by Craig Thomas
He jumped into a stop that spurted snow away from him — efficiently braking at the foot of the long slope. There were trees now between him and the pursuit, and the sheet of the river just below him, the banks heavy with icy grass. He unbuckled the skis, stepped away from them, hoisted them across his shoulder. He slithered down the bank, almost losing his rooting as his boots met the smoother ice of the river. He trod carefully, moving lightly and surely, the darkness comfortingly drawn around him, his passage silent. There was more shooting, then silence; he knew they would pursue him now.
He guessed that the armoured column had sent back some kind of patrol, for a reason that remained obscure. He could only think that they were to hold the village as some kind of crossing-point, that other columns were expected that night. And perhaps they had been intended to look for him. Ski-tracks, leading away from the camp He spent no time, even as he clambered up the opposite dope, in considering his own death. They would not let him live, he believed; but the priority of his survival had become uppermost now. He had to make some report, present some evidence of what he had seen. He could not, except in extreme emergency, use the transmitter now. That had been impressed upon him. Violation of Finnish neutrality.
As he settled on the far bank, hunched into the hard snow at its edge, the rifle with its night-sight aimed across the already glimmering sheet of ice, his lips twisted in a smile. Waterford and Davenhill, and whoever was behind them — they would know something had gone wrong by his inability to report or return. But not the size of it!
A white-clothed figure, ghostly, appeared at the other side of the river. He fired. The figure dropped away, merging with the snow. In the wake of the single shot, he heard a moan, carrying distinctly across the space between them. Another figure ducked back behind a thin tree-trunk. He fired twice, could see through the sight the white chips appear on the trunk. He fired twice more, grazing the bole of another tree. Nothing moved.
But he had the pictures now, the rolls of film and his mental count. One hundred and twenty tanks. A motor rifle battalion in support. In Finland. Enormity of simple statistics. And his impression of the column merely at a transit camp for the moment. It had to be reported.
In a day's time, the helicopter would return to the dropping point, but would not wait for him. It would return only once more, the following night. Then he would be presumed dead, effectively out of the Snow Falcon operation.
He wondered whether Waterford had known what he had found, already. Known that it was Russian armour. He had proof the Russians were invading Finland.
He had proof. He fired again, and a man staggered back behind the trunk that had concealed him. Wounded, but nothing more than that. He fired again, twice, a warning pattern. Then he slid backwards, towards the skis. The lip of the bank hid him from them as he fitted the cross-country skis, and pushed away silently, the skis slithering on the firm snow, the wind beginning to sing in his ears as he gathered speed.
For a moment, he felt a sagging of his knees, a heaviness against his back, as if he had carried the pack for long hours without rest. Then he dug in with the sticks, beginning to stride as the land levelled and he wound through the denser fir trees, gliding like a ghost. He shook off the weariness and the image. He was vulnerable. Already, they would have crossed the river; and they would have called up reinforcements. He was the tail of the comet streaming away from them, but pulling their mass surely behind him. And leaving a clean, new set of tracks for them to follow.
He struck south-west, in an opposite arm of the forest to that which followed the road to Ivalo; he followed the course of the river, its southern tributary, keeping well within the firs. When the trees died as the land rose again, he would strike westwards, towards the main north-south highway. He tried to comfort himself, as the body laboured and the legs tired, with the thought that the deeper into Finland he moved, the safer he became. It was a difficult consolation.
Natalia had disappeared into her bedroom, complaining of boredom and a headache. The small clock on the wall-shelf showed the time to be almost seven-thirty. Vrubel's dark, handsome face appeared to Vorontsyev to be puckering with irritation — yet there was a frown of nervousness created by the knowledge of Vorontsyev's rank, and department. Vorontsyev had savoured the young man's discomfiture, his apprehension — not as something professional, but as a diet on which his sexual jealousy could feed. He believed that the KGB Border Guard officer had slept with his wife, and he used his professional weight to disturb him.
Vorontsyev smoked an American cigarette — ostentatiously, he had offered one to the uniformed Vrubel. He had refused, smoking instead a Russian cigarette in its cardboard holder. The cheap, dark tobacco was pungent in the room.
