Hyde tapped his free shoulder and then began running down the alleyway to enter the square at a point nearer the embassy gates. Miandad adjusted the sight. The rubber eyepiece was damp with sweat. Mohammed Jan stood by him, immobile, as if despising the modernity of their attack. The old Lee Enfield was cradled in his arms.
Miandad shifted the balance of the launcher on his shoulder. An officer was ordering soldiers towards the burnt-out personnel carrier. They seemed reluctant to the point of disobedience. All of them were still close enough to be killed by the impact. He squeezed the trigger.
Ignition, the spit of flame traveling straight and flat. One hundred yards, one third of a second, slowed down by the perspective of the nightsight and the flow of adrenalin. Then, impact. The concrete above the sandbags swallowed the flame, and the roof flew off the bunker in a rain of concrete boulders. The walls collapsed outward, burying those who had left the bunker. Dust rose to disguise the violence and the murders. Patiently, swiftly, expertly, Miandad fitted the third projectile. He scorched his wrist against the hot barrel of the RPG-7, sucked it for a moment, then pressed home the folded umbrella of the projectile. He adjusted the sights, felt the sweat on his forehead, soaking into the untidy folds of his turban, felt his back tight with reaction to what he was doing — killing so many, so easily — and then he hefted the tube of the launcher on his shoulder so that it was comfortable once more.
As the dust began to settle, the embassy lights came out like huge stars. The concrete bunker was still half-standing amid its own shipwreck. Bodies on the floor, one or two staggering away, parts of them evidently missing. It was, he admitted, a vision of the infernal in the dull fire-glow of the nightsight. Screaming, punctuated by exploding ammunition. The hard-lit stadium was a battlefield.
Now.
He squeezed. Ignition, one third of a second, impact. It had been faster because he was tired. The adrenalin was running out, just as Hyde needed his. He watched for long enough through the nightsight to see that the gates hung drunkenly on their hinges, almost twisted off their supports, the huge red star broken into crazed paving. Then he passed the RPG-7 to one side, and a Pathan took it from him with a chuckle of pleasure and admiration. Miandad listened to the first Kalashnikov fire and the wail of a siren crying above the noises of other alarms, then stood up. Hyde was now on his own. He had precisely fifteen and a half minutes from the breaching of the gates.
Already, less than fifteen minutes remained.
Hyde's hand gripped the railing. He steadied himself, flinching against the burst of random, dangerous fire from exploding ammunition in the ruined bunker. There were two men staring at it helplessly. The red and white barrier had been flung off its hinges. The smoke and dust made him cough. He looked down at his boots — a size too big, stuffed with rags — and saw with satisfaction that they were coated with dust that had settled on them while he made his way along the railings. He touched the leather holster at his hip which contained the Makarov 9mm PM pistol. Then he stooped to pick up a crumbling fragment of concrete, paused for a moment, then rubbed it viciously across his forehead and down his left cheek. He winced and hunched into himself with the pain and the stinging it left behind. He touched his forehead and cheek with his fingertips, casting the lump of concrete away from him. Blood, when he looked. Blood and dust and sweaty dirt. He adopted a limp, and shuffled the last fifteen yards to the shattered gates of the embassy compound.
The concrete guard bunker was an opened, ruined flower, the smoke rising from it obscuring much of the hard white light from the square beyond. Bodies. Some men still upright, but concussed or shocked. Wounded, too. Alarms, sirens, the roar of vehicles, exploding ammunition. The self-inflicted wounds stung intolerably.
He reached the gates. He could just hear, already, the noise of a helicopter in the distance, the whine and beat of the main rotors carried on the cold night air. Evacuation. Support, defence, evacuation; the order of things. Hyde looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes thirty before the Pathans abandoned the square and retreated to the bazaar before making their dawn exit from Kabul.
