Snow Falcon

ameliorated sense of the erotic mingled with something like longing, came over him. She smiled. He was able to imagine invitation, and a curious innocence and warmth, in the movement of her lips.

He took the packet of American cigarettes from the dressing-table, and threw them to her. Then the lighter. She seemed to weigh it in her hand, and then said:

'We do have the good life, eh, Alexei?' She was still smiling. 'You and I.'

He nodded. 'We ought to be able to live reasonably convenient and happy lives.' His tone was neutral, carefully so; yet he was inviting her to commit herself. She puffed at the cigarette, leaned back against the headboard, one arm behind her head, and studied him. He was acutely conscious that he was naked, and that the act of her merely looking stirred him.

'We ought — yes,' she admitted. Then she stubbed out the cigarette, and murmured, 'Come back to bed.'

He almost looked at his watch on the dressing-table, to check the time. He smiled at himself, yet there was a tiny sense of disappointment in him, as if her invitation was a substitute; as if he had been reading a great book, and then been told it was superficial, unreal; or involved in a complex puzzle only to be told that the answer was easy, and not worth the finding.

Which was why he stood at the edge of the bed for a moment, just looking at her. She held out her arms to him, her breasts still free of the sheets, and he saw something crude, soiled about the open eroticism of it. He wanted her to be otherwise, even as he wanted her. She smiled as she saw his erection, which for an instant became a visible, hated helplessness as far as she was concerned.

Then he ignored the fuzzy complexities of his responses, and got into bed.

It was quick, hungry, abrupt. He did not care whether she came or not; he thought she probably hadn't. He was satisfying himself only. Something to make up for the last months — or to try to indicate his independence.

If Natalia was disappointed, she did not show it. While he telephoned the Innokenti Ivanov Charter Company of Khaborovsk, she sat beside him, smoking another cigarette.

'You want breakfast?' he asked as he waited for the call to be connected to Khabarovsk Airport, where Ivanov had an office and rented hangar-space. Her eyes were dosed, and her face tilted to the ceiling, head resting against the headboard.

She nodded. 'Will they serve it here?'

'I should think so — hello, Ivanov Charter?'

The voice at the other end was female, middle-aged, gruff and masculine. 'Yes — what do you want?'

'I want to check over the helicopter you fly for the local KGB. And I want to talk to the pilot — have him standing by.'

'Who is this, comrade?' the voice asked, suspicious but undeterred by the evidence of authority in his voice.

'Major Alexei Vorontsyev, Moscow SID. Is that sufficient for you?'

'May be. Bring your ID card, or you don't go anywhere near the helicopter.' The woman had to be Madame Ivanov.

'Naturally,' he said, not unamused.

'What time are you coming?'

'Shall we say — ten o'clock?'

'Say it if you like. We'll expect you, Major.' The receiver clicked at the other end. Vorontsyev stared at the purring instrument in his hand, then burst out laughing. He was still laughing when he called the hotel switchboard and ordered breakfast for two.

The MIL helicopter was an old one, a cramped cabin with canvas seats up front and a dark hole behind for storage space when the helicopter was used by Ivanov himself rather than the Khabarovsk KGB. Which, Vorontsyev was certain, was often. And, he did not doubt, the KGB footed the parts and fuel bills for most of the private trips.

The pilot was young — Ivanov's nephew, who had learned to fly during his army conscription. Since which time he had worked for his uncle, disliked him intensely, shared his passion for business and money, and was obviously waiting for the premature death of his energetic relative so that he could inherit control of the business.

Vorontsyev had been terrified by Madame Ivanov in the cramped, dusty office. She was everything the telephone conversation had promised — large, badly dressed and made-up, coarse, and clever. Her husband was off flying one of the planes to Vladivostok to collect some freight, she told him grudgingly — one of the two regular pilots was ill. She considered, as she told Vorontsyev, that he had a dose, and serve him right.

After a desultory inspection of the chopper, and a conversation with the nephew concerning recent KGB flights in it, Vorontsyev said, 'Right, you can take me on a little trip.'

'I didn't know you wanted to go up.'

'No?' Vorontsyev smiled. Neither did whoever was listening to his telephone calls at the hotel. Nor the car that had tailed him to the airport, and was parked near the terminal at that moment. 'No — but it seems like a good idea. Since my company owns it, and there's no one else to use it.'

The nephew shrugged. 'OK. I'll go and get us cleared. You wait here.'

It was half an hour before the MIL lifted away from the airport, and Khabarovsk was spread beneath them and away to the south. The two rivers on whose confluence the town stood gleamed like polished silver in the pale sunlight, and the town, as they ascended, became more and more a diagram of a place where people might live, set out as it was like many towns in Siberia and the Soviet Far East in a rigid, functional grid pattern.

Like American cities, Vorontsyev thought, though he had never seen one except in photographs brought back by KGB men who had spent time in the Washington Residency, or had travelled briefly to America. However, it was as if a child, with his building blocks, had ignored the fact that he required a flat piece of ground if he were to assemble a completely orderly structure. Khabarovsk began to straggle over the three long hills that it had been built upon, losing its firm, clean outlines — looking, he thought, as if it was lived-in after all.

Patches of green, the haze of heavy industry away towards the River Amur — shipbuilding there, oil refining; neat white blocks of offices, colleges; the rural fringes of the town of nearly half a million creeping back, it seemed, rather than being encroached upon.

'Well?' the pilot asked. 'Where do you want to go, my Major?'

Vorontsyev turned in his seat, looking ahead. They appeared to be drifting slowly north, towards hills blue and shapeless still with mist, dark with forest where the fog had lifted.

'I want to have a look at Army HQ — but only casually…' He had to trust the man; time was limited, whatever happened, after Ossipov's move against the KGB. He went on: 'You know their exercise areas?' The pilot nodded. 'Let's overfly some of them, and come back via HQ, eh?'

Vorontsyev settled back in his seat as the chopper seemed to spurt forward towards the distant hills. Already, his attention was impeded by memories of the past twelve hours seeping back. His wife — the tremulous sense of happiness of which he was afraid, and the more stark eroticism that now seemed to be re-established between them. This flight seemed removed from any useful investigation. He began to wonder whether Military District Far East could in any way reveal its secrets to a whirring speck in the sky.

Just before he left the hotel, there had been a telephone call from Police HQ. Over the wireprint from Moscow had come an unconfirmed report that Ilya and Maxim were missing. Their helicopter had radioed a distress message just before all contact with it was lost. Search parties had failed to locate any wreckage.

He had not known what to make of the report. It had been authorised by Kapustin, but he was uncertain whether it was a warning. He could not believe that the two men were dead, and therefore attempted to ignore the possibility. The report remained as a speck, irritating the mind's eye.

The foothills were below them now, mounting to the still fogbound clefts and peaks of the mountains. The pilot's voice crackled in his headset. 'Do you want to be seen, or not?'

'What?'

'There'll be a lot of chopper activity soon, when we hit the exercise areas. Do you want to explain what we're doing, or not?'

'Preferably not.'

'Then I'll try it as low as I can.'