Traitor's Kiss

…Chapter Sixteen

He had heard the two chimes of the clock set above the entrance to the headquarters building. Bikov moved for the kill.

His voice was silky quiet. The last of the candle burned.

'I think, Viktor, in your place I would have done what you have. You had motive from what was done to your father and your grandmother — I would have done it. You had the opportunity for the necessary tradecraft, the castle at Malbork and the three visits to Gdansk, and I cannot fault your procedures. Most important, Viktor, you had access. That is where we are different.'

He studied each movement of his prey's body. He knew it was close.

'Take me, Viktor, a humble half-colonel enduring the routine of FSB life. I might have had the motive, but I have nothing to offer that will wound. I am only a functionary, a bureaucrat and a pusher of paper. I have no skills, no information that is wanted. Nothing that is "secret" crosses my desk. My life is tedious…not yours.

Stamped fit. He could not identify what he had missed. It annoyed him. He slithered towards the kill.

'Where is he now? In his club? In a bar, or at home? Does he give a fuck about you, Viktor? Can you see him here now? Can you?'

The tears had returned, and the wretch's body shook. In the puzzle a round hole remained, but the last piece was square. He concentrated to drive the irritation, the annoyance, from his mind. He spoke across the candle's final flicker of light.

'You are lucky to have me as a friend, Viktor, because your handler has abandoned you. I am your true friend, your last one.'

He heard the choked weeping. It was the first time in an interrogation that he had missed a kernel point, and he did not know what it was, only that it eluded him.

Roman listened, and he thought of his daughter and his son and what this man could do for them.

'It's very simple,' Chelbia said. 'What I have learned, in import/export, always follow the simple way. What excites me — until I came to this beach I had no idea of what is now open to us. The unexpected is often the most exciting. Yes?'

Roman nodded. Chelbia ate fish with his fingers. Roman thought it incredible that a man who wore a suit that had cost as much as he earned in a year should sit on the rain-sodden sand beside a fire and eat with his fingers. If either of his own children had eaten like that, or himself, stuffing food into their mouths, they would have felt his wife's slap on the back of the head. The Russian ate like a pig, and talked.

'So, simple…I bring the packages to the harbour in Kaliningrad. A fishing-boat from Kaliningrad takes the package out to sea, then has a problem and drifts into the restricted area. It is only a fishing boat — who cares? Maybe I have to buy a man in the harbour office, but that is cheap. The fishing-boat goes close to the international boundary. He puts the package into the sea. It is weighted but it has a float…Everything is arranged. Roman puts to sea. Roman is separated from the other fishermen, but only by two hundred metres, and he finds the float. He picks up the package, and then he is back with the other fishermen. He lands with the package. Do you know, it costs me a thousand American dollars a week to put packages across the frontier on the Mamonovo to Braniewo road? And it will cost more because the Poles are, every day, more difficult. Later we shall talk, Roman, about what payment you will receive for lifting the packages from the sea…'

Roman watched. The Pole, Jerzy Kwasniewski from Berlin but once from Krynica Morska, could not eat because of his burned hand. When Chelbia had eaten all of the meat off a cod and a plaice, he lifted a mackerel from the glowing fire — and didn't flinch. He pulled off the head and threw it away to the gulls, then stripped the meat from the bones and fed Jerzy Kwasniewski as if he were a chick in a nest. He put little pieces into the man's mouth, and smiled at him. Many times Roman had burned his hands — from upset hurricane lights, from the oxyacetylene cutters — and he knew the pain. He had winced as Chelbia had put the hand into the fire, but he had not intervened. Half of the mackerel went into Jerzy Kwasniewski's mouth, then Chelbia took the rest for himself, and spoke through mouthfuls of fish. He stopped only to spit out bones. He lifted up one of the shoes, drying by the fire, and examined it closely.

