by Craig Thomas
"Or higher still," Massinger said heavily.
"You'll come back to London, after Helsinki?"
"Yes, I think so." Margaret intruded, and he knew that to return to London was dangerous and inevitable. "Yes," he sighed.
"Where will you stay?"
"Hyde's flat," he replied without hesitation.
"It might work."
"Hyde thinks it will — temporarily, at least."
Alison Shelley was absentmindedly loading long French loaves into her trolley. Shelley appeared to be calculating the number of bottles of wine he might add to his present purchases without paying duty. Eventually, he reached for a claret from one of the higher shelves.
"Look at that," he said lightly. "Less than three pounds and perfectly drinkable. I shall have to talk to my wine merchant." He smiled. Massinger felt unnerved by the casual remark.
Instead of simply dispelling their grave mood, its reminder of normality brought images of Margaret flooding back. His hands were weak as they gripped the pushbar of the trolley. The bottles rattled softly against one another. His eyes were misty as he stared at his damp-stained sleeves. Shelley gently placed the claret in the trolley. Alison was waiting for them, impatient and decisive.
"Helsinki, then," Massinger murmured.
"Better than Afghanistan at this time of year," Shelley chided, insensitive of the causes of Massinger's gloom.
Massinger pushed the trolley forward with an abrupt, noisy jerk. Ahead of him, beyond the checkouts, rain streaked the glass doors of the hypermarket. Ahead of him more clearly was Helsinki and a man called Phillipson. Projected upon those images, as if they were no more vivid than a blank white screen, was the sense of separation from Margaret, even her hatred. He could see no end to that, no conclusion.
* * *
The ancient, gleaming Lee Enfield rifle was inlaid with gold and filigree work. It was cradled in the Pathan's folded arms almost like the sceptre of a king. The weapon, a relic or museum piece in age, was only the final assertion to Hyde that he was seated opposite one of the few men he could be certain was capable of killing him. Not desirous, not even an enemy — though certainly no friend — but simply sufficiently skilled, sufficiently strong.
Mohammed Jan shook his head once more as Miandad translated yet another of Hyde's pleas for assistance. The scarf of his green turban fluttered, emphasising his refusal. His blue eyes were hard and expressionless, startling amid the kohl on his eyelids and beneath his eyes. It was almost as if he did not see the Australian and his Pakistani companion. His lips, within the greyed sable of his beard, were a thin line of refusal. Mohammed Jan and his Pathan mujahiddin were interested in Petrunin — indeed they hated him and devoutly wished his slow death — but they had no interest in any scheme that Hyde might propose. Hyde's interest in the Russian was no concern of theirs.
For two dozen SLR or NATO FN rifles, for three launchers and their accompanying missiles, they would have raided the central barracks in Kabul where Petrunin had his quarters. But Hyde had no bribes, and therefore no leverage.
Hyde was cold. They had not even been invited into the man's lean-to hut of wood and corrugated iron, but had been required to squat on the ground outside its door. The afternoon was wearing away and the temperature dropping. The shadows across the refugee camp were long and the mountains beyond Parachinar were tipped with gold. It had been a drive of four hours from Peshawar, and the journey had been completely in vain.
"He repeats that Kabul has become a much more dangerous place," Miandad translated. Hyde tossed his head.
"I'm not asking him to go into Kabul," he replied. "You've already told him that. I want a plan of Petrunin's routine — I want to catch him away from Kabul, out in open country. God, you'd think these blokes had never set an ambush before!"
Mohammed Jan's eyes flickered at the angry frustration evident in Hyde's voice. His face, however, remained expressionless. He seemed to be patiently awaiting the departure of his uninvited guests. They had received tea, served by one of his daughters-in-law, he had listened to their arguments, and he had rejected them. Now only their departure was unaccomplished.
Hyde stood up and walked away. Miandad followed him, and the Australian turned on him.
"Can't that stubborn old bugger see—?" he began.
"You have given him no reason to help you."
"Christ — he hates Petrunin! What more excuse does he need?"
"You offer neither weapons nor help. You only want something from him. Something he is not prepared to give — lives."
