‘Where else can you go?’ asked Belov.
The grinning son of a bitch at the other place would have known what was going to happen, Willick guessed.
The meeting was at Wilson Drew’s request, in response to the panic from Washington, and he chose Le Due. As always Kapalet watched the American enter and waited a sufficiently safe time before entering off the Boulevard Raspail.
‘Washington is wetting its pants,’ announced Drew.
‘They’ve got good reason,’ goaded Kapalet.
‘I need a hell of a lot of help,’ pleaded Drew.
‘That’s not going to be as easy as it has been,’ warned the Russian.
‘Why not?’ asked Drew, immediately worried.
‘I’m being recalled to Moscow,’ announced Kapalet.
34
The chances of his being detected were appalling. On the Interstate there had at least been other concealing vehicles but on the country roads Yuri was utterly exposed. The one car separating him from the Buick carrying Petr turned off after only a mile and Yuri decelerated, letting the distance increase between them, protected only by the rise and fall of the road and its too occasional bends. Because it was ingrained from his training he’d precisely started to check the distance as he’d driven away from the school: so far two and three eighths of a mile. It seemed like a hundred. The wheel was slippery in his hands and the perspiration stuck the shirt to his back. Streets and road signs registered, because they could be important: Meadow and Little Pitch and New Pitch and Heron Pond and Marsh Pond. Far to his right the treeline was abruptly broken by the defoliation he’d detected earlier, a brief baldness, and Yuri added that to the attempted landmarks. Webster Road and Cranbery Pond and Scharmerhorn Hill. Four miles exactly from the school. The humps and dips in the road were becoming more frequent: still not enough cover. They seemed to be climbing. He’d have to stop soon, abandon this attempt: exchange the car overnight, a different model and a different colour and try to evolve another system of pursuit, the following day.
And then the car in front turned. It was abrupt, with no signalled warning, and Yuri braked hurriedly, jerked forward against the wheel by the suddenness of the manoeuvre. And because he was closer against the windscreen he saw the helicopter. It was hovering some way to his left but as he watched it began a series of gradually expanding circles in the middle of one of which it pulled away in his direction. Yuri’s instant fear was that it was coming towards him but sharply it turned upon itself and from its position Yuri guessed it had isolated the car he had been following, minutes earlier, and was flying some sort of aerial escort. It stopped practically at once, hovering again, and Yuri memorized a clump of trees darker than the forest around them.
Hurriedly Yuri put the car back in gear, knowing he had to move before the machine resumed its circling and expanded the survey sufficiently to isolate him on the road. It only took him minutes to reach where the other car had turned; Yuri had hoped for a driveway but it was not. It was a minor dirt raod and at the speed he passed Yuri was unable to see any name sign. It wasn’t necessary: he wouldn’t have any difficulty finding it again. And he would locate it again, he thought, the decision hardening in his mind. He still needed to understand why Kazin had given him the assignment, but having got this close Yuri determined to complete it absolutely.
Yuri’s intention had been to drive back to Torrington for what he wanted but he saw the signpost to Thomaston giving a closer mileage, so instead he headed there. A part of his KGB instruction he’d never imagined he would need, reflected Yuri. But perhaps the most vivid to recall, and not just because of its savagery. It had been the nearest he’d come to failing any of the tests: how near only he knew. The parachute drop had been twenty miles from Bryansk, which was one of the few map references he had been given, because that was the city he had to reach undetected in an exercise which purported him to be a denounced agent pursued by a hostile enemy. And his pursuers had been hostile, spetsnaz commandos whose own fail-or-be-dismissed exercise had been to prevent his reaching the sanctuary of the city. To achieve which they were permitted to employ every and any method they chose. There had been a hunt from behind and a cordon ahead and the bullets and the booby traps had been real, not faked. Yuri had not intended the commando to be maimed in one of his own traps, after he intentionally triggered an alarm: merely to create a diversion sufficiently distracting for him to get past the country road barrier. The mine had been specifically placed to prevent that being possible. Had the man not stumbled on it himself, Yuri would have trodden upon it and been crippled, if not killed. Later, at the KGB academy in Moscow, he heard rumours that deaths were very frequent during such exercises.
In Thomaston he protectively spread the purchases, buying the waterproof rucksack and hiking boots from the obvious sports store but obtaining the other things – the thick socks, jeans, anorak, torch, sports shirt, woollen hat and binoculars – from various shops. He parked the car in a multi-storey park on a deserted level where he was able quickly to change, packing his suit in the rucksack, and left by the least conspicuous side entrance.
He forced himself at the beginning of the walk back, knowing from his careful observance on the way into the town that there were seven miles to cover and anxious for the maximum amount of remaining daylight. Sure of the way, he did not need the map he’d taken from the car and put in a side pocket of the rucksack, along with the camera. Yuri was confident he had followed the first rule of that murderous field exercise and merged inconspicuously into the background. This was going to be much easier than Bryansk.
He reached the humped road in just under an hour and slowed, trying to find as much cover as possible from the bordering trees, which was not as easy as he had hoped it would be. There was a wide, separating verge and in places a ditch. Before he rounded the corner just prior to the dirt road into which Petr Levin had been driven, Yuri saw the helicopter: it was making tight circles now. Wanting to establish its pattern, Yuri jumped the ditch and ran into the treeline, entering only far enough into the forest to be hidden from the road, equally sure he was sufficiently concealed from the air. He squatted on the rucksack, back against a moss-covered fir, focusing upwards with the binoculars, the adjustments of which were stiff with newness and difficult at first to move. Gradually the machine widened its sweep, as it had been doing when it picked up the boy’s returning car. Yuri calculated it to be five minutes from the point of stationary hover until the helicopter was directly over the road and a further seven minutes before it reached the apogee of its manoeuvre and tightened the circle to return to what had to be directly over wherever the Levin family were being kept. Yuri acknowledged that aeronautically the surveillance was absolute and therefore professionally expert: unprofessionally it provided an almost perfect method of identification.
Yuri watched the manoeuvre twice more, to confirm his timings, and at the instant of hover went back to the road and managed to get within ten yards of the turning before having to run again into the trees to avoid detection. Near enough, he decided: from that point he would go entirely through the forest, avoiding any open area. And even here be careful: the eye follows movement, not stillness, had been another field edict. He chose a fir again because of its permanent covering and waited patiently beneath it for the helicopter to fly outwards and then in again, only moving when it neared the unseen house. From the outset the gradient was increasingly uphill and matchingly steep. With the self-imposed stop-start precaution and the snagging thickness of the undergrowth, it took Yuri almost a further hour to reach the peak and having done so he was still much farther away from the now visible building than he had expected to be. There was an odd, U-shaped rift caused by a river and although it was not a barrier between him and the house the land broke sideways, creating a valley before him.
With nothing intervening he had a perfect view of his objective, however. And was able, too, to see that the sun was already close to a mountain top beyond. The last hour before darkness, Yuri estimated: maybe a little more.
From the map he decided that the mountain later to obscure the sun was called Prospect and that the river was named Bantam: it appeared to feed into a huge lake of the same name, but he could not see that from where he crouched. He had slight difficulty again adjusting the binoculars but through them finally obtained a greatly enlarged view of the mansion-like house. And more. As he watched he saw two men come from a coppice within the ground, one with a telescopically-sighted gun crooked under his left arm. The other waved to the helicopter pilot on a return run and Yuri followed the path of the machine. Into view came a separate group of guards, three this time, one with a Doberman restrained tightly on a leash. The downdraft of the helicopter upset the dog, which