'When I want to know whether a man lives comfortably, or whether times are hard for him, I look at his shoes. Not his suit, not his coat. A man can get a new suit and a new coat off a dead man's back, from a charity shop. But it is rare to find shoes that fit comfortably when they have been worn by another man. I look at your shoes. They have been polished, but that tells me nothing. What is important, they are falling apart. An old man needs good shoes, and you do not have them. You have worked for the Secret Intelligence Service of Britain, now you drive for them, but they show little respect for you. If they gave you respect you would have the money to buy good shoes. Once a month you will drive from Berlin and you will meet with my good friend, Roman, and you will collect a package from him — four or five kilos in weight, the same size as a big bag of cooking flour — and you will deliver it to Berlin. You will be paid, and then you will buy new shoes.'

Roman remembered. Chelbia wiped his hand on his handkerchief, then smeared it across Jerzy Kwasniewski's mouth, then pocketed it. Chelbia reached out and took Jerzy Kwasniewski's scorched hand, then Roman's. All their hands were together. The deal was done. For money…

Roman remembered the address given by the Father in the new church in Piaski in the last of the winter months. There had been hardship in the village, and for the first time that he could remember a holiday home owned by Swedes had been broken into and items of value stolen. There was no money in the village. The Father had told his congregation, the fishing families idle in the winter, of an old proverb: The devil dances in an empty pocket. The Father had said that poverty or an empty pocket leads to temptation or crime, and had told them that in history many coins were minted with a cross on the reverse so that the devil could not go down into the pocket if one of those coins was there. There were zloty, a few coins, in his pocket, but none of them had a cross on the reverse. He held onto the two hands tightly.

Free at last from company, alone as he wanted to be, the engineer made good the engine. He crooned softly to himself and his thickened fingers moved with a lover's gentleness over the pistons, plugs and cables. He would not find another job at sea. None of the Lebanese-, Maltese- or Liberian-registered lines would want to employ a forty-seven-year-old engineer whose last ship, for more than ten years, had been a coastal freighter, a rust bucket. When the Princess Rose went to the breakers, so would Johannes Richter. The ship would be scrap, as would he. And there was no work in Rostock: Rostock was awash with unemployed engineers from the shipyards that had been, until 1990, the pride of the Baltic. He would go back to his apartment alongside the railway line that ran between Rostock and Warnemunde, and he would tend the balcony flowers. He would have money for his daughters, which was important to them but not to him. He had seen the determination on the team's faces as they ate their last meal. Win or lose, succeed or fail, they would be suffering hot pursuit when they came back. The patrol boat had returned and had scoured them with its light — it would be out again when the pursuit started. The Princess Rose would sail towards the shore at speed, let them scramble on board, with or without their man, and then they would churn for the safety of the International sea boundary. Two extra sea knots might make the difference. In the engine room, he was below sea level. If she were holed by the patrol-boat… He had no fear. The master's voice, from the bridge, boomed over his radio. 'Give it to me, Johannes. Give me the engine.'

The engineer threw the switches. He heard the rumble, the throb of the thing he loved. It was sweet. She rolled in a slackening swell, the engine idled…and he waited.

He had had only the one day in the forest near Brockenhurst to prepare himself.

It was almost a catalogue of disaster. If the radio in the watchtower had not been switched on, had not played dance music from a Polish station, he would have blundered against the legs of the tower. If the jeep on the track beyond the tower, by the inner fence, had not revved to full power to escape a pond of mud, he would have been on the track and caught in its lights. If a tree had not come down on the inner fence and collapsed it, he would not have known how to climb eight feet of mesh and two feet of barbed wire. He hurried, driven on, and his feet crackled over fallen branches.

The voice he heard was the instructor's, Walter's, when they had sat around him in the half-circle. Rumour had him as a onetime sniper, but now elderly and past a shelf life; the gossip at Fort Monkton said he had killed men from the Derry walls over the Bogside and from the mountain overlooking the Crater District of Aden. Locke could hear his voice, but not distinguish what the damned man had said.