"He's over there — the man with all the answers!" Hyde bellowed. He waved his arms. "The man with my life in his hands," he added more softly.
Miandad nodded. "And Sir Kenneth Aubrey's life, perhaps, and that of my old university teacher. I understand. But Mohammed Jan does not. Your concerns are not his — this is his concern, here…"
Miandad gestured around the refugee camp. It dropped slowly away from them down the hillside, not unlike the slow slide of rubbish down the slope of a tip. It had long since lost its appearance of temporariness and become permanent; the kind of village expected amid that scenery and so close to the border with Afghanistan. Its tumbled lean-tos and tents and hovels contained the remnants of perhaps three or four different Pathan tribes, predominant among them the tribe whose chieftain was Mohammed Jan. This was his territory, this heap of refuse flung into a narrow valley which led towards the border town of Parachinar and the Kurram Pass into Afghanistan. He ruled the place and its inhabitants autocratically, and he lived to kill Russians and Afghan troops. He was an exile, more certainly and with far more purpose than Hyde himself.
"All right!" Hyde snapped, turning his back on the camp, now beginning to soften into shadow. Cooking fires were already strengthening their glows, and cloaked women moved around them. Children and goats grumbled and shouted. In places, bare, sharp rock thrust through the snow. Armed men moved as if their only purpose was to be carriers of weapons. "All right — my life doesn't matter to him. But I can't help worrying about it, just a bit. If I can't do anything, then it's a question of sitting out the war — for the duration. Here, or somewhere like here."
Miandad turned to look once more at Mohammed Jan.
"They are as fierce and cruel and proud as people say they are," he murmured. "Also immovable. They simply live in another world from you. Your dislike of Russians is — well, rather like moonlight at midday. Not to be noticed beside their feelings. They are very good at hating — but on their terms, for their reasons."
"Let's get out of here."
"Very well. We should be safe, driving back to Peshawar. It is always possible we may not be, of course." Miandad smiled a small, grim smile. "Mm? Just one moment, I wonder what is happening over there…?"
"What—?"
"Listen. The old man talking to Mohammed Jan. I want to hear what he says."
Hyde moved away, hands in his coat pockets, shoulders slumped, eyes hardly seeing the grim reality of the camp. It did not interest or move him. He felt only his own predicament, and frustrated rage that these Pathans would not help him. He heard shouts, and saw men moving up the slope towards Mohammed Jan's hut. They passed him without taking notice. They carried long, ancient rifles and modern Kalashnikovs. All of them wore bandoliers of cartridges. Miandad was right; it was a different world. Its priorities, the depth of its hatreds and revenges, all were alien to the encounters of Hyde's professional life. He began to wonder what changes had been wrought upon the urbane, intelligent, professional persona of Tamas Petrunin since his engagement in this kind of war. For his part, there was a hint of relief in Mohammed Jan's refusal; as if he had escaped some unforeseen, unnerving danger.
Yet Aubrey intruded on his thoughts even at that moment; old, distressed, impotent. Hyde almost hated the loyalty that welled up in him, knowing its power.
"One of Mohammed Jan's returning raiding parties is in trouble, I think," Miandad said softly at his elbow, startling him. Men
continued to brush past them, flitting like shadows towards their chieftain's hut. Hyde turned to watch them gather around Mohammed Jan. The man's voice was powerful as he began speaking.
"What did you say—?" Hyde asked absently.
"His eldest sons are leading a returning raiding party. The old man who arrived a few moments ago was a lookout, awaiting their return through part of the Kurram Pass. But they are pinned down and waiting for darkness — there are helicopters. And many of the party are dead, from the numbers the old man was able to see."
Hyde shrugged. "You told me," he said, "it's a different world. What can I do?"
Men were already moving off, towards the perimeter of the camp and the long shadows from the mountains. The snow-clad peaks gleamed in the setting sun. A sprinkling of lights showed the position of Parachinar. Mohammed Jan had disappeared.
"Come," Miandad said. "Perhaps you will see what this war is all about. Perhaps it will be a good lesson for you. We will follow Mohammed Jan and his men. You may see what your old acquaintance has learned of guerilla war." Miandad's teeth flashed whitely, but not in a smile.
