"Uh-huh."
He watched the two Russian MiLs diminishing below and to port. Heading west, back to Parwan. Even if not at once, or in half an hour, someone was eventually going to suspect — know. Long before he got to Baikonur and back out again, someone would have checked, and they'd be waiting. Looking and waiting. He ground his teeth audibly, then lunged the Mil toward the mountains that stretched away toward the river Oxus where the border lay.
The wind raced almost horizontally across the frozen marshes. Filip Kedrov teetered against its force as he crossed the long, dipping plank of wood from the rotting mooring to the hulk of the houseboat. Thankfully, shivering, he stepped onto the deck of the boat, rubbing his gloved hands together with the cold and genuine relief. He bent his head into the wind as it sliced down the flank of the houseboat, blowing sleet into and through the gaps in the decks planking and the panels of the main cabin.
He shut the door behind him and wedged it with a thick sliver of wood. Then leaned a decrepit old chair against it, too. The door rattled on its hinges with the force of the wind. He flicked on his torch, spraying its feeble light around him until he located the steps. He clattered down them, afraid each time one creaked, afraid of falling, of breaking his neck. The houseboat groaned and sighed and seemed to be made of rotting cardboard. The wind howled.
It was small and low and no one had used it for years. Kedrov could not imagine who might ever have done so. Perhaps some officer's sexual hideaway, perhaps it had belonged to someone before the army came — one of the entrepreneurs the old town used to boast? It did not matter. It suited him. Long, low, bargelike. Just holding together enough to keep most of the weather out. He saw in the pool of yellow light from his flashlight that the blankets on his bed were damp; sleet had been blown through cracks in the peeling woodwork and soaked them. His breath smoked in the light and dark of the room. He washed the flashlight over the main cabin. He was alone.
He unslung his haversack, laying his flashlight alongside it on a cheap wooden table in the center of the boat's one main cabin. The windows were wet, blank squares of darkness. Swiftly, he drew the thin curtains and pinned them together at each of the windows on either side of the cabin; it was a practiced, almost effortless task. His breathing sounded loudly, above the muted noise of the wind. At each window, his breath formed a targetlike circle of fogged glass. When he had finished, he returned to the table, then lit an oil lamp that sat in its center. It smoked and glowed and smelled in the narrow, confined cabin. He coughed.
He needed coffee, some of the canned food he had stored there a week ago, and a check on the transponder, which was his lifeline to the rescue. Don't think about it, he warned himself. Don't start all that again.
But he knew the thought would return. He had rushed upward, as if on a child's swing of hope, after his escape from the silo complex; he would swing down again, just as certainly.
He drew the transponder from the haversack. It looked like a transistor radio. Cheap, Russian-made, unreliable — thereby attracting even less attention than a Japanese portable would have done. Its cheap look depressed him; as if it foretold the malfunctioning of the thing, indicated that the Americans held him in no great esteem, had spent no money or effort on his rescue — stop it! Oh, stop it.
He was an explorer in a strange new country. All the nervousness, the exhilarating fear and tension of the past weeks of his spying paled into insignificance now, beside these — terrors that leaped out at him. This was territory he had not visited before, and its landscape enclosed him, wore him down.
Tonight was the earliest they could possibly come — but tonight was Tuesday. If they intended rescuing him, if they meant to come, it would be tonight. Had to be, otherwise they would be too late. He understood their schedule, by instinct rather than information. They expected to be able to use the photographs — those he had had to abandon in the paint cans in the garage — on television, in the newspapers, to expose what was intended at Baikonur; to prevent the launch. They had to get him to the West before Thursday; they knew that, so tonight was the earliest and the latest they could come…
… and would not come — oh, stop it, stop it please!
The cheap cabinet of the transponder made it impossible to envisage the complicated microcircuitry inside. If he used it, even then, he would not know whether it worked — a light was supposed to come on, but what would that mean? — and he would hear nothing. It was simply a homing device, sending out a carrier wave that only his rescuers could receive — science fiction! His own expertise, his own technical background availed him nothing. He simply stared at a toy he was certain would not work. It had been given to him just to keep him quiet, keep him working.
He tried to sigh, but the noise became a sob in his throat. His mouth was filled with saliva, which he found difficult to swallow. He was shaking. He distracted himself by looking at the lamp, trimming it, then at the walls and fixtures of the boat. He had repaired some of the worst gaps in the planking and paneling, he had hidden food here, the lamp, beer. He shuddered as he remembered the closeness of his brush with the GRU, hugging his hands beneath his armpits. Hour after hour in the freezing cold, all day and most of the evening, until he had worked his way on foot to this last safe house. He was intensely weary—
— which was why he was so uptight, so frightened. The explanation paled, overcome by the noise of the wind, the groans of old, rotting wood. Ice, the soupy slush around the hull, grumbled beneath his feet. Sleet puffed like thin cigarette smoke through gaps in the wooden walls of the cabin.
He slumped onto the bunk, all his anticipation and returning warmth seeming to evaporate. It was impossible to sustain the fiction of rescue here, with the occasional cries of a night bird and the disturbed honking and barking of wildfowl in the darkness outside. The Americans would not come.
Please let it be tonight, please let it be, he kept repeating. Please.
He was worn almost transparent with fear. His doubt had increased, gnawed its way to full growth. He had nothing left, no reserves with which to fight it.
Please let it be tonight, please.
He huddled into himself on the bunk, the transistor radio unnoticed in his lap. Knees drawn up, cradling it. Presently, he began to sob with self-pity.
It was eight-thirty in the evening. He cried, oblivious of the passage of time.
Katya Grechkova took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Looked at her watch. Eight-forty. She yawned, tiredness and satisfaction mingled in the stretching of her arms and back. She stood up, lit a cigarette, and walked to the other side of her small office— the office she had shared with Viktor Zhikin. Her head was aching, but its dull throbbing failed to blunt the edge of her pleasure.
She stood near the window, looking back at her desk, at the pool of white light from the desk lamp felling on papers, then stared at its shadows thrown on the Venetian blind. Then back to the desk, posing the scene as if for a forensic photograph; exactly capturing the source of her satisfaction. She puffed on the cigarette with a conscious hint of melodrama. Zhikin had always — not unkindly — teased and joked about her fastidious, intense manner of working, the degree of her absorption in any task at hand. As if she were hiding from life in her work, he had once said — her own life, perhaps? Then he had broken off at once, seeing the naked, pained look she could not keep from her face.
She puffed quickly at the cigarette. The room was smoky, the ashtray littered with stubs. She did not want to think about all that, not now. Work was no longer a solace or an escape — and Zhikin would never have understood that she was escaping from an insight into herself, not from her husband's character or their failed marriage. Captain Yuri Grechkov was someone she had suddenly seen through, and in that moment of discovery, contempt had entered and occupied the place of all other emotions. He had failed to attend his mother's funeral; simply not bothered to apply for leave from army maneuvers. Katya had gone, wearing a black armband on her uniform sleeve. And she hadn't even liked his mother. He'd known she was dying and hadn't returned from wherever he was, hadn't come even after she telephoned to say it wont be long, can you come at once?