Birds, disturbed by him, screeched into the night off the pines' canopy, and once there was a bullocking charge away from him. Then he'd stopped, a statue, pounding heart, and thought it must have been a boar or a deer, until its stampede had died. He hurried until he could no longer force air into his lungs…and her face was always ahead of him, and her forehead, which he had kissed. Lower branches lashed his face, caught at his jacket, and twice he was in small bogs. Once his shoe was prised off his foot and he had to grope in slime to find it. There had been a boy, Garin, from the next farm to that of his parents. Garin went at night to a wood on the farms' boundary and could get close to a vixen's earth or a badger's sett and not break a twig, not disturb them when he sat on the moss carpet. He had thought Garin Williams an ignorant little creep. Useless at language and literature, mediocre at maths and sciences, inept at history and geography — only able to walk in silence into an oak wood in the depth of night. He'd felt contempt for Garin…now he would have cried out in relief if Garin Williams had been beside him, leading him.

They came back slowly to him, the words of the old sniper. The Book of Walter. About a stick, about being a blind man. About keeping off paths and looking for animal trails…and never putting down the weight of a foot before the ground was tested. About using the protection of trees, about never making a silhouette against a skyline, about never crossing the middle of a clearing.

Locke stood against a tree and took from his pocket the keys to his apartment in Warsaw, and some zloty. He bent and laid them on the mould carpet at the base of the tree. Then, he moved forward, very carefully, testing with his shoe and with his hand held out until he came to a hazel bush. Breaking off a sprig seemed like a gunshot in the forest, and he waited until the sound had echoed away, then he stripped the side branches off it. It was his wand. The Book of Walter said that, cross-country, good boots should be worn and a camouflage tunic. Locke wore lightweight lace-up shoes, a grey suit, white shirt, and a red anorak with yellow piping.

He hoped Tasha, Justin, Charlie and Karen suffered, pleaded for them to be screwed, because they had talked and deflected when he should have listened to Walter and learned his Book. At the next big tree, brushed against by his wand, he knelt and scratched up a fistful of earth in his hand, spat on it to moisten it and wiped it over his forehead, cheeks and chin, on his wrists, the backs of his hands, and then put more on his anorak.

Locke moved forward. He found a trench system of zigzag pits and a bunker of concrete but didn't blunder into them because he had his wand, and had Walter — and Alice, not that she would ever know.

The base slept.

While it slept, a few radios played and a woman in married quarters screamed at her NCO husband. Close by, a baby cried, wind caught overhead wires, the sea was a distant murmur. A dog barked for attention, unheard. To save electricity in the base every second streetlight was extinguished and those that were lit had been fitted with low-power bulbs. The base, sleeping, was a place of shadows. Brighter lights beamed from the windows of the senior officers' mess where Vladdy Piatkin and friends who massaged the conceit of the zampolit still drank. A lesser light shone down from the inner office of the fleet commander where he sat unmoving at his desk with a small key in front of him. A single dull strip light above the dormitory's doorway illuminated the young conscripts of the 'Ready' platoon. Arc-lights were above the guarded main gate, and a searchlight played over the base from a tower on the walls of the historic fortress. Cats, feral and emaciated, moving on their stomachs, occupied the shadows between the lights. Only the cats knew that intruders stalked in their territory while the base slept.

They did not need to speak. On the paper map was the name of a street: Admiral Stefan Makarov. A low wooden hut on the street was marked: 'Shop'. Another square building was outlined: 'Gymnasium'. Ham peered down at the map he held. It was the map of a semi-literate kid, and they depended on it. Ham could see the street's name on the sign near the wooden hut where conscripts would have come to buy chocolate and soft drinks, and a solitary light was above the double doors of the gymnasium. Lofty opened the bag and his fingers groped inside it. They were at the end of a building, opposite the shop and short of the gymnasium. At the end of the street, Admiral Stefan Makarov, was an isolated three-storey building, a throwback to the days of a former regime. Ham thought that once a swastika would have flown from its roof. On the map it was double outlined and written beside it in a spider scrawl was the title: Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. It was hard for Ham to make out the scrawl of the map. They faced the side of the building. To reach it, they would have to cross open ground that was lit by every second light. An open jeep went past the side of the building, two men in it huddled against the cold, and the sound of it drifted away, as the lights caught the glare of a cat's eyes in a black corner.

'That's it,' Ham whispered. 'If the map's right, that's it.'