* * *
Below the aircraft, the scene was colourless; grey and white. The waters of the Gulf of Finland were wrinkled like a shabby grey cloth, ending abruptly where the snow-covered shoreline of Helsinki became a sheet of white. Narrow lines of snow-ploughed roads and railway lines had been lightly traced, but the overwhelming the impression was of an uninhabited, hostile environment. Massinger turned away from the window at the recognition that the landscape and the sea lay below him like an image of his own state of mind; empty and somehow hopeless. He could not let go, he told himself once more, though, the precisely formed words in his mind echoed hollowly in a small, piping voice. Patriotism was ridiculous in him, an expatriate Bostonian, a cool-minded academic, especially the simple, emotional kind he seemed to be experiencing. Hyde did not have it, and he wondered whether even Aubrey possessed it. Somehow, he had a capacity for patriotism, like a capacity for love, and the object of that capacity could as well have been Afghanistan or the US or, as it plainly was, Great Britain. He found that he cared, almost despite himself, that his adopted country's intelligence service was being manipulated by the Soviet Union. It was intolerable.
Or was it merely his damnable sense of right and wrong? Was that at the bottom of his heated urge to solve the mystery, clear Aubrey, defeat his enemies? It might be, and he disapproved. It was a naïve view of his character, and he desired not to be naïve.
He had spoken to Margaret again, from the airport, looking out through tall windows onto a rainswept runway, a scene reduced to monochrome like the one below him now as the aircraft dropped towards Seutula airport. He had attempted to convince her that he was safe when the very reason he could not return to her, do as she asked and give it up, was because someone wanted him safely and incuriously dead. The conversation had been painful, pointless. The chasm was still there, merely emphasised by physical distance. She had settled into a routine of hatred towards Aubrey, totally believing in his guilt; it was an orthodoxy that nothing could soften or contradict. Therefore, while he aided Aubrey he was a heretic, and damned.
Yet he knew that her belief was tearing her in two, just as he was himself being pulled apart. He could not tell her he would never be safe, never, unless he could unravel the mystery — whatever the truth concerning her father and Kenneth Aubrey.
Lastly, he had told her — trusting her with his life, as he had wanted to do, felt he needed to do — that he would be coming back, that he would telephone, that he had to see her…
The telephone receiver in their flat had gone down on those protestations, on his pleading, on his need for her. The line had crackled with static and he had listened to the emptiness for a long time before putting down his receiver.
The rain had been cold on his face as he had crossed the tarmac to the Finnair flight to Helsinki.
The wing outside his window dipped, showing him the grey buildings and the runways of Seutula. The aircraft dropped its nose, straightened, then began its final approach, Massinger settled himself to thoughts of Phillipson and the immediate future.
* * *
In the growing darkness, Hyde caught glimpses of light-coloured cloth from blouses or turbans, even of dark shadowy forms against the snow, as the Pathan raiding party moved from rock to rock, from bush to stunted tree to straggling vegetation. On the ground, it was a scene in extreme slow-motion, the elapsed time so extended it was almost stilled. Above the defile of the narrow, knife-cut valley that cut through the border north of Parachinar, Russian helicopters moved like agitated insects; flies maddened and over-exerted by poison from an aerosol spray. Two kinds of time; patience and urgency, hunters and hunted. To Hyde, using night-glasses, it seemed that many were wounded, and by Miandad's guess the party was considerably reduced from that which had entered Afghanistan three days before.
The MiL gunships drove the valley again like airborne beaters of game, moving towards the high cleft in the rocks which concealed Hyde, Miandad and, a little away from them, Mohammed Jan and three or four of his trusted lieutenants; old, grey-bearded men with long, antique rifles. The noise from the helicopters was deafening. Then they turned, whirling as easily as dancers, the downdraught plucking at Hyde's hair and shoulders as the four MiL-24s moved away. Hyde could distinguish the 57mm rocket pods beneath their stubby wings and the four-barrel machine-gun in the nose of each aircraft as they turned no more than two hundred feet above him. He shivered.
