Authors: Craig Thomas
He had told her to keep down, had tried to push her back into her seat; but her arm had become limp and unresponding. Anna had turned to look back at Priabin, standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms. Gant had heard one of the two Kalashnikovs on automatic. The bellow of sound had unnerved him more than the concussions of the first bullets; the thuds against the boot and into the rear seat.
He stared at her face for only a moment. Very pale. Her eyes were open. They hardly registered shock, were without pain.
He let her body fall back against the seat and wished he had not done so. She looked very dead the moment he released her. Her head too rapidly flopped onto her shoulder, the hair spilled over her cheek, and there was a snail-track of saliva at the corner of her mouth. He withdrew his hands, holding them against his chest, afraid to touch her again. They were shaking as he bunched them into fists. He groaned.
The Vietnamese girl, burning…
He grabbed the door handle. His hand froze for a moment, then flung open the door. Two bullets immediately thudded into it, making the plastic of the panel bulge near his knuckles. He knelt behind the door. The two rifles ceased firing. He straightened, smelling on the freezing air the exhaust from the Finnish car moving towards him. He ran. He heard Priabin shout something; the voice sounded almost demented above the noise of Gant's breathing and heartbeat and squeaking footfalls. He hunched his body against the expected impact of rifle bullets.
Then the Finnish car, a long Mercedes saloon, swung across the road behind him, skidding to a halt. He heard the doors open. He tried to stop and turn, but slipped and fell onto the snow-bound road. His buttocks and hands ached. The Vietnamese girl was incinerated in an instant beside the car he had abandoned. Two men were kneeling behind the open doors of the Mercedes, yet not expecting trouble. The two border guards had stopped firing, stopped running.
Another man was still moving, charging towards the abandoned car, arms flailing as if he were combating the freezing night and the falling snow. Headlights from the Mercedes glared towards the lights of the abandoned car. The brightness hid Anna; hid Priabin the moment he stopped and ducked his whole body almost frenziedly into the car's interior. Gant closed his eyes. The image of the Vietnamese girl had vanished, but he could clearly discern the blue hole in Anna's forehead. He shook his head, but her surprised, hardly shocked face would not leave him. He breathed in deeply and opened his eyes. A man was extending his hand, offering to help him to his feet.
'Major Gant?' he said.
Immediately, as if the action would help to establish his identity, or remove Anna's image from his retinae, Gant tugged the hairpiece from his own closely-cropped hair.
'Yes,' he said.
'Quickly,' the Finn instructed, clutching Gant's elbow, forcing him to his feet. Gant's legs were foal-like, awkward. 'We must get you away from here - I do not think there will be trouble, but - '
'Yes,' Gant repeated dully, brushing down his overcoat and trousers. The other two Finns had also stood up. One of them, the driver, had climbed into the Mercedes. The engine was still running. The incident was over. The two guards had retreated to the customs hut, where their officer stood on the wooden steps, watching through night-glasses. 'Yes.'
He was ushered to the rear door of the Mercedes. He paused and stared into the other car's headlights. It was as if he had been trapped in a searchlight's eager beam. Beyond the lights, he saw Priabin. He was out of the car, his arms wrapped around Anna's body. Gant could see the splash of fair hair against Priabin's dark clothing. Priabin's face was white, aghast, lost.
Quickly, Gant got into the car, which reversed across the road, turned, and headed back towards the red and white pole on the Finnish side. Gant turned his head, wincing as he realised he was imitating Anna's last living movement, and watched the figure of Priabin diminish, the splash of blonde hair against his chest no more than a trick of the light. Priabin did not move, seemed incapable of volition. He simply stared in his lost way after the receding Mercedes.
Then the Finnish border post was behind them, the glow from the overhead lights retreating behind the falling snow. Gant shivered, realising that the car was warm, realising that it was over.
He did not dare to close his eyes. Open, and Anna remained only a tumbled trick of the light against Priabin's chest; closed, and the white face with its blue hole would return. He stared at the back of the Finn in the front passenger seat like a nauseous drunk attempting to defeat the spinning of his head.