For stating the obvious Ham was rewarded with a sharp jolting elbow from Billy. It hurt him. Billy took Wickso's arm and pointed, a short-arm gesture, to the left side of the building, then reached for Ham and pointed to the right. Ham felt the fear. Back at Poole, long ago, the moment was called 'Fight or Flight'—go forward or go back. They listened to the night and the night's sounds, and the jeep had gone. Ham was shoved hard, like when he had done his first jump and the dispatcher had heaved him out of the gate in the wicker basket of the balloon tethered eight hundred feet above a Dorset field. He crossed Admiral Stefan Makarov in a pounding charge and thought every man and woman, every officer, NCO and conscript in the base would have been woken. His harness, worn over the wet suit, thudded against his chest and stomach. He held the Skorpion tight in his hands, as if it were salvation. He reached a door and shadow, and nestled into it. He listened, and heard only the radio's music, the woman and the baby, and the beat of his heart. He left the safe place, went past three more doors. The last doorway in the street was his goal. He looked across the open ground.

In front of the building was a saloon car. Between the car and the steps to a closed heavy door was a pacing sentry, his rifle over his shoulder. As he stamped backwards and forwards, the sentry raised his gloved hands to his mouth and breathed uselessly into them. Beside the door was a window, and Ham saw through it a second guard whose back was to him. The door opened, and a plastic cup was passed out. The man from the inside wore a pistol on his belt. The door was closed. Two drunks, in uniform, staggered along the far side of the lit area, one supporting the other.

He went back.

Ham told Billy what he had seen, then Wickso returned to them. Wickso said there was a fire escape at the back, unguarded, with a closed steel door on to each floor. Billy said they'd go through the back.

They were going into the building. None of the team disputed it. Lofty made spaghetti. He rolled it in his hands, about an ounce of it, and thinned the military explosive into a lengthening, narrowing strip. Wickso had the detonator and Billy had the firing box for the electric impulse. Lofty's hands moved fast. Ham thought himself a battleground survivor — had done ever since he was a child in the playground — but his legs seemed fastened in clay. When Lofty had done the spaghetti he laid the strips carefully on Wickso's arms, like a woman's knitting-wool. Ham's grip on the Skorpion whitened his knuckles, and Billy had Lofty's grenade-launcher.

Ham thought of the police cell and, momentarily, wished he were there. Billy had said they would need speed and surprise and a shit bucket full of luck. The bile choked in Ham's throat, and he hooked the mask on to his head.

In the quiet, with only the cats watching them, they headed to the back of the building.

He had been given friendship — had not been beaten, kicked, punched.

His body rolled in tiredness.

In the worst of his dreams over the long months before, Viktor had seen men in uniforms, men in heavy leather jackets and men stamping in and out of a cell with shit on the floor, and he had been scum to them — yet only friendship, sympathy, kindness had been handed him by the man in shabby clothes and mud-caked boots.

He hardly heard the words.

'I have it all, Viktor, I know everything…I know of your grandmother and your father, and the castle at Malbork and the visits of the delegation to Gdansk, and I know of the mistake you made. I shall tell you about your mistake, Viktor. A book of matches from the wrong hotel. Such a small mistake. You pocket a book of matches from a hotel that you did not visit, and a little sliver of suspicion is aroused — a worm turns. I don't expect, Viktor, you can even remember the moment you picked it up. A trifle, a small present for yourself, taking a book of matches and you don't smoke. You had no need for the matches, you gave them to another officer. They were used to light the cigarette of Major Piatkin, the zampolit…'

He rocked. He remembered…such a little moment, of such insignificance. And he remembered, too, the sharp, sneered anecdotes about Piatkin that so delighted the admiral when he told them, and his smiles and Falkovsky's bellied laughter. He remembered also the contempt that he, a senior serving naval officer, felt for the base's zampolit, who knew nothing of the science of naval warfare. The man was a clown, a fool. The man was mediocre. Piatkin was a grubby little shite on the take…and had brought him down. A rat gnawed at the base of a great house built of wood, and it crashed. Piatkin, whom he despised, had destroyed him. He did not see Rupert, or the men in the zoo park, or Alice. Above him, grinning and superior, was the face of Piatkin.

