Northlight q-11 Read online

  This man would take on the KGB but he'd much rather not: he'd rather get me back in the train and pistol-whip me or use a syringe and shove me under the seat until he could get me off at Kandalaksha.

  "Two."

  I was worried about my coat. It was still draped half across the windowsill of the toilet and I was so cold now that it was the only thing I could think of by simple association, thirst, drink, so forth. I thought of something terribly funny to say — Do you mind if I fetch my coat?

  Not funny, no. You've got to do something, I don't want to the.

  Shuddup you snivelling little bastard.

  Then a spark came flying back from the engine and stung my face and I came out of the alpha waves and thought oh Jesus Christ this is going to be it.

  'Three.'

  I squinted upwards and saw the gun and remembered what was happening and moved my feet along the running board and brought my hands level and then moved my feet again and saw from the corner of my eye the coat fall from the window but there was nothing I could do about that.

  'Faster,' the Lithuanian called.

  The whole thing was rocking badly now — the train felt as if it were running across the bare sleepers instead of the rails because I wasn't much more than a frozen carcass and normal consciousness kept slipping into zen as the mind tried to save the organism by relaxing and going blank and letting the body fight its way out of trouble if it could.

  'Faster!'

  Bastard thought I was a fucking miracle worker.

  He had the door open and he was crouching on his haunches, because even he'd got enough sense to know that if I were going to climb back into this train I'd need some help. You can't expect anyone to hang on and go on hanging on with the shimmering light and the scent of roses, till you can't. Wake up.

  What? Yes. Nearly lost it all.

  Dangerous, this is very dangerous, we- I don't want to the.

  Shuddup.

  'Come on,' he said, and I took another look upwards with the air-rush tearing at my eyes and the stink of the coal-smoke bitter-sweet in my lungs. He still had the gun on me but his knee was hooked against the edge of the doorway to keep him stable and he was reaching down with his free hand. I thought of taking hold of it but couldn't manage that: it would be too personal, like a handshake, too intimate within the context of kill or be killed. It would pay him to take my hand and pull me to safety but it would also pay him later to shoot aminazin or sulfazin into my veins and blow the last vestige of sanity out of my skull.

  You're no friend of mine.

  'Take my hand.'

  Not bloody likely, you've probably got the pox.

  He was reaching down but I wouldn't cooperate so he got fed up and took hold of my jacket and I let him get the top part of my body across the doorway with my face against the floor and the smell of linoleum and ancient tobacco stains in my nostrils and then I dragged back enough of my consciousness to work things out because we couldn't go on like this, it was bloody humiliating.

  I could feel the relative warmth of the compartment against my head and shoulders and it brought back a feeling of life, a small flame that began flickering through the veins and the nervous system and working on this half-stiffened carcass and bringing some kind of rational thought back into the mind. I began noting things: the bulk of the Lithuanian still crouched on his haunches; the trembling of the floor as the train rocked on its way through the snows; the uncertain light from the bulbs in the ceiling as they blinked to a faulty contact; the ring of steel pressed against my temple and the smell of gun oil.

  'Make an effort,' he said.

  Rather formal, that. He could have said come on you bastard I haven't got all day, or something equally rude. He was quite educated, quite a gentleman, but frankly, you know, when someone's digging your grave for you it doesn't make any difference if he's a gentleman or an absolute shit.

  'You know what this is?' The ring of steel pressed harder.

  'Gun.'

  I suppose he was testing me to see how far gone I was.

  'Get a grip on that seat,' he said.

  I could see the edge of it from where I was lying with my face still against the floor. I reached up and got a hold with my fingers below the cushion and realized that full consciousness was back in my head now and my body was losing its numbness in the warmth of the compartment. I didn't know how much time had gone by since I'd dropped from the window but it was probably a good three or four minutes. That was important, because this man was in a hurry to get me phased out in some way and shoved under the seat. Or he might rely on the gun and order me to sit beside him with the thing against my ribs and make some kind of plausible conversation when people went past along the corridor, we've had a rotten grain crop again, you know what that means, we'll have to buy it from those bloody Americans.

