Snow Falcon

Six: Things Fall Apart

He was left now, on the A40, the driving, persistent sleet obscuring vision and inducing lethargy, with nothing more than a desire to stop. Only when the small delivery van stopped would he begin to think of a drink, or food. He and the tall man had finished the flask of coffee — and he knew he could not drink anything more from the silver hip-flask without falling asleep.

The M40 had been bad enough — lunatic drivers overtaking, spraying the windscreen, and the sluggish wipers, with slush; out the A40 was worse. He and the tall man and the body of Ozeroff seemed to have been imprisoned in the delivery van for an endless time. He was irritated, and careless, with the fatigue of long having completed his task, and not being able to relax from it. They had not even stopped at a pub; something stupid, even superstitious — pushing their luck — about leaving Ozeroff in the car park while they drank whisky by a fire. He shrugged, amazed at his own surrender to the conditions of this aftermath. After all, the signal had gone off to Kutuzov direct; all they had to do was to lose this body for the space of less than a week. By that time, it would all be over — and they would be out of the country, anyway. Stupid.

Kutuzov, of course. Old Magnet-man — Svengali. If he said it was important — vital — then you did it, no matter how gritty your eyes were, or how your stomach protested.

He glanced at his companion, heaped uncomfortably in the narrow seat, and trying to doze. Then he stretched his eyes wide, and concentrated on the flying sleet, the fuzzy headlights, the sudden slow rush of other lights out of the darkness.

He saw the other lights, realised that they were high up, as on a truck, and swerved. He was aware, in the few seconds remaining to him, of a noise as Ozeroff lurched like something resurrected in the back of the van, and his companion stirring as he was jolted awake, mumbling through a dry, sticky mouth for him to take more care. He was aware, too, quite certainly, that he was going to die, and that the betraying Ozeroff was lying in mock state in the back of the van — and he hoped the local police were very stupid men.

Then the car-transporter, having strayed across the white line because the driver was tired, and hurried, flipped the van over on its back, as a child might turn a tortoise upside-down with the aid of a stick. The van, apparently that of a towel service firm, ended up in the ditch at the side of the A40 just outside Wheatley, after somersaulting twice. The back doors burst open, sliding out, almost as in a farce, the body of Ozeroff, feet first, on to the roadside verge. The driver was crushed against the wheel — the passenger flung through the windscreen. The driver of the transporter, uninjured, was sick when he inspected the wreck and the three bodies. Then he called the Oxford police from the nearest telephone box.

Kenneth Aubrey was chilled, angry, and fascinated. Traffic on the A40 had been reduced to a single lane, and a canvas screen erected to shield the accident from the inquisitive. Behind this, spotlamps glowed in the sleet, shining down on the sodden bundles, side by side now, and covered with grey blankets, themselves sodden wet; policemen directed the moribund queues of cars coming home from pubs and parties, or analysed the events of the accident. Aubrey alone, perhaps, now that he had been introduced to the three bodies, remained still, and contemplative.

'So much stuff on them, sir, we got in touch with the Branch. They must have thought of you.'

'They did, indeed, Inspector. My thanks for your promptitude,' Aubrey had replied stiffly to the Inspector, who was bending to peer under the umbrella Aubrey carried. And such stuff — chauffeur's uniform, British passport for someone, with a face not identifiable among the dead here, another change of clothes, and one of the dead murdered with a rather out-of-date, though still effective, KGB tool, the watch-wire — Times Cravats, he understood were their popular name. It was KGB, that was evident — the one security machine above all others that enjoyed the gadgetry of violent death, the little toys that killed.

And towels from the airport — strange that they had not rid themselves of them, or the white coats. Aubrey thought he understood the lethargy of aftermath. But — who was dead, and who killed him? And — Aubrey could almost taste the feline pleasure of the mystery — who owns the face on the British passport?

'Inspector?' he called.

The policeman, disgruntled and wet, hurried up.

'Sir? CIS have some instructions to give. Perhaps I might use your car radio?'

'Certainly, sir.'

'And I shall have need of photographs of these three — not here, but when they've been cleaned up. As quickly as possible — you can get them removed now. All papers, anything you remove, will be collected for our own investigation, early tomorrow.'

'Sir.'

As they walked bowing to the windy sleet, the Inspector grateful for Aubrey's offer of a crescent of the umbrella, Aubrey had a sudden image of the crash outside Kassel, months before. And he sensed an excitement he could not quite explain, certainly not define with any precision, that here was coincidence in a certain direction. He hurried his steps, unconsciously, to the police car.

'You'll want it rigged through to — London, sir?

'Yes, use the number you would normally use — I'll take it then.'

It took little more than two minutes for the police radio to be patched into the receiving station on one of the floors of the Euston Tower, and from here Aubrey was connected directly with INTELCORD, the SIS's co-ordination and evaluation section, housed in Queen Anne's Gate itself, unlike many of the service's units.

'There you are, sir.' The Inspector left without pause, handing the mike to Aubrey, shutting the car door on the sleet and the traffic. As the window misted almost immediately, Aubrey felt quiet, and calm, with a little tickle of excitement beginning somewhere in his stomach.

'Who's that?'

'Callender, sir.'

'Good. Callender — send someone out here to collect some pictures, some bodies, and some evidence, would you? One of your customers has some nasty marks on his neck, which one of our foreign counterparts is responsible for. I — shall want a lot of clearance time for this, Callender. I shall want to know who the men are, and whose picture I have in a fake passport.'

'Sir, we're right up to here with co-ord work—'

'No, Callender, you are not. Not as of early tomorrow morning. Hurry things up, would you? Out.'

He sat for a time in the fuggy car, warmth not apparent, but cold less so. A great nuisance that he was booked on a morning flight to Helsinki, to act as Waterford and Davenhill's control, and to oversee security, in conjunction with the CIA man, Buckholz, for the Treaty Conference's final sessions, when Khamovkhin and Wainwright would both be present.

A great pity. Here, on this Oxfordshire roadside, there was a real mystery — and, with an instinct he would never have trusted as a younger man, he knew it was important.

Galakhov knew that his picture had been taken at least twice during the time he spent passing through Passport Control and then Customs at Seutula Airport. It would have been done by the CIA, by Finnish Intelligence, even perhaps by the KGB. It did not matter. To any foreign intelligence service, he was simply a native Finn returning to Helsinki, then travelling north; and to the KGB, he was expected. And they would be expecting Ozeroff to look like him, not like the body in the Heathrow toilet. Records had been changed, the computer doctored, everything required already done. Thus, it was with confidence that he passed through the controls, out into the lounge, and waited to be contacted.

He could not restrain a small pulse of excitement beating in his chest, making his breath flutter. There had been little reaction on the plane to the killing of Ozeroff — he had had a couple of drinks, true, but only for the pleasure; no, but he could not help, as he stepped on to Finnish soil, realising how deep into the operation he already was, and how close to the real simplicity of the thing. Preliminaries were almost over — he and Khamovkhin, soon. All he had to do was to pass the interview with the Head of Security where Khamovkhin was being kept during his visit, then act his part until Khamovkhin was no longer required to be alive.

'Have you a light?' a voice asked him at his side. He turned slowly.

'What?' he asked in Finnish. 'What do you want?'

Nonplussed, the young man said, 'Have you a light?' He spoke in Finnish.

'I am a non-smoker — it is a filthy habit,' Galakhov replied, bored, even amused at the kind of rubbish the KGB still considered viable operational procedure.

'Where is the toilet, please?' the young man asked. Though he spoke in Finnish, this time, instead of the word toaletti, Galakhov heard the Russian pronunciation, twalyet. He almost burst out laughing.

'Wait till you get home,' Galakhov said; then, when the young man's face appeared suitably pained, said, 'I believe the toilet is on the next floor.'

The young man could not quite disguise his satisfaction before he made his face expressionless, and said, 'Follow me, please.' He took Galakhov's suitcase, and walked away towards the glass doors to the car park. Galakhov, seeing his neck still red above the coat collar, even though cautious by nature, and careful of indulging his abiding sense of superiority, could not help but consider how easy the whole thing was going to be.

Vorontsyev had rubbed a small round clearness in the mist of the window, and was staring down into Pyatnitskaya Street. People on their way to work, huddled in heavy clothes, shunted against each other on the pavement six floors below. It was a bitter day, frost bright on the road, the trails of tyres black on its silver.

He had got up at six, washed and shaved, and eaten a good breakfast. The work, and drink, of the previous night had left him and he felt refreshed.

The faces were still on the wall — the diagram of the state on a second, and a huge map of the entire Soviet Union on a third, lapping down over the bureau. He was waiting for the duty officers of his team to arrive. When he briefed them, they would be taken entirely into his confidence. Then he would talk to Kapustin, and seek permission to go to the Finnish border, to discover what Vrubel had been doing.

He posed himself before the faces, and stared up at them. Old men, most of them. Men of distinguished loyalty to the Party, men about whom no questions had been asked, not even during the Kruschev regime. And yet, if they were guilty, it was precisely during that period that they would have been forming this Group 1917, working out its strategy.

He looked at General Ossipov. It was an older photograph than the ones he had studied in his office, and the man was in a light suit, and it was summer in Odessa. He knew the place, had holidayed there with Gorochenko and his wife, just before he began his studies at the Lenin University.

He did not allow himself to idle over the memory, though it was pleasant. Marya Ilyevna Gorochenko retained a special, perhaps sacred, place in his memory.

Vorontsyev smiled at the simplicity of his attitude — like so many other simplifications, or unthinking responses he had made over a lot of years — conforming, accepting, belonging; and yet he could not despise such a sleep of reason. They were good people, both of them. He had wept at her funeral, and many times the prick of tears had come to him when he thought of her. It might have been a luxury, but she had been his mother, childless and grateful for the opportunity; his own mother had died soon after the war, soon after the death of his real father. He remembered her as a faded, untidy, shabby woman. Something that hovered in corners, and did not go out — like a ghost, or something left over that no one wanted.

He skirted the procession of images, and focused again on Ossipov. Why the Far East? And the reference, he suddenly remembered, to Finland Station? Did that mean Finland itself, or Leningrad? Was it a reference to the return of Lenin to Russia, in the sealed train — a symbol of what the coup wished to do ideologically? Was Vrubel's attachment to the Finland border confusing him?

'You cunning old shit,' he said softly to the photograph, 'Where did you go, and who did you meet? And what for?'

He looked above the photograph, to another. Praporovich, commanding Group of Soviet Forces North, a strong man, old-style Communist; he had a blunt, violent language which expressed his hatred of the West, his commitment to the eventual, and military, spread of Communism. Who could be more loyal a servant of the State — on the surface?

Vorontsyev crossed to the chair at the bureau, and pulled out of the old briefcase the file on Praporovich. Then he moved a sheaf of papers from the armchair, and sat down, opening the buff folder on his knees. He had not been seized by a definite idea — merely by the logic of beginning at the top. The Marshal was the most senior man on the wall in front of him. He would require to be investigated first, as was his right, Vorontsyev thought with a smile.

Praporovich was a widower, with two sons, both of them in the army — Vorontsyev checked them immediately, shuffling through the loose papers until he found photostats of their army records. On was a Major in an Airborne Division, the other a Colonel in command of one small section of the northern missile chain — 'Firechain'. Little there. He went back to the old man, looking up once at the hard, square features appearing to regard him with contempt from the wall — a portrait of an old and terrible Tsar. He winked at the photograph, wondering why the Marshal could not smile even at a party following a large-scale military exercise in the DDR. Perhaps he was an habitual stoneface?

The Marshal rarely took holidays — he had a dacha outside Leningrad, and spent a great deal of his off-duty time there, or in his suite of rooms at the expensive Baltiskaya Hotel. He rarely entertained women at either residence, preferring his huge collection of gramophone records and his books — and his persistent hobby of wood-carving. Vorontsyev studied, briefly, pictures of two statuettes in polished wood, and seemed to touch the old man's private self. A boy and a girl — the girl on a small pony.

There were sheets of small prints supplementing the written records. They were less talismanic than the cartridges of slides he had watched of Ossipov, but he studied them carefully, noting the faces he did not know, the possible contacts — though he did not compare them with the supplementary sheets which explained their identities. Not at that moment. He was interested in the Marshal.

Praporovich's movements had been exhaustively documented. Military conferences at the highest level in Moscow, Leningrad and various Warsaw Pact capitals — Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw. Vorontsyev wondered for a moment whether there was sufficient freedom of movement…

But no. He could not be his own courier. He was present at the annual exercises of Group of Soviet Forces Germany — though not at the most recent winter exercises, which were the largest for five years — '1812'.

Vorontsyev felt chilled, as if a door had opened, but no light, only cold, flowed from it. He checked back, his fingers clumsy and gloved with haste. No — Praporovich had not attended every exercise over the past years — seven, eight, ten years; he checked off the references on the grubby photostat compiled by Leningrad SID. He usually attended the summer exercises had been on the 1968 exercise that had led to the intervention against the Dubcek regime — but he had attended two, four of the last seven winter exercises in the DDR. As part of the necessity for all senior Group Commanders to be aware of overall strategy. In case of illness, resignation, death — transfer was easy.

Why not?

Was his staff there?

Vorontsyev scribbled the query on a fresh page of his notepad. He would have to check. He wondered why Praporovich had not been at '1812'. And did it mean…?

He refused to countenance the idea that acceleration was taking place, that there was any vital reason why the Marshal had stayed at his headquarters in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, as if in answer to some subterranean explosion, his hands shivered with the groundshock. The solid structure of the investigation appeared on the point of subsidence, sliding into something horridly real.

He began to cross-check. How closely was Praporovich acquainted with the other faces on the wall?

It was a little after nine when the doorbell rang. He looked up from the papers now spread on the floor, stretched as he rose from his kneeling crouch over them, as if trying to spark them into reluctant flame, and his back and bruises protested. He stood up, stepping carefully over the arranged documents. He had taken the decisive step of cutting the original documents to pieces, arranging them anew, with the help of paste and a stapler, into sections which displayed more easily and meaningfully the relationships between the men on the wall.

And it was interesting — if one went back far enough. Almost, he thought, almost like discovering someone who has patiently covered his tracks, but who had been at the scene, or near it, at the time in question — whatever his alibi, however he had burned the bloodstained clothes, tidied the room, removed the fingerprints…

No. His men had arrived. He would let them see, and ask them to decide, before he would commit himself…

His smile of satisfaction died when he saw his wife on the doorstep, her face freezing into haughtiness and a sense of mistaken action as she saw his own face change.

'Well?' he said. He was holding the door foolishly ajar; it was like his stupid mouth, he thought, hanging open.

'I — want to talk,' she said, appearing to damp down her irritation, her embarrassment.

'What about — I'm busy,' he snapped.

'You — you've seen your father?'

'Yes. I said I'd telephone.'

'You might have said no. May I come in?'

He looked at his watch.

'I'm busy,' he said, then: 'Oh, come in!' It was graceless, and sulky. He despised himself for the immaturity of his reaction. He could sense the smile of satisfaction on her face as he led her into the lounge. He waved his hand towards the sofa. Natalia hesitated, then settled herself. She did not offer to remove her fur coat, nor the dark fur hat she wore.

Standing by the empty mantelpiece above the electric fire, he studied her. Her cheeks were touched with pink from the cold outside. Her fur-lined boots, to her knees, were new, and unmarked from the pavements. She had come by taxi.

She said, 'I had to talk to you.' It sounded remarkably artificial. As a singer, she was not renowned for her acting ability, only for the quality of the voice itself. He felt she was acting a part. He could not understand why she needed to.

'About what?'

'Us?'

'Us? There isn't any us, is there, Natalia?' Even the use of her name seemed a concession. He did want her there.

She opened her coat, as if on cue. It was ridiculous. She was too smartly dressed — dark-green wool, with a high collar and excellent fit. It would have cost money — would have been given by a lover, or bought on a Bolshoi tour. They had been in Paris in the autumn. It was as if she declared herself naked by the gesture. He hated her.

'Isn't there?' she said. 'About the other night — I'm sorry it had to happen. I — was ashamed…' She dropped her gaze.

He could not believe her. He wanted to re-establish some sense of superiority, and his voice was loud as he said, 'Sorry? Ashamed? Your bloody lover tried to kill me — or didn't Mihail Pyotravich tell you that?'

She looked at him, and there seemed to be something real happening in the theatrically wide eyes. She was speaking to him, as well as to some imagined audience of her performance.

'I — he didn't say that…'

'Didn't he? He left you before you could climb all over him, and led me right into a neat little trap. For some reason, Vrubel wanted me dead! You wouldn't know why, I suppose?'

'You don't think—?' she began, and there was genuine fear in her voice. As if she sensed herself alone in the room with him for the first time.

'How the hell do I know! You're capable of it.' She shook her head. He admitted: 'I suppose not.'

There was a silence. He turned his back on her, and lit a cigarette from a fresh packet. He heard her say: 'What about us, Alexei?' It was the first time she had used his name. And the tone was old, magical. He knew it was calculated.

He turned round.

'You're here, aren't you?' He wanted to go on being bitter, recriminatory. But, though he despised his feeling, he could not ignore it. Too often he had imagined the scene, and he was now helpless before the reality. He had to concede; that had been decided when he opened the door to her. 'What the hell do you want with me, Natalie? You've buggered up my life once already! Do you want the satisfaction of doing it again? Is that it?'

She shook her head. He was glad she did not offer to move from the grubby sofa and its dun-coloured covering. He did not want to be any closer to her. Her body, even at that distance, was tangible against his frame. The sensation was dirty, like a wet dream. He hated that — she the cinema, he the audience; her body unreeled like the frames of some titillating film. He tried to dissolve the feeling in anger.

'The hell it is? Who sent you, eh? Mihail Pyotravich?

She looked startled, as if he had seen deep into her self, but she said, 'He only helped me to make up my mind.'

'Fuck you, you bitch! I don't want to be handed to you like some sticky sweet! Or a bandage because I'm coming to pieces! If you don't want to come back, then get out — get out!'

He turned away from her again, willing her to move, wanting her not to come closer to him. He heard the sofa creak slightly as she stood up.

The doorbell rang again, releasing him. He turned round, and saw her hand a little extended. He smiled in satisfaction.

'Work,' he said.

'I'll go, then.' She hesitated, then: 'Shall I come back — later?'

He wanted to hit her, at least banish her. He nodded.

'Yes, if you want to—' He would not offer to go to the flat on Kalenin Street — he had to preserve that much. She nodded, reached out as if to touch him, and then dropped her hand.

'Later, we can talk properly,' she said.

The doorbell rang again. He acquiesced with a nod.

To the manager of the Matkailumaja-Turiststation, the only real hotel in Ivalo, they were from the Central Electricity Generating Board, studying the hydro-electric schemes in the Inari region. Philipson, the man the Helsinki Consulate had loaned them, spoke Finnish and established their cover. The staff of the nearby Kirakkakoski power station lived in their own compound, and only came into Ivalo at the week-ends. By the time that happened, Waterford and Davenhill would have left, probably be back in London.

Philipson had a jeep for them, and had stocked it with supplies, had driven north-east out of the town with them, and then watched them as they turned south-east, towards Raja-Jooseppi. Then he turned up his fur collar and headed back to Ivalo. He had little idea of their intention, and small wish to know. It was his role to fend off any awkward enquiries concerning the presence in the area of two British electricity experts.

They camped the first night off the single road just south of the village of Ruohokangas. Waterford, it seemed to Davenhill, paid little heed to the bitter cold, to the discomforts of travel and pitching camp, to the inadequacy of the food, or to him; while he resented, ever more bitterly, the decision that had placed him there. He had been shunted by Aubrey in the most high-handed way, and made to appear nothing but an errand-boy.

He was cold in his sleeping bag, his teeth chattering, his feet numb. He could hear the steady breathing of the other man, and hated him. He had always found it difficult to resent himself for very long, or indulge in recrimination; but he could, he knew, be satisfyingly viperous towards others. Now, that feeling towards Waterford warmed him, and eventually he drifted into sleep.

In the morning, he awoke aching with cold and senilely stiff. When he moved, his whole body protested. He reached out of the sleeping bag, and his hair was stiff with rime. He sat up, groaning. Light, grey and unwelcoming, was coming from the open tent flap, and he saw Waterford's face grinning at him without humour.

'Your turn to cook breakfast.'

'Push off!' Davenhill snapped, rolling the unzipped flap of the bag away from him, and climbing wearily to his feet. 'You like this, don't you?' he asked, as Waterford allowed him out of the tent. 'This Hollywood stuff — very manly.' His voice was acid; but there was a bile of memory, as if they had shared an unsatisfactory physical act.

Waterford said, 'I thought you were the man's man.'

Davenhill's unlined face narrowed with spite. Then he seemed to control himself, and said softly, 'Is that how you get your kicks? Despising people? It's a sign of weakness, you know.'

Waterford walked away. He had set up the primus, and Davenhill crossed to the jeep and fished out the provisions box. Then, not looking at Waterford again, he began to prepare the breakfast. His mind came free of ice and acid at the smell of the coffee.

They shared the breakfast in silence, then Waterford stowed the tent, and they pulled back on to the road. It had snowed heavily in the last forty-eight hours, and the narrow road was clean of vehicle tracks. The chains on the wheels bit and stuttered at first, then they made better going of it as they entered thicker forest; the snow was light covering over compressed snow-ice. Waterford drove in silent concentration, and Davenhill became enervated by the passage of silent, snow-heavy firs which crowded against the road, a flowing, dark tunnel on either side of them.

'Bloody silly,' he said after perhaps a couple of hours.

Waterford appeared to digest the remark as a piece of vital information, then he replied, 'Any suggestions?'

Davenhill's surprise at the alkaline tone was increased when Waterford halted the jeep. Then he found Waterford looking at him. 'Well?' the older man said. 'Anything to suggest?' There was the edge of contempt again, but controlled.

'Why aren't we stopping — looking?'

'This is the only road, Davenhill. I don't intend being caught, like Folley. So far, there's been nowhere anything big could have left the road. This…' He waved a hand at the lines of the firs. 'This isn't deep cover, not enough for the kind of thing…'

Davenhill studied the trees lining the road. Dark and impenetrable they appeared to him.

'God — it's hard to believe in Aubrey's idea out here!'

'It isn't Aubrey's idea, and it isn't hard.' Waterford said drily. 'It's just the way you civilians look at it that makes it hard to believe.' His breath smoked around him. He was big and solid in the driving seat. He still frightened Davenhill who, used as he was to the Foreign Office, and the professional detachment that allowed only glimpses into souls in moments of indiscretion, could see no further than the skin with Waterford.

He was not a type of person he had met before; and his self appeared as hooded as his eyes.

'Well, then?'

'Well what?'

'Will we find anything?'

'Who knows? Anything may find us.'

'That's a pleasant thought to start the day. I — hadn't thought of it like that before.'

'You wouldn't.'

Waterford started the engine, which coughed like a cry in the cold silence. He eased out the dutch, and the jeep skidded, then rolled smoothly forward, the packed surface of the road now rutted tangibly below the skin of snow.

'What are we looking for?' Davenhill asked after a while, 'Not tracks — just a clearing, or a track. Damage to trees — anything.'

'Right.'

It was more than another hour before Waterford stopped the jeep, a look of irritation on his face.

'You and your bloody water!' he snapped. Davenhill smiled disarmingly, and jumped out of the jeep. 'Christ!' Waterford added as he moved away. 'Who's going to see you? I shan't be looking!' Davenhill was already off the road and moving more clumsily through deeper snow.

