Northlight q-11 Page 15

  'Seventy-one kilos.'

  'Have you got any kind of scar across your left shoulder?'

  'No.''

  I dropped these papers too into the stove and watched the flames. Fane was going to get some good ones for him and until they were in my hands and we had a car to drive we couldn't make a move, but at least it would give me time to coax him out of his shell and find what was frightening him like this.

  There was something I was missing or something I didn't know and would have to know before I could get rid of the feeling that there was more, much more, to the routine mission Control had given me, of taking a blown sleeper across.

  'We're getting you some effective papers,' I told him. 'Then we can move. Once you're out of Russia you can start making a new life for yourself.'

  'Yes.' His eyes hung on me like a grateful dog's.

  There'd be people he'd miss, I supposed. His wife. His mistress. 'I phoned Tanya,' I said, 'to let her know you were all right. She was worried.'

  'Tanya?'

  'Your girlfriend.'

  'I don't know anyone called Tanya.'

  16 BRIEFING

  One of the sailors threw his cards down onto the table and got up and hauled another man off his chair and pushed him into the door and the hinges broke and the door swung down with the man on top of it. A bottle hit the floor by his head with a crash and I put my hand up to protect my eyes from flying splinters of glass.

  'Cheating son of a whore!'

  The sailor began kicking the man on the floor and some other people stopped him and dragged him away to the bar.

  'What's that?' Fane asked me.

  'Chap arguing.'

  'Where are you speaking from?'

  'A workers' club.' It was nearer than the post office.

  The man on the floor began crawling outside, leaving a trail of blood. Two or three of his friends went out to help him.

  'Debrief,' Fane told me.

  'I've located the objective.' We couldn't afford to mention his name; even on an unbugged line there could be an operator with a sharp ear, and Karasov was being hunted throughout {Western Russia. 'He's lost his nerve, as you suspected. Volodarskiy is first class, for your information. Also for your information, the woman Tanya Kiselev is either a KGB swallow or she's with the Rinker cell or some other opposition group.'

  I waited. It was a long pause. 'How do you know?'

  'The objective denies any knowledge of her, and there'd be no point in his lying.'

  'Did he mention his wife?'

  'No. But he knows I'm getting him out of the country and if he sees her again it'll be in the West. There was nothing to stop him admitting he had a mistress: I wasn't likely to tell anyone.'

  Another pause. 'Have you been in touch with her since your first meeting in Murmansk?'

  'Yes. I phoned her to say he was safe and well.'

  'You didn't say where he was?'

  'Not really. He's the objective.'

  'Did she ask where he was?'

  'Of course.'

  There was silence for another few seconds. 'It's not going to be an easy run for you.'

  'Croder wouldn't have sent me otherwise.'

  Glass smashed again at the far end of the room where the bar was. I couldn't see what was happening because the place was thick with tobacco smoke. I think they were having trouble with the sailor. The other man hadn't come back. There was a freezing draught coming in and two men were trying to put the door back but the hinges had been torn right out of the moulding.

  'I'll signal London,' Fane said on the line. He meant about Tanya.

  'Don't let anyone go near her.'

  'Of course not.'

  She had to go on thinking she hadn't been blown.

  'I've got some transport for you,' Fane said. 'It's a black Moscwicz pickup truck loaded with grain. Where do you want it left?'

  'Is it available now?'

  'Yes.'

  'Have it left outside the public reading room behind the main post office. There's a car park there. What's the number?'

  He read it to me and I memorized it. 'I'll also need some papers for the objective. His were no good: I burned them.'

  'There are some new ones on the way from Moscow by plane tonight. Unless there's any kind of hitch the courier will arrive in Kandalaksha on the 11:15 train tomorrow morning, snow conditions permitting.'

  'Where do I make contact?'

  'Immediately below the iron footbridge across the freight-yard at the station. There's only one bridge and one freight-yard. The rendezvous is for 11:30. If the train is delayed you'll rendezvous again at twelve noon and every hour after that, on the hour.'

  'Parole?'

  'He'll ask you if you're waiting for the geese. You'll tell him they were sent yesterday on the market train.'

  'Roger.'

  They were taking the sailor out now, singing drunk. Two other men had found a carpet from somewhere and were nailing one end across the top of the door to keep the draught out.

  'As soon as you've got the papers,' Fane said, 'drive to Severomorsk, just north of Murmansk on the Kola River, the east bank. I'm going to try getting you both out by ship.'

  I felt sudden hope. Fane was working more efficiently than I'd expected: he'd already found some transport and was getting the papers through and working on a plan to ship us out. There was no reason for the KGB to stop us on the drive north, and the Rinker cell hadn't picked up my scent. It looked as if we were actually going to be taking the objective to the West. End of mission, so forth.

