Snow Falcon

He passed deeper into the night, and the only sounds were the constant wind and the ceaseless and rhythmic hissing of the long skis.

Beneath the arctic camouflage of his winter combat clothing, he wore the uniform of a lieutenant, his own rank, but a Yliluutnantti of the Lapland Rifle Battalion. His uniform was Finnish, the Russian-style fur hat jammed on his fair hair under the camouflage hood. Badges of rank on his combat dress were accurate. Across his shoulders, free of the heavy pack, was lying a 7-62 mm M/62 assault rifle, the Finnish copy of the Russian Kalashnikov; in a hip-holster, a 9 mm Lathi pistol, regulation firearm for Finnish officers. And there were the papers, and their false identity. He was engaged in a crosscountry endurance and survival test, part of his final examination before acceptance into the exclusive and semi-secret Finnish Special Force — a body equivalent of Folley's own British SAS.

Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.

He cupped gloved hands round the mug and swallowed the coffee, grateful for the pungent taste. It shocked the palate, unfroze the mind. He could hear Waterford talking in his steely, precise tones, suggestive of a masked or restrained power — even a deep and bitter fury.

He knew something of Waterford's cavalier and even brutal army record, his connections on more than one occasion with the SIS. He allowed himself to laugh, a sound sharp as cracking wood in the silence and cold air, as he recollected the small, childish excitement he had felt as the briefing had begun. He had understood the crude exploitation of information in his CPP (Complete Personality Profile) by the senior man, yet he had been unable to quench the sudden warmth of the belly or control the shallowness of his breathing as the words separated him from others, acknowledged that he was the only suitable selection for the Snow Falcon thing.

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.

He passed deeper into the night, and the only sounds were the constant wind and the ceaseless and rhythmic hissing of the long skis.

Beneath the arctic camouflage of his winter combat clothing, he wore the uniform of a lieutenant, his own rank, but a Yliluutnantti of the Lapland Rifle Battalion. His uniform was Finnish, the Russian-style fur hat jammed on his fair hair under the camouflage hood. Badges of rank on his combat dress were accurate. Across his shoulders, free of the heavy pack, was lying a 7-62 mm M/62 assault rifle, the Finnish copy of the Russian Kalashnikov; in a hip-holster, a 9 mm Lathi pistol, regulation firearm for Finnish officers. And there were the papers, and their false identity. He was engaged in a crosscountry endurance and survival test, part of his final examination before acceptance into the exclusive and semi-secret Finnish Special Force — a body equivalent of Folley's own British SAS.

Eventually, deep in the night, he stopped to rest, his breathing laboured as if to impress him with the body's exertions and the distance he had travelled. He unslung the pack and the rifle in its canvas sleeve, and set up the tiny gas heater. He brewed coffee, hunched in the darkness behind a fold of the land. The burdened trees leaned over the lip of the dell, as if in some fish-eye lens. He felt enclosed by the trees from the flatness and the flowing white curtains of the forest.

He cupped gloved hands round the mug and swallowed the coffee, grateful for the pungent taste. It shocked the palate, unfroze the mind. He could hear Waterford talking in his steely, precise tones, suggestive of a masked or restrained power — even a deep and bitter fury.

He knew something of Waterford's cavalier and even brutal army record, his connections on more than one occasion with the SIS. He allowed himself to laugh, a sound sharp as cracking wood in the silence and cold air, as he recollected the small, childish excitement he had felt as the briefing had begun. He had understood the crude exploitation of information in his CPP (Complete Personality Profile) by the senior man, yet he had been unable to quench the sudden warmth of the belly or control the shallowness of his breathing as the words separated him from others, acknowledged that he was the only suitable selection for the Snow Falcon thing.

Ski-training in Scotland, the hours in the gym, the shooting practice with unfamiliar weapons, the hurried Finnish instruction from a professional type — for a long month he had lived with that. And it had all been unexplained until that last meeting in Waterford's room. Then transport by Hercules to the NATO base at Tromso.

He had tumbled through the door of the Wessex even as snow billowed out and blinded him and the helicopter pulled up and away, banking severely and heading back into Norway.

'What we want,' Waterford had said, 'is evidence, and the harder the better. That's why you have the camera. And you are expendable, Folley, and so is the mission in this instance. There'll be as many Snow Falcons as we need to find the answer.' The hard blue eyes had stared into his at that point. 'This isn't just suspicion, or pissing about trying to resurrect old networks or anti-regime movements in Eastern Europe. This may be now, and tomorrow. So, don't be too easily convinced, and don't miss anything, either. Find out if there's more than reindeer and a few Lapps infancy dress in Finnish Lapland these days I' As if he heard the voice now, insistent in his ear, he woke himself from the narcosis of his rest and the coffee. He could be close now, and the empty landscape might not be as empty as it seemed. Soon it would be light again, the time of caution. He threw away the dregs of the coffee, and stood up. He had more miles to cover before he pitched camp.

Alexei Kyrilovich Vorontsyev pushed the files away from him, leaned back in his chair rubbing his eyes, and the persistent nightmare flashed against his lids almost in the instant that he closed his eyes. His wife — Natalia Grasnetskaya, mezzo-soprano with the Bolshoi, a rising operatic star. He could see her dearly, as if she were in his office on the Frunze Quay, above the book repository. He wanted to remove his long fingers from his eyes, but he did not. She still fascinated him, even after the years of her infidelity. He could not rid himself of the persistent obsession with her, even after her body passed into the possession of others, and she had rendered him, he believed, faintly ridiculous to the wide and privileged circle of their acquaintance.

He pulled his hands away with an effort, and blinked in the harsh strip-lighting. He got up from behind the desk, galvanised by some current of thought, and went to the window. He looked down from the third floor, along the almost deserted Frunze Quay, the cold Moscow evening kept out by the double glazing and central heating.

He was thirty-six. He jiggled the coins hi his pocket, a small comfortable sound that seemed to interpose itself between his awareness and his recriminations. He held the rank of Major in the KGB. More than that, he had transferred from the 2nd Chief Directorate five years before, at the age of thirty. A meteoric performance to have