beds, who were probably criminals or even dissidents, he had ceased to exist. Isolation swamped him.
He struggled to escape it by following the thread back into his interrogation. His removal to this silent ward might mean he had told them everything, that they had finished with him while they checked the truth of his story — had he told them?
Slowly, cautiously, he sifted through the wreckage — father, aircraft carrier, burns, Aubrey, the lake, drowning, burning, ejecting… the tiles, the tiles…
He had been sitting up, screaming for them to listen to him. What had he said? He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. What had he said?
He could not stifle the audible sigh of relief when he was certain. Nothing. He had not told them. They did not know.
He listened as the nurse's chair scraped on the linoleum. He heard the footsteps approach. The light over his bed flicked on. Gant controlled his eyelids, his lips. The seconds passed. He tried to breathe normally. The light went out, the footsteps retreated, the chair scraped once more. The nurse grunted as he sat down. Gant heard the book being picked up, re-opened, pages being shuffled.
He was sweating freely once more. It had taken a vast effort of control and made him realise how weak he was. The nurse would have been capable of plucking him upright with one hand and dragging him from the bed without effort. He could never overpower him.
And there was no weapon. His itchy, sweating hands, tense yet without strength, did not constitute a weapon. And there was nothing else. He could never take the nurse's gun away from him, even if he wore one.
He heard the chiming of a clock somewhere, a small, silvery, unreal sound. Ten. He must have been asleep for hours. In all probability they would be coming soon. They were pressed for time. There was an almost frantic sense of urgency about their pursuit of what he knew. There was no reason for it — no one else knew of his whereabouts or the location of the airplane, but they could not seem to stop until it was over.
So they would come, and he would be helpless. Weaponless and helpless.
Mitchell Gant lay in the dark waiting for the doctors and interrogators. The bandaged head of one of the other patients loomed in his thoughts. A mummy, almost. Something, like himself, long dead and forgotten.
He felt himself once more on the point of losing the struggle against his sense of isolation.
Aubrey felt the nose of the Hercules C-130K dip towards the carpet of gleaming cloud he could see through the round porthole in the fuselage. It still lay far below them, stippled and endless. The moon was brilliant, the stars as hard as diamonds. It was difficult to believe that from that black, light-punctured clearness would come weather conditions even worse than they had anticipated when the aircraft took off from Scampton.
He removed the headset, his conversation with Waterford at Kirkenes at an end. As he stared through the porthole, the clouds seemed to drift slowly up to meet them. They were still flying along the Norwegian coast, inside the Arctic Circle. The pilot was taking the Hercules down as low as he could, to deceive the long-range Russian radars, before turning to an easterly heading which would take them towards Kirkenes. To all intents and purposes, the Hercules would have dropped out of radar contact west of Bardufoss and be assumed to be a routine transport flight to the Norwegian NATO base.
Aubrey fretted, even though he attempted to allay his mood by losing himself in the mesmeric effect of the clouds. It might have been a white desert landscape with wind-shaped rocks rising from its surface. The self- hypnosis held momentarily, then dissipated. Aubrey transferred his gaze to the whale-ribbed, bare, hard-lit interior of the transport aircraft.
It was almost done, they were almost there. He was for the moment in suspension, unable to do more. It was always the most frustrating, dragging part of an intelligence operation — the flight, the drive, the train journey, whatever it was… just before the border was crossed, the building entered, the target sighted. Useless tension, pointless adrenalin. He did not
Five huge pallets of equipment were secured in the aft section of the cargo compartment. The team of fifteen men lounged or stretched or checked equipment. Charles Buckholz once more familiarised himself with the cargo manifest, in conversation with the WRAP Air Loadmaster. Curtin was standing at a folding table on which lay a large-scale map. He was talking to the Hercules' co-pilot. Everything had been decided, the briefings had been completed. This was repetition to occupy time, nothing more.
The Hercules would land at Kirkenes and Aubrey, Buckholz and the other members of the team without parachute training would disembark. Waterford and his SBS unit, twenty-five men in total, would then embark and the Hercules would take them and their equipment to the area of the lake. The dropping zone for the parachutists had already been selected; the surface of the lake. Waterford had confirmed its suitability. Once the men had dropped, the Hercules would make a low-level run and the five pallets of equipment would simply be dropped, without parachutes, from the rear cargo doors. At first, Aubrey had considered the method primitive, unsophisticated, potentially dangerous to the valuable equipment — especially the winches. RAF reassurances had failed to convince him, even though he accepted them. It still seemed an
Above the Norwegian border with Finland, Eastoe's AWACS Nimrod was back on-station. It would operate in an airborne, early-warning capacity, a long-range spyplane, observing the Russian border for any and every sign of movement. Also it would provide a back-up communications link with Washington, London, Helsinki and the lake to supplement the direct satellite link established when Waterford's initial search party had left the commpack at the lake.
He turned away from the scene. Buckholz and the non-parachutists would be flown by RNAF Lynx helicopters, arriving no more than an hour behind Waterford's party. Aubrey looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. By four-thirty, the whole party would be in place at the lake, where the Firefox lay in twenty-six feet of icy water.
Twenty-six feet. It was hardly submerged. A man standing on the fuselage would have his head above water. Eighty feet in length — the tailfins in perhaps thirty-four feet of dark water — with a wingspan of fifty feet, it had to be winched no more than one hundred and fifty feet before it was ashore. Or, preferably, plucked out of the water like a hooked fish by the Skyhook which had refuelled on the German-Danish border thirty minutes earlier. The figures were temptingly simple, the task easy to achieve. Yet he could not believe in it, in its success.
Gant -
The nose of the Hercules was dipping into the clouds when the operator of the communications console that had been installed for Aubrey's use, turned to him.
'There's a coded signal coming in, sir — from Helsinki.' He attended to his headset; nodding as the high- speed frequency-agile message ended. 'There's no need to reply, sir. They've signed off.'
'Very well-run it.'
The operator flicked switches, dabbed at a miniature keyboard set into the console, and hidden tapes whirred. It was Hanni Vitsula's voice.
'Charles!' Aubrey called.
Buckholz arrived as the replayed voice chuckled, then said: 'Don't rely on the weather, Kenneth. Forty-eight hours from midnight tonight is our final, repeat final offer. Our forecasts suggest it might be easier to reach the site than you're supposing… don't expect us not to arrive. Good luck. Message ends. Out.'
Buckholz shook his head ruefully.
'He guesses we're relying on getting ourselves socked in by the weather. Think he'll decide to move in before the deadline?' Aubrey waved his hand dismissively. 'No. But, otherwise he means what he says.' He slapped his hands on his thighs. 'Well, that's it. Your President has gained us the dubious bonus of a few more hours.' Through the porthole, Aubrey could see the grey cloud pressing and drizzling against the perspex. 'But that's all the time we have.'
'Let's just you and me hope the weather turns real sour, uh?'
'Then we will have lost the game, Charles. The Skyhook will never arrive in the weather you're hoping for!'
Dmitri Priabin turned slowly and gently onto his back and sat up. In the soft lamplight, he stared intently at the hollow of Anna's naked back, as if he were studying the contours of a strange and new country. Eventually, he clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. He pursed his lips, pulled dismissive,
