Trade Hall, and he had chosen to run with the girl, making Manchester as alien and dangerous as Prague or Warsaw or Moscow. He slapped notes and change on to the counter of the booth, together with his ticket.
He swallowed saliva, said 'I'm in a hurry. Keep the change. Open the barrier when I drive out — yellow TR7. Got it?' Then his hand was in his pocket and he was waving the shorthand of the CID warrant card. The Indian nodded.
Hyde ran on, the girl ahead of him now, but slowing because there seemed no safety amid the cars under the cracked, glassless station roof.
'Where?' she said.
'Over there,' he said, pointing.
One or two weak lights revealed the massed, hunched, beetle-like shells of car bonnets and roofs. The girl stared around her wildly. Hyde glanced back. Petrunin and the other two had slowed their pace, almost strolling past the barrier, confident but wary, imitating legitimacy. Seconds between them. Hyde ran out on to the platform with the girl. Dully gleaming, crustaceous cars; silence. The wind soughing thinly in the shell of the station. The three Russians were past the barrier and had paused on the threshold of the station itself. Hyde ducked down, pulling the girl into a crouch, and began weaving awkwardly between parked cars.
He paused, listened, then moved on. They came to the edge of the platform, and he dropped down. He reached up and the girl surrendered to his grasp on her waist. He lifted her down. A row of cars, one of them yellow.
'Mr Hyde?'
He thought for the moment it was the girl speaking, because of the light, interrogative tone. But it was Petrunin — accent and authority seeping into Hyde's awareness just behind the words. He gestured to the girl to remain silent, and they moved, crouching, along the rear bumpers of cars until they were leaning against the TR7. He heard the girl's ragged breathing again, but not like his mother's now; too alive for that, too much wanting to live. Hyde fished the car keys from his pocket and reached up to unlock the door.
'Mr Hyde?' Then whispered instructions above the girl's breathing, the shuffle of footsteps as the three men spread out. Petrunin was confident. He hadn't left anyone at the barrier. 'Mr Hyde.' A sharper tone, impatient.
Hyde eased open the door of the TR7, and indicated that the girl should climb in. They'd be looking for the yellow car. He crept round to the driver's door, unlocked it, clambered into the low hard seat. He eased the door shut on the footsteps that were coming closer. Steel-tipped heels to the heavy shoes. He slipped the key into the ignition, and pulled out the choke. He looked at Tricia Quin. Hair damp on her forehead, face pale, cheeks quivering.
'Which way?'
'North,' she said, hugging herself as if to keep warm; trying to retreat from her danger.
Hyde breathed in deeply, then turned the key. Cough, chatter of the ignition, cough, firing of the engine, drowning a surprised and delighted cry from up on the platform. He thrust the gears into reverse, screeched out of his parking place, heaving on the wheel. The TR7 skidded, almost stalled, and then the car was bucking over the uneven ground.
He reached the end of the platform, and swung the car left, across the hard-packed earth where the tracks had once been, until he mounted the platform ramp at the other side of the station. He had heard no gunfire, nothing after that shout of discovery. The engine whined, the tyres screeched as he roared along the platform, then turned again on to what had been the concourse, heading for the entrance.
One man, stepping out from behind a car, gun levelled. Hesitation, a slight turning of his head — a cry of protest from Petrunin? Then the TR7 was almost on top of him, a spit of flame from the shadowy bulk of the man before he flicked aside like a matador, between two cars. The bullet's path was a groove in the thin metal of the roof, directly above Hyde's head. He screeched the car round and through the entrance to the station, and the barrier was going up, very slowly. Another man was entering the booth alongside the barrier — barrier going up, making a chopping motion as it reached the peak of its swing, beginning to descend almost immediately. The TR7 raced beneath it, bounced over cobbles, and squealed into the road behind the Midland Hotel.
'North,' Hyde said loudly when his breath returned and the hotel's bulk was between them and the station. His palms were damp on the steering wheel, and he was perspiring freely. 'North.'
'Come on, come on!' Ardenyev yelled, his voice already hoarse from its combat with the wind and the sea, his gloved hands seemingly frozen and incapable as he attempted, with Teplov and Nikitin, to drag the largest of the sleds across the deck of the launch to its side.
The trough made them wallow as the helmsman steadied the launch. The young lieutenant watched them through the cabin window, his head flickering back and forth like a tennis spectator, towards them then towards the next peak, looming ahead of them.
'One more, sir!' Teplov bellowed back at him, even though they were not more than three or four feet apart on either side of the sled and its mound of cylinders. Shadrin and Vanilov and Kuzin were already submerged, safe under the water, with the second sled and the welding and cutting gear. Their ten minutes already begun. There should have been four sleds, more communications equipment, more everything. Petrov was lying on a bunk, his leg broken and splinted in an inflatable plastic bag. Groaning and useless.
The sled tilted on the side of the launch as the next wave reared up in the darkness and opened its jaws. Teplov glanced over his shoulder. Regret was useless, too. Ardenyev strained like someone demented or terrified as Nikitin, attached by a line, flipped over the side of the launch into the water, mask and mouth-piece in place, his ten minutes already beginning. One thought re-emerged from the panic of Ardenyev's mind. Unless they could get on to the
Nikitin's barely discernible bobbing head was accompanied by a raised hand, and then he swam close to the side of the launch. Ardenyev felt the dead weight of the sled pull towards Nikitin, and saw Teplov's face grey with strain. He yelled at the senior
Then the water, even as he turned his head to look and thought of time once more, lifted him and threw him across the deck of the launch. He glimpsed the lieutenant's appalled face, the rearing nose of the launch, then he was headfirst into the water, spun and tumbled like a leaf or twig in a stream's torrent, whirled down as he fitted his mouthpiece by instinct. His legs were above his head, just discernible; then blackness, and orientation returning. There were lights below him, two pale blobs like the eyes of a deep-ocean fish. He breathed as calmly as he could, then struck down towards the lights.
He tapped Teplov on the shoulder, and signalled with upraised thumb. Teplov's relief sounded withdrawn and almost mechanical through his throat-mike. Teplov slid further back against Nikitin on the seat of the sled, and Ardenyev swung himself into the saddle, holding on to the steering column. Directly in front of him, the tiny sonar screen was switched on, and the bright spot of the British submarine!ay below and thirty degrees to port.
'Shadrin?' Ardenyev enquired into his microphone. All formality, all wasted words and energy and air disappeared beneath the surface.
'Skipper?'
'Got her fixed?'
'Yes, skipper.'
'Let's go.'
Ardenyev dipped the nose of the sled — a light, frail craft now that it was in its own element, not being manhandled across a sloping, slippery deck — towards the ledge on which the
