The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  Yet here he still was. It might have been foolish—it almost certainly was—but he couldn’t bring himself to hightail it over the hill at this stage of the proceedings. It would be like leaving a nickelodeon with the heroine still in the villain’s grasp or walking out of Ibrox with Rangers and Celtics tied in the final minutes and a penalty kick about to be taken. He would slip away only when he knew that she was safe and that the final result was no longer in doubt.

  The open window looked out across the river, and as the room grew hotter, McColl took up station beside it, enjoying the breeze that blew down from the mountains. He watched with interest as two antique muzzle-loading cannons were trundled past him and out of sight to the left. Around noon six soldiers assembled on the wooden landing stage and sat down on its edge, their feet dangling over the water.

  Not long after that, his door swung open, and Komarov walked in. The Russian looked, if possible, even more exhausted than he had in the hour before they’d reached Kerki. He sat down on the bed and stifled a yawn.

  “Will those guns actually fire?” McColl asked.

  “I hope so.” The Russian massaged his chin with his left hand. “I have another question for you. Nothing important, just to satisfy my own curiosity.” He looked McColl straight in the eye. “After you lost your tail in Samarkand, why didn’t you make a run for it then? It wouldn’t have been difficult.”

  “I’m sure you know the answer to that, Yuri Vladimirovich.”

  “She means that much to you? You could not have stayed here, my friend, and she would not have left. Her work is here.”

  “Women are no better treated anywhere else,” McColl said.

  “Perhaps not, but she is part of this.”

  McColl sighed. “She was. She may be still—I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”

  Komarov gave him a searching look and seemed satisfied with what he found. “I have a proposition for you. I have only twelve men out there, and most of them are boys.”

  “I will gladly join you,” McColl said simply.

  Komarov shook his head. “No, that would be misunderstood. I have something else in mind.”

  After a short but surprising talk with Komarov, Caitlin spent the rest of the morning at the Soviet offices up in the fortress, talking, or rather listening, to the woman who had greeted their party at the landing stage. Her name was Shadiva Kuliyeva, and at any other time, Caitlin would have found the woman’s story as fascinating as it was inspiring. Only a year earlier Kuliyeva had been the veiled slave-wife of a local rice merchant, and now she seemed to be running the local Soviet—and the town of Kerki—in all but title.

  She could certainly talk the average Russian under the table. Or perhaps it was simply the excitement of having a “comrade woman” to talk to. The flow of anecdotes and stories dried up only when Caitlin’s yawns became too frequent to ignore. “You must get some sleep,” Kuliyeva said, not at all offended.

  “No.” Caitlin slowly got to her feet, still stiff from the two nights on horseback, and took a look out of the window. The river below was empty, but the view downstream was cut off by a protruding tower, so for all she knew the riverboat might be approaching. A swift descent to the quay was tempting, but Komarov had made her promise to stay out of harm’s way, for all of their sakes. “What time is it?” she asked Kuliyeva.

  “Half-past twelve.”

  “Then they should be here soon,” Caitlin said, mostly to herself.

  “Is it true that your husband is one of the . . . ?” the Uzbek woman asked.

  “Yes, he is,” Caitlin acknowledged. And her lover was locked in the barracks. And her comrade—and that, she realized, really was how she saw him—was down by the river getting a dozen boys ready to fight three dangerous men.

  Kuliyeva waited patiently.

  “It’s a long story,” Caitlin said wearily. Down below two boats were inching out into the current. “Is there somewhere we can go with a better view?” she asked.

  “Of course. The roof. Here.” Kuliyeva picked up a pair of binoculars from the desk and handed them to Caitlin. “Come.”

  As they climbed the steps, Caitlin found herself going through all of the feasible outcomes, and realizing that every last one was freighted with sadness and grief.

