Northlight

I believed they would have done it the simplest way and linked it with the ignition switch.

But when I moved I moved slowly.

It could be anything: C3, C4, Cyclonite, TNT, picric acid, gelignite, dynamite, Tetryl, Amatol, any one of a dozen sensitive chemicals. In this region they wouldn't have found the more sophisticated materials and they'd probably used something out of any army ordnance store but I couldn't count on that.

I got down from the cab and stood on the earth floor and let the sweat trickle down my flanks and waited until my scalp loosened again before I moved to the front of the truck and stood still again, looking at the bonnet lever. When they rig a bang in the electrical circuitry of the vehicle they don't like you to disconnect a battery lead and today they might have placed auxiliary contacts on the bonnet levers or the hinges so it was a little while before I decided that they wouldn't have made things more complicated for themselves than they needed to.

They too were working their mission within the hostile and all-powerful environment of the KGB and all they had wanted to do was to wipe Karasov out and do it by stealth, setting it up and moving away and leaving it to the device itself to finish the business. They could do that by wiring the ignition switch and there would be no real need to provide backup circuits or contacts so I moved the bonnet lever and waited again until the nerves came down from screaming pitch and I got my breathing rhythm back to normal. Then I went round the front of the truck and pulled the other lever and lifted the bonnet.

Filthy engine. Everything was covered with an antique film of dried mud and oil stains and husks of grain, and I got the torch out of the tool compartment and used it, looking for any disturbance in the grime. Something bright flashed under the beam of the torch and I spun away and hit the snow outside as the whole barn blew apart and a roaring filled the sky and I lay there with my body against the snow and the nerves came off their high and the barn came back into one piece again and the roaring stopped and I thought Jesus Christ if I can't do better than this…

The snow cold under me, my face against it, my breath melting its crystals as the lungs went on pumping in the aftermath of unholy terror, pick yourself up, yes, get on with things.

When I was ready I got up and went back to the truck and found the wrench and disconnected the battery and stood for a minute with my eyes shut, just taking a break, it wasn't over yet because the thing could have its own battery but we might have come a little further away from blowing Northlight across the Kola River..

'What's wrong?'

I jerked round and looked at him.

Volodarskiy.

No dog. I think if he'd brought his dog I'd have killed it.

'Someone was here in the night.'

He watched me, noting, quite obviously, quite obviously noting, damn his eyes, the sweat on my face.

'How do you know?'

'They put a bomb on board this thing.'

'How do you know?' he asked again.

'In the same way in which you would have known, Volodarskiy, if you had come here first,' using my most polished academic syntax and my best Muscovite-intellectual accent, except for the last bit, 'and it would have scared the shit out of you too.'

His black eyes glittered with amusement. 'Conceivably. Where is the bomb?'

'I haven't found it yet.'

He looked at the filthy engine. 'Are you an expert?'

'I'm finding out. If your barn is still standing an hour from now you'll know I'm an expert.'

'Perhaps I can help.'

'Yes. You can go back and look after Karasov.'

'I would rather stay here,' he said softly, 'and fiddle with the toy you think they've sent you.'

'I know you would. You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you?'

'From what?" 'The brink.'

His eyes glittered again. 'That is a way of putting it, I suppose.'

'You're like me.'

'I think so, yes.'

'But if I get it wrong, and this thing goes up, I want you to look after Karasov. I want you to contact my local control and tell him what's happened and ask him how he's going to get the objective out. Until he can do something I want you to keep that man with you and see that no one gets to him. He's the objective, Volodarskiy. The objective.'

His eyes moved around the barn while he thought about this, then he looked down and shrugged. 'I will do what you say, my friend; I know how important your mission is. But do what you can to find that little toy of yours and make it safe. I have no wish to keep that craven wretch in my house for longer than I have to. He's not fit company for my dog.'

'He's burnt out,' I said, 'that's all.'

'And so am I. But there is heat there yet.' He came to stand close to me. 'I was fifteen years in the labour camps, but that was not so bad. When I came home they told me that my wife had been arrested for circulating subversive material — she was a poet, and she wrote of freedom.' His breath clouded on the cold air and his eyes never left my face. 'She refused to give away her friends, her collaborators, and so they beat her, and she died. The KGB men who killed her had received promotion and been transferred. But I have found one of them, and when I find the other, I have some work to do. So has my dog.' He turned away. 'He is hungry, and so am I.'

I watched him moving back to his cave across the snow.

It took me another forty minutes to find it because they can rig this kind of thing in a dozen ways and just because you've disconnected the battery it doesn't mean you won't detonate it if you move too fast or press too hard or touch the wrong terminal, the wrong wire, the wrong connection.

It was lying under the front floorboards. I hadn't been able to see it from underneath the truck: I'd had to go in from the top, prying the floorboards upwards a centimetre at a time and shining the torch beam through the widening gap. I first saw the bomb when the floorboard was still raised only two or three centimetres and I stopped moving at once.

It would depend on how good the man was at his job. He could have used any one of a dozen initiators — chemical, electrical, mechanical, acoustic, vibratory, magnetic — or he could have used a combination initiator to produce detonation whatever I did, so I got a spanner and took the driving mirror off its bracket and slipped it through the gap in the floorboards and used the torch again.

These things are never pleasant to look at, simply because you know what they will do if you disturb them. This one had the squat shape of a giant slug and the stillness of a rattlesnake. Its potential for monstrous havoc gave it, in my mind, a kind of life: the brain refused to believe that this degree of power could be contained in such a small object. What I was looking at was something that could produce an air-blast pressure of a million pounds per square inch and a temperature of four thousand degrees centigrade and a fragmentation velocity of twenty thousand feet per second and it would do this if I made a single wrong move. The infinitely complex system of intelligence inside my skull was within two feet of the source of cataclysmic obliteration, and the forebrain was working out the options while the primitive stem kept the hairs on my arms lifted and the pressure in the arteries raised and the heart's rhythm racing.

But there were no real options. The objective had to be taken across and that was what I was here for and it wasn't the time to weigh values — Karasov's life against mine, the ruthless demands of the mission against the executive's personal survival. I was here because the brink was here and if I'd wanted anything different then I could have walked out of that bloody building in Whitehall long ago and told them to stuff it, get off my back, leave me alone. But they knew what I wanted and they'd put it on the map and set my feet in its direction and told me how far it was and now I was there. On the brink.