Legionnaires 03 The Honour and the Glory by Douglas Boyd

Author:Douglas Boyd [Boyd, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780751513400
Google: UkkUHQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1530740517
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group Limited
Published: 1995-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

PART 5 - THE MESH

Autumn 1992

1

The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Park outside St Petersburg was the largest cemetery in the world, with the remains of half a million people who died in World War Two during the siege of what was then called Leningrad. Some were soldiers who met death from fire and steel but most were civilians — women and children whose end came from starvation and hypothermia. They made thin corpses, but even so it was necessary to lay them three deep in order to accommodate all the mass graves within the forty-acre site. During the siege there were probably another half-million corpses that had never made it to the cemetery, being lost in the snows, eaten by animals or humans — or simply blown to pieces too small to identify and bury.

From concealed loudspeakers the sound of the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra wafted over the huge slabs of wet granite that led from the memorial statue at one end to the eternal flame which flickered and roared in the wind at the other. Not a sweet wrapping, a drink can or an untidy blade of grass marred the geometric precision of the site.

On the last Monday of November 1992 the weather in St Petersburg was cold and squally under a grey sky. In the harbour the cruise ship Anton Chekhov was inching in to its moorings. Madeleine Wharton looked out of the window of her luxury cabin on main deck and thought it a fitting day to visit a graveyard. Piskaryovskoye was the first call on the printed excursion itinerary in her hand.

The four-day round-trip from Helsinki was cheap as cruises go. The catch, if there was one, was that the shore excursions had to be paid for on board in hard currency, which made the Anton Chekhov a small but useful money-spinner for Boris Yeltsin’s hard-pressed Treasury. It was also a loophole for people who wished to enter Russia without applying for a visa in the usual way; passengers who paid for an excursion were, by a quirk of Russian bureaucracy, entered on the ship’s group visa and allowed to go ashore on their own afterwards simply by showing their passports at the bottom of the gangway. That suited Madeleine Wharton very well. At an airport she would have been recognised by someone in the business of watching faces, who would have wondered what the Director-General of Britain’s SIS was doing, making an unaccompanied visit to Russia.

A thin, elegant and lonely woman of fifty-eight, Madeleine had not left her cabin since joining the ship at Helsinki. A hefty bribe in dollars to a steward before the ship left Helsinki harbour ensured that all her meals were brought to her, avoiding the need to meet or speak to any other passenger. She had spent the voyage immersed in a well-thumbed copy of The Herries’ Chronicle. Although ostensibly on holiday, she was dressed in one of hei habitual dark grey two-piece business suits, the only concession to femininity being a Victorian floral brooch pinned on her lapel.

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