‘They’re giving up, they ain’t following.’ Every pace brought new pain to Ripper as the scar tissue forming over his burns was stretched and broken by the jarring strain of keeping up with the others.
Only a smattering of single shots chased them across the strip of ploughed land behind the school, and even that petered out as they reached the steep slope of the valley wall.
‘It is not that they are giving up,’ blood trickled from beneath the cuff of Boris’s smock and over his hand to drip from his fingers, ‘it is that we no longer matter to them. They have what they want.’ There was only a dull sensation of discomfort from the bullet wound in his forearm, and when he reached for a handful of pliant branches of a young pine to pull himself up a difficult section between craggy boulders, he was relieved to find he had the unimpaired use of the limb, there was no fracture. Until now he’d been frightened to use it, expecting agony and the confirmation of its being shattered when he did. Inside his sleeve there was a growing damp stickiness.
‘I told you we should not leave them.’ Andrea didn’t care that her words might carry to others besides the officer. ‘You should have let me finish them. The Russians will make much use of them, and you will have failed.’
There was no one else Revell would have let speak to him like that, certainly no one else in the squad. He resented what she said, and for the first time realized that having her close was not always going to be fun. Her way of reducing all situations to black and white was not his. In the church he’d been presented with a far more complex decision ‘than she realized. It was not a simple choice between eliminating a few worthless traitors or letting the Russians win. She offered him the option of permitting an atrocity, of being party to a war crime and that he couldn’t do. Damn it, that was what they were fighting.
All of them at various times complained at how the NATO forces were forced to fight clean while the communists used every dirty trick in the book plus many more of their own invention, but when it came to it, when they had the choice of doing things that way themselves, inevitably they balked.
This wasn’t the time or place he could explain all that too her, that’s if she’d even been prepared to try to understand, and so he said nothing, exaggerating the difficulty of the scree slope he was negotiating and pretending absorption with that to the exclusion of all else.
The ground rose fast, near vertical in places and within a short while they were looking down on the roofs of the village, spread in a ribbon along the floor of the valley. Twice they had to call a halt to enable Ripper and Boris to catch up, and both times took advantage of the respite to gulp air into their into their aching lungs.
‘Either I’m getting old, or we’re a good way above sea level.’ Dooley eased the straps of his pack and rifle as they started up again.
‘Bit of both I expect, but mostly it must be the old dames you go with sucking the life as well as your spunk out of you.’ Burke looked at Dooley struggling to climb a difficult patch, a slope littered with shale-like stone that slid away from beneath his feet as he placed them. ‘Help a bit if you got rid of that pack. It could have cost you your bloody life if it’d snagged as we bailed out. Still could if it drags you off this fucking mountain.’
‘There ain’t no way I’m chucking this.’ Dooley hitched its straps more securely onto his shoulders, sliding back some distance as he did. ‘This is my shitty future in here, where I go it goes.’
‘Shut your gabbing and climb.’ They were becoming spread out, and Revell recognized the danger of their becoming separated in this broken country. The journey back on foot was going to be hard and long, tackling it as individuals they would stand no chance, sticking together for mutual support they would.
A last effort and they made the crest, to find themselves on a knife edge ridge that fell away as steeply before them as the climb they’d just completed. Away into the distance stretched a succession of similar features, interspersed with hills that were little more than piles of rock dotted with sparse stands of fir and pine. They were as devoid of colour as the bare hills, leached of life by the poisonous yellow rain the Russians used in such concentrations.
Before starting the descent, Revell looked back at the church. All he could see was the tower and a part of the roof, none of the activity that he knew there would be around it. Beyond the compact confines of the small settlement, still stranded amid the flood waters like beached whales were the Russian tanks. Tiny figures waded about them, working without sign of urgency.
As he was about to give the order to move, Revell caught a glint of bright reflected light further down the valley, and then heard the beat of the gunships’ blades thrashing through the thin air. The sun flashed again from the domed canopies of the tandem cockpits, and as the chopper banked he saw the weapons operator hunch over his sights.
During his pacing of the room Rozenkov had approached the radio a dozen times, and the telephone as often. He’d touched neither. If ever he got his hands on Major Morkov… As far as Department A of the KGB was concerned the whole operation had become a disaster, and far worse than that for him personally. To think, only hours before such power had been not just within his reach but actually in his grasp, and now it was about to be torn from him.
At least he had some small consolation in knowing that Military Intelligence was not likely to come out of it well either. The last intercepted message had shown them calling urgently for medical assistance. There would be no impressive press conferences, no television interviews. All that the GRU had gained was a trio of dying civilians. If they had any sense they would not try to make overmuch of that, the capitalist editorials would soon point out which side it was that had seeded the area with toxins and bacteria…
It came to him suddenly, and he knew it was the only solution, the only way by which he could hope to salvage something. He grabbed the phone. ‘Connect me with the Kremlin. I wish to speak with Comrade Politburo member Ivan Forminski.’ The wait seemed interminable. ‘Then put me through to him at his dacha, it is of the highest priority.’ Again there was a long delay as Moscow’s telephone system torturously routed the call through the several manual switchboards involved.
‘Rozenkov, Colonel Rozenkov, Head of Department… Yes, I’ll wait… Comrade Forminski? It is Rozenkov. Forgive my asking, Comrade, is this a secure line?… Then I shall try to be as clear as I can, Comrade Forminski. It is about the deal that was discussed recently at the meeting… yes Comrade, the one that is of special interest… Yes,’ he changed hands and wiped his sweaty palm on the side of his jacket, ‘I have to tell you that the foreign goods have become spoiled… I understand your disappointment, Comrade… The contamination is due to interference and clumsy handling by another member of our cooperative… Then would our customer rather wait for another consignment?’
The minute he waited for the reply was the longest of Rozenkov’s life, dragging on forever. It came, a single word. ‘Thank you Com…’
He was talking to himself. As he shakily replaced the receiver he had to sit, he was shattered, utterly drained.
He would not be getting that immediate confirmation of his appointment, it and the promotion would have to be gained the hard way by three months’ grinding slog at petty detail. But at least he had that second chance, if he tidied the loose ends in a satisfactory manner, discreetly, thoroughly. And in doing just that he could extract a measure of revenge on Military Intelligence, whose meddling had almost cost him his career. He reached for the radio…