'How would you describe Major Piatkin, Viktor? A corrupted criminal? An imbecile? Or would you call him a counterintelligence officer with a prying and suspicious mind? He undid you, Viktor. You are now alone. The words of your handlers were lies. You have only me.'

Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko swayed and his voice was a hoarse whisper, 'What will they do to me?'

He saw a hand cup the tiny flame of the candle. A breath blew across it and into his face, and the flame died.

'Nothing, Viktor. You have been so helpful, and I am your friend and we are together.'

A hand was on his shoulder and a body slipped beside him, was warm. An arm held him close.

Bikov's major pushed the earphones off his scalp. He checked the spool still turned on the tape-recorder. He murmured to the sergeant that he should go down the stairs to the car and should start the engine. From his pocket, he took thongs for a prisoner's ankles, a hood and handcuffs. On tiptoe he followed the sergeant from the outer office and watched him go down the stairs. Bikov, he thought, was the finest interrogator he had known, the best. Without evidence, with no proof, the interrogator had bluffed his way to a confession. Incredible. On his mobile he called Kaliningrad Military and warned the pilot that they would be leaving Baltiysk within five minutes — with a prisoner. He cut the call and there was a mirthless quiet chuckle in his throat. What will they do to me? He had heard the whine on the earphones. Nothing, Viktor. Only a bullet in a prison yard. Or only a fall from the open hatch of a high-flying helicopter. It was hard for him not to laugh out loud.

They went up the rusted ladder. There was a light above it, they were exposed. They were on the steps below the little platform, the light shining on them. Lofty worked the explosive strip down over the hinges of the metal door and Wickso passed him up the small detonator, which Lofty sank into the putty. They were all breathing hard, and Lofty seemed to take an age. What he had told Ham, the kid on whom they depended had never been in the building and knew nothing of its interior layout, only that the office of the zampolit major was on the second floor. Each of them slipped the gas masks down. Billy gestured, like his nerve was going, that Lofty should go faster.

'A spy?'

The kill was made. He was on his haunches, he had pressed himself close to his prey and he held him tight in his arms. He was the mantis. The tape would be turning. That evening he would sleep in Moscow. The wretch would lie on a concrete bed in a cell, and in the rooms of the Lubyanka the lights would burn late and the bottles would be drained, and couriers would take the transcripts to the President in the Kremlin. A crisis would break and an ambassador would be summoned to receive an expulsion list — and it would be because of him, because of the skill of Yuri Bikov. He could not think of what he had missed, but he knew that one piece was outside the puzzle.

'Yes.'

'Can I hear it again, please? A spy?'

'Yes.'

He was not surprised that he felt no pleasure. The chase was done. He was drained, washed out. On the aircraft to Moscow, while the prisoner sat handcuffed, trussed, hooded, he would sleep.

'Each time you say it, Viktor, you will feel better, liberated. Again, a spy?'

'Yes.'

He saw a pit, a circle of discoloured concrete. The slot in the puzzle that troubled him was a circle. He bored on.

'Because of your grandmother and your father? Your dead drop was at Malbork Castle? You met your handlers three times in Gdansk? Everything that crossed the desk of Admiral Falkovsky you delivered at the dead drops or gave to your handlers?'

'Yes…yes.'

'They were British, the handlers who have abandoned you?'

He tried to read the sign above the pit, to complete the puzzle's picture. He was not listening for the answer. Bikov did not realize the stiffened tenseness that rippled in his prey's body. Without thinking, wearied, he repeated…'Who have abandoned you.'

His prey twisted. Hands were at his throat. Nails gouged at his neck's flesh. He could not cry out. He was pushed down. His prey was above him, a knee in his stomach and little choking, crying sounds played in his ears. He could not breathe. Who have abandoned you. He tried to shout, could not. He saw the scraped picture above the animal pit, made out the faint outline of a hippopotamus. He heard a thud of noise beyond the closed door. The legs of his prey were above his and smothered his effort to kick, to beat his heels on the concrete, to alert his major and his sergeant.

