And if that was his plan, the hail of dum-dums would not only obliterate the generals. It would blow Meridian into Christendom.
He was still watching me. The field-glasses hadn't moved since I'd seen them lock onto the image of the Skoda.
Gunfire, echoing from the huts. I kept still, watching the twin glint from among the trees, staring him out.
He would have plans for me, too, now that he'd seen me. It had been the major calculated risk I'd had to take. If he were here to wipe out the generals with a burst of fire he would do the same with me, immediately afterwards, because I'd present a threat: at the least I would be a witness to his act of assassination and at most I might intercept him when he left the hill and block his run, leave him set up for the armoured cars. But perhaps he wouldn't wait for that. Perhaps he would deal with me first, soon, get me out of the way, as a spider moves onto the web and removes a foreign object that has fallen there and then goes back into cover to wait for the fly.
That was the risk, but it was calculated: it's the only kind I'll take.
And I had options. Perhaps, for instance, I could talk to him.
He was still watching me, so I started the engine. He hadn't swung the field-glasses away, was still wondering who I was and what I was doing here. I wanted him to see me move off, so that he could follow me with the glasses, know that I was coming. I didn't want to surprise him: he might react, and lethally. I had to approach him overtly — he knew that I knew he was watching me; I wouldn't be some honest burgher out here to admire the view, because all the honest burghers in Novosibirsk were in the queues for a loaf of bread, poor buggers, be there all bloody day. He would know, that man on the hill, that I would be one of his kind, up to nothing innocent, and perhaps might sense a kindred spirit in the field.
A touch optimistic this morning, aren't we?
Shuddup.
The snow broke under the tyres as I moved down to the fork in the road, and the bodywork creaked as we shimmied over the ruts. I had options, yes, but there weren't any others 1 could choose at this particular time. They were for later, if he proved a danger to Meridian, as I believed he was; then I would try to get past his weapons and contain him, bring him away from here, take him to the support base and tell them to look after him, get him medical attention if that were necessary, if he put up too much of a struggle and had to be subdued with some of the more extreme techniques.
I wished him no harm, be this noted. In looking for the death of those two generals he would, I'm reasonably sure, be seeking to dispatch them to the same Elysian climes to which they would have dispatched others, perhaps hundreds, in the execution yards. The late Gennadi Velichko, with at least a Rusakov's blood on his hands, had been their close confederate.
The snow crunched under the tyres, the chains clinking now on the roadway, where military traffic had pounded the surface and reached the hardtop. I couldn't see from here whether he was still watching me. I didn't need to see. He was watching me very carefully, I knew that, and a tingling sensation began in the exact centre of my forehead. It was familiar, and didn't rate any attention: this wasn't the first time I'd moved deliberately into a potential line of fire and felt the phantom impact of a bullet, perhaps this time a dum-dum, not my favourite, they blow the whole thing into a chrysanthemum, nothing left but the stalk.
I was halfway there now, a quarter of a kilometre from where I'd last seen him: a snow bank had blotted him out as I climbed the hill. He would use this, if he were trained, to change his position and turn the car to face my direction so that he could see me through the windscreen when I appeared; or he might get out and stand there with the assault rifle ready to swing up into the aim as soon as he saw me. Then there'd be the delicate business of going closer to him under the gun, close enough to talk to him, and then, if the talk broke down and he told me to get out of this area on pain of instant death, close enough to get behind the weapon and effect a change in things. That would be the tricky bit.
I kept a steady pace in low gear, bumping over the ruts, watching for him among the higher trees.
I don't like this. You won't have a chance if he -
Oh, piss off.
Watching carefully now, trying to find the profile of his car or part of it, enough of it to know if he'd turned it round or got out to wait for me.
Watch carefully.
The snow crunched under the wheels.
You won't have a chance if he -
I've told you before, piss off.
Crackle of gunfire and sweat broke instantly.
The rooks flew up from the camp.
Keeping a steady pace up the hill. Any change in the scene at this point — sudden acceleration, a burst of speed — could trigger his nerves and the gun.
There were widening columns of light now between the trees where I'd seen him last, but the configuration of his car wasn't there. He might have turned it, so that its narrower front-end profile would be presented, but I thought I should see it, even then: I'd marked his location at the outset, where the branch of a tree had hung down at an angle, broken by a storm.
He'd moved the car. This was where he'd been, less than a hundred yards away — and then I saw him, moving in the distance along the hill road, and I gunned up and lost the rear end and steadied things and gunned up again more carefully and started building up the speed, saw him again as the road straightened, saw that I was holding him now — at a distance but holding him.
The observer drove away, Rusakov had told me, before he could be challenged.
Skittish, then.
He was driving something European, not Soviet, possibly a SAAB 504 but nothing fast like a Porsche. The speed factor didn't come into things in any case: I'd simply have to gain on him by playing with the gears to get as much traction as possible on the snow, keep the Skoda on the road, keep him in sight until I could draw close enough to see where he was going, catch him if I could, yes, but in these conditions it wouldn't be easy.
He was still the same distance ahead of me when the road dropped from the hill and straightened out, and I was trying to bring the speed up a degree when I saw he was pulling away, not fast but gradually, taking me three kilometres, four into the desolate open ground between the military camp and the suburbs of the town, and it was here that he slowed and then swung in a U turn until he was facing me and the first shots hit the front of the Skoda low down and began smashing their way upwards in a raking volley of fire as I dropped below the windscreen and it was blown out and the shots began hammering into the metal roof in a deafening percussion storm that blanked out conscious thought, I was only aware of closeness to death, could only see the snow and the sky revolving slowly as the Skoda rolled and churned among the drifts and hit rock and bounced and rolled again, rearing now with the front end going down and the whole thing swinging over, over and down, crashing amidst whiteness, whiteness and silence and then a sunburst, sounds dying away.
Chapter 22: ZOMBIE
It had happened before.