Yes, if they were coming — with their filthy, contaminated cargo — they would be near. That, at least, he could be certain of.
‘Would you choose this fucking place to take a fucking holiday?’
‘I would not, Molenkov. Nor would I talk. It takes breath to talk, and breath takes energy.’
‘You’re so pompous, always were and always will be. I talk about holidays. Where shall I go on holiday? Not here, so where?’
‘Shut up, Molenkov. Use your energy to pull.’
‘I have no energy left. I need to think of the beach, the sunshine, the beer, not mud. How far?’
He didn’t answer. Yashkin heard the drip of Molenkov’s voice and the moan of the wind in the trees. He heard his own gasps and Molenkov’s wheezing hisses. How far? He didn’t answer because he had no idea how far it was to the river, but he used the moon’s climb behind him — between the trees — as a guide. It had risen high enough to show where paths and tracks had been fashioned through the dense planting of the pines. But every pit in their way was an obstacle filled with water, and sometimes they saw them in advance and could skirt them and sometimes they couldn’t. The deepest pit took the water above their knees and doused the beast they dragged. Every rut, where the tracks were wider and long-ago forestry tractors had been, was filled with flooding pools and had cloying, clinging mud at the bottom. Yashkin did not know but he hoped the river was now within a kilometre of where they struggled, and he hoped, also, that his calculations on direction were exact. Each had hold of one of the side straps of the weapon, codenamed RA-114. Clear from a resting-place in the back of the Polonez, and without its tarpaulin shroud, it had the shape of a small oil drum and was encased in a canvas jacket. The straps were stout. The weight was in excess, Yashkin believed, of sixty kilos. Heavy enough when he had been fifteen years younger and had manoeuvred it from the porch at his home, down the side of his house and into the hole he had dug in his vegetable patch. Fifteen years of existing on the Sarov scrap heap had wasted his strength. The week of driving west had sapped what he had left, as had lack of sleep and food, the beating at Pinsk, the high-octane stress of the frontier crossing into Belarus … and for two hours or more they had slipped, slithered and dragged the thing through the forest. Little strength remained, and he thought Molenkov weaker. The weight and awkwardness of it seemed to grow with each metre covered.
‘Yashkin …’
He heard the bleat of his name. ‘Yes?’
‘If we ever take the holiday — you, me and Mother — and we’re somewhere that has a beach, sun and many cans of beer …’
‘What?’
‘Would they come after us?’
For a moment he gagged, then whispered, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Would they try to poison us? Would they pay for a contract hit with a pistol? Would they explode a bomb under the car? You don’t know, but what do you think? Tell me.’
‘I don’t know, and I don’t think. Will you take your share of the weight, my esteemed friend? Do I have to do everything?’ Yashkin swore. The pit in the track was deeper than the others. The mud at the bottom was stickier than it had been in others. Yashkin was in the pit, with the water almost at his crotch, and Molenkov had missed it, and was a half-metre above him, and the weight of the beast seemed to pitch towards him, and it was pushing him lower into the water. He realized what he had lost. Molenkov was pulling at him.
‘Oaf — you’re so clumsy. Get up, get out.’
‘I’ve lost … fuck …’
‘What have you lost?’
‘My shoe.’
‘What do you mean?’ Then a chuckle. ‘Lost it? Look at your foot, try there.’
He thrashed in the water. He came up the side of the pit. He was very close to hitting Molenkov with a clenched fist. He looked back. His left foot was already a frozen, unfeeling mass. He could see the water, silver in the moonlight, and the great ripples flowing on its surface. He didn’t know where he had been in the hole when the mud had caught his shoe, clamped on it and torn it from his foot when he had struggled to free himself. He could have wept. The pit he had gone into was, perhaps, two metres long, a metre wide and more than a metre deep. He swore again. To grope in the mud and search for his shoe would require him to immerse his whole body in the water, maybe even his fucking head.
Yashkin said, ‘I’ve lost my shoe in the mud and I doubt I can find it.’
He hopped at first and was reluctant to set his stockinged foot down on the ground. But the track was of soft compost, matted pine needles and old leaves, and had give in it. With each step he was prepared to test more weight on the forest floor. They dragged it between them. They went down into more ruts and more pits. They kept going.
Molenkov had started again to talk about holidays, another beach, endless sun, beer without limit, but Yashkin didn’t hear him. Above the wheezing and the gasps, the whine of the wind in the branches, was a far-away murmur that grew in intensity with each faltering step they took. He knew what he heard. There was no break in the murmur. He felt pride surge in him and the loss of the shoe seemed irrelevant. He made Molenkov move faster.
Yashkin said, ‘I can hear, at last, the voice of a great river. My friend, we’ve done it, survived it. Soon you will have, maybe in an hour, a half-share of one million American dollars in your pocket, and you can take a holiday anywhere you want. We’re very close to the river, to the Bug.’
Viktor saw them.
They had come through an open space — where a storm might have brought down a cluster of trees — and the moon’s light had caught them. Two were together and one was a few metres apart from them, nearer to the riverbank.
Viktor was end marker. Upstream from him was Mikhail, Goldmann, then Weissberg and the bastard who was a stranger among them.
They were fifty metres short of him, he estimated. He rated the one nearer the water as being the more competent, moving quieter and not coming into the silver filtered light. He reckoned the pair were short on the art of crossing rough ground. Thoughts came very fast to Viktor’s mind, and images to his memory. In the Stare Miasto they would have been on familiar territory; on the cobbled streets and the pavement slabs they would have been apart and expert in the environment. He could not recognize in that faint light what clothes they wore or their build, but he had no doubt of it: had the sun been high, had the forest been lit, he would have recognized them from the Old City of Warsaw. He would have seen the same men coming through the choke-points.
Viktor knew the art of surveillance and knew what gave professional esteem.
They had not seen him. Most of his body was sheltered by a birch clump. Beside it on the river’s side, there was a similar open space to the one the two men had just come through, and the same degree of moonlight shone into it. Viktor stepped out. He exposed himself, stood tall in the middle of the space, let the light come down and catch his forehead. Maybe it would glint in his eyes. He could recall what instructors had done when he was a recruit officer in State Security and the course was on the finer art of surveillance; it had been done to a friend, not to him, but that recall was sharp, as was the humiliation of his friend. They had frozen, the two men. He couldn’t see the third because his eyeline was directly ahead, locked on the two. Viktor had no doubt now that the surveillance had been on them from the time they had driven down the fast road to Heathrow. Vengeance would come later. It was not to be rushed — was like a good fuck or a good meal, best done at convenience and after consideration. They stared back. They were in their pool of light and he was in his.