For Bikov, the last piece of the puzzle was in place…a rescue from the zoo park, not abandoned. He should have…

The fingers tightened on his throat. He should have posted a guard…

The second noise, from outside, was not the same dull thud, but a whipcrack of sound — the fall from a height of a metal dustbin on to concrete. His voice was a coughing gurgle. He should have posted a guard of naval infantry around the building…

He felt himself failing.

The door opened and came across the room, flying free. Light blazed in his face. The fingers loosened. Grey gas smoke spread. Above him was the ceiling, around him were the bare walls and under him was the concrete floor. The fingers came off his throat and he gasped, drank in the smoke spreading from the ceiling, the walls and up from the floor. He should have…

The figures were grotesque, huge, smoke swirling around them. The pain came to his eyes and his lungs burned and he rolled away, and a weapon barrel broke through his front teeth and bedded in his throat. He heard the command cry.

'Viktor, identify yourself — which is Viktor?'

The command was in his own language, but muffled. His eyes were open. He did not dare to wipe them, to cleanse them of the pain. There were three men in the room, black-suited with the water still on them, and the great masks guarding their faces. He saw the hand raised, then a torch shone sharply into his prey's face. The hands reached down. His lungs were filled and his eyes were coated in the smoke. Arms grabbed at his prey. He rolled to escape the smoke and the torchlight torturing his eyes. A shot exploded close to him, but he had rolled. Windows had been thrown open, and doors. Each time they passed a window or a doorway where a face peered at them, Ham shouted in Russian: 'Main gate — major incident — barricade yourself inside.' Little went through Ham's mind as they ran, but paramount was the need to exploit the first minutes of chaos. He had shot both of them in the building and the blood had spurted up from the one who had groped for his shoulder holster and the droplets had bounced to the eyepiece of his mask and there were smears there from when he had wiped it. They were going towards the canal and Billy's back was only a blurry shape through the smears.

The package was a dead weight, and with each stride was heavier. He clung to the package, as Wickso did. Between him and Wickso there was a little gasp of pain. His mind focused. The package had no coat, no tunic, and the white shirt shone out each time lights trapped them. The package had no belt and clung to his trousers to stop them sliding down, impeding his stride. They ran past workshops, and the track Billy took was over gravel. He heard the whimper from the package's throat. He looked down.

The package wore no shoes, no boots. Its weight went down on the gravel and it shuddered. They were going under a high light. The face of the package winced. He saw the already shredded thin black socks. The package was a passenger. They carried him to the quay and, behind them, the shouting, the alarm blasts and the siren made a cacophony of sound.

Lofty covered them. Wickso hooked a little life-jacket over the package's shoulders and snapped the clasp.

Ham said, 'He can't run, he's no shoes.'

Billy threw the bags into the canal and the blackness of it seemed to call them. They went down into the water.

The telephone rang, unanswered, on his desk, and the alarm pealed from the siren on the roof of the headquarters building. The fleet commander stared down at the key beside his hand. The curtains of the inner office were open and Admiral Alexei Falkovsky had expected to go to the window in time to see the tail-lights of the car driving towards the outer gate. Then he would use the key. Through the evening and the night he had thought only of the waters of the Tsushima Strait and the fate of a previous Baltic Fleet commander in chief, Admiral Rozhdestvensky, and the disaster visited on the navy's reputation then, which still lingered. A fist beat against his door, and a voice shouted his name with increasing impatience. It was eleven minutes past three o'clock in the morning. He had thought by now he would have seen the car drive his friend, his chief of staff, his protégé, away towards the main gate. His door was opened.

He yelled at the night duty officer, 'Fuck off, get out! Fuck off away.'

He was told, 'The base has been attacked, a terrorist attack. Two of Colonel Bikov's colleagues have been murdered in the FSB building, but Colonel Bikov has survived. The terrorists are in flight and with them is Archenko. The base is now on black alert, the Ready platoon is about to move.'

He never looked up. His head sank, and his eyes rested on the key.

