cover of the trees. Half-way up the first flurries of fresh, falling snow started to eddy around them.
At last they reached the trees and their blackness. Kolya pulled up, beckoning Bond alongside him and leaning over to speak. But for the gentle throb of the idling engines, it was very still among the tall firs and pines. Kolya did not appear to shout, and this time his words were perfectly clear.
‘Sorry about Tirpitz,’ he said. ‘It could’ve been any of us. They may have rearranged the mine pattern. Now we’re still one short.’
Bond nodded, saying nothing.
‘Follow me like a leech.’ Kolya went on. ‘The first two kilometres are not easy, but after that we’re more or less on wide tracks. A road, in fact. Any sign of the convoy and I’ll switch off my light, then stop. So pull up if my light goes out. When we get near to Blue Hare we’ll hide the scooters and go in on foot with the cameras.’ He tapped the packs attached to the back of his machine. ‘It’ll be a short walk through trees. About five hundred metres.’
Around half a mile, Bond thought. That was going to be fun.
‘If we take it steadily – roughly an hour and a half’s ride from here,’ Kolya continued. ‘You fit?’
Bond nodded again.
Kolya slowly took his machine forward, and Bond, pretending to check his gear, yanked on the lanyard, pulling out the compass. He opened it, fumbling with his gloves, then laid it flat on his palm and lowered his head to see the luminous dial. He watched the needle settle and took a rough bearing. They were approximately where Kolya had said they should be. The real test, then, would come later, if they managed to follow the convoy from Blue Hare to the Ice Palace.
Bond slid the compass back inside his jacket, straightened himself and raised an arm to indicate his readiness to continue. Slowly they moved off, covering the difficult first two kilometres at almost a walking pace. It was obvious there would be a wider path leading into this protective stretch of woods, if the convoy were coming in from Finland.
As Kolya had predicted, however, once past the first stage they found themselves on a wide, snow-covered track – the snow hard and packed, frozen solid, but deeply rutted in places. Perhaps Kolya was playing straight after all. The ruts suggested a previous passage of tracked vehicles, though it was impossible to tell how recently they had been made. The cold was now so intense that anything heavy, breaking the surface of the frozen snow, would leave tracks frozen equally hard within minutes.
Kolya began to pile on the speed, and as Bond followed easily on the flat surface, numbed as his mind was by the chill and marrow-freezing temperature, he started to ask questions. Kolya had shown almost incredible expertise on the way over the border – particularly going through the forests. It was impossible for him not to have followed the same route before: many times. For Bond it had been a time of unrelieved concentration, while Tirpitz had stayed well to the rear for most of the trip. Now the impression came back to Bond that Brad Tirpitz had not even been close during the zig-zagging journey through the trees.
Had both of them crossed the frontier by this route before? It was certainly a possibility. On reflection, Bond was even more puzzled, for Kolya had kept up a rapid pace even in the most difficult areas, and had done so without reference to bearings by compass or map. It was as though he was being navigated through by external means. Radio? Perhaps. Neither he nor Tirpitz had seen Kolya out of his gear, when they met at the scooters. Had the Russian brought them through on some kind of beam? Earphones would be easy to hide under the thermal hood. Bond made a note to look for leads plugged into Kolya’s scooter.
If not radio, was there a marked path? That was also a possibility, for Bond had been so busy keeping his own machine on Kolya’s tail that it was doubtful whether he would have noticed any pinpoint lights or reflectors along the way.
Another thought struck him. Cliff Dudley, his predecessor on Icebreaker, had not been forthcoming about what kind of work the team had been doing, in the Arctic Circle, before the row with Tirpitz and the briefing in Madeira. Had not M suggested, or said outright, that they had wanted Bond on the team from the outset?
Indeed, what had those representatives of four different intelligence agencies been up to? Was it possible they had been into the Soviet Union already? Had they already reconnoitred Blue Hare? Yet almost all the hard information had come from Kolya – from Russia; from the hi-fly photographs, and the satellite pictures, not to mention the sniffing out of information on the ground.