'Why did you meet Colonel-General Ossipov at the officers' dub, Captain?' A professional tone of voice, the interrogatory flatness, the absence of the man's name, as if he were already a cipher.
'Why? Because he invited me to, Major. He was a comrade in arms of my father — at Stalingrad. He has always — favoured me with his friendship, ever since my father was killed.' Vorontsyev noticed the cold tone, which was without fear. He was talking to someone who belonged to a special class, an elite; the clique that the army had always inspired. Yet he was struck by the likeness of their separate biographies — he, in Mihail Pyotravich, possessed a guardian, an influential substitute parent, as this young man did, apparently, in Ossipov.
He dismissed the thought. He did not wish to identify with Vrubel in any way.
'What did you talk about?'
'Old times — the future. The things friends talk about.'
Vrubel was smiling again, unafraid. Once again, Vorontsyev was struck by the assurance Vrubel displayed. It was unexpected, despite his rank in the KGB. SID officers were not met with confidence, with secret amusement.
He said, 'I understand what you mean by friends, Captain.' Vrubel's left eyelid twitched, as if a secret nerve had been struck. Vorontsyev became irritated by the smile on the other man's lips. Sexual dominance, which he had enjoyed over Natalia and her lover for the past hour was vanishing, evanescent as steam. He was being laughed at again.
'Of course, Major.' The tone was patronising.
'You met the General again?' he asked.
Vrubel shook his head. 'Our tastes do not coincide, Major. The General likes museums, art, sculpture. I prefer…' He spread his open hands on his knees, smiling. 'Other pleasures,' he added.
Vorontsyev became cold. He saw the man's intact ego, the sexual arrogance — and something more. Secrecy, the enjoyment of unimparted knowledge. He saw how the balance of their relationship had swung like a pendulum, in minutes. He used his insight.
'I see,' he said, looking down. 'You — where did you meet my wife?'
'We were introduced by — another friend of mine. A mutual friend.'
The amusement was evident.
'Who was that?'
'A member of the Bolshoi — a dancer.'
Vrubel was not lying — it was obvious that he was enjoying presenting himself as the stallion of the Bolshoi, and Natalia as a cheap tart.
'I see.' He looked up, snapping: 'When do you return to your duties, Captain?'
'Alas, tomorrow.' He stubbed out his cigarette, and looked markedly at his watch. Vorontsyev saw the confidence ooze, the skin of the face now smooth again, the look untroubled. 'I have tickets for a show — at eight,' he said pointedly.
Vorontsyev squeezed anger into his face.
'I see.' He stood up, robotically. 'I shouldn't waste your valuable time, then! I'll leave you.' He bunched his hands. Vrubel was unmoved, 'Tell my wile I'm sorry I interrupted you, won't you.'
'I will.'
Vorontsyev sat in the car, trying to recapture the professional mask that had slipped from his face in the lift; a moment of pure rage had smothered his coldness. Now, he regained something like composure. He picked up the microphone under the dashboard.
'Centre — go ahead Moscow Unit Nine-Si
x-Four,' he heard in reply to his call sign.
'Put me through to my office — night duty-staff.'
He waited, then he heard Ilya's tired voice.
'Yes, Major.' There was no amusement, only a peeved deference, and frustrated boredom. A broken date., probably.
'Don't sulk!' he snapped. Then he hesitated. 'I–I'm at my wife's apartment, on Kalenjin Street.'
'Yes, Major?'
'A — Captain Vrubel is being entertained there…' The words came out, dragged up, each with its separate soft explosion of breath. His chest seemed to hurt with exertion. 'I want a tail on them — on the man, understand?'
'Yes, Major — isn't he the — ?'
'He is. I want a team out here, and another car for myself. My wife knows this one.'
'You're going to tail them yourself, Major?'
'Yes. Anything in the rules against it?'
'No — sir.'
'Right, then! Anything on that bastard in black, yet?' He let the accumulated venom into the question, as if expelling saliva that had filled his throat. He spat at Vrubel in the emphasis of the words.
