It must have welled inside Molenkov, but whatever had been dammed now burst out. ‘Yashkin, have you seen one?’
‘Seen what?’
‘An explosion.’
‘What explosion? What are you talking about?’
‘Have you seen a nuclear explosion? With your own eyes?’
Had Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin ever lied to his friend, Colonel (Ret’d) Igor Molenkov? He couldn’t remember having done so.
‘I have not.’
‘I thought you had, at Semipalatinsk-21.’
‘I have never seen a nuclear explosion, big or small.’ He couldn’t remember offering even the most trifling untruth to his friend. If his friend had asked him, after they had gone their separate ways in the fruit and vegetable market at Sarov, in the late afternoon when prices were lowest, whether he had found potatoes, cabbage or turnips at what could be afforded, and he had enough for Mother and himself, he would have said what he had bought — and then he would have shared. If he were down to the last bucket of coal, needed as a base under wood for the kitchen stove, and his friend came to the door to ask if he could spare some, he would not have denied that he had it. He had always shared the truth with his friend.
‘In your papers, do I not remember seeing you had the security clearance to accompany weapons to Semipalatinsk-21 and for the test site?’
‘I did the escort but didn’t visit the test site.’ He lied again.
‘You passed up that opportunity?’
‘I have never seen an explosion, and have never visited a test site, so let it go.’
The weapon had been taken from Arzamas-16 by road to Kazakhstan. The journey had lasted five days, and Yashkin — then a lieutenant — had been third in command of the detachment of 12th Directorate troops. The device, and he did not know its power or the delivery system intended for it, was to be exploded deep underground. There would be no mushroom cloud and no flash, as there had been in earlier years when First Lightning was detonated, and the RDS-37 hydrogen bomb. The one he had seen was called Project 7. He could not have described it honestly. If he had, his friend would have abandoned him. He did not yet believe fully in Molenkov’s commitment. At the edge of the Semipalatinsk-21 test site was the dry bed of the Chagan river, and a shaft had been sunk among the stones. Kilometres back, safe in a bunker with reinforced-glass slits to view through, he had waited, heard the countdown and had not known what to expect. First the movement of the riverbed, then a towering column of stones, mud, earth and rock as strata and layers from far down were thrown up. The noise had pierced the bunker, a rumbling roar that he couldn’t describe adequately. The concrete floor had shaken, men had clung to walls and chairs, and coffee cups had fallen from the table. The cloud had surged into a clear sky and darkened the sunlight. It had reached its height but had not dispersed for many hours, and dirt from the far down subsoils coated the ground. He had been among those permitted, the next day, to go forward. He had seen a crater that was a hundred metres deep and four hundred wide, and the ground’s contours had changed. He had heard, the next year, that the explosion had formed a dam that would block the flow of the Chagan river in spring when the winter snows melted, and would make a new lake. He had heard, also, the year before his dismissal, that Lake Chagan was dead and polluted, contaminated by radiation. He could not have told his friend what he had seen.
‘If you say so.’
He pulled out recklessly and hooted. The tractor driver slewed to the side, and the Polonez had enough room, barely, to squeeze past. He had to mount the verge and the car bucked, but he had silenced the questions and would not have to lie again. Molenkov grabbed the dashboard and braced himself.
The most incredible sight Oleg Yashkin had witnessed in his life was the eruption in the bed of the Chagan river, and no man or child in Russia would live long enough for it to be safe to walk where the spring waters had made a lake.
He said, ‘I think we’ve made good time. We’ve earned a bath and good food tonight.’ He talked then, with his friend, of the beers they would drink, and how many, and what was the local brewery in the Kaluga district, how often they would need to get up to piss in the night, and the laughter returned.
The hawaldar told the Crow — and sighed, holding out his hands as if to mark the dimensions of the sum — that a huge amount of money was guaranteed.
The Crow told him that the guarantee was from the Base, whose word had never faltered, and was not an advance of one-tenth already made in Dubai.
The hawaldar told the Crow that the necessary messages had been sent by courier to a German city, that confirmation had been received of the courier’s arrival, and the acceptance by a colleague and trusted friend to make payment.
The Crow told the hawaldar that he would be gone from the Gulf in the morning, would fly to Damascus, and from there the trail of his movements would be lost.
A construction-site foreman and a banker of the Islamic faith prayed together. Then they hugged. The hawaldar had prayed fiercely and hugged tightly. He had thought the Crow to be a man of the greatest importance if he was entrusted with purchasing an item for ten million American dollars. He showed the Crow out of his villa and asked if he would ever return to the harbour-front skeletons at Dubai. His answer was a noncommittal shrug. So the hawaldar asked a question that had concerned him since he had met this man: how was it possible that the giant crane stayed stable when the winds blew in from the Gulf? Patiently, the Crow detailed the science of cantilever weights, and he found the answer fascinating. He watched the Crow walk to his car, climb into it and drive away. He thought he was a small part in a great network, one of the many wheels turning behind a clock face, and that so many others, of whom he would never know, were also wheels in the clock.
‘I’m going to be away for a few days,’ he announced, breaking the silence at the evening meal.
‘How is that possible?’ Sak’s father asked. ‘There are three more days of term.’
‘The classroom laboratory is now closed. A school trip is planned to Europe in the autumn, but if it is to be successful it must be reconnoitred now.’ He was fluent at deception, had been taught well.
‘That will be nice for you,’ his mother said.
He saw on their faces — in the dark chestnut eyes of his father, the pale blue ones of his mother — relief. They did not know the full reason why, that afternoon in January 2002, he had arrived at the front door of the guesthouse as they prepared for their evening’s clients. He had had two bulging suitcases of his possessions from the hostel room at Aldermaston. From the West Midlands, he had lethargically chased some work opportunities in academic research under the name of Steven Arthur King and with hospital trusts, but he had gone for a job with police forensic investigation when hoping for ethnic discrimination with the name of Siddique Ahmed Khatab. He had always been turned down, or his applications had gone unanswered, so he had worked for his father and had helped his mother to clean the guest bedrooms. In the last summer he had gone to his father’s relatives in Pakistan and had stayed seven weeks. He had returned revitalized — his parents had noticed the change in him and rejoiced at it — and had been offered a job at the nearby comprehensive school. ‘Not important work, not yet,’ his father had told a friend, ‘but steady, with security.’ He had presumed the role of laboratory technician was too lowly to feature in the computer checks where he had failed on previous applications.