Snow Falcon

waiting and searching. He had sufficient evidence — yet he wanted more, an answer to this empty village, and its pressing silence.

The whole idea of invasion had become ridiculous — forced to the back of his mind by the emptiness the village emitted like a gas. The implications of what he had seen were buried — he refused to consider any of them.

Empty.

This room — he had the sense of invading other lives, but no sense of the lives that had been lived there — and himself; he could catch sight of himself in a smoky mirror over the huge fireplace. Out of place; rudely forced upon this place, squatter or looter. He had touched nothing, acutely aware of his intrusion. What had happened to the people of Rontaluumi? There wasn't a single sign of violence.

Then he must have dozed — a false light sleep.

He woke to the sound of voices outside, the calling of orders; a tone of voice that reached down into him, pulling him awake. He was out of the chair in a moment, the taste of sleep still sticky in his mouth. He dribbled, wiped it away, blinking his eyes, straining to hear…

As he moved to the door, the door opened. He had forced the back door, next to the log store, but the man outside was using a heavy key to turn the lock.

The heavy door swung open.

A figure, in winter combat dress, hood thrown back to reveal the Russian fur cap on the dark hair. A face twisting with surprise, and the hand moving to the holster.

Folley shot the Red Army officer twice, the rifle still at his hip, the sudden noise of the gun bellowing in the low-ceilinged room, echoing back. The doorway was empty, wiped clean of the man's form as it fell into the snow outside.

For a single moment his body was frozen, the aftermath of unpremeditated violence. A boot stuck across the doorway, belonging to the dead man — the echoes of the two shots from the rifle dying away. Then he gathered up his pack, slung it over one shoulder, adjusting it on his back as he forced himself through the narrow door to the kitchen; he collected the skis from their propped position against the back door, and opened it silently.

Behind him there was a cry, orders barked in distant voices like the call of foxes. He stepped out into the darkening evening, alert for movement.

Beyond the initial rise, the ground sloped away from the back of the house, towards a narrow frozen river, and dense firs already looming and dark as the light faded rapidly. He clambered up the slope, then stopped to buckle on the heavy, long skis, then pushed off. Behind him, as the wind of his passage began to louden, he heard a shout, then the explosion of a gun. Something whined past his head, then again — a sharp, unreal cracking noise, as if he had crossed thin ice. Then he was shielded by the rise.

He jumped into a stop that spurted snow away from him — efficiently braking at the foot of the long slope. There were trees now between him and the pursuit, and the sheet of the river just below him, the banks heavy with icy grass. He unbuckled the skis, stepped away from them, hoisted them across his shoulder. He slithered down the bank, almost losing his rooting as his boots met the smoother ice of the river. He trod carefully, moving lightly and surely, the darkness comfortingly drawn around him, his passage silent. There was more shooting, then silence; he knew they would pursue him now.

He guessed that the armoured column had sent back some kind of patrol, for a reason that remained obscure. He could only think that they were to hold the village as some kind of crossing-point, that other columns were expected that night. And perhaps they had been intended to look for him. Ski-tracks, leading away from the camp He spent no time, even as he clambered up the opposite dope, in considering his own death. They would not let him live, he believed; but the priority of his survival had become uppermost now. He had to make some report, present some evidence of what he had seen. He could not, except in extreme emergency, use the transmitter now. That had been impressed upon him. Violation of Finnish neutrality.

As he settled on the far bank, hunched into the hard snow at its edge, the rifle with its night-sight aimed across the already glimmering sheet of ice, his lips twisted in a smile. Waterford and Davenhill, and whoever was behind them — they would know something had gone wrong by his inability to report or return. But not the size of it!

A white-clothed figure, ghostly, appeared at the other side of the river. He fired. The figure dropped away, merging with the snow. In the wake of the single shot, he heard a moan, carrying distinctly across the space between them. Another figure ducked back behind a thin tree-trunk. He fired twice, could see through the sight the white chips appear on the trunk. He fired twice more, grazing the bole of another tree. Nothing moved.

But he had the pictures now, the rolls of film and his mental count. One hundred and twenty tanks. A motor rifle battalion in support. In Finland. Enormity of simple statistics. And his impression of the column merely at a transit camp for the moment. It had to be reported.

In a day's time, the helicopter would return to the dropping point, but would not wait for him. It would return only once more, the following night. Then he would be presumed dead, effectively out of the Snow Falcon operation.

He wondered whether Waterford had known what he had found, already. Known that it was Russian armour. He had proof the Russians were invading Finland.

He had proof. He fired again, and a man staggered back behind the trunk that had concealed him. Wounded, but nothing more than that. He fired again, twice, a warning pattern. Then he slid backwards, towards the skis. The lip of the bank hid him from them as he fitted the cross-country skis, and pushed away silently, the skis slithering on the firm snow, the wind beginning to sing in his ears as he gathered speed.

For a moment, he felt a sagging of his knees, a heaviness against his back, as if he had carried the pack for long hours without rest. Then he dug in with the sticks, beginning to stride as the land levelled and he wound through the denser fir trees, gliding like a ghost. He shook off the weariness and the image. He was vulnerable. Already, they would have crossed the river; and they would have called up reinforcements. He was the tail of the comet streaming away from them, but pulling their mass surely behind him. And leaving a clean, new set of tracks for them to follow.

He struck south-west, in an opposite arm of the forest to that which followed the road to Ivalo; he followed the course of the river, its southern tributary, keeping well within the firs. When the trees died as the land rose again, he would strike westwards, towards the main north-south highway. He tried to comfort himself, as the body laboured and the legs tired, with the thought that the deeper into Finland he moved, the safer he became. It was a difficult consolation.

Natalia had disappeared into her bedroom, complaining of boredom and a headache. The small clock on the wall-shelf showed the time to be almost seven-thirty. Vrubel's dark, handsome face appeared to Vorontsyev to be puckering with irritation — yet there was a frown of nervousness created by the knowledge of Vorontsyev's rank, and department. Vorontsyev had savoured the young man's discomfiture, his apprehension — not as something professional, but as a diet on which his sexual jealousy could feed. He believed that the KGB Border Guard officer had slept with his wife, and he used his professional weight to disturb him.

Vorontsyev smoked an American cigarette — ostentatiously, he had offered one to the uniformed Vrubel. He had refused, smoking instead a Russian cigarette in its cardboard holder. The cheap, dark tobacco was pungent in the room.

'Why did you meet Colonel-General Ossipov at the officers' dub, Captain?' A professional tone of voice, the interrogatory flatness, the absence of the man's name, as if he were already a cipher.

'Why? Because he invited me to, Major. He was a comrade in arms of my father — at Stalingrad. He has always — favoured me with his friendship, ever since my father was killed.' Vorontsyev noticed the cold tone, which was without fear. He was talking to someone who belonged to a special class, an elite; the clique that the army had always inspired. Yet he was struck by the likeness of their separate biographies — he, in Mihail Pyotravich, possessed a guardian, an influential substitute parent, as this young man did, apparently, in Ossipov.

He dismissed the thought. He did not wish to identify with Vrubel in any way.

'What did you talk about?'

'Old times — the future. The things friends talk about.'

Vrubel was smiling again, unafraid. Once again, Vorontsyev was struck by the assurance Vrubel displayed. It was unexpected, despite his rank in the KGB. SID officers were not met with confidence, with secret amusement.