'Nothing, sir. The computer doesn't know him. We're waiting for time on the central records computer now.'
'Get that time! 1 don't know what Vrubel knows, but he 6?
knows something. But he won't be easy to question, or to break.' He understood how he had chosen the word — the personal life leaping over the snake of professional procedures. 'We must have that man who imitated Ossipov. He must know why he did it.'
'Yes, Major.'
'Get those cars over here, on the double. They're leaving soon.'
'On their way, sir.'
He almost wanted to plead that Ilya send men who would not laugh at the humiliating prospect of Major Vorontsyev trailing around the city after his wife and her lover, using the Centre's vehicle and manpower resources to do so. Instead, he clipped the mike back under the dashboard.
He gripped the wheel, noticed that he was cold. He took one ragged breath, then started the car, and drove some way down the service road to the flats. There he parked with a view of the foyer, waiting for his wife and Captain Vrubel to come out.
Folley crouched, exhausted, behind a spindly fir, his ears straining to catch the sounds of his pursuers. Nothing. For a few moments, he was safe. He drew in the cold night air in great heaving sobs, and his body began to shake with reaction to the demands he had made upon it. There was no impression of loneliness, of fear or loss of hope. Only the body, pleading with him, already wanting to curl into some foetal rest.
He looked at his watch. He had been travelling, with only two short sops, for four hours. He was on the very edge of the fir forest, the trees tiny, misshapen, dwarfish. He had climbed steadily, wearily, up out of the bowl in which the taller trees grew, and were dense, into the higher country, the bare landscape on which he would move like a white fly towards the main Ivalo road.
He could not use the radio; it would pinpoint him, since the frequency available to him was that used for ordinary NATO traffic. The Russians would be monitoring that; and the chopper that was airborne in order to pick up his reports would not be airborne until the morning.
He had lost the brief, illusory comfort of moving further into Finland — he wasn't safe, could not be until the chopper made the first of its dashes across the Finnmark, bearing Finnish markings, the pilot in Finnish army uniform, to the pick-up point. And it would happen only once more after that; exactly twenty-four hours later. If he did not appear, he was to be presumed dead.
Or captured.
Folley wondered, weakly, whether he was the first Snow Falcon; or had there been others, as there would be others after him if he did not return? Had any of the others learned what he knew? Snap, snap — had the pictures been removed from their bodies?
It would not matter, his limbs and joints persisted, if he was caught; lie down. It wouldn't be long before they caught up…
He pushed with his hands, but his body refused to rise from the snow. It was as if everything except his mind was straw. Even the way his legs stretched out, comical, like a scarecrow; ridiculous.
He attended to the body, in a compromise — as if bribing it with the chocolate from his pack. And he pressed the canvas sleeve of the rifle to his face, as if as a reminder.
So far — so far… No airborne search. He didn't think it likely, not yet. But he knew they would have to risk it after dawn. Perhaps they would use Kamovs or MILs to hunt for him — drop troops ahead of his possible and predicted course. They must know he would head for the road, had to be going west.
His thoughts tailed off into a lysergic acid photography, fed by the adrenalin of weary fear, in which the tactical moves of the day to come were vivid with terror and exhaustion and capture.
He knew they would do it; they had to. They understood what he had seen. He had to be stopped.
His left leg was twitching. A feeble attempt at movement, be wondered, or a protest at thoughts of continued Sight.
He wasn't sure that he slept, but the taste of sleep was in his mouth; yet it might have been minutes only. He jerked awake because a cry to attention sounded within him. Something was imperative as a dream of falling…
The cry was outside himself, he realised with a bright, tearing pain of betrayal and fear in his chest. A voice had spoken, only a few Russian words after he recognised that it was not his dream speaking. Close.
He rolled on to his stomach. It was that close. As if the next step of the foot would place it on his chest, smother his face… He slid the canvas sleeve from the rifle, and aimed. Into the telescopic sight, gathering the feeble light of stars and snow, walked the Russian soldier. And he was that close, close as the body had recognised, moving instinctively as it had done.
