by Craig Thomas
"Why are you here?"
Hyde grinned. "You know I'll kill you, don't you," he said. It was not a question. "You know I'd have killed you in Australia because I knew I should have killed you in England. You're sure of it."
"And that is why you're here?" Petrunin was watching for signs of growing impatience. Yet he was also troubled.
Hyde shook his head. "I'm here because of Teardrop — there, I've given you your passport. I need you alive."
Petrunin laughed aloud. "Then they've done it—?" he asked excitedly. "I wondered, when I saw that Aubrey… but, it's Teardrop, you say. My scheme." His faced darkened. "While I rot here!" he added with a black and utter bitterness.
"Come on."
"There's no way out for you."
"Nor for you. I'll kill you, if it comes to it. You know that — quickly now!"
Hyde moved closer, his eyes intently watching Petrunin's face as he brushed his hand over the man's jacket, his torso. Then he moved carefully behind the Russian, touching along the line of his belt, then brushing his back. Petrunin had no weapon. Hyde gestured to the door with the Makarov, and Petrunin hesitated only for a moment, then collected his greatcoat from the rack and picked up his cap and gloves from a small table. He passed with assured nonchalance out of his office, Hyde close behind him, the Makarov drawn as if for Petrunin's protection.
A guard blundered into the outer office. From his position, Hyde could see the secretary's legs, despite the cover of the desk. The guard saluted. Hyde closed on Petrunin, touching the small of his back with the barrel of the Makarov. Then he stepped quickly away again.
"Is my escort here?" Petrunin demanded.
"Yes, Comrade Colonel—!"
Petrunin's shoulders twitched at the mention of his present rank, as if it pained him that Hyde was present to witness his reduced circumstances.
"Then get on with it. Get out of the way!"
The guard's face was white, thin. He held the door open. Hyde motioned him away from it and slammed it shut behind them, just as Petrunin appeared about to issue an instruction to the guard — perhaps to assist his secretary…? Hyde grinned. There was the slightest shrug from Petrunin as he donned his greatcoat. Hyde glanced through the windows. A splay of lights on the patchy snow, the noises of a helicopter's descent. In the windowed corridor stood three soldiers and an officer, the soldiers in combat fatigues and armed with AKM rifles. Crack troops. The officer saluted Petrunin.
"Come quickly, Comrade Colonel," he instructed. "The helicopter is waiting for you." His glance passed over Hyde but was satisfied by the uniform. Petrunin nodded but said nothing, then swiftly moved into and beyond the circle of the three soldiers, shielding himself from Hyde with the three bodies. Hyde realised he had lost the advantage. Petrunin — this Petrunin — had an animal's quick, alert cunning. A word — a moment of safety and a quick order — could kill him. The Russians moved down the corridor and rounded the corner. Hyde hurried after them, aware of his own danger. People were running and there was a smell of burning paper and plastic and celluloid. Hyde sensed panic. There was sporadic firing from beyond the embassy compound as the second MiL helicopter, a big transport, began to sag into view, thirty yards or so above the lawns, its lights playing over the grass and snow and the bare trees on the other side of the compound. Still Petrunin remained silent. The man was taking not the slightest chance. Hyde guessed he had begun to enjoy the situation. He knew that the tables had been turned — that now he had Hyde.
Hyde reached the top of the stairs. People pressed back as Petrunin and his small escort moved down the stairs, boots clattering, rifles bristling, Petrunin at the centre of their tight circle. Hyde cursed himself. He had allowed himself a moment of confidence in which he had relaxed, and in that moment Petrunin had surrounded himself with a protective curtain of soldiers. The helicopters had been minutes too early, minutes—
A bright, false sunrise garishly lit the windows alongside the stairs, gleaming whitely on each shocked, puzzled face. The officer, Petrunin, each of the guards, each of the embassy staff. Hyde's eyes were dazzled.
