place, Mr Hyde — if you do not mind my saying so?' There was, after all, a hint of the comic Asian inflection expressing itself in archaic colloquialisms. Hyde was almost relieved to discover it.
'I am,' Hyde admitted.
'Here.' Miandad passed him a vacuum flask. Hyde poured himself a strong, sweet coffee.
'It is most unusual — your visit,' Miandad continued. 'However, perhaps not the strangest request we have received in the Bureau since the Russians entered Afghanistan. Usually, it is the CIA who require the most outrageous assistance.' He smiled with very white teeth. He looked young around the mouth, experienced around the eyes, where fine lines had begun to appear. Hyde assumed he was probably in his mid-thirties.
'Coffee's good.'
'Excellent. I — do not have great good news for you, Mr Hyde. Not so far, at least.'
'Oh.'
'Professor Massinger's idea was a very clever one,' Miandad admitted. 'In theory. And, as my old university teacher, he was sensible to think of myself, and to remember that I had been trained, at least in part, at one of your establishments in the Home Counties…' Miandad's eyes seemed to stare into the distance, towards the mountains, or towards memories that were years old. '… by your Sir Kenneth Aubrey. Who is now in such deep trouble—' The comic, sing-song inflections were stronger for a moment, as if Miandad parodied his English education and experience. 'Yes, all that was very astute. However, it relied upon the assistance of the mujahiddin, and Pathan mujahiddin into the bargain.'
'I see…'
The pilot and crew of the Douglas were already in the second truck, which then pulled away after its companion towards the airport buildings.
'I don't think you do see, Mr Hyde. And I'm afraid we should move now. There are sometimes eyes who watch, even in Peshawar.'
'Russians?'
'The occasional one. No — Afghan army spies who cross over as refugees, some of them even posing as rebels. I will take you now to meet the man who is the problem. A mujahiddin leader called Mohammed Jan. A brave, independent, pig-headed man. Without his help, I do not think you could even cross into Afghanistan. You certainly will not be able to reach your objective.' As he put the Land Rover into gear and revved the engine, Miandad watched Hyde. He seemed to be weighing the Australian, who felt his glance was clear and keen, missing little.
'What are our chances?'
Miandad shook his head. 'I should say, Mr Hyde, that they are very poor. Mohammed Jan does not send his people into Kabul any longer. Certainly, he would not send them to attack the main headquarters and barracks of the Soviet army!'
The Land Rover bumped in the rutted wake of the two trucks. Hyde did not know whether his uppermost sensation was disappointment or relief. Three days ago, he had been asleep in the hired car as they approached Munich in a grey, wet dawn. A weary yet fiercely wakeful Massinger had been driving. In the moment that a halt at traffic lights had woken Hyde, he had seen a determination that amounted to passion in the American's face. The smile that Massinger had directed at him had been ominous in its self-satisfaction and its attempt to disarm. Hyde's relief at escaping from Vienna remained, but it was severely lessened by the promise in Massinger's smile.
In the forty-eight hours that followed, Massinger never left his hotel room; rarely was he not engaged in a telephone call. Hyde supplied his drinks and his meals, and otherwise wandered the city in the chill rain to escape the hothouse atmosphere. The man burned with organisational energy, and with an almost demented sense of purpose. His face and voice and the countries and persons who received his calls continually hoisted signals of danger to Hyde, unsettling him, making the adrenalin flow, eroding his reluctance.
Shelley, of course. Call after call to the telephone box outside the village pub. Shelley's wife had answered the telephone at first, and forestalled Massinger identifying himself. Shelley had gone to the telephone box and rung Munich; the first of perhaps twenty conversations between them. Then other people in London, then old colleagues in Langley and Washington or even retired to New England, Florida or California. It appeared as if Massinger were calling his whole, lifelong acquaintance. Then Pakistan…
Eventually this neat, purposeful man beside him. Colonel Zahir Miandad of Pakistani Military Intelligence; an expert on Afghanistan and the guerillas and the Soviet occupation. On that first occasion a crackling, scrambled military line down which Massinger had to shout to be heard. Perhaps the first of fifteen or sixteen calls, the last of them almost the beginning of Hyde's journey. Massinger had not asked him to go, simply told him what had been arranged, having continued in the assumed role of his field controller.
