The Bear's Tears (37 page)

Shelley rubbed his cheeks with his long fingers and was silent
for a
time. Eventually, when the tense breathing of both women was audible
above the occasional spitting of logs on the fire, he looked up and
said: "It's thin - it's almighty thin."

"Do you think Mr X existed in 1974?" Alison demanded.

"No, but I believe he exists now - and he isn't Kenneth Aubrey,
Mrs
Massinger —" She waved the assertion dismissively aside.

"I'm keeping his two guilts apart," she announced quietly,
frostily.
"It is this business which threatens Paul, not my father's
murder."

Shelley nodded. "Very well."

"If he exists now, he would have to be high-up, wouldn't he?"
Alison
asked.

Once more, Shelley nodded, but this time it was in response to
some
inward image or realisation. "Yes, he would," he murmured. "He would
indeed."

"If he's helping the Russians now - then couldn't he
have
been the one helping them in 1974?" Alison felt her hands clenching
into fists at her sides, felt herself willing her intuition upon her
husband. A fragmentary sense of Margaret Massinger's continuing
problem, the identity of her father's murderer, was dismissed as soon
as it appeared.

"He could… he could indeed," Shelley said, then: "It's a very
long
shot, though." He looked at Margaret. "But it would get Paul out of the
country for a while - to Germany. He'd be safer there. Can you two do
that?"

Margaret nodded, and said: "But, where? Why?"

"The German security service, BfV, cooperated with Aubrey and
our
people, later with the M15 investigation. They have files - and we have
the man Paul can ask."

"Who?"

"A German —" He grinned like an adolescent. "Who owes Aubrey his
innocence, his career, his respect… just about everything."

"Who?"

"Wolfgang Zimmerman."

"The man —?" Alison began.

"The man the KGB tried to frame as a double agent when the
Berlin
Treaty collapsed. He can repay Aubrey's efforts now. Time to call in
the loan."

"But - didn't the previous Chancellor sack him?"

"He resigned."

Margaret was aware that Peter and Alison Shelley were oblivious
to
her. She envied them their easy communication, their intuitive,
quick-minded cooperation. They represented an image that contrasted
with her own past days, the rift that had yawned into a chasm between
herself and Paul. She would take this chance now, go to Germany with
him. Her father would have to wait - as he had waited beneath the ruins
of that bombed house in Berlin for five years, decomposing…

She shook her head. Her companions did not notice as their talk
bubbled and flew. She had to forget him. She had to help Paul, keep him
alive. She could not bear the thought of his death, that new, utter,
final loss; the loss of the man who had replaced her
father-husband-lover-father Paul.

"Yes," Shelley was saying to his wife as she attended once more,
"when the plot was exposed, the Chancellor wouldn't take him back on
the payroll, but he appointed him Special Adviser to the BfV. The man
has a lot of power - he can get into the old files, rake them over for
you… even arrange some protection for you."

"Can you do all this?" Margaret asked confusedly.

"Yes. I can talk to him. He'll do it. Ever since his own people
informed him of the debt he owed Aubrey rather than themselves for
being cleared, he's wanted the chance to clear the slate. He'll do it."
Shelley's face darkened, then he added: "Who knows, Ally - we might
find your Mr X this way. I think we may have just found another, hidden
door into the fortress. A Judas-gate." He smiled directly, disarmingly
at Margaret. "I should get packed for a trip - discreet departure, I
think. You're probably being watched. The flat, certainly, will be
under surveillance." He paused, then added: "Believe me, Mrs Massinger
- you won't be helping the man who killed your father. Kenneth Aubrey
couldn't have done that, not even for a personal motive. I swear he
could not."

Margaret Massinger stood up abruptly. "Thank you, Mr Shelley.
Thank
you so much." From her eyes, it was evident she disbelieved Shelley's
oath testifying to Aubrey's innnocence.