  I got it half right and that was dangerous because it left the gun flat against the side of my head and if he pulled the trigger he'd probably blow my shoulder off but at least I'd made a start and he hadn't been ready for it — I'd swung my arm up in a sweeping forearm block and that had paralysed his arm and got the muzzle of the gun away from my temple but there was a lot to do yet if I wanted to survive and I wasn't at all certain I could muster enough strength out of a half-frozen body. He wasn't saving anything, wasn't trying to warn me. I suppose he was enough of a pro to know there wouldn't be any point in talking: the situation wasn't very complex and he knew I understood that unless I could do something effective I'd either finish up with my head blown off or he'd pitch me out of the train and deal with things that way.

  We were in a lock at the moment, like two wrestlers. He was a strong man and he was above me and he had the gun but the face of my sensei had come into my mind and his image was floating there as he lent me his spirit, his ki, so that I was able to stop thinking about what had to be done and concentrate instead on how to do it, which moves to make, which muscle groups to call into action, which angles and surfaces and hand-holds would be best for me if I could find them and use them. There was for instance the strap of the window touching the fingers of my left hand, and I thought about it, picturing the inside of the compartment until I could identify the strap and decide whether it would help me.

  My arm was still across his throat and his neck was arched back with his head against the door-hinge but I couldn't increase the pressure enough to block his windpipe because he knew where the danger was: the throat is the primary killing area at close quarters for three very good reasons and he knew what they were. I couldn't increase the pressure there but I had to maintain it because he was waiting for me to slacken off and lose the initiative and then he would move his right hand and fix on the target again and squeeze his index finger and send a 200-grain hollow-point projectile into my skull and through the soft grey convolutions of my brain at 1500 feet per second and I didn't want him to do that.

  He'd shut the inside door of the compartment after him when he'd come in here and when the train hit the tunnel it slammed a gust of stinking air across us and blocked the eardrums as the tumult of the wheels built up against the tunnel wall and produced a long sustained roaring that shut down a certain degree of consciousness while the brain tried to accept what was going on and reassure the emotions.

  For the moment I couldn't do anything but keep him where he was and it wouldn't be long before muscle fatigue set in and he made a move and caught me by surprise and finished me off so I began trying to work something out, using the tactile data that was available. He had a choice, of course, and we both understood what it was: if he couldn't put a bullet somewhere conclusive he would have to push me bodily off the train; and as I thought about it I became gradually aware that the tactile information coming in confirmed it. He'd started to ease the pressure of the gun against my head and transfer it to my left arm. If he could break my arm or paralyse it at the median or the radial nerve it would release my fingers from the edge of the seat and I would fall backwards through the open doo
rway and he'd have time to put the bullet in to make sure.

  I began putting pressure the other way to see if I were right and I was: he reacted at once, increasing his own. It was like a silent conversation going on, not terribly civil but perfectly articulate; we were equally experienced at clinging to life and there wasn't likely to be anything more than luck involved when we reached the conclusion; meanwhile our two heads were within twelve inches of each other and inside them there was going on this telepathic dialogue, so explicit that each of us had started anticipating the other's next move.

  The train was still in the tunnel and I was shallow-breathing again because the compartment was thick with smoke and my eyes were streaming the whole time. The muscles in my right forearm were beginning to feel the fatigue of keeping up a constant pressure and when I took it off and clawed for his eyes we both shifted to the shock of the sudden movement and I felt the gun swinging across my temple and waited for the noise and found my right arm free and smashed the elbow against his face but missed and grazed his head and felt the whole of my weight falling backwards until I found one of his eyes with my fingers and used a gouge and sent him hard against the seat as he tried to stop me. I thought he was screaming but it was the locomotive — the sound came shrilling along the tunnel like a cry of pain.

