Heating some water and washing, I tried to feel that Meridian had got back on track tonight: the generals were still hi Novosibirsk and I had their exact location and it looked as if we could rely on Rusakov at least to signal a warning when they made a move, and that was about as good as I could expect at this stage of the mission.
I don't know if I'd managed to convince myself about this but it didn't really matter because it was less than an hour later when I heard the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony come whistling softly through the dark and the support man came below deck with the radio for me and said he couldn't raise Ferris any more on the telephone, the night porter at the Hotel Karasevo said that room was empty now.
Chapter 21: ROGUE
He stood there watching me, Frome, he'd said his name was, the wavering light of the candle moving the shadows across his face, its reflection in his eyes, two pale flames, his breath clouding on the air.
Floating ice, colliding with the stem of the hulk, rang in the silence.
'And the woman?' I asked him. 'Rusakova?'
'She's gone too.'
He watched me, hands in bus-driver's gauntlets hanging at his sides, moisture glistening on his fur hat where he'd caught it, I suppose, when he'd ducked down through the hole in the timbers up there, bringing away snow.
'And all measures are being taken,' I said, a statement, not a question, something to say while I thought things out, of course all measures were being taken to find the DIF, at least find his tracks.
I felt like an astronaut — this is the nearest I can get to the idea of what it's like — losing one end of his life-line when he's out there on a space walk, floating away.
'Did he leave anything in his room?' I asked Frome.
'I don't know.'
'What about her — did she leave anything?'
'I don't know,' he said again.
'Then what the bloody hell do you know?'
Ice clinked out there on the river.
He watched me, Frome, the two pale flames in his eyes.
'Sorry,' I said.
'That's okay. I mean, there's not much to know, see. I tried phoning him several times and the switchboard said he couldn't be in his room, so I went round there and checked, found his door unlocked and the room empty, same as hers on the same floor.'
'No signs.'
'None I could see. I took a good — '
'Toilet things?'
'Still there. So were — '
'Scrambler gone?'
'Yes. And the bug sniffer.'
It didn't mean much. If anyone had got in there and managed to take Ferris they'd have taken those things as well, they weren't cheap and you'd never find any more like that in Russia.
'Bitch, isn't it?' I heard Frome say.
'What? Yes.' He was still standing there. 'You want to sit down?'
'No. I don't like leaving the car out there too long, bit of a giveaway. Try the walkie?'
I picked up the unit and switched it on and moved the dial off the squelch and pressed CALL and said Meridian a couple of times and got a response from support base.
'Executive,' I said. 'Two numbers for you.' Rusakov's at the camp, and his woman friend's in the town. 'If Rusakov can't signal, a man named Bakatin might come through, replacing him. Any news?'
Of Ferris. He'd know that.
'No. I'll raise you if he calls. The minute he calls.' Remembering to hope, scratching around for straws, they all were, Frome was, I was, any straw of comfort we could find.
All right, yes, that's putting it a fraction too dramatically, about the astronaut thing, I mean that poor bastard's going to finish up somewhere on the far side of Pluto one day with his super-trained athletic body shrivelled inside its metal-alloy shell and his wife remarried and his kids middle-aged, and when one of us poor bloody ferrets loses his DIF he loses his life-line in a way, but it's not that bad, we can go on foraging for ourselves, get home with our heads still on if we're lucky, it's just that when the mission's running hot we tend to get a bit edgy and the last thing we want to hear is that we're cut off from our director and hence from London Control.
Make a note, we should perhaps make a note here, should we not, my good friend, to get it put into the training manuals at Norfolk: Do not learn to regard the director in the field as your bloody mother.
'I'll need your radio manned,' I said into the unit, 'round the clock.'
'Yes, sir, understood.'
I shut down the signal and looked at Frome. 'Mind your head when you go back up there.'
I should have got used to the broken bells by now, but as the dark body of the river moved under its scales of ice the sound kept sleep away for a time, and then I lay drifting at last, the current turning me and turning me back as I kept the fur of the dead cat close against my face, using it as camouflage to deceive the men who were waiting there along the bank with their guns swinging as they moved, watching for the target, for me, on the surface of the river, but that must be a dream, perhaps of an earlier mission, I'm always having them, they never leave us, I've talked about it to others in the Caff, and now the feeling of movement across the scalp, the delicate exploratory scratching and then the first nibble, with the small sharp teeth rooting more boldly among the hair — Oh Jesus Christ and I swung up an arm and felt the soft warm body before it vanished into the shadows, not a dream this time, no, and I got up and found a length of timber and lay down again with one end of it under my hand, waiting but drifting down again after a while, down into the lulling silence of the delta waves before I felt it again, this time on my foot and I hit out with the bit of timber and felt a splashing across my cheek and hit out again and then sat up and saw it lying there, big as a boot, its blood pooling across the boards in the candlelight, some of it on my face.
It was gone four o'clock in the morning when I woke next time, swathed in the extra blankets with a hole for breathing through. I hadn't felt them again; perhaps they'd recognized the scream that thing had given for what it was, had heard death in it and kept their distance. I impressed future time on the subconscious and it woke me accurately at seven, an hour before first light. For my breakfast, turtle soup from one of the self-heating cans, with two hard-boiled eggs and a slice of that Christmas cake, 'twas the season, if not to be jolly, to indulge the appetite, on the sound and ingrained principle that I didn't know when I would eat again.
Then I opened the map Frome had brought me and spread it out in the candlelight, walking my fingers around the wooded area where the army camp took up three-quarters of a square kilometre. It was served by two minor roads that joined and made a fork three kilometres from the main gates of the camp. Then I folded the map and picked up the radio unit and left the hulk and put Meridian into extreme and imminent hazard, because I had no choice.
The crackle of gunfire came again, and the rooks took off from the poplars that laced the eastern horizon, wheeling and cawing. The rifle range was out of sight from here, below a fold in the ground, and the sound of the guns was muffled, echoing from the long corrugated iron huts that formed most of the camp.
The new day was frozen, as the days before had been, the earth invisible under the snow, the bare trees standing in a black iron frieze across the hill to the south. The air was motionless, its cold clamped to my face as I studied the landscape from beside the car.