"Maybe those pilots have flown sex missions before—they swallowed it. It only needs some suspicious little Party shit on the AWACS aircraft to call Kabul—just to make sure—and we're blown wide open. So look sharp."
"Uh-huh."
He watched the two Russian MiLs diminishing below and to port. Heading west, back to Parwan. Even if not at once, or in half an hour, someone was eventually going to suspect—know. Long before he got to Baikonur and back out again, someone would have checked, and they'd be waiting. Looking and waiting. He ground his teeth audibly, then lunged the MiL toward the mountains that stretched away toward the river Oxus where the border lay.
The wind raced almost horizontally across the frozen marshes. Filip Kedrov teetered against its force as he crossed the long, dipping plank of wood from the rotting mooring to the hulk of the houseboat. Thankfully, shivering, he stepped onto the deck of the boat, rubbing his gloved hands together with the cold and genuine relief. He bent his head into the wind as it sliced down the flank of the houseboat, blowing sleet into and through the gaps in the decks planking and the panels of the main cabin.
He shut the door behind him and wedged it with a thick sliver of wood. Then leaned a decrepit old chair against it, too. The door rattled on its hinges with the force of the wind. He flicked on his torch, spraying its feeble light around him until he located the steps. He clattered down them, afraid each time one creaked, afraid of falling, of breaking his neck. The houseboat groaned and sighed and seemed to be made of rotting cardboard. The wind howled.
It was small and low and no one had used it for years. Kedrov could not imagine who might ever have done so. Perhaps some officer's sexual hideaway, perhaps it had belonged to someone before the army came—one of the entrepreneurs the old town used to boast? It did not matter. It suited him. Long, low, bargelike. Just holding together enough to keep most of the weather out. He saw in the pool of yellow light from his flashlight that the blankets on his bed were damp; sleet had been blown through cracks in the peeling woodwork and soaked them. His breath smoked in the light and dark of the room. He washed the flashlight over the main cabin. He was alone.
He unslung his haversack, laying his flashlight alongside it on a cheap wooden table in the center of the boat's one main cabin. The windows were wet, blank squares of darkness. Swiftly, he drew the thin curtains and pinned them together at each of the windows on either side of the cabin; it was a practiced, almost effortless task. His breathing sounded loudly, above the muted noise of the wind. At each window, his breath formed a targetlike circle of fogged glass. When he had finished, he returned to the table, then lit an oil lamp that sat in its center. It smoked and glowed and smelled in the narrow, confined cabin. He coughed.
He needed coffee, some of the canned food he had stored there a week ago, and a check on the transponder, which was his lifeline to the rescue. Don't think about it, he warned himself. Don't
start all that again.
But he knew the thought would return. He had rushed upward, as if on a child's swing of hope, after his escape from the silo complex; he would swing down again, just as certainly.
He drew the transponder from the haversack. It looked like a transistor radio. Cheap, Russian-made, unreliable—thereby attracting even less attention than a Japanese portable would have done. Its cheap look depressed him; as if it foretold the malfunctioning of the thing, indicated that the Americans held him in no great esteem, had spent no money or effort on his rescue—stop it! Oh, stop it.
He was an explorer in a strange new country. All the nervousness, the exhilarating fear and tension of the past weeks of his spying paled into insignificance now, beside these—terrors that leaped out at him. This was territory he had not visited before, and its landscape enclosed him, wore him down.
Tonight was the earliest they could possibly come—but tonight was Tuesday. If they intended rescuing him, if they meant to come, it would be tonight. Had to be, otherwise they would be too late. He understood their schedule, by instinct rather than information. They expected to be able to use the photographs—those he had had to abandon in the paint cans in the garage—on television, in the newspapers, to expose what was intended at Baikonur; to prevent the launch. They had to get him to the West before Thursday; they knew that, so tonight was the earliest and the latest they could come. .
. . . and would not come—oh, stop it, stop it please!
