At 09:53 I started up and put the headlights full on and reached forty miles per hour over the rough surface before I hit the brakes and began using the horn in short warning blasts as the yellow-lit windows of the signal-box loomed above me on the right. I was already running with the cinders crunching under my feet and the Trabant sliding to a halt with the door open and the hand brake on and the engine still running. The steps to the box were free of snow and dark with sand as I went up them two at a time and hit the door open.
“There’s a plane down across the line!”
One man, thin, greying, startled, dropping long-legged from the stool and standing uncertainly, staring at me.
“It’s blocking the down line — give me some flares!” I was looking around for them but the light was bad in here: a couple of enamel-shaded bulbs hanging low above the plotting desk that threw awkward shadows.
“Are there people?”
“What?”
“The pilot. Does he — ”
“Yes. Have you got a first-aid box too?”
He went on staring at me for another two seconds, was I a drunk, was I a joker, was I a psychopath, so forth, then he moved steadily and threw one of the big metal levers and ducked below the plotting desk and dragged out a bucket with a wooden cover and swung it towards me. I caught it and he pulled a cupboard door open and slid a box down, white-painted with a red cross, using his fist to make sure the lid was secure.
“You have a lamp?” he asked me.
“Yes.” I made for the door.
“Where is the machine down?”
“Just this side of the bridge.”
The Litsky Bridge?”
“Right.”
I left the door open and dropped down the steps and ran to the Trabant, gunning up and slinging a wave of snow and cinders into the moonlight as I skid-turned and hit the lights on and got going. At this point the time pattern became critical because the train had to reach the bridge before the emergency crews got there and in snow conditions it could be half an hour late, an hour, it was totally unpredictable and therefore characteristic of what happens when a wheel comes off: you can keep going but you’re always just this side of a smash till you make a mistake and then the whole lot goes.
I wouldn’t have to make a mistake but Gorodok could make one and so could Chechevitsin and so could London because they were running this thing by remote control with no director in the field and the courier line beginning to blow. We could go down on luck alone because tonight’s action was strictly shut-ended: if the Tashkent express arrived any time after the deadline I’d have to get out, and the deadline was the precise moment when the emergency crews would start asking questions. If they got here before tie train came they’d want to know where the aircraft had come down and I could expand the timing quite a bit by telling them it was between here and the signal-box, hadn’t they seen it, so forth: the embankment was forty feet high along this stretch and they could easily miss any wreckage because it’d be above them and unlit. But then they’d come back because they hadn’t found anything and at that point they’d start asking me questions and that would be when I’d have to get out of here and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t use the phone in the signal-box and report a hoax and get me stopped by a police patrol on my way back to the city, strictly shut-ended if I pushed the deadline to that particular point and just as bad if I decided to get out before they suspected a hoax because they’d douse the flares and change the signal and let the train go through and Gorodok would get off at Yelingrad and walk straight into a snatch, no bloody go: the classic mortality rate of a courier line after the first courier gets blown is a hundred per cent and that’s perfectly logical because they’re a chain and a chain is as strong as the first link to break, finis.
By 09:59 I was near the bridge and saw that the signal for the down line was still at red. It was a dead-straight stretch and I left the Trabant on rough ground, kicking the throttle and holding the wheel hard over and burning the snow off the surface to leave me with a reliable take-off pad for use in an emergency. The flares were a foot long, red-paper-wrapped pitch with an iron spike at one end and a friction-ignition cap at the other. The moonlight was good enough to use as background and I staked them out at fifty-foot intervals on both sides of the track but left them unlit because on the wrapping paper their duration was given as fifteen minutes and they could burn out before the train got here if it was late.
I began waiting.
From where I was standing, at the top of the embankment, the night had two components: a disc and a dome, the gigantic disc of the earth’s surface spreading blue-white under the moon and the gigantic dome of the sky, pricked and glittering with stars. Only the bridge made a connection between the two, breaking the skyline a quarter of a mile away with its dark skeletonic girders curving across the snows like the bones of a dead rainbow. In the opposite direction, to the north-east, I thought I could glimpse the windows of the signal-box a mile distant, a yellow point of light that I could see only when I looked slightly away from it, and not always then. That was where the headlights would begin showing along the service road, a little while from now.
Eastwards a small plane was taking-off from the airfield; its navigation lights were still invisible but I could hear the distant snarl of its engine as the power came on. Moments later the red and green motes of light began rising and floating across the stars, turning and drifting towards the south as the engine’s note died, over the minutes, leaving the night soundless. To the south-west, beyond the Litsky Bridge, there was nothing. The whiteness of the land, lit from overhead, had lost all definition: I could only tell where it ended by noting where the stars began. Somewhere in that direction was the train, and Gorodok.
10:10 and from this moment my nerves began tightening: when the ETA is reached you start thinking that a minute late is going to mean an hour late, and the situation seems critically changed.
Gorodok.
Who was Gorodok?
Smith, Jones, Robinson, Brown, nothing in a name, but he was certainly English because a courier can be any nationality providing he’s not in a line, and the Bureau has a strict ruling on the point. Too many operations have come a mucker because of a blown courier line, and apart from all the other considerations it can be deadly when it goes up. Two years ago we crashed a mission in Scandinavia like that and the ruling was established immediately afterwards.
The air was freezing and I had to keep on the move, going down the embankment and along the road and up again fifty yards on to make channels in the snow: if I had to get out of here fast I didn’t want to waste any time doing pratfalls. In one place there was a lump of rock about half-way down and I pulled it out of the frozen earth and threw it farther away and filled in the hole with gravel and looked at my watch again and saw we were going to cut this fine, too fine for comfort, 10.21 and the night quiet with no sound from the south-west, nothing to break that silence out there.
This time I was certain I could see the yellow light of the signal-box, low on the horizon. He had seemed an efficient, steady-handed man, the type who would think of telephoning the airfield while he was waiting for the tram, asking them if they knew there was a plane down across the line not far to the west of them: in which case there would be a helicopter over with a searchlight and as soon as it had made its first run I’d have to get out because they could scan the track for five miles in five minutes and report it clear.