When he had finished, he moved from behind the tree, and knelt in the snow. With a smile on his face, he fashioned a snowball, looking up to see Waterford with his head averted, and aimed and threw. The ball of snow spattered like a ripe fruit against the side of the jeep. Waterford looked round, brushed some snow from his sleeve, and tossed his head. He appeared as if he might be amused. Davenhill walked towards him. The white gouge in the trunk of a tree almost slipped his gaze.

Then he went back to it.

'Waterford,' he called.

'My mother says I can't come out to play,' Waterford replied.

'Look at this,' Davenhill said firmly, already moving to another tree. A hole in the trunk, a piece of bark plucked away when something was removed. 'Where are we on the map, Waterford?' he asked, his voice still uninflected with excitement. He did not understand, as he moved from tree to tree, what the spike-marks might be. But understood they were man-made, and recent. Snow had been brushed from the places where the wind had fixed it, as if by heavy curtains or a large gloved hand.

Waterford said, close beside him: 'The forest is deeper here — begins to stretch for a couple of miles, maybe more, either side of the road. Trees are thicker, too.'

'What does it mean?' Davenhill said caustically.

'Not much,' Waterford said quietly. 'Perhaps the fixing-points for camouflage nets.'

Davenhill looked at him. 'What?'

'Maybe. But maybe not Russian, anyway. The Finns do have an army, you know.' Davenhill suspected Waterford's habitual sarcasm, but his face was expressionless — except for a thoughtful frown as he peered at the gouge in the tree. Then he bent down, and brushed at the snow, disturbing it.

He stood up, brushing the snow from his gloves.

'What were you doing?'

'I wondered about the pin, that's all — they took it away, like good soldiers should.'

He crossed to another tree, then another, working his way in a vague circle back to Davenhill, studying the trunk of each tree before which he paused.

'Well?' Davenhill was impatient now.

'Something has been pinned to these trees all right. Possibly netting — enough to cover half a dozen vehicles.'

'Tanks?'

'Possibly. Troop-carriers, whatever.'

'Thank God.'

'Hardly. Not really evidence.'

'What do you want — a packet of Russian fags, the odd Kalashnikov rifle dropped in a hurry?'

'More than this. Let's find where this unit, if unit it was, pulled off the road, shall we?'

'Aren't you going to take pictures?' Davenhill sounded childishly disappointed.

'Make a real impression on the Pentagon and NATO, eh?' Waterford said with a slight smile. 'Please, gentlemen — conclusive proof that the Red Army invaded Finland — pictures of nail-holes in trees!'

As he walked back to the car, he was laughing, Davenhill trailing in his wake, his shoulders hunched with disappointment. He had perceived only then how ridiculous he must seem to Waterford.

'How could they move through those trees?' he asked as he climbed back in the jeep.

'They couldn't — not far without damage, anyway. No delightful groves to assist movement.'

He started the engine, and they followed the road once more, Davenhill now alert for any break in the trees.

'They wouldn't cause damage, though — would they?'

'Not unnecessarily.'

A few minutes later, Davenhill said excitedly, 'There!'

'I see it.'

Waterford pulled into the side, and switched off the engine. There was a gap in the trees, probably caused by a felling operation, on a small scale, the previous summer. A wedge of trees had been lifted from the forest, a slice of dark cake.

Waterford got out, and said: Stay here. I don't want your fairy footsteps over that ground just yet.'

'Why not?'

'Because I am looking for something in particular.'

He walked away while Davenhill savoured the new ease in their relationship. Waterford, engaged in action, was easier. Not more human, enlarged in compassion. Merely distracted from bitterness; indifferent to his contempt for others.

Davenhill watched him kneel just off the road, and sweep gently at the powdery snow which crackled as its iced surface was disturbed. The sky was palely blue now, and high and empty. The scene, Davenhill observed, was losing its hostility, becoming photogenic.

'What are you doing?' he called.

Waterford went on brushing, over a wider area, his hand smoothing the snow aside until he exposed the packed ice-snow beneath. Then, eventually, he stood up.

'Bring the camera over here, would you?'

Davenhill joined him. Waterford had exposed, like the tracks of some strange species, the rutted ridges of caterpillar tracks. Tanks, or personnel carriers.

'Well done.' Davenhill observed, capitalising on a new familiarity. 'How many?'

'Just a few. Outriders. Some sort of advance guard, close to the road, ahead of the main column.'

'But they're not here now!' Davenhill burst out with the pure disappointment of a child.

'I should hope not. If they are, then there could be a couple of regiments, even a couple of divisions — in there.' He pointed towards the trees.

'Mm.' Davenhill photographed the exposed tracks, then said, 'What next?'

'Fancy a walk in the woods?' Waterford said.

'That depends. What are we looking for?'

'What we find. Come on — let's get the jeep off the road and under the trees, then we'll scout around a bit.'

For more than an hour they combed the ground beneath the trees, working gradually further into the forest, taking any path that suggested itself as wide enough for the passage of tanks. The search proved fruitless, and when they returned to the jeep, Davenhill was disappointed. He understood that they would find very little — perhaps nothing. But to kneel in drifts of snow, to part the blanket or examine the bark of trees for marks — was an invidious, tiring, frustrating job.

'We need to get further east.' Waterford observed, swallowing from a small flask which he then passed to Davenhill. Davenhill felt the brandy warm his stomach.

He said, 'What happened to Folley, Waterford?'

'Christ knows.' Waterford looked at.him, as if appraising some reaction. 'Probably dead. We know they've been here. He must have found them, too. And they found him — otherwise we could all be sitting in London listening to his report.' He looked at the camera, still slung round Davenhill's neck. 'Fuck,' he said softly. 'All we've got is some caterpillar tracks. I wonder what he saw?' He looked at the trees as if envisaging camouflaged vehicles beneath them.

'Where was the main body? The heavy stuff?'

'East of here.' He reached over and lifted a folded map from the pouch at the side of the door. He pointed a finger. 'Look, the forest is Y-shaped, stretching north and south of here. In either arm, I should think.'

'Where are they now, then?'

'Gone home?'

'Because of Folley? Perhaps they've called the whole thing off?' It was not a serious suggestion.

Waterford said, 'I doubt it. I think they had a dry-run. Timing would be of the essence to them — getting to Ivalo, then north-east to link up with a main attack.' He traced their route on the map. Davenhill, looking over his shoulder, nodded as he saw the line of advance unfold. Waterford pointed out Kirkenes, in Norway, and the road from the Russian border. 'That's where they'd cross,' he said. 'Down here would be the second thrust, to link up — oh, there.' His finger picked out Lakselv, on the Porsangerfjord. 'But they'd hop along that road with airborne troops, and land men by amphibs in the fjords.' He looked up at Davenhill. 'It would be a shit to stop them,' he added unnecessarily.

'A few pictures of tracks in the snow won't stop them, either.'

'What we want is Folley.' Waterford admitted. 'But he won't be in very good voice, even if we should find him.' He threw the map into the jeep. 'Come on, let's get moving.'

An hour later, they stopped for the fifth time. At each of their previous stops, they had inspected likely gaps in the hedge of the forest that pressed in on either side of the road. They had uncovered nothing. There was something phantasmal to Davenhill in the way a simple snowstorm had obliterated any trace of the forces he now knew had been on Finnish soil. Perhaps as recently as forty-eight hours ago. Folley — he thought of him with a wince of pain, sharing the man's route now — must have found them. And as Waterford had said, they had found Folley.

He climbed reluctantly out of the jeep, and trailed after Waterford towards a star-shaped pattern of forest rides that was obviously used to allow the passage of lumberjacking equipment and the removal of felled trees. It would appear that here they were at the heart of the forestry operations.

'How would they have known about these paths?' he called as a thought struck him.

Over his shoulder, Waterford said, 'Low-level photography — under the radar net, snap, snap, and off home. Easy.'

'I see.' He paused, as Waterford had done. Four trails snaked away through the forest. The trees seemed dense, heavy with snow, silent. 'Here?' he said.

'Here — if anywhere,' Waterford replied. Then he turned to Davenhill, and the younger man saw a flicker in the eyes, as if the blank mirrors had been removed. It was excitement, Davenhill thought. Perhaps love? Something strangely absorbing to the soldier. Then he understood it. The passion of the hunter close to the game. The spoor was beneath the thin film of snow at his feet. He could sense it. It did not make him like Waterford; but it added a kind of respect, and he placed himself more readily in his hands.

'What do we do?'

'Look. We'll need the jeep. Each one of these trails. And — watch out for felling work that may have taken place.'

As they walked back to the jeep, Davenhill said. 'Why were they here, Waterford? In my enthusiasm to believe, I didn't ask why.'

'Why? I don't know.' He started up the jeep, and pulled off the road, heading up the trail which most nearly paralleled the road from Ivalo. After a while, he said, 'The theory is — to succeed, at high speed, entails airborne operations, air-dropped supplies, all that kind of thing. That means transport aircraft. And they may not have sufficient. If so, an armoured column would take Ivalo, to support the lightest possible airborne assault. Then consolidate at Ivalo, air-drop light forces ahead, and follow up with armour. Sending armour up these roads…' He smiled as they bucked out of their seats. 'Like pouring a waterfall through a bottle-neck. Overcome lack of airborne transport by using armour as quick as you can. In this case, someone decided that it needed practice. The dry-run, as I said.'

'Then when will they be back?'

'I don't know.' He pulled off the track at that moment, into the softer snow under the trees. 'A nice tunnel,' he said enigmatically. Almost immediately, they came to a clearing, roughly circular. And the trees, shorn of branches, stacked as if for the spring. 'There.'

Davenhill sat in the jeep, absorbing the innocent looking clearing.

Waterford got out and cast about. Walking as if over a film of ice, he moved around the circle. Then Davenhill saw him stoop over the snow, brush at it with the tenderness of archaeology, then raise his hand to beckon him.

The snow beneath the freshest fall was stained with engine oil.

'This is it,' Waterford said. He stood up, and waved his arms around the clearing. 'Bright as a new pin.'

'What's under here?'

'Troy,' Waterford replied. 'Get digging.'

'So that's it,' Vorontsyev ended, looking at Alevtina and the three men gathered in a crowded, littered study. While he had talked, they had looked at the walls, eyes straying to the scattered files, the pasted, clipped strips of information.

There was no relief now that there was silence, no release. Rather, all four of the junior officers seemed insistently appalled by mental digestion of what they had heard.

'Chief?' Maxim said in a small voice. He tittered with embarrassment, then cleared his throat. 'We have to keep coming back to this bugger Vrubel, and who killed him. Do we know any more about him?'

Vorontsyev settled in the single easy chair — his team were stiff and upright on dining-chairs from the other room. He said, 'Alevtina, what's new?'

'Nothing, sir,' the girl said, correctly, almost primly.

'Sent the bill for your coat to Tortyev, have you?' Ilya asked.

'I have,' she snapped. Then, to Vorontsyev, who was smiling: 'We can't trace anything suspicious in his contacts — and no one saw him that night. This is a dead-end, sir.'

'Naturally. He wasn't mugged for his wallet. All right — his history. He's been on the Finland border for two, three years. In charge of a section of the wire. Overall security. You know how the Border Guard works — compartments, autonomously run, but with a central co-ord.'

'Then is he being used in his capacity as a Border Guard officer, or as something else?' Pyotr's mind seemed to unclog as he asked the question. There was just a dull patch of brain at the front of his head now, solid as an undigested dinner.

'As a Border Guard — what for?'

'Doesn't it depend what this Finland Station is supposed to mean?' Alevtina remarked. Vorontsyev looked at her carefully. The girl never started hares.

'Explain.'

'What I wondered, sir, was whether it was just his code, or the code for something bigger.'

'Bigger? In what way?'

'What are we dealing with, sir — revolution, or something else? We are dealing with the Army, aren't we?'

'We are. But it's the revolution aspect that we have to be concerned with here — so where does Vrubel fit into that setup? I can't believe that a Border Guard Captain is behind a revolution! Can you?' Ilya shook his head. 'Quite. However, we are going to divide our strength, as of now. What we have to know is what the set-up along his stretch of the wire is. Know everything. His men, their attitude, his movements, and the like.'

'You know what you're saying, sir?' Maxim said. 'You are suggesting that he's concerned in some kind of border crossing…'

'Don't talk rubbish!' Pyotr burst out, then saw Vorontsyev's unamused features. 'Sorry.'

'Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?' he said. 'But — is it? I want to know. Which is why I'm going to Finland in the morning — at least, to the border. Deputy Kapustin has placed this team in charge of the Vrubel business — run everything down. You four will stay here, and branch out as much as necessary over the next couple of days — tracking down any lead suggested by his contacts, his background, his behaviour-pattern.'

Not one of them uttered an audible protest. Then Pyotr said, 'This is while we're checking on your Rogues' Gallery, sir?'

'Yes. I want you to concentrate on Vrubel, but on the others as well, taking two each for the moment. When I get back from Finland, I'll take on the other two myself — Ossipov and Praporovich.'

'We can presume that Vrubel knew a lot — otherwise why try to kill you when you tailed him?'

'That may have been already set up — witness the body of the old sod in the black coat. I wonder whether Vrubel wasn't laying for me all the time? However, I can't see it. We assume no one else knew of our suspicion that Ossipov had a double…'

'Hundreds of people did, by the time we started asking questions. Vrubel was in the KGB. So are a lot of others who must be helping!' Maxim said, his eyes staying fixed on the wall-chart that Vorontsyev had drawn.

'Agreed. It could be anyone. Which is why we have to turn up something, and soon. Some common factor.'

'How widespread is it, sir?' Ilya asked. 'I mean, you don't need much to knock over the Politburo, not if you're using tanks.'

'True. Moscow Military District could supply more than enough — even a nice airborne assault on the Kremlin!'

'What a bloody mess that would be!'

Vorontsyev smiled thinly, then went on: 'So, we have to gain some kind of inside knowledge of Moscow District without arousing suspicion. But, if it's Moscow, then why Ossipov — he's at the other end of the world? And why Vrubel — he was based a thousand miles away? And all the others. What of them?'

He napped his hands on his thighs, an audible disturbance in the sudden silence.

'We're going to make a lot of noise doing this, sir,' Ilya offered unhelpfully.

'I know. We can't afford low profile, but we have to look like a small and isolated group, just making enquiries. Remember that. We can't afford to trigger off the thing we're trying to prevent.'

'But, sir—' Ilya again. 'Do you really think that a revolution is on the cards? It's impossible, surely?'

'Is it? Not if the Army does it, surely? Can you see the Air Force bombing their comrades in the tanks, or the fleets shelling Moscow from the Baltic? It only needs a little push — and what is there to tumble down? The Politburo, the Kremlin clique — and MS! Do you fancy taking on a T-72 with a 9 mm pistol, Ilya?'

'I see.'

'All of you — do you see? All they need to do is to take and hold the centre. If they're sure of enough Army support from the other Military Districts. Then no one could touch them. The KGB swept away, and replaced by some military police organisation, and the Kremlin in the hands of the Marshals. It's easy — as long as it's the Army doing it!'

His face had gone bright with perspiration and effort. He wanted the best out of them. They were young, and the system was their safe, warm womb. He had to show them how unsafe the whole thing was when threatened by an army. The Red Army.

'But why would they want to do it?'

Vorontsyev paused, then looked at each face — each clean, scrubbed, confident face. They seemed so young, and incapable of being hurt, or believing themselves mortal. And a mental consideration that might have been going on beneath the conscious surface seemed to clarify, achieve a peroration. Those faces in front of him in the untidy room dazzled him with insight.

'You four — not one of you believes in anything — right?' They appeared puzzled, grins starting and fading like little glimpses of sunlight. Alevtina looked quizzical, but as if she teetered on the edge of his own realisation. 'You don't read Lenin, you don't read Lenin, you don't remember Stalin, or the War against the Fascists — think about being in Berlin, in the grounds where they found the petrol-soaked corpses—' He felt the rhetoric whirl up, speaking through Gorochenko's experiences, and what he knew of his own father's life. If he could suddenly understand, perhaps they could, too. 'Or rinding the thousands of lime-decayed bodies in the mass graves — Babi Yar and all the other places the SS had been. Go further back, remember the Civil War against the Whites, the hungers, the billions who've died since 1917. Think about these things when you buy your next bottle of malt whisky in the shop across from the Centre, or eat your subsidised breakfasts in the Centre canteen, or order a new suit from imported Italian cloth. Silk scarves, fur coats—' he added suddenly for the girl's benefit. 'It's a cushy number, brothers and sister. Without history. But these old buggers remember — and perhaps they still believe!

'Or maybe they're just not ready for their pensions, or to throw away their 88–22 toys and new bombers and reactor-driven aircraft-carriers. In the end, does it matter a toss whether they have a motive or not? They may be doing it — and that's all that should worry us!'

Slowly, they looked at each other, then to him. Each one of them, as if present at some ritual, nodded to him. He sat back again, relieved. Then the telephone rang in the lounge. He had not switched the extension through. Ilya got up, and he waved him out.

The others got up, stretched, and began to study the faces on the wall. Vorontsyev tried to relax into the satisfaction of authority, to attend with a complacent half-ear to their comments, often ribald, frequently irreverent. Yet it was a hard quietude. What he had told them, the emphases he had placed, had frightened him, too. It was no longer easy to think in terms of wall-charts, pictures taken with the power of secret surveillance. If the Army was really engaged on a coup, then there was no stopping them — not if they had the agreement, even acquiescence, of the majority of senior commanders. Like those men on the wall.

Moscow would be no safer than Luanda, or Beirut. Except that the struggle would be short, and bloody — and the Army could not lose it.

'I'll take that hatchet-faced bastard, Timochenko!' Maxim said with delight, tugging the photograph from the wall. 'He once gave my cousin the shaft — I owe him!' It was said with amusement, and with an underlying enthusiasm.

'Don't frame him,' Pyotr laughed.

'I shan't need to!'

Ilya came back into the room at that moment. Vorontsyev turned to receive the message, still smiling at the enthusiasm of Maxim as he now hunted for the files on Timochenko, one of the two members of the Secretariat he had pinned to the wall. His smile vanished when he saw Ilya's white face — as if, he thought, only at that moment had the danger come home to him.

'What is it, Ilya?'

'Sir, that report on Ossipov and his staff from Khabarovsk KGB Office-'

'Well?'

'They're all dead — the office was blown to smithereens early in the morning — the off-duty team were murdered at home. Bombs…'

'What?'

The silence of the room was stifling. 'The work of the Khabarov Separatist Movement — they say. They're all dead. Every KGB officer in the town.' And Vorontsyev understood. He would have to go to Khabarovsk himself. Ossipov had had them killed.

Seven: Winter Journeys

None of the Oriental carpets or embroidered sofas, not even the tall windows overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square from the third floor, nor the high ceiling, could disguise in spacious elegance the functional nature of Andropov's office. The furnishings displayed him as a connoisseur, as someone immensely privileged in his society — and the battery of telephones on his immense desk betrayed his position as Chairman of the KGB. Mahogany wall-panelling, brocaded curtains — he sat looking round the room for a few moments after Kapustin had left, then turned his gaze on the telephones. He shook his head, as if admitting a reality.

The line to the Kremlin, the line to the Politburo and Central Committee members, the lines that connected him with any, or every, KGB office in the Soviet Union. He stared at the bakelite that, through high-frequency circuits, allowed him to control his security machine.

Dial Khabarovsk, and see who answers…

He did not wish the thought, but now it had presented itself, he felt an anger stirring in him, shaking a frame unprepared for high emotion. He despised emotion — feared it because it had the unfamiliarily and danger of an infection.

Of course he had approved sending Major Vorontsyev to Khabarovsk, with a forensic team. The Major's supposition was not unsound, that Ossipov had had his men killed. There, the centre of the little storm he felt. There. All right, in the Ukraine, before now, KGB men had been stabbed in alleys, even been blown up in their cars; but to take out the whole team?

Something else. It meant it was close. They had nothing to fear.

Khamovkhin had left him in charge. The apparatus of State had moved to Dzerzhinsky Street, to the Centre. Andropov perceived no possible irony in the thought. This was now the State, he thought. Here. Because nothing else mattered but that they find, isolate, and remove the enemy. And only he, and his service, could do that.

Could they?

He stirred in his desk, a sudden cramp in his legs. He looked down at them, as if they had turned against him. He did not blame Khamovkhin — only a stupid man would do that. Everything had to be as normal. Which was the trouble — no one could be told. They were sitting in a restaurant with the rest of the world, but only they knew about the bomb — and most of the staff were sick, or untrustworthy, and only one or two could be sent to search it out, disarm it He put aside the analogy. It was too real, too sensuous. Feodor had left him to mind the house.

The file on his desk was leather-bound. In it was material not dissimilar to that which had been scattered over Vorontsyev's floor, pinned to his walls. Material that tired, and infuriated Andropov. Ridiculous not to have a perfectly dear idea of who might be involved — who had to be involved — and maddening, to be able to do nothing. He could not admit to impotence, not after the years of power. But he was aware that the State had shrunk to the size of this room, and that his hold upon things was as fragile as the connections made when he dialled numbers on the telephones in front of him.

He stood up, walked swiftly, as if possessed with purpose, to the windows, and looked down. The square in front of his office, sparkled below him. The people of Moscow were out in great numbers, as they always were when the snow fell, or the frost glinted. Winter people, the Russians. He felt detached from them, as he always did. He felt no sense of mission, no obligation.

He went back to his desk, and opened the file, flicking through the polythene-covered pages, seeing the faces stare out at him. The prime suspects. Praporovich, Ossipov, the Defence Minister, Marshal Yaroslavich, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee.

Isolate, and destroy.

But, before he could do that, he had to discover the chain of command, the hierarchy of the coup. And twelve months had so far brought nothing. If, if, if — who is behind it, who is the leader, who, precisely, is involved, what are the commands, the plan — when? His head ached with the unanswered questions, his body ached with the sense of impotence. He was not afraid, but Did it all depend on one young Major in the SID, and his flight to Khabarovsk? How could it? And how could it not? Had the Khabarovsk Office discovered something, so that they had to be silenced?

The telephone rang, startling him.

'Yes?' The Kremlevka, the direct line to the Kremlin. Pushkin, the Prime Minister. The business of government. He listened, and stared at the room. It was there, the business of government, he thought. In that room.

Vorontsyev was waiting for the specialists with whom he was to fly to Khavarovsk. His plane left in another hour, and he had arrived in order to finalise the briefing of Ilya and Maxim, who were flying to Leningrad, on their way to Vrubel's section of the border wire.

The three of them sat together in the Diplomatic Lounge, in that glassed-off section of it reserved for the KGB. As they sipped at coffee and watched the commercial airliners stack, descend, and touch down outside the double-glazed windows, Vorontsyev warned them, repeatedly, of the parameters of their investigation.

He knew he was being cautious, but caution was required. It was of the essence. He felt old, much older than them, a crabbed and pinched soul in the face of their almost adolescent enthusiasm. The tension was high in each of them, and they were impatient with his sober mood. Yet they had to understand. He saw Maxim's eyes drift to the TWA Boeing as it slid past the windows, and snapped:

'It's not for my health's sake, you know!'

'Sorry, sir,' Maxim said, just able to resist glancing at his companion.

'You have to be undertaking an ordinary investigation — understand? You have to convince everyone that you're doing a police job because Captain Vrubel has been murdered. His mistress reported his disappearance…' He lowered his eyes for a moment. The name filed on the official notification to Missing Persons was that of his wife — her maiden and professional name. But it had to be good — because he did not know who might engage himself in checking the checkers.