They spilled out of the senior officers' mess. The last of the drinkers lurched on to the step. Three had stayed with Piatkin, the zampolit, to gain a glimpse of the saloon car that would take Archenko away. As the zampolit on the base, he was always assured of having toadyish men around him who would laugh with him and share his gossip. The three represented the network that augmented their service salaries with the sale of weapons, building materials, food from the kitchens to Chelbia, who paid well. At the moment the siren had started the telephone call had come and the steward had passed it to Piatkin. He, and the three others, shouted slurred orders into the night at any sailor or infantryman passing them, at any officer racing past in a jeep.

'Extra guard on the gate, seal the base. Double the perimeter patrols — treble them.'

'Road blocks on the Kaliningrad road, get them in place.'

'Reinforce the frontier, close the frontier — no traffic out, no trains — shut the airport. Mobilize the Ready platoon.'

Piatkin, swaying, started to run towards the armoury where the Ready platoon would be forming up, where he could take control. The drink seemed to slosh in his body. Muddled, but already present, was a sense of impending disaster. He was responsible for base security. He would face an unmerciful inquiry. He ran towards the armoury, speeded on his way by the catastrophe that had enveloped him.

The queue snaked back out of the building.

One at a time, the conscripts were handed assault rifles off the racks, two empty magazines, and had to dig in a wide box for fistfuls of ammunition. Only one clerk served the queue. Half dressed, half asleep, the conscripts took what they were given and shuffled back outside.

Vasiliev was at the back. Maybe he had slept for two hours, restless and fitful, but no more. His head ached from the explosion of noise, the siren blasts and the screams of the sergeant. The sergeant, a demented ghost, had run down the length of the dormitory barracks stripping the blankets off them. Behind him the platoon formed up, and among the yawning, coughing and grunting was the scrape sound of ammunition being loaded into magazines, and the rattle on the paving of dropped bullets, and the yelling of the sergeant, and the shouting of the zampolit. In front of him, an assault rifle was handed over and rounds were gathered up.

'Next.'

A rifle was thrust at him. 'No, I use the heavy machine-gun.'

'You use what you are given.'

'I should be given the NSV heavy machine-gun.'

The clerk threw up his hands in exaggerated complaint, then shuffled off to the back of the armoury. When he reached the far end he shouted for Vasiliev to come to help him. The sergeant called after him that the whole 'fucking platoon' was not waiting for him he should catch them up at the headquarters building. Two heavy youngsters, the last in the dormitory to be half dressed, Mikhail and Dmitri, made the final length of the queue. Piatkin's voice rose above the sergeants; the platoon should go immediately to the headquarters building. He went past the desk and down past the rifle racks into the dim-lit recess of the building. Against the rear wall was Vasiliev's weapon resting on its tripod — as he had left it when he had come back from the range, and after he had cleaned it.

'Don't think I'm carrying it. You want it, you carry it. And how much ammunition?'

'Two hundred rounds, ball and tracer and—'

A voice, soft as zephyr wind, behind him said, 'He wants seven hundred and fifty rounds — ball and tracer and armour piercing — and he wants a second barrel.'

Vasiliev turned. The man close to him was slightly built and wore dirtied casual clothes. There was blood on his hands, caked dry, and his eyes were deep reddened as if from weeping.

The clerk snapped, 'And who are you to give orders in my—'

'I am Colonel Bikov, FSB military counterintelligence. He wants seven hundred and fifty rounds and a second barrel, and he gets them whether I have to break your neck or not. And I want one 82mm mortar, and I want twenty-five para flares. How do you want your neck to be?'

He barely knew Mikhail and Dmitri. They were wide-shouldered, wide-gutted, and inseparable. He knew they came from the great wheat plains of central Russia, near to the Urals. He'd heard other conscripts say that Mikhail wet his bed at night and that Dmitri cried for his home and family. They had been one month in the platoon, and he had never seen evidence of that. Standing behind the shabby bloodstained man, the great swollen muscles of their shoulders burst inside the singlets and the open tunics, and their hands — big as hams from a smokehouse — reached for the 82mm mortar that the clerk pointed to, and the boxes for the mortar shells.

