The Bear's Tears (39 page)

The first helicopter had been minutes early, had been left out
of
Hyde's calculations. Then the second helicopter, the big transport…

Gobbets of flaming metal, a burning body, flailing rotor blades
scattered down on the snow and grass and the guards around the first
MiL. A huge ceremonial firework; Miandad had used the rocket launcher
once more, perhaps because he had weighed the odds against Hyde. Panic
now —

Hyde moved, skipping the intervening steps. Petrunin watched him
come, his gloved hand reaching towards the officer's arm, to turn him
and his dazzled attention towards this new danger - then Hyde was
alongside Petrunin and the Makarov was pressed into the flank of the
military greatcoat, hard. Hyde grinned.

The remains of the transport helicopter were burning like a
scattered bonfire on the embassy lawn. Soldiers were rolling in the
snow, extinguishing the flames that had caught them. One or two green
greatcoats lay still. Frightened faces watched from the windows of the
surviving MiL. The soldiers surrounding Petrunin had begun to drift
towards the glass doors of the building. One of the transport's main
rotors lay buried like a sword in the lawn. A ball of flame ascended
from an exploding fuel tank. The light washed the foyer. Much of the
glass had shattered - Hyde felt his face and hands prickling with
fragments - and the cold night air had entered, the successive waves of
heat from the fire now dispelling the chill.

Hyde had regained control.

"Guard the helicopter!" he yelled in a high, panicky Russian
voice
full of desperate authority, pressing the gun into Petrunin's side to
ensure his silence. The officer in charge of the escort detail turned
to him. "Do it! It's the Colonel's only way out, you fools. Move!"
People were clambering into the surviving MiL - civilian staff,
soldiers, clerks and secretaries, clinging to it like the one remaining
lifeboat adrift from a sinking liner. "Get everyone off that helicopter
except the ambassador and his wife!" Hyde yelled in Russian. "Get them
off."

And they moved. The officer transmitted Hyde's orders. The
Makarov
pressed against Petrunin's side, just below the ribs. A BMP rolled
gruntingly, cautiously past the foyer, passing a parked staff car.
Petrunin moved his hands as if to restrain the now running soldiers,
but he said nothing. The soldiers spread out, moving towards the
helicopter, whose rotors had begun to pick up speed. There was shouting
- a woman was bundled from the interior of the MiL and flung
spreadeagled on the melted slush.

"Now!" Hyde whispered fiercely into Petrunin's ear.

He pushed the man forward with the Makarov, through the main
doors.
The cold was more intense now that the helicopter fire was dying down.
There was still some firing at the gates, their ruin almost blocked by
the BMP slewed across them. Hyde saw the vehicle launch a Sagger
missile. There were dozens of soldiers near the gates now, and two
trucks and a personnel carrier. In the hard-lit square, buildings
appeared to be burning.

They reached the staff car. Hyde opened the door. Guards watched
them from the steps, undecided. Petrunin looked back at them, then at
Hyde. He shook his head.

"In," Hyde said, gesturing with the gun.

Guards, suspicious now or concerned for Petrunin's safety, had
begun
to descend the steps. Petrunin sensed the moment, and raised his head
as if to summon them. A small explosion at the gates distracted him and
distracted the guards. Hyde struck Petrunin across the temple with the
barrel of the Makarov and shoved his crumpling body into the rear of
the staff car, arranging it as carefully as he could on the deep rear
seat. Then he climbed into the driving seat. The keys were in the
ignition of the Zil, and he switched on the engine. The noise brought
the attention of the guards back to him. He waved them away, and
accelerated towards the gates, the rear wheels slewing then biting into
the gravel of the drive.

In the driving mirror, the guards seemed to accept the
situation.
The escort detail was busy emptying the MiL of its unwanted passengers
while still more of the embassy staff - many of them obviously
half-dressed or still in their nightclothes - streamed towards the
helicopter as to a shrine. Petrunin sat propped and unconscious behind
him.

