FireWall

I got to the road and turned left toward the traffic circle, not once looking behind me. I could hear screams and the sound of smashing glass as the DTTS team did whatever they did in apartment buildings in an afternoon.

I was cursing to myself, but at the same time feeling lucky they hadn't turned up a few seconds later. What concerned me now was that he could be there when I returned to the house for any kit I might need.

I took the first opportunity to turn left again, off the road and back into the apartment building as the BM drove past me, heading for the traffic circle.

I drove cut of town, heading west and following signs along the Tallinn road to a place called Kohtla-Jarve, about twenty miles away. The road didn't hold any surprises for me. The car bumped all over the place, slithering over the different levels of pavement under the ice and slush. I couldn't complain; I was just happy to have got the thing started again.

I went through a couple of small towns, trying to avoid the bus and truck drivers who wanted me to join their death race. This was supposed to be a two-lane road, but it didn't work out like that; everyone took the center of the road because that was where there was less ice and more pavement. Seeing signs for Voka, I made a mental note of the time since leaving Narva. I'd be wanting that road later.

The wipers were slapping away ineffectually against the shit that was being sprayed up by trucks and dumped on us smaller vehicles. I had to keep stopping, using the newspaper from the back seat to wipe the windows. At one stage, I even had to piss over the windshield to clear the icy grime, trying to avoid the splash as the wipers did their stuff before it froze once again.

Kohtla-Jarve, it appeared, was the home of the giant, brooding slag heaps and long conveyor belts I'd seen from the train. Bright white light spilled from factories on either side of the road as I dueled with my trucker friends. They eventually dwindled with the industry, and soon there was complete darkness, apart from kamikaze trucks and bus lights on full beam, mixed with cars with only one light trying to overtake the lot of us.

I followed the road west for about another twelve miles then turned left, heading south for a place called Pussi. I was in no mood for gags, otherwise I might have passed the time composing a limerick or two.

In the Lada's headlights I could see that the road was single lane and hadn't been used or cleared for quite a while. There were just two tire rutt worn into the snow. It was going be like riding on rails.

It was another twelve miles further south to the target. There had to be a quicker way of doing it than driving a right-angled box, west and then south, but I didn't know how accurate the maps were. Besides, I wanted to stay on the main roads as long as possible, and then I could at least be sure of getting there. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, considering I had no map; one of the muggers in Tallinn was probably wiping his ass with it right now.

The headlights reached about five to thirty feet either side of me, exposing banks of snow and the occasional ice-laden tree waiting to spark up in the spring.

I drove through Pussi, which looked like a small farming community.

The buildings were rundown shacks made of bare, unpainted wood and surrounded by wrecked cars. The roofs were bowed in with age or bad construction. Most had two lengths of wood, with strips going across to form a ladder, permanently attached as a means of getting the snow off. Bythelookofitthe timbers would have collapsed without them.

I reckoned this was the place for Eight, without a doubt. A hand painted Lada would be the ultimate passion wagon in this neck of the woods.

They had electricity, because there was the occasional glint of light coming through the curtains of very small windows, and a dull bulb shone in the back of a barn. But there obviously wasn't running water because I kept seeing the sort of communal hand pump that Glint Eastwood used to strike a match on to light his panatela. These ones, however, were wrapped up in tarpaulin and bits of rag to stop them freezing. The chimneys were going for it big time. They must have been chopping logs all summer.

There were no warning signs that I was about to bump over the railway track from Tallinn, and after that I didn't see a single sign of human activity. The road got steadily worse. The Lada slid all over the place and didn't enjoy the potholes one bit now that my own personal snow railway had come to an end. I checked the odometer, counting down to the only intersection, which, if I remembered correctly, was a couple of miles away.

Once there, I at last got help: a small sign told me it was right to Tudu. I turned left, now knowing that the target would be the first building on the left after one more mile.

Just after one mile a high concrete wall appeared in my headlights, about thirty feet in on the left-hand side. I drove slowly for another forty yards or so, encountering a pair of large metal gates the same height as the wall. I drove past them, and the wall continued for about another forty yards before it turned at a right angle into the darkness.

The second building, just a bit further on and maybe thirty yards in length, resembled a large hangar. It was slightly closer to the road and wasn't fenced or walled in. I waited until I'd rounded a bend and was physically out of the line of sight of the target, then I threw the Lada into a little driveway on my left, stopping after a three-foot slide. It was probably an entrance to a field or something, but it wasn't as if people were going to be working on the land for a few more months.

I closed the door quietly onto its first click, then the second, and used the wipers to secure a sheet of newspaper over the windshield. I started to walk back down the road, trying to keep warm by moving as fast as I could, and sucking to the ice that had formed on the road to keep footprints to a minimum.

I didn't have a clue what I was going to do yet.

33

After two hours of straining my eyes to see the road through a dirty, smeared windshield, it was taking a while for my night vision to kick in.

A bird screeched in the distance, but there were no other sounds apart from my own breathing and the crunch of my boots on the ice. I found I had to step quite gingerly. So much for warming up.