  Komarov could hear the distant churning of the paddle, but the ship itself was still hidden from sight by the bend in the river a mile or so downstream. There both banks rose into cliffs, and the paddle steamer, when it did appear, seemed dwarfed by nature, smaller than he had imagined. It was a dazzling white in the afternoon sun, pumping dark grey smoke into the clear blue sky.

  The timing was almost perfect. By the time the boat reached Komarov’s position, the sun would be ideally placed to cover his intended angle of approach. Making use of this blind spot might not provide much of an edge, but it was all he had. If the riverboat slowed to its usual speed on this treacherous stretch of the river, and if the four of them rowed fast enough to catch it, then they might get aboard unseen. All the evidence pointed to there being only three renegades, and one at least would be on the bridge. The others, he hoped, would be suitably distracted by the cannons on the opposite bank and the boats up ahead in midchannel.

  Komarov scrambled down the bank and into the skiff, which was screened from view by the drooping branches of a large and ancient willow. When Maslov and the two soldiers all looked up expectantly, he found himself feeling almost irritated by their touching faith in his leadership.

  Three-quarters of a mile farther upstream the other two boats were inching out into the center of the river, each with its crew of three soldiers. These men had shown rather less confidence—they were quite likely lambs to the slaughter, and some of them seemed to know it. If the cannons could silence the mounted machine gun, they had a good chance of survival. If not . . .

  The paddle steamer was less than half a mile away, and appeared to be moving slower than Komarov had expected. Which, if true, was excellent news.

  There was no sign of passengers or crew, no movement on the outside deck—if not for the churning wheel and the steam pulsing out of the funnels, it could have been a ghost ship.

  But then a steam whistle pierced the air, once, twice, like a bugler announcing a charge, and Komarov could make out a blond-haired figure on the foredeck, crouched behind the mounted machine gun. The latter’s position gave it a wide field of fire, but as Komarov had hoped, the riverboat’s superstructure, rising behind it, precluded it from covering his intended approach. His plan might work.

  The seconds ticked by, the distance shortening—surely it had to be in range by now. “Fire, for God’s sake,” he heard himself mutter.

  Somebody heard him. First there was a puff of yellow smoke, then a dull boom that rolled across the water. The outflung ball splashed into the river behind the churning wheel.

  The Red Turkestan drew level with Komarov’s position. “Go,” he told the others, leaning into the oars.

  “How many guns?” Piatakov shouted.

  Brady was standing on the steps up to the bridge, examining the southern bank through the captain’s telescope. “Two!” he yelled back. “And they look about a hundred years old. If only we had a Jolly Roger!”

  The second cannon fired, its ball falling fifty yards short. Piatakov could see the guns now and knew they were still beyond his machine gun’s range. So were the two small boats up ahead, but he aimed a short burst at them anyway, hoping they’d realize the cost of staying where they were.

  There was another puff of smoke on the bank, and this time the ball crashed into the ship’s superstructure with a deafening clang. Piatakov instinctively flinched, then saw that the culprit was trundling off down the deck like a bowling ball.

  He and Brady grinned at each other. The enemy might as well have been throwing cabbages.

  Komarov swore under his breath. The cannons
were next to useless—only a direct hit on the machine gun or the paddle would cause the renegades a significant problem. And God only knew what the machine gun would do to the men in the boats up ahead.

  The men on the landing stage had opened fire with their rifles—he could hear the bullets pinging off the metal sides. His boat was now about a hundred yards adrift and slowly gaining. Sweat was pouring off their faces as they strained at the oars.

  There was a thumping explosion on the far bank, and Komarov lifted his eyes in time to see something—or someone—heading skyward above the muzzle-loaders.

  One of the guns had exploded. The Kerki Soviet would probably need a new chairman.

  Piatakov fired a burst over the heads of the soldiers in the two small boats, hoping that they would turn tail like their colleagues in Burdalik. A bullet whining off his improvised breastplate suggested that they intended otherwise, and he raked one boat, dropping at least one soldier and causing two others to take to the water. But when he tried to swing the barrel into line with the other boat, it wouldn’t move.

