Snow Falcon

him, tearing, crying sounds that belonged to no human experience. The whole mass of metal, to which he had now added perhaps three hundred and fifty pounds of human material, slewed across the road, almost into the ditch below him.

Then it stopped. Silence. He was grateful for that; he could sense Goessler crouched into shock beside him. A whistle blew, and Goessler's team went into action.

The ambulance, headlights gleaming off the road, blue light flashing, siren wailing, turned out on to the road. A police car appeared round the bend in the road, and parked broadside-on, blocking oncoming traffic. Its red light swept continually across the road. A red fire-engine appeared from the trees, as if lost, then drew out alongside the container-lorry.

The cab door had to be cut open with torches which flickered blue off metal and wet road, sparked and blazed. When the first of the men, the driver, was lifted from the twisted intestines of the cab, it was evident he was dead. Aubrey did not need the white face of one of Goessler's men looking up towards them, and the shaking head.

'Why have they bothered with the driver?' he snapped. Then, raising his voice, he called, 'The other man — he is the one. Is he alive?'

A fireman had clambered into the cab, and now he appeared, his hand raised towards them. Aubrey could see the extended thumb dearly in the glasses. The man was alive. A shiver of success, and relief, possessed his old frame for a moment.

'We shall go down, Herr Franklin,' Goessler remarked, with the first urgency he had shown all afternoon. Aubrey raised himself from his stick, letting the glasses hang from their strap.

He was irritated by having to hold on to Goessler's arm for support as they descended the muddy slope.

The second man, the driver's mate, was extracted from the cab in half an hour. His legs were obviously crushed by the impact, and the German doctor continually shook his head. He administered morphine to keep the man unconscious. When he was finally lowered on to a stretcher, and the black bags had been inflated round the crushed limbs to form splints, the doctor glared at Aubrey with what seemed to him to be dislike, even momentary hatred.

'Don't waste your sympathy, Herr Doktor,' Aubrey snapped at him across the stretcher — its red blanket and white, strained face. 'This man is a senior Russian tank officer. Not a German — as you well know. Now, get him into the ambulance.'

When the driver's mate was loaded aboard, Aubrey climbed into the rear of the ambulance, Goessler following him. He slammed the doors shut behind them. A nurse, water from her wet cape joining the pool from the umbrella Aubrey had folded, began giving a transfusion to the unconscious man on the stretcher.

As he watched the tube redden through its length, reach the arm like a quick red snake, and the bottle begin to empty, Aubrey was suddenly afraid. It was as if a hand had swept down the house of cards he had built — or someone had laughed at something he had thought, or written or composed in secret.

'How bad is he?' he asked the doctor, sitting beside the patient.

'Bad.'

Aubrey tapped the floor of the ambulance as it jerked into motion, its siren accelerating up the scale as it headed for Kassel. His umbrella protested drops of water on to his trousers.

'He must live,' he remarked. 'It is imperative that this man makes a sufficient recovery.' There was a hissing, almost threatening urgency in his voice. The doctor was quelled, rather than resentful. 'The man must live — he must live.'

The Kaseler Zeitung carried a news item on the accident, and what it claimed were exclusive photographs. There was a vivid description of the wreckage, and the weather conditions. The main burden of the article seemed to be an attempt to reopen discussion on extending the E63 autobahn from Eisenach to Kassel through the Kaurunger-Meissner Wald, which stretch of road had proven once again fatally inadequate for the present volume of traffic A further item on the same page informed the readership of the death of the driver's mate, one Hans Grosch, of Stadtroda near Jena, after an unsuccessful operation at the Kassel Central Hospital. His body, the authorities had informed the Kaseler Zeitung, would naturally be returned to the DDR for burial, in due course.

That evening, twenty-six hours after the accident, an RAF Hercules took off from an airfield outside Hanover. When it landed at RAF Brize Norton, an ambulance was waiting for one of its passengers, who was then driven to a small private hospital outside Cheltenham.

Cunningham looked down at the red file on his desk, then up into Aubrey's habitually ingenuous blue eyes. The face round those eyes, once child-like and unageing, now appeared drawn caught a whiff of it earlier, I would have gone for it — as it was…' He lifted his hands in a shrug. 'Nevertheless, what Smoktunovsky considered most vital to conceal was encapsulated in those phrases, and that number. Group 1917 — Finland Station and the twenty-fourth. The last is presumably a date, though it might be something else. I am convinced that he thought it most important, and highly secret.'

Cunningham was silent for a moment as he re-read the underlined passage. When he looked into Aubrey's face again, it was evident he was sceptical. There was sympathy in his eyes that could only be for Aubrey's tiredness.

'Wasn't the man just rambling — his prayer-beads, perhaps?'

'I considered that. No, there is a later stage when he does that — a dead wife, I gathered, sons, his own father. His wanderings around himself were personal, not political.'

'And you want — ?'

Aubrey rubbed his eyes, as if assailed by the weariness of the interrogation again. He saw his suspicions with Cunningham's eyes, momentarily.

'I — should try to explain my feelings about this, Richard. I don't want to be accused merely of a womanish intuition.' Aubrey smiled briefly. 'It's the language that's being used. The whole revolutionary evocation — '

Cunningham smiled.

'I see. This is a semantic intuition, then? We are to be concerned with language, with meaning?'

'You're dismissing the whole thing — but you weren't there, with him. He was down in his belly, escaping me in screams, Richard!' Aubrey shuddered, as if someone had opened a door and let in cold air. 'No, you weren't there. This was so important to him, he had to hide it. Wainwright and the Soviet First Secretary are to sign the SALT3/MARS agreement early next year. The Red Army is, we are certain, violently opposed to the Politburo over the whole package — they've even gone into print arguing for an increase in defence spending.'

The words tumbled out now, as if he had struck some rock in his mind and a long-carried cargo was being spilled. The and thin. Age, Cunningham decided, did not become Aubrey. It seemed to have wasted him more than others. Unless the weariness, the stretched skin, could be put down entirely to his interrogation of Smoktunovsky.

'A great pity the man died,' he observed. It was not a criticism.

Aubrey looked at the bright wintry day outside in Queen Anne's Gate, over Cunningham's shoulder.

'I quite agree.'

The warmth of the room was stuffy, dry, belying the weather, which possessed such an agreeable sharpness that Aubrey had walked part of the way to his office that morning. 'However, perhaps convenient, since his body may now be returned to the DDR, in compliance with the official request by the family Grosch.' He smiled thinly. 'Colonel Smoktunovsky of Group of Soviet Forces Germany — I wonder how he liked playing the part of driver's mate? I quite forgot to ask him.'

Cunningham flicked open the file. Aubrey was always bitter after a prolonged interrogation; as if hating something in himself.

'Satisfied — in broad terms, Kenneth?'

'I think so. In broad terms. Colonel Smoktunovsky knew a great deal.'

'False alarm, then?'

'I think so. The military analysts are taking their time coming to the same conclusion — but I think they'll get there. No, the sending of perhaps the most senior tank officer ever into the Federal Republic to do his own routine reconnaissance was — well, perhaps an expensive luxury, or a piece of bravado. An old warhorse, feeling his oats…