began to fight against the lead and to bark: the sound did not reach Yuri.
Another man in the group made a gesture of greeting to someone out of Yuri’s vision and he shifted direction, perfectly to see the boy he’d observed leaving the Litchfield school. Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin was by his side. Yuri was just in time to see the defector respond to the wave. Yuri snatched his camera from the rucksack and managed three exposures, despite the focus being blurred. He tried the infinite setting but was still unsure if the man would be identifiable from that distance.
Yuri was about to press the button again when he heard the sound, the soft noise of something moving carefully against detection. Momentarily he stayed motionless, seeking the cause within his immediate vision, not daring even to turn his head. There was nothing. He lowered the camera, but to the cushion of pine needles and not the rucksack where it might have scraped against the canvas, looking as he did so to the left and then the right. Still nothing. It came again, closer this time. Behind him then. Yuri pressed himself against the bole of the tree, trying to assess his vulnerability. Bad, he decided; very bad. Wrong to make the slightest shift; safety in stillness, he remembered. He swallowed, thinking he could hear himself do it.
The doe snuffled into view from his left, nuzzling beneath the leaf mould. The animal saw Yuri as he saw it. Its head came up, in startled alertness: for several seconds it regarded him with brown-eyed curiosity and then hurried away, not panicked but at a trot. Yuri released his breath, shivering with the tension.
He looked back to the faraway house, still able to see Levin and his son. He needed to be closer, he thought. There would be just enough light, for about another half an hour. He let the helicopter clear the house and started at once down the hillside, not waiting for it to get as far away as he had earlier, finding an animal path and using it instead of trying to make his way through the delaying undergrowth. As he descended lower, where the trees were thicker, Yuri occasionally lost sight of the house and realized he could not descend too far, because he needed the elevation. Twice he had to halt when the aerial surveillance was directly overhead and on the last occasion, waiting, Yuri confronted his error. The dusk was making it difficult to see more than a few yards in the fast-darkening forest: the helicopter was already using lights. Just ahead was a knoll, from which he was sure he would be able to see over the valley floor into the house for the last opportunity.
And in deciding to make that one final attempt Yuri made his greatest miscalculation. The helicopter had passed and the Russian was actually starting up the incline when the siren screamed and the searchlight stabbed out from above, whitely illuminating the animal track only yards behind him.
Yuri kept going, to increase their mistake and get further away from the light, pulling into the undergrowth when the probe began splaying back and forth, gauging the sweep when it went uphill to plunge on down into the valley, fleeing from it. No safety in stillness now, he decided, panted breath burning into him: the only thing now was to run. But towards what? The siren sounded again, an obvious alert to the armed and dog-handling guards below, towards whom he was running.
He thrust sideways, off the track, stumbling over roots and fallen wood he could not see, face whipped by branches that stung and tore at him. He could actually feel the torch against his hip, through the rucksack, the light he needed but could not use because it would immediately show where he was. Going in the proper direction, he told himself: parallel with the slip road but away from its junction with the larger highway, the obvious place to block. Was there another linking road, the way he was heading? He could not remember, from the map: possible but the line could have indicated another tributary into the lake he’d not been able to see. And if it were a road, wouldn’t they block that exit, too? The rucksack was an encumbrance, the straps and buckles easily entangled, but Yuri refused to discard it, not wanting to leave any evidence of his detecting Levin.
Not easier than Bryansk. The same: surrounded by a hostile enemy, guns that weren’t fakes. As the thought came Yuri believed he heard shouts from the road below and a dog, perhaps several dogs, barking. The helicopter’s lights still darted and searched above him, once so close in front that he had to stop against a tree, to prevent stumbling into it. Definitely voices. And dogs. The dog sounds were closer: he guessed the animals had been let loose, to hunt him down. He’d forgotten a knife: anything at all that might have served as a weapon. He needed a stream, any wetness, to blur the scent. Wouldn’t be tracking him by scent, he realized, starting forward again. All they’d need would be his noise. The barking was definitely closer: he thought he could hear their crashing through the undergrowth.
