coffee mugs and croissants.
‘Grub’s up,’ he said, putting the tray on the table and grinning at Jack. ‘Isn’t that what your old seadog grandfather used to say?’
Jack took a coffee and smiled. ‘Hello, Jeremy. Is Rebecca awake?’
‘I’ll knock on her door if you want.’
‘No,’ Jack said. ‘It’s only just dawn, and she is still a teenager.’
Jeremy grinned again. ‘As you keep reminding me. She can’t wait to see you.’
‘Let’s see what Mikhail has to say first.’ Jack leaned forward, took a gulp of coffee and put the mug down on the table. He pointed to where the Lee-Enfield lay beside three other weapons, a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle, a Beretta side-by-side 12-gauge shotgun and a revolver, alongside a cardboard box filled with ammunition. ‘That’s quite an arsenal.’
‘Ben and John are both carrying Glocks,’ Mikhail said. ‘These are just my farm guns, for hunting and personal defence. I know how good you are with the Lee-Enfield, from shooting with you here last year, but I’ve only just sighted it in for new ammunition I’ve reloaded myself so I’ll take that. If the need arises, Rebecca has the shotgun and Jeremy the Ruger.’
Jack looked questioningly at Jeremy. ‘Have you done much shooting?’
‘I grew up in rural Vermont, where just about every boy I knew had a 10/22. You just have to know the limitations of the. 22, even the hyper-velocity rounds. For anything bigger than a squirrel, that means less than fifty yards and always a head shot. But with the right shot placement, that rifle could kill a man instantly.’
There was a rustle from a corner of the room and Rebecca appeared bleary-eyed around a door, her long dark hair hanging over an oversized T-shirt. She gave a small wave, then shut the door again. Jeremy turned back to Jack. ‘I know what you’re asking. I haven’t pulled a gun on a man before, but I’ll do what it takes. We’ve got assets to protect.’
Jack reached over and picked up the revolver, a heavy break-top Webley. ‘So it looks as if this is mine.’
‘It’s an old British service revolver,’ Mikhail said. ‘A lot of Webleys were sold as surplus into the States in the fifties and sixties. It’s a man-stopper,. 455 calibre, designed to put down fanatical tribesmen on the Afghan frontier. It’s my home defence weapon.’
Jack spun the cylinder, then cupped his hands around the grip and aimed the pistol. ‘Scott Macalister has one of these, and I’ve practised with it from the ship.’ He pressed the lever on the receiver with his right thumb and broke the pistol open, pivoting the barrel and cylinder forward and letting the ejector snap out and fall back again. He reached over to the cardboard box and took out a container of. 455 ammunition, opened it and loaded six cartridges into the cylinder, leaving the pistol broken open and laying it back on the table. ‘If Saumerre’s men do try to attack, what’s the drill?’
Mikhail sprang up from his chair and went up to the window on the opposite side of the house from the barn, gesturing for Jack and Jeremy to follow. Jack mounted the stairs and stood beside him, looking over the lush green winter wheat that carpeted the field towards the pine and maple trees bordering the forest beyond. Mikhail opened the mosquito screen on the window, took a compact laser rangefinder from the ledge below and peered through it, finding a target and holding the rangefinder steady with both hands while he pressed the activator on the top. ‘That large dead pine at the end of the field is three hundred and twelve metres away,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the furthest line-of-sight distance in any direction from the house.’ He took down the rangefinder and pointed to a large aerial photograph of the farm pinned to the wall beside the window, showing the three main fields extending off from the buildings like fingers penetrating the forest. ‘It’s all near enough for me to shoot using the battle sights on the Lee- Enfield without any need for range adjustment.’ He looked back, scanning the far edge of the field for a moment, and then pulled shut the mosquito screen. ‘It’s been done before,’ he said, looking at Jack. ‘During the war of 1812, the place withstood a combined British and Iroquois attack. The farmer and his boys only had flintlock longrifles, but it did the trick.’
‘Should one of us be standing lookout?’ Jeremy said.