  “What’s the matter?” Brady shouted.

  “The mounting’s jammed!”

  “Leave it!” Brady yelled as he ran down the steps. “You take the port side,” he told Piatakov, gesturing in that direction. “Anyone tries to get aboard, tell them they don’t have a ticket.”

  As Komarov’s skiff pulled alongside, a well-aimed grappling hook tagged it to the moving paddle steamer. He watched as Maslov and the two soldiers clambered up and through the deck railings, then followed. There was no one else in sight. The machine gun had fallen silent; the only firing was coming from the landing stage, the bullets bouncing off the ship like blind mosquitoes. So where was the enemy?

  Someone ran along the deck above them, the footfalls disappearing around the stern.

  “Take the other side,” he told Maslov. “You go with him,” he told one of the soldiers. “Shoot on sight.”

  The young Ukrainian tried for a gallant smile and only narrowly failed. Komarov stood where he was for a moment, watching the two men go, aware of the sweat running down either side of his nose. He hadn’t felt this frightened since his days as a trainee policeman.

  “All right,” he said calmly, as much to himself as to the soldier beside him. “Slowly.”

  They edged forward, Komarov in front, trying to keep their heads below the windows. The rifle fire from the landing stage had stopped, and all he could hear was the thunderous spinning of the paddle wheel. Then someone shouted something from a long way off, something unintelligible.

  Komarov stopped abruptly, and the soldier stumbled into his back. The engine room! They should have gone straight for that and put the boat out of action. He remembered all the times he’d thought that you couldn’t make a policeman out of a soldier. It seemed the opposite was also true.

  Two shots rang out on the other side of the boat, one crack, one boom. Maslov! Komarov hurried forward, looking for a way across, but all he found was a view across the open hold. Maslov was nowhere to be seen, but the soldier who’d gone with him was draped across the deck rail like a casually thrown-off coat.

  “Comrade!” a mocking voice shouted behind him.

  Komarov whirled, and what felt like a sledgehammer hit him in the right shoulder. He tried to lift the arm, and realized the gun was gone from his hand. The soldier’s rifle clattered onto the deck.

  Piatakov was standing some twenty feet away, holding his gun on both of them.

  Hearing footsteps behind him, Komarov turned, hand on his shoulder. The American was walking toward him, a smile on his face.

  “Deputy Chairman Komarov himself,” Brady said. “We are honored.”

  Komarov stared stonily back at him. He could feel the blood coursing through his fingers.

  “Start swimming,” Brady snapped at the soldier, who, with one guilty glance at Komarov, vaulted the rail and disappeared into the foaming water.

  “He’ll make a useful hostage,” Piatakov was saying.

  “I don’t think so,” Brady said.

  Komarov examined his gore-soaked hand. Stretching away behind the American, the red-brown Oxus looked for all the world like a river of blood. As the other man pulled the trigger, his late wife’s face appeared in front of his eyes.

  Realizing that his guard had vanished, McColl had walked down to the landing stage. “If I fail,” Komarov had told him, “then you will have your chance.”

  Aboard the receding riverboat, Aidan Brady and another man were standing over Komarov’s body, both looking back at the town. Then Brady reached down and dragged the corpse to the edge of the craft, before tipping it into the river with a thrust of his boot.

  Caitlin lowered the binoculars, lowered her head. Her fingernails bit into her palms.

  “They are escaping,” Kuliyeva said disappointedly, as if they were watching a film and the ending had proved unexpectedly sad.

  “I’m going down,” Caitlin told her.

  “But—”

  “I’m going down.”

  Kuliyeva stepped aside, then followed her down the stone steps and out through the crumbling gateway. In the middle of the river, a man or corpse was being dragged aboard the surviving skiff. The paddle steamer had passed from view around the next bend in the river, a hanging line of smoke offering proof of its passage.