A burst of wailing pop music from an unlit upstairs window,
further
back down the alley; someone laughing, then a child's grizzling crying.
The smell of food and dung and garbage. Even as the heavy tyres of the
BTR-60 armoured personnel carrier squeaked as the vehicle trundled
slowly into the square, Miandad was returned to his own childhood. All
that was lacking from the familiarity of odours was the hot, foetid
scent blowing off the mouths of the River Indus. Here, in Kabul, the
night was colder, and the familiar smells changed to sharpness in his
nostrils. In Karachi —

No, it was different; the illusion could not be sustained. The
personnel carrier was head-on to him now in the dull fire-glow of the
infra-red nightsight. There was a flat-helmeted head behind the black
hole of the 14.5mm machine gun which was mounted on the squat turret
above the two slightly open viewing ports. The rubber eyepiece of the
nightsight pressed around the socket of his right eye. He could feel
his perspiration becoming chilly beneath his arms and across his back.
Behind him, Hyde was waiting, dressed in the dead boy's uniform -
Lieutenant Azimov resurrected. Mohammed Jan was behind him, too, with
two other Pathans. The rest,of his men - no more than seventeen of them
now, after the attack of the patrol - were in their positions around
the square. Seventeen, he thought again. Enough, but perhaps only just
enough. A shadow-army of fanaticism swelled their numbers.

The BTR-60 came on towards them, skirting the hard-lit square
past
the shops and the hotel as if it, too, sensed it had no place there.
Now, it was no more than seventy yards from the unlit alleyway where he
and Hyde and Mohammed Jan waited. Somewhere, a bell struck the hour.
Three, four - four in the morning. Miandad's right hand tensed around
the forward stock, his finger squeezing gently at the trigger of the
rocket launcher. His left hand steadied the slim barrel on his shoulder
with the rear stock. The projectile, looking like a miniature closed
umbrella, waited at the end of the barrel. The personnel carrier came
on. Except for the vehicle, the square was empty; it looked like a
stage without performers, a great stadium in which the white light
glared and smouldered pointlessly.

Except to him. To him, the square was red. Dull red, like the
last
of a fire, through which a dark shape composed of wheels, hatches,
machine guns, approached. His target. Forty yards away now.

He squeezed the resisting trigger of the RPG-7 launcher. The
tube on
his shoulder bucked, noise enveloped him. Through the nightsight, he
saw the projectile ignite its own internal rocket, then watched the
spit of flame moving on its brief, flat, accurate trajectory towards
the bulk of the BTR-60.

The HEAT shell struck the personnel carrier just below the
slightly
open viewing hatches, penetrating the 10mm armour immediately upon
impact. The flare of the explosion was like watching a backward-run
film of a gunshot. The flame from the projectile was swallowed by the
bulk of the carrier which, at the same moment, buckled, swelled like a
green, squat toad, and then erupted - two, three, four times its size,
then no more than wheels bouncing away, flanks disintegrating into
sheets of torn metal, turret opening like flesh sliced with a sharp
knife. Smoke, the thunder of detonation, the first tinkling and
crashing of windows and falling pieces. Something like a dummy, arms
akimbo, was thrown perhaps a hundred feet without its lower torso. Two
more dummy-things were flung out of the viewing hatches like
jacks-in-the-box. Exploding ammunition filled the square with
panic-making firepower.

Miandad loaded a second projectile onto the end of the hot tube
of
the RPG-7. He glanced up at Hyde. An alarm was beginning to sound in
the embassy compound. Incredibly, someone was screaming in the
shattered maelstrom of flames. Miandad shuddered, then adjusted his
body to comfort in his crouch. He focused the nightsight. The pale
concrete of the guard bunker outside the embassy gates was perhaps a
little over one hundred yards from where they hid in the alleyway.

"Begin," Miandad told Hyde. Two Russian soldiers had emerged,
dazed
and horrified, from the refuge of the guard bunker. Miandad could see
their surprised, desperate, fearful faces, very pale even though
reddened by the nightsight. They seemed very young, like Azimov.
Farmboys or factory-hands, not professional soldiers. "Good luck," the
Pakistani added.

Hyde tapped his free shoulder and then began running down the
alleyway to enter the square at a point nearer the embassy gates.
Miandad adjusted the sight. The rubber eyepiece was damp with sweat.
Mohammed Jan stood by him, immobile, as if despising the modernity of
their attack. The old Lee Enfield was cradled in his arms.

Miandad shifted the balance of the launcher on his shoulder. An
officer was ordering soldiers towards the burnt-out personnel carrier.
They seemed reluctant to the point of disobedience. All of them were
still close enough to be killed by the impact. He squeezed the trigger.

