Northlight

I went down the companion ladder into the pitch darkness and the acrid stench of coal, and when I reached solid planks I turned and looked for signs of life.

'Freeze.'

Light struck across my eyes and I put a hand up to shield them but all I could see in the glare was the blued steel of a gun.

'Potemkin,' I said.

'You are the Englishman?'

'Yes.'

The torch-beam was lowered and the gloved hand reversed the gun and handed it to me barrel-first. 'Captain Kirill Alekseyevich Zhigalin, Soviet Navy. I am at your command.'

'Clive Gage.'

I put the gun into my coat. It would have offended him if I'd thrown it into the scuppers.

'Can you understand my humiliation?' He gripped my arm, moving the torch higher to watch my face. 'The dishonour?'

'What? Yes of course, but we-'

'Did I fail them in my duty? Did I neglect-'

'Come on Zhigalin, get moving.' I took the torch from him and pushed him towards the companion ladder. 'There's an aircraft waiting for takeoff and the fog's closing in, do you understand?'

His boots clanged their way up the metal rungs. Bloody ideologists, all they could think about was their bloody honour. I switched off the torch and climbed after him to the deck. He was standing there looking across at the shore lights in the distance, a short man in a duffle coat with his hands by his sides as if he'd lost something.

'Here I was born,' he said softly, 'in this land.'

I had to jerk him into motion again and he went on telling me about the "primordial necessity" of mutual loyalty between a man and his country — Christ knows where he was educated but it sounded like a mail-order course. I got him to shut up because he had a voice that carried.

'Get into that van, Zhigalin, and don't talk. This town's crawling with KGB patrols and we're going to be lucky if we get through.' I slammed the rear door after him. 'If anything happens, leave it to me, is that clear?'

'I am at your command, comrade Gage.' An odd kind of whimpering started as I got into the front and shut the door. I think he was actually weeping.

'Airport?' the driver asked me.

'Yes. Have you been over the route?'

'Of course.' He sounded hurt. 'We're running late, do you know that?'

'Best I could do. What's your name?'

'Antonov.' That's what we all said.

'Are you carrying arms?'

He looked at me as we got into second gear along the frozen ruts. 'I have a gun. Why?'

'If there's any trouble. I don't want you to use it. If you get clear on your own that's your own business but all the time you're with me you don't even show your gun, now is that understood?'

'Whatever you say, Colonel.'

Ferris had given him my executive's operational ranking. 'All right, but don't call me that if we meet anyone.' I watched a pair of blue-tinted headlights turning along the quay from the shore road. 'How long will it take us to reach the aircraft?'

'Not long. Fifteen minutes.' He was staying in second gear; the ruts were sending the front wheels all over the place. The blue-tinted headlights swept across our windscreen and didn't dip. 'Whoreson,' the driver said and lowered the visor.

'Have you a military escort for me?' Zhigalin-had stopped crying and was leaning with one hand on the seat-back.

'A what?'

'A military escort. That would be correct, and I have no objection.'

'All you've got as an escort to the West, old son, is a shagged-out ferret. Sorry about that.' I didn't expect him to understand but that wouldn't matter because the other vehicle was pulling across the quay right in front of us with its headlights still blazing and we slid to a stop to avoid hitting it.

Two uniformed figures got out and came up to the van with their — guns drawn, one on each side and dragging the doors open.

'KGB! Out! Out! Hands on your heads! Out!'

29 DOLL

Liz threw the KGB patrol car into reverse across the ruts and then sent it forward in a tight sliding turn to miss the van and straightened up, driving on dipped headlights now.

I could hear a siren somewhere.

Zhigalin had been forced into the front of the car and I was in the rear with the KGB sergeant. He was holding his gun at my head.

Liz got into third gear, sending the car in a series of zigzags across the treacherous surface. She was in KGB uniform with major's insignia on the shoulders.

'Clive, can you deal with that man?' She said it in English.

Zhigalin sat in the front with his head turned to watch her, not understanding what she'd said.

There were more sirens now from the shore road, and headlights were swinging onto the quay towards us.

I had to take her on trust. There was no other way.

'Clive, you've got to see to that man. It's no good if you-'

There was only a marginal vector available because if I tried dragging the gun-hand downwards I risked taking the shot in the pelvis and if I knocked it aside it would send it in an arc across Liz and Zhigalin so I used a rising wedge-hand to send it straight upwards but there wasn't enough leverage and the first shot ploughed through my scalp and I had to work very fast and connect my left hand with his neck and even then I wasn't in time to stop a second shot smashing into the door pillar before I could impact with the baroreceptors in the carotid artery and shut down his nervous system. The gun dropped across my leg and I kicked it under the front seat and got the window down to clear the air before we started choking on the cordite fumes.

Liz threw a white-faced glance over her shoulder. 'Shit, he had two kids-'

'He's not dead.'

The car lurched as the wheels lost traction across a patch of ice and the headlight beams swung across the stern of a fishing boat tied up at the quayside. A lot of militia patrol cars were coming past us from the shore road with their code lights flashing and their sirens on, one of them clipping our rear wing as it slewed across the ruts.

'Hit that window, Clive. I don't want anyone seeing in.'

I wound it shut and took a look at the sergeant. He was slumped over across his knees and I dragged him upright because I didn't want him to get the blood back into his brain too soon.

'What about my courier?' I asked Liz. 'The one in the blue van.'

She talked across her shoulder. 'I told him to get the hell out of here on foot if he could. I didn't want him along.'

'How did it happen,' I asked her, 'did they get Fane?' It was difficult to think logically with this amount of action going on but I needed to know things because I didn't want to go into this kind of situation without a rough idea of the score. And that was all that could have happened: somehow they must have got hold of Fane. He'd set up this rendezvous and handed the briefing to Ferris.

'Right.' Liz swung the car at ninety degrees onto the shore road, sending a white bow-wave up from a snow drift. 'They got your courier in the freight-yards in Kandalaksha and grilled him and he blew Fane.' She had to choke something out of her voice. 'It took four days.'

'When did they pick up Fane?'

'Last night when he was getting on a plane for Berlin in Leningrad. They started work on him right away. Jesus Christ-' she was slapping the wheel with the flat of her hands-'I didn't know it was going to be like this when I-'

Someone else hit us and she swung the wheel and straightened up along the shore road. There weren't so many code lights flashing now and I jerked a look through the rear window and saw a whole line of patrol cars jockeying along the quay towards the barge. Fane must have held out until only minutes ago.