He asked urgently, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said, though her voice trembled. “It just scraped my shoulder, that’s all. It’s nothing.”
Her sleeve was wet with blood, and her face was pale and frightened; there was nothing worse than that. Shaw said, “I’ll see to it as soon as I can, Virginia.”
His gun in his hand, he turned his attention to the roadway. There was no more firing, though he fancied he detected a faint movement to the left of the road ahead. He and Virginia lay there dead still, scarcely daring to breathe until Shaw could identify a target — and be certain of hitting it first time, before his own fire drew another spreading burst from the sub-machine-gun in ambush. The minutes passed; from the distance came the fast-fading roar of the Kosyenko motorcade, and another sound, the sound of the MVD patrol car racing in; the moment the security police saw Treece’s car standing there, in full view, they would stop. Shaw was trying to work out the next move when he saw Treece dash suddenly out from cover and race for the car. There was a grinding noise as the brigadier, jumping in, at once engaged his gears; then the slam of the door — and the car was on the move, accelerating fast along the road towards the dam.
“What the hell… the lousy, rotten bastard!” Shaw, taken completely by surprise, was almost on his feet when, just in time, he remembered the hidden gunman. He ducked back into cover… and it was then, as his mind registered that the unknown gunman hadn’t fired a shot at Treece, that things began to fall amazingly, unbelievably, into place. Shaw’s face became suffused… he’d been criminally careless not to have tumbled to a few things earlier, though heaven knew he had excuse in plenty — in the circumstances! It was clear as crystal now why Treece had turned up in Moscow and then at Kyakhta, why he had been so insistent about taking the rear of the line in the motorcade, and why he had taken, apparently so uselessly, that left-hand fork. That hadn’t had anything directly to do with the MVD car. The ambush had been rigged, and Treece would have taken that turning whatever had happened. By now, he and the girl should be dead — dead, so that Ivan O’Shea Conroy, alias Brigadier Treece of ‘I’ Branch, could have a clear run along the short cut to the dam on the Chalok River, get there before Kosyenko, and get on with whatever he had come to do.
And currently, Treece was on his way right there.
Moments later, the police car came in sight, traveling fast — with Colonel Andreyev at the wheel. Andreyev, looking neither to right nor left, went on fast in the wake of Treece’s car… and after that, everything seemed to happen at once.
Twenty-eight
A sustained burst of firing had come from some way ahead, and after that a brief pause, followed by a slightly shorter burst and then the long-drawn-out sound of a skid and a crash. Next, there came four single revolver shots in rapid succession, and a cry quickly bitten off, then silence; and in that silence, Shaw heard the snapping of branches behind him and he just had a moment in which to grab Virginia and send her rolling to one side when a burst from a sub-machine-gun hit the spot where they had just been. Leaves danced in the air, ripped by the lead from their anchorage; a branch snapped off, hung drunkenly by a green sliver, shivering under the impact. The stench of gun-smoke drifted down on to them.
Shaw kept still and silent, watching, straining his eyes through the scrub and the foliage that kept himself and the girl covered.
It was a full minute later before he saw the vague movement behind a bush, saw a man coming slowly into view, and a few seconds later he recognized the bloated face: Wicks — unmistakably Wicks. The man had the sub-machine-gun in his arms — it was a Kalashnikova, and heaven alone could say how Wicks had come by it — the muzzle pointed, by accident rather than design, precisely at the spot where the two of them were lying.
Shaw lined up his gun on the hand-grip of the Kalashnikova and fired.
There was a startled cry and an oath, and Wicks’s weapon fell into the undergrowth, and as Shaw got to his feet he saw the blood pouring from the man’s hand. He snapped, “Hold it, Wicks! Leave the gun where it is. Next time I fire it’ll be to kill you, Wicks — if that is your name. Just move backwards till I tell you to stop. Get moving!”
Wicks’ tongue flicked out to moisten his lips; his coarse features were working with fear and pain. For a moment, he stayed put, then took a couple of steps backwards. When he was something like four feet from the sub-machine-gun he suddenly dropped, throwing his body heavily forward. In the same split-second Shaw fired. The slug took Wicks in the left side of the chest; he gave a coughing grunt, there was a rush of blood from his mouth, and he lurched forward, face down, lying half across the gun.
Shaw, with Virginia close behind him, ran towards Wicks. He bent and turned the man on to his back, lifting the head between the palms of his hands. Looking up, he caught Virginia’s eye. He said, “He’s alive — just — but he won’t last more than a few minutes.”
She nodded. “I think,” she told him, “there’s something he wants to say.”
Shaw looked down again at the white, blood-streaked face. Wicks’ eyes were slightly open, and as Shaw bent towards him he noticed that the pupils were dull and listless; blood drooled from the mouth thickly, a slow surge which from time to time became a red gush. But the lips, pale like the face, were moving, and there was something, a kind of intensity and urgency, about the set of the mouth that lent weight to what Virginia had said.
Gently, Shaw lowered the head to the soft, wet ground and knelt beside Wicks, his ear close to the lips. Faintly, breath fanned his face and then there was a bubbling sound as the man inhaled painfully, and Shaw heard the labored noises as he tried to speak. Shaw could distinguish no words whatever. The gruesome process was dragged out for thirty seconds and at the end of that time, Wicks’ head fell sideways, the body twitched for a moment, and then lay still.
Shaw scrambled up from the muddy ground, then bent again and picked up the sub-machine-gun. “Well,” he said, “that’s that! It’s a pity he couldn’t have made us understand. I believe there was something he wanted to come clean about. Anyway, the fact he was here pretty well establishes that he and Fawcett were part of the Conroy network, and I think I can make a fair guess at what he was trying to say.”
She pushed hair from her face. “And that is?”
“He was going to tell me Conroy’s identity, but I believe I’ve got there anyway.”
She stared at him. “Well, give!”
“Treece,” he said flatly.
“Treece… Brigadier Treece!” Her voice was almost hysterical now. “Steve, have you gone out of your mind?”
He shook his head. “I’d like to think so this time, but I doubt it very much. Treece is the man I’ve come here to kill.”
“But… now look, Steve, Treece is a very big bug in your security set-up!”
“Very nearly the biggest,” he agreed grimly, “and don’t I know it! It isn’t nice, Virginia, and it’s going to cause the biggest stink this century if and when it all comes out—”
“And if you’re right.”
He said, “I’m right! We’ll put it to the test soon — meanwhile don’t press me for details. I’ve a lot of sorting out to do. I’ve just—”
He saw the cry forming on the girl’s lips and almost before her shout of warning came he was on the move, swinging round with Wicks’s sub-machine-gun leveled. To his surprise, he saw Andreyev standing there, a revolver in his left hand. Andreyev had emerged from the scrub, blood trickling down one side of his face and his right arm showing a wet stain through the sleeve of the jacket.