The Bear's Tears kaaph-4

by Craig Thomas

  "Yes," Disch admitted finally in a small, weak voice. "Yes, I believe it."

  * * *

  The second helicopter flicked up and away, its belly luridly reddened by the flames from the first. A fuel tank exploded, and a ball of white flame soared into the air, almost touching the underside of the surviving MiL. The whole of the courtyard was illuminated. Dead Pathans, sporadic movement, Miandad's body, Mohammed Jan's green turban on the snow only yards away. Hyde turned over the body of Petrunin and tugged open the greatcoat and the jacket beneath. There was a spreading stain on the front of his uniform shirt. A thin dribble of blood from the corner of Petrunin's closed mouth. Hyde groaned as if he, too, had been wounded. The flames from the crashed helicopter died down and he almost missed the flickering of the Russian's eyelids. But he saw it, and heard the groan of pain. It was thick, as if coming through a liquid. More blood dribbled across Petrunin's cheek.

  Hyde hauled Petrunin into a sitting position, then laid the Russian's weight across his back and heaved himself upright. Petrunin was draped heavily and unmoving — perhaps fainted, perhaps now dead? — in a fireman's lift. Staggering, Hyde jogged at a leaden pace across the courtyard. The spotlight of the second MIL was returning, moving towards the now located source of the rocket that had destroyed its companion. The shooting had almost stopped. Then the four-barrel machine-gun in the nose of the gunship opened up, raking the other side of the courtyard.

  Hyde stopped, regained his bearings, shifted Petrunin's weight to greater comfort across his back, and then jogged through the shattered gates of the fort. Immediately, his feet blundered into thicker snow and his breathing became more laboured. His field of vision was restricted, but he saw no soldiers. He was climbing before he fully realised the fact, stamping one precarious and tired footstep ahead of the next, his face bent almost to the snow under his burden. He heard a groan, but sensed no movement through Petrunin's body. Fire lit the snow around him, dimly and fadingly. He thought he could hear orders shouted above the noise of his heart and breathing, but he could not be certain it was not his own voice urging him to greater effort. The light on the snow had vanished, and he realised he was in the trees above the fort. He leaned their combined weights against the rough bole of a fir, then let the Russian's body slide into a sitting position while he rested, hands on his knees, dragging in lungfuls of freezing air. When he turned his head, Petrunin seemed to be watching him sightlessly and Hyde could only wish it had been Miandad still alive and whom he had carried out of the fort. It might have been his hatred that caused the trembling in his limbs, or simply weakness. Blood stained Petrunin's chin. Hyde knelt by him, holding him upright, his hand at his back. It felt sticky, and he realised that the bullet had passed through the Russian's body. He realised, too, that the bullet had punctured one of Petrunin's lungs and that the man was going to die.

  He studied the terrain below him. Figures moved in the light of the hovering helicopters — there were two of them again now — checking bodies. There were three Pathans in turbans in the centre of the courtyard. He heard clearly on the cold air the shots that killed them. The helicopter which had crashed had almost burned out. He counted more than twenty Russian troops, disregarding however many the two MiLs carried. He returned his attention to Petrunin, who had turned his head slightly and was looking directly into Hyde's face. The Russian tried to smile, but only coughed blood. Hyde wiped the man's chin slowly and delicately with the sleeve of his loose blouse. The blood, he saw, stained his sleeve almost up to the elbow. Petrunin was dying.

  Petrunin nodded, as if he guessed at Hyde's thoughts.

  "They had orders to kill you," Hyde said. "You're right in the shit now, just like me." Again, Petrunin nodded. "They wouldn't take the slightest chance, would they? Not with your bloody Teardrop. As soon as someone laid hands on you, that's all that worried them — stop you from talking at all costs." Hyde was breathing heavily again, and leaning towards the Russian. Then he stood up. "Oh, fuck it," he growled. He looked back down at Petrunin. "Do you want to go on living — or stay here?"