His own excitement had long since drained away as he set up the two-pronged investigation — Maxim and Ilya to Finland, himself to the Far East. Kapustin had agreed that the action of the Separatist Movement in Khabarovsk was unexpected, even suspicious. And had consented to his personal investigation of the bombings, together with a team from the SID who would study the forensic realities. Vorontsyev's target was Ossipov, and military truth.

Because he had been able to convince Kapustin, and presumably Andropov himself, that Ossipov had to be perhaps the most important single link in a chain that they could not see. Not only had he bobbed up, a cork of suspicion, but the death of the whole KGB team was too fortuitous to be accidental.

He had slept little, his mind turning like his stomach with rising nerves. He said, for perhaps the third time since they had arrived at Cheremetievo, 'We dare not trigger the thing we're trying to prevent.' He knew they regarded his sombre face as that of a rather boring uncle, intent on restraint, on dampening youthful spirits. He felt the necessity to communicate to them, and the difficulty of doing so. They were being entrusted with an investigation he would have handled himself; and they understood the gravity, the weight. But they did not feel it as he did.

'We'll be careful, Major,' Ilya said. 'We know what's at stake.'

'Good. Just Vrubel, then. Arouse as little suspicion as possible. But act normally, please! You are in SID, and that should frighten people. Don't be too low-key.'

'No, Major.'

He gave it up. It was like rehearsing children in a lesson. Parrot-fashion they repeated what he taught them, but they did not understand. He was filled with sudden foreboding.

They sat in silence for the few remaining minutes, then their Leningrad flight was called, and he stood up with them, and they shook hands. He was despondent as he watched them move away down the tunnel towards the plane. He was afraid that they would miss something, something important. He should have gone himself.

He got himself another coffee from the machine, winced at its acrid taste, and lit a cigarette. He picked Pravda from the plastic bench, and scanned the inside pages. The official story of the explosions in Khabarovsk was to lay the blame where it had been claimed by telephone — the Separatists.

He folded the paper, and tossed it aside.

Kapustin had not been willing to be rushed into a premature judgement. He had not shared Vorontsyev's moment of inspiration when Ilya had repeated the telephone message. Kapustin, and Andropov saw the wider picture — which was largely grey, unformed. Kapustin wanted to know why Ossipov was involved, and he could not tell him. He could not even imagine a plausible explanation. Instead he clung to the fact that Ossipov had needed a double, to avoid surveillance. To meet someone, receive orders.

Another unit of the SID had begun to investigate the Moscow Military District hierarchy. The excuse was a trumped-up bribery charge against senior officers — or was it misappropriation of military equipment? He could not remember. But he was certain they would discover nothing that related to Group 1917. Again, he felt an urgency envelope him, choking yet electric, spasms to his muscles and brain, urging activity.

He looked up, and Natalie was standing beside him. So unexpected was her appearance, he was disorientated for a moment. It was from the past, the scene, especially the careful smile, and her arrival was apposite.

Then he said, 'What in hell's name are you doing here?'

Once more he was conscious of the way in which her smile flickered like something working from an interrupted current, then re-established itself. She was determined not to be angered, or put off. He wondered whether that was what penitence was like.

'I came to see you,' she said. 'You didn't ring.'

He was suddenly suspicious.

'How did you know I was here?'

'Mihail Pyotravich told me.'

'Told you — when?'

'Don't interrogate me!' she flashed, and the revelation of her known temper convinced him there was no need for suspicion.

'He doesn't know I'm here,' he said, as if relenting, but falling into that sullen, pouting mood and expression she so detested.

She smoothed her features before he could react to her look, and said, 'He was with — oh, Kapustin, I think, early this morning. He told him.'

'Oh. Well?'

'I'm coming with you — I have a few days before we begin rehearsals for Cosi — Mihail told me, I think, so that I could think of it… If I hadn't, I'm sure he'd have suggested it!' She laughed. It was false, winsome in a play-acting way. But her laughter was one of the things most unnatural about her.

'I'm working!' he snapped, but he sensed his own powerlessness; like the beginnings of a head-cold. She confused his thinking, somehow — overshadowed him. It wasn't sinister — rather he had drawn comfort from it, at one time. Something to do with his childhood, he assumed. Need to be dominated — mother-fixation…

'What the hell—?' he said, aloud. Her face narrowed, then he added, 'All right. Sit down — but don't get in the way!'

'Very well, Alexei — certainly, Alexei!' she chorused, mimicking her pretence of subordination, of dutiful wifehood, from the early days. He could not prevent the smile, even though he almost choked on the sudden sense of loneliness memory brought him; and despised, for an instant, the dependence he was demonstrating.

She moved the small leather travelling-case to her side, smoothed the long leather coat beneath her, and crossed her long, booted legs. She was desirable, even now, he thought. Yet he said, 'Just don't interfere when I'm working, that's all.'

'I won't. But you won't be working all the time, will you? We will have time to — discuss things?' He would not admit the suggestiveness of her tone.

'I suppose so.'

It was with relief that he saw the approaching figure of Blinn, the Deputy Senior Forensic Officer of the SID; tall, gangling, hang-dog. He looked like that American film actor — what was it? Matthau. Walter Matthau. Yes. He had seen him in a film, a couple of years ago, at the Dom Kino, by virtue of his privileged rank. Behind Blinn were two others. Then minutes before their flight was called. His thoughts turned to Khabarovsk, and seven dead men.

Already — and it was the shortness of the time that terrified him — Folley was finding it increasingly difficult to retain any firm hold on experience. Even though he had not been beaten again since his arrival at the house where they were now keeping him, he was blindfolded, his ears filled with wax, thick gloves on his hands. He was kept in a cellar, he imagined, because he climbed steps when they wanted to talk to him. Already, he was grabbing the stuff of their coats — uniforms, he thought — when they took him, leaning against them, trying to make them talk to him.

He had done the things they had done to him — undergone the white noise, the spreadeagling, the lack of sleep, the hooding. He should — was — able to withstand it. They were only the techniques used on Proves, in the earlier stages of interrogation, and he had been trained to take them — easy ride, they called it in 22 SAS.

But, they weren't here. Didn't want to know where was here. They had walked down familiar corridors, into familiar rooms, before the sessions began. Not like him — not like him at all.

He did not know where he was — just somewhere in the Soviet Union. Which, he realised, was a ludicrous thought, and not at all comforting. But the worry lay deeper than that. He was not disturbed or disorientated by the interrogations. The two officers who had conducted them, using the shit-and-sugar formula, tough and pleasant, had failed to elicit the kind of information they were seeking; and though their interminable questions whirled like frozen sparks in his brain for hours, and he had not slept for what seemed like days, he had not broken. And he did not think he would.

Except for the sapping of resolve that was going on all the time, deep inside him, like the crumbling away of a cliff, or the subsidence of a huge building. Because no one, not even himself, knew where he was; he would already have been disowned by London. Expendable. Waterford's word for him. And he would only have been passing on the message from on high.

It was hard, and harder all the time, to resist the sense of annihilation that crept closer to him, made him curl on the narrow cot in the cellar as if afraid of the dark. He had become afraid of wetting the bed, and he wanted to suck his thumb — or call out for the guard, who wasn't a bad sort.

No, he thought, definitely, and with an effort. It had not become as bad as that. That had been the nightmare last night. Night? The last brief sleep-period, he corrected himself. He walked hooded up from the cellar when they wanted to talk to him, feeling along blind corridors with closed doors and uncarpeted floors, into a room with heavy curtains always drawn. Once they had let him see it. And he had the feeling, the inhibition, that if he had moved to tug the curtains open, they would have shot him.

Only a nightmare. But, he knew they would have heard the noises — probably even now they were feeling the rough stuff of the sheets, seeking the evidence of drying sweat, or urination.

He had ejaculated once — when was that? He had been ashamed of the semen staining the sheet, and his trousers. It was weakness, even if it did not help them. Yes it did, he corrected himself — they knew that under the unhelpful surface, he was escaping.

It was Novetlyn this time. The sugar-man. The modulated voice of an actor or a queer. Insinuating, full of Russian promise… He formed the silly joke with difficulty, and laughed aloud, beneath the hood which was too thick for any light to penetrate. His bruised lip, which was healing slowly, cracked again, and he felt the dribble of warm blood down his chin.

He wanted to cry, wanted to dab at it roughly with a handkerchief. Everything had to be an assertion, have about it a residual toughness. He had to go on believing he was holding out, winning.

He said, 'Let me ask you a question? Which lot are you in?'

'Lot?'

He heard quick footsteps, and flinched as if before a stick, then the hood was pulled roughly over his head. Novetlyn's face was close to his, and he was smiling. Folley blinked in the subdued light, and was grateful. He dabbed at his split lip. Novetlyn sat behind his desk. He lit a cigarette, and laid one on the other side of the table, in front of Folley, ready for him to pick up and smoke when he felt he had resisted long enough to make his point. He smiled encouragingly, waited for the explanation.

'You know what I mean? Your partner, he wears GRU uniform — Colonel, too.' Folley, as if on a treadmill, felt the volition of scorn. 'But you don't. Nice Italian suit — cost a packet in the KGB shop across from the Centre, I'D bet.' He sneered. The grimace made the lip bleed again. He dabbed at it furiously with his grubby handkerchief.

'Ah. Would it help you to know? Yes, perhaps it would, Therefore, I shall remain a man of mystery to you.' He drew in smoke, blew it towards the ceiling, then said, 'Come, let us talk again. I like talking to you.'

'Piss off!'

'An English expression?'

Folley clenched the handkerchief against his groin, hurting himself with the effort of restraint. It did get to you — the consistent superiority of the interrogator. That when they talked — and the collapse of the will when you were alone.

He stopped his thoughts. He imagined himself, on a road, slowing down — walking. Strolling.

Stopping.

Novetlyn said, 'Ready?'

It was as if he knew, the bastard. Folley, lifting his eyes, saw the smile on Novetlyn's handsome, shaven face. The blue tie, with the large silver pattern; the lightweight suit, as if it were summer. Even the suede shoes were Western.

'You're a bigger shit than the other one!'

'Come — you haven't forgotten his name already?' Novetlyn was evidently pleased with the situation.

The drawn curtains were behind him. A heady pattern of browns and oranges, which disturbed but drew the eye. There was nothing else in the room on which to focus the gaze. Just the bare desk, and Novetlyn behind it. The carpet was neutral in tone, the wallpaper drab.

Folley picked up the cigarette. Novetlyn, as if he had timed the moment, had left his lighter beside it when he last spoke. Folley tried not to devour the smoke too greedily.

'You see,' Novetlyn said, pressing the long fingers of both hands together in a momentary steeple, 'we didn't have a chance to talk to the man who came ahead of you.' He smiled. 'We don't even know his name. He was clumsy, and got caught, and someone with too much enthusiasm and too little in his head shot him. Not like you — rather a good attempt, we thought. More the professional approach.'

'All London dustmen are trained to use that rifle — and in karate,' Folley said.

'Ah, the sense of humour returns — excellent. No, no. We are sure you are not a dustman — some other agent of disposal?' His English was almost without accent. 'We think SAS — based at Hereford.' He had never mentioned the regiment before. Folley gripped the ball of the handkerchief in his hand, pressing his knuckle into his thigh.

'Who? SAS? They don't send SAS out to do this sort of thing.'

'I'm sure the Sultan of Oman would be disappointed if that were true,' Novetlyn remarked drily. 'Anyway, your unit is not important. We do want to know whether another will come, and then another. You see — it would be as well to be prepared.'

'When are you going to bribe me?'

Novetlyn snapped, 'When you are ready to be bribed! Which is not yet, I think.'

The force of his insight struck Folley like a blow. They knew! They could hear the rumble as his self slid into the total isolation that waited for him like the sea. 'I don't know anything!' he persisted.

'Who sent you? Gaveston in SO-I? The Ministry of Defence? No, I think not. Who, then? How many people are interested in you, and in what you might have learned?'

There was the slightest inflection of urgency. Folley glimpsed others, outside that room, pressing Novetlyn for results. And the man disliked haste. He grasped the tiny hope of a time-limit, regardless of the conclusion.

'Lots of people! So you'd better let me go, hadn't you, before my big brother comes to find me. He's a policeman.'

'Here, everybody's big brother is a policeman — and their little brothers are in the Army,' Novetlyn replied.

'Variety is the spice of life.'

As if he sensed the initiative slipping, Novetlyn frowned, then said, 'No one will come for you.'

'Sod off!' Folley replied, swallowing the gurgle of loneliness that was bilious in his throat. 'You don't know that — you don't know anything? He tried, and failed, to inflect his voice again with an imitation of childish sneering.

'But we will — and you know that we will. If I told you what progress we have made, what regress you have made — in the short time — if I told you what little time you have been here, you would realise that we shall, very soon, know all you know.'

'You've got Colonel Krapalot's script today!'

Novetlyn smiled.

'It isn't even today. I shan't tell him his new nickname — it is appropriate. He's a shit when he's not interrogating, you know.'

'So are you.'

'Very well — back to the cot, and to the foetal position you are increasingly adopting, and no doubt the thumb in the mouth. Don't wet the blanket. Your guard might laugh.'

He pressed the buzzer beneath his desk, to summon the guard.

Khamovkhin slumped in his chair, and poured himself a large whisky. He spilt some of the liquid on his waistcoat, muttered a curse, then ignored it as the dark stain spread. His mind was so exhausted by the day that he did not consider the symbolic properties of the stain.

The helicopter flight over the sixty miles from the centre of Helsinki had been a final strained weariness after the other events of the day — a hammering metal box around him, shadowed by two other helicopters, and a flight path patrolled on the ground and in the air all that day. It had drained him, so that an aide remarked on his health, behind his back, to one of the security men who had surrounded him since this morning.

Now, even the walls of the Lahtilinna — the sixteenth-century castle frequently used for prominent political visitors to Finland, even for meetings by visiting heads of state with the President and Prime Minister — failed sufficiently to enclose him, rid him of the day-long sense of exposure, of helplessness.

The castle overlooked the Vesijaarvi, squatting on a hillside above the lake, three miles outside Lahti itself. A fortress it still was; except to him.

He could barely remember the rapturous applause with which his address to the Finnish Parliament had been greeted. Politically, it had been a fitting climax to a day of success. Lunch with the President, in the company also of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, a tour through the streets — here he had refused, politely but insistently, to undertake a fashionable 'walkabout' — and there had been crowds, enthusiasm more marked than curiosity. Yes, it was good, and seen to be good. Everywhere the cameras, the flash of bulbs, the chatter of commentators.

A little fat old man in a little room. His imagination insisted on that, and on the vulnerability of the body, and the title, and the power. All vulnerable.

A decoded transmission from Andropov lay on the eighteenth-century writing-desk behind him. He had glanced at it, but could not turn past the first sheet, as if the paper burned him. Nothing, and more nothing. But, oppressively closer the threat — a KGB Office blown up somewhere by pretend-dissidents.

A knock at the door. Smile, smile, he thought — then a moment of fear, distrust of his own voice, more whisky to unfreeze the chords.

'Yes?'

'Security report, Comrade First Secretary.'

'Who is it?'

'Captain Ozeroff, sir.'

'Come in.'

Galakhov opened the door, and saw Khamovkhin seated at the writing-table, presenting his back to him. He knew that it was bluff, saw the deep impression of the man's body in the cushion on the armchair. Khamovkhin was frightened, had been all day from the talk of the daytime security team that had accompanied him to Helsinki. He closed the door behind him, and stood to attention. Khamovkhin went on reading something, then turned to him. Galakhov admired the strength that appeared in the square face, the ruddiness of accustomed power.

'Yes, Captain?'

'Your daily security digest, sir.' He proffered the file.

'Thank you.' Khamovkhin indicated a low table before the fireplace, and Galakhov placed the file on it. 'I — may take a walk by the lake later, Captain. Bear that in mind in your — security patrols, would you?'

'Sir.'

'They tell me it's quite beautiful here.'

'Sir — but it's hard to see it that way when you're on duty.'

'Hard for me, too, young man.' Khamovkhin's gaze seemed to penetrate, question, understand — just for an instant. Then there was nothing but an old man's rheumy eyes and tired, baggy folds of skin beneath them. 'Thank you, Captain. You may go.'

'Sir.'

Galakhov smiled to himself as he closed the door behind him. The officer on duty at a desk in the chilly corridor, looked up and said, 'The old boy still jittery?'

'Not so you'd notice. I think he feels safer here.'

'Good.' The man looked at his watch. 'I'm off duty in an hour. See you in the bar — you can tell me all about London. Years since I was there.'

'Sure,' Galakhov replied, walking away down the corridor.

The KGB office in Khabarovsk was a ragged hole in the grey facades along Komsomolskaya Square. A bitter wind blew sleet into Vorontsyev's chilled features, and scattered a lying whiteness over the charred, smashed array of spars and frames that had once been a four-storey shipping office, the second and third floors of which had been the security HQ.

The wind sought through Vorontsyev's heavy sheepskin coat, down its turned-up collar, and the damp of the ground struck through the thick fur boots. He shifted his feet again, to warm them, and the powdered fragments of glass crunched under his steps. There was no longer even a wisp of smoke from the fires the bomb had started to suggest that anything recent had happened. It was old wreckage, the black stumps of teeth in an ancient jaw.

The explosion had torn out the sides of the buildings on either side of the shipping office. He looked up, his eyes squinting against the wind-blown sleet, and saw an office desk leaning drunkenly out over black space. Apparently, a secretary had been sitting there. Flying glass had decapitated her. He had not seen the body.

Alongside him, respectful and silent, stood Inspector Seryshev of the Khabarovsk Police. He was in a uniform overcoat and cap, and his ears were red with cold, like his nose. Occasionally, he murmured deferentially as if afraid to cough, and shifted his booted feet. He was a middle-aged man, careful of his pension and his prospects, and he knew that the younger man was a Major in SID and that it behoved him to stand alongside him for as long as Vorontsyev remained.

Vorontsyev said, turning to him so that his pale face was lit by the flashing red light on the police car, 'Why the hell were there only seven in the KGB team here?'

Seryshev shrugged without taking his hands from his pockets.

'You should know the answer to that one, Major.' He observed what he considered an appropriate deference, sensing that Vorontsyev would react unfavourably to a greater obsequiousness, and because he could not overcome the habitual lack of fear the KGB inspired five thousand miles from Moscow Centre.

'I don't know! A town of nearly half a million, and there are seven KGB men to look after it.'

'Don't forget we're here too,' Seryshev muttered.

'What happens in the summer — tourists?'

'The KGB come in with the Intourist guides. More of them here, then. Bloody uncomfortable, being out here otherside. Military District, too — the GRU are more than enough to make up for the absence of your lot.'

'Are they?' Vorontsyev said musingly, and Seryshev decided not to enquire. 'Tell me about the Separatists. What sort of information do you have on them?' He rounded on the policeman as if he expected to be told lies, or fed excuses. His face was drawn with cold and with anger. And perhaps something, something like fear, Seryshev decided, even though he could not understand such a feeling.

Seryshev looked around at the forensic team poking among the wreckage of the shipping office while he replied. Four hundred pounds of explosive — it could be as much as that. He shook his head. There were still some bodies in there — or parts of things that had once been people.

'No fuss just lately,' he said. 'About eighteen months ago, one or two minor incidents…'

'Any with bombs?'

'One. A car blown up. No one injured.'

'What else?'

'Some nameless threats — leaflets, banners. One or two arrests.'

'Anybody special? What's the set-up?' Vorontsyev, despite his indifference to Seryshev, felt an anger which he could not define welling up in him, so that his throat was constricted. It was as if he suddenly sensed the distance between himself and Moscow; was one of the men who had died. Certainly angry on their behalf.

'No,' Seryshev replied in a stolid, unexcited way. 'Only students. Heavy sentences, to discourage others, of course. But — no leads to anything. No expectation of anything…' He waved a heavily mittened hand towards the wreckage. 'Anything like this.'

Vorontsyev rounded on him.

'The men here were wiped out! Someone did a very professional job on them — wives and families, too, in some cases. Each one with a bomb. Don't you have any idea?'

Seryshev shrugged. 'No.' He did not like the admission, but it was safer than bluff, he considered, at that moment.

Vorontsyev stared at the wreckage, as if willing himself to remember every detail. Then he said, 'Nothing else?'

'Not for months.'

Silence, then Vorontsyev called, 'Blinn! Anything yet?'

The stooping forensic officer looked up, his face caught by the revolving, winking light on the police car. He looked chilled, and irritated.

'Don't be stupid, Vorontsyev! What would you expect? I'm still putting together the parts of the people here!'

'Get moving, then!' Again, the unreasonable, unreasoning anger flared, filled his throat like nausea. 'Balls to the bodies! I want to know how they died, and who killed them!'

Blinn took a step towards him, casting aside a charred length of carpet. It rolled back over something humped and blackened that Vorontsyev did not care to identify.

'You're a prize bastard, Vorontsyev! Its people who died here, don't you realise that?'

Vorontsyev was shouting now, in contest with the wind and Blinn. Blinn seemed even more deeply shocked than he over the atrocity. As if the massive safety of his organisation and his office had been stripped from him like so many inadequate clothes.

The two men stared at one another across the spars and frozen waves of the ruined building, Blinn's taut, thin face reddened by the light, the sleet blowing across it caught by the same glancing light.

'I want to catch the bastards who did it! And I may not have a lot of time to do it. Can you get that into your thick skull?'

Blinn's nostrils flared. Vorontsyev saw the puzzlement succeed anger in his face. He had said too much.

'What the hell has tune got to do with it? All the watches and clocks around here have stopped!'

'I–I'm sorry,' Vorontsyev said. 'It — look, it may be urgent,' he added, stepping away from Seryshev. 'Urgent. So put someone on the explosive — exclusively. At each house that was blown up. I want to know type, amount — all of it.' Blinn was already nodding in the concert with the demands. 'I want to know how much there was. And then perhaps we can guess where it came from.'

'OK, I understand.' He looked at Vorontsyev. 'I wondered why they sent you out here.' He turned away.

Vorontsyev looked once more at the rubbish of the building and its occupants. Where did the explosive come from? Ossipov, you bastard, he thought, this isn't like slipping a tail in the cinema toilet… Again the unreasonable anger. If it was you — I'll finish.

Even then, in the street, despite the sleet, the chilling cold, and the traffic thinning in the square behind him, it did not sound a particularly stupid boast.

General Ossipov was entertaining a young man in civilian clothes in his quarters; his town quarters, a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Dalni Vostok Hotel on Karl Marx Street.The young man was standing before him, almost at attention, staring into a mirror above the mantelpiece — an ornate, gilded mirror in which he could see the back of Ossipov's grey head and sometimes the side of his face as he spoke. The young man felt angry with his orders from Moscow, and half-afraid of their effect on Ossipov.

The General had taken too much to drink already, that was evident. His tie was slightly askew, and the grey suit appeared rumpled — the collar was wrinkled to the hairline, he could see. He was feeling aggrieved that he should have to berate the General, imitating the anger that Kutuzov had shown when he had briefed him the previous night. He was not certain the General, in his present semi-drunken mood, would respect his status as courier.

'You dare to tell me that I have acted precipitately — that I am wrong?' Ossipov snarled, a second or two later than he would have done, the emotions muddied by the drink. The young man winced at the evident blame he was attracting.

'Sir,' he said again, 'I am only repeating what I was told to say. You know that is my function. My opinions are irrevelant.'

