10:24.
Silence across the night.
Whoever he was he knew what he’d got to do because we had a definite rendezvous and he’d be expecting the train to stop and he’d be ready. God knew when the alert had gone through but they must have warned him before he boarded the thing at Tashkent: they couldn’t have got a message to him after that. The network was in a big hurry — he could’ve been simply sent to ground and someone else could have come in his place to take over the films but that hadn’t happened and the obvious answer was that they hadn’t got anyone else to replace him, but I don’t like obvious answers and I would have said that London wanted the films as soon as they could get them and I wished them luck because someone had blown Gorodok and they’d have his description out and he was going to have a bad time getting clear.
Who had blown him?
I stood listening to the night. My hands were now numb and I blew into my gloves but my breath was cold before it reached the skin. The stars had the glitter of broken icicles and the snow was an ocean, stilled and frozen, capping the curve of the planet and reaching to infinity, making it seem absurd to wait here for a thousand tons of metal to come steaming out of the void with the force of a fallen comet: there was a degree of sensory deprivation in this vast silence as I stood here, small as a molecule, between earth and sky.
Of course it didn’t strictly matter who had blown him. What mattered was that the whole of the line was now vulnerable and would become exposed if he was caught and interrogated: it wasn’t certain that the network could alert the rest of them before Gorodok was broken and the KGB went to work on what he’d given them. A courier is a mobile entity and not always at the end of a phone.
10:32.
So there was snow on the line or the points were frozen or there’d been a derailment because we were now running twenty-two minutes late.
Or they’d stopped the train at Alma Ata and taken Gorodok off and he was sitting there now under the bright lights and they were starting with a cosh. They might have to work all night on him but in the end -
Sounds north-east, vehicles, and I turned round with a jerk and listened, cupping my ears. Lights. The sounds were intermittent, a series of low rumbles, and the lights flickered up and down. They were coming from the direction of the signal-box and I watched them. The distance was a mile and over this road they’d keep up a good speed and be here within three minutes.
I turned and looked the other way but there was nothing.
Four and a half miles south-west of the Litsky Bridge there was a tunnel marked on the map and the express would use its whistle on the far side of it, assuming standard procedure; and in this stillness I’d hear it over that distance unless the emergency crews were too close by then. Their headlights were bright now, already throwing shadows over the scrubland and silvering the telephone wires along the track.
I gave it ten seconds and stooped and lit the first flare and then the next, moving back from side to side until there were ten of them going, their short flames reddening the snow. The Trabant was directly below me now and I slithered down the embankment through one of the channels I’d made and got in and started up and gunned into a half turn with the lights off and headed for the bridge.
The flares would burn for fifteen minutes and in that time the crews would be here asking questions and if I told them the plane had come down half-way between here and the signal-box they’d take less than ten minutes to look for it and come back and at that point I’d have to get out and if they’d left one of their vehicles in the way I’d be blocked and it’d be no go.
The light was tricky and I hit something with a front wheel and the Trabant lurched and half-spun and dug into the snow at the side of the road until I banged the shift into first gear and put the power on and burned the snow down to solid ground and took off again with the back end snaking across the surface until we got traction. On the far side of the bridge I slung it in a U-turn and stopped under the first outrigger girder from the south end and got out and stood listening.
The only sound was from the north-east and I watched the lights moving in line and slowing as they saw the flares, the first vehicle halting below the embankment and dropping its crew off. These were not railway emergency units: their lights were shining on the next truck ahead as they stopped in convoy and I could see the Red Star insignia on their sides. The closest place to find help must have been the army camp and that’s where the signalman had phoned.
Soldiers were climbing the embankment near the flares, the blood-red light spreading over their uniforms and glinting on their rifles as they stood together, uncertain what to do. I could hear an officer shouting.
The flares had seven minutes to burn and I turned and walked to the other end of the bridge, watching the snows to the south-west and seeing nothing. The deadline had shifted to a new phase: it would now depend on how long the officers in that unit took to decide there was no plane down and go back to the signal-box and report the line clear. The journey would take them two minutes and the night was freezing; they wouldn’t stay here very long.
I heard shouting again and saw that a party of men had been formed up and was off on a jog-trot down the track: it had obviously been decided that the service road didn’t offer a good enough view and that a search by foot parties was indicated. A second one was starting off, with an NCO running beside it. The leading transport got into motion, turning and going slowly back along the foot of the embankment.
Whistle.
Or my imagination. I turned and looked to the south-west again, cupping my hands behind my ears and hearing nothing. The snows were infinite beneath an infinite sky, and the track’s perspective was lost to sight within a hundred yards of the bridge where I was standing. Somewhere to my right an owl called again and I cursed it because I wanted to bring the vastness of that silence out there to my ears and pick it over, searching for the one sound that sooner or later must break it. All I could hear was the tramp of the soldiers’ boots along the track behind me and the rumbling of the transport on the move, and I had to shut them out of my consciousness, keeping my ears and my whole body oriented towards the southwest. And then it came again, a far note vibrant on the winter air, from this distance as faint as the, piping of a flute among the snows. It sounded a third time and died abruptly as the tram entered the tunnel four miles away.
Behind me the whole convoy of trucks had begun moving off, their lights swinging across the slope of the embankment in a sparkling wash as they accelerated nose to tail, their rear lamps farming a ruby chain that lost size and definition as they rolled towards the signal-box. Nearer and half-concealed by the structure of the bridge the flares were burning low. The deadline was close but there was nothing I could do so I turned again to face the south-west and for the first time saw a gleam of light below the horizon and heard the constant tremble of sound that was coming into the land.
The signal was behind me, a hundred yards down the track, and I didn’t need to watch it because I’d hear the levers if they moved, and the weight of the arm coming down. The rumbling of the army transports had died away, with the tramp of the soldiers’ boots along the track. Time was taking over and the last few minutes were running out: the flares were burning low and when they finally guttered there would be only the signal left to stop the tram. But if the military reported the line clear then the signal would change and the train would go through and I’d stand here watching it as it carried Gorodok to the trap.