Ignition, the spit of flame traveling straight and flat. One
hundred yards, one third of a second, slowed down by the perspective of
the nightsight and the flow of adrenalin. Then, impact. The concrete
above the sandbags swallowed the flame, and the roof flew off the
bunker in a rain of concrete boulders. The walls collapsed outward,
burying those who had left the bunker. Dust rose to disguise the
violence and the murders. Patiently, swiftly, expertly, Miandad fitted
the third projectile. He scorched his wrist against the hot barrel of
the RPG-7, sucked it for a moment, then pressed home the folded
umbrella of the projectile. He adjusted the sights, felt the sweat on
his forehead, soaking into the untidy folds of his turban, felt his
back tight with reaction to what he was doing - killing so many, so
easily - and then he hefted the tube of the launcher on his shoulder so
that it was comfortable once more.

As the dust began to settle, the embassy lights came out like
huge
stars. The concrete bunker was still half-standing amid its own
shipwreck. Bodies on the floor, one or two staggering away, parts of
them evidently missing. It was, he admitted, a vision of the infernal
in the dull fire-glow of the nightsight. Screaming, punctuated by
exploding ammunition. The hard-lit stadium was a battlefield.

Now.

He squeezed. Ignition, one third of a second, impact. It had
been
faster because he was tired. The adrenalin was running out, just as
Hyde needed his. He watched for long enough through the nightsight to
see that the gates hung drunkenly on their hinges, almost twisted off
their supports, the huge red star broken into crazed paving. Then he
passed the RPG-7 to one side, and a Pathan took it from him with a
chuckle of pleasure and admiration. Miandad listened to the first
Kalashnikov fire and the wail of a siren crying above the noises of
other alarms, then stood up. Hyde was now on his own. He had precisely
fifteen and a half minutes from the breaching of the gates.

Already, less than fifteen minutes remained.

Hyde's hand gripped the railing. He steadied himself, flinching
against the burst of random, dangerous fire from exploding ammunition
in the ruined bunker. There were two men staring at it helplessly. The
red and white barrier had been flung off its hinges. The smoke and dust
made him cough. He looked down at his boots - a size too big, stuffed
with rags - and saw with satisfaction that they were coated with dust
that had settled on them while he made his way along the railings. He
touched the leather holster at his hip which contained the Makarov 9mm
PM pistol. Then he stooped to pick up a crumbling fragment of concrete,
paused for a moment, then rubbed it viciously across his forehead and
down his left cheek. He winced and hunched into himself with the pain
and the stinging it left behind. He touched his forehead and cheek with
his fingertips, casting the lump of concrete away from him. Blood, when
he looked. Blood and dust and sweaty dirt. He adopted a limp, and
shuffled the last fifteen yards to the shattered gates of the embassy
compound.

The concrete guard bunker was an opened, ruined flower, the
smoke
rising from it obscuring much of the hard white light from the square
beyond. Bodies. Some men still upright, but concussed or shocked.
Wounded, too. Alarms, sirens, the roar of vehicles, exploding
ammunition. The self-inflicted wounds stung intolerably.

He reached the gates. He could just hear, already, the noise of
a
helicopter in the distance, the whine and beat of the main rotors
carried on the cold night air. Evacuation. Support, defence,
evacuation; the order of things. Hyde looked at his watch. Fourteen
minutes thirty before the Pathans abandoned the square and retreated to
the bazaar before making their dawn exit from Kabul.

A soldier blundered into him. His jaw was missing, and his eyes
begged. Hyde rested him like a plank against the railings and slipped
through the gates. No one challenged him. He was clean-shaven beneath
the dust and blood, armed and wearing the full uniform of a lieutenant
in the Red Army. Ahead of him, the lights in the embassy extension
blazed like the lights of an approaching liner. A heavily armoured BMP
rumbled on its tracks around the side of the main embassy building,
increasing speed along the gravel path, squeaking and crunching its way
towards him. Its cannon and Sagger missile mounting were clearly
outlined against the facade of the building. Hyde began running.

There were other men running; confused, frightened, challenged
men
who felt they were too few and in an alien country. His boots crunched
on the gravel, his shadow raced ahead of him, thrown long by the lights
in the square and the burning bunker. Then a shadow began stretching
behind him like a warning to turn back as he entered the field of light
of the KGB block. The BMP howled past him, cannon swinging like a
pedagogue's eyes looking for someone small to punish first, and he
stumbled into the doorway of the glass and concrete block which
reminded him of, of —?