Winter Hawk

Six bottles had contained beer, the larger bottle vodka. They were all empty now. Filip Kedrov studied them, shaking each of the bottles in turn as if tuning a set of musical bells. Then he replaced each with exaggerated care on the bunk opposite his; a rank of brightly painted toy soldiers. Dead soldiers, he reminded himself, and giggled.

Nothing else to do, he justified his tipsiness to himself. Bloody nothing else to do but sit and wait, just as he had been doing for the past twenty-four hours. Good thing he'd brought the bottles, an even better thing that he'd stored the vodka and some cans down here on an earlier visit. It had been intended as overstocking, but… the cans were all empty, too. In the bunker's kitchen, in the metal sink. There had been nothing else to do.

He flopped onto his bunk, slightly theatrically, hands clasped behind his head, which commenced whirling and spinning disconcertingly. Keep your eyes open. He raised his knees gently. The room began to spin.

He sat up quickly. His head lurched, and he wanted to hold it but was forced to grip the edge of the bunk with both hands if he was not to become one of those dolls with rounded bases that rocked back and forth for whole minutes after a single touch. His head bung over his knees; he groaned. The sound washed away down the long, empty corridor of the room.

He should have known, should have known he would get drunk out of sheer boredom. He released the bunk and held his head softly. After he had cradled it for a time, he looked up slowly. The row of bottles remained still. The opposite bunk did not lurch. He swallowed the sickly saliva in his mouth, and his stomach remained at some distance below his throat. He sighed cautiously.

All the drink had gone now, anyway. He focused slowly on the dial of his watch. Midmorning. Twenty-four hours had passed down there, two days since he had had Orlov send the last signal — well, almost two; a day and a half at least. They would be on their way now, coming for him. They had to come, didn't they? He felt certain they would, confident of the fact, and kicked his legs over the edge of the bunk like a child on a seawall. Soon he'd have to think about moving from here.

When?

Tomorrow would be early enough. It was difficult to decide, to imagine the distances, the time of their journey. But they wouldn't waste time, not with Thursday only two days away. And he had another hiding place, at the pickup point, the exact and agreed rendezvous. He would go there tomorrow. The helicopters would come in probably disguised as Russian machines — from where? Turkey, Afghanistan, more than a thousand miles away—

— Stop, stop it! He remembered why he had sought the drink's temporary oblivion. It was the fear of abandonment, the fear of huge distances, of a helicopter attempting that vast, hostile airspace. But he was indispensable, wasn't he? Indispensable.

Helicopters? One helicopter? Ridiculous!

Had they ever said helicopters? Had they? Well? Fool, fool, can't you remember? He pressed his hands against his temples, but he could not still the debate, could not squeeze certainty back into his head. Isolation, the sense of abandonment, welled up in him. Fool, fool — did they ever even mention helicopters? Isn't that what you supposed? Tears leaked from his squeezed-shut eyes. He slumped back against the cold wall, his hands loosely lifting and letting fall the material of the gray army blanket on which he sat. Then he let his head loll to one side, his cheek and ear and temple against the concrete, his posture magnifying his sobs. He could hear them, the great slobbering groans of a child sent to bed early. It had only been his dream, the helicopter; he had no authority for the idea whatsoever. It was Tuesday morning, and they would not come, not now. Cars, trucks, trains, would be too slow now… the moment was past when they would come.

He wailed loudly. He heard the noise magnified against the wall, almost through the concrete. They would not come. How could he ever have believed it?

He heard the noise he was making. Sobbing again now.

Heard—

The corridor on the other side of the wall was like a whispering gallery.

Heard—

— whispers, shuffles, clicks; movement and conversation of small animals — rats talking and scrabbling. He lifted his feet from the floor. He swallowed a sob. What did it matter now?

Whisper, shuffle, click…?

Heard—

— them.

Feverishly wiping his wet mouth with his hand, he pressed his ear more firmly against the wall. Shuffle, click, whisper, shuffle-click, whisper, slam, click-click-click, whisper, whistle—?

He was shivering with terror, unable to believe that the sounds were as distant as they appeared. He looked wildly around for a glass — remembering something from a detective story — and saw where a tumbler had rolled away from his drunken grasp under the bunk opposite; snatched it up, his hands shivering as they clasped it. He put it against the concrete, then rubbed his ear to comfort against it. His blood pounded, magnified, and his breath rushed. He had to hold the hand that held the glass, to still its tremor.

Click, click, click, whisper-whisper-whisper, shuffle, shuffle— little rat noises out there in the dark corridors — where? How far? Slightly louder now, coming closer…? He listened, until it became irrefutable that the noises were gradually becoming louder moving in his direction. A search — of every room!

His desperation doubled him up with stomach cramps. He wanted to retch. He dropped the glass on the bunk. His mouth hung open, but the nausea was like repeated soft blows to the back of his head, clubbing him gently down into the rough gray blanket.

He did not understand how he moved to the door, not even that he had done so. He pressed his ear against it, switched off the room lights, then moved the heavy, stiff handle and turned it. He opened the door with exaggerated caution even as the blows continued to bang in his neck and head. His breathing seemed wild, uncontrolled as he looked out. He heard the whisper moving down the corridor but discerned nothing in the gloom. Then heard and distinguished footsteps clicking, some distance away, funneled indirectly to him. They were still in another corridor, beyond the T-junction. But this corridor was a dead end. If he moved, it had to be back toward the noises he could hear, toward the crackling exchanges over walkie-talkies, thin tinny voices without recognizable words. The opening and slamming of steel doors. How far down the corridor beyond the T-junction were they?

His head had cleared. The blows of his pulse had receded. He ducked back into the room, and in the darkness that did not seem to delay him, he scrabbled up his haversack, checked that the precious transponder was inside, then scraped and bundled his possessions into it. Half-wrapped sandwiches smeared margarine on the heavy boots he would need in the marshes; he felt its stickiness…

He returned to the door.

He could not hide the fact of his presence. They might be at the end of the corridor already… no, no, the noises were still too quiet — but he had to head back toward the noises! The idea stunned him into immobility in the doorway. The row of lights along the corridor's roof could be switched on at any moment, exposing him. He shuddered, then moved stiffly, like a paraplegic at painful exercise. Walking as softly as he could, moving slowly, limbs unfreezing….

Yet, however cautiously he moved, it still seemed as if he were rushing toward the noises that slid and whispered along the concrete walls. Rushing into the narrow neck of a bottle — to become an exhibit, a preserved specimen. There were patches of silence in the search when he, too, stopped, then further crackles, whispers, slams. Occasionally, the calls seemed to be louder, on the edge of comprehension, and those were the most frightening. Closer, closer — he was converging on them. The noises of boot heels sounded like pebbles dropped down a deep well.

He touched off each door, each yard of wall, hardly breathing. He felt light-headed with panic, but there was a clarity to it. The panic hurried him on, but with caution, with alert senses; his ears began to measure the weight and distance of the noises made by the search. Even as his mind whirled with terrors.

Corner. The T-junction. Which way were the noises, which way the nearest runged ladder to the surface?

Footsteps, voices — left… ladder? Ladder? Come on, come on, which way, which…? Right, right! Thank God. Relief tumbled into his mind.

He felt the skin across his shoulder blades stretch and become sensitive as he turned down the right-hand