They had the machine-gun and its belts of ammunition, the mortar and the boxes. They struggled, the four of them, back down the length of the armoury shed to the door. The clerk shouted at them that he needed signatures.

A second platoon of naval infantry was reaching the armoury and had begun to form a queue.

Vasiliev struck out towards the headquarters building.

The command cut in the night air. 'You are with me. You take my orders.'

'Where do we go?'

'To the nearest point of water, where there are no fences and no regular patrols.'

He pointed towards the canal. Now Vasiliev led. His right hand on the barrel, and Bikov's on the shoulder rest, took the weight of the machine-gun; with their left hands they carried the ammunition box. Behind them, with the strength of farm-boys, Mikhail and Dmitri brought the 82mm mortar and the boxes of flares. They could not run, could barely trot. After a hundred metres, he thought the officer struggled, but he had seen his face and did not think this was a man likely to show his weakness.

Vasiliev said, 'May I ask, sir, did they take Captain Archenko?'

'They took Captain Archenko.'

'The sergeant said Captain Archenko was a traitor, and that terrorists had freed him and…'

'…and murdered two good men. What is your name?'

'Vasiliev, sir.'

'Your given name?'

'Igor, sir.'

'Please, Igor, keep your strength and don't talk. Please, don't waste your strength.'

A searchlight played over the base, flitted between buildings and over roads, and as they struggled forward the light caught the glimmer of the canal.

The searchlight's beam tracked from the base to the beach below its mounting on the wall of the fortress. For a few moments its cone crossed the length of the sand and the sea wall then it raked on further and out on to the water. The beam had the power to penetrate the mist that had followed the rain. When it hooked on to a breakwater or a buoy marking a sunken wreck, it lingered, then moved on. It found a speck of white, traversed beyond it, and was jerked back. The cone of the searchlight's beam settled on five men, one in white and half out of the water clinging to something that the searchlight's crew could only identify as a floating black bag. One screamed into his radio what the searchlight showed them, and the other held the target. The target was close to the wall on the west side of the canal. The beam locked on to the swimmers.

Locke was away from the track and could move quicker on a cushion carpet of pine needles; the wand stick eased his path. There were no more brambles to catch at his clothes and tear his hands, and fewer of the hazels, which had whipped back on to his face when he'd blundered into them. He was beyond the line of trenches and bunkers, and he thought that this ground, now pine-planted, had been given up in that old battle. It was the first time in six years that he could remember being without the weight of the mobile telephone on his belt.

He felt a sense of peace. The phone was always on his belt in Warsaw and had been with him every working day, and every weekend day, and had been on charge at night, always within reach. The phone, its presence and its link to his work, had been confirmation of his status as an intelligence officer, a symbol of constant responsibility.

The mobile phone was now in the pocket of Alice's coat, which hung on the back of a chair in the kitchen of the bungalow. Only when it was over, when she needed her coat, would she find his mobile phone. He wanted no contact with a world away from the sand spit and the forest.

Without the phone, he was free of them. He was liberated from Ponsford and Giles, and from Rupert bloody Mowbray. He was released from the spectral image of the dead man floating under the pontoon bridge.

He heard a whisper of sound that was alien to the motion of the high pine canopy and to the tread of his shoes over the carpet of needles.

Eight miles from his parents' farm, a direct line over fields and past rock outcrops and bracken slopes, was a quarry. Regular enough that a clock could be set to it, they had blasted a fresh fall of granite boulders each working morning at six a.m. As a child, in the school term, he had slept through the distant crack of the explosion, but in the holidays his father had pitched him out of bed and he had been frogmarched to the milking parlour to help. Every holiday morning, milking began at five forty-five a.m. Sourly, he had driven the cattle into the bays of the parlour, and every one of those mornings he had promised himself that as soon as he was able he would be gone from the cold, the cow shit and the smell of the farm. Ten minutes before the blasting, eight miles away, as the milk was sucked from the beasts' udders, a siren warned of the explosion. For ten minutes, if the wind was from the east, in the milking parlour he could hear it faintly.

It was the same sound. He knew they were running.