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 rescuers 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.
Miandad inhaled sharply. Hyde's shoulders hunched with tension, and his neck ached. The eyepieces of the night-glasses hurt him as he pressed them to his face. Men ran, closer now, almost…
A glowing spark seemed to drift down from the command helicopter, which immediately lifted to a greater height and banked fiercely away. The spark fell like a luminous insect, even a cigarette-end dropped from the helicopter.
The mist burst into flame. A tunnel of fire existed in an instant, a coffin of flame which contained every one of the moving men. Hyde could see them still moving, then standing, then twitching, then staggering, then falling. He could hear the roar of the ignited napalm or whatever it was. It was louder than the faint screams.
Then it began to die like the glow of a flashbulb; remaining on the retinae of the watchers still as a bright light, but dying into paleness, then shadow then darkness. Hyde had dropped the night-glasses. Heat beat against his face for a moment, then was gone and he felt chilled to the bone. A few ragged shots from the antique rifles in the rocks near him rang feebly out after the command helicopter. Hyde raised the glasses once more. He felt nauseous. Petrunin's helicopter was retreating backwards down the valley, its pilot and observation windscreens facing back towards the carnage, its air intakes above the windscreens like huge, flaring nostrils. It looked like something gloating over its success.
"I think there were more than fifty of them," Miandad murmured. "Including the wounded." Hyde turned to him, open-mouthed. "Including two of his sons." He nodded his head at the man beyond Hyde.
"I–I—" Hyde began, but he could say nothing more. His mouth remained open, as if expecting comment. What was it? What lurked at the back of his mind like a shadow? Some book, was it? Conrad — Kurtz? Heart of Darkness, that was it…
Petrunin had become — a savage. A murdering savage. 'The horror… the horror', Kurtz had said of his own decline into savagery; or the world's decline. Petrunin was Kurtz now. Once urbane, clever, far-seeing, professional; now a butcher, and one who gloated. The camp guard with the lampshades of Jewish skin…
Hyde retched, but nothing came.
There was a smell of burnt flesh, burnt people, reaching them from the floor of the valley, together with the faint aroma of chemicals. The black eggs he had seen must have burst open on impact, spreading the gas that he had been able to see as a mist. The spark dropped by Petrunin's helicopter had ignited the mist that by then clung to everything — especially to fleeing human skin and clothing. A twelve-foot high box of fire, a prison of flame.
Mohammed Jan was standing over himself and Miandad. He spoke to Miandad in Pushtu; perhaps two brief sentences. Hyde looked up into the chieftain's face, above the cradled Lee Enfield. The whites of his eyes gleamed, but Hyde could distinguish no expression on his face. Then he turned and was gone.
"Come," Miandad said. "He wishes to speak with us. Of the Russian."
Miandad got up and brushed off his trousers. Hyde rose weakly. Turning slowly, he could see Mohammed Jan descending to the floor of the valley, moving towards the charred remains of his two sons and fifty of his Pathan subjects. Hyde dragged the cold air into his lungs. There was a black, charred swathe through the valley; through the clean snow that blanketed the high pass. Hyde found himself shivering. He had always feared Petrunin. Now, he was terrified. He was in dark, turbulent water, entirely out of his depth.
Paul Massinger carefully stamped the snow from his shoes at the top of the steps leading to the low wooden cabin. After the cries of an unseen bird, more like a cough than a song, had faded, the taxi's idling engine behind him made the only sound. The forest of dark-boled, snow-laden pines seemed to crowd upon the cabin, threatening its temporary occupation of the small clearing. There, no more than twenty miles north of Helsinki, Massinger felt totally isolated, utterly without resources.
He tugged at the bellrope. The noise of the bell suspended near his head reminded him of his own schooldays; his turn to be the bell monitor. When the heavy sound died, he could hear no noise or movement inside the house. His breath smoked, the air was chilly against his face. The clearing was almost colourless; only black and white, trees and snow. He shivered.
He rang the bell again, then shrugged at the taxi driver, who seemed uninterested; or interested only in his meter. Phillipson had answered the telephone, had agreed to talk to him, albeit with some reluctance. They had agreed the time, but now -
Footsteps?
"Who is it?" a voice asked. Its evident anxiety, even through the wooden door, chilled Massinger more deeply than the temperature.
"Massinger — Paul Massinger… we talked on the telephone—"
"I've nothing to say to you, Mr Massinger."
Massinger heard his own surprised, quickened breathing in the silence that followed as if it were the noise of Phillipson's fear. The man was evidently afraid — had been frightened…
Massinger ignored the idea. "Mr Phillipson — it could be important," he said as levelly as he could, leaning confidentially towards the rough, unpainted surface of the door. A strong lock, he noticed. "It really could prove very important." He glanced behind him. No, the driver wouldn't hear, not with the engine running. "It has to do with the arrest of Kenneth Aubrey. I couldn't explain to you over the telephone line, but…" He breathed deeply. He could hear, above the engine of the taxi, the heavy, persistent silence of the small clearing and the forest around it. It intimidated. He continued in what seemed a small inadequate voice: "I'd like to explain it to you in detail — in private, Mr Phillipson." He felt like an unsuccessful salesman.