'You arrogant young turd!' Ossipov snapped, and the young man saw the head jolt upwards, in the mirror, and refrained from meeting the General's eyes.

'No, sir,' he said.

'You tell me that Kutuzov considers me a fool who has acted like a silly, middle-aged virgin when a man looks at her? God, I got rid of that stinking KGB gang in one night! And the Separatists will get the blame!' The General laughed, but the young man considered it was only the confidence of alcohol.

'I was told to inform you that the SID have a man here — a Major. That Kutuzov considers to be an indication that the — enemy — have a strong suspicion that all is not as it appears out here.'

'Considers? Rubbish!' Ossipov poured himself another vodka, a noisy meeting of bottle and tumbler. 'We have five days, if his bloody marvellous plan works! What, pray, is there to fear?'

'You become an object of suspicion, General,' the young man proceeded. 'An SID unit was on to you — you eliminated your double with Vrubel's help. Now you have attracted this attention to the Far East District, just a few days later.'

Ossipov shifted in the chair — the young man saw the head jerk, the whole body move, as he came out of the chair. Shorter by five inches or more, his head came into view at the edge of eyesight as the young man strained to stare into the neutral mirror.

'Attention? Attract attention? What the hell does that mean?'

The young man swallowed, then said, 'It means — Kutuzov considers that the exercises should be suspended while the SID man is here.'

There was a silence. As if drunk himself, the young man moved his gaze over the reflected room; over the ornate furniture, most of which belonged to Ossipov, over the thick, patterned carpets — returning, unwillingly, to the back of the General, the square shoulders and the bull neck.

'No,' Ossipov said with difficult restraint, the glass clinking against his dentures a moment before his reply. 'Kutuzov should have asked me whether I was able to suspend the tests, not give me an order when he's thousands of miles away. I will not jeopardise the whole operation because of one man. "Exercise Mirror" must continue. There are still problems with the chemical attack to precede the armoured assault. These must be solved in the next two days!'

Ossipov regained his seat, studied his drink for a moment, then went on: 'I am working without expert assistance — I have to, since I can't trust the scientists I could otherwise lay my hands on.' The courier stood patiently at attention, staring into the ornate mirror. It was, he presumed, one of his more irksome duties to listen to these old men as they communed with their drink and their past, present and future. 'And if we are to test the chemical devices, then we have to go through the fiction of the whole exercise to fool the American satellites.'

He looked up briefly, but the young man did not meet his eyes and he returned his gaze to the carpet, his head resting on his chest. 'They must continue to think we are once again rehearsing the invasion of China — not the invasion of Norway. Tell Kutuzov when you return to Moscow—' The General seemed to have created in himself a certainty born of reasonableness, and of reasoned argument, and was prepared to end this tirade on a note of quiet defiance. 'Tell him that for his sake, for all our sakes, I will not stop now.' He paused, then, with confidence, snapped, 'Now, get out!'

Eight: Border Incident

The MIL helicopter followed the single road from Murmansk to the Finnish border, flying at little more than five hundred feet above the narrow white parting between the heavy darkness of the trees and the strip of dull glass that was the river Lotta.

Already, the country below was boring to Ilya. Their flight to Leningrad, then the transport plane, an old Ilyushin, which had taken them to the military airfield at Murmansk, had tired him. He never slept well on aircraft, unlike Maxim, who had dozed in the seat next to him, wrapped in his heavy overcoat, snoring gently. Instead, he had drunk whisky on the prolonged flight and in the uncomfortable, sparse transit lounge at Murmansk, until the MIL was able to take off before first light and in improved weather.

He had little idea of how to conduct the investigation. Major Vorontsyev had told them, repeatedly, to be careful, to convince whoever they met that it was a straightforward missing persons case — except that the missing person was a KGB officer, and that was why the SID had been called in. But he knew that they would find out little that way.

What was there to find out, anyway?

The dark trees, the snow-covered swellings of the landscape, flowed beneath him like waves.

Finland Station. That was all.

He tapped the pilot on the arm. The young man turned to him, lifting one earphone of his headset.

'What is it?'

Maxim stirred lazily in the seat behind him, irritating Ilya.

How could he sleep so soundly, with the rotors beating above them, and the insecurity of being suspended above the wild landscape below.

'Where are the tanks?' he said, grinning foolishly. The pilot smiled.

'Not yet,' he said. 'The divisions are pushed almost up to the border here. I'll show you some when we get there.' He replaced the earphone, and turned away from Ilya. A few minutes later, Ilya again tapped him on the arm. The pilot pointed to a second set of headphones, slung over the dual controls of the MIL. Ilya uncomfortably adjusted them, and the pilot's voice crackled inside his head.

'What is it? You're like a kid!' He was smiling, however.

'Were you on Vrubel's staff- part of his section of the wire?'

'Yes,' the pilot replied. 'But I'm Army, not KGB.'

'How come?'

'Your lot don't seem very keen to fly choppers in this part of the world,' the pilot replied. Ilya scowled, and the pilot added, 'Don't be insulted. It gets pretty rough. I'd thank you for a Moscow posting!' He laughed. For a moment, Ilya had the feeling of some ambassadorial charm being exercised, as if the young man was more aware than he seemed behind his affability.

Then he said, 'We do cover more than Moscow.'

'Sure. But SID?'

'All right — you win. I prefer Moscow, or Leningrad — I don't like flying, and I'm trying to make conversation!' He shrugged.

'Great! Now, what do you want to know?'

'Just tell me about the captain. What sort of officer was he?'

'One of the best,' the pilot answered. 'Even if he was KGB — sorry. No, he was Army, really, like you're really a policeman. Good to his men, firm, clear-headed, even when he'd been drinking… A loss — if he's dead.'

There did not seem to be any depth of regret.

Ilya said, 'You're sorry he's dead, then. If he's dead…'

'Of course I am. Good man.' He added, after a pause: 'He is dead, I suppose?'

'Who knows?

'You've implied it — so did your office in Murmansk when they called for me.'

'I suppose so,' Ilya wondered, then: 'Why should he be dead? Or, why should he disappear?'

Ilya looked out of the window, as if indifferent to the reply, and the flowing landscape appeared even more hostile. He could not be certain why that should be. Was it the landscape making the conversation sinister, or was he picking up something that made his position, five hundred feet above that, more insecure than ever?

He wondered, too, how strongly the Murmansk Local Resident had implied that Vrubel was dead. It was as if the pilot had known about it for some time, and had come out on the other side of shock.

And perhaps, he thought, he didn't like Vrubel and it is politeness towards the dead that gives him a stilted, practised manner. He smiled at his own suspiciousness.

'I don't know,' the pilot said after a while, having screwed his face to the contortions of thought. 'It has to be something in Moscow, not here. There's nothing out here — except us.'

'No jealousies — nothing like that? Nothing in the line of duty?'

'Out here? You didn't know Russians had landed on the moon, did you? That's it, down there!' He pointed below with his thumb. 'All it is is trees, tanks, and men. Men get drunk, play cards, read dirty books, toss themselves off because they're so bored… But it doesn't lead to murder. Oh, Vrubel gave out his fair share of extra duties, as punishments, but that wouldn't explain it.'

'And what if he disappeared?'

'Why would he do that? Boredom?' The pilot was disbelieving. 'With you lot on his tail as soon as he does? Why not disappear from here, anyway? Nip over the border. Nothing easier!'

'Nothing?'

'Well — almost.' The pilot pushed the stick forward, and the nose of the MIL dipped so that the trees and the river and the whiter ribbon of the road all seemed to assert themselves, reach up at Ilya. He stared at the pilot, who pointed. 'Down there!' he said, pointing ahead. 'You see if you can spot them — three tank regiments on permanent station.'

'Finland Station,' Ilya said, thankful for the opportunity, savouring his assumed indifference as he said the words.

'What was that?'

'I was making a joke,' Ilya said, looking directly ahead. 'Isn't that what they're for — Finland. So it's a Finland station — uh?' He simulated huge amusement; rather well, he considered.

The helicopter drove towards the trees, and Ilya concentrated, as he had been instructed. He could see nothing. Only a single clearing, and two figures in heavy coats and fur caps — and perhaps netting.

The pilot said, as they lifted away again, 'Finland station? That's good, that is. Do you think Comrade Lenin would have laughed?' Now he too, was smiling. The rapport of humour seemed to have returned to the flight-cabin.

'I doubt it,' Ilya said, relaxing now that the helicopter was flying a level course once more. 'No sense of humour!' He laughed.

And you, you bastard, grinning away, Ilya thought. You've heard that before — Finland Station. I wonder what it means to you?

They had staked out the ground as clearly as they could; tape and stakes, a weird pattern of parking spaces where they had discovered the traces of vehicles. Or where temporary wooden huts had been erected, or tents put up. And they had amassed their evidence — pitifully labelled and stored in plastic bags — cigarette-ends, oil-stained snow — this in a freezer box in the jeep — splinters of wood, empty cigarette packets.

And the photographs — roll after roll of film.

When they reported back to Aubrey, he would authorise a angle low-level photo recce flight over the area. Then the hard evidence would be presented to the government of Finland, and to NATO, and to America and the Soviet Union.

Davenhill had slept an exhausted sleep, and resented it when roused by Waterford, though it was mid-morning by the time he awoke. When they had eaten, they set off down the last miles of the one road to Rontaluumi and the border.

By afternoon they were on a rise above the village looking down on the back of the few houses that clustered around the main street and square of the village. They had been there for two hours, and they had seen nothing.

As the glasses passed between them once more, and Waterford pulled his flask before handing it, too, to Davenhill, the Foreign Office adviser said, 'It is deserted, I suppose?'

'Could be full of vampires,' Waterford observed. 'Sleeping off the daylight and the peculiar diet.'

'What are they using for victims?' Davenhill said, feeling the long monotony thaw, resolve itself in grudging humour. He rolled on to his back, drinking the brandy, handing the glasses back to the soldier.

'How about a tank regiment of the Red Army?'

'A nice solution to our problem. Is it deserted 'Christ knows. It certainly looks it.' Waterford scanned the silent village once more through the glasses, then put them at his side, and stretched himself, shifting his prone body. 'We are going to have to find out. Fancy volunteering?' There was no longer a sneer in the voice, and Davenhill felt no offence. Their relationship had become anaesthetised in work; they were part of the same mission, and that sufficed for both of them. They relied upon each other now. Davenhill nodded.

'Come on then. I don't fancy this place after dark. We'd better go in now.' Davenhill was still smiling when his tone darkened and he added: 'Softly, softly is the word, Alex. You keep close to me, you take the safety-catch off your gun, and you keep your eyes swivelling like those on a bloody chameleon. Savvy?'

'OK. You're the expert. What do you expect?'

'The dead lying on their beds, hands across the chest,' Waterford said. 'Or mere emptiness. I don't know. What I don't expect is to find Russian soldiers — but then, I don't want to be surprised.' He lifted his head, raised the glasses, scanned, then said, 'The big house — village headman that will be. We'll make for that. Just follow me.' He looked at Davenhill, and the younger man saw the features tauten, the eyes seem to become shallow yet intent. It was as if he were looking at a sharp monochrome picture of the man, without shadows or highlights. Something etched, yet flat.

'Watch yourself,' Waterford said quietly. 'No heroics, and no panic. If — if there's anyone nasty down there, it'll be the time to remain normal in the abnormal situation. That's what it's about, son — being ordinary when the world goes mad.'

'I'll try.'

Waterford nodded, seemingly satisfied; yet Davenhill thought he caught something in the twitch of the lips that might have been pity, or disappointment. Then the bigger man got up, into a crouch, and dusted off his waterproof trousers.

'Ready?'

'Ready.'

Davenhill followed him down the slope, keeping to a crease in the land as to a path, his body balanced inwards towards the slope, his eyes on the path Waterford was making through the restraining, glutinous snow. Waterford, he knew, was ceaselessly scanning the village as their viewpoint dropped lower, to the level of the ground floor of the house that steadily, jerkily seemed to move towards them.

Beneath them then was what must be the garden, or at least the strip of land belonging to the house. There were no footprints in the snow, but it had snowed that previous night, and Davenhill dismissed the relief that threatened to bubble up in him. He felt the tension, withdrawing into himself, unaware of Waterford except when he touched the body in front of him whenever the man stopped, or as he watched the sunken footprints. A little narrow frightened world that was Alex Davenhill.

Ordinary.

He understood what Waterford meant. Like entering the club, or the new bar, this should be.

No, not even that. Like the washing-up, or mowing a lawn.

Christ, he wondered, how does he manage it, to be like that when a bullet might tear the life out of him at any moment?

Davenhill tried breathing deeply, regularly.

'Do your exercises later,' Waterford snapped in a whisper. They were almost at the rear door of the house, and Davenhill saw, as Waterford pointed, the chipped whiteness against the door and the frame around it; the absence of a lock. He said nothing, however, moving instead to the window to the left of the door. He rubbed at the frost, and peered in.

'Well?' Davenhill asked after what seemed like minutes of Waterford craning and bobbing his head.

'It's very tidy,' Waterford observed. 'Very houseproud. And not what you might expect from someone having to leave their home suddenly.' He moved back to the door, abstracted, and Davenhill felt more than ever outside what was taking place. This was a celluloid reconstruction of events — a demonstration film.

Waterford touched the handle of the door with a mittened hand. Then he suddenly had the Parabellum in his hand, and Davenhill clutched inside his pocket for the Walther. It was an instinctive, clumsy gesture. It was years since he had fired a gun, and never in anger. Unless grouse counted. He almost laughed at the idea, and hated the nerves that bubbled dose to hysteria. Ignoring them for something like a minute had only made them multiply, like ameoba.

The door swung open soundlessly. Waterford glanced at him, shrugged, and put the gun to his lips for silence. Then he opened the door suddenly wide, and ducked inside. Davenhill waited for a moment, as if forgetting a cue, and feeling foolish. Then he went through the door.

Waterford was already in the big main room of the house where Folley had sat. It was empty, tidy, clean. Waterford wiped his ringers over a mirror, then along the edge of a table.

There was no dust. His face was creased into a dramatic, abstracted frown.

'There is no one here,' Davenhill said, and his voice was very loud.

'Possibly. But the evacuation is recent, and perhaps temporary. I wonder—?'

Swiftly, he checked the bedrooms, all on the one floor. Then he paused before the cellar door.

'Is that the cellar?' Davenhill asked. 'What — do you expect?' He was suddenly assailed by a Gothic imagining which was stupid, and only served to emphasise the unhealthy state of his nerves.

'Not the corpses — I hope.' He pushed open the door, which creaked, and reached for the light. There was only the usual slight mustiness of a cellar, and the smell of stored animal fodder. He went down the steps. Davenhill waited, again with the foolishness not so much of reluctance but of incompetence. In this water, he could not swim. And he knew it before he dipped his toe.

He joined Waterford at the bottom of the steps.

'See?' Waterford said, holding a Kalashnikov rifle up for his inspection. It was neatly stacked, with three others, against one wall. Looking at them, Davenhill noticed the uniforms hanging from fresh pegs, the boots — then, near the stacked hay, a military cot.

Are they Russian uniforms?' he asked.

'Not the Lapland Fire Brigade, that's for certain.'

'What does it mean?'

Waterford was patient, probably because he conceived no immediate danger.

'A special detachment, left to guard the village.'

'And — the villagers?'

'Settled — elsewhere.'

'Well, where are they?'

Davenhill pursued, determined not to move ahead of the answers he elicited from Waterford.

'Out and about — looking for us, or someone like us.'

'What?'

'Folley must have come here, or been brought. They found him, and they'd expect another enquiry of the same sort. That's why the uniforms are here. And I bet they speak Finnish.'

It was not a voice that they heard next, but footsteps on the bare floorboards above their heads. Waterford saw Davenhill's eyes roll comically in his head, and almost laughed inwardly at the way in which real fear hadn't even begun for the clever queer. He felt him an encumbrance, and pitied him at the same moment.

'What do we—?' Davenhill's whisper was a squeak.

Waterford covered his lips again with the gun barrel, then listened. A voice called out in Finnish, and Waterford smiled. He motioned to Davenhill to put the gun away, and slipped his Parabellum back into the shoulder holster. Again the voice called out, then the footsteps began on the stairs, and they watched two legs above high boots come into view. There was an assuredness about the unhesitating steps.

Waterford called out, 'I say — can you help us?'

He moved swiftly to the foot of the steps, looking up into the face of the young man before he could leave the steps. The man, dark, thin-faced, was smiling openly, and yet contrived to appear surprised. 'You speak English, old man?' Waterford added.

Davenhill remained where he was, confused and withdrawn. He could no longer fathom motive, even identity. He wasn't sure who the young man on the steps was, but he believed, with difficulty, that he must be Russian. And his ignorance screamed that Waterford had betrayed them by addressing the man in English.

'A little?' the young man said, and the accent was no longer Scandinavian.

'Ah, how lucky, eh, Alex?' He turned momentarily to Davenhill. 'We're electricity board surveyors from England — our jeep broke down about a mile from here. Do you think the chaps here might help us?'

It was ridiculous, Davenhill had time to think. Then the young man said, with difficulty, 'I saw you — come here? Why are you in the cellar?'

'Couldn't find anyone, old man. Thought there might be someone down here. Not your cellar, is it, old man? Awfully sorry.'

'No — I live — other house. You come up now?' There was nothing of menace in the voice, perhaps only anxiety that they come quickly.

There were wet footprints on the stone floor of the cellar, next to the uniforms and the leaning rifles. It was stupid, a farce that they should be pretending to be innocent travellers. Davenhill felt something in him collapsing. His breath smoked round him in the cold.

The young man had stood aside on the steps. Waterford, with a charming, bland smile, was passing.

He turned and said, 'Come on, Alex — this chap will give us a hand with the jeep!'

He went up the steps quickly, and Davenhill, seeming to himself to be moving through an element more glutinous than the thick snow behind the house, followed. He hardly glanced at the young man, then, aware of admission in his averted gaze, stared at him, grinning foolishly; hating his inadequacy, already sensing Waterford's scorn.

That, more than the fear as soon as he was above the young man, and his unguarded back was to him.

At the top of the steps, Waterford, relaxed, smiling, was waiting for them. His hands were in the pockets of the heavy anorak. There was, incredibly, nothing to fear. Ridiculous.

The young man was alert — Davenhill saw the tension in his frame. An inappropriate image of nakedness, remembered just for a moment, then he was standing between Waterford and the Russian who was still pretending to be a Laplander.

'Why are you here?' the young man said then.

Waterford smiled, disarmingly. 'Ah — hydro-electric power.' His hands went into a mime, his voice into a pedantic deliberateness, head moving in emphasis. 'Water — dams, using the power of the water — we are investigating for the British electricity industry…' Pausing, while the vocabulary caught up.

Davenhill was tempted to laugh, and admire. 'What can we learn from your country? You understand?

'Ivalo?' the young man said.

'Yes. Doing a bit of sightseeing — tourists? — on our own.' Waterford had moved away from the young man and was looking out of the window. Davenhill saw now how lean the Russian's frame was, how fit the man must be underneath the assumed civilian clothing. He remained near the Russian, as if a token of good faith or an emblem of peace.

'Where is your jeep?' the young man asked, moving too.

'Just outside the village,' Waterford said, apparently unconcerned, looking up the main street of the village. The young Russian approached him. Davenhill could see the menace in the movement, but could not be objectively certain — hating the impotence that made him a spectator of the tiny events, and concentrating, as if afraid of missing something — but Waterford seemed oblivious.

When he turned from the window, he was holding a knife, glimpsed briefly by Davenhill, and the young man's back flexed convexly as he bucked his stomach away from the point of the blade.

'One move, sonny, and I'll kill you, just one move or sound — understand?' Davenhill knew sufficient Russian to understand what Waterford had said.

Then the older man moved closer to the Russian, turning him with apparent ease, knife now across the stretched white throat above the check shirt and the collar of the anorak.

'Don't kill him—!' Davenhill blurted out, as if disturbed by events on a screen that were unexpectedly real.

'Shut up!' Waterford snapped, and Davenhill almost failed to recognise the voice, as if a trick of ventriloquism had made the man's lips move. Alien…

Then Waterford pushed the man so that he stumbled, slipped on a loose thick rug, a splash of bright colours, and even as he turned over on his back Waterford kicked him in the thigh, near the groin, bent and pulled him to his feet, drew the gun with the right hand and hit the Russian across the cheekbone with the barrel.

Davenhill found his long fingers at his quivering lips, and a strange voice saying, 'For Christ's sake, what are you doing to him?' It was his own voice, and that was horrible, too.

'Disorientate!' snapped Waterford, as if reciting some lesson. 'Get a bucket of water — now!' There was no resistance in Davenhill. He turned and went out into the long kitchen.

He heard the sounds of tearing cloth, then slapping, and he hurried, as if afraid to be rebuked, filling the plastic bucket from beneath the sink with ice-cold water. He slopped it back from the kitchen, along the bare corridor to the main room, where Waterford snatched it from him, and flung the contents over the dazed, bleeding Russian in the armchair where he had been pushed. The man was naked, except for his boots and long socks. His torn trousers were in a stiff, degrading pool around his ankles. The check splash of the shirt was beside the armchair.

The body jerked as if from electricity as the water cascaded, shocked, froze. There was a strangled cry, and then Waterford was on him, knee on his chest, gun beneath the point of the jaw, forcing the flopping head with the lolling black hair up, to look into the grey, flat eyes.

'Where are the others?' he barked, shouting almost, jerking the gun in his hand so that the Russian's jaw grated, and the head snapped up and down. Puppet, thought Davenhill, with appalled fascination.

There was no sound from the Russian.

'Where is the Englishman? Where is he?' Again the pressure of the gun — then he saw Waterford lean away, and the Parabellum exploded. Davenhill found his hands about his face, plucking at his lips, wanting to cover his ears. There was nothing he could do; the Russian was dead. He heard Waterford's voice, distantly: 'Where is the Englishman?' Why ask a dead man? 'Where is he — you're not dead yet!' The command in the voice was — terrible.

And then Davenhill saw the head flop, as if alive, and Waterford said again. 'Where is he? Did you bastards kill him? Answer me!' There was a choking sound, as if the young man was still swallowing the water thrown over him, and the head moved again, and over the hunched shoulder of Waterford he saw the eyes roll in the head, whites rather than pupils, and another groan.

Only then did he realise that Waterford had not killed the Russian.

'Speak! Now! When did you kill him? When?

A silence. Then:

'No — not kill…' the voice was awful, something already dead trying to get back from somewhere impossibly far. 'He — was taken back.'

'I don't believe you, you little Russian shit! He's dead!'

'No, no!'

'Yes!'

'Beg you…' Davenhill heard, and braced himself, hands fluttering at his sides, uncertain.

'You killed him!' Each syllable broken, precise with menace.

'No! They took him back over the border with them!'

'Who!'

The voice was easier now, lubricated by some whiff of possible life.

'The tank regiment — when they went back.'

'When?'

'Two — days.'

'Why are they here?'

'I don't know. Invasion!' The last word was shrieked as the gun drew back from the jaw, then pressed against the temple. Davenhill saw the terrible eyes swivel in the head, following the gun. All whites.

Then Waterford, as if some conjuror or magician releasing a spell, stepped back, slipped the gun into its holster. Then, his back to the Russian, he put on his gloves.

'Right,' he said. 'Let's get this young man outside and back to the jeep, shall we, Alex?'

Davenhill was immobile with shock, disorientation.