Many of the Russian troops had moved beyond the gates now. Hyde
glanced at his watch. His time had run out; the Pathans were beginning
to withdraw and he was now racing to overtake them. He swerved around a
truck, then edged the staff car alongside the green, high flank of the
BMP, its cannon pumping shells into the square. He looked up, seeing
flat Soviet helmets above the flank of the vehicle. Kalashnikovs on
automatic were creating a dense field of fire ahead of the BMP, which
had begun to move into the square.

The nearside wheels of the staff car jolted over one of the
ruined
gates. An infantry officer suddenly appeared and bent to glance into
the car, then indicated that Hyde should wind down the window. Two
soldiers barred the car's path. The BMP moved away, letting the lights
in the square glare on Hyde, like a curtain being drawn. The concrete
bunker was still smouldering and there were a number of bodies near the
gates. Most of the square was littered with wreckage and clumps of
flame and smoke. Hyde wound down the window. The lieutenant had checked
the identity of the passenger. Hyde saw distaste disfigure the man's
features.

"This bastard's been wounded - I'm getting him out!" Hyde
explained,
gambling.

"Pity he isn't dead - bastard's right. Where's your
escort?"

"We were going to use the chopper - but there's panic back
there.
Everyone wants to get on. They'll be shooting each other for a place in
a couple of minutes!"

"Fucking KGB!"

"He's too afraid of getting shot by one of his own - he wants to
get
out the quiet way. If they've got a launcher out there they could pick
him off… Come on, man! If I don't deliver him, I might as well shoot
myself!"

"Too right. Running like a rat, is he?"

"You've got it. Can I go, then?"

"OK - out of the way, you two!" The lieutenant waved Hyde on. He
slid the car through the wreckage around the gates, jolting it over
rubble and bodies. Petrunin slid slowly to one side behind him until he
was lying slumped on the seat. Hyde ignored him. The BMP was ahead of
him, its field of fire concentrated towards the shadowy streets beyond
the lights. There seemed to be no return of fire. Infantry followed the
BMP on foot, armed, afraid and cautious. Through the still open window,
above the noise of flames and firing, he could hear the approach of
other helicopters. He pressed the accelerator after assuring himself
that Petrunin was still unconscious, turning the car into the narrow
street at the corner of which Miandad had crouched with the RPG-7 and
opened the way in for him. The staff car bounced on uneven cobbles. In
the driving mirror, the small sliver of the square that he could see
was filled with soldiers and light. The attack had been beaten off.

He unbuttoned his tunic and reached into its inside pocket for
the
map of Kabul they had given him. He stopped the car in the narrow,
silent street that was little more than an alley, and switched on the
courtesy light over his head. He studied the river, the warren of
narrow streets, the broad Soviet-Western thoroughfares, the suburbs,
the road to Jalalabad.

A helicopter beat low over the buildings that lined the street,
startling him. His finger twitched on the map where it had been tapping
the location of the bazaar, his point of rendezvous with the Pathans
and Miandad.

The narrow street was grey now, not black. Hanging lines of
washing
emerged from the featureless profiles of blocks of flats. Many windows
were lit. A helicopter made another pass over the street in the
direction of the square. He laid the map on the passenger seat, checked
Petrunin's unconsciousness once again, and accelerated. The visualised
map of the city's network of avenues, streets and alleys unrolled in
his head. He reached for the red light, to attach it to the roof, and
looked for the switch for the staff car's siren. It would be easy. He
would move in the direction of army headquarters, only turning into the
warren of the bazaar district at the last moment, doubling back through
the chilly, vile, winding alleys and packed-earth streets to the rug
maker's shop.

He reached out of the window and clamped the red light to the
roof.
New York, he thought. Playing cops. Behind him, Petrunin murmured and
Hyde turned, startled into a sense of danger once more. The hand that
still held the red light twitched, then let go of the seeming-toy that
had reminded him of celluloid policemen and blank cartridges. He
stopped the car at the end of the alley and turned in his seat to look
at the Russian, as if for the first time.