Yuri was fleeing with both hands outstretched, to detect the trees, but only his right hand struck the obstruction and it wasn’t wood and he stopped, frightened by the unknown, feeling out and touching the coldness with both hands. It was, absurdly, the seeking helicopter light which briefly illuminated it and even showed him the commencement of the culvert, where it opened to the stream. He groped along its length, in the darkness again, to its beginning and felt around it, trying to assess the size. Big, he determined: huge, in fact. He’d have to bend but it would be possible to walk in. Maybe even run. No, couldn’t run. There was the stream. Water. What he needed to defeat the animals whose yapping and barking was very close now. The water’s flowing would actually disguise any sound.
The helicopter returned, again briefly illuminating. The stream emerged from somewhere above, about a foot across, but a much wider path and a concrete receiving sluice had been built at the entrance to the pipe which ran in the open for about fifty yards. And then disappeared into the hillside. The wideness of the stream had given Yuri the clue: it was a drainage pipe to carry off the melted winter snows (‘there are lodges and good skiing all around’) from a river that had been eroding the hillside through which it passed. How far was it buried, before re-emerging? Yuri definitely heard a man’s voice this time; an irrelevant question, then.
He slipped out of the rucksack and, thrusting it before him like a shield, entered the total darkness of the pipe. The water came up above his ankles, soaking very quickly through his boots and numbing his feet. He scuffed along, bent double, feeling the slime underfoot. It was greasy to his touch when he reached sideways for support to the wall of the drain and he pulled his hand quickly back again, offended. He was aware of a sound above the hiss of the water, a squeaking, and recoiled when something brushed against his leg, above the waterline. The smell – wet decay and decomposing rot – was so repugnant Yuri gagged, choking back vomit. After several hundred yards he turned but was unable to see the slightly lighter circle marking the entrance so he decided at last to risk the torch.
Dozens of reflective spots of light came back at him. Eyes. He’d expected rats but not so many. They swarmed either side, unafraid, but were avoiding the water. Just rats? He couldn’t see anything else. Surely the water would have prevented it being habitable to snakes! The slime virtually encircled the pipe, showing the volume of water at the height of the snow thaw. How did the rats survive then? Yuri put the rucksack back on, to free his hands, and waded on, directing the torchlight straight ahead, desperately anxious for some sign of the tunnel’s end. Total blackness stretched ahead of him. A rat squeaked and made as if to jump at him and Yuri whimpered away, shuddering. And not just with revulsion. The coldness was moving up from his feet, actually making it difficult for him to walk properly and he clamped his mouth closed against the distraction of his teeth chattering. He moved the torch up again, away from his immediate path. Still total blackness but at least there were fewer rats: far fewer. He supposed it was obvious they would congregate around the beginning of the tunnel because of the need to forage outside for food.
Attuned as he was to sound after the forest manhunt it was the change in the rush of water which registered first, louder and faster, and expectantly he pointed the torch again, looking for the outlet to the river into which the stream fed, but couldn’t see it. He drove himself forward, wanting to get out of the foul place, and had there been more feeling in his feet and legs he might have detected the change underfoot, because it was not abrupt but graded. It was not until he began to slip on the slime that he became aware that the pipe was curving increasingly downwards. And realized the sound wasn’t a river but the fall of water and that was why there were no longer any rats. By then it was too late. Yuri clutched out but there was no purchase in the slippery walls and then he fell, awkwardly, losing the torch. The rucksack became a float beneath him and the rush of water hurried him down the now virtually perpendicular pipe. Everything was black. He was engulfed in rushing, choking water but he fought against choking because he could not breathe, either. Yuri was not conscious of hurtling out of the pipemouth. The indication was a lessening of the water’s push, where it spread into a man-created waterfall and of falling differently and helplessly through space, without the hardness of the concrete tube around him. He tried to correct himself, to get as near as he could into the parachute landing position he had been taught, but the rucksack unbalanced him and he cartwheeled, out of control. It was only later, in daylight and from the bank to which he hauled himself, that Yuri realized how close – hardly more than a foot – he had come to being thrown against the sharp-ridged granite cliff face that would almost certainly have killed him. Instead, propelled from it by the thrust of the water, he landed actually in the river, but from the height from which he fell it was practically the same as