Waterford watched the sky. The cloud had thinned, the snow had almost stopped; desultory and innocent, as on a greetings card. The window in the weather had arrived. Out on the lake, a huge cross formed from orange marker tape indicated the dropping point. A single smoke flare betrayed the wind direction. It climbed like a plume from the ice, then bent as it reached the wind, straggled and dissipated. There was no sky above, no colour except grey, but the cloudbase was high enough to allow the Hercules's first run to be at a sufficient altitude for the parachutists to jump safely. The lake was strangely silent against the slow, creeping grey dawn that revealed its far shore, the sombre snow-bound country and the pencilled margin of trees.
Then he heard the baritone murmur of the aircraft's four engines. Other heads turned with his, towards the south. He glanced to check the smoke plume, which rose strongly before the wind distressed it like long yellow hair. He turned his face back to the clouds and saw it, at little more than fifteen hundred feet, seeming to drift up from the indistinct horizon, enlarge, then hang above them. The expectant silence around him was all but palpable. The Hercules was a plump, full shape overhead.
Then the parachuting Royal Marines appeared, dots detaching themselves like laid eggs from each side of the bulky fuselage. Parachutes opened, and the black eggs slowed and swayed. Waterford counted them, urging them to be more, wanting to go on counting. Twenty, twenty-one, two, three, four, five, six…
And then he reminded himself that not all of them were soldiers. There were also engineers and technicians from the RNAF Tactical Supply Squadron at Bardufoss. They and the pallets of supplies required had limited the number of marines that could be carried. The Hercules would return to Bardufoss at high speed to attempt to take on a second detachment of marines, but Waterford doubted they would be able to drop. The window in the weather would have closed once more before the Hercules could return.
Thirty-two, three… already, the first jumpers were drifting against the grey horizon like unseasonal dandelion clocks. The Hercules vanished beyond the limit of visibility at the far end of the lake. The drone of its four engines had become a mild hiss; the noise of a distant saw. The first marine landed on his feet, ran after his billowing, closing 'chute, wrapping it into a bundle as he moved. Then the second landed, rolled, came up grabbing the 'chute to himself. Three, four, five…
Perhaps two dozen marines, Waterford thought, assessing the degree of comfort he felt at the figure. Not much. The Hercules would have been tracked on Russian radar. Its run would be too pattern-like, too intended to be mistaken. They would know men and supplies had been dropped into Lapland, and they would know where. The weather window had to be slammed shut against them before they could act on the knowledge, even if its shutting did lock out a second detachment of marines.
Already, every parachutist had landed and was moving quickly off the ice. The air force experts trudged in a hunched, somehow child-like manner, the marines moved more quickly, already identifiable as a group. Everyone was wearing Arctic camouflage or long grey-white parkas. They looked like members of an expedition.
Waterford returned the salute of the captain in command of the marines, then turned away from him. The last stragglers, 'chutes bundled untidily beneath their arms, had moved off the ice. Among marines and technicians and experts alike there was a muted, intense murmuring as they climbed the slope of the shore and confronted the Firefox, now at the rear of the clearing beneath the camouflage netting. The noise of the Hercules's return moved towards them from the northern horizon.
Then the aircraft appeared, a flattened, murky, half-real shape at the far end of the lake. The smoke flare had already bent further, like the unstable stem of a heavy-flowered plant. The wind was picking up. There would be no second drop of marines. The clouds, too, already seemed lower and heavier, and the snowflakes blew sideways into Waterford's face, as if the storm were sidling up to him in some surprise ambush. He shook his head. The Hercules moved slowly and steadily up the lake. Then the pallets emerged in turn from the cargo ramp in the rear of the aircraft. Waterford realised that Moresby was standing beside him. It was as if he had taken no interest in the men who had parachuted, only in the lifeless supplies and equipment now to be unloaded.