The cheap cabinet of the transponder made it impossible to envisage the complicated microcircuitry inside. If he used it, even then, he would not know whether it worked—a light was supposed to come on, but what would that mean?—and he would hear nothing. It was simply a homing device, sending out a carrier wave that only his rescuers could receive—science fiction! His own expertise, his own technical background availed him nothing. He simply stared at a toy he was certain would not work. It had been given to him just to keep him quiet, keep him working.
He tried to sigh, but the noise became a sob in his throat. His mouth was filled with saliva, which he found difficult to swallow. He was shaking. He distracted himself by looking at the lamp, trimming it, then at the walls and fixtures of the boat. He had repaired some of the worst gaps in the planking and paneling, he had hidden food here, the lamp, beer. He shuddered as he remembered the closeness of his brush with the GRU, hugging his hands beneath his armpits. Hour after hour in the freezing cold, all day and most of the evening, until he had worked his way on foot to this last safe house. He was intensely weary—
—which was why he was so uptight, so frightened. The explanation paled, overcome by the noise of the wind, the groans of old, rotting wood. Ice, the soupy slush around the hull, grumbled beneath his feet. Sleet puffed like thin cigarette smoke through gaps in the wooden walls of the cabin.
He slumped onto the bunk, all his anticipation and returning warmth seeming to evaporate. It was impossible to sustain the fiction of rescue here, with the occasional cries of a night bird and the disturbed honking and barking of wildfowl in the darkness outside. The Americans would not come.
Please let it be tonight, please let it be, he kept repeating. Please.
He was worn almost transparent with fear. His doubt had increased, gnawed its way to full growth. He had nothing left, no reserves with which to fight it.
Please let it be tonight, please.
He huddled into himself on the bunk, the transistor radio unnoticed in his lap. Knees drawn up, cradling it. Presently, he began to sob with self-pity.
It was eight-thirty in the evening. He cried, oblivious of the passage of time.
Katya Grechkova took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Looked at her watch. Eight-forty. She yawned, tiredness and satisfaction mingled in the stretching of her arms and back. She stood up, lit a cigarette, and walked to the other side of her small office— the office she had shared with Viktor Zhikin. Her head was aching, but its dull throbbing failed to blunt the edge of her pleasure.
She stood near the window, looking back at her desk, at the pool of white light from the desk lamp felling on papers, then stared at its shadows thrown on the Venetian blind. Then back to the desk, posing the scene as if for a forensic photograph; exactly capturing the source of her satisfaction. She puffed on the cigarette with a conscious hint of melodrama. Zhikin had always—not unkindly—teased and joked about her fastidious, intense manner of working, the degree of her absorption in any task at hand. As if she were hiding from life in her work, he had once said—her own life, perhaps? Then he had broken off at once, seeing the naked, pained look she could not keep from her face.
She puffed quickly at the cigarette. The room was smoky, the ashtray littered with stubs. She did not want to think about all that, not now. Work was no longer a solace or an escape—and Zhikin would never have understood that she was escaping from an insight into herself, not from her husband's character or their failed marriage. Captain Yuri Grechkov was someone she had suddenly seen through, and in that moment of discovery, contempt had entered and occupied the place of all other emotions. He had failed to attend his mother's funeral; simply not bothered to apply for leave from army maneuvers. Katya had gone, wearing a black armband on her uniform sleeve. And she hadn't even liked his mother. He'd known she was dying and hadn't returned from wherever he was, hadn't come even after she telephoned to say
it wont be long, can you come at onceP
Not even for the sake of avoiding the guilt to come would he break off from his silly army games somewhere in East Germany. It wasn't much, but the revelation was, for her, like a collision with an express train. She seemed to understand him, see his shallowness and indifference, and despised him for his fadings.
Her view of him now was more fixed than a photograph; an oil painting, framed and hung. She would never see him in any other pose. What she avoided, what Zhikin would never have understood, was her inability to forgive or make allowances. She had sentenced him, finding him guilty, and there was no appeal.
