Not even for the sake of avoiding the guilt to come would he break off from his silly army games somewhere in East Germany. It wasn't much, but the revelation was, for her, like a collision with an express train. She seemed to understand him, see his shallowness and indifference, and despised him for his fadings.
Her view of him now was more fixed than a photograph; an oil painting, framed and hung. She would never see him in any other pose. What she avoided, what Zhikin would never have understood, was her inability to forgive or make allowances. She had sentenced him, finding him guilty, and there was no appeal.
So, after the weeks of quarrels and silences and shadowy, separate living, she'd left Alma-Ata and gotten herself posted to Baikonur. Got a flat, a few sticks of furniture from central stores, some prints to replace photographs, which he was fond of taking, developing, and framing — mostly of her — and began a new and partial existence on her own. It had taken a long time to accommodate the new knowledge she had of herself. To have made such demands, to have had such standards for him, to have such ideals. He'd shattered her image of him. She had thought herself quite, quite evil for a long time, in a little-girl, final way. She could not live with him, could not bear to have him touch her.
But all that had faded.
Cold satisfactions, those to be gained from being successful in her work, being adept at it, had sustained her. Those, and the belittlement of Yuri — the minute catalogue of his faults and weaknesses — had pardoned her self-knowledge. Her work was her independence; it made her eager, active, clever, a more flattering mirror than her marriage had ever been. Now the satisfaction was intense, almost unmarred by memory or insight.
She believed she had discovered where Kedrov the spy was hiding.
She returned to her desk. The dog's tail thumped against her legs as he joined her from his corner of the room. She patted his head, stroked his neck, felt the wet muzzle and nose against her palm. Looked at the map she had been working from.
Her forefinger and index finger, still clamping the remainder of the English cigarette, stroked a slow, diminishing circle around a small area of the salt marshes. The dog wandered away from her other hand. Yuri would not let her have a dog, didn't want the trouble and the loose hairs in their bright, well-furnished apartment in Alma-Ata.
She shook her head and replaced her glasses, which glinted in the lamplight as she raised them from the desk. She bent forward, as if to check something. Yes, just there.
Katya knew the marshes. She'd hiked there often enough to have been able to make her clever guesses. With ease, she could recollect sites on the map in three dimensions. Trees, islets, swampier areas, ornithological blinds, hunting lodges — a few of them from before the Revolution, now used by senior officers who imitated the pleasures of an older aristocracy — old, ruined boats and huts, even villages long abandoned, game wardens' cabins.
Kedrov's books and maps lay on the floor. Now beneath the dog, who was looking up at her, eyes wide, tongue lolling pinkly. His eyes were moist with the illusion of devotion. Using the maps and notes, she had narrowed and narrowed her search, until—
— this place. She tapped it on the map. There was a rudimentary sketch in one of his notebooks, a chart warning himself of deep water in one place, of the existence of a blind in another. A blind that had once been a houseboat. Almost in ruins now.
So, she felt she had him. Other references, other places in his notes and on his maps were possible, but she had put the old boat at the top of her list. Tomorrow. Impatience surged even as she reaffirmed the need to wait until daylight, the need to report to Priabin.
She looked at the dog. If she were careful, very careful… She'd drawn a gun, she could use it. She had waders, a flashlight, a dog from some hunting breed that couldn't have forgotten everything its ancestors had once known, a car, a map.
She grinned, tense with excitement. Shivering with nerves.
Tonight, tonight, tonight…
She cleared her throat. "Come on, Misha!" she called out. The dog lumbered to its feet, wagging its broadsword of a tail in delight
The Hind-D's shadow glanced like a blow off the long, hanging beard of a frozen waterfall that pointed like a gesture to flat snow-fields, a clump of stone huts, tethered camels and ponies in the moonlight. A shuffling figure glanced upward out of the folds of a cloak and a long, old rifle swung ready for use. The figure was, in an instant, miniaturized in the mirrors. A white plain broken by a frozen river stretched before the helicopter and its shadow, which raced across the snow, the Mil moving above it like a dark insect.
Gant skimmed the ground at no more than thirty feet. His whereabouts were secret once more. He had picked up no information over the Tac channel to indicate anyone still remained interested in him. He was, for the moment, safe.
Garcia's helicopter was tight behind him, zigzagging, skimming, flicking and dancing through the terrain. Garcia had become infected by the exhilaration of danger; now he was alert, confident, flying on instinct and even passion. Yet he nagged at Gant's awareness; a liability, someone to have to be careful for, someone whose mistakes could be fatal.
On the moving-map display, the dot that represented his position was well to the north of the Panjshir Valley and the air base at Parwan. He was little more than fifty miles from the Soviet border. Ahead, directly north, lay the main highway from Faizabad to Mazar-i-Sharif, running east to west like the huge river valley of the Oxus, which lay beyond it and which marked the border itself. It was flatter land there, less easy to hide in, more populated; roads, railway lines, villages, irrigation canals, air bases and military camps. The golden road to Samarkand.
He glanced at his watch, at the map once more, then around him. Mountains were retreating in the mirrors, the land opening out ahead. Patches of brown rock jutted through the snow, naked outcrops — and a tented encampment was suddenly beneath and alongside them; still lumps that were camels, the flicker of a cooking fire. Dark tents bulging like the backs of huge creatures trying to bury themselves in the snow and sand. The river gleamed. The country had altered. He wanted to use the radar, now that it would begin to be effective, out of the mountains, but he dare not allow any electronic emission to be picked up and pinpointed. Not now, not this close. He was seven hundred and fifty miles from Baikonur. It was almost nine in the evening. He had to make it before daylight — get back out before daylight. He crushed all thought of the hours of the return flight, skulking through Afghanistan in broad daylight. He had perhaps nine hours in which to be on his way back — well on his way. Haste, haste, his thoughts cried, and his hand twitched on the stick, his eyes glanced at the throttle levers over his head.
Russian from the HF radio, startling in his headset.
Positional report, one MiG, he guessed. It was about twenty miles away from him. The AWACS Ilyushin would be there somewhere, too, and the helicopters. There had been no alarm raised, he reminded himself. No one is interested in you. They think they have you pigeonholed. No one is interested. He withdrew his hand from the main panel where his fingers had twitched near the switches that would activate the radar. No.