Hyde grabbed Miandad's arm in a panic of fear. Ahead of them, no more than twenty yards away, the machine gun had stopped firing. The cloud, too, seemed to thin. Struggling men. The group who commanded the machine gun had been found, were being killed—
Hyde ran, Miandad a pace behind him, both of them blundering along the uneven, rock-strewn ditch. A blank-eyed face stared up at them from the edge of the road. Hyde did not even register consciously that there was little that remained of any human shape below the shoulders. Then he was among the struggling group. Someone knocked him aside. He saw a military bayonet flicker like silver, then a curved knife at its business. Miandad blundered against him, then seemed to dart to one side. Hyde's head moved from side to side in growing desperation. He was looking for something as small, as insignificant, as collar tabs or shoulder boards. He needed an officer.
Miandad was struggling with something on the ground, dragging it along the ditch, resting it against the roadside slope. He bent to lift the unmoving legs, and as he did so a Pathan emerged from the thinning cloud, rifle at his side, knife in his hand. He hesitated only for an instant as he saw Miandad struggling with the Russian's limp legs, and then he raised his knife. Hyde did not know whether the man assumed Miandad was being attacked — a fellow Pathan — or whether he did not care. He had time only to move a single pace and swing the butt of the Kalashnikov. Its rigid plastic stock struck the Pathan just above the left eye, and he fell away from Miandad and the Russian, dropping his knife as he did so.
'Quickly!' Miandad demanded, looking up.
Visibility was improving quickly now. Hyde could see perhaps a dozen Pathan tribesmen moving among the wreckage and the bodies. He saw one Russian soldier's body buck and twist as his hands were cut off. The man did not scream because he was already unconscious.
'Help me get this one away into the rocks!' Miandad added.
Hyde shouldered his rifle, and together they dragged the Russian — collar tabs, young unconscious face, bruise on his temple, slight burns on his cheeks and jaw, officer! — out of the ditch and down the slope towards the river.
They splashed through the shallow water, the Russian officer supported between them, and gained the cover of the rocks at the foot of the steep cliffs. Hyde's breath was coming in huge gulps, and he was bent almost double, resting on his knees as if vomiting. Miandad's hand rested on his arm. The sky above was pale and blue. They were out of the dust and smoke, which was now dispersing, exposing like the retreat of some tide the wreckage on the shore of the highway.
Miandad pointed towards a clutter of broken rocks.
'Help me get him over there,' he said. Hyde realised he was no longer shouting. There was no longer any need. The gorge echoed now only with screaming of a decreasing intensity and horror, and the occasional rifle shot. A burst of startling fire as some ammunition exploded, then only the screaming, which had begun to sound more like the noises of carrion birds than those of dying or mutilated men. Hyde nodded. 'You don't have much time,' Miandad added, tossing his head back towards the road.
'OK. Let's go.'
They dragged the Russian, who groaned once in a boyish hurt way, towards and behind the rocks. They were perhaps seventy or eighty yards up the slope and a hundred yards from the road.
'Work quickly!' Miandad commanded, tilting a silver flask to the young Russian's lips. The boy coughed, and his eyes opened.
Opened and became fearful at the same moment as he saw Hyde's turbanned head in front of him.
'Be quiet!' Hyde snapped in Russian. The boy's eyes widened further, in surprise and shock. He turned his head and saw Miandad's narrow dark features. 'Now,' Hyde continued, 'if you want to go on living, keep your voice down — lieutenant,' he added, glancing at the collar tabs and shoulder boards.
'Who are you?' Hyde could not be certain of the accent, but it sounded Ukrainian. The lieutenant was little more than twenty or twenty-one.
'It doesn't matter. You're my prisoner, not the Pathans'. You understand the difference?' The lieutenant nodded, swallowing the fear that bobbed in his throat. 'Good. Give me your papers — quickly!'
The lieutenant hesitated, as if the documents were somehow talismanic, then he reached into his jacket and removed them. His hand shook as he passed them to Hyde. There was a high-pitched scream, and his whole body twitched in an echo of the agony of the man on the road. Hyde opened the ID folder. A tiny monochrome picture of the young officer, unsmiling and perhaps a little pompous. The official stamps, the public details. Lieutenant Azimov. Yes, from Kiev in the Ukraine. Commissioned two years before, after leaving military academy. Afghanistan had been his first posting. Sergei Azimov. A white, scorched, bruised face, foreign-looking in an alien place.
A sheet of paper, much folded and unfolded, drifted to the ground. The young man's eyes followed it hungrily. Hyde picked it up. There was a snapshot, too, in the little bundle of papers which had been tucked inside a battered wallet which might once have been the boy's father's property, almost an heirloom. Hyde read the letter.
Dear Sasha,
I love and miss you so much. We have spent such a little time
together. It is very hard for me to think about my work, about
anything but you. I worry for your safety all the time…
Hyde stopped reading. The girl was round-faced, unmemorably pretty, her hair tied back. Azimov's wife, Nadia. Hyde felt he had pried. He hurriedly passed the letter and the snapshot to the lieutenant, who pressed them against the breast of his uniform jacket. He was shivering now, with after-shock and the cold.
'Right, Lieutenant Azimov — you can stay alive if you tell me what I want to know — understand?' A solitary scream, hardly human, worked like a stimulant on Azimov. 'You understand?' Azimov nodded. 'Good. I want to know about Colonel Petrunin — understand? Colonel Tamas Petrunin. Everything you know, everything you can remember. I want to know where he is now, what his routine is, where he can be found. Help me, and I'll save your life.'
You lying bastard, Hyde told himself. It is the cause — shit on it, then…
Miandad tilted the flask again. The boy swallowed, cleared his throat and said, 'Thank you, thank you…' Hyde merely nodded. The boy evidently had no interest in who he was, in the loyalties dictated by his uniform, in anything but the fiction that he would go on living. Hyde raised his head and peered over the rocks down towards the road. The cloud had dispersed. Cold sunlight was edging like a spent wave across the grey road. The river gleamed like polished steel. The mutilated bodies had been flung into the ditches on either side of the road. The Pathans were gathering weapons and ammunition — machine guns, rifles, the RPG rocket launcher, a Pathan waving that jubilantly above his head, boxes of ammunition dragged from the burning wrecks. Two men were even dismantling the machine gun from its mounting on the overturned scout car.
They had perhaps ten minutes.
He had already begun to lose interest in the young officer, possessed as he suddenly was by an idea. The rocket launcher, with luck complete with night-sight, capable of penetrating more than twelve and a half inches of armour — or a solid wall…
Uniform, confusion, disguise…?
'Ask him,' he instructed Miandad. 'Ask him everything. If-if he's…' His excitement was evident. He snapped at the officer: 'Where is Petrunin now — today, tomorrow? Do you know? Can you tell me where he is?'
'That bastard,' the young officer muttered.
'Yes, that bastard. Where is he?' He was almost shouting at Azimov, who flinched at the noise and urgency of his voice.
'He's in the embassy…'
'Military headquarters, you mean?'
'No, the embassy. He's KGB, remember. He won't use military communications — too insecure for him.'
'Why the embassy?' Hyde snapped.
'Who knows? Who cares? Some purge of the civil service in the wind, of the government, of the army. Who gives a toss why? He'll be there all week, so I hear.'
Yes, yes, yes…
'What is it?' Miandad asked, standing up beside him.