The tractor tug was bright yellow. Its pallet thudded distantly into the ice, skidded and ran to a halt. A second pallet with tarpaulined equipment emerged, then a third. Then the fourth, bearing great rolls of MO-MAT, a second pallet of rolled portable runway followed it. The Hercules was almost level with them now. The smoke from the flare streamed out horizontally, a few feet above the ground. The trees on the far shore were shrouded in what might have been a freezing fog. Then shapes like great, tyred undercarriage wheels appeared one after the other from the gaping cargo ramp. Waterford thought he glimpsed the figures bundling them out, even the supervising Air Loadmaster at the mouth of the hard-lit tunnel that was the interior of the Hercules. Then the aircraft was gone, lost beyond the trees around the lake, heading south. He saw a vague, dark shape lift into the clouds, which were lower and thicker than before. The Hercules vanished, leaving Waterford with a momentary sense of isolation.
The black fuel cells bounced awkwardly and rolled strangely, like trick balls weighted with sand. Slowly, they came to a halt, giant woods searching for a jack. The air transportable fuel cells had been landed safely; huge rubber containers filled with the various oils and the vital paraffin required if the Firefox was ever to take off from the lake.
The farthest of the pallets, with its bright yellow tractor tug, was already almost obscured by the driving snow. A window - ? Nothing but a glimpse of something through the storm. At least, Waterford thought, the Russians can't do anything. They won't be able to move.
Nor will we.
He watched as men detailed by Moresby moved out onto the ice to recover the pallets and the fuel cells. It would take no more than half an hour to get everything stowed under cover, camouflaged. Just in case -
'You'd better come with me,' Waterford said. His voice was pinched in his throat. He growled it clear. 'Come on, captain, we've got work to do. Your blokes aren't here to hold spanners for these buggers.'
'No, sir. But - '
Waterford turned to face him. The captain was staring at the Firefox, stranded amid trees and beneath camouflage netting; out of its element.
'What?'
'Hell of an aircraft, sir.'
'One problem with it - it doesn't fly!'
The Russian major tugged the hood of his camouflage blouse further forward, as if to conceal completely the fur hat with its single red star in the centre. He smiled at his nervous gesture, as if he really had been fearful of their being spotted through the weather from the other side of the lake.
His Border Guard reconnaissance party had heard the distant noise of the Hercules transport while they were breakfasting. He was fairly certain it was one of those big turboprop transport aircraft used by the Norwegians and the rest of NATO. His unit had made good time, even with the poor weather. The moment it cleared they had rested, hoping to make a quick, scrappy meal, then push on before the weather closed in again. Of course, once they reached the trees, the weather ceased to matter as much, inconvenient though it was. But the noise of the aircraft, muffled and distant and to the east, alerted them, created fears and prognostications and they had broken camp at once and pushed on with all possible speed. Somehow, each of his men and himself had known that the transport aircraft, even though it had not landed, had business at the two lakes.
The smaller, more westerly of the two had been empty of activity, supplies and people. The plane had made two passes, one at a reasonably high altitude as far as they could discern, the other much lower. The major had his suspicions; they were almost certain enough to report them to Moscow. But, he hesitated. He would be reporting directly to Andropov himself; his ultimate superior, his Chairman. He wanted further evidence before committing himself - yet, he should alert the reconnaissance aircraft, there should be an investigation. However, the weather had closed in again and he knew that no flights would now be possible to investigate the activities of the transport aircraft. But, surely it had been picked up by the border Tupolev AW ACS plane and reported? Had the weather closed in too quickly?
His party of twelve men moved behind him on the long crosscountry skis across the surface of the smaller lake. Out in the open, the wind was noisy again now; buffeting and yelling around them. The snow drove horizontally across the lake. The clouds were dark and heavy and seemed to hang like a great smothering cushion just above their heads. What was going on at the other lake? What had the transport aircraft been ferrying in? Men, supplies, equipment - why? The questions hurried and blustered in his thoughts, with a cold excitement like that of the wind. He felt on the verge of answers, but would not reach out to grasp them.
They moved off the ice, pausing for a short rest at the edge of the trees. Then they headed across the half-mile that separated the two lakes, climbing slowly and gently through the crowding pines and spruces that were heavy with snow. Birds called from a distance. Snow dropped with dull concussions from the overweighted branches of trees. His men spread out into a curving line of advance with himself at the centre, and began to move more cautiously. He could hear the slither of his skis and those of his sergeants on either side of him. The Kalashnikov rifle in its white canvas sleeve bobbed on his chest.