'Come on, Alex,' he heard Waterford say, almost cringing as the bigger man came towards him. But his voice was kindly. 'We haven't got any time to waste. Get him dressed.'

He left the room abruptly, exuding a confidence more appropriate to a Ministry corridor, an officers' mess, than to their present situation.

Then he realised that the peculiar sound in the room was the Russian's teeth as they chattered uncontrollably. The young man was hunched in the armchair, arms wrapped across his chest, moaning through the noise of his teeth. He moved to him, helping him slowly to his feet. The young man flinched from him, and his body began quivering as soon as it abandoned the mould of the chair. The eyes were still now, receded.

His nakedness was upsetting, humiliating. Davenhill bent down, and pulled the trousers up to his waist. The buckle was missing, and the waistband was torn. He gently guided the young man's hand until it held the trousers in place. Then he picked up the shirt, saw its condition and abandoned it, then pulled the anorak across his heaving shoulders. The chattering noise had gone. Sobs, irregular and heaving, were the only sounds now.

Waterford came back into the room.

'The back way,' he said. 'Get him moving.' Precise, clipped tones; army manoeuvres. The voice enraged Davenhill.

'You bastard! He'll freeze to death before we can get back!'

'Rugs, blankets in the jeep. He won't freeze — if he runs fast enough!' He glared theatrically at the Russian, who bowed his head, his mouth opening and closing, fish-like.

Davenhill stared Waterford out for a long moment, then capitulated. The man was right — always bloody right. And the Russian had talked. Folley was alive, somewhere in Russia.

And, he realised, they had a witness.

He bundled the young man in front of him, out of the main room, down the corridor, through the kitchen. It was already getting late in the afternoon, and the weak sun low on the horizon, a bleary, tired eye. Waterford went ahead of them, moving quickly, and Davenhill found the gun in his hand again, and he prodded the Russian in the back. He moved like an automaton, and Davenhill snarled, 'Pick your feet up!' in Russian. And shuddered as if he had caught some infection.

They almost walked into Waterford, because the man stopped suddenly.

A patrol of four, returning, topping the rise twenty yards away. Rifles, Kalashnikovs, slung over their shoulders, gait weary, relief and tiredness evident in the slouch of the shoulders.

Davenhill had an impression of heads snapping up, of fumbled movements, then the Parabellum roared in the quiet where the only sound had been the labour of footsteps through the snow. The noise banged back from the building behind them, seemed to echo from the low sky.

Then the Russians were firing, even as they split from the tight group; two of them, moving in separate directions, firing from the hip, bent low and running. Two bodies lay on the ground, ugly sprawling things like dark stains.

Then the exaggerated noise again from Waterford — he was in a crouch, hands stiff in front of him, both holding the gun. He was turning on his axis like a doll, spinning like something on a muscial box, firing alternately at one then the other. Davenhill saw flame from the direction of one of the Russians, who had paused long enough to kneel in the snow — and the young man in front of him, who had stood stupidly observing events he seemed not to comprehend, was flung back against him. Davenhill clutched the thin body as the anorak came away, and then stumbled and fell, the dead Russian on top of him, an obscene weight, his Walther sticking butt-up from the snow, out of reach of his hand.

Then there was a single shot, then silence. Davenhill lay sobbing, feeling the scream rising in his throat, threatening. It had to be madness, this being buried beneath a dead body naked to the waist and the trousers hanging open across the privates…

He heaved at the Russian, as at something loathsome, and staggered to his feet. Waterford was inspecting the bodies. Davenhill plucked his gun out of the snow, and wiped it, attending minutely to the whiteness, the wetness that had gathered on it, and in the barrel. Then Waterford was beside him, his hand on his shoulder.

'Don't sulk,' he said, but his voice was without rancour or sarcasm. 'I'm sorry the game has changed.'

Davenhill felt himself shaking with relief, quivering, and was ashamed. Waterford squeezed his shoulder. Davenhill looked at him; he saw the gulf between them in experience and nature, and he saw the kind of man Waterford was. Yet he saw something akin to pity, too — even regret.

Then the moment was over. Waterford said, 'We'll have woken the dead. Let's get moving. We might have to run all the way to Ivalo yet.' He looked down at the dead young man whose buttocks were exposed by the broken trousers as he lay face-down in the snow. 'Pity they killed that poor sod. Star witness, he would have been.'

Then he walked abruptly away, towards the top of the rise. Davenhill looked at the white buttocks, and the creeping red stain just showing beneath the hip, and felt sick.

'Come on — there are other patrols out, Alex. We have to move!'

Davenhill began to walk up the slope in Waterford's deep footprints.

There was an increased tempo of activity. Ilya was certain of it now. While Maxim interviewed a Senior Sergeant in the KGB Border Guard, Vrubel's most senior NCO, he was standing at the window of the wooden hut put at the disposal of the two SID men to conduct their enquiries. It was late afternoon, and Ilya's head was thick with cigarette-smoke and pointless interviews. Maxim seemed to have the stronger constitution when it came to the dead-end minutiae of their profession.

Outside, the pace of footsteps through the packed snow, the number of people appearing from the doors of other huts in the HQ compound of Wire Patrol Station 78, increased. Movement between huts: men emerging into the failing light tugging on jackets — a fur-lined flying-jacket, he would have guessed in one case — the tread of heavy boots audible, even through the double-glazing.

He looked once at the Senior Sergenat, a heavy man with a square, passionless face, probably looking a dozen years older than he was — grizzled hair stiff on his head, creased low forehead. The man was glancing over Maxim's shoulder. As his gaze caught Ilya's, he looked promptly back at Maxim.

'Thank you, Sergeant, that will be all,' he said on impulse. He saw Maxim's shoulders flex, then relax. He would play along.

'You've been very helpful,' Maxim said.

The Sergeant seemed suspicious, then nodded and stood up. The chair scraped on the wooden floor.

When he was gone, Ilya said, 'Come over to the window — tell me what you see.'

Maxim, amused rather than intrigued, joined him. They were silent for a few moments, then Maxim said in a curious voice:

'The wire which divides Comrade Lenin from Coca-Cola — was that what you wanted?'

'No, idiot. Closer than that.' Ilya, too, looked across the six or seven hundred metres of treeless, levelled ground that separated them from the wire and the two visible watch-towers that overlooked it.

'Oh. Mm…' He rubbed his chin in mock-thoughtfulness. 'Ah — a Border Guard running, is that it?'

'Yes!'

'Unusual, I agree. Shall we put him on a charge? Perhaps he is a follower of Trotsky?'

'Why is he running?'

'Caught short?'

'Lot of people about?'

'Some.'

'More than earlier? See that man in the flying-jacket? That's the second I've seen in a couple of minutes.'

'Oh, no!' Maxim exclaimed in an assumed falsetto. 'It's happening! Finland is invading us!'

'Seriously…'

They both heard the sound of rotors quickening, and across the snow from somewhere out of sight a redness was splashed from helicopter lights.

'Where are they off to?' Maxim asked.

'I wonder. Let's ask.'

He walked swiftly to the door, taking his fur-lined coat from a peg beside it, jamming on the fur hat as he went through the door. The sudden change from the fugginess of the room struck both men — the crisp air after the fumes of the stove.

They walked out into the middle of the open space before their hut. Suddenly, Maxim began to trot, a mere half-dozen steps before he cannoned into a soldier, who lost his balance and fell over. Maxim pulled him to his feet, dusted him down, and snapped:

'What the devil's the rush, soldier?'

'Trouble across the wire, man! All hell's broken loose by the sound of it!' Then he gagged, saw the civilian topcoats, the two strange faces, and backed away. Maxim moved after him, but felt Ilya holding his arm. The soldier was fiddling with the strap of his rifle.

Then all three of them looked up involuntarily as a helicopter, red lights at tail and belly, lifted over the huts, the nearest trees parting like dark waves from the downdraught. Then the soldier, sensing his release, trotted off — looking back over his shoulder from time to time until he was out of sight behind a barrack block.

The helicopter shifted sideways in the air, gained a little more height, and streamed away from them, towards and across the border wire.

'What in hell's name—?' Maxim breathed, watching it.

'Come on!' Ilya snapped. 'This is it!' He turned Maxim away from the sight of the diminishing helicopter, a black spot winking red.

'What the hell is?' he asked, in his puzzlement returning to the humour they had shared in the hut.

'The whole bloody shooting-match!' He was looking about him, realising that his voice was raised unnaturally. 'Finland Station!' It came out as a harsh whisper, just audible above the retreating drone of the helicopter.

The HQ seemed to settle, briefly, then another high-pitched whine of rotors, and, away to their right, where their own helicopter had landed in a clearing, the winking of lights.

'Finland Station?'

'Yes, you silly bugger!' Ilya was shaking his arm as he gripped them. 'That chopper is over the border, in Finland. Why? Ask yourself why! It has to be the answer to the puzzle!'

'Oh my—!' Maxim's face went blank, then came back to the present. 'What do we do?'

'Where the hell is our pilot?'

'Canteen?'

'On his back reading a naughty book! Where the hell is the rest room — where are their quarters?'

The two young men looked around wildly, feeling the puzzle that the HQ presented.

'He went off that way,' Maxim said, pointing to their left.

'He did. A hut down there.'

They began to run, feet slipping minutely with every stride on the packed snow. They seemed to be the only people now running in the whole of the camp.

'What about that bloody soldier?' Maxim panted.

'If he's as thick as the usual, he'll spend an hour realising he's given the game away!'

They went on running. Heads turned to look at them, but with the incuriosity of routine. They were part of the retreating wave of activity.

'But if he's not—?'

'Then they know that we know — and up yours!'

'What the hell is over there?'

'Who knows? Hell! Our people?' Ilya skidded to a halt, mounted the two steps up to the porch, and wrenched the door open. Maxim crowded into the doorway with him, and Ilya felt the prod of his Makarov automatic in his back.

'Careful!' he could not resist saying. 'My virginity.'

Their pilot, the young, assured man who had been so unguarded, it had appeared, during the flight from Murmansk, was lying on his bunk at the far end of the small barrack. He was alone. The room was warm, and a record player beside his bunk was tinnily producing Mozart. He lifted his head from the pillow and his supporting arm, smiled — then saw the two drawn guns.

'On your feet!' Ilya barked, then: 'You do and I'll blow your hand off! You won't fly again.'

The pilot stopped reaching for the automatic in his holster, hung on a peg above the bed with his flying-jacket. He raised his hands, and the recognitions nickered in his face as his thoughts embraced the sequence of half-observed events that had brought them there.

'Yes — we know,' Maxim said. The pilot nodded in acquiescence. 'Get up.'

'Stupid,' the pilot observed.

Ilya, the scheme forming desperately in his mind, as a sequence of ill-linked episodes, a badly-edited film, said: 'One chance! Only one — but it's there. With your assistance.'

The pilot remained seated. 'Assistance?'

'Don't drawl, and don't delay! On your feet, and get into that flying-jacket. You're going to take us up, and show us the view!' He smiled. Turning to Maxim, he added: 'Ever been to Finland, Maxim?'

'No. Always wanted to, though.'

'Great. Let's have a little holiday.' He walked over to the pilot, careful to leave Maxim a clear field of fire, and pulled the pilot to his feet. The young man, sensing, perhaps, that an extreme purpose had settled uncomfortably on the room, made little physical protest. Instead, he put on the jacket that Ilya handed down to him, picked up his cigarettes and lighter, and walked slowly to the door, his hands in his pockets.

At the door, a sheepish grin on his face, he said, 'And what do we do now?'

'We walk directly to the chopper, and we make it go up in the air, and head west, across the border,' Ilya said. 'By the way — what's going on over there?'

The pilots shrugged. 'Routine patrols. It happens all the time, this far from Moscow.'

'Balls! No one in their right mind flies routine patrols in those beauties. They're MIL-24s, gunships!'

'Clever.'

'Only a well-spent Soviet youth, taking a proper interest in the armed forces of our glorious country, get going.'

They crossed the packed snow in a tight group, Maxim walking alongside the pilot, apparently engaging him in animated conversation, with much laughter, while Ilya, the gun in the pocket of his coat, walked just behind them.

The transport helicopter in which they arrived was in the same condition of constant readiness as the MIL-24s that had taken off minutes before, even though it was not required until the following day when it would take an off-duty platoon for forty-eight hours' leave in Murmansk. It sat on a swept concrete square, white-and-yellow striped, in a tiny clearing just big enough to allow it to take off and land. Camouflage netting, now drawn aside, concealed it from the air, and its temporary hangar was erected around it when the weather required. At that moment the corrugated structure was wheeled back under the trees.

The pilot nodded to the two members of the groundcrew on duty, and they asked no questions when he climbed aboard. Maxim, then Ilya, clambered awkwardly after him up the handholds on the fuselage. Once inside, they settled themselves in metal-framed, canvas-webbed seats behind the pilot.

'Ask no one nothing!' Ilya ordered, taking pleasure, an almost wild delight in what was becoming for him a daring piece of initiative — an escapade. 'Just take off, and follow those taxis!'

'And don't bugger about with the machine, will you?' Maxim added, his tone level, without the slightest humour.

'We may be ignorant laymen, but if this thing doesn't behave as helicopters normally do, then I'll make sure you don't live to regale your colleagues with the tale!'

'All right, Comrades. Just like the flying manual says. Strap yourselves in, please.' He fitted his headset, settled in his seat, was aware of Ilya craning forward over his shoulder to watch him, and began the checks; hurrying them as much as he could.

As he settled to the task, he began to be less aware of his danger. His stomach settled, and the routines with which he was so familiar possessed him.

He set the turrets on the computerised fuel-flow, then the turbines began to wind up. Ilya was aware, comfortingly, of their increasing whirr. Then the chopper jiggled sideways as the tail rotor started. When there was sufficient power to the main rotor, the pilot released the rotor brake, flickered a switch, and hauled over the handle of the clutch which engaged the drive to the main rotor.

Ilya, seeing the ease, the speed of familiarity, assumed that nothing untoward was in the pilot's mind. The pilot, aware of the gun near his right ear, knew that he could have done a dozen things that Ilya would never have noticed until it was too late.

He settled to fly them. He knew the extent of their possible discoveries. He did not — he suddenly perceived — have the nerve.

He ignored the whole problem.

When they came back. It would do, then. Then they would be taken care of.

Through the canopy top, Ilya saw the rotor blades begin to turn as the engaged clutch bit, and he heard their swirling beat. Normal. As they achieved proper speed, they became a shimmering horizontal dish.

The pilot gently moved a lever to his left, and the rotor blades changed angle. The engine pitch rose as the engines fed more power to the rotors. The chopper moved off its shocks, the wheels for the moment just in contact with the ground. The pilot gently pressed the rudder bar to counteract any rotation of the fuselage, paused to check his instruments again, then moved the left hand lever slightly higher. The MIL lifted from the square of concrete, and the light suddenly increased as they lifted clear of the trees. It was not yet dark The pilot checked the drift caused by the wind, and the chopper swung round towards the border.

'You know the course, don't you,' Ilya said. It was not a question. Suddenly reminded of their presence — and Ilya applied the cold barrel of the Makarov to his jaw at that moment — the pilot merely nodded. He moved the control stick, altering the angle of the rotor disc, and the MIL moved over the wooden huts, towards the open ground, snow-covered, and the huge wire.

They passed over the wire at less than a hundred and fifty feet, then the racecourse-like stretch of open ground, then the lower, unmanned fence on the Finnish side, and a narrower space clear of trees, then the forest that engulfed both sides of the border at that point. There was little danger of being picked up; they were too low for radar detection, and the Finns maintained few watch-towers. They relied instead upon regular helicopter patrols — regular as clockwork, risibly punctual. It was a token to independence, designed not to anger the Soviet Union or give the least provocation for a border incident.

They saw the white, winding line of the single road, a parting in the trees, and the further, icy gleam of the river to the south of them. Maxim tapped Ilya's shoulder, and he leaned back.

'What are we going to do?' Maxim whispered. Ilya, aware of the pilot, stretched his right hand so that the gun rested against the pilot's neck, just where the hair touched the collar of the flying-jacket.

'Don't get any ideas,' he said. 'Sorry if it makes you nervous!'

'Look, Ilya — you're behaving like a kid! What are we going to do, afterwards?'

Ilya looked at him, and scowled like a child. The flickering, half-plotted scenario he had felt was in his grasp was not a firm outline. Separate incidents, nothing more, the bulk of his plan already put into operation when the MIL took off.

He said: 'We can't go back there.' Again he glanced at the back of the pilot's head.

Maxim nodded. 'Too bloody true, my son.'

'Look — if we—?' He thought, shook his head. Then: 'This thing can take us back to Murmansk!' His voice was a breathy whisper.

'Oh, yes? Outrunning those gunships you seem determined to take us towards?' Maxim turned away, looking ahead, past the pilot. The darkening sky was empty of lights.

Ilya was silent, offering after a while only: 'I'll think of something.'

'You do that. Meanwhile, ask him what is going on.'

Ilya increased the pressure of the gun against the pilot's neck, sufficient to alarm him. He saw the slight spasm of the shoulders, the wrinkling of the neck as if to get rid of a stiffness. The man was frightened.

'Now, what are we doing here?'

Silence. The steady beat of the rotors over their heads, the dark flow of the forest below, patches of white clearing like baldness, the road like a parting in thick hair. Then, ahead of them, winking red lights, one above and to port, the other to starboard, at about the same height. They were overtaking the two gunships.

'What are they doing?' Maxim snapped.

'Looking,' the pilot offered.

'In Finland? What do they want — a wolfhead for the mess wall?

'No.'

'Enlighten us.'

A tremor passed through the pilot's frame, as if he were trying to overcome some deep, traumatic block. He was afraid of them, but he was perhaps more afraid of something else. Both Ilya and Maxim, looking at one another for a moment, realised the significance of what the pilot must know.

Then the village whose name they did not know.

'Down!' snapped Ilya, and the pilot pushed the stick forward and the nose of the MIL sagged. Figures moving, light flickering across the snow as torches and lanterns were wobbled in gloved hands — a stream of light from a doorway.

And behind a house, stiff, cold dark spots — too familiar to be anything other than dead bodies.

'What the hell is going here?' Maxim barked, grabbing the pilot's arm in his shock. The MIL wobbled, slewed sideways, and as the pilot's arm was released and he righted the chopper, he snapped in a high voice:

'Don't touch me! Do you want to kill yourself, you stupid bastard?'

Then the intercom crackled in his ears. The cabin speaker had been left on, and the two passengers heard the pilot of one of the MIL-24s ahead of them say:

'North Star 92 to unidentified helicopter — identify yourself, and state mission.'

'North Star 86 to North Star 92 — mission to assist search,' their pilot replied, the gun digging painfully into the back of his neck.

'Acknowledged North Star 86. What in hell's name have they sent you for?'

'I have troops on board — in the event. Any sign yet?

'No. Ground radio claims five of our men dead. It should be a sizeable party, but no sign of anything. Over and out.'

Ilya released the pressure of the gun-barrel, and patted the pilot on the shoulder.

'Good,' he said. 'Nice touch, that, about the troops. Now — what is going on?'

'Enemy agents, I should think. Firefight of some land, not long ago by the look of it. They're looking for the agents.'

'This is bloody Finland, not Russia!' Ilya exploded.

The pilot turned his head. Ilya could see the humour around the mouth, the contempt displayed in the nostrils, the eyes. The pilot was pitying his ignorance.

He sat back, the gun relaxing from the pilot's head. It was — he could not explain the pilot's moods a frightened man who yet talked as if they were flying over Russia, not a neutral neighbour.

Then, ahead of them, they saw the red lights of one of the MIL-24s dip down below their view.

'Follow him!' Ilya snapped, and pressed the gun back against the neck, which wrinkled with disgust and fear. The cabin seemed to alter its angle suddenly, and the ground moved up to meet them. The road was a ghostly ribbon now, but along it, headlights blazing, an open vehicle was moving at perhaps fifty miles an hour — a suicidal speed.

'What the hell is that?'

'It must be them!' the pilot shouted, his caution swallowed in excitement.

'Who?'

'Enemy agents — the bastards!' It was as if they were no longer with him, or he their prisoner.

Ilya could not believe what happened in the next moment. The MIL-24 which had swept down upon the jeep on the road below them launched two of the small missiles slung beneath its stubby wings, then pulled ahead of the racing jeep.

Flickers of fire beneath the wings, then bright bursts of flame, gouts of snow and packed earth ahead of the jeep — almost in the same instant. It was incredible; his mind refused to countenance what it perceived. He watched the jeep.

It bucked wildly, then swung off the road, leaping like a mad horse across the ditch, and disappeared under the trees. The headlights flickered off. In the moment before it slid under the trees and under the belly of their chopper, Ilya saw a white face looking up, then obscured by something dark held out — and he realised, ludicrously, that the passenger in the jeep was taking photographs of them.

The MIL-24 was flicking round on its course, to make another run at the road. Then the intercom crackled in the cabin.

'You'll have to put your troops down and cut them off!' the pilot said without introduction or call-sign. In his voice there was an aftermath of dangerous elation, and a rising panic. 'Follow me!' The MIL-24 slid away from alongside them, stretching to a lead of two hundred metres, flying less than fifty feet above the trees. It was a dark bulk ahead of them, lights flashing, the carpet of trees below them revealed nothing of the whereabouts of the jeep or its two occupants.

A beam of light flicked down from the MIL-24 ahead, bathing the tree tops in white light. They glistened with ice and snow. It was an affecting scene, brilliant and harmless. Ilya shook it off.

'What happens when they find out we have no troops to put down?' Maxim asked.

'We'll have buggered off, won't we!' He prodded the gun into the neck again. 'Time to go!' he snarled. 'We have a long way to go before any of us gets to sleep tonight.'

'Where?'

'Murmansk, brother! All the way, no stops!'

'What?'

'You heard. After all,' he added turning to Maxim, 'we have a star witness here, haven't we? After what we've just seen, together with what they can get out of him at the Centre…' He chuckled. 'We're home and dry, eh?' He laughed, infected with the same excitement they had heard in the pilot's voice a little earlier. A pendulum of success had swung in their direction now.

'And what is going on ? 'I don't care to think about that,' Ilya said flatly. 'Someone else can find that out. I don't think it bears thinking about, do you?'

'I agree.'

'Right, alter course, Comrade Pilot! Take us just a little south of your HQ — and fly very very low! Understand?'

The pilot nodded. The chopper banked, sliding across the trees to retrace their outward course.

When they were settled on course, Maxim said, 'And what are we going to do to make sure that we aren't followed and overtaken by those gunships — or the other two I spotted at HQ? Those aren't fireworks they carry under those silly little wings, you know.'

'We're going to fake a forced landing — give our position, and then get the hell out of there while they spend their time looking for us!' Ilya spoke in an intense whisper, his face gleaming with pleasure. He tapped his forehead with the forefinger of his left hand.

'Mm. Do you know, I actually approve,' Maxim said, his face breaking into a rare smile. He was a man not without humour, but who often appeared to lack the necessary facial muscles to smile or laugh.

'I knew you would you dear old thing,' Ilya said.

They flew just to the south of the village, and crossed the border at an unmanned point. They reached the first trees on the Russian side, the MIL flying barely twenty feet above them. They were travelling fast, over a hundred miles an hour perhaps.

He said, 'Now, comrade, a little fault is about to develop. Radio in a convincing fault that will mean you have to force-land. And radio a position…' He reached forward and picked up the pilot's map which lay on a tiny folding rest at his side. He glanced at it, then:'… a position on the other side of the wire. Understand? Be very careful of what you say.'