  Less than an hour had passed since Komarov had ushered her into Kuliyeva’s empty office, shut the door behind them, and told her he had no doubt of her loyalty to the revolution. He had, he said, already informed Ghafurov and Kuliyeva that they should, in the event of his and Maslov’s deaths, take their orders from her.

  Satisfied that her English lover was interested only in thwarting his own people’s plot, Komarov had further arranged that McColl would be freed to continue the pursuit, should failure on his own part make that necessary. He hoped Caitlin would offer the Englishman any assistance he needed to reach the border. Whether or not she went with him was of course up to her.

  As Caitlin started down the narrow road, she caught sight of Jack on the distant jetty, staring up the river, like someone who’d just missed a boat.

  September 1921

  Unworthy Empire

  The tonga deposited Alex Cunningham at the end of the Kudsia Road. He lifted out his suitcase, paid the preagreed amount, and assured his young driver that there was no point in waiting. The boy turned the horse in a tight half circle, and offered up the usual reproachful look before gently twitching the reins and rattling off down the road.

  Cunningham took a deep breath and started walking, mindful of the hot tropical sun and the strange, sweet scents of the flourishing gardens. Hundreds of invisible birds seemed to be singing their hearts out, and the distant sound of racket on ball, interrupted by bursts of excited laughter, offered evidence of human life behind the curtains of bougainvillea.

  At a cursory glance, the Indian Political Intelligence building was just another European bungalow in the Delhi cantonment, but the soldiers lurking in the trees and the wireless mast reaching up to the heavens rather gave it away. A replacement had presumably been included in the plans for the new city five miles to the south, but Cunningham doubted the setting would have the same charm.

  He had no sooner shown the soldiers his papers than a tall, fair-haired young man in a shirt and slacks appeared in the doorway. “Cunningham?” the man asked with a faint Yorkshire accent. “Morley, Nigel,” he said, offering his hand. “We’ve been expecting you.” He looked around. “You might as well leave your luggage here for the minute. We’ve got you a bungalow near the Ridge. Come this way.”

  Cunningham followed him across the marble-floored hall and into a large reception room. “Help yourself to a drink,” Morley said, pointing out the decanters on the side table. “I’ll see what the colonel’s up to.”

  Cunningham poured himself a gen
erous whiskey and looked around the room. The creamy white walls were patterned by sun and shadow, the furniture a mixture of raffia and mahogany. Not a lot had changed since his last visit in 1918.

  “The colonel will see you now,” Morley said from the door.

  Another corridor took them through the bungalow and out onto a bougainvillea-draped veranda. Colonel Mortimer Fitzwilliam was sitting in an incongruously European chair with a polished walnut frame and burgundy velvet upholstery. His suit—the sort of limp white affair favored by tropical traveling salesmen—had rather less class.

  Cunningham shook the outstretched hand and accepted the offer of a simple wooden chair. Morley remained standing.

  “Glad you made it,” the colonel was saying. “How was the trip up from Bombay?” he asked, with the tonelessness of one repeating an oft-used phrase.

  “No worse than usual,” Cunningham replied noncommittally.

  The colonel smiled. “Ah, well, I expect we’ll be using airplanes soon.” He looked up at the sky, as if expecting one to appear at that very moment. “Ah, well,” he repeated, turning back to Cunningham, “I just wanted to welcome you in person. As to your business here”—the tone implied distaste, but whether that came from patrician breeding or a lack of sympathy with this particular endeavor wasn’t clear—“Morley here will fill you in on the current state of play.”

  It sounded like a dismissal, and Cunningham got to his feet.

  “At any rate,” the colonel said, staring at his garden, “it must be for the best that we’re all working together on this one.”

  Cunningham presumed he meant Five, the IPI, and British India’s Department of Criminal Intelligence. “Indeed,” he agreed.

  “You spent several years here, didn’t you?” the colonel asked.