The jetty, then. Priabin climbed the rotting steps carefully, easing his weight onto each one, then to the one above. He kept his hand away from the rail. Eventually, he crouched at the top of the steps, and Katya, moving with much less noise, joined him. Her breathing was rapid, excited.
A helicopter passed above them, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred feet. Still scouting. The moon was old and low in the sky; they were just two shadows amid shadows. But Kedrov must be getting panicky at the insistent overflights. Priabin wanted to hurry, scuttle on all fours like a dog along the jetty, bang open the cabin door, gun in hand, make certain of his quarry.
"Come on," he whispered. "Follow me."
The helicopter's noise diminished toward the south. Priabin, bending low, hurried forward, caution no longer expedient or even desired. It was not a stalking game now, but a kill — Kedrov was his now.
He scurried beside the limp snake of the borescope cable, still carrying the images of the houseboat's interior. He was thirty yards, twenty-five—
— stopped. Because of Rodin.
He was playing for ridiculously high stakes. Kedrov, his would-be rescuers… Rodin and Lightning. Katya reached him, leaned into his body for shelter, looked up at him urgently.
"What is it?"
"What?" It was all too risky, too dangerous. He had been blinded by the dazzle of complete success. He had wanted it all. "I" — he shook his head—"nothing. Come on," he urged. The wind was at his back, blowing him toward the rotting houseboat like a scrap of paper. If he were quick, sudden—
He had whole minutes yet and a great desire to see shock subside into fear and defeat on Kedrov's face before he returned to Rodin.
"Come on."
He was running without caution. Clattering along the jetty, his noises masked by the wind and the protests of the old boat. He jumped onto the deck, drawing the Makarov pistol from his holster. His open overcoat flew aside. He raised his right boot at the doors, two steps down from the deck, and kicked savagely at them, as if already cheated and circumvented by events. The doors flew open, crying and splintering. He stumbled down the steps. The wind caused Kedrov's shadow to flicker and enlarge, then shrink, as the oil lamp's flame wavered and smoked.
"Kedrov, you're done!" Priabin shouted, almost laughing, pleasure welling up in him.
Kedrov was stunned, then further startled to see Katya's small frame emerge from behind Priabin's coat, her.gun, too, trained on him. His mouth plopped open and shut, open and shut, like that of a goldfish. Priabin clasped Katya's shoulder, and said:
"You can arrest him, Katya — you found him."
She moved carefully toward the bunk. Kedrov's shadow, their own shadows, danced and mingled and loomed at one another all around the room. A beer can rolled to Priabin's feet. He kicked it with the kind of pleasure he might have felt kicking back a boy's football in a park. Katya motioned to Kedrov to extend his hands. She handcuffed him. The man's mouth continued to open and close He could find nothing to say. Katya stood back, her narrow face flushed with excitement, her gun steady.
Priabin moved to the table. Tapped the transistor radio with the barrel of his pistol.
"Works without its batteries, I see," he murmured knowingly. Further shock was impossible on the stretched, blanched mask of Kedrov's face. He spoke, however.
"How—?" Like an actor forgetting his lines, he dried after the single word.
"We know someone's coming," Priabin said, offering no explanation of his knowledge, not even referring to the borescope. "We'll all just sit and wait for him, shall we?" His voice was still musical with success. Katya, too, was smiling.
"When's he due to arrive? Soon, I should think, the way you keep looking at the door. Soon? Good — excellent."
Priabin looked at his watch. Three twenty-eight. He'd give it until four. Then the worries returned. Rodin — I should have told Mikhail to watch Rodin, stay with him.
Would he somehow be made to pay for this success? He felt himself almost superstitious, needing signs and portents. The ticket to Moscow on the morning flight was waiting at the Aeroflot desk. He'd simply checked the Aeroflot computer from the KGB offices; the airline, thank God, was still KGB rather than army, even out here. Mikhail had the tape of his conversation with Rodin. Yes, that was safe. The little incantations of his successes that night calmed his breathing, cooled his body. He looked at Kedrovs face, crumbling like waxy, old cheese; the portrait was almost complete. Kedrov's rescuers next, then Rodin… the thought of Rodin was like the hollow tooth to which the tongue inevitably returns. He winced. But if he had not left the boy, he would have just continued to refuse, even threatened Priabin with his father, denied everything. He had had to be left alone with his growing fears. Through them, Priabin might come to help.
His anxiety would not go away. To allay it, he snapped at Kedrov: "What do you know about Lightning, my friend?"
As if he had been practicing his response to just that question, Kedrov flung back at him: "Nothing. Nothing at all. What are you talking about?"
"You know something, Kedrov — you know," Priabin murmured. "It's in your eyes." Priabin felt calm once more, albeit temporarily, he suspected. The cabin seemed less shadowy and cramped. Katya and Kedrov and he formed a still, restful painting as they waited.
Until four o'clock.
Then Rodin would have to become his absolute priority.
His speed was no more than ninety miles per hour. The Hind wove its way along the channels and roads and railway tracks of a derelict silo complex. Canallike gouges in the flat land. The complex had been abandoned in the early seventies, when all passages and missile railways had been tunneled underground. Satellite photography had shown this place unchanged for more than fifteen years. Dust flew up behind the helicopter. Kedrov's transponder was less than five minutes away now.
He jerked the Hind aside violently, avoiding a fallen power cable that had suddenly draped itself in front of the cockpit as if hanging from the dark sky. The helicopter rolled, then he righted it.
He studied the map display. He was working to the largest scale now, and the details were more sketchy, adapted from countless satellite pictures. The thin, dark trail of a shallow stream, barely running on the surface at all, lay ahead of the white dot that represented the helicopter. He lifted out of a gully. In his mirrors, skeletal gantries and towers leaned or remained upright without purpose. Beyond them, the bathing place was lost to sight. On the map, fireflies moved now that he was in open sky. Russian crackled and flew in his headset.
His conflicting emotions had receded, lost in routines, in flying the helicopter. There was an abiding sense of moving closer to the center of a web, of deliberately putting his foot on a branch-covered pit. Otherwise, the fear had diminished, the sense of panic that had made him turn west and begin to run was under control. He was wound tight as a spring, but there was an unreality about the danger and an excitement that welled in him. He believed he could get to Kedrov, believed he could get him out — despite the odds against him. He had recovered his ego. There was a cold, machinelike exhilaration about his attempt that swept even self-preservation aside, for the moment. But the whole thing was narrowing like a blind alley. It was going to be close, very close.