dusted with snow. The Russian's head remained resting on his chest. Petrunin had answered none of Hyde's questions. He realised his value to the Australian and relied on Hyde's protection. Petrunin realised as clearly as the Pathans his value as a commodity. He knew Hyde would not sell him to Mohammed Jan, not even at the price of his own safety.
Hyde shook his head. 'I don't know,' he muttered. 'Christ, I don't know—!' Petrunin appeared to stir in his sleep. Hyde dug his elbow viciously into the Russian's side. 'Wake up, you bastard!' he growled. As if the Pathans had been large cats huddled around them, there was a murmuring noise as Petrunin sat up; a throaty, greedy, hungry noise. 'You bastard, you bastard…' Hyde repeated impoteritly.
'You can't threaten me with them,' Petrunin observed calmly, though his face betrayed the effect of the Pathans' murmuring on him. 'And I won't tell you, because then you would give me to them. And you can't hand me over and hope to stop it if I talk — they'd never Let you.'
'So how do you expect Mr Hyde to protect you, if they are so much to be feared?' Miandad asked.
Petrunin glared at the Pakistani.
'Can you get us over the border?' Hyde asked.
'From here, yes — but I doubt if we could slip away unnoticed, my friend.'
'Shit—'
'I am already compromised, I fear,' Miandad continued. 'It would do me no extra harm to help you escape. But I cannot see how we would possibly outrun Mohammed Jan — can you?'
'No, I can't. We're right in it, thanks to this bastard.'
'I didn't ask to be kidnapped,' Petrunin observed with an affected lightness that seemed to recapture, for an instant, a former time and place, even character.
'Aubrey didn't ask to be set up!' Hyde snapped. Again, the Pathans stirred. Wild, large cats. 'I didn't ask to get shot at by my own side, or to be here.'
'I did nothing more than create
'What was its purpose?'
'Ah,' Petrunin answered smugly, and smiled. Hyde could see his face in the failing light, somehow softened and made younger. It was haggard with effort, of course, and afraid. But it belonged to the Petrunin Hyde had formerly known. It was the face of an invalid who had recovered from a severe fever; and the face of a still dangerous enemy.
'Listen,' Miandad said, his head cocked on one side. 'I think the helicopters have returned.'
Petrunin's eyes gleamed in the firelight as he raised his face to the darkening sky. Hyde listened, realising that Petrunin still expected, by some miracle, to be rescued. Mohammed Jan had appeared in the doorway, then turned and moved quickly away at the first sounds overhead. Hyde got to his feet. Most of the Pathans were alert now, standing or already moving back into the shadows at the corners of the room. Someone had kicked out the fire. Petrunin's smile was almost indistinguishable. Hyde drew the Makarov and nudged the Russian's side with its barrel. The noise of rotors was loud now, and Hyde leaned towards Petrunin's ear in order that the man would hear him.
'Back against the wall. Don't be stupid in your old age.' Petrunin nodded and did as Hyde ordered. They pressed back into the shadows. Hyde thought he could distinguish a thin streamer of smoke ascending from the fire's scattered remains, but perhaps it was only the smell of the fire that remained. Snow began to lift and swirl from the floor and the corners and the rooms beyond. The rotor noise was deafening, very low and near.
'Look,' he heard Miandad call out. Hyde raised his head.
The MiL gunship squatted above the roofless room. Involuntarily, Hyde's body began to shudder, as if the rotors were beating at the packed earth under his feet. The helicopter squatted on the air, toadlike, and they watched it like minnows from beneath clear water; a dark, ugly shape. The snow whirled up in the down-draught, coating their clothing, flicking against their skin and into their eyes. The room was foggy with the distressed, dusty snow. Hyde, looking up, realised that the helicopter was still descending. It was perhaps no more than fifty feet above the room in which they pressed against the chilly walls, and was slowly enlarging, as if the toad were inflating itself. The snow seemed sucked towards it through the open roof. Like a roof itself, the helicopter filled the space of evening sky.
