The Bear's Tears (32 page)

"Where?" he shouted, inhaling a mouthful of acrid smoke. He
could
smell burning petrol, cordite, and flesh. He clambered out of the ditch
- he could hear the screaming now - blundered against a Pathan
tribesman, and then he was on the road, crunching over the rubble of
metal and rock.

"This way!" Miandad grabbed his arm and pulled him to his left.
Hyde
followed the Pakistani. A gout of flame shot up somewhere ahead of them
and he felt its heat against his skin. Other Pathans slipped past them,
a uniform blundered near, but it was alight and Hyde ignored it. Only
minutes, and he began to think it was already too late. "The other side
of the road, yes?" Miandad shouted against his ear. Hyde nodded.

The leading scout car was wrecked and on its side. A body
spilled
out of its forward trapdoor like a leakage of fuel. Miandad bent by the
meaningless form, then looked up. Hyde could see his eyes gleaming,
their whites intense.

"What—?" he yelled.

"Some got out - some must have got out!"

"Where?"

A burst of machine-gun fire from close to them whined off the
overturned body of the scout car.

"There!" Miandad yelled.

A deep, rumbling explosion, followed by the clatter of hot
fragments
and slivers of metal on the road around them. One piece sliced and
burned Hyde's sheepskin jacket, another scorched his hand. One of the
BMPs had exploded. There couldn't be many left now. A turbanned Pathan
staggered against the scout car and fell on top of Miandad. The
Pakistani almost fastidiously pushed the body away. In a moment of
silence, Hyde heard someone screaming like a rabbit. Then the machine
gun opened up again, raking the road away to their left. Evidently, the
officer who commanded it had decided that anyone still likely to come
out of the maelstrom of smoke and dust would be an enemy. And if not,
better to take no chances just for the sake of one or two raw
conscripts.

"Come!"

Miandad moved away to the right and Hyde followed him in an
awkward
crouch, moving as swiftly as he could. The edge of the road appeared,
grey changing to earthen brown sand and filthy slush. Then they were in
the wet ditch, the snow soaking through Hyde's baggy trousers and
sleeves.

To his left, Hyde could see - in the moment when he heard its
renewed chatter - the flickering flame at the muzzle of the light
machine gun. There was little other firing now. Sufficient lack of
concussive noise to make movement audible; screaming audible, too.

Dying men everywhere —

Close.

Hyde grabbed Miandad's arm in a panic of fear. Ahead of them, no
more than twenty yards away, the machine gun had stopped firing. The
cloud, too, seemed to thin. Struggling men. The group who commanded the
machine gun had been found, were being killed —

Hyde ran, Miandad a pace behind him, both of them blundering
along
the uneven, rock-strewn ditch. A blank-eyed face stared up at them from
the edge of the road. Hyde did not even register consciously that there
was little that remained of any human shape below the shoulders. Then
he was among the struggling group. Someone knocked him aside. He saw a
military bayonet flicker like silver, then a curved knife at its
business. Miandad blundered against him, then seemed to dart to one
side. Hyde's head moved from side to side in growing desperation. He
was looking for something as small, as insignificant, as collar tabs or
shoulder boards. He needed an officer.

Miandad was struggling with something on the ground, dragging it
along the ditch, resting it against the roadside slope. He bent to lift
the unmoving legs, and as he did so a Pathan emerged from the thinning
cloud, rifle at his side, knife in his hand. He hesitated only for an
instant as he saw Miandad struggling with the Russian's limp legs, and
then he raised his knife. Hyde did not know whether the man assumed
Miandad was being attacked - a fellow Pathan - or whether he did not
care. He had time only to move a single pace and swing the butt of the
Kalashnikov. Its rigid plastic stock struck the Pathan just above the
left eye, and he fell away from Miandad and the Russian, dropping his
knife as he did so.

"Quickly!" Miandad demanded, looking up.

Visibility was improving quickly now. Hyde could see perhaps a
dozen
Pathan tribesmen moving among the wreckage and the bodies. He saw one
Russian soldier's body buck and twist as his hands were cut off. The
man did not scream because he was already unconscious.

"Help me get this one away into the rocks!" Miandad added.

Hyde shouldered his rifle, and together they dragged the Russian -
collar tabs, young unconscious face, bruise on his
temple,
slight burns on his cheeks and jaw, officer! - out of the
ditch and down the slope towards the river.

