Kelso could hear O'Brian, breathing hard, stumbling after him, but he didn't stop to let him catch up until they were out of sight of the hut.
O'Brian said, 'You got the notebook?'
Kelso patted the front of his jacket. 'In here.'
'Oh, nice work,' said O'Brian. He performed a little victory shuffle in the snow. 'Jesus, this is a story, isn't it? This is a hell of a story.'
'A hell of a story,' repeated Kelso, but all he wanted was to get away. He resumed his walk, but more urgently now, his legs aching with the effort of pushing through the snow.
They came out on to the track and there was the Toyota, a hundred yards away, wrapped in a wet, white layer more than an inch deep, thicker towards the rear where the wind was blowing from, and as they came closer they could see that the surface was beginning to crystalise to ice. It was still tilting forwards, its back tyres almost clear of the snow, and it took them a while to locate all the damage. The Russian had fired three bullets into the car. One had blown off the lock on the back door. Another had opened up the driver's side. A third had gone through the hood into the engine, presumably to silence the alarm.
'That crazy sonofabitch,' said O'Brian, staring at the ugly holes. 'This is a forty-thousand-dollar vehicle -'
He squeezed behind the steering wheel, put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. Not even a click.
'No wonder he didn't mind if we came back to the car,' said Kelso, quietly. 'He knew we weren't going anywhere.'
O'Brian had started looking worried again. He struggled out of the front seat and sank deep into the drift. He waded round to the back, lifted the rear door and blew out a long sigh of relief, his breath condensing in the cold air.
'Well, it doesn't look as though he's damaged the Inmarsat, thank Christ. That's something.' He glanced around, frowning.
Kelso said, 'Now what?'
O'Brian muttered, 'Trees.'
'Trees?'
'Yeah. The satellite's not straight above our heads, remember? She's over the equator. This far north, that means you need to keep the dish at a real low angle to send a signal. Trees, if they're close up - they, ah, well, they kind of get in the way.' He turned to Kelso, and Kelso could have murdered us then: killed him just for the nervous, sheepish grin on his big handsome, stupid face. 'We're gonna need a space, Fluke. Sorry.'
A space?
Yeah. A space. They would have to return to the clearing.
O'BRIAN insisted they took the rest of the equipment back with them. That, after all, was what Kelso had told the Russian they were going to do, and they didn't want to make him suspicious, did they? Besides, no way was O'Brian going to leave over a hundred-grand's-worth of electronic gear sitting in a shot-up Toyota in the middle of nowhere. He wasn't going to let it out of his sight.
And so they struggled back along the track, O'Brian in the lead carrying the Inmarsat and the heavier of the big cases, with the Toyota's battery, wrapped in a black plastic sheet, jammed under his arm. Kelso had the camera case and the lap-top editing machine and he did his best to keep up, but it was heavy going. His arms ached. The snow sucked at him. Soon, O'Brian had turned into the forest and was out of sight, while Kelso had to keep stopping to transfer the damned bloody swine of an edit case from one hand to the other. He sweated and cursed. On his way back through the trees he stumbled over a hidden root and dropped to his knees.
By the time he reached the clearing, O'Brian already had the satellite dish connected to the battery and was trying to twist it into the right direction. The trajectory of the antenna pointed directly at the snowy tops of some big firs, about fifty yards away, and he was hunched over it, his jaw working with anxiety, holding the compass in one hand, pressing switches with the other. The snow had almost stopped and there was faint blueness to the freezing air. Behind him, framed against the shadows of the trees, was the grey wooden cabin utterly still, deserted apparently, apart from the thread of smoke rising from its narrow iron chimney.
Kelso let the cases drop and leaned forwards, his hands on his knees, trying to recover his breath.
'Anything?' he said. 'Nope.
Kelso groaned. A bloody circus -'If that thing doesn't work,' he said, 'we're here for the
duration, you realise that? We'll be stuck here till next April with nothing to do except listen to extracts from Stalin's Complete Works.'
It was such an appalling prospect, he actually found himself laughing, and for the second time that day, O'Brian joined in.
'Oh man,' he said, 'the things we do for glory.'
But he didn't laugh for long, and the machine stayed silent.
AND it was in this silence, about thirty seconds later, that Kelso thought he heard again the faint sound of rushing water.
He held up his hand.
'What?' said O'Brian.
'The river.' He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky, straining to hear. 'The river, I think-'
It was hard to separate it from the noise of the wind in the trees. But it was more sustained than wind, and deeper, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere on the other side of the cabin. Let's go for its' said O'Brian. He snatched the pair of crocodile clips off the battery terminals and began rapidly rolling up the cable. 'Makes sense, if you think of it. Must be how he gets about. A boat.'
Kelso hoisted the two cases and O'Brian called out, 'Watch yourself, Fluke.'
'What?'
'Traps. Remember? He's got this whole wood wired.'
Kelso stood, looking at the ground, uncertain, remembering the spurt of snow, the snap of the metal jaws. But it was hopeless to worry about that, he thought, just as there was no way they could avoid passing directly by the door of the cabin. He waited for O'Brian to finish packing up the Inmarsat, and then they started walking together, treading warily. And Kelso could sense the Russian everywhere now: at the window of his squalid hut, in the crawlspace underneath it, behind the stack of cordwood piled against the back wall, in the dank and mossy water barrel and in the darkness of the nearby trees. He could imagine the rifle trained on his back and he was acutely aware of the softness of his own skin, of its babyish vulnerability.
They reached the edge of the clearing and followed the perimeter of the forest. Dense undergrowth. Fallen, rotted logs. Strange white fungoid growths like melted faces. And occasionally, in the distance, crashes, as the wind shifted and brought down falls of frozen snow. It was impossible to see much further than a hand's reach. They couldn't find a path. There was nothing to do but plunge between the trees.
O'Brian went first and had the worst of it, lugging the two heavy cases and the big battery, having to twist his bulky body sideways to edge through the narrow gaps, sometimes left, sometimes right, ducking abruptly, no free hand to protect his face from the low branches. Kelso tried to follow in his footsteps and after half a dozen paces he was conscious of the forest swinging shut behind them like a solid door.
They stumbled on for a few minutes in the semi-darkness. Kelso wanted to stop and transfer the edit machine to his other hand but he didn't dare lose sight of O'Brian's back and soon he had forgotten about everything except the pain in his right shoulder and the acid in his lungs. Trickles of sweat and melted snow were running into his eyes, blurring his vision, and he was trying to bring his arm up to wipe his forehead on his wet sleeve when O'Brian gave a shout and lurched forwards, and suddenly - it was like passing through a wall -the trees parted and they were in the light again, standing on the ridge of a steep bank that fell away at their feet to a tumbling plain of yellowish-grey water a clear quarter-mile across.
IT was an awesome sight - God's work, truly - like finding a cathedral in the middle of a jungle - and for a while neither man spoke. Then O'Brian set down his cases and the battery and took out his compass. He showed it to Kelso. They were on the northern bank of the Dvina facing almost exactly due south.