The second guard-post lay in a gap in the high wire fence that surrounded the whole project area, including the airstrip. The original farming village of Bilyarsk lay outside the wire, a separate, and separated, community of wooden houses, communal agriculture, and poverty. The project-town had been grafted on to it, a hybrid growth surrounded by trees, ordered, secret.
Semelovsky slowed the car as he approached the gates in the wire, and he saw the increased size of the guard, a pattern he already expected from the junction guard-post fourteen miles down the road. Two guards, rather than the usual one, approached the vehicle, and he was almost blinded by the new, powerful searchlight mounted on the back of a truck. The beam of a searchlight mounted on one of the guard-towers, fifty yards away, swung to- pick him up, and he was bathed in cold, white light. He wound down the window, and stuck out his head. He recognised the guard.
'Ah, Feodor — I see you have some new toys to play with, eh?' He laughed naturally, smiling inwardly at his own bravado.
'Dr. Semelovsky — where have you been? You were checked through the guard-post more than an hour ago.' The guard was frowning, more, Semelovsky suspected, because an officer he did not recognise was watching the little scene, than because he was suspicious, or angry.
Semelovsky held out his hands, and the oily stains were clearly visible in the searchlight's glare.
'Damn car broke down!' he said. 'Much as the latest Five-Year Plan has achieved, it has not solved the problem of the Moskvitch — eh.' He laughed again, inviting the guard to join him. The guard smiled.
The second guard joined him, and said: 'Turn on the engine, please.' Semelovsky did not recognise this guard, looked at Feodor for a time, then shrugged and did as he was ordered. He revved loudly, and the missing cylinder could be plainly detected. The guard motioned him to release the bonnet-catch, and lifted the bonnet, his head disappearing. Semelovsky spared a momentary glance at the officer, who appeared to be persuaded of the normality of the situation. He was smoking, and appeared bored.
Leaning out of the window, he called: 'Any idea what it is?'
The second guard slammed down the bonnet suddenly, as if caught at some forbidden prank, and replied gruffly: 'That engine's filthy. You're a scientist — you should take more care.' Then he seemed to realise that his mask of deference had slipped. Semelovsky, surprised by his unguarded tone, realised that the man had to be KGB or GRU, whatever his uniform said. He nodded in reply.
'They keep us too busy…'he began.
The second guard turned away, and shook his head in the direction of the officer lounging against the wall of the guard-hut. The officer waved a hand nonchalantly, and the gates swung apart. The guard Feodor waved Semelovsky through.
He eased the car into gear, and pulled forward. He passed through the gates, and they closed behind him. At that point, and at that point only, a wave of fear swept over him. The incident was more fraught in retrospect than it had been as he experienced it. He had smuggled Gant into the complex, and his job was done.
He steered the car through the straight streets of the living quarters. Each dadza-like dwelling, wooden and one-storied, was identical, set back from the road behind a strip of lawn. It was, he thought, more of a camp than a town. Not a camp like the ones Baranovich knew from personal experience, on what they called the Gulag Archipelago, but it was a camp, nevertheless. It did not have walls like Mavrino, where Baranovich had spent years of his creative adult life — but there were electric fences, and guard-towers, and the KGB.
He turned the wheel of the car, and drove it up the slightly-sloping drive and into the opened garage of a house half-way down Tupolev Avenue. It was near the middle of the fenced-in township, identical to almost every other street, except those which contained the shops, the bars, and the cinema and dance-hall.
Semelovsky glimpsed the watcher in the black car parked across the street from the house. He was suddenly afraid again. It did not matter that Baranovich had told him, and that he knew himself perfectly well, that they would not arrest them until after the weapons-trials — otherwise, who would complete the arming of the plane, the rest of the work…? It was only by recalling Baranovich's face, and by hearing his voice, that he was able to calm himself. Then the bumper of the car bounced gently away from the car-tyre at the end of the garage, and he tugged on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As if forgetting Gant, locked in the boot, he sat for some moments, breathing regularly and deeply. He had seen too much, too quickly.
Then he opened the door, took the key from the ignition, and closed the garage door before he opened the boot.
'And you have learned nothing from either of them, Dmitri — still nothing?' The silkiness that had earlier invested it was gone from Kontarsky's voice. Instead, it was querulous, impatient. He was pacing his office, while Priabin sat in a chair before his desk, maintaining a ceaseless patrol. It was ten past seven. Priabin had left the cellar-room in Dzerzhinsky Street only minutes earlier, after Riassin, the man who seemed most likely to break of the two they had collected from the Mira Prospekt flats that morning, had slipped again into unconsciousness. Priabin tasted the ashes of an unsuccessful interrogation. There had been no time for the more refined, slower processes he preferred — this had been a brutal softening-up and the massive misuse of pentathol on both men. Yet, they had learned nothing. Priabin was of the opinion that there was nothing to learn, other than the fact that the two men knew Pavel Upenskoy, and that one of them, Glazunov, worked with him, as driver's mate on his delivery truck. Glazunov had been instructed to remain at home that day, despite the fact that Upenskoy was leaving for a delivery to Kuybyshev, a long trip but, so he claimed under drugs, he had not been told why.
However, Kontarsky was in no mood to believe that Priabin had tried as hard as he could, pushed as hard as he dare, without killing Glazunov and the other man — he was prepared to believe only that his aide had failed. Kontarsky, it was obvious, still believed that the two men possessed the information.
Priabin's eyes followed Kontarsky as he paced the carpet. He, like his chief, had a sense that there was a mounting urgency about the circumstances of the second man in the truck. The problem was the inability to understand what these agents of British and American intelligence could hope to gain by smuggling one man into Bilyarsk… for that must be where the impostor was heading. What could he do, that one man, that could not be done by Baranovich, the brilliant original mind, or Semelovsky, or even Kreshin — all of whom would be working on the actual aircraft during the night? A stranger would not be able to get anywhere near the Mig. And to consider that he had come merely to spy, to photograph, was ridiculous, Priabin concluded once more.
He realised that Kontarsky had halted in front of him. He looked up into the colonel's strained face. The man was already hours late in departing for Bilyarsk, since he wanted to go with positive information concerning the man travelling in the same direction in Upenskoy's truck. A KGB helicopter had been waiting for him on the outskirts of the city since early afternoon.
'Very well,' Kontarsky said, appearing to have come to some decision. 'Pick up the phone, Dmitri. Get in touch with the tail-car, and have Upenskoy and the other man pulled in — at once!'
'Sir.'
Priabin picked up the telephone. A simple instruction would be relayed via radio to the KGB office in Kazan, whence it would be passed on to the tail-car.
'Tell them to request what help they need from the guard-post at the Bilyarsk junction,' Kontarsky added. 'How many men in that car?'