Northlight

17 TOY

The smell wasn't strong, but it was unmistakable. The truck wasn't familiar to me — I'd only driven it three miles and in any case there were electric wires and plastic and brass fittings under the dashboard that would add their own subtle odours to the general smell of this particular machine: they weren't much different from the electric wires and the plastic and the brass terminals that I knew had been put in here more recently, during the night, perhaps when the dog had voiced, sensing something outside.

It was the smell of death that I had recognized when I'd climbed behind the wheel. It's not always the same: it can come from gun oil, geraniums, smoke, new rope and a hundred other things that in the harmlessness of their natural context can go unnoticed. But I was starting the final run out with the objective for the mission and my senses were fine-tuned and alert for any conceivable threat to the organism. It wasn't the smell of the bomb itself that had warned me. My instinct had triggered cognizance of enormous danger and in the instant I became afraid, and what I had recognized was the smell of my own fear as it sprang from the skin.

Metal banged and sent echoes through the hollow shell of the barn and my scalp rose again and the sweat came so fast that it trickled against me under my clothes. The relative warmth of the new day had expanded the corrugated iron sheets of the building where they overlapped, and a bolt had moved, that was all.

There was a lot of incoming data and some immediate decisions would have to be made because if that thing had a timing device on it that had started ticking to the movement when I'd got into the truck it could detonate at any next second and I ought to get out now and get out fast. But, Yes, we've got to get out before. Shuddup.

But it wasn't likely they'd done that. They would only have put that kind of mechanism in here if they'd wanted to make sure that Karasov and I would blow ourselves up in the barn before we started off, and that didn't make any sense — it would be all the same to them if we did it five miles along the road, or fifty. If they'd wanted to keep things quiet they wouldn't have chosen explosives: they would have used a telescopic lens and waited for us to come out of Volodarskiy's cave and dropped us quietly into the snow. Or they would simply have tipped off the KGB and run us into a road-block and left it at that.

It was probably wired to the ignition.

That was a problem because I wanted to use this truck and get us both out of here without wasting any more time: there was a ship waiting for us in Severomorsk and if we missed it there might not be any other way for Fane to get us out before the KGB finally picked us up in their dragnet for Karasov.

Correction: they hadn't simply tipped off the KGB and run us into a road-block and left it at that because they hadn't wanted to.

They wanted us dead, out of it, finis. They didn't want the KGB to put us under the light and drain the information out of us.

Why not?

What did we know?

The metal roof strained again and my left eyelid began flickering. There were a lot of things to be worked out but I didn't know which ones could wait and which ones had such a direct bearing on this immediate point in time that it could make the difference between driving the truck out of here or going through the roof with it.

Something had gone wrong. The Rinker cell had so many people in the field that they could afford to watch the traffic coming in on the main road from Murmansk and as soon as they knew I'd left the train they'd done that, they'd watched for me. Or they'd picked me up since then and thrown a distant-surveillance net round the periphery of my travel patterns and kept me in sight with field glasses.

But they couldn't know about this morning's rendezvous in the freight-yards. I would have to get Karasov there and get his papers and drive north if I could. We had to get out of Kandalaksha. They were too close.

Pale light came through the open end of the barn, costing me too much visual purple in the retinae: the cab of the truck was almost dark. I didn't know that if I could see better in here I wouldn't actually see an extra wire creeping below the dashboard or the glint of a terminal.

Tune for decision-making. I didn't think they'd put a clock on the thing or a rocker mechanism or a remote-control receiver or a heat sensor because it wouldn't matter when it blew up and a rocker would detonate at the first corner and a remote control would mean they were still in the immediate environment and waiting to transmit and I knew they weren't in the immediate environment because they couldn't afford to be: otherwise they would have simply come here hi the night and finished off the lot of us including Volodarskiy and the dog. A heat sensor would delay detonation until the engine had warmed up but that involved a time element again and it wasn't of any interest to them.

I believed they would have done it the simplest way and linked it with the ignition switch.

But when I moved I moved slowly.

It could be anything: C3, C4, Cyclonite, TNT, picric acid, gelignite, dynamite, Tetryl, Amatol, any one of a dozen sensitive chemicals. In this region they wouldn't have found the more sophisticated materials and they'd probably used something out of any army ordnance store but I couldn't count on that.

I got down from the cab and stood on the earth floor and let the sweat trickle down my flanks and waited until my scalp loosened again before I moved to the front of the truck and stood still again, looking at the bonnet lever. When they rig a bang in the electrical circuitry of the vehicle they don't like you to disconnect a battery lead and today they might have placed auxiliary contacts on the bonnet levers or the hinges so it was a little while before I decided that they wouldn't have made things more complicated for themselves than they needed to.