Petrunin glanced back up the steps that separated him from Hyde. His expression was shocked. For the moment, the man was incapable of giving the order he might have issued an instant before. Move, then—
The first helicopter had been minutes early, had been left out of Hyde's calculations. Then the second helicopter, the big transport…
Gobbets of flaming metal, a burning body, flailing rotor blades scattered down on the snow and grass and the guards around the first MiL. A huge ceremonial firework; Miandad had used the rocket launcher once more, perhaps because he had weighed the odds against Hyde. Panic now—
Hyde moved, skipping the intervening steps. Petrunin watched him come, his gloved hand reaching towards the officer's arm, to turn him and his dazzled attention towards this new danger — then Hyde was alongside Petrunin and the Makarov was pressed into the flank of the military greatcoat, hard. Hyde grinned.
The remains of the transport helicopter were burning like a scattered bonfire on the embassy lawn. Soldiers were rolling in the snow, extinguishing the flames that had caught them. One or two green greatcoats lay still. Frightened faces watched from the windows of the surviving MiL. The soldiers surrounding Petrunin had begun to drift towards the glass doors of the building. One of the transport's main rotors lay buried like a sword in the lawn. A ball of flame ascended from an exploding fuel tank. The light washed the foyer. Much of the glass had shattered — Hyde felt his face and hands prickling with fragments — and the cold night air had entered, the successive waves of heat from the fire now dispelling the chill.
Hyde had regained control.
"Guard the helicopter!" he yelled in a high, panicky Russian voice full of desperate authority, pressing the gun into Petrunin's side to ensure his silence. The officer in charge of the escort detail turned to him. "Do it! It's the Colonel's only way out, you fools. Move!" People were clambering into the surviving MiL — civilian staff, soldiers, clerks and secretaries, clinging to it like the one remaining lifeboat adrift from a sinking liner. "Get everyone off that helicopter except the ambassador and his wife!" Hyde yelled in Russian. "Get them off."
And they moved. The officer transmitted Hyde's orders. The Makarov pressed against Petrunin's side, just below the ribs. A BMP rolled gruntingly, cautiously past the foyer, passing a parked staff car. Petrunin moved his hands as if to restrain the now running soldiers, but he said nothing. The soldiers spread out, moving towards the helicopter, whose rotors had begun to pick up speed. There was shouting — a woman was bundled from the interior of the MiL and flung spreadeagled on the melted slush.
"Now!" Hyde whispered fiercely into Petrunin's ear.
He pushed the man forward with the Makarov, through the main doors. The cold was more intense now that the helicopter fire was dying down. There was still some firing at the gates, their ruin almost blocked by the BMP slewed across them. Hyde saw the vehicle launch a Sagger missile. There were dozens of soldiers near the gates now, and two trucks and a personnel carrier. In the hard-lit square, buildings appeared to be burning.
They reached the staff car. Hyde opened the door. Guards watched them from the steps, undecided. Petrunin looked back at them, then at Hyde. He shook his head.
"In," Hyde said, gesturing with the gun.
Guards, suspicious now or concerned for Petrunin's safety, had begun to descend the steps. Petrunin sensed the moment, and raised his head as if to summon them. A small explosion at the gates distracted him and distracted the guards. Hyde struck Petrunin across the temple with the barrel of the Makarov and shoved his crumpling body into the rear of the staff car, arranging it as carefully as he could on the deep rear seat. Then he climbed into the driving seat. The keys were in the ignition of the Zil, and he switched on the engine. The noise brought the attention of the guards back to him. He waved them away, and accelerated towards the gates, the rear wheels slewing then biting into the gravel of the drive.
In the driving mirror, the guards seemed to accept the situation. The escort detail was busy emptying the MiL of its unwanted passengers while still more of the embassy staff — many of them obviously half-dressed or still in their nightclothes — streamed towards the helicopter as to a shrine. Petrunin sat propped and unconscious behind him.
Many of the Russian troops had moved beyond the gates now. Hyde glanced at his watch. His time had run out; the Pathans were beginning to withdraw and he was now racing to overtake them. He swerved around a truck, then edged the staff car alongside the green, high flank of the BMP, its cannon pumping shells into the square. He looked up, seeing flat Soviet helmets above the flank of the vehicle. Kalashnikovs on automatic were creating a dense field of fire ahead of the BMP, which had begun to move into the square.