The man was still unconscious. In the faint grey light of the
first
of the dawn, his features appeared sickly, unfed. There were deep lines
in his cheeks and brow and beside his lips. He looked much older; he
looked vulnerable and alone and someone who had become superannuated
and unable to frighten Hyde any longer. Yet this was only a sleeper's
mask. Hyde had been shocked by the changes he had seen in Petrunin's
face the moment he had slammed shut the door of his office. Older,
cunning, the eyes haunted, even totally empty until they filled with a
transitory fear and then with a violent urge towards self-preservation.
He had come face to face with a savage, degenerate man, someone who had
taken lives indiscriminately and often - and had learned to enjoy that
power; desiring and needing it. He had been certain of that from the
moment the red helicopter had hovered, watching the incineration of
fifty tribesmen in the narrow, snow-covered valley. Petrunin's altered,
corrupted face had confirmed Hyde's certainty.

Hyde shook his head. He rubbed his throat where the uniform
collar
had chafed his skin after the loose robes of his Pathan disguise.
Disguise - the clothes had smelt, but it wasn't that, either. He hated,
had come to hate, the way they implied a common identity between
himself and someone like Mohammed Jan. He dismissed the Pathan's image
and returned his consideration to the unconscious Petrunin. He had
become a wild, dangerous animal, instead of a senior KGB officer bound
by the unwritten rules governing the conflicts between intelligence
services. Like the Pathans he pursued and destroyed, he was without
emotion and mercy.

Hyde realised that he could never trust the Pathans with regard
to
Petrunin. It would mean his having to travel in the rug maker's
delivery truck towads Jalalabad when it left Kabul within the next
half-hour, hidden in the back with the Russian. Without him, Petrunin
would be a corpse by the time the raiding party took to the mountains.

Petrunin moaned again, entertaining nightmares. Hyde turned his
back. The self-loathing that he could not avoid sensing in that low
moan chilled and disturbed him. He felt the reality of the alien
country and people around him once more. Petrunin was a prisoner of the
war he fought. He had become, in essence, a light-skinned Pathan. How
would he, he wondered, ever get this Petrunin to talk? What -
tortures… ?

Mutilation followed by an offer of the release of a quick death
- would he have to use those threats, those bribes? He dismissed the
Pathan thought.

Savagely, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and slewed the
staff car out of the alley and onto a broad thoroughfare that might
have belonged in any city of eastern Europe that the Soviets had
rebuilt after the war; even in Moscow it would have been familiar. The
wide road ran alongside the river, a sullen grey scarf in the first
light. In the distance, the Hindu Kush was tipped with bright gold.
Hyde accelerated. The mountains seemed impossibly high and endless, and
alien like the streets of Kabul.

Aubrey left the main passenger lounge of the ferry because the
carelessly disposed bodies of those sleeping suggested defeat to him
and the high, raised voices of parties of schoolchildren seemed to
taunt. The lights, too, were hard and unsympathetic. On deck, the wind
was sharp and buffeting and chilly. Nevertheless, he made his way
towards the stern. Long before he reached it, he felt himself to be an
old, skulking figure, displaced and exiled. And, as if they had
gathered to witness his departure from England, he could see the lights
of Brighton along the coast, slipping behind the Dieppe ferry.

He had avoided Dover almost superstitiously, suspecting that any
search for him would be concentrated there. He had not rung Mrs Grey -
he could net bear to discover that the hunt was up. His journey from
Victoria had been uneventful, the pursuit confined to the tumbled and
broken terrain of his thoughts. His fears had chased him across the
landscape of his imagination.

He gripped the stern rail, which immediately struck cold through
his
gloves. Brighton, a town he had never much liked, now appeared
infinitely desirable; the last rescue craft moored to his country,
ablaze with light. The wind filled his eyes with water. He refused to
acknowledge the tears for what they were. Instead, he tried to
concentrate upon the ease of his escape. One bored policeman at
Victoria had seemed more interested in the antics of two drunks than in
looking for someone like him. The passport that he had always renewed
in a fictitious name had served him well. SIS knew nothing of this
falsehood. It was a private matter. Almost everyone in the intelligence
service possessed at least one other and unofficial identity. It was,
to Aubrey, the twitch of distrust at the very centre of the animal that
was always alert for the possibilities of deception. There was a
subconscious comfort in possessing a secret and unused new identity.
The secret world was habit-forming, perhaps incurable.