By the time I'd reached the target the rods in my eyes had realized there was no ambient light and they had to get to work. Not that I could miss the first building, just off the road to my right. The gap of fifteen feet or so in between them was knee-deep with snow, covering the fallen brickwork that had spilled out across the verge. It was, or had been, quite a substantial building, though most of the masonry had collapsed, exposing what I supposed was the steel frame; I could see right through it to the field beyond. It was one story, lower than the concrete wall further along, but very wide and with a low-angled pitched roof covered with a thick layer of snow. A very tall chimney, resembling a ship's funnel, soared out of the roof on the right-hand side and disappeared into the darkness.

Continuing toward the concrete wall, I crossed the thirty feet or so between the hangar and the target compound. As I approached, I began to make out the dark shape of a normal-sized door set in the concrete wall. I'd have loved to have gone and tried it, but I couldn't risk leaving tracks in the deep snow.

As I walked on toward the gates the front wall towered above me.

There was no light pushing skyward from the compound, and no noise. I tried looking for CCTV cameras or intruder devices, but it was too dark and the wall was too high and far away. If there were any, I'd soon find out. A depressing thought hit me: I hoped they hadn't changed location already. I moved the forty yards or so it took to reach the point where the compound driveway joined the road.

Turning right, I started to walk to the gates. It was pointless skulking about, I just had to get on with it. The depression didn't lift when I failed to see light spilling out from under the gates as I got closer.

As I slowly closed in on them, keeping within the right-hand tire rut, I began to see that the wall was constructed of enormous concrete blocks, maybe twenty-five yards long and at least three to fifteen feet high. There must have been a fair thickness for them to rest on top of each other like that; they looked as if they should be laid flat, end to end, to construct a runway. I still couldn't see anything that even resembled CCTV or alarms.

The two large gates were as high as the wall itself. I was right up against them now and still couldn't hear anything on the other side.

The gates were made of steel plate with a thick coating of dark, anti oxide paint which was smooth to the touch, without a trace of blistering or flaking. I could also see white chalk markings, the sort scored on to guide the welder. I gently pushed against them both, but they didn't move, and there were no locks or chains I could see holding them in position. They were newly made, but judging by the exposed reinforcement rods jutting out of the crumbling concrete, the wall wasn't.

Set into the right gate was a smaller, pedestrian door. It had two locks, one a third of the way up from the bottom and another a third of the way down from the top. I gently pulled the door handle, which of course was also locked.

The gap between gate and ground was four to six inches. Lying down slowly on my side, and using the length of the tire rut to avoid making prints in the snow either side of me, I pressed my eye against the gap.

I could feel the frozen ground under my body as it made contact, but that no longer mattered; there was light on the other side.

I became aware, too, of the gentle hum of machinery. I couldn't be sure, but it was probably a generator.

I made out the shapes of two buildings about sixty yards away. The smaller one on the left had two lights shining from ground floor windows; their patterned curtains were drawn, but light still spilled onto the snow in front of the building. The noise must be a genny; there wasn't enough wattage in this country to penetrate curtains. The building was too far away for me to notice anything else about it; it was just a dark shape on a dark background.

I studied the larger building to the right. There was a dark area in the middle front of the building, its rectangular shape, with a semicircular top, suggesting a large access. Maybe this was where they kept their vehicles. But where were the satellite dishes? Were they around the back? Or was I doing a recce on the local beet boiling factory? And where would they have locked up Tom?

What now? I had the same problem as at Microsoft HQ: too much virgin snow and not enough time. It would have been great to have been able to do a full 360 of this place, but tough, I couldn't. I even wondered about trying to climb up the outside of the hangar funnel to get a better look around, but even if there was a climbing rail attached to it, I was likely to leave sign on the roof or on the rungs, and anyway, what would I see at that distance?

I lay there and reminded myself that when you are short of the two most important commodities, time and knowledge, sometimes the only answer on target is P for Plenty of explosives.

I stayed where I was, visualizing how to defeat the wall and get in on target, going through a mental checklist of the kit I'd be needing.

Some of the stuff would have to come from Eight, because it would be impossible for me to access it on my own in the time available. If Eight couldn't get it, plan B would have to be to tie a suicide bandanna round my head and bang on the gates making really rude threats. I might as well; anything else but P for Plenty of explosives would be futile, given the time scale. The rest of the kit I would get myself to make sure it was exactly right; I hated depending on other people, but when in Chad… The cold was getting to me and I was starting to freeze. I had seen all I was going to see tonight. Being careful not to disturb the snow on either side of the tire ruts, I got up, checking with my hands that I hadn't dropped anything. It was just habit, but a good one. Then I slowly checked the snow on either side of the rut as I moved back to the road, getting ready to play repair man. If any sign did need covering up I would have to collect snow from the area around the car and carry it over. Detail counts: There would be no point in picking up snow from near the repair and just creating more sign.

I had warmed up quite a bit by the time I got back to the Lada.

Unfortunately, the first thing I had to do after lifting the hood was take off my jacket and ram it down onto the starter motor. I didn't want Tom's new friends to hear me when I battered it with the hammer.

Ripping the newspaper from behind the windshield wipers I got into the driver's seat quicker than last time, now knowing how to play the door lock. The engine fired third time. Keeping the revs low I drove away, not going past the target this time, but taking a few lefts instead to try and box round and get back on the main road to Narva. I got lost a couple of times, but eventually found it and rejoined the death race.