There had been talk of the search for von Gloda, of identifying him as the Commander-in-Chief of the NSAA, even as Aarne Tudeer. Yet von Gloda was there, at breakfast in the hotel, large as life, recognised by all. And nobody had appeared to be in the least concerned.
If Bond had started by trusting nobody, the feeling had now grown into deep suspicion towards anybody connected with Icebreaker. And that even included M, who had also been like a clam when it came to detail.
Was it just possible, Bond wondered, that M had deliberately set him up in an untenable situation? As they racketed and slid through the snow, he saw the answer plainly enough. Yes: it was an old Service ploy. Send a very experienced officer into a situation almost blind, and let him discover the truth. The truth for 007, hammered home again, was that he was well and truly on his own. The conclusion to which he had privately come earlier was, in reality, the basis of M’s own reasoning. There had never been a ‘team’ in the strict sense of the word: merely representatives of four agencies, working together, yet apart. Four singletons.
The thought nagged away at Bond’s mind as he heaved and hauled the scooter at speed, following Kolya over the never-ending snow and jagged ice. He lost all track of time, conscious only of the cold, and the motor growl, and the endless ribbon of white behind Kolya’s machine.
Then, slowly, Bond became aware of light somewhere ahead to his left – to the north-west – rising, bright, from among the trees. A few moments later, Kolya flicked off the small beam of his headlamp. He was slowing down, pulling into the trees to the left of the road. Bond brought his scooter to rest beside Kolya’s machine.
‘We’ll haul them into the woods,’ Kolya whispered. ‘That’s it over there – Blue Hare, with all the lights blazing like a May Day celebration.’
They parked the scooters, camouflaging them as best they could. Kolya suggested they get into the white snow suits. ‘We’ll be in deep snow, overlooking the depot. I have night glasses, so don’t bother with anything special.’
Bond, however, was already bothering. Under cover of getting into the snow camouflage, he fumbled with numbed fingers at the clips of his quilted jacket. At least he could now get at the P7 automatic quickly. He also managed to transfer one stun grenade and one of the L2A2 fragmentation bombs from his pack to the copious pockets of the loose, hooded white garment that now covered him.
The Russian did not seem to have noticed. He carried a weapon of his own quite openly on his hip. The large night glasses were slung around his neck, and, in the gloom, Bond thought he could even detect a smile on that mobile face as Kolya handed over the automatic infra-red camera. The Russian was carrying a VTR pack clipped to his belt, the camera hanging by straps below the binoculars.
Kolya gestured towards the point where the light now seemed to blast straight up between the trees, behind a slope above them. He led the way, with Bond close on his heels – a pair of silent white ghosts passing into dead ground, moving from tree to tree.
Within a few paces they had reached the bottom of the uphill climb. The top of the rise was illuminated by the lights, which cast their beams up from the far side. There was no sign of guards or sentries, and Bond found the going difficult at first, his limbs still stiff with cold from the long scooter ride.
As they neared the crest, Kolya gave a ‘get down’ signal with the palm of his hand. Close together, the pair squirmed through the deep snow which buried the roots and trunk bases of the trees. Below them, in a blaze of light, lay the ordnance depot known as Blue Hare. Having strained to see through darkness and snow for over three hours, Bond was forced to close his eyes against the sudden shock of arc lights and big spots. It was not surprising, he thought fleetingly as he peered down, that the men and NCOs of Blue Hare had been so easily suborned into a treasonable act of selling military weapons, ammunition and equipment. To live the year round in this place – bleak and uninviting during the winter, mosquito-ridden through the short summer – would be enough to tempt any man, even just for the hell of it.
As his eyes adjusted, Bond thought about their dreary life. What was there to do in a camp like this? The nightly games of cards; drink? Yes, a perfect place to post alcoholics; crossing off the days to some short leave, which probably entailed a long journey; the occasional trip into Alakurtii which, by his reckoning, was six or seven kilometres away. And what would there be in Alakurtii? The odd cafe, the same food cooked by different hands; a
