'Number one tube loaded, sir.'
The Tigerfish wire-guided torpedo was ready to be fired. Lloyd looked at his watch. Four minutes and thirty- six seconds since they had cleared the pen. Speed was the essence, Clark had said. Just like killing the two guards, he reminded himself with a sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Speed, surprise. And the gamble that Pechenga would switch off and disarm its minefield in order to preserve 'Leopard'.
'Range seven-fifty, sir.'
'Torpedo room — fire one!'
'One away, sir.'
Lloyd crossed the control room to where Thurston was studying the tiny, blank television screen set alongside the fire control console's other screens and panels of lights. The screen flickered on. Both men ignored the voice over the intercom calling the range and speed and functions of the wire-guided Tigerfish. They seemed mesmerised by the stir and rush and billow of grey water illuminated weakly by the light on the torpedo. Lloyd's wrist with its curling, dark hairs was at the edge of his eyesight. He saw, conjointly with the image on the screen, the second-hand ticking round, moving up the face of the watch, a red spider-leg.
The flash of something, like a curtain or a net though it might only have been an illusion created by the moving water. Then the screen blanked out as the torpedo operator registered the correct and chosen proximity to target and detonated the warhead of the Tigerfish. The shock-wave was a dim, rumbling shudder along the outer hull a few moments later. Lloyd grinned at Thurston.
'Let's see if you can find the hole, John, mm?'
Aye, aye, sir.'
The mist had lifted, remaining in small, thin pockets only in hollows and folds of the ground. The sun had resolved itself into a hard, bright circle, and the sky was palely blue. Hyde was sweating with effort and the rise in temperature as he pulled the girl up the steep bank behind him. When they stood together on the top of the bank, Hyde could see the Chase sloping away from them. He pulled the girl down beside him, and they lay on the wet, dead ferns, staring down through the silver-boled, bare birches towards the tiny figures making their way with laborious effort up towards them. The rifle ranges were behind them, the line of huge, numbered targets perhaps six hundred yards away.
Three of them — no, four. Somehow, Hyde knew there were no others. He checked the magazine, weighing it. Perhaps ten rounds left of the thirty it had originally contained. He thrust the folding double-strut stock against his good shoulder, and looked through the tangent rear sight and the protected post foresight. The action gave him confidence. The mist had been their patron, then their betrayer. Now, the clear air and the bright, warming sun were on their side. Hyde held the high ground. The effective range of the AK-47 was three hundred metres. The four men were at twice that range. He was required to wait.
'You all right?'
'Yes.'
The situation became increasingly unreal the more he considered it, the closer the Russians drew. He was in the middle of Staffordshire, these men were either accredited diplomats of the Soviet embassy or they were casuals called out from the woodwork to assist Petrunin. They were the ones on alien ground, and only now that he looked down on them, armed with one of their rifles and with the mist evaporated, could he perceive the situation in those terms. He had already won. The men down there pushed other men under buses, poisoned them with tiny metal pellets in the tips of umbrellas, pushed them on to the live rail of the underground. Maybe in the north of Scotland they could go on playing this hunting game, but not here. In a minute, a portly matron would appear, exercising a small dog, or someone from the Forestry Commission would pass them in a Land-Rover.
Stop it, stop it, he instructed himself. It was still four to one, and the police would be out in force on the M6, but not necessarily on Cannock Chase. Perhaps four hundred yards now. The four men had spread out, but until they reached the trees on the slope below they had no cover. They moved more cautiously now, probably afraid.
'Not long now,' he offered to Tricia Quin.
'What isn't? What won't be?' she asked in a sullen, tired voice. 'Christ, I'm tired and scared and hungry.'
'That's two of us.' He opened his squinting eye, and removed the gaze of his other eye from the sights of the Kalashnikov, He studied her. She had become girlish again, and his attitude to her hardened. The rest of it, anything warmer, belonged in the burrow where they had hidden and in his disordered imagination as he half slept. Now, he could not say that he even liked her particularly. She, evidently, disliked him. Their former attitudes had re-emerged, as if they both understood that they were already on the. other side of their experience. 'We' ve got the advantage now.'
She shook her head, staring at the rifle. It alienated her from him. He accepted her distance. She was about to climb back into the feckless skin which he had forced her to shed. She already resented the sloughing of her past self for the last few days.
He looked back. Still the four men, clambering through the wet ferns and the dead heather. A Land-Rover passed along a distant, open track behind them, and he grinned. He put down the rifle and cupped his hands.
'Petrunin! Can you hear me, Petrunin?' he bellowed. The men stopped immediately.
'Yes,' came the faint reply. Petrunin remained just out of effective range of the Kalashnikov. And he knew he was out of range.
'I' ve won, you stupid joker!'
'Not yet.'
'Admit it. You're finished. You'd better start making arrangements to fly out before they catch you. You're finished in England, mate!'
The four men remained standing, like an irresolute group of hikers. Just over three hundred yards away. There was nothing they could do, no way in which they could move forward into the trees without coming into range. Stalemate. Stand off.
'I think not. We are four to one.' Petrunin's voice was faint, unthreatening. The Forestry Commission Land- Rover had turned into a wide, sunlit ride, and was moving away. The normality it represented did not, however, diminish. Petrunin was bluffing, his words empty.
'Piss off!' Hyde yelled with a quick, sharp delight. 'You're beaten and you know it! Go home to Mother — '
The girl's gasp was inaudible, the begging of her scream merely scratched at his attention, far below the volume of his own voice, but the slump of her body at the corner of his vision attracted him, caused him to turn, his hands reaching instinctively for the rifle. It was kicked away from him, and then a second kick thudded into his wounded shoulder as it came between the walking boot and the side of his head. Tricia Quin, he had time to see, had been struck by the man's rifle stock on the temple, and her head was bleeding. He heard himself scream with pain, his whole body enveloped in the fire which ran from his shoulder. He raised one hand feebly as the man kicked again, them drove the wooden stock of his ARM rifle down at Hyde's face, an action as unemotional as stepping on an insect. Hyde attempted to roll away, but the stock of the rifle caught him between the shoulder blades, winding him, forcing all the air from his lungs so that he fell transfixed to the ground.
He went on rolling, and the man who must have doubled around behind them before they had reached the top of the slope came after him, rifle still pointed stock-first towards the Australian. There was a set, fixed smile on the man's face. The man wasn't going to shoot him, he was going to beat and club him to death. Petrunin and the others would already have started running, reaching the bottom of the slope, beginning now perhaps to labour up it to the top, through the birch trees.
Hyde kicked out, struck the rifle but not the man, who stepped nimbly aside and then came forward again. Hyde tried to get to his knees, aware of himself offering his back and neck for more blows, for execution. He could not catch his breath, which made a hollow, indigestible noise in his throat. The rifle swung to one side, then the stock swung back. Hyde fell away from it, and kicked out, catching the man on the shin, making him exclaim with the unexpected pain. The rifle stock sought his head. He pushed himself half upright on one arm, and dived inside the intended blow. His head snapped up into the man's groin, making the man's breath explode, his body weakly tumble backwards. Hyde grabbed the man's legs, squeezing them together, aware of his back exposed to the next blow. Broken back, his imagination yelled at him. Broken back, lifelong cripple in a chair. He heaved at the man's thighs against his shoulder, and they tottered in that supplicatory embrace until the ground dipped and the Russian
