What I didn't know, as I climbed the drifts and lurched through the freezing ruts of this city's streets, was whether the papers I carried would get me through or trap me. I didn't know whether they had made the connection yet between the dead Lithuanian and the freight-yards bombing and the man who'd been taken to the General Maritime Hospital. They could still be sifting through the routine reports and questioning the last of the passengers on that train and watching the computer screens as they punched the data in. Two things were certain: they were doing that now and they were inevitably making progress. It was like a slow-burn fuse that would at any hour, any minute reach the papers I carried in my pocket and blow my operation the instant I fell foul of a random check and had to show them.
There was only one thing more dangerous: not to show them at all. It was a matter of time, and in the diminishing time frame available to me I had to reach the rendezvous before one of the computers threw the name of Petr Lein on the screen and the KGB operator flashed an immediate all-points bulletin to have me picked up.
Checkpoint.
I turned into a side street and saw two militiamen on routine patrol coming in this direction at a distance of a hundred metres and there was no cover except for a sandbin half-submerged under a snow drift so I turned back and waited for the shout but it didn't come, though I might not have heard it because one of the civic transport trucks was getting up speed along the main street and I started running — Halt! but only in my mind — Halt, that man! but only in the nerves as I slung the shovel high and one of the men caught it and gave me a hand as I clambered onto the truck and hung jack-knifed across the side until they hauled me aboard.
'One more for the cattle-yards!'
'Run out of snow, comrade?'
Packed, yes, like cattle in the open truck with the slipstream cutting our faces as it got up speed again with the gears jerking and a shovel clanging against the back of the cab.
'Is this a work party?'
'No, comrade, we're off to a bloody circus!'
In the last two days I'd seen that the checkpoint militiamen had let some of the trucks through if they were on their way to a clearing site but it wasn't a hundred per cent predictable and the situation now was strictly Russian roulette because the work truck ahead of us was being waved through the intersection but it didn't mean they wouldn't stop this one — they could be checking them alternately to keep the traffic moving.
'Which gang are you with, comrade?'
'Number 5,' I told him.
'Five's been sent home. This is the night shift.'
Slowing towards the intersection.
'I'm volunteering.'
'Glutton for bloody punishment!'
'No,' I said, 'it's just that I've got a nagging wife.'
Raucous laughter and the whiff of alcohol in the air-rush: for the past two days the snow-clearing gangs had been sent to the workers' canteens for free soup and a vodka ration.
Speeding up again with the green-lit batons waving us through and the eyes under the peaked caps checking us without much interest and the hope now, the definite hope that within another half an hour they could change the signals data on the board for Northlight to read Rendezvous made.
'From Moscow?' a man asked me.
'Yes.' We had the same accent.
They were letting the truck ahead of us through the next intersection, the illuminated batons waving. In the far distance I could see the lights of the airport control tower.
Is Air Croder there?
He went home.
Call him up for me. Our chap's made the rendezvous.
Much rejoicing because our first objective had been killed and the executive was operating in hazard and his local control had been changed at his own request and that had shaken the network because it's like switching partners on a trapeze but soon there would be much rejoicing, yes, and the monitors at the signals board would make some fresh tea.
'You like it in Murmansk?'
'Not in winter.'
He laughed briefly. 'No, but the sea air's pleasant, after the Moscow smog. I'm a lawyer.' He reached inside his coat and brought out a card. 'If you ever need assistance, let me know.'
The truck was slowing again. The one ahead of us had turned left along Lenin Prospekt. There weren't any green-lit batons this time: they were red.
'All right,' I said, and put the card in my pocket. 'I'm an engineer. Lein, Petr Stepanovich.'
Slowing hard now as the red batons began waving and spreading out as the militiamen moved across the road. The truck's brakes locked and the tyres slid across the slush, no rejoicing, no you won't have to call Mr Croder, the brakes coming off and the tyres finding grip but we were still slowing. I do, as a matter of fact, need your assistance, comrade, but I doubt if this is a matter you can do much to help me with, the brakes coming on again and sending us into the piled snow at the roadside, the rear of the truck clouting a sandbin with a scream of tearing metal.
'Bloody militia check again! Haven't those whoresons got nothing else to do?'
Grinding to a halt now at the intersection as we lurched into each other and grabbed for support, a shovel clanging down and the diesel exhaust gas clouding across our faces.
'Security check! Get your papers ready!'
Floodlights came on, freezing the truck in a white glare, making us shield our eyes.
'One at a time, come on?
The gas was sickening and we stood choking in it until the driver switched off the engine and there was silence except for the thud of our boots as we dropped one by one on to the roadway. 'Your papers.'
26 FERRIS
It was A high-impact crash but not totally head-on because the main instrument panel was almost intact although the deceleration forces had wrenched it away from the left side holding bolts and smashed most of the dials. One wing sloped downwards from the main cabin, sheared off at the root; the other was missing altogether.
Smell of burning, and something else, like a stale oven, and I connected this with the soft charred shreds stuck to the instrument panel; in the faint light it looked like the remains of a scalp.
Small bells ringing, rather prettily.
I didn't know how long this thing had been here or whether they'd hauled it out of the way of the air traffic or whether it had finished up here smothered in fire foam, choosing its own grave-site where it could rest until the salvage crews came to settle on it like vultures and pluck it apart for what they could find. It wasn't pleasant in here because of the smell and the cold but I thought Fane had done welclass="underline" as a rendezvous location it was as good as we'd get; it was a half-mile from the main runways and difficult to reach over the snow and unless we showed a light or made a noise nobody would come here.
The only light filtering in through the sooty glass of the windows was from the control tower and the occasional sweep of headlights as the Navy bulldozers turned across and across the perimeter roads, shovelling the snow into the waiting trucks. The little warning bells rang automatically when the bulldozers reversed.
A short-range commercial Aeroflot Yak-40 had landed five minutes ago with its centre engine reversing thrust as it slid past the lights of the terminal and left the scent of burnt kerosene seeping into the wreck where I sat wailing. It should be in from Leningrad.
I'd thought that the heat from my body was misting on the window where I sat but when I wiped my sleeve across the glass nothing changed. When I'd reached here twenty minutes ago the runway lights in the far distance had been clear; now they were shining through some kind of haze, perhaps sea fog from the north. Now that the sound of the Yakovlev had died away it was quiet in here, and I could hear metal creaking along the main wing as it contracted in the night's increasing cold. I could also hear faint screaming, and believed at first that a wind was rising and fluting through the gaps in the wreckage; but there was no wind outside: the tiny pennant drooping from the airspeed Pilot tube at the wingtip was perfectly still. It was just that my nerves were ultra-sensitive at this stage of the mission, taking the organism close to the zone where the psyche was picking up extrasensory vibrations from what we call the past.