The men on the landing stage had opened fire with their rifles—he could hear the bullets pinging off the metal sides. His boat was now about a hundred yards adrift and slowly gaining. Sweat was pouring off their faces as they strained at the oars.
There was a thumping explosion on the far bank, and Komarov lifted his eyes in time to see something—or someone—heading skyward above the muzzle-loaders.
One of the guns had exploded. The Kerki Soviet would probably need a new chairman.
Piatakov fired a burst over the heads of the soldiers in the two small boats, hoping that they would turn tail like their colleagues in Burdalik. A bullet whining off his improvised breastplate suggested that they intended otherwise, and he raked one boat, dropping at least one soldier and causing two others to take to the water. But when he tried to swing the barrel into line with the other boat, it wouldn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” Brady shouted.
“The mounting’s jammed!”
“Leave it!” Brady yelled as he ran down the steps. “You take the port side,” he told Piatakov, gesturing in that direction. “Anyone tries to get aboard, tell them they don’t have a ticket.”
As Komarov’s skiff pulled alongside, a well-aimed grappling hook tagged it to the moving paddle steamer. He watched as Maslov and the two soldiers clambered up and through the deck railings, then followed. There was no one else in sight. The machine gun had fallen silent; the only firing was coming from the landing stage, the bullets bouncing off the ship like blind mosquitoes. So where was the enemy?
Someone ran along the deck above them, the footfalls disappearing around the stern.
“Take the other side,” he told Maslov. “You go with him,” he told one of the soldiers. “Shoot on sight.”
The young Ukrainian tried for a gallant smile and only narrowly failed. Komarov stood where he was for a moment, watching the two men go, aware of the sweat running down either side of his nose. He hadn’t felt this frightened since his days as a trainee policeman.
“All right,” he said calmly, as much to himself as to the soldier beside him. “Slowly.”
They edged forward, Komarov in front, trying to keep their heads below the windows. The rifle fire from the landing stage had stopped, and all he could hear was the thunderous spinning of the paddle wheel. Then someone shouted something from a long way off, something unintelligible.
Komarov stopped abruptly, and the soldier stumbled into his back. The engine room! They should have gone straight for that and put the boat out of action. He remembered all the times he’d thought that you couldn’t make a policeman out of a soldier. It seemed the opposite was also true.
Two shots rang out on the other side of the boat, one crack, one boom. Maslov! Komarov hurried forward, looking for a way across, but all he found was a view across the open hold. Maslov was nowhere to be seen, but the soldier who’d gone with him was draped across the deck rail like a casually thrown-off coat.
“Comrade!” a mocking voice shouted behind him.
Komarov whirled, and what felt like a sledgehammer hit him in the right shoulder. He tried to lift the arm, and realized the gun was gone from his hand. The soldier’s rifle clattered onto the deck.
Piatakov was standing some twenty feet away, holding his gun on both of them.
Hearing footsteps behind him, Komarov turned, hand on his shoulder. The American was walking toward him, a smile on his face.
“Deputy Chairman Komarov himself,” Brady said. “We are honored.”
Komarov stared stonily back at him. He could feel the blood coursing through his fingers.
“Start swimming,” Brady snapped at the soldier, who, with one guilty glance at Komarov, vaulted the rail and disappeared into the foaming water.
“He’ll make a useful hostage,” Piatakov was saying.
“I don’t think so,” Brady said.
Komarov examined his gore-soaked hand. Stretching away behind the American, the red-brown Oxus looked for all the world like a river of blood. As the other man pulled the trigger, his late wife’s face appeared in front of his eyes.
Realizing that his guard had vanished, McColl had walked down to the landing stage. “If I fail,” Komarov had told him, “then you will have your chance.”
Aboard the receding riverboat, Aidan Brady and another man were standing over Komarov’s body, both looking back at the town. Then Brady reached down and dragged the corpse to the edge of the craft, before tipping it into the river with a thrust of his boot.
Caitlin lowered the binoculars, lowered her head. Her fingernails bit into her palms.
“They are escaping,” Kuliyeva said disappointedly, as if they were watching a film and the ending had proved unexpectedly sad.
“I’m going down,” Caitlin told her.
“But—”
“I’m going down.”
Kuliyeva stepped aside, then followed her down the stone steps and out through the crumbling gateway. In the middle of the river, a man or corpse was being dragged aboard the surviving skiff. The paddle steamer had passed from view around the next bend in the river, a hanging line of smoke offering proof of its passage.
Less than an hour had passed since Komarov had ushered her into Kuliyeva’s empty office, shut the door behind them, and told her he had no doubt of her loyalty to the revolution. He had, he said, already informed Ghafurov and Kuliyeva that they should, in the event of his and Maslov’s deaths, take their orders from her.
Satisfied that her English lover was interested only in thwarting his own people’s plot, Komarov had further arranged that McColl would be freed to continue the pursuit, should failure on his own part make that necessary. He hoped Caitlin would offer the Englishman any assistance he needed to reach the border. Whether or not she went with him was of course up to her.
As Caitlin started down the narrow road, she caught sight of Jack on the distant jetty, staring up the river, like someone who’d just missed a boat.
September 1921
Unworthy Empire
The tonga deposited Alex Cunningham at the end of the Kudsia Road. He lifted out his suitcase, paid the preagreed amount, and assured his young driver that there was no point in waiting. The boy turned the horse in a tight half circle, and offered up the usual reproachful look before gently twitching the reins and rattling off down the road.
Cunningham took a deep breath and started walking, mindful of the hot tropical sun and the strange, sweet scents of the flourishing gardens. Hundreds of invisible birds seemed to be singing their hearts out, and the distant sound of racket on ball, interrupted by bursts of excited laughter, offered evidence of human life behind the curtains of bougainvillea.
At a cursory glance, the Indian Political Intelligence building was just another European bungalow in the Delhi cantonment, but the soldiers lurking in the trees and the wireless mast reaching up to the heavens rather gave it away. A replacement had presumably been included in the plans for the new city five miles to the south, but Cunningham doubted the setting would have the same charm.
He had no sooner shown the soldiers his papers than a tall, fair-haired young man in a shirt and slacks appeared in the doorway. “Cunningham?” the man asked with a faint Yorkshire accent. “Morley, Nigel,” he said, offering his hand. “We’ve been expecting you.” He looked around. “You might as well leave your luggage here for the minute. We’ve got you a bungalow near the Ridge. Come this way.”