  Petrunin held up one limp hand. Hyde knelt by him. Then he said, "Drop them in the shit, sport. Tell me about Teardrop." Petrunin shook his head, in the slightest but most definite of movements. Hyde glared at him, then shrugged. There was no time, now. Later, perhaps—

  He dragged Petrunin's arms across his back, hefted the body — Petrunin groaned once and immediately became deadweight — across his shoulders, and rose from his squat. He staggered under the weight and the sudden assault of his own weariness, then he began climbing again, one foot slowly and carefully and numbly placed in front of the other; one, two, three, four, five, six seven…

  Skirting trees, resting every twenty steps, then fifteen, then twelve, as he climbed into the darkness and silence of the forest. Often, he had to drop Petrunin's unconscious body into the snow and rest, waiting until the shaking weakness left his limbs and he could return his breathing to something like normal. Then, after checking the fluttering, fading pulse and the amount of blood soaking the uniform, he would heft him up again and continue his climb.

  Two hundred and forty-three… four, five, six… seven… eight — nine, ten… eleven… He dropped the body again. When he had recovered sufficiently to look around him, the fort was invisible, and the forest was lightless and quiet. Distantly, he heard the rotors of a helicopter, moving in what might have been another world or time. It hardly impinged upon his awareness, and occasioned no sense of danger in him. His body was capable only of feeling weakness, of resenting the weight that burdened it. Hyde was incapable of emotion.

  Seven hundred and sixty-two, three… one thousand-fifty, no, seventy, eighty-three… twelve hundred and eighty-three… four… four… five — six… Three thousand forty-one… One, two, three — six, seven…

  Hyde lurched and fell. The trees were smaller, more straggling, upside-down. Something soft was falling on his face and hands. He crawled, clawing with his hands, pushing with his feet. He touched snow, pulled at it as at a lifeline, felt rock beneath, clung to it as if on some vertical cliff-face.

  He drifted… attended… drifted — woke. His breathing was calmer, his body numb. Petrunin lay, staring upwards a few yards from him on the gentle slope. He had noticed nothing of the changing terrain. The thinner trees were stunted by altitude. Hyde turned on his back. Rock hung over him, a great shelf blacker than the sky. It frightened him before it slowly assumed the properties of safety and hiding. He listened. His fading heartbeat, his breathing, the soughing of the wind, the call of an animal. Then, silence. What was missing? What noise—?

  There was no noise of rotors. His hands beat the snow at his sides in applause. Of course—! No helicopters. No noise. He could not consider his luck, or his direction, or why his footsteps had not been discovered. He looked at his snow-covered body, and licked his wet face. He blinked. There were no stars. Cloud—?

  It was snowing. He hadn't realised until a gust of wind had blown the snow under the overhang and onto his face. He raised his head. Petrunin was slowly being whitened by the snow, as with a shroud.

  Shroud—

  Hyde got to his knees and crawled swiftly, scrabblingly across to Petrunin, shaking him by the lapels the moment he reached him. Cough, blood, eyelids flickering…

  "Come on, you bastard!" Hyde breathed fiercely. "Get out of the bloody snow, you tit!" He giggled to himself as he dragged Petrunin under the overhang. He propped him against the rock, and pulled his greatcoat tightly about him, in part to hide the bloodstained shirt. Petrunin's face was white, drawn. He was dying, was already close to death.

  Failure filled Hyde, as if his exhausted body was a bay that had simply waited for the tide of that emotion to engulf it. The one man who understood Teardrop, who had created it, was dying at his side; bleeding to death with absolute certainty. Hyde could do nothing.

  He clenched his hands into fists he could not feel, not even his nails digging into his palms. Cold or exhaust
ion, he could not tell. He could distinguish nothing except the sharp edges of the rock at his back and the curtain of snow falling, swaying in the gusts, moving aside, falling again. He could do nothing…

  Except listen—

  Petrunin was talking. His voice sounded calm, without delirium, but it was weak and interrupted by coughing. Hyde tore part of the tail of his blouse away and wiped at the man's chin after each bout of coughing. It was as if the words were mouthfuls of pureed baby food and the piece of cloth a means of removing any the baby did not swallow. Petrunin stared at the curtain of snow that must have hidden their tracks from the pursuit and was concealing them now, and spoke. It was evident he knew he was dying.

  "I hate this place," Petrunin was saying. Rather, his voice spoke; it was somehow separate from the man, almost the last surviving particle of him. The tone was tired, detached, almost affected. Hyde would have dismissed it, in other circumstances, as a lack of resource in a mediocre actor. "I hate this place." It was evident that he had repeated the phrase over and over again, until it caught his companion's attention. "I hate this place…"

  "Yes," Hyde said quietly.

