leaning forward as he jogged desultorily, his head beginning to fill with the noises of his own heartbeat and breathing, emptying of everything else — Petrunin, the computer retrieval that was no more than a pipe-dream unless you were Petrunin himself or a KGB Deputy Chairman; Miandad, Mohammed Jan, the Pathans, the dead young Russian below the ridge — whose Kalashnikov he had forgotten, like his R/T — his last footsteps, the noise of helicopters…
All faded. To each step there were numerous heartbeats. One ragged breath each time a foot was lifted and moved — the snow was thinner here, because the wind sliced it off the path like a knife, cutting through him too, freezing him — and almost ten hurried beats of his heart before each step was complete and the next one begun. He laboured upwards with increasing slowness, staggering from time to time, those times when he failed to lower his foot quickly enough to keep his balance. His breath came more and more quickly because the air seemed so thin and cold. He couldn't get enough of it into his lungs with a single deep breath, and yet did not want to breathe deeply because of the searing pain caused by its coldness. His stubble was frosty where his breath had frozen on his skin and hair. He did not look at his watch — he did not become or remain aware of his wrist which wore his watch at the end of his left arm unless he needed that arm to drive on, to adjust his balance, to plunge into the thin snow and lever his body forward…
All noises outside himself faded. The path had rounded the mountain as he climbed. His hands were deathly white in the first sunlight, the snow began to glitter, hurting his eyes. He was almost there. The path had narrowed — by an effort he remembered noting the fact on the way in — but he could still move freely along it, the wall of the mountain to his left, touched often by his hand, scraped by his knuckles for reassurance or gripped by tense, clawlike fingers for support when he became dizzy or unbalanced.
He passed through the crease, the narrow gate to the valley, without realising. He began to descend into shadow again, away from the first rays of the sun. He paused, then, on his hands and knees, and looked ahead of him, out of Afghanistan.
And realised that he had no image of rescue in his imagination. He had not thought, not considered… He had lost Miandad, his courier, his secretary. Hyde did not know the arrangements.
The slope of the mountains dropped quickly, like the deep sharp cut of a great knife, to the snow-covered floor of the narrow valley perhaps two hundred feet below him. This ran like a twisting snake through high mountains for perhaps three or four miles, until the land lifted again to the pass over which he might reach Parachinar and the Pathan camp.
He knew he could not return, alone, to that camp — dare not.
Something seemed to give out and slump inside him, something more radical and vital than mere physical energy. He shivered with weakness, on all fours, an exhausted animal. Then he fell against the cliff-face, hunching into it as if into a parent's skirts, a lover's comfort. His breathing sounded like sobbing, even to himself…
Until drowned by the noise of helicopter rotors approaching rapidly from behind him, clattering against the rock face, making his body shudder with the downdraught as it lifted into view and hung there, its tinted glass windscreen like a threatening mask, its gunports like a grin. It dipped sideways. He could see faces at the side doors, which were open. He could see a heavy PKMS machine-gun on a swivel mounting in the doorway, aimed at him. He rose from all fours to his knees, pressing himself against the rock. The helicopter moved closer, perhaps thirty feet above him, where the accentuated slope of the mountain peak allowed the rotors closer access without danger. Spiderlike, huge, deafening, the MiL gunship hung over him, filling the morning sky, its racket reverberating like physical blows from the mountain. It sank very slowly towards him. Hyde could not move.
He became enveloped by the whirling snow dragged up and flung about by the downdraught. The helicopter lowered itself into the writhing cloud of snow it was creating. Hyde pressed his face against the rock, feeling the pressure of the downdraught in his arms and hands — fingers slipping all the time, unable to hold their grip, gtow into the rock enough — then in his body, which juddered with increasing velocity and violence as he crouched with his back to the rotors, then in his knees and calves and feet which shuddered, slid, began to move across the narrow ledge towards the edge and the drop beyond. He was being agitated into motion, like a compound in a chemist's jar, shaken into something else — a body falling from a high place.
