Northlight

30 BROTHER

The skeleton danced to the tolling of the bell, its bones clinking and its bright eye winking through the dark.

The great steel clamp of the cold crushed my skull. Smell of blood, fresh blood.

I dropped and screamed and fetched up sharp and opened my eyes and there was the bottomless pit, the vastness of night.

'What?'

He was watching me.

'Nothing. I didn't say anything.'

It hadn't been a scream at all, just fright in my throat because in the dream I'd been falling forever.

'Have to keep moving,' Zhigalin said.

'What?'

'Because of the cold.'

'Yes.' I tried to stand up but all we had between us and the cold black water was a rubber raft and you couldn't stand up in it without pitching over the side.

The ice-floes clinked together, making the sound of bones. The one light winked and went out again.

'What light is that?'

'I don't know,' he said.

'You don't know?' He should know this coast, he'd sent a hundred men to their death in these waters.

'Perhaps the shore,' he said. I supposed he was ashamed at not knowing what light it was.

The bell tolled with a funeral sound, and I began counting the chimes. The ice bobbed on the water, bringing the skeleton back into my mind, its cackling laughter. Danger there, I knew, but there was nothing to do about it.

Wake up.

There's nothing I- Wake up.

My eyes came open and found him staring at me.

'Zhigalin.'

'Yes?'

'-Are you all right?'

'I have no idea.'

The man must be a bloody fool. I shifted my numbed body closer to him and the smell of blood became suddenly raw on the air. I found the torch and switched it on, keeping it low because we didn't want to attract attention. God knew where the plane was, or the pilot. The hunt had moved away hours ago, or we'd been drifting out of sight.

I shielded the torch with my hand.

His leg was half off.

'You caught a bullet,' I told him.

'Rather more than that.'

'I'm going to make a tourniquet.'

I opened my coat and began tearing my shirt at the sleeve. 'Don't move,' I said. It produced an odd spasm of laughter from him.

'Where would I go?'

'Try to think what light that is. I want to know.'

'I think it is the shore.'

'How far away?'

'Perhaps half a kilometre.'

'That close?'

'The fog is thick.'

'Are we drifting?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Which way?'

'To the east, if that is the shore.'

'If that isn't a light on the shore, what would it be?'

I got the sleeve free and twisted it into a cord.

'There are two lighthouses here, at the border. It could be one of them.'

'If we're drifting to the west, we could get picked up.'

'I think we are drifting to the east.'

Another light was moving in the haze, but I couldn't hear the sound of an engine. There was still a degree of aftershock in the organism and the cold was numbing the tissues. It was difficult to know whether we were seeing a light or hallucinating.

I felt for the pressure point in his femoral artery and wrapped the sleeve round the thigh, pulling it tight. He didn't seem to feel anything. We were being slowly frozen alive.

'I gave you my gun,' he said.

'Yes.'

'If they find us while we are still alive, I ask that you will shoot me with my gun.'

'The sea could turn. We could drift the other way, to the west.'

'You still have the gun?'

I could feel it in my coat. 'Yes.'

'Please grant my last request. I wish to avoid the humiliation of an enquiry. They would send me to be shot. I prefer you to do it, as an act of brotherhood.'

In a moment I said, 'Very well. I'll do what you ask, if they pick Us up alive.'

Easy enough to say. In the open sea and with these temperatures we were going to last another hour at most, if his loss of blood didn't stop the heart before that.

I started tearing at the other sleeve because one wouldn't be enough. Brotherhood. Odd word, but I knew what he meant. You meet interesting people in this trade, and it's when you're in a position to save a life or get your own saved that you know who your friends are. Your brothers.

Her arm thrown up like that in a kind of farewell salute before she'd gone down in the snow, another of those bloody ideologists, when you looked at it, and finally I discovered, out of anger I guess, a sense of direction, a conviction that there was something I had to do. And I've been doing it ever since, Clive, in my own way, hurling myself at the barricades while everyone else is busy making a detour and maybe getting home sooner. But the barricades are still there, and until I can bring them down…

Another of those bloody ideologists, but I would wish once more to look into the glistening green of her eyes and feel against this numbed flesh the warmth of the earth mother. Hi, I'm Liz Benedixsen. Standing there with her brave little pistol, banging away with it in the name of peace on earth. Saved our lives, at least for a while. Got us airborne. You know where your friends are when it comes to the crunch.

Zhigalin moaned this time as I pulled the second sleeve tighter, kicking with his other leg and opening his mouth and letting the pain out, singing across the dark water as my stomach shrank and I pulled the sleeve tighter again and his song broke to a shriek while the skeleton cackled, clinking its. bones.

'Over now,' I told him, and the moaning died in his throat. After a long time he said something.

'What?' I asked him.

'Thank you.'

The light was still moving over there, going in circles, some kind of patrol. I could hear an engine now.

'Zhigalin, what boat's that?' He should know these waters.

'Soviet, since we are drifting east.'

'But if you don't know what that light is, the other one, we could be drifting west, couldn't we?'

'We will hear their voices, when they see us. Then we shall know. But please take my gun. You agreed to do that.'

It's not often, I dare say, that the executive has to kill off the objective at the end of a mission.

He wants Zhigalin taken across, at all costs.

Fane. Finished now. Dead or a madman.

Poor old Croder.

And is that all you know?

That was the last we heard, sir. Ferris got them onto a plane but it went down into the sea.

The red bulb would go out, over the board for Northlight.

That's all you know, yes, and all you'll ever know.

The light was sweeping in a circle, and I moved closer to Zhigalin, the idiot ideologist, my brother of the Arctic night. The light's beam cut the sea from the sky, swinging towards us and throwing a back glare against the huge shape of the boat. It was almost on us. I put the gun against my brother's head.

The light hit us like a blow, blinding us, and swung back, steadying. A voice came over a loudhailer.

'Hvem er de?'

Zhigalin touched my wrist. 'Not Soviet,' he said. 'Not Soviet.'

'Dreie til og berede de at redde! 'No,' I said, 'Norwegian,' and lowered the gun.

THE END