  No go. I'd relieved the strain on my arm but we were locked again and the gun was pressed against my face with the barrel pointing downwards along my body and it was only a matter of time before he fired and waited for blood loss and pushed me out of the train.

  He began hurrying now and I knew why. If he could shoot me and push me out while we were still in the tunnel he'd bring off a certain kill: it wouldn't matter if the shot didn't do anything lethal because when I went down I'd hit the wall and bounce back under the wheels and that would be final. He was hurrying by millimetres and I felt it and gave it some thought and realized that he wanted to make sure of a useful shot before he pulled the trigger: it was no good just putting it into my leg because you can go on working for quite a long time unless there's an artery hit and even then you can try for an overkill before the blood loss starts weakening the organism.

  So I began hurrying too and pulled my arm from his neck and formed a half-fist and went for the windpipe but he was ready for any kind of move and blocked me and then there was a rushing of foetid air and the eardrums opened as the train ran clear of the tunnel and I lost my balance and clawed for a grip on anything I could find but it was no go and I went pitching down to the track.

  15 OBJECTIVE

  'Look at this! And they expect me to keep to a schedule!' The huge windscreen wiper grated across the glass.

  'Three snow ploughs, in fifty kilometres. It's a joke!'

  We hit a drift and he dragged us clear again.

  'They should try it themselves some time!"

  He tugged the gearshift, double-declutching, and the engine roared. Ahead of us the sky was black with snow clouds.

  'Don't they make allowances for the conditions?' I asked him.

  'Allowances?' He turned his huge bearded face to me, his eyes rolling. 'They wouldn't make allowances if the engine dropped out and the wheels fell off and the exhaust pipe got stuck up a polar bear's arse! They think this is summer! They're whoresons!'

  He kicked the throttle with a massive boot and put the truck into a slide to avoid a stranded tractor. A man in a fur cap waved to him for help, and he stuck his face out of the window. 'Fuck your luck, comrade!"

  I shifted my weight on the worn seat to ease the bruises.

  'Have you got enough petrol to get you to Kandalaksha?'

  'If those constipated imbeciles have got the road clear, yes.'

  It was a big Sovtransavto truck with a Leningrad licence and a TIR plate at the rear. It smelled as if it were carrying some kind of fertilizer, or perhaps it was the driver, but I didn't mind, he was my friend, my good friend. He'd been crawling in low gear through a mess of stranded vehicles a few miles back and I'd climbed into the cab without asking first and told him my car was broken down with a cracked cylinder block.

  The coat was a good fit and most of the numbness had gone from my legs. The bruises were on my right shoulder and forearm where they'd hit the rocks alongside the track. The Lithuanian had been underneath me when we'd dropped because my weight had torn his one hand-hold away and he couldn't save himself.

  'That's my wife!' the truck driver called above the drumming of the engine. He pointed at the coloured photograph stuck to the facia panel, of a girl with enormous breasts in a bikini.

  'Very nice too,' I said.

  'Don't I wish!' he yelled and gave a bellowing laugh.

  I hadn't intended, in any case, to leave the train without the Lithuanian. I think he tried to bring the gun into some kind of aim on the way down through the freezing windrush but I knew he'd do that so I found his arm and twisted it and the only shot he managed to fire was wild. He was dead as soon as his head impacted on the rocks: I saw that much when I crawled back from where the momentum had thrown me. There wasn't any blood on the coat so I pulled him out of it and put it on as the last of the train rolled past and left a funereal quiet among the snows.

  I searched his pockets for what I could find, leaving the wad of notes and taking the wallet to go through: his papers might tell me something about his cell and if they were forged I'd know, and if they were genuine they might be usable. In this trade you always pick a corpse: the dead can sometimes save the living.

  I knocked the eight remaining rounds out of the chamber and scattered them and threw the gun across the tracks and into the deep drifts on the other side and then rolled him into a gully and threw snow over him until he was covered. One hand rose into sight again and I caught my breath and felt my scalp tighten as I stared down; it was the way he'd finished up, that was all, rolling deeper between the rocks so that his arm had moved upwards through the snow. I pushed it down again and started walking to the highway.

