The Bear's Tears (42 page)

"Yes, Sir Andrew?"

"I want you as Deputy Director-General. Second Deputy, of
course. I
shall have to promote Worthington - temporarily."

"I understand, Sir Andrew. Thank you." Eldon sliced at his lamb
cutlet. Babbington sipped at his claret. "I did not expect —" Eldon
felt obliged to offer, surprised at his own lack of excitement.

"You never do, do you, Eldon?" Babbington almost sneered. "You
seem
quite without proper ambition, at times."

"I'm sorry, Sir Andrew," Eldon replied calmly, chewing on the
piece
of lamb, his gaze level and untroubled. Babbington was irritated by his
subordinate's self-possession. His own delight was tarnished by
Aubrey's disappearance, but only on the grounds that its ease reflected
on himself. Aubrey, per se, did not matter any longer. He had
lost, was lost.

"Very well, Eldon," Babbington snapped, irritated by the lack of
surprise and pleasure in Eldon, then dismissing the emotions. Eldon was
good, reliable, efficient, unambitious - a perfect DDG 2. There was a
wife somewhere in Hampshire who would, no doubt, see the promotion in
cruder, more pleasurable terms than had her husband. "Where do you
think dear Kenneth is now?"

Eldon studied the claret as if its vintage and origins were no
more
than a cover story. Then he sipped it, and nodded. "On his way East,
Sir Andrew. He'll pop up in Moscow, no doubt, in due course - for the
medal ceremony." Eldon seemed to be speaking without irony.

"I suppose so," Babbington agreed. "A damned nuisance, all the
same."

"Perhaps tidier," Eldon murmured.

"Root and branch now, Eldon. Your first job. All Aubrey's old
cronies, his lackeys and appointments and time-servers. I want them all
out."

"Of course. It makes sense."

A waiter approached as Babbington was about to reply. A silver
tray
was offered. Babbington took the sealed envelope. He opened it with the
proffered paper-knife, levering up the red, embossed wax, then waved
the waiter away. Eldon watched him as he read; watched, too, his own
emotions. Studied the lack of pleasure, remembered the Sunday lunch he
had shared with Aubrey, and sensed an unwilling and surprising
comparison of Babbington and Aubrey in his emotions. Babbington was
without charm, except when he chose to exercise it. Aubrey was -
charming. Gifted, intuitive, and he would have said upright before
events proved that idea no more than a sham. Aubrey was what Eldon
might have fancied himself to be - except that Aubrey was a proven
traitor. Eldon had no wish, however, to be Babbington.

He watched Babbington's heavy features. Brutally handsome,
perhaps.
Elaine would have admired the strength of character they displayed,
even in growing anger, as now. Fear, too, he thought quickly, even as
he inwardly smiled at his wife's impressionability with regard to the
superfices of human character. It was as if he had married, with
subconscious deliberation, someone who could never rival or imitate his
own capacity for insight.

Fear, too —?

Why?

Babbington caught Eldon's gaze, and there was only anger. Eldon
maintained a calm expressionless exterior. Babbington screwed the paper
into a ball in his fist.

"A message from the Continent," he announced with heavy irony.
"Massinger has been seen in Bonn."

"One of the first fruits of SAID," Eldon observed.

"It isn't a joking matter, Eldon!"

"I'm sorry —"

"What in hell's name is Massinger doing in Bonn?" Eldon thought
he
detected an element of bluff, or subterfuge in the puzzlement. As if
Babbington knew the answer… ? Eldon dismissed his guess. Better to be
like Elaine on some occasions, he warned himself. Interrogator's
paranoia. "Why the devil can't he drop this damn business?" Babbington
continued. "He must be stopped."

"Does it matter? May I?" Eldon held out his hand. Babbington
reluctantly passed him the ball of paper. Eldon smoothed it on the
tablecloth, and read. Eventually, he said: "I don't see what we can do,
since he's with Zimmermann. Ask politely, I suppose?"

"So do it. And - find Aubrey. I want him to stand trial -I want
Aubrey in the dock at the Old Bailey!"

Eldon glimpsed the fear once more, lurking beneath the anger
like a
serpent beneath a flower. Eldon, too, squeezed the sheet of notepaper
into a ball in his fist.

