and secure copies of the engineering documents and blueprints.

We'll be nearby should you need help. Red smiled warmly. Please don't worry about a thing. Red's smile was empty. She could not tell him they had tried to gain access to the facility on their own and failed. Security was at its highest and even the special police had now been deployed to guard the doors. Given the importance of the new weapons inside it was little surprise. It was Blue who came up with the idea of looking for disgruntled employees. Litvenko was a perfect fit.

Blue pulled out a wallet-sized photo album and pulled out a few photos. He showed Litvenko a photo of a small house in the country surrounded by green grass and rose beds. We'll make sure you're set up comfortably. Food will be taken care of. Even a house-keeper so that you don't have to worry about little things. There will be opportunities for employment at our universities, or even an engineering company later. What prospects do you have here?

Litvenko looked around the tiny wooden cabin coming apart at the corners. Pats of mud smeared on the cracks in the walls to block the ice wind from sneaking into his bed. He had heard about the exuberant luxuries of the West, how the common people lived like kings, spoiled, fat. It was supposed to be a deterrent to the ready energy of ascetic youth. But Litvenko felt the advancing creak in his bones and was curious about being spoiled and fat. It was better than cold and thin, though people fought to defend their coldness and their thinness, that was the way of a demoralized people. They clung to what they knew, any improvement was seen as a threat to their existence.

What did he have to lose? Worst case, they captured him and hauled him off to the Gulag. He could simply kill himself. They could not control him completely, not an engineer. He could turn a tap into a weapon given a few supplies. What did life matter any more except to take the chances fate laid at his feet? Not even these spies could control him, but he could make them think they had him, then he would decide. They seemed enamoured with these little pointless rewards like sticky weather and mouldy brick houses and schmaltzy cinema tickets. They did not understand the stoicism of Russia, and never would.

I want to go to France for a holiday. I want to see the beaches, he blurted out.

Blue and Red both smiled. Blue said conspiratorially, The beaches in the South of France are magnificent. Warm water. Fine white sand. A vast amount of natural beauty to appreciate.

Red glared sternly at Blue, but he ignored the daggers in his back and persisted. "You will be free to