The pilot nodded, opened the channel, and said, 'North Star 86 — North Star 86 to base. I have developed turbine surge. I have to set down quick. Repeat — turbine surge, am forced to land. My position is—' The gun pressed more attentively against his stiff neck. He gave the position, and repeated it quickly. Ilya strained to read the coordinates on the pilot's map, gave up the attempt, and nodded to Maxim as if he had checked the position. Neither of them knew that the pilot, who was beginning to sweat with relief, had given their present position.

'Down there!' Ilya snapped, motioning towards a small white patch in the darkness.

'What for, man?' Maxim asked. 'We've sent them the wrong way. Let's get going!'

'No! Just in case we're spotted going the wrong way. Sit tight for a little bit, then up and away.' Maxim looked doubtful, and Ilya shouted, 'We can't afford to cock it up now! As you said, those gunships don't carry fireworks. We can't afford to be seen, from the air or the ground!'

Maxim looked down. The chopper was circling the tiny clearing, and its landing light had flicked on. The snow appeared rutted, lunar, beneath them.

'All right. We don't move until they're looking the other way.'

'Down!'

The chopper settled slowly, nose slightly up. Snow began to blow in the downdraught, fanning out beneath them, whirling up alongside the cabin as they sank lower. Gently, the MIL seemed to be coming to rest. Fifteen feet, twelve, ten. The pilot moved the stick suddenly, and the tail boom of the helicopter dropped. It thumped into the surface snow, and there was a tearing sound, the magnified noise of a pencil snapping as the whole tail boom broke away under the impact.

The incident happened so swiftly that Ilya and Maxim were entirely its victims. They were not observers, but sufferers. The pilot, seizing his one opportunity, had sabotaged the helicopter.

The fuselage immediately began to wobble from side to side without the appropriate balancing effect of the tail rotor, in the half-second before it, too, hit the ground at an angle. The undercarriage buckled, and the cabin began to tilt. Then the rotor struck the frozen snow and earth.

The cabin felt like a barrel which was being kicked once a second. The rotor blades churned against and into the ground, hurling up snow and earth as the cabin tilted ever more crazily over on to its side. Then one blade snapped, then another, then a third. The vibration was incredible, seeming to rattle the brains in their skulls, possess their whole bodies.

Maxim felt his whole spine jar against the metal frame of the webbed seat. Then the cabin was completely on its side, and there was a silence. The churned cloud of snow settled, audibly, like a snowstorm, on the perspex.

Ilya sat stunned, head hanging over towards the ground, the straps of his seat restraining him from rolling against the perspex which had now become the floor of the cabin. Only the single thought that he was still alive filled his mind. He moved, almost by instinct, fingers, arms, legs. All of them flexed and stretched as they should. Only the pain of bruises.

He watched, without moving, as the pilot killed the switches in front of him, then threw off his straps, and began sliding back the canopy above him. He reached up, and pulled himself out of the window. The cold air rushed in, chilling Ilya. The pilot's legs dangled for a moment, then he was smearing the settled snow over Ilya's head as he crawled across the perspex. Ilya heard him drop to the ground.

Then, and only then, did he move, galvanised as if by electric shock. He clambered on the back of the pilot's seat, lifting his head out of the cabin. The pilot was standing, looking back, only ten yards away. It was as if he felt no urgency, or was perhaps stunned like Ilya. Then they saw one another.

The Makarov was stiff in Ilya's grip, as if the impact of the crash had moulded it to his flesh and bone. He shifted it to a two-handed grip, and leaned his elbows on the perspex.

'Back inside,' he said. He heard Maxim groan below him. 'Inside, you clever bastard! You did that on purpose!' His finger tightened on the trigger. His next words were strangely high, almost falsetto. 'Get back in this bloody deathtrap before I blow you to pieces!'

The pilot hesitated, and then he turned and began to run through the deep snow, stumbling over the frozen surface, floundering into small drifts where the surface ice gave way.

Ilya felt very tired. He could not run through that. And he felt lightheaded. He aimed, feeling sorry that the pilot was having so much difficulty moving away.

He fired twice, while Maxim's second outburst of moaning drove up his emotional temperature and he hated the pilot.

He watched the sprawled figure on the snow for a moment or two, and when it did not move, he dropped awkwardly back inside the cabin of the MIL, pulling the window shut above him.

Maxim's face was white with strain. His eyes were filled with terror at guessed injuries, and they closed with two spasms of pain even as Ilya watched. Ilya could see each wave leave him weak and terrified, his eyes darting from side to side as if seeking some escape from the next assault.

'What is it? he asked gently.

'I can't feel my legs. Not at all. Can't feel anything below my waist. Can't move anything…' A further spasm crossed his face, crumpling like a discarded ball of paper. He groaned, teeth clenched. When it passed, he opened his eyes only to see the depth of Ilya's concern. He wanted to avoid the information on the face above his own, and he tried to smile. 'Tell me — has my dick dropped off?' As he laughed, the pain came again and he screwed up his eyes.

Ilya winced. Maxim had an impacted spine. He touched the seat-belt. He hadn't been strapped in very securely, and the base of the spine must have been jolted against the metal bar at the back of the seat. He couldn't move him.

He said, feeling the nausea sharp in his throat, 'I found it on the floor by your seat. I threw it away.'

'Just as well,' Maxim muttered through clenched teeth. 'Bloody thing only ever got me into trouble…' He almost fainted as the next wave of pain took him. 'Like having bloody labour!' he groaned as it passed, Ilya moved away, rooting in the first-aid box which had remained secure on the wall behind their seats during the crash. He found the flask of vodka and unstoppered it.

Kneeling over Maxim, he poured the liquid against his lips. They opened gratefully, and he swallowed. He coughed once, then motioned to be settled on the floor of the cabin. Ilya released the slack belts, then moved the stiff form awkwardly. By the time he had stretched Maxim on the curving floor of perspex, he saw he had fainted.

'Sorry,' he murmured. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry…'

When Maxim recovered consciousness, he said, 'Why haven't you gone?'

'Where?'

'Anywhere! They will come, won't they?'

'I expect so. I'm not very good at reading pilots' maps. I expect he gave our present position.'

'You've — got to go, then!' Maxim moved an arm with difficulty, gripped Ilya's sleeve. Ilya shook his head.

'Not bloody likely! I might as well freeze with you as out there by myself!' And he added a silent prayer that they would come soon, and get Maxim to a hospital.

'Get going! You have to report to the Major — to someone!'

'Bugger the Major! Bugger someone? He poured vodka against Maxim's lips, and he swallowed with the instinctive guzzling of a baby. 'I got you into this, finessing the bloody idea until it didn't work out any more! So — who the hell cares? When they find us, then I'll think about getting out of it…' He laughed. 'Besides, I need a vehicle — they've got them!'

They talked then, for perhaps an hour or more — Maxim slipped in and out of consciousness, and his lucid moments became fewer. Ilya subsided into a dull monotone which scrabbled for subject-matter to distract Maxim. The only thing, he began to believe, was to distract Maxim from the pain he had caused him.

His first awareness that others had arrived was of the dull concussion of a 122 mm gun mounted on a T-62 battle tank. Its infra-red sighting equipment had picked out the two figures in the now-clear perspex, the snow having slid away to reveal them. As soon as it was determined that both SID men were in the chopper, the order came from the regimental commander, acting on instructions from Murmansk, to open fire.

Ilya's world exploded an instant after his head lifted in response to the noise of the fin-stabilised shell. He did not hear the second and third rounds being fired.

When the chopper had been reduced to smouldering rubbish, the T-62 retreated again into the forest.

Nine: Safe Return

'Charles — all I wish to ascertain at this time, before my people get back with what I hope will be proof, is this: if I can offer evidence, concrete evidence, of a Soviet incursion into Finland, what will you do with the information?'

Aubrey and Buckholz, Deputy Director of the CIA, had sat in the second-floor office of the American Consulate in Helsinki, overlooking the rock-strewn park of the Kaivopuisto, for almost two hours longer than the American had expected, while Aubrey explained the business he had called Snow Falcon. Buckholz, his back to the window, settled deep in his armchair behind the big desk, had said little, rubbing occasionally at the white hair he still wore cropped close to his skull, though now pink skin showed through. Aubrey sensed, almost from the beginning, that he was disturbed, even half-convinced — but that his concern rested on his respect for the teller and not the potentialities of the tale.

Now, in the silence that Aubrey had anticipated after he posed the question, he saw Buckholz as uncomfortable, restless, perhaps even at a loss.

'Kenneth — my standing. That's the problem. I'm going out to grass this year. The Admiral's made that more than clear.' Aubrey nodded, unhelpfully silent. 'I'm a cold war warrior who embarrasses the Company. Y'know, three Senators have spoken to the President personally, asking he demand my resignation?' There was something affronted, and amused, in Buckholz's voice. 'Three liberal Democrats, sure — believers in the Kennedy myth, who've forgotten all the dirty tricks we used to play in those days.' He shook his head — Aubrey thought it only an imitation of the wisdom of resignation; a hawk's deception.

'I, too, have my detractors, Charles,' Aubrey remarked quietly. 'But, arthritis may get me before they do.'

Buckholz laughed, a bull-like roaring that sounded as if it lacked genuine amusement, but which Aubrey knew was sincere.

'OK. We both got troubles. I'm here to oversee security for the Treaty signing. Maybe this comes under that head, maybe not.'

'I have lost—'

'Two men, yes. Two good men?'

'Yes.'

'Your government — they in on any of this?' Aubrey shook his head, and Buckholz shrugged, as if about to say something, then relapsed into silence again.

'I have to have proof. But, do you support the hypothesis? 'It's possible — but unlikely, especially in the present circumstances.'

'Exactly my original thoughts.'

'Look, Kenneth — this is the Man's ticket to another term, this Treaty. Checks and balances that work, real reductions — his social programme can go ahead just as soon as the ink is drying on the paper. Closer cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West. Man, it's the reallest thing in Washington at the moment! And you want to know if I want to tell him that it may all go down the tubes? Hell, I don't want to tell him — I want my pension.' He stared at Aubrey, eyes glinting. 'But I'll tell him, if there's anything to tell.'

Aubrey sighed audibly. 'Thank you, Charles.'

'What'll you do if your guys come back with something — but not enough?'

'Order an overflight — one Harrier, under the net.'

'You could do that?'

'I'm sure it can be done.'

Buckholz nodded. Then he stretched his chair.

'I'll have to be good, to convince the White House. Mrs Wainwright just bought two new fur coats, ready for the visit to Finland in winter.' He laughed. 'Why is Khamovkhin here on a State Visit, if he's planning to ride all the way in a tank?'

'No simple answer — except that he may not know.'

'Mm. Hell!' Buckholz slapped his palm thunderously against the desk. 'All Joe Wainwright wants to do is rebuild the urban deserts, get the Blacks and the Puerto Ricans educated and in useful work, and solve the energy crisis, and I have to tell him—'

'Perhaps First Secretary Khamovkhin just wants to improve Soviet agriculture, and open up Siberia a little more. One thing is certain — at least to me — someone doesn't want the world ticking like that.' Aubrey rubbed his cheeks. 'Will you help with this mysterious substitute?'

'Captain Ozeroff?'

'Remember that Ozeroff is dead, Charles. It's the new Captain Ozeroff who interests me.'

'Do what I can. You're right — he had to come from somewhere, and he must be known to someone. It'll be checked out.'

'Thank you — when we know who, we will know why.'

Buckholz stood up. 'Drink?'

Aubrey looked at his watch. 'Just a small Scotch — no ice.'

As he was about to move the dumb-waiter, Buckholz stopped, and looked down at the still seated Aubrey.

'Hell, don't you long to be legitimate, Kenneth? Just once, to close your eyes to what might be happening, uh?'

'My illegitimacy has weighed heavily upon me of late,' Aubrey remarked with a smile. 'One knows, or suspects that one knows, so many nasty things!'

'For Christ's sake, Alex — swallow!'

Davenhill felt the flask tipped against his lips. As soon as he unclenched his teeth, they began to chatter uncontrollably, and the brandy spilled on his chin and over his chest. Looking up into Waterford's face, he was afraid to question the man. He gagged on the little liquor he swallowed, and then sank back against the seat of the jeep. Waterford's face disappeared from above and beside him — a moment of colder air, if that was possible, and then distant slamming of the door as he sank back into a pain-lit dream where a great dark bird — bird or dragon he could not be sure but it breathed flames and burned his arm — hovered over him as he lay helpless on a smooth white sheet of paper.

Waterford dialled the number of the hotel in Ivalo. He had pulled up on the main road, just outside the settlement — the first time he had halted the jeep since he had stopped under the trees to bind Davenhill's arm, sliced open from elbow to shoulder by a fragment from one of the missiles, just as he had careered off the road and under cover. As he waited for his call to be answered, he drummed savagely on the coin box, though the rest of him — as if all energy had flowed suddenly into his square fingers — slumped against the glass of the call-box. He stared at the ceiling, watched his breath cloud the glass, felt the cold of the night for perhaps the first time; felt the chill of reaction possess him.

'Philipson?'

'Yes?' The voice sounded very distant. He shook his head, and the receiver. 'Who is that?' The voice was no louder.

'Where are you, in the bloody bar or the restaurant?'

'Call-sign, please.' He realised what it was — Philipson was whispering confidentially down the line. He laughed. 'What—'

'Bugger the codes, sonny. We're blown — and we have the evidence to put the Soviet Union behind bars for a long time.'

'Where are you?'

'Never mind. Davenhill's wounded. Get the pilot out of his — or anyone else's — bed, pronto. We'll meet you at the airport.'

'If he's wounded, then he'll—'

'Forget it! I've got the bloody Indians right behind me. No time to stop. Get there!'

'It'll take more than an hour for clearance—'

'It better be quicker than that. Get moving!'

He slammed down the receiver, and left the call-box. As an instinct, he glanced back down the road the way they had come.

Nothing. The emptiness chilled, isolated him. Diminished him in an unfamiliar and frightening way. He winced, as if a helicopter had appeared overhead, or he shared Davenhill's dreams for a moment. He hurried to the jeep.

Davenhill roused himself as they pulled away, opening one vague eye, staring at him as he tried to focus.

'Bad, is it?' Waterford asked, seeing the lights of Ivalo as a pale splash low on the sky ahead. They passed a wooden house on his side, silent, a glow of subdued light from behind shutters. The airport was south-west of the settlement — he needed to start looking for a left-hand fork.

'Oh, Jesus-fuck-off—' Davenhill muttered between clenched teeth. Waterford wasn't certain whether the remark was addressed to him, to the pain in the limp arm, or to something else.

'Hold on, son, won't be long now. Philipson's meeting us at the airport.'

In the headlights, the road forked. A silhouetted aircraft on a signpost. The jeep slid into the corner, and Davenhill lurched against Waterford. Even as Waterford glanced at him, he saw the spite, even the hatred, on Davenhill's face, and the almost desperate attempt to pull himself upright, away from physical contact. Waterford stared bleakly ahead.

'You — bastard—' he heard Davenhill mutter.

'Save it. You'll get cold, talking and hating. Fold into yourself.'

'Your world—' Davenhill began, staring at the canvas roof of the jeep, his head lolling. 'Your world—'

'Like this most of the time, son,' Waterford said angrily. 'No pissing about with bits of paper, conferences, operational planning. This is the sharp end, and you don't like it, rolling in the shit.' Waterford watched himself with amusement — part of him was always eternally angry with people like Davenhill; part of him wanted to take the younger man's mind off his hurt. 'You ought to hate me, son. I'm the thing that comes up the plughole, breeds under the stones. Your bogeyman — the one you'd like to think was on the other side…'

Davenhill murmured, then began a compulsive nodding of his head, silently punctuating each of Waterford's statements. He was beginning to ignore the self, to attend, listen, absorb.

'Oh, yes — I liked doing it to that young Russian. Make no mistake about it. Plenty of instant-result techniques I could have used — just wanted to do that to him.' Waterford, obedient to another snowblown signpost, turned left again, and the suffused lights of Ivalo, creeping alongside them until that moment, slid away. Ahead now there was a paler, whiter glow. Ivalo airport. He hoped Philipson was already on his way. He slowed the jeep, the chains biting as the snow, less compressed, threatened beneath the wheels.

'Liked it,' he murmured. 'Oh yes. Pull his trousers down, throw a bucket of water over him. Bet you liked that bit, eh, son — bare-arsed boy to look at.'

'Balls—' Davenhill murmured. The price of concentration was being extracted, and he was drifting into sleep.

'Yes — I noticed he had two,' Waterford replied, and glanced at Davenhill. His eyes were closed, his facial muscles relaxed. Waterford sighed with relief, then tossed his head as if he felt he had wasted valuable time. The piled snow from the plough's passage leaned threateningly over the road on both sides. The lights of the airport were brighter now. Waterford felt tired, but not because of their escape, or because of the driving. He looked across at Davenhill and, as if reasserting some old self, murmured, 'Stupid little queer.'

'There is no time to go through the formalities!'

'I say we must. Kutuzov has to be informed at once.'

'He will be — eventually. General Pnin will inform him of the escape of these agents. Meanwhile, Kutuzov will want to be informed from this office that the agents told nothing, that they have been eliminated.'

'I'm not so sure. We declare our hand by taking precipitate action here in Helsinki. Are you sure you're not just panicking because of what has happened? Consider the repercussions—'

'Repercussions? The whole thing is turning into a nightmare, and it's up to us to bring some sense back into things. You know we have to try and stop a report being made. They attacked agents from a MIL! It is something of a give-away, wouldn't you agree.'

'I'm not sure—'

'Then it's a good job I outrank you. Get on to it at once. Either at the airport, or before they reach either of the two likely consulates. And if you can, take out the man Aubrey as well!'

'Is he going to die?' Philipson asked, leaning over Waterford, staring down at Davenhill's pasty features, garishly purpled by the dimmed overhead light of the passenger cabin of the Cessna. Davenhill was stretched out on two seats, and Waterford was re-dressing the torn arm.

'Don't be bloody soft, Philipson,' Waterford replied without changing the focus of his attention. 'Just a scratch. Alight never be able to play tennis again, but he won't die.'

'Thank God for that.'

'He had very little to do with it, I imagine — don't worry, there won't be a diplomatic stink about a British Civil Servant dying of his wounds in Finnish Lapland. It won't ruin your career.'

'That wasn't my concern,' Philipson said stiffly.

'Be a good boy — make sure the pilot's sent that message ahead, will you? I want to be met by our side at the airport!'

Philipson hesitated, then moved forward towards the cockpit. Waterford tossed his head, then finished binding Davenhill's arm, his nose tickling at the smell of brandy on Davenhill's breath as he began to breathe more stertoriously in drunken, wearied sleep.

Aubrey watched the Cessna seemingly sag out of the lowering sky just after dawn. It touched down as if reluctant, with a waver of the wings, then trundled down the narrow runway towards them. The private airfield at Malmi was almost deserted, but he had come with an armed escort selected from the security staff drafted in by SIS and the CIA for the Treaty visit by Wainwright. At that moment, even as the small plane rolled to a stop, they were searching the airfield and its perimeter, carefully.

There had been a moment, just one, as he first spotted the plane seemingly materialising as it emerged from the cloud, when he had thought in terms of terrorists rather than an enemy security service, and had thought of the RPG-7 antitank grenade launcher — even a Dragunov sniper's rifle might have been sufficient. A couple of shots. So vivid was the impression, he could not rid himself of it, could not help but feel that the enemy had lost its best chance.

The Cessna halted less than a hundred yards from him. He nodded to the driver of the Consulate limousine, and climbed into the back seat. The big Daimler pulled silently level with the aircraft, and Aubrey could see the pilot kicking the door-ladder down so that it thumped into the slush at the end of the runway. Quickly, Aubrey got out of the car, feeling the chill of the light breeze suddenly more keenly, sensing the evaporation of warmth in tension. Only now, standing at the foot of the ladder, did he allow himself to wonder how seriously Davenhill might be wounded.

Waterford appeared in the doorway of the Cessna. His face was tired, strained but alert. His eyes suggested the rapid movements of a dreamer, but with specific purpose.

'It's all clear, for the moment,' Aubrey called up to him.

Waterford nodded, then disappeared back inside. When he reappeared, with Philipson helping him to support a barely conscious Davenhill, Aubrey was shocked at the waxen, hanging face of the younger man. Philipson he hardly noticed. 'Help them get him down!' he snapped at the driver. The driver took Davenhill's waist, and Waterford lowered the upper torso carefully, wearily, down below his own level on the steps. Seeing Waterford using last reserves of energy, Aubrey felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable on the tarmac — defenceless.

'Come on, come on,' Waterford instructed in a tired voice.

'Get him in the car.'

They slid Davenhill into the back of the Daimler. Aubrey saw the bloody bandage on his upper arm smear the trim and the window as they arranged him as comfortably as possible. The breeze, freshening, hastened things.

'You've got it?'

Waterford looked at Aubrey quizzically, then: 'Oh, yes — you won't have any problems convincing anyone.' He pushed the pack containing the cameras and film into the back of the car. 'Now, let's get out of it.'

Aubrey sat next to the driver while Waterford took Davenhill's weight on his shoulder and leaned himself against the cold glass of the rear window. All he wanted to do was sleep, and he heard only distantly Aubrey issuing instructions over the radio to the escort.

'Car One — move to the gates, then give us the signal. Car Two, fall in behind us when we move off.' Waterford could not be bothered to watch the first of the two Volvos move away from in front of the small terminal building, startlingly white under the grey sky.

'They're just leaving the airport gates.'

'What formation?'

'Usual — lead car, then the Daimler, then a second Volvo.'

'Very well. Minimum tail, then hand over.'

'Sir.'

'Anything, Car One?'

The radio sputtered with background, then: 'Not so far.' A Welsh voice — who was that? Aubrey dismissed the question as irrelevant.

'Keep your eyes open. They have to try — and I mean that. It will appear imperative to stop us.'

'Sir.'

'Car Two — close up.'

'Sir. Nothing behind us — wait! -'

'What is it?'

'Volvo truck — OK, taking the last left, is it? Yes. Relax, everybody.'

Aubrey felt irritated at the momentary levity from the trailing car, then dismissed his own nerves. He looked out of the window, still cradling the microphone in his palm. Waterford's breathing was audible from the back seat — but he wasn't asleep. Aubrey had a sense of experiencing something like it before — where was it? Negro tennis player, at Wimbledon? Yes, that was it. Concentrated relaxation, the animal curled up, just for a moment, but ready.

Innocuous suburb — small houses in vivid colours, neat gardens, white fences, all strangely unreal under the grey sky. They were taking a careful, long route, but one which did not leave them far from the main road into the city, in case they were required to make a run for it. Most of the houses too low for the kind of thing a sniper would like as a vantage Aubrey dismissed the thought. A sniper would like to be level with the windows of a closed car. The glass was reinforced, but impossibly fragile against a Kalashnikov, let alone a Dragunov sniper's special. Would they kill them? Hardly anyone about — the problems of disposal might be minimal — an incident, yes. But for reasons unknown, if they were all dead. Yes, they would do it.

'Car One — anything?' He could see the car, turning the corner ahead. 'Go ahead, Car One.'

The radio crackled with background.

'Coming your way, Twelve.'

'Already got them.'

'Go!'

Aubrey had heard nothing. Waterford's breathing, Davenhull's more ragged noise, the humming heater, the background from the radio — enough noise?

