He kept it to himself, didn’t show his increasing anxiety to the rest of them. And he thought time was ebbing, went fast through his fingers … and it would happen, yes, and very soon, but his control was slipping.
The Crow stared ahead, and had no wish to talk.
‘Shouldn’t they have been here by now?’ The man had come to his car, opened the door and slid into the vacant passenger seat. He had looked with growing frequency at his wristwatch, and it was the third time he had asked that question. The first time the Crow had shrugged, as if that should have been enough of an answer. The second time, he had gestured with his hands, outstretched above the steering-wheel.
Now, the Crow said, ‘There will have been a delay.’
‘What sort of delay?’ There was a squeak in the voice, apprehension and nagging worry. ‘How can there be a delay?’
The Crow carried many burdens. He thought then that, chief among them, dealing with novices, those with necessary expertise but without experience, was the most taxing. Kids who had not been on the front line of the struggle stretched his patience and calm exterior almost to a break-point. They wanted chatter, demanded to belong, had no sense of being a mere valve in a great engine, needed to talk.
‘There might have been a delay in the collection or in its transshipment. There are many reasons for a delay.’
‘How long do we sit here? I’ve never slept in a car. I haven’t eaten. How long?’
But they couldn’t be ignored, slapped down, insulted to silence and left to sulk. So often an amateur from outside the inner tested circle of activists was needed — an engine didn’t function without a ‘mere valve’. A mighty sum of money, ten million American dollars, was to be paid over if this gabbling, fearful little idiot gave the assurance that the device indeed contained a core in spherical shape — the size of a moderate orange — of weapons-grade plutonium. He, the Crow, could not give such an assurance. Neither could the men who had planned his journey, nor those at the container port in Hamburg’s harbour who would move the device on, nor those who would take it from another dockside and carry it to the target area, nor those who would bring it the final metres of its journey and detonate it. None could give the assurance that the damage created would be worth the expenditure of ten million American dollars. When he had fought in Afghanistan, where he had been wounded in the throat and his voice changed by the Soviet artillery shrapnel, there had been similar kids who had talked too much, had wanted comradeship, and their bones were whitened by the ravages of the winter gales on the mountains. They had died because they had lacked the strength to endure silence; it was the hard, quiet men who survived, that war and this struggle. He did not show his exasperation, or his contempt.
‘We wait through this day and into the evening. If they are delayed and are coming, I will be called and we will stay here until they reach us. If they do not call we will know it has failed. Later, I will get some food. You are a stranger to me but I regard you as my friend. And you should know that there are those senior to me who know your name, the sacrifices you make and the dedication you show. They have very considerable respect for you.’
He could lie, in his hoarse, rasping voice, with ease. The Crow excused himself, left the car and walked off into the bracken and gorse. He searched for a hidden place where he could defecate, and be free of the idiot’s interrogation.
Molenkov still had that foulness in his mouth. It burned and his gums were raw.
They came to Kobrin, a small town. Molenkov knew that, because Yashkin had informed him that the population at the last census was fifty-one thousand. It was a mercy to Molenkov, as he nursed the poison in his mouth, and almost in his throat, that Yashkin knew little of the place, only its population and a brief history: in the eleventh century it had formed part of the Volhynian Vladimir, in the fourteenth it had been annexed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then had been part of Imperial Russia, then a part of Poland, then had been a battlefield fought over by the Polish Army and the XIXth Panzer Corps of General Heinz Guderian, occupied by the Germans until liberation by the Soviets, a part of Belarus since 1991 and … It was a great mercy to Molenkov that Yashkin had not dug up more information from the library in Sarov. It appeared to him a dismal town, and without virtue. He coughed, spluttered and spat out of his open window, but couldn’t free himself from the awfulness of the taste in his mouth. He watched, when not coughing and spitting, the needle of the fuel gauge, which did not leave the red zone, was trapped there.
‘How much further?’ The same repetitive question.
‘Through Kobrin, then eight or nine kilometres.’
They crossed a canal bridge. The waterway was weeded up, its use as a navigation route destroyed by disrepair. Yashkin said it was a section of the waterway linking the Dnieper river to the Bug.
‘I don’t fucking care. I care about the fuel, what’s in the tank and what’s in my throat.’
It was early morning in Kobrin. The first stalls in an open market beyond the bridge were being set up, clothes hung out and vegetables stacked. The sun was shining, low, milky, unmistakable, and shadows were thrown from the stalls and reflected back from the mirrors that were the puddles. In the night, they had tried to get fuel in Pinsk.
Pinsk, then, had been a sleeping town, battened down for the darkness, the streets deserted. They had rested on that bench beside one of the old churches, and no police had come to question them, no bastard skinheads had made footballs of them or punchbags. They had driven away, then started to search. Had had to search because Yashkin, the clever one who knew every moment of history on this great route from Sarov, fifteen hundred kilometres of it, had not thought to include a length of rubber piping in the back. In a suburb of Pinsk, outside the old town, there had been a house with a tap attached to the front wall, and a hosepipe coiled round it. On the short driveway, near to the tap and the hosepipe, was a gleaming Mercedes, apparently washed the previous afternoon. Molenkov had eased his old penknife from his pocket, climbed over the wire fence beside the gate, scurried to the tap and had been sawing at the hosepipe when the house security lights had come on. He had fled with the length of pipe back to the car and Yashkin had driven off.
‘Are you an idiot, Molenkov?’ Yashkin had asked him. Through his broken mouth and split lips, he had denied it. Yashkin had said, ‘Did you not look at the type of Mercedes it was? You did not? It was a diesel.’
Four roads away, they had found a car parked at a kerb, and the house beyond the garden was in darkness. It was an old car, a Moskva, petrol-driven. Molenkov had said that he didn’t think such an old car as a Moskva would be alarmed. Yashkin had stayed at the wheel, had pulled up close to the Moskva, had switched off the Polonez’s engine. Molenkov had gone, a thief in the night, to the back of the Polonez and had unscrewed the fuel cap. He had placed it on the roof, then had gone to the parked car and unscrewed the Moskva’s cap after breaking its feeble lock with his penknife. He had inserted one end of the hosepipe into the hole, had gone to the Polonez, had stood at the back and put the other end of the hosepipe into his mouth and sucked … His mouth had filled — and the Rottweiler had thrown itself at the gate of the house. Fucking great animal, fucking great teeth. Gaped and gasped, and swallowed before he had spat. His mouth filled with petrol. Then lights were going on upstairs in the house, the Rottweiler was scrabbling with its front paws at the top of the gate, and he’d had a sight of the brute’s teeth.