The nearside wheels of the staff car jolted over one of the ruined gates. An infantry officer suddenly appeared and bent to glance into the car, then indicated that Hyde should wind down the window. Two soldiers barred the car's path. The BMP moved away, letting the lights in the square glare on Hyde, like a curtain being drawn. The concrete bunker was still smouldering and there were a number of bodies near the gates. Most of the square was littered with wreckage and clumps of flame and smoke. Hyde wound down the window. The lieutenant had checked the identity of the passenger. Hyde saw distaste disfigure the man's features.
"This bastard's been wounded — I'm getting him out!" Hyde explained, gambling.
"Pity he isn't dead — bastard's right. Where's your escort?"
"We were going to use the chopper — but there's panic back there. Everyone wants to get on. They'll be shooting each other for a place in a couple of minutes!"
"Fucking KGB!"
"He's too afraid of getting shot by one of his own — he wants to get out the quiet way. If they've got a launcher out there they could pick him off… Come on, man! If I don't deliver him, I might as well shoot myself!"
"Too right. Running like a rat, is he?"
"You've got it. Can I go, then?"
"OK — out of the way, you two!" The lieutenant waved Hyde on. He slid the car through the wreckage around the gates, jolting it over rubble and bodies. Petrunin slid slowly to one side behind him until he was lying slumped on the seat. Hyde ignored him. The BMP was ahead of him, its field of fire concentrated towards the shadowy streets beyond the lights. There seemed to be no return of fire. Infantry followed the BMP on foot, armed, afraid and cautious. Through the still open window, above the noise of flames and firing, he could hear the approach of other helicopters. He pressed the accelerator after assuring himself that Petrunin was still unconscious, turning the car into the narrow street at the corner of which Miandad had crouched with the RPG-7 and opened the way in for him. The staff car bounced on uneven cobbles. In the driving mirror, the small sliver of the square that he could see was filled with soldiers and light. The attack had been beaten off.
He unbuttoned his tunic and reached into its inside pocket for the map of Kabul they had given him. He stopped the car in the narrow, silent street that was little more than an alley, and switched on the courtesy light over his head. He studied the river, the warren of narrow streets, the broad Soviet-Western thoroughfares, the suburbs, the road to Jalalabad.
A helicopter beat low over the buildings that lined the street, startling him. His finger twitched on the map where it had been tapping the location of the bazaar, his point of rendezvous with the Pathans and Miandad.
The narrow street was grey now, not black. Hanging lines of washing emerged from the featureless profiles of blocks of flats. Many windows were lit. A helicopter made another pass over the street in the direction of the square. He laid the map on the passenger seat, checked Petrunin's unconsciousness once again, and accelerated. The visualised map of the city's network of avenues, streets and alleys unrolled in his head. He reached for the red light, to attach it to the roof, and looked for the switch for the staff car's siren. It would be easy. He would move in the direction of army headquarters, only turning into the warren of the bazaar district at the last moment, doubling back through the chilly, vile, winding alleys and packed-earth streets to the rug maker's shop.
He reached out of the window and clamped the red light to the roof. New York, he thought. Playing cops. Behind him, Petrunin murmured and Hyde turned, startled into a sense of danger once more. The hand that still held the red light twitched, then let go of the seeming-toy that had reminded him of celluloid policemen and blank cartridges. He stopped the car at the end of the alley and turned in his seat to look at the Russian, as if for the first time.
The man was still unconscious. In the faint grey light of the first of the dawn, his features appeared sickly, unfed. There were deep lines in his cheeks and brow and beside his lips. He looked much older; he looked vulnerable and alone and someone who had become superannuated and unable to frighten Hyde any longer. Yet this was only a sleeper's mask. Hyde had been shocked by the changes he had seen in Petrunin's face the moment he had slammed shut the door of his office. Older, cunning, the eyes haunted, even totally empty until they filled with a transitory fear and then with a violent urge towards self-preservation. He had come face to face with a savage, degenerate man, someone who had taken lives indiscriminately and often — and had learned to enjoy that power; desiring and needing it. He had been certain of that from the moment the red helicopter had hovered, watching the incineration of fifty tribesmen in the narrow, snow-covered valley. Petrunin's altered, corrupted face had confirmed Hyde's certainty.