The lead Volvo was already burning, and men were moving towards it, cautiously, while others formed a line across the street into which the Volvo had turned. Even as he reacted, he realised that they knew Helsinki better than he did, that the street into which he had turned was a sudden blotch of light industry, old warehouses and grass-usurped, unsold plots.

'Get out — get out!' He cried, even as the driver wrenched the wheel, slid the Daimler into reverse. Aubrey saw the first two holes appear in the nearside wing of the car. Waterford said behind him. 'Just move out of it! They don't want prisoners!'

Aubrey felt the draught of air as Waterford lowered the passenger window.

'For God's sake!' Waterford squeezed off three shots from the Parabellum, all of them missing, Aubrey thought, as he craned and crouched in one awkward movement, the scene spinning past the windscreen of the car as it slewed its tail towards the oncoming men. No, one body was sprawled across the road, near the Volvo — one of his, or the enemy?

He banged his head painfully against the dashboard as the Daimler surged forward, and then heard bullets thudding dully into the boot and the reinforcement behind the passenger seats.

'All right?'

'For Christ's sake, I don't want another cucumber sandwich!' Waterford yelled. Aubrey sensed the delight in the voice, the vivacity. 'Tell them to cover us, quickly!'

They were passing the second Volvo which was turning slowly into the wide street. Aubrey saw a face, said into the microphone, 'Cover us — but make your way out as quickly as you can.'

He saw the window of the Volvo coming down, the passengers in front and back leaning out.

'Take the main road — as quickly as you can!' he ordered the driver, who turned right almost at once, doubling back the way they had come.

'No!' Then the sound of Waterford knocking out the rear window, and the interior of the car like a fridge. 'They must have a spotter — that wasn't just luck.' Silence, the car merely retracing its journey and the ambush still between them and the centre of Helsinki. 'Yes. A helicopter. Fuck it! You know Helsinki?'

'Yes,' the driver said.

'Use your judgement — don't listen to the rest of us.'

Hesitation, then Aubrey said: 'Do as the Major suggests.'

'Sir.'

'Poor sods,' Aubrey heard from behind him. He craned round in his seat, and saw the second Volvo swerving round the corner from the ambush, then staggering across the road as if drunk. It piled against a lamp-standard, and was suddenly still.

The Daimler swerved right again, then left in a second or two. Aubrey, despite the pressure he felt, was amused at the independence the driver had suddenly assumed. Then he thought of Davenhill, and realised, from the way his own heart was beating and his palms felt damp inside his gloves, what the younger man had been through. He looked at Waterford, who was staring out of the shattered rear window, his greying hair plucked by the slip-stream, and said, 'You seem to attract extreme circumstances, Major.'

'Sure it's not you?'

'How far are we, driver?'

'A couple of miles — as the helicopter flies, sir.'

Aubrey sensed the dangerous glamour of threat, of ambush-and-escape, and worried. His own adrenalin seemed to have evaporated with age.

'Your direction, Seven.'

'Sir.'

'Twelve, you should have let the Volvo go!'

'They spotted one of us, sir — had to.'

'Get it cleared up. Any witnesses?'

'No one on the streets — we've got the remains stowed.'

'Get out of there, then.'

'Sir.'

'Where are they now?'

'Down there — see?'

'I see. Who's nearest? Let's see — Four, you're favourite by the look of it — wait, Nine. Nine?'

'Sir?'

'Pick up pursuit. They'll pass you in a minute on the main road — damn!'

'Sir?'

'Forget it! Three — three — move into position Omega, just in case. Four, coming your way again!'

'It's too much to hope they're not still with us?'

'Too true. They're up there, but they're confused. Know what they'll do?'

'What?

'Take up position as close to the Consulate as they dare. Perhaps anticipate we'll drive to a hospital — how far?'

'Ten minutes, sir — if you give me a straight run.'

'Mm. We're inside their outer markers now. No places left for an ambush. Car to car would be — Main road?'

'You can see the Stadium Tower over to the right, sir. That's the Elaintarha — straight down to the Mannerheimintie.'

'Right — go.'

'They're making a dash for it, sir.'

'I can see that. Very well — all units. Converge on position Omega. We are into the end-play situation. Don't mess it up! All units to Omega — end-play running.'

The Swedish Theatre, broad facade and normality returning as they turned into the Etala-Esplanaadikatu from the Mannerheimintie. The Daimler was suddenly caught behind a tram, and Aubrey expecting his pulse to begin racing again, was aware that the advert for a soft drink on the back of the tram; the hatted, wrapped-up passengers boarding it, suggested only safety. He accepted the veil that the city centre had put back on the day, on what had happened.

'Watch everything that moves!' Waterford snapped at the driver, who was watching a leggy young woman in long boots climbing aboard the tram. 'When it pulls out, watch the cars, watch the pedestrians.'

'Surely you—'

'Air Aubrey, when were you last in the field?'

'What do you—?'

'They're into an end-play now — have to be. You might think of driving down to the Soviet Embassy, if you aren't going to expect trouble.'

The tram pulled away, and the driver turned the Daimler out into the stream of traffic down the esplanade. The wide street graceful buildings, trees down the middle of the thoroughfare — Aubrey felt himself resisting Waterford's words, as if they were subversive, or corrupting. Mere hundreds of yards, people everywhere.

'They can blame terrorists — the Proves, Red Army Fraction, it won't matter, really. We'll be dead, and they'll have stopped up the leak — there!' The Volvo Daf was innocuous, so was the windowless van which purported to belong to a firm of central heating engineers. Together, they drove, like a closing neck, from different sides into the Daimler. The driver accelerated after a second's hesitation, but he was already too late. The Volvo Daf bounced off the crumpled nearside fender, but the van drove the nose of the limousine round, back into the Volvo. The engine raced, then died. The driver fired it, it clattered, almost caught 'Out! Out!' Waterford yelled.

'It's what they want!'

'No, shock-delay — move, move!'

They hadn't moved from the van and the car yet. Waterford had minimised the delay by conscious effort, and was out of the Daimler, the Parabellum levelling up at the windscreen of the Volvo Daf — it starred, and the face behind it fell away — ducking or dead, he did not care.

'Get Davenhill out of the back — cross the street!'

He swung to the van as he shouted — the noises of people, acceleration of cars away from the sudden chaos, rising distant whine of a siren — but all distant as he squeezed again. Distant even to the impact of the first bullet, as if his thick clothing was sufficient to stay the passage of the 9 mm slug. All he did was to lean back against the Daimler, as if tired. But he steadied his stiff-arm grip again, and shot both men as they climbed out of the van to finish him.

Screams — eradicate all unnecessaries — siren — eradicate — look round, see where they are — driver and Aubrey scuttling across the road, Davenhill between them, body limp — the rest of the scene indistinct, slowed-down like a film. A man moving faster, crossing the road — focus, check, aim, fire — the man was only yards from Aubrey when he seemed to trip and fall on his face. No one else moving, not towards them — yes, one more, just as they passed out from beneath the lacy, whitened trees — man in overalls, back of the van, probable — difficult, focus, focus — aim, steady, re-align, fire. The man toppled, as if from a wire or ledge, and slid against one of the trees.

Eradicate unnecessaries — impact? Something wet, running down his leg — pissed myself? he laughed. He saw his stomach, and heard a scream that was not his own, but which was on his behalf, and thought he heard pity in it, which for once he did not reject.

How far now?

He had to hold the door of the Daimler — heard the siren, close now, and saw the Volvo Daf pull away quickly. Another car, further away, moving too in a scene that seemed to have frozen.

How far?

He could see the slab of grey that was the corner of the Consulate — thought he saw three figures — focus, focus, he screamed at intolerable ineptitude — a lump, three figures, reaching the door, door opening—?

He wanted to say that he wasn't deaf, that everyone should stop, screaming, as he let his head drop. The siren, unrecognised, whined down the scale as the police car pulled up only yards away. He saw something in white — might have been overalls — move near the door of the van, and he shot into the puddle of white which might have been snow but he was too old a hand to be tricked like that — puddle that might have been a white-out. Waterford slumped over the open door of the Daimler, the gun still hanging from his fierce grip, as the police approached his body.

The main doors of the Consulate closed behind Aubrey, Davenhill and the driver before the policeman could remove the Parabellum from Waterford's dead hand.

'Get these developed, would you,' Aubrey remarked in a tired voice, indicating the rolls of film and the cameras on the desk of the duty-room. Henderson, the SIS Senior at the Consulate, hesitated as Aubrey returned his attention to the cup around which he cradled his mottled hands.

After a silence, Aubrey looked up into his face with vague blue eyes.

'Well?'

'The Consul would like to see you at once, Mr Aubrey. He has two senior police officers downstairs, and they're getting a little impatient.'

The blue eyes sharpened their focus, and the face seemed to collect itself, tidying the sagging folds of skin, etching the lines at forehead and mouth.

'Henderson, I'm sorry that parking regulations on the esplanade have been infringed, and that a certain amount of litter has been chucked about — but I am in no mood, nor have I the time, to talk to the Consul or the police. Now, run along and get those films developed, there's a good fellow.'

Terrorists, he thought, and nodded his head decisively. And, as if decision brought other thoughts, he grimaced at the tea, got up, and poured himself a large whisky from the bottle on the trolley. Gratefully, he gulped it down, coughed, and then developed his idea. Waterford was a government agent, naturally. But engaged in nothing on Finnish soil. He was obviously a marked man. That would do, until HMG had spoken in confidence with the Finnish Cabinet, and until he spoke to Buckholz, and he to Washington. The films hardly needed developing — someone had been sufficiently desperate to try to eliminate agents in the middle of Helsinki. Aubrey sighed.

Waterford was dead — he would have to debrief Davenhill, now resting in the tiny consular pharmacy in the basement of the building. An event he wished to postpone, for reasons obscure even to himself. Very well. He dialled the US Consulate, identified himself by Dickens Code, who else but Pecksniff, he thought once more, and Buckholz was on the line in a moment, identified by Cooper Code at Natty Bumpo. Buckholz had inherited the code for Deputy Director of the CIA along with the job; Aubrey had retained Pecksniff from the early sixties. 'Secure?'

'Secure, Kenneth. What gives? I'm getting reports of—'

'A vulgar brawl, yes. Us, I'm afraid. One of my people is dead, the other under sedation and wounded. But — the attack is sufficient evidence, I think—?'

'Moscow Centre?'

'A local chapter, but affiliated, I believe.'

'Jesus-'

'Helicopter activity, marksmen, and my two car-teams taken out. Two of your men, I'm afraid.'

'Hell — OK, Kenneth. Not your fault. It's proof. Look, let me get on to Langley direct with this. I'll get back to you.'

Aubrey stared at the telephone for a long time before replacing it. When he did, he thought of Waterford. Then, struck by something else, he thought of Khamovkhin, at that moment touring a pulp-milling complex before doing the rounds of the harbours that afternoon. And he thought of the Ozeroff-substitute.

'Kenneth?'

'Secure. Go ahead, Charles.' Aubrey was desperately tired. Davenhill had rambled, and the films had been developed. A little disappointing, but they clarified Davenhill's broken account. As hard evidence, just sufficient to convince of past events. The events of that day would have to suffice to arouse suspicion of present, and future. 'There's been code-traffic all morning — I've been in conference with Langley and the Pentagon, and the President patched it when we went to satellite com—'

Aubrey felt too tired for a recital of American technological achievement; unreasonably irritated.

'The outcome, Charles?'

Buckholz continued unabashed. 'There's a SAMOS reprogramming under way, and a launch slot later today. The sat can have a look-see. We don't usually have the coverage up here, and the President and the Pentagon won't make any premature moves just on my say-so.'

'What will the President do, Charles?'

'I told him to stay home.' Buckholz chuckled. 'He's fixing a dialogue over the red telephone for this evening, our time, with Finland's most prestigious guest of the moment. The First Secretary will be informed of the call at lunch. He'll have to take it in the Embassy here.'

'I see.'

'What of your people, Kenneth?'

'I am sure they would rather not believe it — any of it. But I do think they're worried.' Frustration burst out almost as petulance, suddenly. 'Charles, are we the only two sane people in the world, or the only two madmen?'

'Hang in there, Kenneth. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes activity in Washington — meetings, dialogues, contingencies, war-games. It isn't being allowed to fall down the back of the wardrobe. There'll be an alert issued by now. Brussels is in constant contact, and I guess we're stepped up to Readiness Two by now.'

It sounded a little more reassuring. Buckholz had not been wasting his time, and he could divine the mood in Washington perhaps more clearly than any other CIA officer Aubrey had ever met. Aubrey decided to be conciliatory.

'Very good, Charles. Then we must await developments. One other thing — that trace your people are doing for me—'

'You're worried about that — now?'

'I think it may be more important than ever.'

'OK — I won't cancel.'

'I'd be very grateful if you didn't. My people in Moscow have come up with nothing so far. I'm on to Africa, Satellites, and Far East now, and its getting urgent.'

'Why?'

'You told Wainwright about the twenty-fourth?'

'He laughed — a little. But, he doesn't ignore things. I'll come to see you before this evening.'

'Very well. I must allocate some people here to the mysterious Captain Ozeroff — or whoever he is.'

Ten: Proof of Intent

It was the acceleration of events that tired him so much. Having waited for ten years, it was as if he had adjusted to a somnolent, covert pace, and could not shake off what was now lethargy. In the Diplomatic Lounge at Cheremetievo, waiting to meet a courier, he was confronted by the almost archaic method of communication he had carefully and secretly constructed. And knew that he would have to issue the order in the next twelve hours to switch to radio traffic.

Kutuzov hated feeling a tired old man — but he could not escape, or disguise, the impression his old body forced upon him, the leaden grooves in which his physique seemed to make his thoughts function. Folley, the English soldier — the desperate ambush in Helsinki, after the border incursion — the accident on the road outside Oxford, where Ozeroff's body had fallen into the hands of the SIS — Ossipov's presumptuous destruction of the Khabarovsk KGB Office. He rubbed his hands down his leathery cheeks. A system of deep-cover couriers transmitting verbal orders and instructions disabled him — broken nerves, failing to transmit in time to the brain, so the hand gets burned, injured, the legs bang into things. The body of Group 1917 thrashing blindly about like an automaton.

The operation was beginning to develop a frightening momentum. He had to go to Leningrad, to see Praporovich, even Folley, to establish, if he could, what level of suspicion or half-knowledge had prompted three separate attempts to investigate Finland Station Six. Yet he could not blame them — they had acted on assumptions, and they had acted out of the kind of precipitate confidence he had felt himself a couple of days before — so close, he could taste it, feel it against him like another body, the sense of victory. The Army induced over-confidence, and the kind of action that had been taken on his authority, without his orders.

When it all came down, in the final analysis, to the word of one old man over the telephone. He felt chill, and ancient, and imprisoned in the weak, stick-like, hateful body. Really, was it like that? Yes, he admitted, then wondered if anyone in the lounge, especially the security men, had seen him nod absently in concert with the admission — trick of a decrepit, of the senile. He had to give the order, on the 24th. Valenkov, at Moscow Garrison, insisted on that. Part of the total operation, he had said, part of the whole. Praporovich would give the orders to the Attack Groups at Kirkenes and along the Finland border. Dolohov would give the Fleet its orders. Below them, perhaps a dozen generals to transmit those orders further down, to regimental commanders, to sections of regiments, to companies and platoons — to each tank and rifle and gas-wagon.

His thoughts stung him like an attack of insects; but all the time, with the clarity that pain sometimes had brought him in the past, this emotional infliction cut away at the confusion — and the few small lights upon which his enterprise was founded gleamed brightly and in isolation. But they were small lights, little bulbs strung together — and each one of them dependent upon the others, and he, the fuse that prevented them going out.

Praporovich, Dolohov, Valenkov in Moscow — himself. Millions of men, millions — and nothing would happen unless he and those others gave their orders on the 24th. 06:00 to be precise.

He looked at the security men as he fidgeted in his seat and pretended to read a book — there were more of them on duty at Cheremetievo. No, there were enough of them on duty, if they knew their targets, to prevent Rabbit Punch, and to prevent the overthrow of the regime. Ridiculous, but true.

He glanced at his watch, put down the book, and walked out of the lounge, waving his personal security guard to relax. He went down the steps to meet the courier.

Simple, simple, he told himself. They do not know, and there are only fifty-six hours of former days left. Fifty-six hours. And no one knew, no one. Valenkov and the Moscow Garrison would be incommunicado in eight hours' time, until the dawn of the 24th. Praporovich and Dolohov need take no risks, could make themselves unreachable.

And, in forty-eight hours, he would disappear himself.

Simple, simple, simple — the litany relaxed him.

He found the courier in the main departure lounge, still in his uniform, and they sat a little apart on a plastic-covered bench set below a panoramic window which looked out over the light-splashed tarmac, the garishly illuminated plumage of the aircraft caught by the lights. The courier read Pravda, and he smoked a cigarette as nonchalantly as he could, and drank bad coffee.

When the courier had finished his brief narrative, Kutuzov said: 'Ossipov cannot be forgiven for attracting attention to Far East District, even though he cannot see where he was at fault. However, on second thoughts, he must continue with the "Exercise Mirror" operations as far as the gas-attacks are concerned — yes…' His voice tailed off. The gas was the most necessary. The chemical attack had to be right, and it had to be done without the assistance, in planning and practice, of scientific advice and knowledge. They were soldiers, not research scientists, and the gases they had in sufficient supply in GSFN were unreliable, even unpredictable. And it had to be right! Ossipov was too important to be disliked, and his task too important to be postponed, or cancelled. Anger had betrayed him into issuing an order that Ossipov was right to ignore — even though the courier might not understand.

'Very well,' he went on. 'You have one more trip to make, back to Khabarovsk. You will instruct Ossipov to radio his final report direct to Praporovich — and you will tell him that the SID Major, Vorontsyev, is not to be eliminated. He is to be taken and held in custody until— You understand?'

'Sir.'

'Very well.' He looked at his watch. 'They will be calling my flight in a moment.' He stood up, and walked immediately away, his cigarette-stub burning in the ashtray where he had left it.

'Goodbye, sir,' the young man said to his back, and went on reading his paper.

All the way back to the Diplomatic Lounge, Kutuzov wondered what the Englishman, Aubrey, was doing — and kept repeating the litany of time running out. Fifty-six hours, fifty-six hours, fifty-six hours. It seemed to settle his stomach, tidy and soothe his thoughts.

Khamovkhin sat at the Ambassador's desk in a spacious third-floor room of the Embassy on Tehtaankatu. With him was the Soviet Ambassador to Finland, Foreign Minister Gromyko, and the head of the duty security team, Captain Ozeroff. Ozeroff stood away from the desk, and its red telephone drawn nearer the First Secretary than the battery of black telephones, as if in deference to the call about to be received, while Gromyko and the Ambassador sat within hearing distance of the amplifier rigged to the 'hot line'.

Khamovkhin looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. In Washington, four-thirty in the afternoon. President Joseph Wainwright would call him at any moment. Khamovkhin was nervous. Wainwright wanted answers, assurances that he could not give. There was no way he could bluff convincingly.

The four men in the room heard, distinctly, the connection being made by the Embassy exchange, the slight crackle of the static, then Wainwright's voice as he was instructed to begin his call. The slight delay in the signal, transmitted by satellite, then the illusion that the President of the United States was in the next room, or the next town.

'Mr First Secretary — good evening.'

Khamovkhin gagged on his reply for a moment.

'Mr President — good afternoon.'

And silence, for a long time. Khamovkhin felt, already, a bead of perspiration, standing out on his heavy brow, and his palms damp as he closed his hands into fists in his lap. A child, waiting for the rebuke of an adult.

'Mr First Secretary—' There was a freezing hauteur about the voice now, a righteousness, even. Wainwright spoke from strength. But what followed surprised Khamovkhin in its cunning, its obliqueness. 'I have a suggestion to make to you which I am sure would be in the interests of both of us, and of the world.' Khamovkhin shuddered at the grandiloquence which he found rolled so easily from the tongues of American Presidents. He could see Wainwright, dapper, handsome, middle-aged, leaning slightly forward across his desk in the Oval Office, as if to make distinct, unmistakable, each of his words.

'Yes, Mr President?'

'I propose, as a preliminary to the signing of our Treaty in three days, and as a gesture of faith the world cannot mistake—' A pause for emphasis, for clarity of meaning, for weight of impression, Khamovkhin thought. Angry with himself for being concerned to weigh such things, like a theatre critic with an actor's performance. 'That we institute, immediately, large and evident troop withdrawals from frontier areas.' The clarity with which his situation seemed understood in Washington chilled Khamovkhin, then instantly seemed to raise his temperature or that of the room. But Wainwright gave him no time for thought or reply. 'I will order US troops in the Federal Republic to withdraw from forward positions. I will immediately institute the stand-down of strike squadrons in the United Kingdom, and order the US 6th Fleet to a condition of secondary readiness — all of which your satellites and tracking ships can verify in a matter of hours.'

Silence — heavy, into which the breathing of the Ambassador and Gromyko dropped like stones, and the static from the amplifier scratched at his attention. He looked at Gromyko, whose face was impassive, without suggestion or support.

'Mr President, this is a gesture which pleases me, but which I need time to consider.' Lame, lame—

'What's to consider, Mr First Secretary? I have satellite pictures here—' A pause, as if an aide had gestured warningly. 'I have evidence to suggest that units of the Red Banner Fleet have been recalled to Murmansk. A gesture already on your part, surely? Continue the good work. Stand down forward units in the DDR, or maybe on the Norwegian border, or the Finnish border — yes, maybe best of all. Before I join you in Helsinki.'

Satellite pictures — stand down units — Red Banner Fleet — Khamovkhin was appalled, at a loss. He was learning, from the President of the United States, what the Red Army intended. The invasion of Scandinavia? Impossible. Finland Station. Not impossible.

'I — have to consult with the High Command of the Soviet Army, Mr President. I have no room for such a unilateral decision.'

'You're reluctant, Mr First Secretary — at this late hour?'

It was a direct challenge. He could almost begin to frame the rest of the conversation.

'No, no, of course not. But, you expect instant action, Mr President—'

'My orders have already gone to the Pentagon, and to Brussels, Mr First Secretary. They need only be confirmed. Now — can you do less than that?'

He was in a trap — he could not even speak to Gromyko. The red telephone, and the amplifier, sat on his desk, a squat toad listening to his thoughts.

'I–I must consult. It will take time to arrange — it is, of course, most desirable—'

'I think that way, too.' There was irony now! 'Forward units in your northern theatre, to compound your gesture of withdrawing units of the Northern Fleet to port. Can we agree on that?'

'I — in principle, yes, of course—'

'By tomorrow?'

'But — I am not sure it can be done—'

'Mr First Secretary — unless those units are withdrawn a token fifty miles from the border with Norway and Finland — and by dawn of the 24th, then I will order units of the AMF to go ahead with the cancelled NATO exercise, "Snowfront Express". Do I make myself clear, Mr First Secretary? I will also, in consultation with America's allies in NATO, place our forces on a twenty-four-hour readiness alert, unless I hear from you that withdrawals are beginning. This will happen at midnight, seven a.m. on the 23rd, your time.' Another pause, then: 'That's all, Mr First Secretary. Good evening to you.'

Static, for a long time, until his hand darted out to cut off the connection, kill the amplifier. Then, only then, did he look up at the other men in the room.

'We seem to have been given an ultimatum, gentlemen.'

'A sensible suggestion—' The Ambassador began, then dropped his eyes, lost his voice, and he saw the look in Khamovkhin's eyes. Gromyko remained silent.

