Thinking mostly of Sutherland, who’d be as likely to break his neck in daylight as in the dark. But the risks involved in night travel would be more than the obvious ones of skiing into unseen hazards. The weaker force’s best hope lay in avoiding contact, which was a lot easier if you could see where you were going.
‘Will we take Isak?’
‘I don’t know what else we’d do with him, Sophie. Besides, if we can get him back into Norway he may open up, start divulging. There’s a charge of accessory to murder to hang over him, isn’t there?’
And treason, presumably. Also, if ‘they’ had murdered the niece by then, and Isak knew it, there’d be nothing to stop him talking. Meanwhile the only existing evidence was the yoik tape and Sophie’s interpretation of it; if Isak could be pressured into talking, delays might be short-circuited.
Although taking him along wasn’t likely to make the withdrawal any easier.
Ollie took the first watch, and let Stenberg sleep for longer than his ration of two hours. He had a lot to think about and if he’d turned in too soon he wouldn’t have slept anyway. Unlike Isak, snoring steadily at the back of the small bivvy… Getting out — getting the intelligence and these people out — was the problem he had to work on. Thinking around it time and time again, coming up against the same walls: there were too many imponderables, such as who the enemy were, where they’d be in the morning‘s first light and later, how many of them and what equipment they had… The only answer seemed to be that having decided which way to go you’d play it off the cuff.
After about three hours the thought of stretching his spine out horizontally began to have strong appeal. He jerked on the string that had its other end looped to Stenberg’s wrist inside his sleeping-bag, and finally got a response, a double tug of acknowledgement.
A minute later the other bivvy‘s tent-flap opened long enough for a gleam of candlelight to show, soft yellow glow with falling snowflakes slanting across it and the blackness of Stenberg’s bulk emerging, blocking it out, leaving the surroundings blacker than they’d been before. He heard the American blunder away into the trees, then the sounds of natural functions before he re-appeared.
‘Any wolves around, Ollie?’
‘None I’ve heard. But your toes don’t have to click, do they? They’ll have heard that lot in Kautokeino.’
‘Remind me to get fitted with a silencer… Snow eased a bit, has it?’
‘Not really. We don’t want it to, either, we want it heavy and continuous. Good sleep?’
‘While it lasted, sure… How about Isak?’
‘Like a dog. Hasn’t stirred or once stopped snoring.’
‘Incredible.’
It was, in the circumstances. And ‘like a dog’ was not inapposite, there was something close to the animal in that ability to flop down and pass out, with the situation as it was. Ollie envied him. Except if you were either on the go or dead to the world, when would you do your thinking?
Maybe a Lapp didn’t. Maybe he just followed instinct. Stenberg asked, ‘Take over the shotgun, shall I?’
‘By all means. I’ll leave it with you. But tell me about your CIA background, Gus. I’m not asking out of idle curiosity, more because we’re liable to face some crises in the next day or two. You can handle yourself, can you?’
‘Well, I have this Beretta and I can shoot straight.’ He’d paused… ‘Look, I’m a desk man, Ollie.’
‘Desk—’
‘That’s the plain truth of it. No point pretending otherwise, I’m sorry. Like I said, they gave me the brief because I speak the language, that’s the only reason… Jesus, we weren’t expecting to be up against the fucking KGB, were we?’
‘No, we weren’t. And anyway it’s no fault of yours. They did at least give you some kind of survival course, I was told.’
‘Two lectures and a piece of film.’
‘Oh…’
‘But Carl and I have both ski’d most of our lives when we’ve had the chance. Recreationally, of course.’ He added, ‘There again, we weren’t trekking to the Pole, were we? Little visits out of Kautokeino and Karasjok, day trips with a packed lunch from a hotel, was all Carl had in mind.’
On that basis it was surprising they’d wanted a ‘minder’ along. But then, they probably hadn’t. Someone in London, behind or above Jarvis, had decided that London’s eyes and ears should be out here with them.
He said, ‘I dare say we’ll make it without even seeing the bastards.’
And pigs can fly…
‘Have you thought about how we proceed from here on?’