So, after the weeks of quarrels and silences and shadowy, separate living, she'd left Alma-Ata and gotten herself posted to Baikonur. Got a flat, a few sticks of furniture from central stores, some prints to replace photographs, which he was fond of taking, developing, and framing—mostly of her—and began a new and partial existence on her own. It had taken a long time to accommodate the new knowledge she had of herself. To have made such demands, to have had such standards for him, to have such ideals. He'd shattered her image of him. She had thought herself quite, quite evil for a long time, in a little-girl, final way. She could not live with him, could not bear to have him touch her.
But all that had faded.
Cold satisfactions, those to be gained from being successful in her work, being adept at it, had sustained her. Those, and the belit-tlement of Yuri—the minute catalogue of his faults and weaknesses—had pardoned her self-knowledge. Her work was her independence; it made her eager, active, clever, a more flattering mirror than her marriage had ever been. Now the satisfaction was intense, almost unmarred by memory or insight.
She believed she had discovered where Kedrov the spy was hiding.
She returned to her desk. The dog's tail thumped against her legs as he joined her from his corner of the room. She patted his head, stroked his neck, felt the wet muzzle and nose against her palm. Looked at the map she had been working from.
Her forefinger and index finger, still clamping the remainder of the English cigarette, stroked a slow, diminishing circle around a small area of the salt marshes. The dog wandered away from her other hand. Yuri would not let her have a dog, didn't want the trouble and the loose hairs in their bright, well-furnished apartment in Alma-Ata.
She shook her head and replaced her glasses, which glinted in the lamplight as she raised them from the desk. She bent forward, as if to check something. Yes, just there.
Katya knew the marshes. She'd hiked there often enough to have been able to make her clever guesses. With ease, she could recollect sites on the map in three dimensions. Trees, islets, swampier areas, ornithological blinds, hunting lodges—a few of them from before the Revolution, now used by senior officers who imitated the pleasures of an older aristocracy—old, ruined boats and huts, even villages long abandoned, game wardens' cabins.
Kedrov's books and maps lay on the floor. Now beneath the dog, who was looking up at her, eyes wide, tongue lolling pinkly. His eyes were moist with the illusion of devotion. Using the maps and notes, she had narrowed and narrowed her search, until—
—this place. She tapped it on the map. There was a rudimentary sketch in one of his notebooks, a chart warning himself of deep water in one place, of the existence of a blind in another. A blind that had once been a houseboat. Almost in ruins now.
So, she felt she had him. Other references, other places in his notes and on his maps were possible, but she had put the old boat at the top of her list. Tomorrow. Impatience surged even as she reaffirmed the need to wait until daylight, the need to report to Priabin.
She looked at the dog. If she were careful, very careful. . . She'd drawn a gun, she could use it. She had waders, a flashlight,
a
dog from some hunting breed that couldn't have forgotten everything its ancestors had once known, a car, a map.
She grinned, tense with excitement. Shivering with nerves.
Tonight, tonight,
tonight . . .
She cleared her throat. "Come on, Mishal" she called out. The dog lumbered to its feet, wagging its broadsword of a tail in delight
The Hind-D's shadow glanced like a blow off the long, hanging beard of a frozen waterfall that pointed like a gesture to flat snow-fields, a clump of stone huts, tethered camels and ponies in the moonlight. A shuffling figure glanced upward out of the folds of a cloak and a long, old rifle swung ready for use. The figure was, in an instant, miniaturized in the mirrors. A white plain broken by
a
frozen river stretched before the helicopter and its shadow, which raced across the snow, the MiL moving above it like a dark insect.
Gant skimmed the ground at no more than thirty feet. His whereabouts were secret once more. He had picked up no information over the Tac channel to indicate anyone still remained interested in him. He was, for the moment, safe.