They splashed through the shallow water, the Russian officer
supported between them, and gained the cover of the rocks at the foot
of the steep cliffs. Hyde's breath was coming in huge gulps, and he was
bent almost double, resting on his knees as if vomiting. Miandad's hand
rested on his arm. The sky above was pale and blue. They were out of
the dust and smoke, which was now dispersing, exposing like the retreat
of some tide the wreckage on the shore of the highway.

Miandad pointed towards a clutter of broken rocks.

"Help me get him over there," he said. Hyde realised he was no
longer shouting. There was no longer any need. The gorge echoed now
only with screaming of a decreasing intensity and horror, and the
occasional rifle shot. A burst of startling fire as some ammunition
exploded, then only the screaming, which had begun to sound more like
the noises of carrion birds than those of dying or mutilated men. Hyde
nodded. "You don't have much time," Miandad added, tossing his head
back towards the road.

"OK. Let's go."

They dragged the Russian, who groaned once in a boyish hurt way,
towards and behind the rocks. They were perhaps seventy or eighty yards
up the slope and a hundred yards from the road.

"Work quickly!" Miandad commanded, tilting a silver flask to the
young Russian's lips. The boy coughed, and his eyes opened.

Opened and became fearful at the same moment as he saw Hyde's
turbanned head in front of him.

"Be quiet!" Hyde snapped in Russian. The boy's eyes widened
further,
in surprise and shock. He turned his head and saw Miandad's narrow dark
features. "Now," Hyde continued, "if you want to go on living, keep
your voice down - lieutenant," he added, glancing at the collar tabs
and shoulder boards.

"Who are you?" Hyde could not be certain of the accent, but it
sounded Ukrainian. The lieutenant was little more than twenty or
twenty-one.

"It doesn't matter. You're my prisoner, not the Pathans'. You
understand the difference?" The lieutenant nodded, swallowing the fear
that bobbed in his throat. "Good. Give me your papers -quickly!"

The lieutenant hesitated, as if the documents were somehow
talismanic, then he reached into his jacket and removed them. His hand
shook as he passed them to Hyde. There was a high-pitched scream, and
his whole body twitched in an echo of the agony of the man on the road.
Hyde opened the ID folder. A tiny monochrome picture of the young
officer, unsmiling and perhaps a little pompous. The official stamps,
the public details. Lieutenant Azimov. Yes, from Kiev in the Ukraine.
Commissioned two years before, after leaving military academy.
Afghanistan had been his first posting. Sergei Azimov. A white,
scorched, bruised face, foreign-looking in an alien place.

A sheet of paper, much folded and unfolded, drifted to the
ground.
The young man's eyes followed it hungrily. Hyde picked it up. There was
a snapshot, too, in the little bundle of papers which had been tucked
inside a battered wallet which might once have been the boy's father's
property, almost an heirloom. Hyde read the letter.

Dear Sasha,

I love and miss you
so much. We have spent such a little time
together. It is very hard for me to think about my work,
about
anything but you. I worry for your safety all the time…

Hyde stopped reading. The girl was round-faced, unmemorably
pretty,
her hair tied back. Azimov's wife, Nadia. Hyde felt he had pried. He
hurriedly passed the letter and the snapshot to the lieutenant, who
pressed them against the breast of his uniform jacket. He was shivering
now, with after-shock and the cold.

"Right, Lieutenant Azimov - you can stay alive if you tell me
what I
want to know - understand?" A solitary scream, hardly human, worked
like a stimulant on Azimov. "You understand?" Azimov nodded. "Good. I
want to know about Colonel Petrunin - understand? Colonel Tamas
Petrunin. Everything you know, everything you can remember. I want to
know where he is now, what his routine is, where he can be found. Help
me, and I'll save your life."

You lying bastard, Hyde told himself. It is the cause - shit on
it,
then…

Miandad tilted the flask again. The boy swallowed, cleared his
throat and said, "Thank you, thank you…" Hyde merely nodded. The boy
evidently had no interest in who he was, in the loyalties dictated by
his uniform, in anything but the fiction that he would go on living.
Hyde raised his head and peered over the rocks down towards the road.
The cloud had dispersed. Cold sunlight was edging like a spent wave
across the grey road. The river gleamed like polished steel. The
mutilated bodies had been flung into the ditches on either side of the
road. The Pathans were gathering weapons and ammunition - machine guns,
rifles, the RPG rocket launcher, a Pathan waving that jubilantly above
his head, boxes of ammunition dragged from the burning wrecks. Two men
were even dismantling the machine gun from its mounting on the
overturned scout car.