To have reached the abandoned Afghan fort before darkness seemed
to
Hyde like a race that had been won. The day had exhausted him. Not
because of the distance so much as the tensions that surrounded himself
and his prisoner. There were eleven Pathans still alive, including
Mohammed Jan, and all of them coveted Petrunin as certainly as if he
were encrusted with precious stones. Even now, in the shadows of the
fort's empty, windswept rooms - a wind that plucked little drifts of
snow from the corners and floors of the rooms and whirled them like new
showers - Hyde could sense their eyes turning continually towards the
Russian, their hunger evident. Miandad sensed some kind of approaching
crisis, too, for he had positioned himself near Hyde and Petrunin, his
small frame crouched and alert with tension. Mohammed Jan, after
posting his look-outs, paced through the fort like a magnate who had
acquired a mansion requiring extensive renovation. There was about him
both an urgent need for change and a sure sense of possession. Petrunin
was his, his stance and movements declared. His by right, his
to take.

They had left the truck to continue its journey to Jalalabad
less
than five miles from the place where they had ambushed the patrol and
Hyde had killed Lieutenant Azimov. The Pathans who had slipped out of
Kabul in wagons, on bicycles, by bus and even on foot, rendezvoused
with them before midday. Hyde was shocked to discover how few in number
they were. There had been no time at the rug maker's to ask Miandad
anything as the Pakistani had hurried him into the back of the truck
with the now conscious Petrunin, then joined the driver in the cab. The
staff car was driven away by one of the rug-maker's sons and presumably
dumped.

The truck had not been searched. They had evaded the net,
perhaps by
no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Confusion still aided them, and
Petrunin might not yet have been missed.

The afternoon had been filled with the noise of helicopters,
after
they had taken to the hills - their noise and the sharklike shapes of
MiL gunships dark against the snow-clad hillsides. The Pathans had
protected Petrunin like their dearest possession; which he was, Hyde
admitted. He was the purse that held the coinage of their hatred and
their revenge. Bright gold coins. They had avoided detection with what
had seemed like ease, threading through narrow defiles or using hidden,
hair-thin tracks that clung to the sheer sides of the hills, until they
reached the fort where Hyde and Miandad had rested two days before.

After nightfall, they would continue their journey. Miandad
expected
them to cross the border into Pakistan before dawn. Hyde associated the
crossing, and the hours before it, only with crisis, not with safety at
the journey's end.

Hatred. Even in that sub-zero temperature, its effects heated
Hyde's
body. Almost three-quarters of the Pathans had died for this man's
capture, the last of them in the square, buried by rocket-loosened
masonry or raked by bullets. Some of them might yet die of wounds,
exhaustion or gangrene. Their efforts and their losses demanded the
mutilation of Petrunin and his slow death as recompense. To satisfy
their hatred, they would risk capture and death by remaining here for
two or three days just to kill him slowly and with infinite pleasure.

Above all, Petrunin had burned fifty of Mohammed Jan's men;
burned
two of his sons.

"My friend," Miandad murmured on the other side of the
apparently
sleeping Petrunin, "what will you do? Have you decided?"

The wind whipped snow from one corner of the roofless room in
which
they huddled around a small, flickering fire, creating a tiny blizzard
which lasted no more than a moment. The arms of Petrunin's greatcoat
were dusted with snow. The Russian's head remained resting on his
chest. Petrunin had answered none of Hyde's questions. He realised his
value to the Australian and relied on Hyde's protection. Petrunin
realised as clearly as the Pathans his value as a commodity. He knew
Hyde would not sell him to Mohammed Jan, not even at the price of his
own safety.

Hyde shook his head. "I don't know," he muttered. "Christ, I
don't
know —!" Petrunin appeared to stir in his sleep. Hyde dug his elbow
viciously into the Russian's side. "Wake up, you bastard!" he growled.
As if the Pathans had been large cats huddled around them, there was a
murmuring noise as Petrunin sat up; a throaty, greedy, hungry noise.
"You bastard, you bastard…" Hyde repeated impoteritly.

"You can't threaten me with them," Petrunin observed calmly,
though
his face betrayed the effect of the Pathans' murmuring on him. "And I
won't tell you, because then you would give me to them. And you can't
hand me over and hope to stop it if I talk - they'd never Let you."

"So how do you expect Mr Hyde to protect you, if they are so
much to
be feared?" Miandad asked.

Petrunin glared at the Pakistani.