  'This one's my wife, really!'

  Next to the picture of Lenin was a faded sepia photograph of a strong young woman perched on a milk churn with a chicken struggling in her arms, her smile seductive except for a missing tooth. 'She's a good woman, a good cook. Feeds me like a fucking commissar!'

  The road was clear most of the way to Kandalaksha and I asked him to drop me as close as he was going to the main post office. The time was 10:47.

  'No. I covered him with snow.'

  Fane gave one of his pauses on the line. 'What about the other man?" 'As far as I know he's still on the train.'

  'As far as you know?'

  'It didn't stop. No one pulled the cord. But he might have jumped off when he saw we'd both gone.'

  'It's possible, then, that he could have caught up with you along the road, by getting a lift too?'

  'Yes. But call it a thousand-to-one shot.' I checked the time again: it had taken me nearly an hour to get through to Murmansk. 'There was a third man on the train,' I told him. 'He was surveilling me.' There was some crackling on the line. 'Are we clear on this call?'

  'What? I'm clear at this end. Are you in a hotel?'

  'Post office.'

  We both listened, but I couldn't detect a bug. It didn't mean there wasn't one because they're not always detectable, but there'd been heavy snow across the telephone lines between here and Murmansk and some of the poles were down.

  "If you're in a post office,' Fane said, 'then we're clear. Was the third man in the Rinker cell?' "No. He was working his peep independently.'

  A brief pause. "I'm not too surprised. With an international background this big we can expect almost any group to crawl out of the woodwork.'

  In a moment I said quietly, 'Fane, he wasn't one of Croder's people, was he?'

  I'd tried to sound casual but it didn't quite come off. My hands were shaking now and I couldn't stop them: that man under the snow was the fifth one to the since Northlight had started running and I'd been with him and just because he was work
ing for the other side and just because he'd been trying to blow my brains out it didn't mean I wasn't going to get the shakes a couple of hours afterwards — we see a lot of it in this trade but we don't exactly enjoy it, we don't exactly revel in it, we're not bloody machines, you know 'Croder's people?' I heard Fane asking.

  'Oh come on for Christ's sake — was he a shield or a backup or some kind of support, you know what I'm talking about.'

  I was sweating badly because it wasn't only that man's death on my mind and the way his hand had come out of the snow like that as if he were asking for help, it was my own death too, the one that had nearly happened, because he'd only needed to force that gun round half an inch until it was against my head and I wouldn't have been standing here in this overheated fucking post office reporting the status of the mission to a local control I didn't like and didn't trust and didn't" Croder never told me he was sending anyone to support you,' Fane said. 'He-'

  'That doesn't mean a bloody thing. He wouldn't necessarily tell you what he was doing if he decided to send out a pack of bloody amateurs to get in my way.'

  Watch it, you're losing your cool and he won't like that, he'll signal London and tell them this one's losing his nerve, better have a replacement standing by. He's not Ferris. He doesn't understand.

  'I very much doubt,' the voice picked its way carefully along the line, 'that Main Control would put secondary agents into the field without first informing me. It would endanger my executive and the whole mission.'

  I waited a minute and took a breath before I spoke. 'All right. I accept that.'

  'Thank you.'

  He had a point in any case. When some kind of international crisis breaks between East and West they both set up priority missions to defuse the powder keg and stop it blowing the whole thing apart, and it does in fact bring a lot of low-calibre grey-area intelligence outfits out of the woodwork to look for anything they can pick up and trade. They don't amount to much more than mobile listening-posts, I've just got hold of some rather interesting stuff on troop movements along the Chinese border, old boy, do you think your people would like me to get in touch? That sort of thing, but you can never be certain they won't tap a line or get wind of a courier run and then they'll try to throw shadows across your operation in the hope of picking up something they can trade with any legitimate network who'll buy it.