'It must be done — he said nothing about coming to Helsinki, you notice. Nothing!' Anger, anger of confidence, he thought. Show them. 'Sensible, Mr Ambassador — of course, sensible. But — demanded, as of right, at this late hour! What kind of thing is that to do, eh? Why must it be done now, at this minute? He talks like a schoolmaster, a dreamer!'

He looked across at Ozeroff, standing stiffly to attention by the door, as if not wishing to draw attention to himself. Inwardly, Khamovkhin quailed. Andropov was right — the 24th. The Americans knew something, something that told them the timetable of Group 1917. And they had tested him, and now they knew he was powerless, impotent. And had issued their challenge — put your house in order, or the next war begins in three days' time!

He turned his back on them, looked at the portrait of Lenin above the chair in which he had been sitting. Ozeroff, at attention, had been directing his line of sight there. With little more than a hundred men, Lenin had done it, wrested power from Kerensky and the ditherers. And Group 1917 had the whole Army as a means of doing it!

What was his code? To those faceless men against whom he could make no move — what was his code? Comrade Romanov? The idea was laughable, the title apposite.

Get them out, get them out, he told himself. He had to get back to Lahti, talk to Andropov in Moscow. Had to. Everything was crumbling in his big, clumsy hands — he had dreamed, hadn't he, a couple of nights ago, of huge hands picking up delicate china cups and saucers, and smashing them with sheer clumsiness. Looking down, he had seen his own body in the dream, and these great shovels of hands sticking out of the sleeves of his coat.

Woken in a sweat — almost crying out, then realising.

He had to talk to Andropov. There had to be something, some lead, some identification of the leader, his enemy. Had to be.

'Captain Ozeroff, order the helicopter to stand by. We are returning to Lahtilinna at once!'

'Sir.'

Galakhov was smiling as he closed the door of the Ambassador's office behind him. In the morning, he could contact a courier and relay a message to Kutuzov. The Americans were suspicious, forewarned. But Khamovkhin knew nothing, feared everything. He would even, as duty officer, hear what was said between Andropov and the First Secretary. The American suspicions would change nothing. Wainwright was bluffing — all the High Command knew he would not go to war for Norway and Finland — it was an axiom of strategy.

He enjoyed Khamovkhin's fear as he went down the stairs to the duty-room to prepare the car and the helicopter.

'So that's it, Kenneth — Khamovkhin isn't behind anything. Right this minute, he's got about as much clout as my Aunt Fanny!'

Buckholz appeared suitably grim, but Aubrey saw the gleam in his eyes, the set of his jaw, and admired, and was amused by, the easy way in which the man had been impressed by the manner of his President's conversation with Khamovkhin.

'I accept your reasoning, and see you are pleased with the President's enactment of your scenario—' Buckholz turned on Aubrey, grimaced, then smiled swiftly, raising his hands in an admission. 'However, I am not certain—'

'Not certain of what?'

'How effective it will be. It places us in a position of impotence not unlike that of Khamovkhin himself. We can do nothing more, except sit and wait.'

'Tomorrow, we go see Khamovkhin, for openers—'

'Charles, what good will that do? The man knows nothing! Otherwise, this Group 1917 would have disappeared from sight long ago, into Gulag or the ground or the mental home, Khamovkhin doesn't know who they are, dammit! It hasn't worked out. We can't expect him to move against the High Command, even though we helped put him on the knife-edge.'

'Don't come cold water with me, Kenneth. Right now, Khamovkhin is on board his chopper, heading hell-for-leather for his castle on the hill to talk to the Chairman of the KGB!'

Buckholz walked round his desk to confront Aubrey. The round face of an ancient, cunning child looked up into his. Buckholz shook his head, walked over to the dumb-waiter.

'It isn't that I don't want to be optimistic,' Aubrey said in a more conciliatory tone. 'It's simply a matter of looking at facts head-on, without the squint imparted by the status of representing a super-power. I can do that, having been born into the aftermath of the British Empire, on which the sun has firmly set—' Aubrey smiled as Buckholz handed him the tumbler of whisky. 'Your health. No, it is simply that we now have to rely on the efforts of the KGB for our survival — as simple as that.'

'It won't come to war — they'll back down.'

'Khamovkhin would turn somersaults, I agree. But — the Red Army. Will they feel threatened, or simply challenged to a fight — and respond by picking up the gage?'

'It won't come to it, Kenneth.'

'In the time that may be left to us, I shall do my best to solve the mystery surrounding Captain Ozeroff — after all, he may know something useful. My surveillance of him begins with the dawn. And I have a way of placing him in our hands — do you wish to hear it?'

Buckholz nodded.

'Very well, but bring the bottle first. And I shall tell you what we shall request of Khamovkhin tomorrow.' Then, struck by a sobering realisation, he added, 'I wonder who the KGB have investigating this matter. I hope it's someone first-class — I really do!'

Vorontsyev stirred in the big bed, reached out, and found Natalia near him. She was still, apparently, asleep, and he touched her only lightly on the arm, not wishing to wake her.

As he came awake himself, there was the groundswell of urgency, and fear, in the pit of his stomach, making the bed colder, his wife distanced. He had been in Khabarovsk for thirty-six hours, and nothing. Except that they followed him everywhere, and probably laughed as he got nowhere, learned nothing.

Yet he could not move. It was just a case of getting out of bed, stepping on cold tiles in the bathroom — but, literally and metaphorically, he did not want to leave this bed.

He looked at his wife again. They had dined together early the previous evening, and drunk perhaps more than was good for them. Later, they had made love for the first time in months; it had been a natural conclusion to the evening — and perhaps he had wanted to bury his waking, wakeful mind in the temporary dream of sex. It had been as if they were on holiday together, and their behaviour imitated domestic life but with the added piquancy of a new place, a strange bed.

Thus, his reluctance to consider himself a policeman, on an investigation.

A beginning?

He refused to think about that, by an effort of will. Nevertheless, now he had recaptured the mood, there was a deep contentment in him for those few minutes after waking. He had enjoyed eating with her again, and enjoyed the clever, familiar humour they both brought, at one time, to conversation. And their first love-making, hurried and urgent though it was. He had been close to her then, for a few moments — lost in her.

When he had woken her later in the night, then perhaps that had been — more erotic, yes, but not as he would have wished. There was a small wince of shame, of impurity, that ran through his frame; it sprang, he knew, from the kind of puritanism he had inherited from his father, and had imbibed in Gorochenko's house.

In the ecstasy, he had asked her to reassure him, and she had done, telling him over and over that he was better than her other lovers, there was no one like him.

Alexei, Alexei — yes, yes… He felt the stirrings of an erection even at the memory, and the little shame — deeper than the embarrassment at recollected intimacy.

He had wanted her to master him, riding above him, her breasts like fruit just out of reach of his mouth — yes, he had wanted that, and it had seemed real for her as well.

It was himself he disliked a little.

But she had come back to him. And now, while she was still asleep and there could be no contradiction of perfection by anything she did or said, or they did or said, he was content again. He felt his eyes pucker at the sense of her nearness, and the weight of memory pressing on tear-ducts.

He got softly out of bed, and went over to the window. He lifted aside the heavy drape; it was a clear day, windy, high-clouded. It would serve for his purpose.

He looked back at his sleeping wife, the bare arm over the coverlet, the black hair massed on the pillow, hiding the small face. Because the moment offered a complete contentment, he had abandoned it. It would be preserved in memory, ready to be returned to. If he had let it go on any longer, it might have passed ripeness. He was afraid, he admitted — as afraid of happiness as he had been of isolation, disappointment.

So, he returned to his job. He looked out of the window again.

The police had rounded up a few suspected Separatists, and he had tried to show a polite interest, but he had known those frightened little people could never have planned to take out the whole KGB Office in Khabarovsk. They amounted to little more than slogan-daubers, booers at public meetings from the safety of crowds.

Which left the Ivanov Charter Company, which rented hangar-space at Khabarovsk Airport, nine kilometres outside the town. Ivanov, or whoever was in charge of the operation, owned two old Antonov high-wing monoplanes, and a helicopter. A small MIL. Which was paid for by, and reserved for, the KGB in Khabarovsk. An economy measure — the lawman's twentieth-century horse in the Soviet Far East.

Ivanov was obviously a local entrepreneur; the charter company was not state owned, like many of the small companies and businesses in this part of the Soviet Union; it was more efficient to allow enterprising capitalists to set up, and fund and operate, such ventures. Ivanov delivered mail to outlying villages, flew missions for the doctors and hospitals, delivered groceries to state-owned outlets throughout the region. And he assisted the KGB in the matter of a helicopter.

Vorontsyev had stumbled across the information by chance. A policeman had referred to the fact that 'Old Ivanov was lucky he didn't get blown up too, and his precious helicopter.' When Vorontsyev had elicited the source of the reference, he had trembled with excitement. A non-military aircraft; the only successful means of sniffing around the Military District HQ — from the air.

'Have you got any cigarettes, Alexei?' he heard Natalia ask. She was sitting up in bed, her breasts free of the sheets, her arms stretched as he pushed the thick dark hair away from her forehead. He breasts were taut, inviting. He was almost certain it was an unconscious gesture. Something like the feelings of the previous evening, an ameliorated sense of the erotic mingled with something like longing, came over him. She smiled. He was able to imagine invitation, and a curious innocence and warmth, in the movement of her lips.

He took the packet of American cigarettes from the dressing-table, and threw them to her. Then the lighter. She seemed to weigh it in her hand, and then said:

'We do have the good life, eh, Alexei?' She was still smiling. 'You and I.'

He nodded. 'We ought to be able to live reasonably convenient and happy lives.' His tone was neutral, carefully so; yet he was inviting her to commit herself. She puffed at the cigarette, leaned back against the headboard, one arm behind her head, and studied him. He was acutely conscious that he was naked, and that the act of her merely looking stirred him.

'We ought — yes,' she admitted. Then she stubbed out the cigarette, and murmured, 'Come back to bed.'

He almost looked at his watch on the dressing-table, to check the time. He smiled at himself, yet there was a tiny sense of disappointment in him, as if her invitation was a substitute; as if he had been reading a great book, and then been told it was superficial, unreal; or involved in a complex puzzle only to be told that the answer was easy, and not worth the finding.

Which was why he stood at the edge of the bed for a moment, just looking at her. She held out her arms to him, her breasts still free of the sheets, and he saw something crude, soiled about the open eroticism of it. He wanted her to be otherwise, even as he wanted her. She smiled as she saw his erection, which for an instant became a visible, hated helplessness as far as she was concerned.

Then he ignored the fuzzy complexities of his responses, and got into bed.

It was quick, hungry, abrupt. He did not care whether she came or not; he thought she probably hadn't. He was satisfying himself only. Something to make up for the last months — or to try to indicate his independence.

If Natalia was disappointed, she did not show it. While he telephoned the Innokenti Ivanov Charter Company of Khaborovsk, she sat beside him, smoking another cigarette.

'You want breakfast?' he asked as he waited for the call to be connected to Khabarovsk Airport, where Ivanov had an office and rented hangar-space. Her eyes were dosed, and her face tilted to the ceiling, head resting against the headboard.

She nodded. 'Will they serve it here?'

'I should think so — hello, Ivanov Charter?'

The voice at the other end was female, middle-aged, gruff and masculine. 'Yes — what do you want?'

'I want to check over the helicopter you fly for the local KGB. And I want to talk to the pilot — have him standing by.'

'Who is this, comrade?' the voice asked, suspicious but undeterred by the evidence of authority in his voice.

'Major Alexei Vorontsyev, Moscow SID. Is that sufficient for you?'

'May be. Bring your ID card, or you don't go anywhere near the helicopter.' The woman had to be Madame Ivanov.

'Naturally,' he said, not unamused.

'What time are you coming?'

'Shall we say — ten o'clock?'

'Say it if you like. We'll expect you, Major.' The receiver clicked at the other end. Vorontsyev stared at the purring instrument in his hand, then burst out laughing. He was still laughing when he called the hotel switchboard and ordered breakfast for two.

The MIL helicopter was an old one, a cramped cabin with canvas seats up front and a dark hole behind for storage space when the helicopter was used by Ivanov himself rather than the Khabarovsk KGB. Which, Vorontsyev was certain, was often. And, he did not doubt, the KGB footed the parts and fuel bills for most of the private trips.

The pilot was young — Ivanov's nephew, who had learned to fly during his army conscription. Since which time he had worked for his uncle, disliked him intensely, shared his passion for business and money, and was obviously waiting for the premature death of his energetic relative so that he could inherit control of the business.

Vorontsyev had been terrified by Madame Ivanov in the cramped, dusty office. She was everything the telephone conversation had promised — large, badly dressed and made-up, coarse, and clever. Her husband was off flying one of the planes to Vladivostok to collect some freight, she told him grudgingly — one of the two regular pilots was ill. She considered, as she told Vorontsyev, that he had a dose, and serve him right.

After a desultory inspection of the chopper, and a conversation with the nephew concerning recent KGB flights in it, Vorontsyev said, 'Right, you can take me on a little trip.'

'I didn't know you wanted to go up.'

'No?' Vorontsyev smiled. Neither did whoever was listening to his telephone calls at the hotel. Nor the car that had tailed him to the airport, and was parked near the terminal at that moment. 'No — but it seems like a good idea. Since my company owns it, and there's no one else to use it.'

The nephew shrugged. 'OK. I'll go and get us cleared. You wait here.'

It was half an hour before the MIL lifted away from the airport, and Khabarovsk was spread beneath them and away to the south. The two rivers on whose confluence the town stood gleamed like polished silver in the pale sunlight, and the town, as they ascended, became more and more a diagram of a place where people might live, set out as it was like many towns in Siberia and the Soviet Far East in a rigid, functional grid pattern.

Like American cities, Vorontsyev thought, though he had never seen one except in photographs brought back by KGB men who had spent time in the Washington Residency, or had travelled briefly to America. However, it was as if a child, with his building blocks, had ignored the fact that he required a flat piece of ground if he were to assemble a completely orderly structure. Khabarovsk began to straggle over the three long hills that it had been built upon, losing its firm, clean outlines — looking, he thought, as if it was lived-in after all.

Patches of green, the haze of heavy industry away towards the River Amur — shipbuilding there, oil refining; neat white blocks of offices, colleges; the rural fringes of the town of nearly half a million creeping back, it seemed, rather than being encroached upon.

'Well?' the pilot asked. 'Where do you want to go, my Major?'

Vorontsyev turned in his seat, looking ahead. They appeared to be drifting slowly north, towards hills blue and shapeless still with mist, dark with forest where the fog had lifted.

'I want to have a look at Army HQ — but only casually…' He had to trust the man; time was limited, whatever happened, after Ossipov's move against the KGB. He went on: 'You know their exercise areas?' The pilot nodded. 'Let's overfly some of them, and come back via HQ, eh?'

Vorontsyev settled back in his seat as the chopper seemed to spurt forward towards the distant hills. Already, his attention was impeded by memories of the past twelve hours seeping back. His wife — the tremulous sense of happiness of which he was afraid, and the more stark eroticism that now seemed to be re-established between them. This flight seemed removed from any useful investigation. He began to wonder whether Military District Far East could in any way reveal its secrets to a whirring speck in the sky.

Just before he left the hotel, there had been a telephone call from Police HQ. Over the wireprint from Moscow had come an unconfirmed report that Ilya and Maxim were missing. Their helicopter had radioed a distress message just before all contact with it was lost. Search parties had failed to locate any wreckage.

He had not known what to make of the report. It had been authorised by Kapustin, but he was uncertain whether it was a warning. He could not believe that the two men were dead, and therefore attempted to ignore the possibility. The report remained as a speck, irritating the mind's eye.

The foothills were below them now, mounting to the still fogbound clefts and peaks of the mountains. The pilot's voice crackled in his headset. 'Do you want to be seen, or not?'

'What?'

'There'll be a lot of chopper activity soon, when we hit the exercise areas. Do you want to explain what we're doing, or not?'

'Preferably not.'

'Then I'll try it as low as I can.'

The nose of the MIL dropped towards a forest-blackened cliff face, and the chopper sidled sideways, hugging the tree tops. Vorontsyev craned his head to look down. The dark fir trees flowed beneath the cabin.

'How often do they exercise up here?'

'All the time. Constant readiness. I was stationed along the Manchurian border when I was in. The yellow peril, my Major!' He laughed. 'More peril from some of the women in the brothels up there!'

Vorontsyev returned the laughter, settling in his seat, his eyes casting to right and left, and ahead. Small clearings, empty, passed beneath them, then a towering cliff face, bare and grey, threatening the tiny helicopter. Mist rolled beneath them in a deep valley like something alive, or as if flames roared beneath it.

Then the MIL slid across a knife-edged ridge of mountain, and the last tendrils of mist were vanishing. Vorontsyev saw a deep valley, and the Ussuri, a tributary of the Amur, narrow at the bottom of the steep cleft. Snow lying thinly on its banks, ice moving like great grey plates on the river surface. The MIL drove down the mountain side, below the treeline. Then Vorontsyev saw them: an engineer unit had thrown a bridge across the Ussuri, and ZSU self-propelled guns were crossing — a dark-green caterpillar. They swept over them. Further downstream, an amphibious BTR-50 was grinding through plated ice, hurling it aside as it progressed like a green wedge.

'What are they doing?' Vorontsyev asked, pointing down and behind.

'Testing equipment. Some kind of tactical deployment exercise, I suppose. Can you get across a river in winter, or something like.'

The MIL followed the line of the Ussuri as it snaked through its lean, deep valley; then the pilot, a straighter, and empty, stretch of the river ahead of him, lifted up and away, past the treeline, the bare face of rock, sliding across another fold of mountain which fell away more gradually on its western side. Deeper shadow here, even at eleven in the morning. Forest, then more open country, stretching to the shore of a spot of blue lake.

In the distance, a winding road, crammed with green vehicles. Vorontsyev used the glasses the pilot handed him. Almost solid — tanks moving in single file. At the head of the snaking column the lighter T-34 tanks and, as if riding herd to the main column, heavy APCs and T-34s in the fields, driving swathes through the long grass, melted snow glistening as it sprayed up from the tracks. Behind the light screen, the heavy JSs and T-62s and T-64s. An armoured column, moving swiftly now that he saw them magnified, racing towards the spot of blue water and the sloping forest beyond.

'Do you want to get closer?' the pilot asked. They had dropped below the level of the trees, at the edge of the open land, and were hovering.

'No,' Vorontsyev said. 'What are they doing?'

'Time trials. How long to move from A to B, or how much can you move in a given time.'

'What purpose?' Vorontsyev asked, his eyes still pressed to the glasses.

'You've heard of "Blitzkreig", haven't you? What the filthy Fascists were doing in the war? Well, you can't say the Red Army doesn't learn! One of our intensive practices.' He nodded towards the column of dark green vehicles, now simply gun-barrels and turrets above the level of the grass. The grass moved like an angered sea as light tanks ripped through it, moving away from them now.

'Are they doing this all the time?'

'Of course, my Major!' The pilot laughed, the sound hard and deafening in Vorontsyev's headphones. 'For when the yellow peril comes boiling across the Ussuri. Practise, practise. It never stops. I sometimes think we keep on doing it just to fool the American satellites — when we finally do go, they'll think it's just another exercise.'

'All right. Find something else.' Vorontsyev said, taking his gaze at last from the fascination of the armour. The MIL seemed to hop over the trees, sneaking away from what it had witnessed like a child crept downstairs to watch adults at their pleasures.

'Why do they practise here, in this sort of country?' Vorontsyev asked as they skimmed the tree tops, leaning up the slope as they did, climbing back towards the ridge.

'What?'

'This isn't like the country in northern Germany — good tank country. Is it? Why the emphasis on armour here? Isn't it going to be infantry and artillery all the way round here? This country looks much more like—' He sensed himself on the verge of a discovery — its momentousness welled up in him so that the thought itself seemed about to be lost in the accompanying mood. Slowly, slowly, he told himself, looking at the terrain. Like, like— The dark trees, the bare rock, over the ridge, slipping along beneath it, the noise of the rotors echoing back to them, amplified. Then he was distracted, almost as he seized upon the realisation.

'What's that?' Vorontsyev snapped, pointing ahead of them. A haze, yellowish it seemed, undispersed. He could not help believing that it was artificial.

'Mist.'

'Go over it if you go near it.'

The nose of the MIL lifted, and Vorontsyev had to crane to see the yellow-painted TMS-65, looking like a petrol tanker with a trailer — the suited men around it like insects, masked heads looking up, spray nozzles in their hands. They were moving beneath a belt of trees.

'For God's sake — pull away from that!' Vorontsyev almost screamed.

The MIL whisked up and sideways, rolling with violence of the change in the angle of the rotor disc.

'Tucking gas!' the pilot snarled. 'What the bloody hell are they doing with it — trying to kill the bloody trees?'

As if to answer him, they flew over a ragged, trailing hole in the forest. Black, naked branches stared at them, a sudden desert. As the MIL followed the defoliated line, it adopted the appearance of a road. Open to the sky, a ragged swathe.

'That's not new,' Vorontsyev said. He looked over his shoulder, then smiled grimly at his stupidity. 'For — of course! That TMS down there is for decontamination work, isn't it?'

The pilot banked the chopper, and up ahead of them again was the rising, yellowish cloud.

'It is.'

'Then — that damage to the trees, what was that?'

'Shelling.'

'What with?'

'Gas.'

The cloud was rising, gleaming with droplets in the sunlight, steaming out of the tree tops like an exhalation of the ground.

'What is that, then?'

'An alkali fog — I don't know. They didn't give us more than the usual introductory lectures on chemical warfare — how to put your suit and mask on, and what filthy stockpiles the United States had built up! You know the bullshit.'

'Guess what they're doing — and pull away again!'

The MIL banked sharply. Masked heads followed them when observing, measuring the effects of the fog that was being sprayed in a widening area beneath the trees. They headed towards the ragged hole in the forest once more, following the narrow road that was its winding central line.

'Guess?' the pilot said after a while. 'Maybe — time trials? Could be. Shell the shit out of a definite area, using VX or one of those bastards, then move the men in the special suits in to see how quickly they can clear it.'

The MIL lifted away from the defoliated, obscene swathe, towards the bare, clean lines of a cliff face. Sharp, hard — natural.

'Why?'

'You ask a hell of a lot of questions! Why? Because the Army thinks it'll start a war with chemical attacks, and it's practise, practise!'

Vorontsyev, as the MIL lifted clear, into the sun, and the land was spread out suddenly, like something flung from a hand, beneath him — dotted lakes, mountains, deep, narrow valleys, the river — knew he had the answer.

And was stunned, almost paralysed, by its enormity. Yes, yes— He clamped on the thought, the realisation, that had been interrupted, then confirmed, by the yellow cloud. It was — it had to be— There was a connection between Ossipov and Vrubel, between the Far East and the border with Finland. This mountainous, heavily wooded country below him was the connection. A mirror-image, almost.

Ossipov and his armies were practising the invasion of Scandinavia — so the real thing would go smoothly.

A chemical attack to precede an armoured spearhead.

Ilya and Maxim were dead. They must have found out something, and they had been eliminated.

He felt sick.

'Don't look now, my Major — we've got company!' he heard the pilot say at a great distance.

As if from ambush, four helicopters in army camouflage, the red stars bright on their bellies — MIL-24s, gunships, he registered — leapt from the cover of a ridge below and to starboard. They were flying in a rigid formation.

A box to contain their one small helicopter.