"There," Miandad shouted above the din and its ricochet from the valley walls. "There!"
Hyde lowered his night-glasses, following Miandad's extended arm, focusing the glasses beyond the retreating gunships. The faint redness in the lenses swam and cleared. The scene had little colour; a clear, bloodless monochrome. As the focus sharpened, it was as if something had entered an arena; something making everything else of less significance. A pike in a pool. A presence.
The helicopter must have been daubed some garish colour, Hyde guessed. Certainly, it was not camouflaged like the gunships that now seemed to bob and curtsey their way towards it.
"Red — blood-red," Miandad murmured.
Hyde lowered the glasses for a moment, and looked at the Pakistani colonel. Miandad nodded. Hyde felt chilled, but he could not have explained his reaction. Petrunin—?
"Him?" he asked.
Miandad nodded. "Him. You will find his style — more flamboyant?" Miandad's teeth gleamed white in the darkness of the cleft of rocks.
Hyde raised his glasses once more, again adjusting the focus slightly. The command helicopter which contained Petrunin was moving up the valley, though very slowly, as if engaged in some courtship ritual with the four MiL gunships. Its speed decreased further as it reached its four heavily-armed courtiers.
Hyde moved the glasses down, twiddling the focus. He was prompted by an inexplicable fear and urgency. Below him, in the narrow river-bed, the Pathans seemed to be moving with a similar sudden speed. Wounded men were being handled more roughly, pulled and even dragged. Small, bent figures scurried ahead of them. It was dark now, and they were no more than half a mile from Hyde's vantage-point. They had already crossed the border, even though that crossing was meaningless. Hyde returned his gaze to the black air above the valley — some stars beginning to appear, falsely bright in the night-glasses — and the five helicopters. The four gunships hovered and paid homage in a slow circling dance about the command aircraft.
Hyde heard Mohammed Jan issue orders. Men below them began to move swiftly towards the oncoming party and its wounded. Away down the valley, the noise of the helicopters was magnified by the valley walls.
Then the group dissolved. The four gunships wheeled, came into line, began to beat up the valley again. The command helicopter lagged behind; the armed sportsman waiting for the game to be terrified into flight. It was sinister in the extreme, especially to Hyde, who knew the occupant of the red MiL-24. The res
cuers scuttled and weaved and ran towards the returning party; flickering white and light-coloured patches or swift shadows. The four MiLs closed above them, their noise a fearful clatter from the rocks. Hyde watched.
He winced as small black shapes detached themselves from the bellies of each of the MiLs; strings of laid eggs. He followed them down, watched some bounce, roll, jump, split. None of them exploded. His shoulders and stomach relaxed. He turned to Miandad, glancing into his grim face. The Pakistani shook his head slightly. Hyde returned his attention to the moving Pathans. The two parties had met; wounded men received extra, urgent support. The tempo of their progress increased. The four MiLs banked and turned. More black eggs fell. There were no explosions. Hyde found it difficult to breathe; impossible to understand.
The retreating MiLs passed over the moving men, their noise towed behind them like a net. Almost silence, out of which the separate and distinct noise of the command helicopter emerged, closing at a height of no more than two hundred feet. Its racket banged back from the cliffs above the valley floor. Hyde saw raised faces, bobbing, quick-moving turbans. He could begin to distinguish bodies, forms, figures. The party, augmented by the rescuers, was no more than a quarter of a mile away from his vantage point. A faint, silver-sheened mist was rising in the valley. It shone as if with dew or an inner light.
Mist—?
It was thin, gauzy, hardly opaque. Yet it glowed falsely.
The red helicopter — now Hyde could distinguish patches of other shades on its nose and flanks. Shark's mouth—? Grotesque faces—? Animal heads—? He could not tell. Something occult, almost, about the thing, as if it was not a piece of airborne technology but something much older.
It hovered. Men ran, scattered, limped or fell. Hunched, scuttling, they moved through the sheen of silver which seemed to cling about them, rising from the floor of the valley to a height of no more than ten or twelve feet. Petrunin's helicopter hovered.