He nodded into the darkness. Hearing distantly the voice of what might have been a wolf, over the lower note of wind in the trees… ‘We’ll move out before it’s light. Leaving the pulk; we’ll have to share some extra load between us, cache the rest here. I’ll scout ahead and we’ll keep in cover — trees — and move in stages, a few hundred metres at a time. Remember the place we stopped at yesterday — the trees in that dip, on the ridge? We’ll head for that same place. That far, we’ll have cover all the way, but at some point we’ve got to get over to the other side of the ridge, into the forest that side — to get to Angeli or one of those places — northeastward, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So we’ll have to cross open snowfields somewhere, and where the trees grow up on to the ridge is where exposure will be shortest. Maybe a couple of kilometres out in the open — with luck it’ll still be snowing. Otherwise if they had men on the high points with binoculars they’ll see us no matter where we try to cross.
‘Say some prayers for snow, then.’
‘But there’s no way to guess where they’ll be. Could be busy in the pass, looking for our bodies. Touch wood…’ He rapped the stock of the AYA. ‘Or they could be out looking for us, here in these woods. OK as long as we’ve cleared out ahead of them — especially if it’s snowing to fill our tracks.’
‘Night movement wouldn’t be better?’
‘No. It’d mean waiting for dark tomorrow afternoon — giving them time to find out we weren’t under their avalanche, so they’d have deployed accordingly, to cover the routes out of here… Incidentally, I don’t know if you’d thought of this, there was quite likely a rock-fall amongst the avalanche, we wouldn’t have stood a fucking chance if we’d been in it… Anyway — if we can get away fast, we’re ahead of the game, if we can’t we’d be handing them the advantage. Another thing is that night skiing isn’t so easy when you’ve no experience of it. You said you and Carl have done plenty of skiing, but I wouldn’t say he was all that good at it… But third, if those are Soviets we’re up against, they may have night vision gear with them, thermal viewers or IR nightscopes, in which case we’d be worse off than we’d be in daylight.’
*
The wind was down by morning, and although snow was still falling it wasn’t quite as heavy as it had been. Ground temperature minus five. Sutherland made breakfast, a big one to allow or a day in which there mightn’t be much chance of any pauses for snacks, while Ollie saw to the pulk stores, which items should be taken on their backs and what should be abandoned. The tents were too bulky, would have to be left here; nights in the open henceforth would be in bivvies or snow—holes. He took the tarpaulin, though, the pulk cover. Both shovels would be needed — but not the tape-recorder. With luck there might not be many more nights out, or even any, but one had to take along enough rations to allow for all contingencies — in other words, all the food there was… An irritant in his thinking — he’d woken with it — was recognition that his earlier thought of making a solo exit, leaving the rest of them in some secure hide, would have been the most pragmatic solution to current problems. Both for getting the intelligence to Grayling — the number one priority — and for the whole party’s survival hopes. He’d shied away from it for personal, subjective, psychological reasons, and he should have known better, should have remembered the SBS motto By Stealth, by Guile and acted on it, ignored the natural rel
uctance to seem to be running out on them. Sophie wouldn’t be any better off now, if they ran into Soviets on the way out, than she would have been if he’d left her tucked up in a snow-hole.
‘Better re-wax skis, folks. It’ll be wearing thin and I hope we’ll be covering a lot of ground today. Swix Blue looks about the best choice… Gus, will you take charge of Isak? If he gets tricky, shoot him. I mean it — better him than us dead… Carl, would you interpret what I said, so he knows it?’
As an encouragement to him to stay in line. But also Ollie wanted to encourage Sutherland, drag him out of his glum silence. Saddened by his own misjudgement of Isak. And having no part to play now the charade of book research was blown. Leaving him out of the night watch-keeping roster mightn’t have helped either.
Stores were repacked and skis waxed inside the bivvy by candlelight. They were taking quite a lot of extra weight, things from the pulk — such as the naptha stove and containers of fuel, the machete, all the reserves of rations, and so forth. Isak, who’d been travelling light and now had no pulk to tow, was allocated a lion’s share of it.
The final task was to collapse the larger bivvy. The small one had already been dismantled, and now the main shelter became a heap of snow-covered debris with the pulk buried under it. It was still dark; Ollie hoped to have the party up on the ridge by the time the light came, although he knew this might be optimistic. He arranged the shotgun so that its stock protruded from the open top end of his bergen, where he could grab for it quickly if he had to.