The rifle boomed in his ear, twice, and the Russian collided with the tree-bole he was carefully skirting. Folley even saw the lips distort as the cheek was dragged down the rough bark — body sliding into a silly, ablutive crouch. He rolled away from the tree, then fired again on his back as he saw the second man turning towards him, surprised by the sudden noises. He fired again, and the aim was poor; two more shots, and the man was staggering, his own rifle, a stubby Kalashnikov, discharging into the snow. A bright spittle of flame. Then the dull concussion of the white-clothed body into the snow.
He stood up with no sense of weariness. He slung the skis over his shoulder, and, ducking into a crouched run, scuttled like a crab across the uneven ground, away from the trees. He heard again the cries of foxes behind him, but no shots. He had, he sensed, been caught in the middle of a file, grown ragged as it was sweeping the forest skirts, and now they could see one another as they re-grouped and they dared not fire in case it was one of their own. But they would sense his general direction.
Snow pucked from the tree branches, stinging his face wet. Trees no higher than himself. He felt as if he were wading out of deep water, into shallows that exposed him as a target. Snow — dusted up from dwarf trees by the brushing of his pack, the pumping of his heavy arms — splashed across his white clothing.
Few trees, a lip of bare rock almost without snow, then nothing except a land tumbled under the starlit sky, soft, illusory folds of country fading out of eyesight. Before him, a long, gentle slope. He stopped, out of sight behind the lip of rock, and fitted the skis. Then a single moment in which the body seemed to fail — and he dug in with the sticks, pushing away.
Shots behind him, but distant, not even the insect noises of ballets passing close to him — only the sighing wind, the cold stars, and the hiss of the skis as he wound down into a high valley.
He almost sensed, in some para-normal manner, when they too fitted skis, dug in, and began to pursue him. He did not look behind. Ahead of him in the darkness was the north-south load, like the border of another country.
For a moment, he thought he heard, distantly, the buzz-saw whine of a helicopter.
Three: Pursuits
'Can you be cer
tain — certain of these names at least?'
Khamovkhin waved the list of names in front of him. He was sitting at his desk, away from the fireplace where they had sat the previous night, and Andropov had had to pull a chair to the other side of the desk. He understood the First Secretary's need to establish an aura of self-confidence, and did not resent the subordination forced upon him. He had played the same game with three of his Deputies that morning.
'I think we can — Politburo members who have consistently supported the moves towards greater detente, arms reductions — objected to the increases in defence spending…' Then something seemed to snap in him, letting the tight calm elude him. 'You know most of these men — have known them for years — Feodor. You can vouch for their loyalty!'
Khamovkhin appeared challenged for an instant, then he relaxed into his chair.
'Perhaps you're right. The last thing we need is paranoia. Yes, yes…' He put the list aside. 'These, at least, should give us no cause for concern.'
'Good.'
Khamovkhin seemed suddenly to relax. He got up, went to the cabinet, and brought back the bottle of whisky and two tumblers. He poured two generous measures, and passed a tumbler across the desk to Andropov. Andropov looked at the glass as if at something that vaguely threatened him.
'We must wait and see, then. My performance this morning should have stirred something up — I was right, eh, old friend?'
'On balance — yes. Though we conclude we are certain of those names on that list — there are others whose loyalty might be called suspect — who have links with the High Command, sympathies or records that tie them to the Army. Yes — ' Andropov sipped his drink. 'You have worried them. One of them may make some move, give himself away.'
'Why does there have to be someone in the Politburo in league with those bastards in the High Command?'
Khamovkhin swallowed greedily at the whisky.
'You mean — why not a simple army take-over?' Andropov shook his head. 'No. Too simple. Group 1917 is inside the Party machine — it has to be. If anything like a complete coup is being organised — against the Committee for State Security as well as the Kremlin — then it could not be done, for example, without the assistance of GLAVPUR inside the army The loyalty of the Political Directorate would have to be swayed or circumvented. Not to mention the GRU, and our other checks and balances.'
