He checked the group around what he, too, could now see was an ACS 30mm grenade launcher on a tripod, with its round drum, like a heavy case of film, attached to the barrel. The laser rangefinder sat on top of the barrel. Waterford had no doubt that the elevation of the barrel would direct a grenade into the clearing where the Firefox sat.
The officer stood up, addressing a last remark. Someone laughed, a noise above the wind. The officer made to move away. Waterford gripped the ribbed plastic of the rifle's barrel, and fitted the stock against his shoulder. He squinted into the optical sight. He set the selector level for three-round bursts. There were fifty caseless, polygonal rounds in the magazine. He breathed in, held his breath. The officer moved slightly, straightening like an awakened sleeper, hands on hips. One of the others was looking up at him. It was the moment. Waterford squeezed the trigger of the G. 11.
The officer leapt across the barrel of the ACS, turning a half-somersault. Waterford felt the very slight kick of the slow recoil. The officer had taken all three rounds of the burst, fired within ninety microseconds. Waterford refocused on the man looking up from the ground, his head not yet swinging to follow the leap of his dead officer over the grenade launcher. He squeezed the trigger once more. The man's face disappeared from the optical sight. He heard Brooke's Armalite open up on automatic, turned, and began running.
The radio operator was half-upright, staring towards the man running at him. Four seconds. He was already bent once more over the radio, his fingers flicking at switches, turning knobs. Waterford skidded to a stop twenty yards from the Russian, flicked the selector switch to automatic, and raised the G. 11. The remaining forty-four rounds left the rifle in a brief, enraged burst of noise. The soldier and his radio disappeared in a cloud of snow, the man lifted from his feet and flung away, the radio disintegrating. -
In the ringing silence after the rifle emptied itself, Waterford cursed. Twenty yards more, and the man would have been alive. But, he was opening a channel, about to inform Moscow.
'Damn!'
Now, they needed one of the Russians alive.
Brooke's rifle had stopped firing. Already, Dawson would be moving the rest of the SBS team down the slope at the run. Waterford slipped behind a tree trunk and waited. They needed one of them alive — but only one.
'It has begun,' Aubrey announced sombrely as he put down the headset and turned to Gant and Curtin. 'Waterford reports four taken prisoner, the rest dead. The killing has begun.'
'It began days ago!' Gant snapped at him, sitting on one of the camp beds, still dressed in his flying suit, Thorne was lying on another bed, holding a paperback novel above him, reading. He seemed uninterested in Aubrey's announcement, indifferent to the surge and swell of emotion between Aubrey and Gant. 'Days ago,' Gant repeated. 'It killed Anna, too.'
Aubrey glared in exasperation. 'You have already made your point most eloquently concerning Anna,' he remarked acidly.
'The hell with you, Aubrey — the hell with you. Anna's death is as pointless as those poor bastards spying on your people at the lake. Just — dead. Like that.' He clicked his fingers. 'Just like that. And what the hell for? Why didn't you tell the poor slobs you'd given up on this idea before you had them shot? Just so they could know what they were getting killed for!'
'Be quiet, Gant — !'
'The hell I will!' Gant stood up, as if to menace Aubrey. Curtin watched him carefully, analytically, from the other side of the room, near the radio operator's console.
'There is nothing I can do!'
'Then there was no point at all in it.'
'I can't admit that…'
'Because you can't live with it.'
'I have tried, dammit — I have tried…' Aubrey turned his back and walked to the window. Skogeroya's mountain roots were visible. Gulls were blown like scraps of paper over the grey water of the fjord. Kirkenes huddled on its headland. Another glimpse through the storm, but not the weather window that was still promised for later in the afternoon. Still promised, still on time. It could, they now said, last for as long as an hour. Aircraft could fly in it. 'Pointless,' he announced to the room without turning from the window. Then, as if called upon to explain something, he faced Gant.
'I — these events have been uncontrollable, Mitchell,' Gant sneered at the use of his first name. 'The original operation worked just as planned — yes, even to the unfortunate deaths involved. They were not planned, but they were taken into account. No one was forced to work… but these events — the past days — they are happenings outside the rock pool. Do you understand? Intelligence work takes place in a rock pool. In this case, the marine creatures there, in their sealed-off world, have been disturbed, flung violently about by a storm. There is nothing I can do. I am sincerely sorry about the woman's death, but I did not cause it. Yes, yes, she was blackmailed into assisting you, but I intended — just as you promised her — that she would be safe from her own people and from ours afterwards. I would have persuaded Buckholz to set her free. She could have returned to her lover — that foolish, tragic young man who was the real instrument of her death!'
He broke off, as if he disliked the pleading tone of his own voice. He hated the confession he was making, yet it forced itself upon him not so much because of Gant's accusations but because the guilt had returned. It was filling his chest and his thoughts. There was only one justification in the rock pool — success. But, he could not control these events, he had failed to tailor them to the parameters of intelligence work. Soldiers, equipment, a timetable, weather conditions, repairs, the very location of the Firefox — all had conspired to flood the calm rock pool and fling them all into the raging water. He could now only admit defeat, pack and leave.
'I do not need lessons in guilt from you, Major,' he said tightly, surprising himself.
'I wonder.'
'There's nothing more to be done. Acknowledge Waterford's signal.' He crossed to the charts on the table, shuffling through them. 'Curtin, if you please,' he said. 'Now,' he continued when the US Navy officer had joined him, 'the weather window is such as to prevent the Chinook making it all the way, in and out, from Bardufoss. Therefore, the two Lynx helicopters must be used. We must instruct Moresby to salvage what he can — a list of items from his own descriptions of the on-board systems must be drawn up. Everything must be loaded aboard and flown out the moment the weather clears. They will have perhaps less than half-an-hour before the first Russians arrive, probably in force…' His hand skimmed and dusted at the map as he spoke.
It was swift, decisive, false, and he knew it. The imitation of action. The retreat. 'Our people, those who can't be got on board the two helicopters, must move out to the nearest crossing-point into Norway… that's north-west. Waterford can be relied upon to organise everything in that area…'
He looked up. Gant's shadow had fallen across the chart. His knuckles were white as he leant on them. His face was bleak and angry; a remote anger, something Aubrey could not lessen or turn aside.
'Yes?' Aubrey asked in a voice that quavered.
'Send me in,' Gant said. His eyes did not waver, nor did he blink. There was no colour in his cheeks.
Aubrey shook his head, preparing a smile of quiet, grateful dissent to disarm the American. 'No — ' he began.
'Send me in.'
'Impossible, Mitchell — quite impossible…' He essayed the smile. It appeared to have no effect. Thorne had put down his paperback, and was sitting up against the pillows like an interested invalid. Aubrey sensed that Curtin, beside him, was divided in his opinion.