Then the Finnish car, a long Mercedes saloon, swung across the road behind him, skidding to a halt. He heard the doors open. He tried to stop and turn, but slipped and fell onto the snow-bound road. His buttocks and hands ached. The Vietnamese girl was incinerated in an instant beside the car he had abandoned. Two men were kneeling behind the open doors of the Mercedes, yet not expecting trouble. The two border guards had stopped firing, stopped running.
Another man was still moving, charging towards the abandoned car, arms flailing as if he were combating the freezing night and the falling snow. Headlights from the Mercedes glared towards the lights of the abandoned car. The brightness hid Anna; hid Priabin the moment he stopped and ducked his whole body almost frenziedly into the car's interior. Gant closed his eyes. The image of the Vietnamese girl had vanished, but he could clearly discern the blue hole in Anna's forehead. He shook his head, but her surprised, hardly shocked face would not leave him. He breathed in deeply and opened his eyes. A man was extending his hand, offering to help him to his feet.
'Major Gant?' he said.
Immediately, as if the action would help to establish his identity, or remove Anna's image from his retinae, Gant tugged the hairpiece from his own closely-cropped hair.
'Yes,' he said.
'Quickly,' the Finn instructed, clutching Gant's elbow, forcing him to his feet. Gant's legs were foal-like, awkward. 'We must get you away from here — I do not think there will be trouble, but — '
'Yes,' Gant repeated dully, brushing down his overcoat and trousers. The other two Finns had also stood up. One of them, the driver, had climbed into the Mercedes. The engine was still running. The incident was over. The two guards had retreated to the customs hut, where their officer stood on the wooden steps, watching through night-glasses. 'Yes.'
He was ushered to the rear door of the Mercedes. He paused and stared into the other car's headlights. It was as if he had been trapped in a searchlight's eager beam. Beyond the lights, he saw Priabin. He was out of the car, his arms wrapped around Anna's body. Gant could see the splash of fair hair against Priabin's dark clothing. Priabin's face was white, aghast, lost.
Quickly, Gant got into the car, which reversed across the road, turned, and headed back towards the red and white pole on the Finnish side. Gant turned his head, wincing as he realised he was imitating Anna's last living movement, and watched the figure of Priabin diminish, the splash of blonde hair against his chest no more than a trick of the light. Priabin did not move, seemed incapable of volition. He simply stared in his lost way after the receding Mercedes.
Then the Finnish border post was behind them, the glow from the overhead lights retreating behind the falling snow. Gant shivered, realising that the car was warm, realising that it was over.
He did not dare to close his eyes. Open, and Anna remained only a tumbled trick of the light against Priabin's chest; closed, and the white face with its blue hole would return. He stared at the back of the Finn in the front passenger seat like a nauseous drunk attempting to defeat the spinning of his head.
Waterford watched the sky. The cloud had thinned, the snow had almost stopped; desultory and innocent, as on a greetings card. The window in the weather had arrived. Out on the lake, a huge cross formed from orange marker tape indicated the dropping point. A single smoke flare betrayed the wind direction. It climbed like a plume from the ice, then bent as it reached the wind, straggled and dissipated. There was no sky above, no colour except grey, but the cloudbase was high enough to allow the Hercules's first run to be at a sufficient altitude for the parachutists to jump safely. The lake was strangely silent against the slow, creeping grey dawn that revealed its far shore, the sombre snow-bound country and the pencilled margin of trees.
Then he heard the baritone murmur of the aircraft's four engines. Other heads turned with his, towards the south. He glanced to check the smoke plume, which rose strongly before the wind distressed it like long yellow hair. He turned his face back to the clouds and saw it, at little more than fifteen hundred feet, seeming to drift up from the indistinct horizon, enlarge, then hang above them. The expectant silence around him was all but palpable. The Hercules was a plump, full shape overhead.
Then the parachuting Royal Marines appeared, dots detaching themselves like laid eggs from each side of the bulky fuselage. Parachutes opened, and the black eggs slowed and swayed. Waterford counted them, urging them to be more, wanting to go on counting. Twenty, twenty-one, two, three, four, five, six…
And then he reminded himself that not all of them were soldiers. There were also engineers and technicians from the RNAF Tactical Supply Squadron at Bardufoss. They and the pallets of supplies required had limited the number of marines that could be carried. The Hercules would return to Bardufoss at high speed to attempt to take on a second detachment of marines, but Waterford doubted they would be able to drop. The window in the weather would have closed once more before the Hercules could return.
Thirty-two, three… already, the first jumpers were drifting against the grey horizon like unseasonal dandelion clocks. The Hercules vanished beyond the limit of visibility at the far end of the lake. The drone of its four engines had become a mild hiss; the noise of a distant saw. The first marine landed on his feet, ran after his billowing, closing 'chute, wrapping it into a bundle as he moved. Then the second landed, rolled, came up grabbing the 'chute to himself. Three, four, five…
Perhaps two dozen marines, Waterford thought, assessing the degree of comfort he felt at the figure. Not much. The Hercules would have been tracked on Russian radar. Its run would be too pattern-like, too intended to be mistaken. They would know men and supplies had been dropped into Lapland, and they would know where. The weather window had to be slammed shut against them before they could act on the knowledge, even if its shutting did lock out a second detachment of marines.
Already, every parachutist had landed and was moving quickly off the ice. The air force experts trudged in a hunched, somehow child-like manner, the marines moved more quickly, already identifiable as a group. Everyone was wearing Arctic camouflage or long grey-white parkas. They looked like members of an expedition.
Waterford returned the salute of the captain in command of the marines, then turned away from him. The last stragglers, 'chutes bundled untidily beneath their arms, had moved off the ice. Among marines and technicians and experts alike there was a muted, intense murmuring as they climbed the slope of the shore and confronted the Firefox, now at the rear of the clearing beneath the camouflage netting. The noise of the Hercules's return moved towards them from the northern horizon.
Then the aircraft appeared, a flattened, murky, half-real shape at the far end of the lake. The smoke flare had already bent further, like the unstable stem of a heavy-flowered plant. The wind was picking up. There would be no second drop of marines. The clouds, too, already seemed lower and heavier, and the snowflakes blew sideways into Waterford's face, as if the storm were sidling up to him in some surprise ambush. He shook his head. The Hercules moved slowly and steadily up the lake. Then the pallets emerged in turn from the cargo ramp in the rear of the aircraft. Waterford realised that Moresby was standing beside him. It was as if he had taken no interest in the men who had parachuted, only in the lifeless supplies and equipment now to be unloaded.
The tractor tug was bright yellow. Its pallet thudded distantly into the ice, skidded and ran to a halt. A second pallet with tarpaulined equipment emerged, then a third. Then the fourth, bearing great rolls of MO-MAT, a second pallet of rolled portable runway followed it. The Hercules was almost level with them now. The smoke from the flare streamed out horizontally, a few feet above the ground. The trees on the far shore were shrouded in what might have been a freezing fog. Then shapes like great, tyred undercarriage wheels appeared one after the other from the gaping cargo ramp. Waterford thought he glimpsed the figures bundling them out, even the supervising Air Loadmaster at the mouth of the hard-lit tunnel that was the interior of the Hercules. Then the aircraft was gone, lost beyond the trees around the lake, heading south. He saw a vague, dark shape lift into the clouds, which were lower and thicker than before. The Hercules vanished, leaving Waterford with a momentary sense of isolation.