"Can you get us over the border?" Hyde asked.

"From here, yes - but I doubt if we could slip away unnoticed,
my
friend."

"Shit —"

"I am already compromised, I fear," Miandad continued. "It would
do
me no extra harm to help you escape. But I cannot see how we would
possibly outrun Mohammed Jan - can you?"

"No, I can't. We're right in it, thanks to this bastard."

"I didn't ask to be kidnapped," Petrunin observed with an
affected
lightness that seemed to recapture, for an instant, a former time and
place, even character.

"Aubrey didn't ask to be set up!" Hyde snapped. Again,
the
Pathans stirred. Wild, large cats. "I didn't ask to get shot
at by my own side, or to be here."

"I did nothing more than create
Teardrop
- I didn't
use
it. It was an intellectual exercise, nothing more."

"What was its purpose?"

"Ah," Petrunin answered smugly, and smiled. Hyde could see his
face
in the failing light, somehow softened and made younger. It was haggard
with effort, of course, and afraid. But it belonged to the Petrunin
Hyde had formerly known. It was the face of an invalid who had
recovered from a severe fever; and the face of a still dangerous enemy.

"Listen," Miandad said, his head cocked on one side. "I think
the
helicopters have returned."

Petrunin's eyes gleamed in the firelight as he raised his face
to
the darkening sky. Hyde listened, realising that Petrunin still
expected, by some miracle, to be rescued. Mohammed Jan had appeared in
the doorway, then turned and moved quickly away at the first sounds
overhead. Hyde got to his feet. Most of the Pathans were alert now,
standing or already moving back into the
shadows at the corners of the room. Someone had kicked out the fire.
Petrunin's smile was almost indistinguishable. Hyde drew the Makarov
and nudged the Russian's side with its barrel. The noise of rotors was
loud now, and Hyde leaned towards Petrunin's ear in order that the man
would hear him.

"Back against the wall. Don't be stupid in your old age."
Petrunin
nodded and did as Hyde ordered. They pressed back into the shadows.
Hyde thought he could distinguish a thin streamer of smoke ascending
from the fire's scattered remains, but perhaps it was only the smell of
the fire that remained. Snow began to lift and swirl from the floor and
the corners and the rooms beyond. The rotor noise was deafening, very
low and near.

"Look," he heard Miandad call out. Hyde raised his head.

The MiL gunship squatted above the roofless room. Involuntarily,
Hyde's body began to shudder, as if the rotors were beating at the
packed earth under his feet. The helicopter squatted on the air,
toadlike, and they watched it like minnows from beneath clear water; a
dark, ugly shape. The snow whirled up in the down-draught, coating
their clothing, flicking against their skin and into their eyes. The
room was foggy with the distressed, dusty snow. Hyde, looking up,
realised that the helicopter was still descending. It was perhaps no
more than fifty feet above the room in which they pressed against the
chilly walls, and was slowly enlarging, as if the toad were inflating
itself. The snow seemed sucked towards it through the open roof. Like a
roof itself, the helicopter filled the space of evening sky.

Mohammed Jan appeared, sidling through the doorway, pressing
against
the wall. Then a white searchlight beam struck down into the room. Hyde
froze. He heard Mohammed Jan shouting above the noise of the rotors,
then Miandad crying out, too.

"Soldiers! The look-outs report troops moving up the hillside to
encircle us!"

Hyde jabbed Petrunin with the barrel of the pistol. "No!" he
warned.
Petrunin seemed to shrug. The light spilled across the floor towards
their feet. Pathans were already spilling out of the doorway, sidling
along the walls. The snow funnel swirled and obscured, garishly lit by
the searchlight. The sky had vanished above them. There was only the
dark belly of the MiL around the halo of the light. "Move!" Hyde
ordered. "Move, you bastard!" He pushed Petrunin along the wall.

Sky again. The light, like a waterfall, poured over the doorway
and
into the next room - then back. A Pathan fixed in its glare looked up,
immobile and afraid. Hyde could discern the noise of other helicopters.
There was shooting from outside, in the main courtyard of the fort,
perhaps beyond the walls. Miandad moved ahead of the reluctant
Petrunin. The light holding the Pathan spilled over them. The
helicopter began to alter its angle of hover, and its belly light
slipped away from them. Another light, presumably from a searchlight
mounted beneath its nose, illuminated the room beyond.