‘Ready, Sophie?’
He’d be leading and she’d be the link between him and the others. She was the best choice for it, being a better skier than any of them, including himself. She asked him as they started off together through the trees, ‘How good are our chances, Ollie?’
‘Well. Given reasonable luck, they’re very good.’
‘But we don’t know how many of them there may be. Also, this isn’t a small thing now, it’s huge, a threat to the whole world… I was awake in the night, Ollie, it was like a nightmare but a real one — I mean that they cannot possibly allow us to get away!‘
‘Not if they can help it — no, they can’t. But look — at first light, in say about one hour, either they’ll be looking for our bodies in the pass — which is what I’m betting on, and incidentally it’d take them quite a few hours — or they know they made a ballsup of it, in which case they’ll guess we came down this way. So they’ll come down here to look for us. But by that time we’ll be miles away — d’you see?’
‘Maybe they wouldn’t all be looking for bodies. They can’t be stupid.’
She was right. Probably…
He stopped. ‘This’ll be about right for you. You’ll have Gus in calling distance behind, me about the same distance ahead. I’ll stop at intervals and wait for you to catch up with me. And so on. But listen, Sophie — on the subject of what chances we have, etcetera. There’ll be one tricky stage, soon after it’s light, a couple of kilometres of open snowfield to cover. High ground, no trees on it. Can’t be helped, we have to get over in that direction and that’s the only way, unless we wasted hours by going right down into the valley and then climbing up again, and we haven’t any time to waste… But here’s my point. If we run into trouble, there or any other place, if you see we’re in real trouble and you have a chance to get away on your own — well, for Christ’s sake do it, just take off. I’d do the same if that was the situation. You and I are the only ones with any chance of making it on our own, and it’s vital that someone does — OK.
She nodded. ‘OK. But otherwise, Ollie — make it together? Please?’
He reached over, squeezed her arm. ‘That’s exactly what we will do. And please to you, too.’
Seven kilometres, he’d reckoned from the map, mainly northward but in a curve following the contour they were on now, and in tree cover all the way. Then he’d turn northeast up to the tree-line and get himself orientated, locate the dip in the long ridge where the firs spilled over across that saddle. He’d go up through that extension of the forest: from there on, you’d need some luck.
Progress wasn’t as good as he’d hoped it might be. It was slowed by the three in the rear, by Isak mostly, it seemed. Advancing in stages, five or six hundred metres at a time, each time re-establishing contact. One change for the better was that the snow was falling more heavily again after the first half-hour, and the wind had risen with it; it didn’t make for comfort, but it would improve their prospects when the time came to cross that open ground.
It took an hour and a half to cover the seven kilometres. By that time there was enough light overhead to pick out the silhouette of one of the peaks flanking the pass, and get a compass bearing on it. No cross-bearing, and he knew magnetic compasses tended to go mad in these parts, but it looked about right. He waited again for Sophie, and told her ‘Ninety-degree right turn here. Then best close up a bit.‘ She’d wait for the others, and warn them about the turn.
Heading east then, uphill.
The trees thinned. Twenty metres from where they finished in a ragged edge he could feel the wind through the headover on that side. At this height, of course, when you lost the woods’ shelter you’d get all the wind there was, and with a ground temperature of five below zero you noticed it. Wind about force three, roughly nine miles per hour, combining with that static temperature would work out as about minus fifteen, sixteen. Snow plastered down, driving from the left, blinding but also camouflaging, blending human figures into the background patchwork of whitened land and dark trees, through a veil of snow, dim but gradually increasing light. He stopped, waiting again, watching for any movement or object that might not be natural to its surroundings. Then hearing the scrunch of her skis.
‘Take a rest, and keep the others here with you. I’ll be back.’
He went on alone again.
The firs ran up to the skyline on his right. That was the bit he’d been aiming for, and he’d overshot it by a few hundred metres. In front of him where he was crouching in a clump of ragged, wind-stunted trees, a slope of unmarked snow led up to the ridge. It was overlooked — would be, if they’d posted a watcher there — from that belt of trees beyond… He slid back to the others. Unless they had a whole regiment of Spetsnazi in these mountains, he thought, they couldn’t have every open area under surveillance. Except that in full daylight a few O/Ps on selected high points might cover a lot of ground. But by the time it was fully light he’d have his lot in cover again, would certainly have got over this next bit.