A soldier blundered into him. His jaw was missing, and his eyes begged. Hyde rested him like a plank against the railings and slipped through the gates. No one challenged him. He was clean-shaven beneath the dust and blood, armed and wearing the full uniform of a lieutenant in the Red Army. Ahead of him, the lights in the embassy extension blazed like the lights of an approaching liner. A heavily armoured BMP rumbled on its tracks around the side of the main embassy building, increasing speed along the gravel path, squeaking and crunching its way towards him. Its cannon and Sagger missile mounting were clearly outlined against the facade of the building. Hyde began running.
There were other men running; confused, frightened, challenged men who felt they were too few and in an alien country. His boots crunched on the gravel, his shadow raced ahead of him, thrown long by the lights in the square and the burning bunker. Then a shadow began stretching behind him like a warning to turn back as he entered the field of light of the KGB block. The BMP howled past him, cannon swinging like a pedagogue's eyes looking for someone small to punish first, and he stumbled into the doorway of the glass and concrete block which reminded him of, of—?
It was suddenly important, like reorientation, like disguise and bluff, as a guard rammed his body against him in the doorway.
The Czech embassy in Kensington, amid all the old and graceful and corrupted buildings the ugliest and most modern.
He snapped the guard to attention, straightened his cap, wiped at his superficial injuries, and glared.
'Colonel Petrunin wants a report — now! Out of my way!' The guard's eyes lost suspicion a moment after his Kalashnikov bisected his features, at attention. Then his eyes became afraid, and Hyde realised how young he was. Like 1914 — the Russians were sending their youngest, their youth… 'That's better,' he snapped, passing the guard and making for the iron-railed, mock-marble stairs which had already begun to pull away from the wall alongside them. He sneered at his own heated image. None of these poor sods was in the Party, in all probability. Sending their best—? Don't be stupid—
He smelt burning paper. Someone had panicked and was already beginning to incinerate sensitive material, the incriminating files, as if a liberating army lay out there in the square. He remembered the SIS house-joke when the Ayatollah's mobs had climbed the US embassy fence in Tehran. The only prayer you could hear, so it ran, was for another box of matches…
He steadied himself at the turn of the stairs. The adrenalin was out of control, running like heady wine. He couldn't restrain his thoughts. That was Petrunin's doing. Even as he saw the sleeve of his uniform jacket, he envisaged the boy's broken, bleeding head — a small thin fount of blood — bang back against the rocks before the dead body slid into a heap. He rubbed his cheek, reminding himself of the stinging pain. Stop it, stop it—
His hand was quivering, his arm shaking as he gripped the cold iron banister. Counter-productive, he told himself. Out of control. He'll kill you in this state…
Helicopter noises, closing now outside—
Helicopters laying black eggs that opened to let out a mist that Petrunin had ignited — fifty men dead, charred like burnt biscuits in no more than a moment. A red helicopter that gloated its way back down the valley—
He could kill you in this state—
Two hard-faced men in civilian clothes passed him, their arms clutching bundles of files. They did not even glance at him. They were obeying an order to abandon ship that had not yet been given. The noise of the helicopter was louder still. He looked through the windows into the compound. One helicopter — only one so far, its lights smearing red-blue-white across the snow on the lawn, red-blue-white, as it descended.
In five minutes, Petrunin would be on his way back to army headquarters and be lost for good.
He clattered up the rest of the flight of steps, sprinted along the corridor, the plan of the building he had drawn for himself from the dead boy's description clear in his mind, as if he had summoned in onto a screen. Almost, in the heightened state of his senses and imagination, he could see himself like a moving dot on that screen. Other end of the building — this corner — empty corridor…
A narrow-skirted girl emerged from an office. Hyde sent her tumbling as he charged into and past her. He heard his boot crunch on her lost spectacles, heard her cry as he rounded another corner. Outside, now that the rotors of the first of the helicopters had slowed, he could hear the chatter of rifles on automatic, answered more distantly by the guns of the Pathans from the square.
He looked at his watch. Twelve minutes — less — remaining. Perhaps four minutes before the corridor in which he hesitated like a lost visitor was filled with rescuers, ready to escort Petrunin to that first helicopter in the