  'What's my cover story?'

  'I'll leave that to you.'

  'There was a thousand-to-one chance the two KGB men who'd questioned me on the train might now be helping in' the search for Karasov along the roads, so I would say that I couldn't get the job I'd hoped for at the foundry and I was earning a few rubles carting the grain to a chicken farm in the north.

  'All right.'

  'Do you need anything else?'

  'No. Will you be in touch with the courier before tomorrow morning?'

  'Yes.'

  'Synchronize watches.'

  '15:21.'

  'That's right."

  There was a short silence, then Fane said, 'Good luck.'

  'Thank you.'

  I hung up the receiver and pulled the carpet aside and went out under the dark afternoon sky, and heard the faint distant singing of the drunk.

  'I don't see how we can get through,' Karasov said.

  I'd been expecting this. He'd hardly slept during the night: he'd woken me a dozen times, turning on the straw mattress alongside mine.

  Volodarskiy spat, turning away. I already knew his contempt for Karasov's lack of courage.

  'Everything is arranged,' I told Karasov. 'We're going to make a short run to the coast, and there's a ship waiting.' I turned to the heavy screen of cowhides and pulled it aside, and heard the dog voice, low in its throat. The dog too had been awake in the night, disturbed by something outside.

  'I would rather wait for a time,' Karasov told me, standing there with his hands hanging by his sides and his head down. 'In another week they will have stopped hunting for me.'

  Volodarskiy came back from the shadows, his eyes as bright as the dog's.

  'Out!' he said.

  Karasov flinched. 'You don't understand my position. They-'

  'But I understand mine, my friend. If they find you here I shall spend the rest of my life breaking stones. Out!'

  The dog voiced again, sensing the menace in its master's tone. Karasov flinched again but didn't move.

  'It'll take me a few minutes to start the truck,' I told him. 'Once it's going, I'm driving north. If you want to come with me you haven't got long to make up your mind.' I went out into the snow. If he didn't get the point I would have to come back and drag him to the truck and if necessary all the way to the Kola River. Not terribly propitious, you might say, not precisely a joy-ride, but theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or the, so fo
rth.

  The barn was a hundred yards from the cave and I'd run the black pickup truck inside it last evening, going in backwards and leaving it to one side where the earth floor sloped towards the entrance. If the battery couldn't turn the engine after the night's cold we had a chance of a push start. As I crunched through the snow I listened for Karasov but so far he hadn't left the cave. There wouldn't be any problem getting him out of there: Volodarskiy would give the appropriate word and the dog would do the rest. The problems would come later unless I could shake him out of his blue funk.

  It was just ten o'clock and the early light was seeping across the sky from the east above the black skeletal trees. It was thirty minutes' drive to the rail yards and I was leaving an hour to check out the environment before we kept the rendezvous. As I went into the barn I looked back and saw Karasov trudging through the snow, a hunched, bulky figure with its head down. There were no doors on the barn: it was a huge ruin of a building, its rotting timbers holding up as if by virtue of the dogged endurance that had brought it through so many winters here. It faced west, towards the cave, and the shadows were still deep. Odd shapes reared against the walls, of wrecked machinery and crates and implements and things unknown. Cattle, I supposed, must have sheltered here once, and even died in here, frozen on their feet.

  I got behind the wheel of the truck just as Karasov reached the entrance of the barn and stood there for a moment looking in, his shoulders hunched and his mittened hands hanging by his sides.

  'Don't come near,' I told him through the open window of the truck.

  'What?'

  'Keep away. Go back to the cave.'

  I was sitting perfectly still.

  'Why?'

  I tried to pitch my voice loud enough for him to hear me, and no more.

  'Karasov, I want you to go back to the cave. Tell him I sent you.'

  My scalp had lifted and I could feel the gooseflesh creeping along my arms. It was just the smell, really: there was nothing to see or hear.

  'Go back?' Karasov called out.

  'Yes. Wait there for me.'

  He went on staring for a long time, trying to think why I'd changed my mind; then he turned away and his figure grew smaller across the snow. I didn't move until he'd reached the cave. Then I moved very carefully.

  17 TOY

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

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

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

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

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

  It was probably wired to the ignition.

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

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

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

  Why not?

  What did we know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But when I moved I moved slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'What's wrong?'

  I jerked round and looked at him.

  Volodarskiy.

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

  'Someone was here in the night.'

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

  'How do you know?'

  'They put a bomb on board this thing.'

  'How do you know?' he asked again.

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