Bovary sat, stunned, staring fixedly at the clear greenish glass of his empty vodka tumbler. The Deputy Director refilled it for him.
‘Perhaps the first step would be to ask General Gogol to assess the situation.’
Bovary tossed the clear liquid back. ‘Well, he could certainly take a look, I suppose.’
‘And no one any the wiser, if he’s careful.’
Bovary shook his head in wonder. ‘Yes. He would have little trouble in arranging that, but I warn you …’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s not…’ Bovary paused, searching for a word that might impart his worry without divulging his knowledge. ‘Not answerable.’
‘You mean he’s out of control?’
‘No.’ Yes, thought Bovary, and the Deputy Director read it in his eyes.
‘A loose cannon, perhaps.’ The Deputy Director moderated the phrase carefully so that the military man could accept it.
‘Partly. Perhaps.’
‘But you can communicate with him? Ask him to take a look?’
‘I can order him to make a reconnaissance and a detailed tactical report, yes, of course.’
‘But how quickly? How soon?’
‘That depends on the clearance.’
The Deputy Director slid across the desk a document on the bottom of which were a series of signatures. Bovary recognised them at first glance, though he checked their authenticity closely. The last, least important of them, belonged to his commanding general.
He picked up the phone.
‘Who are you calling?’
‘First my commanding officer, then General Gogol.’
‘You’re calling Gogol? On the phone? From here? Now?’
‘If he’s in his tank or his helicopter I’ll get straight through- If he’s anywhere else they’ll page him. He’s on the Dark Continent, Dimitri, not in the Dark Ages.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
General Valerii Gogol stood on the rocky outcrop above the drought-withered River Mau and looked around with the slow, intense concentration which Ann Cable remembered from his behaviour in the witness box after Chernobyl. The intensity of that gaze, even at this distance, made it seem that the general could all too easily see through lies, persiflage, disguises and rocky hiding places. Ann slithered back into the crack which was concealing both herself and Robert Gardiner. But then, typically, the action, an almost unconscious movement towards self-preservation, immediately begot its opposite. ‘Brace up, Cable,’ she muttered to herself and began to move outwards again, scrabbling for her camera.
‘What are you doing?’ whispered Robert anxiously, still in the self-preservation mode.
‘Going for a picture.’
‘You’re mad! Look what they’ve just done to those others! Do you want flying lessons?’
‘Sod you, Gardiner. That’s a five-star Russian general up there. This is big news!’
‘But he’ll kill us, Ann. God knows what he’ll do! I mean, what if he’s mixed up with the slaughter we’ve just witnessed upcountry? What if—’
‘What if nothing! Of course he’s mixed up in it. Who else is in charge of those tanks? And how could that village have been destroyed without the involvement of the tank? And who else but the people who destroyed the village would also destroy the landing field? I mean I saw that bastard there when poor old Harry Parkinson was killed. The only question is whether General Gogol has gone out of control or whether this is official Kremlin policy! Can you imagine the trouble Yeltsin will be in if he’s sanctioned this?’
Ann’s manic wriggle to get into a good position for a photograph and the hissing conversation were brought to a halt as a spray of pebbles fell past their hiding place and they realised that someone was just above their heads, looking down.
They froze and for the next few moments it was as though the added weight of the man on the rock above them was enough to close the whole thing down on their heads with crushing power. As they lay, hardly daring to breathe, even had the weight of the rock allowed them to, Ann kept her eyes firmly on the general. And it became obvious to her that he was not the same man she had seen interviewed at the Chernobyl enquiry. The same person, yes, there was no doubting that, but the man himself, the physical man, had changed. Gogol seven years ago had been thin but strikingly fit-looking. Almost threateningly athletic, he had moved with a sinister grace and the slightest of bounces, exactly the type of movement she associated with a hunting cheetah. Then he had worn the battle dress of a full general as though it was a suit from the most exclusive of English tailors. Now he wore the ubiquitous battle fatigues which everyone with military pretensions — or dreams — could find anywhere in the world. But he did not fill them; they hung off him as though they had been bought for someone much larger, much fitter. Only the red scarf knotted round the turkey-skinned throat and the jauntily angled green beret gave a hint of the old style. Now there was something emaciated about him; a withered gauntness which was eerily apparent even from this distance, an aura of sickness almost as powerful as the febrile intensity of his gaze. The effect of such intelligence attached to such corporeal corruption was deeply disturbing. Nimrod Chala might be a sadistic power-crazed psychopath, but Gogol was a dead body looking for somewhere to lie down, a man with no life left and nothing left to lose. And he was one of the foremost tactical intelligences of his day. It seemed all too probable that the pair of them wanted to speak to her. Urgently. It was more than enough to restart her unconscious wriggling towards self-preservation.
The ledge was narrow and the cleft reaching back into the black rock tapered so sharply that it pinched their legs and especially their feet painfully as they tried to crush themselves more deeply into it. And their movement finally disturbed the creatures whose home the humans had temporarily usurped. The first sign of life that Ann felt was a rushing scuttle up her right thigh. It required all of her most gritty fortitude to remain silent and immobile as that first scratchy movement over her sensitised flesh abruptly warned her that there were insects running all over her legs. Quite big insects, by the feel of things. Robert lurched beside her and she looked into his face from a disturbingly intimate closeness, as though they were sharing a bed. His face seemed to be swelling as if his head was a balloon being inflated. Sweat beaded his glistening skin. He began to twitch as though gripped by the onset of an epileptic seizure.
Ann came near to panic then, not just because the invasive scuttle was forbidden complete intimacy with her body only by the tightness of her underwear, but also because she knew in her bones that Robert was about to scream. Wildly, guided by nothing even faintly like logic, she reached across, took his head between her hands and crushed her lips to his with all the power at her command. It was not really a kiss; it was a kind of oral gagging. It worked. She felt the trembling in him ease, and was in fact so shocked by her own action that she too began to put the visceral reaction to those intimately scurrying legs into some kind of perspective.
Whatever was running all over her with such frenetic activity was at least not biting or stinging. Visions of scorpions and soldier ants began to recede. Robert’s lips began to move against her own and she correctly assumed that she had rechannelled some of his thoughts too. She broke away and turned back to her observation of the rocky pulpit. The grim, gaunt spectre of General Gogol was gone. Indeed, as her heartbeat slowed and her terror diminished, so the pattern of sounds going on above began to make some kind of sense to her. She lay down on her back, exhausted, and concentrated on what she could hear.
Footsteps were receding, grating over a cinder road bed. Then came the coughing of an engine being fired up and the thud, thud, thud of helicopter rotors. As they lay side by side staring upwards past the sheer edge towards the hard blue sky, concentrating fiercely and trying to envision what they could hear, the rotors achieved power and die helicopter lifted invisibly, clattering away down the distant, rock-hidden sky.