They too were working their mission within the hostile and all-powerful environment of the KGB and all they had wanted to do was to wipe Karasov out and do it by stealth, setting it up and moving away and leaving it to the device itself to finish the business. They could do that by wiring the ignition switch and there would be no real need to provide backup circuits or contacts so I moved the bonnet lever and waited again until the nerves came down from screaming pitch and I got my breathing rhythm back to normal. Then I went round the front of the truck and pulled the other lever and lifted the bonnet.

Filthy engine. Everything was covered with an antique film of dried mud and oil stains and husks of grain, and I got the torch out of the tool compartment and used it, looking for any disturbance in the grime. Something bright flashed under the beam of the torch and I spun away and hit the snow outside as the whole barn blew apart and a roaring filled the sky and I lay there with my body against the snow and the nerves came off their high and the barn came back into one piece again and the roaring stopped and I thought Jesus Christ if I can't do better than this…

The snow cold under me, my face against it, my breath melting its crystals as the lungs went on pumping in the aftermath of unholy terror, pick yourself up, yes, get on with things.

When I was ready I got up and went back to the truck and found the wrench and disconnected the battery and stood for a minute with my eyes shut, just taking a break, it wasn't over yet because the thing could have its own battery but we might have come a little further away from blowing Northlight across the Kola River..

'What's wrong?'

I jerked round and looked at him.

Volodarskiy.

No dog. I think if he'd brought his dog I'd have killed it.

'Someone was here in the night.'

He watched me, noting, quite obviously, quite obviously noting, damn his eyes, the sweat on my face.

'How do you know?'

'They put a bomb on board this thing.'

'How do you know?' he asked again.

'In the same way in which you would have known, Volodarskiy, if you had come here first,' using my most polished academic syntax and my best Muscovite-intellectual accent, except for the last bit, 'and it would have scared the shit out of you too.'

His black eyes glittered with amusement. 'Conceivably. Where is the bomb?'

'I haven't found it yet.'

He looked at the filthy engine. 'Are you an expert?'

'I'm finding out. If your barn is still standing an hour from now you'll know I'm an expert.'

'Perhaps I can help.'

'Yes. You can go back and look after Karasov.'

'I would rather stay here,' he said softly, 'and fiddle with the toy you think they've sent you.'

'I know you would. You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you?'

'From what?" 'The brink.'

His eyes glittered again. 'That is a way of putting it, I suppose.'

'You're like me.'

'I think so, yes.'

'But if I get it wrong, and this thing goes up, I want you to look after Karasov. I want you to contact my local control and tell him what's happened and ask him how he's going to get the objective out. Until he can do something I want you to keep that man with you and see that no one gets to him. He's the objective, Volodarskiy. The objective.'

His eyes moved around the barn while he thought about this, then he looked down and shrugged. 'I will do what you say, my friend; I know how important your mission is. But do what you can to find that little toy of yours and make it safe. I have no wish to keep that craven wretch in my house for longer than I have to. He's not fit company for my dog.'

'He's burnt out,' I said, 'that's all.'

'And so am I. But there is heat there yet.' He came to stand close to me. 'I was fifteen years in the labour camps, but that was not so bad. When I came home they told me that my wife had been arrested for circulating subversive material — she was a poet, and she wrote of freedom.' His breath clouded on the cold air and his eyes never left my face. 'She refused to give away her friends, her collaborators, and so they beat her, and she died. The KGB men who killed her had received promotion and been transferred. But I have found one of them, and when I find the other, I have some work to do. So has my dog.' He turned away. 'He is hungry, and so am I.'

I watched him moving back to his cave across the snow.

It took me another forty minutes to find it because they can rig this kind of thing in a dozen ways and just because you've disconnected the battery it doesn't mean you won't detonate it if you move too fast or press too hard or touch the wrong terminal, the wrong wire, the wrong connection.

It was lying under the front floorboards. I hadn't been able to see it from underneath the truck: I'd had to go in from the top, prying the floorboards upwards a centimetre at a time and shining the torch beam through the widening gap. I first saw the bomb when the floorboard was still raised only two or three centimetres and I stopped moving at once.

It would depend on how good the man was at his job. He could have used any one of a dozen initiators — chemical, electrical, mechanical, acoustic, vibratory, magnetic — or he could have used a combination initiator to produce detonation whatever I did, so I got a spanner and took the driving mirror off its bracket and slipped it through the gap in the floorboards and used the torch again.