Mohammed Jan appeared, sidling through the doorway, pressing against the wall. Then a white searchlight beam struck down into the room. Hyde froze. He heard Mohammed Jan shouting above the noise of the rotors, then Miandad crying out, too.
'Soldiers! The look-outs report troops moving up the hillside to encircle us!'
Hyde jabbed Petrunin with the barrel of the pistol. 'No!' he warned. Petrunin seemed to shrug. The light spilled across the floor towards their feet. Pathans were already spilling out of the doorway, sidling along the walls. The snow funnel swirled and obscured, garishly lit by the searchlight. The sky had vanished above them. There was only the dark belly of the MiL around the halo of the light. 'Move!' Hyde ordered. 'Move, you bastard!' He pushed Petrunin along the wall.
Sky again. The light, like a waterfall, poured over the doorway and into the next room — then back. A Pathan fixed in its glare looked up, immobile and afraid. Hyde could discern the noise of other helicopters. There was shooting from outside, in the main courtyard of the fort, perhaps beyond the walls. Miandad moved ahead of the reluctant Petrunin. The light holding the Pathan spilled over them. The helicopter began to alter its angle of hover, and its belly light slipped away from them. Another light, presumably from a searchlight mounted beneath its nose, illuminated the room beyond.
'Now!' Miandad shouted. Hyde prodded Petrunin forward and they blundered past the transfixed Pathan into the cone of light from the nose of the MiL. Machine-gun bullets plucked and tore at the packed earth of the floor. Hyde heaved at Petrunin to make him run. They almost tripped over the Pathan's body. Bullets ricocheted from the stone walls.
They stumbled out into the courtyard which was washed by moving searchlights. Something dark tumbled from one wall of the fort. Machine-gun fire from two more MiL helicopters raked across the open space. Hyde saw fleeing figures, still forms.
Panic, noise, death. Three, four bodies — another Pathan falling, then the light fixed them, held them. Hyde, surprised, realised that Miandad was on his knees. He seemed to be coughing. A vertical cone of light, then a second, more glancing beam. It was as if the courtyard had become a stage, and the spotlights had focused upon the three tiny figures.
Petrunin was looking up into the light. His shadow was flung away across the courtyard by the noselight of the second helicopter, which shuffled closer through the dark air. There was more shooting. One half-ruined wall of the old fort bulged inwards, and Hyde glimpsed figures and lights moving up the suddenly exposed hillside towards them.
Petrunin was waving. Hyde was distracted by a wracking cough from Miandad. Snow whirled up around him, but the snow just in front of his hunched form was red in the hard light. A patch of bright crimson. Hyde moved to him. Petrunin was waving to the helicopter. Miandad looked up at him as he clutched his shoulders, tried to smile, coughed deeply, spraying the front of Hyde's sheepskin jacket with blood, dyeing his supporting hand. Then the Pakistani slumped against him, his eyes staring into the beam of the searchlight with dilated pupils. Hyde let the body fall gently to the ground. The helicopters hung over him. He could feel the beat of the rotors. He turned his head.
Petrunin was waving and shouting. The helicopter neared. Something blundered against Hyde, and fell. Mohammed Jan's green turban was blurred by its proximity, the man's dead face fell past him; a curved knife glittered in the snow. Hyde drew the Makarov, concealing it against his stomach.
Petrunin looked up into the open side door of the MiL, arms uplifted as if in prayer. He looked, too, into the muzzle of a Kalashnikov levelled at him. Hyde swung the Makarov, realising the entire situation subliminally, knowing without understanding. Petrunin stepped back a single pace. The marksman was bracing himself against the metal frame of the side door; the MiL was absolutely level, completely stationary. The Kalashnikov fired — Hyde saw the spit of flame — and then Hyde fired. The marksman fell through the open door, arms spread, rifle dropping ahead of him. His body thudded onto the snow.
Hyde ran. The MiL lurched away, bursting into flames. One of the surviving Pathans had used the rocket launcher, or else it was a lucky rifle shot. The MiL crashed into the wall of the fort, exploding. In the lurid light, its
