"There is — is a short-cut to Teardrop… short-cuts to everything… wouldn't have much time, perhaps, to cut and run… had to be sure I could get at the juiciest… Teardrop espec — ially… short-cut—!" He cried out, as if he saw an enemy approaching. Hyde flinched, almost turning to check his back. Petrunin began coughing. Hyde's neck and cheek were wet, slimy. "No, no—!"
"Short-cut—" Hyde prompted, shaking Petrunin's arms lightly.
Petrunin's right hand was tapping at Hyde's shoulderblade furiously, emphasising words that the Australian could not hear.
Then his hands scrabbled for a finger-hold on Hyde's sheepskin jacket as if clinging at the edge of an abyss. His voice bubbled.
"Short-cut… short… cut… shor… cu — 't…"
"Yes, yes!"
Petrunin's body slumped against Hyde, boneless and then rigid almost at once. As if he had been dead for hours, frozen stiff. Hyde pressed him back against the rock. His mouth was still daubed with blood, his chin darkly-painted. Smears on his cheeks and neck. His forehead was white and dead. His hands were still shaped into claws.
Powerless. His information was as dead as Petrunin. Every Soviet embassy, anywhere in the world. The only places to have access to the main computer system in Moscow Centre. It was hopeless. Pointless and hopeless. He was almost pleased that Petrunin was dead, that the effort had shortened his life, even if only by minutes.
Yet he felt a curious reluctance to release the body, as if his chilled hands had somehow become frozen to the material of Petrunin's greatcoat. The Russian stared lifelessly at him, and past him at the still falling snow and the stunted trees. Then Hyde removed his hands and the body slid a little sideways, to loll untidily like a forgotten toy against the rock. Hyde breathed deeply a number of times, then crawled out from beneath the overhang. The wind and snow against his face were fresh rather than icy. He felt himself waking from a light trance, disorientated and suddenly fearful of this strange place. He remained on his hands and knees, like a dog sniffing the air. He could not hear the soldiers, but there was a distant noise of helicopter rotors, an indistinct buzzing like that of a television left on after the last programme had finished.
Instinct rescued him before noises alerted him. Instinct, or memory. He remembered what had been called out by the last of the three soldiers who had passed their hiding place. Something about distance, about the limit of their patrol, about the time and about reporting in…
He shook his head but could not recall the words. His subconscious mind, however, had remarked a sense of limit, or return …
They would be returning—
Hyde scrambled to his feet. Dying images of sympathy for Petrunin faded in his mind. The man who wanted to bomb and burn his way back to favour in Moscow, the man who had had to face the wild animal in himself, the shadow of the urbane, intelligent, over-proud man. He began to move on sluggish, almost-giving-way, cramped limbs. He blundered like a drunk, staggered, then began to achieve locomotion. The details of Petrunin's description of Teardrop became unimportant the moment he heard the first voice — a backward glance and call for someone to hurry which almost at once became a yell of surprise and command and delight. He heard the scratch of a transmitter being switched on, then a gabble of Russian as his position was relayed. He ran through the deep snow at the edge of the clearing, labouring almost at once as the slope steepened above the overhang. Sounds came to him, the cry of discovery, the yell of orders to pursue, the more distant and inhuman noise of a reply from the R/T the first soldier was using. He was bent almost double, knees coming up beneath his chin, hands jabbing down into the soft snow at every step to stabilise his leaden charge up the slope. Dwarf trees crowded around him, as if he were scuttling through a toy forest. Snow flew as he brushed whippy branches; his face stung from their recoil. He was aware of the gun in his belt. More noises from behind, the half-shouts, the straining of voices struggling with bodily effort. They were climbing after him.
He was perhaps four or five miles from the border. He paused, his breath smoking around him, mouth open like that of an exhausted dog, and looked up. The mountain seemed to go on forever, white with the grey creases of bare ledges and steep cliff-faces. He could not make out the peak or the fold near the peak where they had crossed from the valley to come down to the fort. The snow seemed invested with something of the approaching dawn's greyness. The noise of rotors seemed louder.
The first bullet ripped through close-packed, low branches near his head. He scrabbled away on all fours, then leaned again into his blundering run. The snow was deep and loose and he floundered on, his feet and legs numb, his chest heaving, pressed by a tightening steel band. Two more shots, both wide. Fear made him aware of every inch of flesh on his back and buttocks, even though he did not know whether they wanted him alive.
He turned to his right, running like a fairground target along a humped ridge which climbed towards a shoulder of the mountain. Underneath the snow, Mohammed Jan had assured him, were tracks, Pathan routes. Hyde knew he was following the route they had taken when they had crossed into Afghanistan, but there was no track. He could not believe in a track, did not consciously choose his path. Some detailed, trained memory guided him, prompted his changes of course, his upward movement. More shots, again wide. He heard the bullets whine in the air, skip off the bare cliff-face twenty yards from him. He raised his body slightly, arms akimbo for balance. It was as if he were running across a tightrope of snow. On either side of the ridge, the mountain fell away — forty feet or more to his left, thousands of feet to his right. He wobbled forward, terrified of slowing, of losing his balance.
He was climbing again, the ridge broadening like a flying-buttress at its point of closure with the cathedral. He spurred his numb, leaden legs to more effort. One, two, three, four, climbing more steeply now, he remembered this section, the ridge and beyond it the narrow path across the cliff-face, then a winding, slow climb up to the fold in the mountain which concealed the entrance to the long, narrow valley where Petrunin had burned the Pathans to death.
Ten, eleven, twelve…
His left leg blundered deeply into the snow, up to his groin. His right leg bent, balanced him, and he thrust with it, toppling himself to his left, over the edge of the ridge, the snow pouring like a waterfall with him as he fell, his head spinning — stars, snow, greyness, snow, snow in his eyes and nostrils, in every opening and crack in his clothing. He tried to reach for the gun, then like a vessel out of control he struck against a rock submerged in snow and lay winded, consciousness coming and going, his body incapable of further effort.
He paused in the secret darkness on the narrow staircase, and wondered whether the ghost of the old maiden aunt had observed his arrival. Not even a maiden aunt, he reminded himself. At the top of the staircase was a flat that had belonged to a reclusive, aged spinster without living family. She had died entirely alone. Her death had been unmourned, even unrecorded. Her property had never been sold. The cat and the canaries, of course, had been disposed of. The flat provided an ideal meeting-place; a safe house. On the ground floor were the offices of a small and unsuccessful importer of plastic novelties from the Far East for inclusion in Christmas crackers. A KGB cover.
Already, he could smell the mustiness of the little used flat reaching down the stairs towards him. Mothballs, the long-ago urinations of successive cat companions, the smell of unchanged and uncleaned bird-cages, the smell of mothballs in old tweed skirts and out-of-date dresses and rubbed-bare, patchy fur coats. Yet he waited on the stairs. Upstairs, his contact would be waiting. It was not that he was reluctant to begin the meeting — far from it. Pausing for a moment between the noise of traffic from the street outside and the pervading old-maid scents from above, Babbington was confident. Of course, treachery was like an old, wounded elephant. Threatened, it had to blunder to its own defence, unable to move quickly or decisively. The cut-outs, the drops, the contacts, the letter-boxes, all the subtle means of contact, prevented speed and decisiveness. Security — the security designed to protect him — was a wound when speed was required. Yet it needed only locomotion; a few moments for the elephant to gather its strength in order to make its enemies instead of itself seem puny and wounded. There had been shock-delay, of course.