They had perhaps ten minutes.

He had already begun to lose interest in the young officer,
possessed as he suddenly was by an idea. The rocket launcher, with luck
complete with night-sight, capable of penetrating more than twelve and
a half inches of armour - or a solid wall…

Uniform, confusion, disguise… ?

"Ask him," he instructed Miandad. "Ask him everything. If-if
he's…"
His excitement was evident. He snapped at the officer: "Where is
Petrunin now - today, tomorrow? Do you know? Can you tell me where he
is?"

"That bastard," the young officer muttered.

"Yes, that bastard. Where is he?" He was almost shouting at
Azimov,
who flinched at the noise and urgency of his voice.

"He's in the embassy…"

"Military headquarters, you mean?"

"No, the embassy. He's KGB, remember. He won't use military
communications - too insecure for him."

"Why the embassy?" Hyde snapped.

"Who knows? Who cares? Some purge of the civil service in the
wind,
of the government, of the army. Who gives a toss why? He'll be there
all week, so I hear."

Yes, yes, yes…

"What is it?" Miandad asked, standing up beside him.

"Find out everything. Get him to draw you a map of the embassy.
I'll
stall Mohammed Jan for as long as I can."

"You have a plan?"

"I think so. If he knows as much as he seems to. Find out. I'll
keep
them away from you." The RPG-7 launcher was being handed almost
reverently to Mohammed Jan, who accepted it like some symbol of
authority. Yes, Hyde thought fiercely, yes —

"I speak very little Russian, you speak no Pushtu. I'll stall
for
you while you question the boy."

Hyde hesitated, then nodded. "OK. Give me ten minutes."

"I'll try." Miandad turned away, then looked back at Hyde. "You
realise," he said softly, his eyes focused beyond Hyde, on Azimov, "you
can't allow him to go, or to remain here in hiding. If a helicopter
comes, he knows too much." Hyde nodded, expressionless. "And you can't
hand him over to —" Hyde shook his head. "You realise, then… ?"

"Yes," Hyde said in a whisper. "I'll shoot him when he's told me
what I want to know. In this God-forsaken place, a quick, clean death
is tantamount to a mercy killing!"

Miss Catherine Dawson bobbed and fussed about the bird table in
her
garden much like one of the tiny creatures she was attempting to
preserve with bacon fat, bread and bags of peanuts. She wore gumboots,
an old fawn coat, and her grey hair was wispy as it escaped from her
headscarf. The snow drifted down gently from a uniformly grey morning
sky. Miss Dawson seemed well able to contain her impatience, if she
possessed any, with regard to her visitor.

Massinger guessed she was almost seventy, which would have made
her
a woman in her late twenties, perhaps as much as thirty, when she was
posted to Berlin as a Control Commission translator and interpreter
immediately the war in Europe ended. She had been a member of
Castleford's staff for more than a year before the man disappeared.

Massinger had first telephoned the previous afternoon. There had
been no reply. He had rung repeatedly, obtaining an answer from Miss
Dawson only late in the evening. She had been visiting friends for the
day. Yes, he might certainly call the following morning. At ten?
Certainly. Thus, Massinger had remained at Hyde's flat overnight. He
realised that, while he possessed a safe route across the border, it
was crucial to his continuing safety that he appear both convincing and
convinced when he surrendered his quest for the truth. He needed to
talk to this woman, perhaps to other survivors, before he could lay
down his self-imposed task and declare himself satisfied with his
discoveries and the fact of Aubrey's murderous guilt.

He had slept little. He was ashamed that impatience to be with
Margaret had troubled him more than guilt at abandoning his friend.
Now, at a little after ten in the morning - Terry Wogan had been making
his farewells on the transistor radio as he had passed through the
kitchen behind Miss Dawson - he was at the rear of a modernised cottage
in an Oxfordshire village, pursuing the charade that might save his
marriage and his life. Despite his lack of sleep, he felt fresh;
impatient, too, and increasingly optimistic. A lighter, shallower
person, perhaps, than he had felt himself to be for some considerable
time. He could, however, sense himself putting clocks back, reordering
pleasure and happiness like additional supplies for a hopeful
expedition. The soft, large flakes of snow fell on his uncovered head,
melted on the shoulders of his raincoat. They were chilly, pleasurably
so, against his clean-shaven cheeks. He almost wanted to put out his
tongue to taste the snowflakes like a child.