He held on, trying to hug the rock. He attempted to sit, then to lie flat. His legs slid away from him like those of a baby, uncontrolled. They were dragged towards the edge of the track, towards the drop. He felt his body slip, too. He turned onto his back and dug in his heels, but could not prevent himself moving. The ground seemed alive and sandlike in its distress beneath him, the helicopter a huge black beetle hovering above him, the cloud of upflung, powdery snow obscuring everything else.
His legs scrabbled in space, then slumped, knees bent, over the edge. His buttocks moved towards the edge. He could not turn over again, his hands could not grip.
The MiL slid to one side. Blue sky where it had been, then a black something dropping from it on a rope. A smaller spider, or only the spider's thread. He lay on his back, legs over the edge, snow boiling around him, covering him, as the helicopter's winch-man came to collect him. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten — he seemed to swoop in towards Hyde, who could only wait for him. He came level, hanging over the drop, then the MiL began to shunt him sideways towards the ledge.
A hundred yards, two hundred, he told himself. Something, at least, told him. No more than that before you reach cover. Then three miles, something else announced. At least three miles.
Two hundred yards, the other something replied.
Six feet, five, four his eyes registered. The winch-man's boots scrabbled on the edge, found purchase, his body leaning slightly away, then straightening. He was on the ledge. Hyde kicked out and the winch-man danced away as the MiL shifted slightly, a puppet on the wire that had lowered him. He came swinging slowly back like a pendulum, feet scrabbling again, then gaining purchase, the rifle already coming around from its position slung across his back. Hyde rolled towards the winch-man, and the MiL danced him away again. Hyde scrabbled in the snow, found frozen dirt, dug his fingernails into it, stopped the roll of his body towards the edge. He was exhausted and terrified; incapable of much more. The winch-man danced back, feet touching lightly on the ledge again. This time, he was grinning, and the gun was pointing.
Did they want him—?
For a while — two hundred yards — before they kill you…
He made as if to roll again, and the man's feet began to dance upwards — Christ, the pilot was good and they'd done this trick before — and then he hovered as if performing a strange, frozen entrechat in combat boots. The boots remained a foot or so above the path. The powdery snow settled around the legs of the man as he waited. Hyde rolled, the legs danced upwards, Hyde drew the Makarov from behind his back and fired. The winch- man's smile became lopsided, and emitted blood — like Petrunin, and Hyde didn't look any more. The MiL whipped away from the ledge, and Hyde turned and was running. The helicopter buzzed behind him, closing. He heard a terrible, screaming noise, then the scrape of metal and flesh and bone along the wall of the mountain. They hadn't even winched the man in, just left him there, just alive, — banging him along the cliff, trapped — ending the dance.
The PKMS opened up, scattering bullets along the track behind him, shattering the outline of a rock that had been close to his head the previous moment. Hyde dropped into the twisted, jagged, concealing trench of rocks that led to the valley floor, fear making his body flow almost as easily and swiftly as the stream that must once have reached the valley by this sharp-cut course. Hyde, his body jarred and bruised and shaken, continued swiftly downwards.
He looked behind him, just once. The MiL was a hundred feet up, and the dead winch-man was being hauled up. His body hung grotesquely, brokenly, beneath the gunship. Hyde slithered downwards, desperate to reach the valley floor before the MiL resumed the game.
'There could be — depositions made available, Frau Schroder. I'm sure your lawyer understands me…?' Zimmermann made the statement lightly turning his- head so he could see the reactions of the woman's legal counsel. A youngish man, running to fat, gold-rimmed glasses giving him a learned air that was at odds with the expensive, modishly-cut suit and the flamboyant shirt. He would have been little more than a baby when the Schroder woman was committing the atrocities of which she was accused.
The lawyer nodded for him to continue with the bribery. Margarethe Schroder watched Zimmermann from beneath heavy eyelids. Her anger and outrage were evident, making her face appear too young for its surmounting thatch of white hair. She shrugged, as if Zimmermann bored her, but there was a gleam of calculation and alert