‘This way, lady and gents. Couple of hundred metres, then right up on the ridge. Trees all the way for cover. OK, Carl?’
‘Sure, I’m fine, don’t worry about me…’ Breathing hard, trying not to let it show. Isak silent, stooped under his heavy load. Those two were the liabilities, the drag on this party’s chances… Ollie led them back, then slanted up so their track became a curve and they were climbing, in file and a few yards apart. It took about a quarter of an hour’s hard plodding before they were on the ridge where yesterday they’d stopped for refreshment.
In the pass, they’d be prodding with poles now, poking around for bodies as the light hardened. He wondered how long they’d persist, how long before they’d decide there weren’t any.
But maybe they knew already. Might have known at the time, cursing whoever had fired the charges too soon. In that case they’d be deploying now to cover the exit routes. It was more than just a possibility; he knew that if he’d been running their end of it that was what would have been happening — would already have happened, before dawn. You might leave one man to search for corpses if you had some reason to believe the trap might have worked, but you surely wouldn’t have left the rest to chance. You wouldn’t know anything about any yoik, but nor would you know Isak hadn’t shot his mouth off.
He’d climbed the slope on the other side of the saddle and was looking out over the wide expanse of open snow, down-sloping from south to north, whic
h they had now to cross in this milky dawn light. A vagueness of shadow beyond it might turn out to be the tree-line on the other side which he had hopes of reaching. Alternatively it might be simply distance, space, an extension of the gauntlet they were about to run. But one thing you could be sure of was you wouldn’t get there at all if you hung around here while the light increased and the enemy got their act together.
‘Now. If we’re all fit.’ He pointed. ‘Long traverse, over into woods on the far side. Traverse just steeply enough to make it a mildly downhill run, but we don’t want to end up lower down than we have to, at this stage.’
Up to the right was an emptiness of falling snow, behind them the darkness of the wood they’d come through, and downhill you were peering into snow that swirled straight at you on the wind. The shortest way to cover — safety, if that word applied — was the way he was now pointing them. Telling Sophie, ‘You stay downslope of us, on the left flank. I’ll be up on the right. I’ll ski down to help anyone who may need help, but the rest of you do not stop, not until you’re well into the wood.’ He glanced at Sutherland: ‘Take it easy now Carl, we aren’t racing.’
He side-stepped uphill, allowing the others to get going first, and then kept his traverse shallower to start with so as to stay well above them, on what he saw as the danger side, if there was such a thing. If there was — enemies higher up, who might come down to cut them off? — Sophie would be well placed to turn her planks straight down the hill, and go.
If she’d do it, as he’d told her. He thought she would. He thought he knew her well enough, despite the very short time he’d known her. He hadn’t dreamt of the world containing anyone quite like her.
Make it together? Please?
No shots, shouts, whistles. Yet… They could have been the only human beings in these mountains. Five lots of ski-tracks being laid parallel to each other across several hundred acres of soft-topped snow, scarring the unblemished surface like smoke-trails fouling a clear sky. With so much new snow falling the tracks wouldn’t last much longer than the wind would take to wipe such a sky clean again. But the soft, fresh surface was a retardant, clinging to the waxed skis. To have described it as being like skiing in treacle would have been an exaggeration, but with this sharp awareness of being exposed, vulnerable, that was how it felt. Even though he could see the forest ahead now, the darkness having resolved itself into a finite mass of trees — safety, beckoning… With about half the distance covered, he guessed, glancing back to compare one distance with the other. The higher slopes were still not visible, still hazed-out in falling snow, so no O/P up there would be of use to them at present. In fact it might not be as easy as he’d envisaged to site O/Ps to maximum advantage when you couldn’t be sure how visibility might vary from hour to hour. Whistling in the dark… Sutherland was doing all right — in his stiff, awkward posture, concentrating hard on not falling. Which in present circumstances was about the best contribution he could make. Isak was on Carl’s left, skiing with no style but with total ease, an ease bequeathed to him by ancestors who’d lived on skis through all the dark winters of the past three thousand years. Gus was below and slightly behind him, and below Gus was Sophie, relaxed and stylish despite the burden of a back-pack.
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