These things are never pleasant to look at, simply because you know what they will do if you disturb them. This one had the squat shape of a giant slug and the stillness of a rattlesnake. Its potential for monstrous havoc gave it, in my mind, a kind of life: the brain refused to believe that this degree of power could be contained in such a small object. What I was looking at was something that could produce an air-blast pressure of a million pounds per square inch and a temperature of four thousand degrees centigrade and a fragmentation velocity of twenty thousand feet per second and it would do this if I made a single wrong move. The infinitely complex system of intelligence inside my skull was within two feet of the source of cataclysmic obliteration, and the forebrain was working out the options while the primitive stem kept the hairs on my arms lifted and the pressure in the arteries raised and the heart's rhythm racing.

But there were no real options. The objective had to be taken across and that was what I was here for and it wasn't the time to weigh values — Karasov's life against mine, the ruthless demands of the mission against the executive's personal survival. I was here because the brink was here and if I'd wanted anything different then I could have walked out of that bloody building in Whitehall long ago and told them to stuff it, get off my back, leave me alone. But they knew what I wanted and they'd put it on the map and set my feet in its direction and told me how far it was and now I was there. On the brink.

You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you? You're like me.

I think so, yes.

There's one born every minute.

Time check. 10:53. I'd been here almost an hour and the train from Murmansk was due in at the station in thirty-seven minutes and there wouldn't be a lot of time to check the environment of the freight-yards but if we delayed the rendezvous until 13:00 hours we'd risk exposure and I didn't want to do that, I wanted to get Karasov out before they came for him again.

I moved the mirror in the gap, angling it and sliding it from one end to the other, lighting the underside of the floorboards with the torch. There were no contacts and I pulled the boards higher and took another look. The bomb was the size of a small brick and preserrated with a shrapnel sleeve. The end terminal carried the wire to the junction box underneath the dashboard and the side terminal connected with earth through the chassis: they'd scraped an area clean and used grip tape, a decent enough job. But I didn't like the flat back lever on the underside of the pack and as I turned it a couple of degrees for a better look I realized it was a grasshopper switch and knew that all I had to do was pick up the main pack to send the truck through the roof of the barn, so I worked on the terminals first and freed the pack from the wires and then picked it up slowly, inching my fingers underneath to keep the switch flat to the body.

There was no sound of ticking. A timing device would have been visually evident; all we'd got here was two and a half pounds of TNT and provision for electrical initiation from an outside source and a liquid chemical in a glass tube to detonate internally by percussion: I could see the end of the tube recessed into the main pack and when I tilted it I could see the bubble.

Think. Consider binding the lever with some string and then putting the bomb onto the curved bonnet of the truck and starting the engine and walking away and letting the vibration shake the thing off and send the barn up. It had worked in Berlin and it would work now. The Rinker people weren't likely to come here and poke among the wreckage to make sure there were bodies in it: they'd hear the bang and assume that what had been designed to happen had happened, simply because the human mind prefers to believe in success rather than failure. And even if they came as far as the barn they wouldn't have much time to poke about in the wreckage before Volodarskiy told Fido to tear their throats out.

But it wouldn't work, in the long run. It would mean getting to a phone and asking Fane to organize some more transport for us and that could take days and I didn't know how long Karasov could hold out before his nerves tipped him over the edge and he went stark raving bonkers, which wouldn't please London at all. There was something on that man's mind that wasn't letting him sleep, wasn't letting him believe that I could get him out, something that was frightening him so badly that it could blow him out of his skull before I could get him to the West.

This thing in my hand wasn't ticking, but Karasov was.

Get him out. Get him out now.

There was some string holding some empty sacks together in the corner of the barn and I cut off a length but it was rotten with age so I raked in the tool compartment of the truck and found some electric cable and used that, winding it round the grasshopper switch and putting the bomb on the floor under the front seat on the driver's side and chocking it with a bit of wood from the littered floor of the barn so that it couldn't roll about; a thing like that could come in handy. Then I connected the battery lead and started the engine and left it running to warm up while I fetched Karasov.

He was coming out of the cave when I got there. They'd heard the engine start.

'So you found your toy,' Volodarskiy said.

'Yes.' I sensed that he hadn't told Karasov what kind of toy it was: it would have pushed him right over the edge.

'Then I wish you a good journey.'

'Thank you.' I looked at Karasov. 'We're going.'

He moved his head slowly, like a punch-drunk, and stared at me in the cold light of the morning, and all I could see in his eyes was the knowledge of death. As I led him across the snow to the barn it occurred to me that his mind, at the brink of hysteria, might be open to the dark voices of premonition that I could not hear.