He, Stepan Stepanovich Vodovos, was the first among his countrymen to come face to face with the man whom the Motherland wanted more than anybody else in the world.
The eyes gazed back at him, indifferently. Their colour wasn’t distinct in the semi-darkness, but Vodovos could see they were pale. The head was close-cropped, the stubble grey as steel.
He watched the man for a full six seconds. Then his eyes returned to Singer’s and he gave a curt nod.
Singer said briskly: ‘On the count of three, each man starts walking forwards and doesn’t stop.’
He took a step back, and Vodovos did the same, as if they were conducting some weird, ritualistic dance.
He took the prisoner gently by the arm. He was elderly, in his early seventies, and although he was spry and thus far had displayed a dignified courage, it was possible he would falter at this late stage.
With a gesture of his other hand, Vodovos signalled the prisoner to begin walking.
He watched the shackled man take his first step forward, the chain binding his feet clanking softly on the scrabble of the clearing’s floor.
Subtly, on his side and theirs, Vodovos noticed the armed men tensing, their grips on their weapons tightening.
They were united, Vodovos and his counterparts and the military men on each side, by their shared experience of this performance. They were privy to an event very few other human beings would ever hear about.
And, united as they were, they reacted to the approaching sound as a single entity, each one of them turning his head at the same time.
The sound resembled repeated strikes on a bass drum, except the noise of each beat was choppier and ended more abruptly. Vodovos felt the pulse of the sonic assault in his chest.
He stared at the ridge of the hill to his right. Saw the beginnings of light seeping over the edge, like a rapidly approaching dawn.
The monster rose, insect-like, over the ridge, black and transfixing and terribly close, looming over them, its eyes glaring down, blazing.
Vodovos felt pinned by that glare, like a butterfly collector with the tables turned.
He tore his eyes from the hovering apparition to look at the Briton, Singer, and his entourage. He thought he’d see triumph, there, or at least no expression at all.
But Singer himself was staring wide-eyed at the helicopter. The men around him swung their guns to bear.
The prisoner, the old man, blinked up at the chopper in confusion, reaching for the glasses on his nose as if not trusting his eyes.
Only the other man, the shackled one, appeared unsurprised.
The firing began an instant later, a yellow burst of flame exploding from the helicopter and the ground around Vodovos erupting as the invisible projectiles smashed into it. At almost the same moment, the guns on either side of him opened up, the noise somehow more shocking because of its closeness.
Vodovos leaped for the prisoner and collided into his back and knocked him prone, feeling the stiff and sinewy frame hit the frozen ground hard. He raised his head and saw the shackled man backing away at an unhurried pace.
‘Stop him,’ he yelled.
His cry must have gone unheard, lost in the cacophony of gunfire, but one of the men on the British side ran to the shackled man and grabbed him by the back of the neck and hurled him to the ground, crouching over him and swinging his rifle back round to train it on the helicopter.
The impact of the stream of high-velocity bullets lifted the soldier almost into a standing position once more, throwing him off the man he was covering and sending him sprawling on the hard earth.
A blow to Vodovos’s back startled him, in a detached way. His first thoughts were: I’m shot. I’m numb. Let the end come now, before the pain hits. He felt relentless, though not uncomfortable, pressure across his body, driving him downward against the prisoner’s own prone form.
Vodovos felt the wetness on his shoulder and craned his head round. He saw the horrible, grinning face inches from his, the mouth distorted in a toothy leer where the lip and cheek had been shot away.
It was one of the soldiers. One of his soldiers.
He’d been hearing the screams around him for a few seconds at least, he realised, but only now was he registering them. By swivelling his head he could make out another body a few feet away, and a man stumbling aimlessly nearby, his injuries impossible to judge in the near darkness.
It’s just one helicopter, Vodovos’s mind shouted. Why don’t they shoot it down?
He saw movement from the corner of his eye.
A black shape moved swiftly from the left. Another appeared a few yards away.
More of them, thought Vodovos. More men, at ground level.
Pain arrowed up his leg without warning, cold and clean and burning.
The flash of the guns lit up the clearing brilliantly in a succession of strobe images, each offering a snapshot from hell. Bodies twisted and spun, and the cries offered a high counterpoint to the roaring of the weapons.
Vodovos’s primitive brain, the part deep below the more modern cerebral cortex, the area that was vestigial to an era before the mammals had separated from their reptilian counterparts, took control.
He flopped onto his back, rolling the dead man off him.
He allowed his eyes to remain open, staring at the night sky.
He brought his breathing under control, so that his respiratory intake and output produced only the minutest movement of his chest. It was difficult, because the pain he’d felt in his leg had returned, and was clamouring for his attention, and he wanted to gasp.
He’d learned the technique during his training. It was seldom used, and it seldom worked anyway.
But, sometimes, playing dead was one’s only hope of staying alive.
The gunfire had stopped. The high-pitched ringing in Vodovos’s ears was all that remained.
Beyond that, faintly, he heard the low whup-whup of the helicopter’s rotor.
A single shot made him almost flinch, but he lay dead still.
Two figures loomed on the periphery of his vision, the forced perspective making them seem huge, with grotesquely enlarged boots.
He continued to stare at the sky, resisting the urge to look at the men. His eyes prickled and itched, the urge to blink almost intolerable.
He felt the tackiness on his face and in his hair, realised the blood from the man who’d died on top of him was providing camouflage of a sort.
One of the looming men bent down. Even on the edge of Vodovos’s vision, the man’s face appeared blurred. He was wearing a balaclava.
Vodovos stopped breathing entirely. He could hold his breath long enough, he decided, that the man would lose interest in him.
He had to.
As the seconds ticked by, the burning in Vodovos’s chest swelled to an inferno.
He was wrong, he realised. He wasn’t going to be able to hold out.
A burst of air escaped from his nose just as the man straightened.
The man moved almost beyond Vodovos’s vision. The second man had disappeared entirely.
Vodovos heard grunting noises, the sounds of men hefting a mass.
He risked an infinitesimal twitch of the muscles that controlled his eye movements.
The two men had hauled the old man, the prisoner, to his feet. Expertly, with their arms under his to support him, they were moving him away.
He saw the old man reach the other, the one Vodovos had been tasked to bring home.
Something happened, then. Something Vodovos couldn’t process immediately.
It didn’t make sense.
Vodovos lay still.
The voices — there’d been several of them, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, or even the language they were speaking in — receded.