Mikhail shook his head. ‘No need until we’re certain there’s a threat. Best to rest and keep alert. At the moment Ben is the first line of defence, and the dogs provide an early-warning system. I built the pen so they have a full run around the house. They’re very territorial and want to attack anything that intrudes on this place. They’ll let us know.’
Jack gestured at a spotting scope on a tripod beside the window. ‘It looks as if you designed this room as a defensive outpost.’
Mikhail gave a wry smile. ‘I’m a pretty serious birder. Rebecca’s probably told you all about it. I used to drag her along to all kinds of places to spend hours sitting beside some swamp at migration time. When we bought this farm, the house was derelict and I had this room built as part of an extension, custom-designed as an observatory.’
‘And a place to write your books. I envy you that.’
Mikhail paused. ‘There’s another reason for the design of this room, the open-plan concept with the continuous window. Even when I’m absorbed in writing, I’m not comfortable in a room where I’m not aware of my surroundings. I can’t sleep unless the windows are open. It’s a small legacy of war.’
Jeremy eyed him cautiously. ‘You were in Afghanistan during the Soviet war, weren’t you? Before you defected? Rebecca told me, but I know you don’t like it spread about. Plenty of people here haven’t forgotten the Cold War and still think of the Russians as the enemy.’
Mikhail walked over and opened the top drawer of a small wooden chest beside the sofa. He took out two badges and tossed them on the sheepskin carpet on the floor in front of them. One was a hammer-and-sickle design within a star surrounded by golden sheaves of wheat; the other was a red-enamel pentagonal star containing a white-metal image of a Soviet soldier holding a rifle. He looked at them ruefully. ‘The Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star. They dished those out to everyone who fought in the battle for Hill 3234, to the men who survived and the families of the men who died. I was an intelligence officer attached to the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment. We were ordered to occupy a nameless ridge 3,234 metres high overlooking the road from Gardez to Khost near the Pakistan frontier. It was the night of the seventh of January 1988. A single reduced company of thirty-seven men fought off waves of attacks by hundreds of mujahideen all night long. By the time we were relieved, we’d suffered thirty-four casualties.’
‘And you survived unscathed?’ Jeremy asked.
Mikhail pulled up his left sleeve, revealing an ugly scar under his bicep. ‘You may have noticed that I can’t really use all the fingers of my left hand. The mujahideen who shot me was using an old British service rifle, a Lee- Enfield. Somehow having one of those rifles here and being in control of it helps me to deal with the pain. He came right up to our perimeter and I killed him with a grenade.’
‘That’s one less Taliban today,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘Maybe. But if we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there’d have been no mujahideen and then maybe no Taliban and no al-Qaeda. The only thing I can be sure of is that I fought in the last campaign of the Cold War and that our defeat brought about what I so desperately wanted, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just like Korea and Vietnam and numerous other proxy conflicts between communism and the West, fighting mujahideen on the Afghan frontier served as a pressure-relief valve that kept the prospect of nuclear annihilation at bay. That’s the way I see it as a historian, though as a soldier you only see yourself and your mates. Without the breakdown in the Soviet security system that was precipitated by the Afghan War, Petra and I might never have defected and I wouldn’t be a professor of history in the United States today.’
‘And Rebecca wouldn’t have had such marvellous foster-parents,’ Jack said.
Mikhail walked around and peered out of the window facing the driveway. ‘The difference between here and Hill 3234 is that we held a mountain ridge with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility down into the surrounding valleys. What nearly finished us was the sheer force of mujahideen numbers, as well as the rocky terrain that allowed them easy concealment as they came up the slopes, and the limitations of our weapons and ammunition supply. What mainly concerns me here are the two places where the forest comes within seventy metres of the house. But let’s leave that to Ben and the dogs. I want to show you what I found in the archive, Jack.’
‘Good. The Embraer’s returning to Syracuse for me this afternoon.’
They walked down the steps and sat around the table. Mikhail picked up a large manila envelope from beside the guns and slid out a sheaf of papers that looked like scanned documents. He peered at Jack, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘You asked me for two things. First, to try to get the inside story on the discovery of those crates of
