Run through the storm and keep running.
It’s too far, and too slippery. They won’t see me in all this snow.
That’s dangerous thinking: they’ll be using field glasses and you’re black against white, don’t stop.
Feet skittering and the air freezing in the lungs, aching against the
teeth, stinging the eyes. They won’t see me now if I -
Don’t stop.
The whole world white and without perspective, without definition, a wilderness without end. Don’t stop.
The pace dizzying and the swirling snow mesmeric, I could run as easily with my eyes shut but that would send me off my balance and if I fell down again it would be for the last time because they’d seen me. The boulders were close now, great white shapes humped against the sky with only the grey of shadows to show where they were.
The thundering of the machine was a physical weight trying to push me down and I shouted at it but couldn’t hear anything. I had to look upward now because I was afraid of something so enormous pouncing on me without seeing it: in the final seconds I would have to take some kind of action, scratch at it, beat my hand against it before it blotted me out.
And here it came, a black mass taking shape in the whiteness, the snow beginning to whip into clouds under the storm of the rotors, the air screaming and the rocks trembling under the tumult coming from the machine. It was moving slowly and was low enough for me to see the numbers on it as I reached the boulders and pitched down and burrowed into the crevice below them and stayed there with my eyes shut and my lungs heaving while the sound drew down and over me, passing me by and leaving a vortex in the air that whipped and fluttered at the rocks before dying away, slowly dying away.
The silence was total.
8178716 38 198 18765413 17 1 829.
It was very cold. After the heated confines of the cockpit this degree of exposure was getting through to my bones. I hadn’t changed out of the uniform yet: it was added protection under the hunting furs.
The falling snow accentuated the silence: it provided movement and with movement there is usually noise and there was no noise, and the silence seemed more intense. There had been no further aerial activity: the helicopters had made three more runs along their line of search, spreading out each time they came back and flying slowly up the mountainside, following its contours. Now they had gone. I didn’t know whether they’d located the wreckage.
8 1876 23 489873890 38 782 1 0109.
In the final briefing my instructions had been to disappear at the end of the airborne phase by ejecting at very low altitude and letting the Finback fly into the Khrebet Tarbagatay range and destruct. The missile had taken care of this requirement and the only thing I had failed to do was to photograph the suspect village near Yelingrad, because the surface-to-air crews had opened fire too soon; but Yelingrad was the target area and I might dig up some material on the village later, possibly something better than low-level photographs.
19 28889198614 15 1555 166 1887.
Ferris hadn’t given me a gamma: I would have needed the matrix and co-ordinates and this way was much faster once I’d plugged in the introductory 8178716. There were ten variations and this was the sixth, indicated by the final numeral, and all I had to do was transpose, reverse and remove blind numbers.
Kirinski. Alexei Kirinski.
I went through them again. The films were to be removed from the camera, and the camera destroyed. A courier would take the films from me at a pretended time, when — re-read: 9198761846, using the sixth variation, not the seventh — at a prescribed time, when I could give him any material I might then have for transmission. The main subject of the orders was the man Kirinski. I was to investigate him and send a report, again by courier. He was a forty-two-year-old engineer and at present lived in Apartment 48 of the Union Building in Gromyko Prospekt, Yelingrad. And that was all.
I thought at first that it looked like a screening for entrapment, but they wouldn’t have mounted an operation the size of Slingshot, involving the USAF and NATO, just for three aerial pictures and a screening job: an agent-in-place could do that with his eyes shut. It could be that London was preparing to bring Kirinski across and wanted to make sure he was clean, or that he’d requested screening as a potential a-i-p, but the same objection applied: Slingshot was a mainline project and the target had to be something bigger than one isolated Russian.
Just before three o’clock I read the orders a fourth time and committed the essentials to memory and burned them, burying the ash. It was now below freezing and I got back into my niche and opened some more food concentrate and nibbled at it slowly: it was the same bloody protein amalgamate they’d given me the last time out and it tasted of fish. I munched some snow for dessert and then struck camp, getting out of the uniform and putting on the polo sweater and slacks. The hunting jacket and hat were some kind of ancient astrakhan and smelt of mothballs, but the fit was perfect and the feeling of chill eased off within a few minutes. The pain in the hip and shoulder was still a nuisance but I could move around well enough; the rib cage only hurt when I took too deep a breath.
I left only the fishing-rod behind, buried deep in a cleft among the boulders. The snow was now driving hard, across the mountainside and visibility was down to less than fifty feet. My tracks would be well covered but that was alclass="underline" there was no horizon now, and no visual reference for size or distance a sheer drop a few feet in front of me could look like a ledge much farther below, and a smooth area of snow could conceal loose stones and an incipient avalanche.
It took me nearly twenty minutes to find that fishing-rod again and screw it together; then I began moving down the mountain with it, tapping my way like a blind man.
The target area is always a trap.
I went into the railway station at nine o’clock in the morning, waiting until there was a train in and a certain amount of activity going on. The descent from the mountain had taken most of the night and I’d spent an hour on the horse-drawn wagon from the farmstead to the town: they’d found me walking with my bundle and had given me a lift after the woman had insisted on giving me some broth and watching me drink it; she had been very concerned and I’d promised to write when I arrived safely back in Moscow.
The target area is always a trap because your work is clandestine, and by definition you are doing something illegal and will have the whole strength of the local police department against you the moment you make a mistake. Once the police have got control of you the problem escalates and involves counter-intelligence, interrogation and the inevitable consignment to the labour camps or the firing squad. The thing is, of course, not to make that mistake.
This leads you to take precautions from the moment you enter the area, as a matter of routine: precautions even against dangers that can’t possibly exist. That was why, when I pushed my bundle into the parcel lockups at the left side of the booking office, I went across to the far side of the hall and bought a copy of Sovietskaya Kazakh and took up a secure position behind a crate of drilling-bits to watch the consignee from a distance of a hundred feet or so from the big plate-glass window I was using for the mirror. I gave it ten minutes and then left. The station master had the keys to those things but there was absolutely no chance of anyone’s taking an interest in me at this stage: I was merely instilling red-area routine into my movements so that they would become automatic.
I began working as soon as I left the station, checking for tags as an exercise and watching the people on the street, noting their dress, listening to their speech as I queued up in the government store and bought a cheap suitcase and a map of the city: they’d been out of stock at the station. Gromyko Prospekt was two miles away and I made a detour to get me to the only car-hire office marked on the map. Papers galore, of course, and I spread them out on the counter, noting that Credentials had used two different photographs for the social security card and the driver’s licence, and made them as dissimilar as they could. The personal identity propusk had the same photograph as the driver’s licence and their dates were within six months of each other, though I was stated to have been a journalist with the Sovietskaya Rossia for the past four years, covering the southern provinces.