  It seemed sufficient, for Petrunin's strange, calm, objective voice continued: "I hate to end like this… I know I'm dying, Hyde. I know…" He coughed a small, polite cough. Hyde wiped the little dribble of blood from the Russian's chin. "I am so — so angry…" It was the weary anger of a corpse. Yet Hyde knew the depth of Petrunin's feelings would have wracked a healthy body. He did not look at the Russian, merely nodded. He felt himself slipping into sleep, in and out of shallow, cold water. He shook his head and sat upright, pressing his back against the sharp creases in the rock. Petrunin's hand was waving feebly towards the swinging curtain of the snowfall. "Out there — a shithouse, Hyde. Like nothing you would know…" He had spoken in English as he gestured, but his voice was as expressionless as that of a translation machine. Alternately, he spoke English and Russian, at times dividing the same sentence or phrase between the two languages. "Like nothing I've known…"

  Hyde knew time was slipping away as surely as Petrunin was moving towards his final evasion. Yet he could not interrogate the man, not even point his monologue in a more fruitful direction. Petrunin might simply give up, die the moment he was interrupted. Hyde had no idea how long remained. He was angry, and yet he simply listened.

  "So many bodies — no rules…oh, yes, they knew what they were doing—" Hyde wiped the man's chin. The face was grey, the teeth outlined by a dark mascara of blood. Hyde looked away. Petrunin continued, thickly: "Kapustin and Nikitin and the smug, smiling, certain others — they knew what they were doing. The boy has got too smart, too big for his boots — let's drop him right in the shit…" There was a grey self-pity in the voice now, though its tone was still remote. "Let's send the smart-ass to Afghanistan. It might even save us a bullet!" Hyde wiped at the man's chin, but there was only a little blood. He began to worry now that the blood would stop, that the final internal haemorrhaging would begin, drowning Petrunin before his narrative was ended. He had changed from shock into the costume of self-pity. Hyde could only wonder when he would become more confidential, ready for another voice; needing company, needing comfort.

  "Two years — two years I survived it… God — do you know how much I learned about killing, about slaughter, about mutilation—! And the rebels taught me everything. I threw up the first time I saw a patrol of ours that had been attacked by rebels…" No coughing; nothing but a loud, choking swallow. "Napalm, burn them like rats, like dark things in corners, like lice… you can burn them all if you can find them…"

  "Jesus wept," Hyde breathed, but it might have been no more than impatience which prompted him. Snow flurried in a quicker wind and dusted them. Hyde tasted it, then smeared it across his face as if to wash, to freshen himself. His beard rasped. Its growth seemed more than a mere stubble; a change of identity. Petrunin, too, had suffered change. Yes, they had known what they were doing when they sent him into exile, to Kabul.

  "You could burn them all if you could find them, if you had enough napalm," Petrunin repeated. "Kapustin — I can see his cunning peasant's face now — sitting on Nikitin's left, telling me I had overreached myself…" His English was more regular now; its tone more clipped, educated, as if the man were reverting to some former, more urbane self as he died.

  "Come on," Hyde whispered. The snow-curtain swayed, flickered, swayed, fell.

  Overreached… even then, he must have been patting Teardrop on the head like a newly-adopted son… even then — peasant. His hissing voice was interrupted by coughing. Hyde almost covered his mouth with the bloodstained piece of shirt, suppressing the spillage. Hyde's lips moved silently, as if he were praying. Eventually, Petrunin's heaving chest subsided. When Hyde removed the cloth, the Russian's cheeks and chin were smeared with darker patches and stripes; an animal mask resembling the symbols that had decorated his blood-red helicopter as it hovered over the burning tribesmen. Hyde sat back, and almost at once his weariness made him close his eyes. He jolted back to wakefulness, his eyes staring at the falling snow. His boots and trousers were covered by a thin white blanket. He heard Petrunin's teeth chattering, and knew he could not let the man wander in the landscape of his self-pity any longer.

