Most of us always will, Harry, Quint told him.
‘After what I did to Bronnitsy last time,' Harry continued, I wasn't sure I could do it again. Now I know I can.'
Felix Krakovitch had been silent until now. I haven't the right to try and stop you, Harry, he said, but there are some good people there.
‘Like Zek Föener?'
She's one of them, yes.
‘I've already told her to get out of it. I think she will.'
Well, (Harry could hear Krakovitch's sigh, and almost picture his nod,) I'm glad for that at least.
‘Now I suppose it's time I got mobile,' said Harry. ‘Carl, maybe you can tell me: does E-Branch have access to compact high explosives?'
Why, Quint replied, the branch can get hold of just about anything, given a little time!
‘Hmm,' Harry mused. ‘I was hoping to do it a bit faster than that. Even tonight.'
Now Mikhail Volkonsky spoke up: Harry, does this mean you're going after that maniac who killed us? if so, maybe I can help you. I've done a lot of blasting in my time — mainly with gelignite, but I've also used the other stuff. in Kolomyya, there's a place where they keep it safe. Detonators, too, and I can explain how to use them.
Harry nodded, seated himself on the stump of a crumbling wall at the edge of the gorge, allowed himself a
grim, humourless smile. ‘Keep talking, Mikhail,' he said.
‘I'm all ears.
Something brought Ivan Gerenko awake. He couldn't have said what it was, just the feeling that something wasn't right. He dressed as quickly as possible, got the night Duty Officer on the intercom and asked if anything was wrong. Apparently nothing was. And Theo Dolgikh was due back any time now.
As Gerenko switched off the intercom, he glanced out of his great, curving, bulletproof window. And then he held his breath. Down there in the night, silvered by moonlight, a figure moved furtively away from the Château's main building. A female figure. She was wearing a coat over her uniform, but Gerenko knew who it was. Zek Föener.
She was using the narrow vehicular access road; she had to, for the fields all around were mined and set with trip-wires. She tried to walk light and easy, casual, but there was that in her movements which spoke of stealth. She must have booked out, presumably on the pretext of being unable to sleep. Or maybe she really couldn't sleep, was simply out for a walk and a little night air. Gerenko snorted. Oh, indeed? A long walk, presumably — probably right to Leonid Brezhnev himself, in Moscow!
He hurried down the winding stone stairs, took the key to his duty vehicle from the watchkeeper at the door, and set off in pursuit. Overhead, to the west, the lights of a helicopter signalled its approach: Theo Dolgikh, hopefully with a good excuse for the mess he'd earlier hinted at on the phone!
Two-thirds of the way to the massive perimeter wall that surrounded the entire grounds, Gerenko caught up with the girl, pulled up alongside and slowed to a halt. She smiled, shielded her eyes from the dazzle of the headlights — then saw who was hunched behind the wheel. Her smile died on her face.
Gerenko slid open his window. ‘Going somewhere, Fraulein Föener, my dear?' he said.
Ten minutes earlier Harry had stepped out of the Möbius continuum into one of the Château's pillbox gun emplacements. He'd been there before and knew the exact locations of all six, and guessed that they'd only be manned in the event of an alert. Since that might well be the current state of readiness if Kyle's absence had been discovered, he carried a loaded automatic pistol in the pocket of an overcoat he'd stolen from a peg in the ordnance dump in Kolomyya.
Across his shoulders he bore the weight of a bulky sausage-shaped bag that weighed all of one hundred pounds. Putting it down, he unzipped it and took out the first of a dozen gauze-wrapped cheeses: that was how he thought of the stuff, like soft grey cheese, except it smelled a lot worse. He moulded the ultra-high-explosive plastic over a sealed ammunition box, stuck in a timer-detonator and set the explosion for ten minutes' time. This had taken him maybe thirty seconds; he couldn't be sure for he had no watch. Then he moved on to the next pillbox, where this time he set the detonation for nine minutes, and so on.
Less than five minutes later he began to repeat the process inside the Château itself. First he went to the mind-lab, where he materialised beside the operating table. It seemed strange that he (yes, he, now) had been lying on that table something less than three-quarters of an hour ago! Sweating, he stuffed UHEP into the gap between two of the filthy machines they'd used to drain Kyle's mind, set the detonator, picked up his much lighter bag and stepped through a Möbius door.
Emerging into a corridor in the accommodation area, he met face to face with a security guard doing his rounds! The man looked tired, shoulders drooping where he ambled down the corridor for the fifth time that night. Then he looked up and saw Harry, and his hand went straight for the gun at his hip.
Harry didn't know how his new body would react to physical violence; this was when he'd find out. He'd learned his stuff long ago from ‘one of the first friends he'd ever made among the dead: ‘Sergeant' Graham Lane, an ex-Army PT instructor at his old school, who'd died in a climbing accident on the beach cliffs. ‘Sergeant' had taught him a lot and Harry hadn't forgotten it.
His hand shot out and trapped the guard's hand where it snatched at the pistol, jamming it back down into its holster. At the same time he drove his knee into the man's groin and butted him in the face. The guard made some noise but not much. And then he was out like a light.
Harry set another charge right there in the corridor; but now he noticed just how badly his hands were shaking, how profusely he was sweating. He wondered how much time he had left, considered the possibility of getting caught in his own fireworks.
He made one more jump — straight into the Château's central Duty Room — and in the instant of emerging caught the Duty Officer a blow that knocked him clean out of his swivel chair. The man hadn't even had time to look up. Moulding the rest of his UHEP onto the top of the desk between the radio and a switchboard, Harry fixed a final detonator and straightened up — and looked straight down the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle!
On the other side of the raised counter, unnoticed, a young security guard had been dozing in a chair. This was obvious from his gaping mouth and dazed expression. The sound of the Duty Officer hitting the floor must have roused him. Harry didn't know how awake he was, how much he'd seen or understood, but he did know he was in big trouble. He'd only set one minute on the last' detonator!
As the guard gabbled a startled question in gasping Russian, Harry shrugged and made a sour face, pointed at a spot just behind the other. It was an old ploy, he knew, but the old ones are often the best. And sure enough it worked. The guard jerked his head that way, turned the ugly snout of his weapon, too — And when he turned back Harry was no longer there.
Which was just as well, for his ten minutes were up.
The pillboxes went up like Chinese firecrackers, blowing their concrete lids off and bursting their walls. The first explosion — the intense flash if not the blast itself, which was minimal at this distance — caused Zek Föener to stagger and cower back where she was about to climb up into Gerenko's jeep. Then the crack and rumbling roar sounded, and the earth gave the first and least of many shudders. Anti-personnel land mines, fatally disturbed in the fields around, began to go off, spouting fountains of dirt and turf. It was like a bombing raid.
‘What?' Gerenko turned in his seat and looked back, couldn't believe what he was seeing. ‘The pillboxes?' He shielded his eyes against the blaze of light.