He had one simple task — the capture of a senior Russian officer from his headquarters in Kabul, or from any place he was to be found. Petrunin. The creator of
'I have talked to Mohammed Jan on many occasions,' Miandad was saying as the Land Rover nudged and shunted its way through the maze of rutted, frozen mud streets of one of Peshawar's ugly, low suburbs. It was a shanty-town, a disfigurement. Miandad's eyes were carefully intent upon the traffic — bicycles, oxen, ancient cars. Hyde saw a Morris which had been daubed orange and was probably pre-war, and an old, partially roofless Leyland single-decker bus. 'I have talked to him of this matter twice — no, three times — in the last twenty-four hours. He refuses to entertain the idea.' Miandad turned to him. 'I cannot make a bargain on your behalf. You have no weapons to supply him. He is not interested in men and what is in their heads. Only in guns — rocket launchers, especially. He would capture the Russian First Secretary for you in exchange for a half-dozen 'Red Eye' launchers and suitable missiles!' Miandad's smile gleamed. 'But — it is not the case. And, although I am able to assist you because I am much my own master here, I cannot offer our weapons on your behalf.'
'I understand…'
Was he relieved, or disappointed? He could not decide. The Land Rover broke free of the restraining traffic, and almost immediately they were beyond the last petrol-tin and corrugated-sheet shanties and the bullocks and the wrapped women and turbanned men. The mountains that contained the border and the Khyber and the other passes into Afghanistan lay ahead of them, grey barriers climbing to dazzling white peaks and ridges. The contrast was too great, almost unbearable, burning like rage or nausea in Hyde's chest. The mountains loomed pitilessly over the river plain that was scabbed and diseased with the shanty-towns and refugee camps that surrounded and clung to Peshawar. Hyde had seen the like of it in South Africa, and on a few occasions when his flight from Australia had refuelled at somewhere like Bombay. The big-eyed, big-bellied children outside a tent made from a corrugated iron sheet and a length of cardboard, propped against one another…
He dismissed the images, both remembered and recent. It was his task to glide across the surface, not to look through the ice at what lay beneath. A white bullock ambled across the track. Miandad slowed the Land Rover, then jarringly they accelerated again. Disappointed, Hyde told himself. Even though Petrunin had almost killed him twice, directly or indirectly, and even though Hyde feared meeting him again — he was disappointed.
'Where is this Jan?' he asked.
'In one of the camps. One of the many, many camps,' Miandad added wearily.
Before them, at the edge of the plain, the mountains gleamed with innocent snow and ice.
'But you think seeing him again will do no good?'
Miandad shook his head. 'I'm afraid not,' he murmured.
Alison Shelley pushed one trolley, Massinger the other, down the busy aisles of the hypermarket. The Shelleys' young daughter sat, legs akimbo, facing her mother from the trolley. She seemed contented with chocolate, the corners of her small mouth already stained like her fingertips. Shelley walked beside Massinger, occasionally depositing bottles or tins in the two trolleys. Were anyone observing them, their activities would have appeared an obvious fiction.
Peter Shelley had brought his family by hovercraft on a day's shopping expedition to Calais. Massinger had spent the wet morning patrolling the beach and seafront of the Pas de Calais like an exile, as if simply to catch some distant, half-illusory glimpse of his adopted country. His damp hair had been blown over his forehead, into his eyes, by a chill, searching, salty wind, his body had shivered and his raincoat had become sodden. Yet he had remained on the seafront until it was time to meet Shelley because across the grey, uninviting water he could sense Margaret's existence, know precisely the distance that separated them, thereby lessening it.
