Snow Falcon

patronising show of paying, he said, 'Infra-red. They must be good. What of?'

'The Finnish-Soviet border area, south-east of Ivalo.'

'Oh — those.' Stig appeared puzzled, bemused. 'Are your lot still taking them from those high-wing monoplanes, so the Russians don't suspect they're doing something your government has agreed there's no need to do?' Luard was smiling broadly, his face seeming to be enveloped by the fat cheeks, the heavy jowl — nose, eyes being pushed into a little fist of lumps in the centre of the globe of fat pink flesh. Stig hated him.

'They are still using private aircraft, if that is what you mean.' Luard laughed, raised his glass, his little eyes twinkling, and presumably drank the health of the Cessnas and their pilots from Finnish Intelligence. He watched the antagonisms chasing themselves across the Finn's features, and decided to give Stig a rest.

'All right, old man. Let's see them.'

'Here?' The Finn appeared outraged, violated. 'We're in an alcove, aren't we. Don't be such a virgin. Holiday snaps, dirty pictures — doesn't matter. No one's going to care.'

'Perhaps you could explain, Shelley, why this has taken two months to reach me?'

Kenneth Aubrey looked at the sheaf of infra-red photographs fanned open on his desk, then up at his aide. The young man appeared disconcerted, but confused more evidently than distressed.

'Sir, it was passing through my hands as routine. I didn't think you needed to see it.'

'Very well.' Aubrey sighed. 'I accept that I was being inordinately curious when I removed them from your tray. But — now that I have them, pray enlighten me.'

'They came in the Bag from Helsinki. With a note from Luard designating his contact as usual, and making light of these.'

'And what are they meant to represent?'

'I checked with Helsinki, because the explanatory note was unsatisfactory.' Aubrey nodded in compliment. 'Apparently, it's a practice roll from one of their covert border-checks. We don't have the later rolls they took of the Russian side of the border. This lot was on its way to the shredder when our contact sidetracked them.'

'Why should he do that?' Aubrey picked up one print, and Shelley another, in order to direct Aubrey's attention. He knew that his superior disliked anyone who stood at his shoulder to draw attention to something he was studying.

'The smear of infra-red sources in the top left-hand corner is Ivalo, the cold spot beyond is Lake Inari — apparently.' Aubrey nodded, impatiently, it seemed to Shelley. 'Towards the bottom, the other smear is the small town of Raja-Jooseppi. The mystery resides, apparently, in the fact that there should be another, smaller smear, down near the bottom right-hand. A village called Rontaluumi.'

'Yes?'

'The practice roll appears all right — except that there is no heat-source whatsoever from the village.'

'What?'

'Our contact's superiors rejected the film as partially damaged, or wrongly developed. The rest of the film, the over-the-border stuff, was quite satisfactory.'

'What other explanation might there be?'

'Luard said, with scarcely disguised contempt, that it frightened the life out of our contact.'

'And is he a man given to panic?'

'No.'

'Then what is his explanation.'

'He says that not to make an infra-red impression of any kind means that the village was empty of life — human and animal. And must have been for several days before the film was taken.'

'Sir, there's no contact from Brunton.'

PART ONE FINLAND STATION 15th to the 18th of…… 19.

'The tasks of the Party are… to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.'

Stalin

One: The Falcon

The brief period of daylight had again passed, and the sky was hard with stars. A soughing wind flicked at the snow, wiping it in quick flurries from the ground and pattering it against the walls of the tent Folley awoke refreshed, stiff with the cold and still with the image of the retreating helicopter in his imagination, the tail-light winking as if in valediction.

He opened his eyes, shook himself, and climbed out of the sleeping-bag.

He appreciated from the tiny rodent noises of the snow against the tent that the weather was holding, glanced at his watch, and then unstrapped the tent-flap. He knelt there, listening with his whole body, head cocked on one side.

Eventually he seemed satisfied, and went out into the air which seemed to grasp at the lungs from within. He stretched, easing the stiffness. The ski-ing of the previous night, after dropping from the helicopter which had come skimming in under the radar net into Finnish Lapland, had taken its toll — not of his strength, but of his youth, it seemed. He was aching in muscles he never considered. He rubbed at the backs of his thighs, easing them under the white camouflage over-trousers.

Then he seemed to decide that further delay was pointless, and there was an urgency about his repacking of the tiny white tent and even in the eating of his rations. He considered coffee, and at once rejected the delay it would involve.

He was a little less than thirty kilometres south-east of Ivalo, the Lapland town at the southern extremity of the sacred Lake Inari. He was well away from the single main highway from Rovaniemi in the south, and from the single airlane between the two towns. A light plane had passed overhead soon after he had been dropped, its lights winking as it made its approach to the airport.

He was in a country desolate with snow, a lunar landscape without real features, even so dose to the foothills of the Maanselka, the mountain chain crossing the body of Finnish Lapland. All the previous night he had passed through the ghostly landscape, heading south-east, and this night, too, it would be the same. Winter exercises inside the Arctic Circle had taught him what to expect in terms of terrain — but even then that had been northern Norway, where the slopes of the land were knife-cuts to draw the eye and hold it, where the fjords broke the snow like fingers spread on a white page.

He shook off the sense of deadness. Here, he was less than twenty miles from the Soviet border.

As he pushed off, digging in with the ski-sticks, putting his bulky, laden form in motion, he knew that this first mile might be the last one, just as every mile he had travelled might have been the mile of arriving.

The large-scale map of Finland that Waterford had pinned to the wall of his cramped hotel room in Hereford, remained clear in his mind. He could see Waterford clearly, four days previously, pinning up the map, then sweeping his hand down the Soviet-Finnish border. Waterford had stressed that the location could not be precise.

He sensed, suddenly, the isolation, the loneliness. Water-ford's room had been as redolent of it as this landscape. The experience was emptying. At the same time, the hours on the long cross-country skis increased his awareness, like some drug. Emptiness almost tangible in the snowbound tundra, its tips of small trees jutting like the fingers of buried hands. Or the thin pine forest, always threatening to die or vanish — straggling away from him to expire on the distant slopes.