He forced himself at the beginning of the walk back, knowing from his careful observance on the way into the town that there were seven miles to cover and anxious for the maximum amount of remaining daylight. Sure of the way, he did not need the map he’d taken from the car and put in a side pocket of the rucksack, along with the camera. Yuri was confident he had followed the first rule of that murderous field exercise and merged inconspicuously into the background. This was going to be much easier than Bryansk.
He reached the humped road in just under an hour and slowed, trying to find as much cover as possible from the bordering trees, which was not as easy as he had hoped it would be. There was a wide, separating verge and in places a ditch. Before he rounded the corner just prior to the dirt road into which Petr Levin had been driven, Yuri saw the helicopter: it was making tight circles now. Wanting to establish its pattern, Yuri jumped the ditch and ran into the treeline, entering only far enough into the forest to be hidden from the road, equally sure he was sufficiently concealed from the air. He squatted on the rucksack, back against a moss-covered fir, focusing upwards with the binoculars, the adjustments of which were stiff with newness and difficult at first to move. Gradually the machine widened its sweep, as it had been doing when it picked up the boy’s returning car. Yuri calculated it to be five minutes from the point of stationary hover until the helicopter was directly over the road and a further seven minutes before it reached the apogee of its manoeuvre and tightened the circle to return to what had to be directly over wherever the Levin family were being kept. Yuri acknowledged that aeronautically the surveillance was absolute and therefore professionally expert: unprofessionally it provided an almost perfect method of identification.
Yuri watched the manoeuvre twice more, to confirm his timings, and at the instant of hover went back to the road and managed to get within ten yards of the turning before having to run again into the trees to avoid detection. Near enough, he decided: from that point he would go entirely through the forest, avoiding any open area. And even here be carefuclass="underline" the eye follows movement, not stillness, had been another field edict. He chose a fir again because of its permanent covering and waited patiently beneath it for the helicopter to fly outwards and then in again, only moving when it neared the unseen house. From the outset the gradient was increasingly uphill and matchingly steep. With the self-imposed stop-start precaution and the snagging thickness of the undergrowth, it took Yuri almost a further hour to reach the peak and having done so he was still much farther away from the now visible building than he had expected to be. There was an odd, U-shaped rift caused by a river and although it was not a barrier between him and the house the land broke sideways, creating a valley before him.
With nothing intervening he had a perfect view of his objective, however. And was able, too, to see that the sun was already close to a mountain top beyond. The last hour before darkness, Yuri estimated: maybe a little more.
From the map he decided that the mountain later to obscure the sun was called Prospect and that the river was named Bantam: it appeared to feed into a huge lake of the same name, but he could not see that from where he crouched. He had slight difficulty again adjusting the binoculars but through them finally obtained a greatly enlarged view of the mansion-like house. And more. As he watched he saw two men come from a coppice within the ground, one with a telescopically-sighted gun crooked under his left arm. The other waved to the helicopter pilot on a return run and Yuri followed the path of the machine. Into view came a separate group of guards, three this time, one with a Doberman restrained tightly on a leash. The downdraft of the helicopter upset the dog, which began to fight against the lead and to bark: the sound did not reach Yuri.
Another man in the group made a gesture of greeting to someone out of Yuri’s vision and he shifted direction, perfectly to see the boy he’d observed leaving the Litchfield school. Yevgennie Pavlovich Levin was by his side. Yuri was just in time to see the defector respond to the wave. Yuri snatched his camera from the rucksack and managed three exposures, despite the focus being blurred. He tried the infinite setting but was still unsure if the man would be identifiable from that distance.
Yuri was about to press the button again when he heard the sound, the soft noise of something moving carefully against detection. Momentarily he stayed motionless, seeking the cause within his immediate vision, not daring even to turn his head. There was nothing. He lowered the camera, but to the cushion of pine needles and not the rucksack where it might have scraped against the canvas, looking as he did so to the left and then the right. Still nothing. It came again, closer this time. Behind him then. Yuri pressed himself against the bole of the tree, trying to assess his vulnerability. Bad, he decided; very bad. Wrong to make the slightest shift; safety in stillness, he remembered. He swallowed, thinking he could hear himself do it.
The doe snuffled into view from his left, nuzzling beneath the leaf mould. The animal saw Yuri as he saw it. Its head came up, in startled alertness: for several seconds it regarded him with brown-eyed curiosity and then hurried away, not panicked but at a trot. Yuri released his breath, shivering with the tension.
He looked back to the faraway house, still able to see Levin and his son. He needed to be closer, he thought. There would be just enough light, for about another half an hour. He let the helicopter clear the house and started at once down the hillside, not waiting for it to get as far away as he had earlier, finding an animal path and using it instead of trying to make his way through the delaying undergrowth. As he descended lower, where the trees were thicker, Yuri occasionally lost sight of the house and realized he could not descend too far, because he needed the elevation. Twice he had to halt when the aerial surveillance was directly overhead and on the last occasion, waiting, Yuri confronted his error. The dusk was making it difficult to see more than a few yards in the fast-darkening forest: the helicopter was already using lights. Just ahead was a knoll, from which he was sure he would be able to see over the valley floor into the house for the last opportunity.
And in deciding to make that one final attempt Yuri made his greatest miscalculation. The helicopter had passed and the Russian was actually starting up the incline when the siren screamed and the searchlight stabbed out from above, whitely illuminating the animal track only yards behind him.
Yuri kept going, to increase their mistake and get further away from the light, pulling into the undergrowth when the probe began splaying back and forth, gauging the sweep when it went uphill to plunge on down into the valley, fleeing from it. No safety in stillness now, he decided, panted breath burning into him: the only thing now was to run. But towards what? The siren sounded again, an obvious alert to the armed and dog-handling guards below, towards whom he was running.
He thrust sideways, off the track, stumbling over roots and fallen wood he could not see, face whipped by branches that stung and tore at him. He could actually feel the torch against his hip, through the rucksack, the light he needed but could not use because it would immediately show where he was. Going in the proper direction, he told himself: parallel with the slip road but away from its junction with the larger highway, the obvious place to block. Was there another linking road, the way he was heading? He could not remember, from the map: possible but the line could have indicated another tributary into the lake he’d not been able to see. And if it were a road, wouldn’t they block that exit, too? The rucksack was an encumbrance, the straps and buckles easily entangled, but Yuri refused to discard it, not wanting to leave any evidence of his detecting Levin.