  In Russian, he said with studied deference: "They did badly by you, Comrade General — those Party hacks." The words were out almost before he could consider and weigh them; yet he knew they were right. He remembered Massinger's voice from the rear of the Mercedes, interrogating the Vienna Rezident. Something like that — a last delusion for the dying man, drugged by his wound. "You're right, sir — peasants, all of them."

  There was a long silence, then he heard Petrunin's remote, quiet voice. "You want to know, don't you?" he said. "Hyde? You're here to find out — aren't you?"

  "Yes," Hyde could not help admitting. Somehow, the proximity of Petrunin's death disarmed him.

  Petrunin laughed; coughed, so that Hyde plucked up the piece of cloth at once; continued to laugh. His amusement seemed as deep as his bitterness, as deep as his inhumanity.

  "Why not?" he said finally. "Why not?" Then, after a long pause: "Why not indeed?"

  Hyde glanced up at the overhang of the rock as if at the sky. His hands clenched at his sides with the relief of tension.

  "It had to be your idea," he said. "So bloody devious."

  "You didn't know — you found out, but you didn't guess?"

  "No."

  "Good. But yes, it was my idea. I created Teardrop. Kapustin merely stole it. After he failed to rescue me — let me drown in front of Nikitin in the juice of my failure — he simply came along and picked the whole thing up."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because the time was right, that's why. Aubrey was head of the service — the time was right. For everyone in Moscow Centre, the time was right. And sweet…" The tone of Petrunin's voice was thin and faint, like the distant sounds of a boy treble rising from a hidden choir. Unearthly. Yet there was a satisfaction that even his closeness to death could not diminish. His scheme had ended Aubrey's career in disgrace. Petrunin's revenge was complete. The high faint tone of the voice was like a long amen. Petrunin seemed at peace.

  "But — just for revenge? You created it just for Aubrey's disgrace?" Hyde's words resonated with disappointment.

  "Not Aubrey — sweet, though. Anyone. The Director-General of the time… there were other scenarios… but the best, the best belonged to Aubrey. Everything fitted… and 1946 was a bonus. Oh, I was an avid reader of Aubrey's biography. I know more about him than anyone on earth — even himself, perhaps. Sweet…"

  "Why? What was the real reason?" Hyde persisted. The curtain of snow seemed lighter now, almost transparent. Petrunin was silent for a long time. Hyde felt very cold, especially numbed in his left arm and shoulder. Then he realised that it was Petrunin's weight leaning against his side. The man's eyes were closed, his jaw was slack, and his lips hung open amid the stripes and stains of t
he smeared, dried blood. Hyde groaned aloud; almost a wail. He shook the body by the shoulders, but Petrunin's eyelids did not flicker.

  Then Hyde heard the distant noise of a helicopter.

  * * *

  Wolfgang Zimmermann felt a curious gratitude that Margaret Massinger seemed so willing to immerse herself in the sheafs of reports and surveillance digests he had given her. He was aware that the woman was somehow keeping herself in check, as if turning her past lightly page by page, an album of old photographs to which she gave hardly any of her attention; someone else's snapshots, another person's history. She seemed determined that the work should occupy her.

  Zimmermann felt that Margaret understood he did not believe Aubrey to be innocent of the death of her father. He had struggled to conceal the truth of his guesses and suspicions when she questioned him about Disch, but the woman was perceptive, keen-eyed for proof of Aubrey's guilt. He did not think he had masked his intuitions sufficiently to deceive her. He did not wish to believe Aubrey guilty, but Castleford's execution as a closet Nazi helping war criminals to escape did not contradict his knowledge of Aubrey's character. He surreptitiously glanced at his watch. They had been working for almost two hours since lunch, and Massinger still had not returned. Zimmermann almost dreaded his arrival.

  Margaret saw, from the corner of her eye, Zimmermann's tiny movements as he turned his wrist to check his watch. She did not look up. Paul — what had Paul learned? Was he afraid to come back? Did he know—? She ground her teeth, certain that the noise was audible, and pressed all thought of her father into the back of her mind. Most of the time — especially whenever she reminded herself of the danger that threatened Paul — she was able to believe that concern over the truth of her father's death had become less important to her. But, at moments when she was off-guard, as when Zimmermann consulted his watch, it leapt at her with unabated strength. Yet she had to suppress it, had to—