difficult to swallow. He was shaking. He distracted himself by looking at the lamp, trimming it, then at the walls and fixtures of the boat. He had repaired some of the worst gaps in the planking and paneling, he had hidden food here, the lamp, beer. He shuddered as he remembered the closeness of his brush with the GRU, hugging his hands beneath his armpits. Hour after hour in the freezing cold, all day and most of the evening, until he had worked his way on foot to this last safe house. He was intensely weary—
— which was why he was so uptight, so frightened. The explanation paled, overcome by the noise of the wind, the groans of old, rotting wood. Ice, the soupy slush around the hull, grumbled beneath his feet. Sleet puffed like thin cigarette smoke through gaps in the wooden walls of the cabin.
He slumped onto the bunk, all his anticipation and returning warmth seeming to evaporate. It was impossible to sustain the fiction of rescue here, with the occasional cries of a night bird and the disturbed honking and barking of wildfowl in the darkness outside. The Americans would not come.
Please let it be tonight, please let it be, he kept repeating. Please.
He was worn almost transparent with fear. His doubt had increased, gnawed its way to full growth. He had nothing left, no reserves with which to fight it.
Please let it be tonight, please.
He huddled into himself on the bunk, the transistor radio unnoticed in his lap. Knees drawn up, cradling it. Presently, he began to sob with self-pity.
It was eight-thirty in the evening. He cried, oblivious of the passage of time.
Katya Grechkova took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Looked at her watch. Eight-forty. She yawned, tiredness and satisfaction mingled in the stretching of her arms and back. She stood up, lit a cigarette, and walked to the other side of her small office— the office she had shared with Viktor Zhikin. Her head was aching, but its dull throbbing failed to blunt the edge of her pleasure.
She stood near the window, looking back at her desk, at the pool of white light from the desk lamp felling on papers, then stared at its shadows thrown on the Venetian blind. Then back to the desk, posing the scene as if for a forensic photograph; exactly capturing the source of her satisfaction. She puffed on the cigarette with a conscious hint of melodrama. Zhikin had always — not unkindly — teased and joked about her fastidious, intense manner of working, the degree of her absorption in any task at hand. As if she were hiding from life in her work, he had once said — her own life, perhaps? Then he had broken off at once, seeing the naked, pained look she could not keep from her face.
She puffed quickly at the cigarette. The room was smoky, the ashtray littered with stubs. She did not want to think about all that, not now. Work was no longer a solace or an escape — and Zhikin would never have understood that she was escaping from an insight into herself, not from her husband's character or their failed marriage. Captain Yuri Grechkov was someone she had suddenly seen through, and in that moment of discovery, contempt had entered and occupied the place of all other emotions. He had failed to attend his mother's funeral; simply not bothered to apply for leave from army maneuvers. Katya had gone, wearing a black armband on her uniform sleeve. And she hadn't even liked his mother. He'd known she was dying and hadn't returned from wherever he was, hadn't come even after she telephoned to say
Not even for the sake of avoiding the guilt to come would he break off from his silly army games somewhere in East Germany. It wasn't much, but the revelation was, for her, like a collision with an express train. She seemed to understand him, see his shallowness and indifference, and despised him for his fadings.
Her view of him now was more fixed than a photograph; an oil painting, framed and hung. She would never see him in any other pose. What she avoided, what Zhikin would never have understood, was her inability to forgive or make allowances. She had sentenced him, finding him guilty, and there was no appeal.
So, after the weeks of quarrels and silences and shadowy, separate living, she'd left Alma-Ata and gotten herself posted to Baikonur. Got a flat, a few sticks of furniture from central stores, some prints to replace photographs, which he was fond of taking, developing, and framing — mostly of her — and began a new and partial existence on her own. It had taken a long time to accommodate the new knowledge she had of herself. To have made such demands, to have had such standards for him, to have such ideals. He'd shattered her image of him. She had thought herself quite, quite evil for a long time, in a little-girl, final way. She could not live with him, could not bear to have him touch her.
But all that had faded.
Cold satisfactions, those to be gained from being successful in her work, being adept at it, had sustained her. Those, and the belittlement of Yuri — the minute catalogue of his faults and weaknesses — had pardoned her self-knowledge. Her work was her independence; it made her eager, active, clever, a more flattering mirror than her marriage had ever been. Now the satisfaction was intense, almost unmarred by memory or insight.
She believed she had discovered where Kedrov the spy was hiding.
She returned to her desk. The dog's tail thumped against her legs as he joined her from his corner of the room. She patted his head, stroked his neck, felt the wet muzzle and nose against her palm. Looked at the map she had been working from.
Her forefinger and index finger, still clamping the remainder of the English cigarette, stroked a slow, diminishing circle around a small area of the salt marshes. The dog wandered away from her other hand. Yuri would not let her have a dog, didn't want the trouble and the loose hairs in their bright, well-furnished apartment in Alma-Ata.
She shook her head and replaced her glasses, which glinted in the lamplight as she raised them from the desk. She bent forward, as if to check something. Yes, just there.
Katya knew the marshes. She'd hiked there often enough to have been able to make her clever guesses. With ease, she could recollect sites on the map in three dimensions. Trees, islets, swampier areas, ornithological blinds, hunting lodges — a few of them from before the Revolution, now used by senior officers who imitated the pleasures of an older aristocracy — old, ruined boats and huts, even villages long abandoned, game wardens' cabins.
Kedrov's books and maps lay on the floor. Now beneath the dog, who was looking up at her, eyes wide, tongue lolling pinkly. His eyes were moist with the illusion of devotion. Using the maps and notes, she had narrowed and narrowed her search, until—
— this place. She tapped it on the map. There was a rudimentary sketch in one of his notebooks, a chart warning himself of deep water in one place, of the existence of a blind in another. A blind that had once been a houseboat. Almost in ruins now.
So, she felt she had him. Other references, other places in his notes and on his maps were possible, but she had put the old boat at the top of her list. Tomorrow. Impatience surged even as she reaffirmed the need to wait until daylight, the need to report to Priabin.
She looked at the dog. If she were careful, very careful… She'd drawn a gun, she could use it. She had waders, a flashlight, a dog from some hunting breed that couldn't have forgotten everything its ancestors had once known, a car, a map.
She grinned, tense with excitement. Shivering with nerves.
Tonight, tonight,
She cleared her throat. 'Come on, Misha!' she called out. The dog lumbered to its feet, wagging its broadsword of a tail in delight
The Hind-D's shadow glanced like a blow off the long, hanging beard of a frozen waterfall that pointed like a gesture to flat snow-fields, a clump of stone huts, tethered camels and ponies in the moonlight. A shuffling figure glanced upward out of the folds of a cloak and a long, old rifle swung ready for use. The figure was, in an instant, miniaturized in the mirrors. A white plain broken by a frozen river stretched before the helicopter and its shadow, which raced across the snow, the Mil moving above it like a dark insect.
Gant skimmed the ground at no more than thirty feet. His whereabouts were secret once more. He had picked up no information over the Tac channel to indicate anyone still remained interested in him. He was, for the moment, safe.
Garcia's helicopter was tight behind him, zigzagging, skimming, flicking and dancing through the terrain. Garcia had become infected by the exhilaration of danger; now he was alert, confident, flying on instinct and even passion. Yet he nagged at Gant's awareness; a liability, someone to have to be careful for, someone whose mistakes could be fatal.