Hyde shook his head. He rubbed his throat where the uniform collar had chafed his skin after the loose robes of his Pathan disguise. Disguise — the clothes had smelt, but it wasn't that, either. He hated, had come to hate, the way they implied a common identity between himself and someone like Mohammed Jan. He dismissed the Pathan's image and returned his consideration to the unconscious Petrunin. He had become a wild, dangerous animal, instead of a senior KGB officer bound by the unwritten rules governing the conflicts between intelligence services. Like the Pathans he pursued and destroyed, he was without emotion and mercy.
Hyde realised that he could never trust the Pathans with regard to Petrunin. It would mean his having to travel in the rug maker's delivery truck towads Jalalabad when it left Kabul within the next half-hour, hidden in the back with the Russian. Without him, Petrunin would be a corpse by the time the raiding party took to the mountains.
Petrunin moaned again, entertaining nightmares. Hyde turned his back. The self-loathing that he could not avoid sensing in that low moan chilled and disturbed him. He felt the reality of the alien country and people around him once more. Petrunin was a prisoner of the war he fought. He had become, in essence, a light-skinned Pathan. How would he, he wondered, ever get this Petrunin to talk? What — tortures…?
Mutilation followed by an offer of the release of a quick death — would he have to use those threats, those bribes? He dismissed the Pathan thought.
Savagely, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and slewed the staff car out of the alley and onto a broad thoroughfare that might have belonged in any city of eastern Europe that the Soviets had rebuilt after the war; even in Moscow it would have been familiar. The wide road ran alongside the river, a sullen grey scarf in the first light. In the distance, the Hindu Kush was tipped with bright gold. Hyde accelerated. The mountains seemed impossibly high and endless, and alien like the streets of Kabul.
* * *
Aubrey left the main passenger lounge of the ferry because the carelessly disposed bodies of those sleeping suggested defeat to him and the high, raised voices of parties of schoolchildren seemed to taunt. The lights, too, were hard and unsympathetic. On deck, the wind was sharp and buffeting and chilly. Nevertheless, he made his way towards the stern. Long before he reached it, he felt himself to be an old, skulking figure, displaced and exiled. And, as if they had gathered to witness his departure from England, he could see the lights of Brighton along the
coast, slipping behind the Dieppe ferry.
He had avoided Dover almost superstitiously, suspecting that any search for him would be concentrated there. He had not rung Mrs Grey — he could net bear to discover that the hunt was up. His journey from Victoria had been uneventful, the pursuit confined to the tumbled and broken terrain of his thoughts. His fears had chased him across the landscape of his imagination.
He gripped the stern rail, which immediately struck cold through his gloves. Brighton, a town he had never much liked, now appeared infinitely desirable; the last rescue craft moored to his country, ablaze with light. The wind filled his eyes with water. He refused to acknowledge the tears for what they were. Instead, he tried to concentrate upon the ease of his escape. One bored policeman at Victoria had seemed more interested in the antics of two drunks than in looking for someone like him. The passport that he had always renewed in a fictitious name had served him well. SIS knew nothing of this falsehood. It was a private matter. Almost everyone in the intelligence service possessed at least one other and unofficial identity. It was, to Aubrey, the twitch of distrust at the very centre of the animal that was always alert for the possibilities of deception. There was a subconscious comfort in possessing a secret and unused new identity. The secret world was habit-forming, perhaps incurable.
But him—? Him—
He was skulking away from England. The wind now seemed like an obscuring curtain drawn between himself and the lights of Brighton. The wake of the ferry straggled away into the darkness like a lost hope. Him—
He thought of them, then. The others. The secret others. The notorious ones, most of whom he had known or met or questioned at some time. William Joyce, sitting detached and even amused in the dock of the Old Bailey after the war. Lord Haw-Haw, voiceless. Then Fuchs, then Burgess and Maclean and Philby and Blake and Blunt, and others behind them. It was as if he had become a dream through which they paraded, much as the Duke of Clarence had seen the ghosts of those he had helped his brother to murder on the night they came to drown him in the butt of wine. He saw his own ghosts, who seemed to wish to number him among them. Traitors.