Quiller Balalaika

You still think I was mad to go for the final chance? Then that's your bloody business.

I looked down at Marius. 'Ready to haul up?'

He got his head lifted and looked at me. 'What? Yes,' got one hand tightened on the rope and handed me the piton he'd pulled out.

In another fifteen minutes we'd climbed another two hundred feet at a rough estimate, the placements easy enough with good deep seams and no dirt or dead moss in them, no loose blocks, little ice and what there was of it sound, the wind remaining at constant force and the snow flurries more of a help as a screen from below than a hindrance here, our lungs getting used to the thin air and Marius holding up as best he could.

Then we met the overhang.

Marius was looking up from below me, wondering why I'd stopped.

The curve of rock jutted six, seven feet from the vertical, hiding the faint light from the sky, and ran east and west without a visible break.

'Oh my God,' Iheard Marius say.

I took a minute to rest, to think. 'We get these, sometimes,' I told him.

He was quiet now.

Six, seven feet of granite brooding above my head, cutting us off. I reached up and ran my hand over it, having to lean backwards over the drop.

The surface was bare, seamless.

I heard Marius again. 'So we go sideways?'

'No.'

'We've got to.'

'We can't.'

'For God's sake, why not?'

'Moving sideways across the face is always dangerous. In any case we don't know how far we'd have to go, how far the overhang goes. It could be fifty yards to the east and we might take the west, and find it reaches for five hundred.'

The wind buffeted the rock face now, tearing at his voice.

'But we can't go over it.'

I went on feeling for seams, fissures, even cracks. 'According to professional practice, yes, we can. Even if we tried going sideways it would slow us up, and time's critical. We've got to reach the top of the massif and get away overland before the search vehicles are in the area tomorrow – with the dogs.'

'It's snowing too hard for that.' He was close to me now, Marius, wanting comfort. His breath steamed in the rays of my little lamp.

'This wind could die in the night and by eleven in the morning there could be sunshine.'

Decision, make a decision, my fingertips sliding across the freezing rock, coming away numbed. But there weren't any choices.

'I'm going to go sideways,' Marius said, his throat tight.

'You're not going anywhere,' I told him. The adrenalin was on full stream now and I could think better.

'I can't do anything else,' his voice came.

'Marius, hook your fall-arrest line to your harness. Now.'

'Where?' I'd had him rehearse it fifty times, and he'd forgotten: you've heard of stress.

'To the front.' I didn't want him pitched forward against the rock if he came unstuck. 'I'm going down again,' he said, 'some of the way. Remember the ledge we crossed, where we rested?'

'Marius, I want you to get this. I'm taking you to Moscow. I'm not dropping you off this cliff for them to find your body in the morning and learn exactly where I am. All we've got to do is get to the top of this massif, one foot at a time. Get there, you understand? Keep that in your mind.'

'I knew you'd lost your reason, Berinov. I told you.'

I fished out another piton and drove it in for a foot rest and pulled myself up against the curve of the rock, unhooking my pick and reaching higher with it, scraping with its point, searching for anything I could find.

It took minutes before a narrow seam caught at the pick, but it was there, and I hauled up. 'Move with me, Marius. Keep close.' I got the hammer and drove a piton in, hard, weight-testing it. But the lead line was still taut. 'Marius!'

'I can't!' His tone was lost now, desperate. It was a case of extreme funk, and I understood that. To look up at an overhang at night has put fear into hardened pros unless they're perfectly prepared. We weren't.

But I'd got to take Antanov with me: He was a man with a life to live, and he was Natalya's passport to freedom. He was also the key to Balalaika.

'Marius, think about Moscow. Think about your sister. Think about destroying that bastard Sakkas. All that's going to be possible as soon as we reach the top of the massif. So think about getting there. Think about being there.'

Okay, Alex had nodded, his eyes bright on me in the shadows of the huts. Okay.

But Marius didn't answer. He was praying now, I knew that.

'Marius! Tighten your lead line and – '

Then he passed out and I felt a jerk on the line and knew that he was swinging over the seven hundred foot drop with the weight of a hanged man.

24: SAKKAS

The wind was whipping at gale force across the massif and we lay huddled together against the risk of hypothermia and frostbite.

I'd put a compress bandage around his head but he still hadn't moved or spoken, and I was hoping to God amnesia hadn't set in. At intervals I kept asking him his name and he stirred at last.

'Name?'

'Yes. Do you remember your name?'

'Of course. Marius.'

I went slack with relief. It was all locked in this man's head, Balalaika.

'We're moving on,' I said.

'Through this?'

'We've got to.'

The snow was blinding but the last of the moon's light was dying in the west and we steered by it towards the railroad station that I knew was six miles away. Before morning we climbed into a freight car as the train slowed for the gradient. Marius had asked me just once as we'd lurched through the snow, 'How did we get to the top of the massif?'

'I found a chimney in the rock face.'

'How did you get me past the overhang?'

I thought of the intensity of the cold in that dank chimney, slivers of ice lining its sides, digging into my back as I bridged my way up, tension in the muscles of the calves, tension in the shoulders, taking deep breaths before each move, tension because of the drift of air, and the crack of moon haze above that might be from a mouth too narrow for a man, too narrow even for a helpless ferret in the field. Then suddenly I was there, in the wind again, swinging out onto a shelf and seeing that the angle eased above me now; from here to the top would be a breeze, a scramble, if I could get Marius this far. I drove a piton in, then two more for an anchor, then lowered myself into the mouth of the chimney for the descent, my back sore now against the rock, to where Marius was hanging, still limp, like a fly in a web.