The Last Aerie (37 page)

Tzonov looked into the back of the truck. A spare tarpaulin, coiled ropes, a box of worn-out parts from the Projekt’s cranky ventilation system. “What was your cargo?”

“Just what you see.” Still mystified, the other shrugged. “I’m on resupply, not delivery. I won’t be full until I start back from the railway depot in Ukhta.”

Siggi had finished her coffee and joined them. She, too, looked into the back of the truck. But she saw more in there than Tzonov had seen. He needed eye to eye contact before his talent came into play, but with Siggi … sometimes it was a lot more than just telepathy. Like now. Why, it was almost as if she could smell Nathan in there! As if she could taste him, feel the rush and whirl of his numbers vortex. He wasn’t here now, but he had been, certainly. And even now he wasn’t that far away.

Tzonov looked at her. “Well?”

“Nothing,” she lied.

He turned to the Corporal driver. “Ivanovich, we’re looking for a man, the prisoner we were holding at Perchorsk. It’s possible he escaped in this truck. These tailgate lashings were loose. Were they like that when you left the complex? Did you see or hear anything suspicious? Speak up!”

“The tarpaulin was OK when I left Perchorsk,” the soldier answered. “It probably came loose on its own. I wasn’t carrying anything anyway and so had nothing to lose—sir!”

Tzonov had been staring straight into the Corporal’s eyes and knew that he’d fumbled the lashings in Perchorsk. At least, he knew that the man suspected that he’d fumbled them. It meant absolutely nothing. “Damn it to
hell
he snarled, and turned to Siggi again. And now his eyes were hard and bright as marbles. “Was he here?”

“No,” she lied again. And her mind-smog swirled, dank and impenetrable.

Whirling away from her and heading for the snowcat, Tzonov only paused to shout back over his shoulder: “Well, then? Are you coming? For God’s sake, let’s get out of here!”

“My parka,” she called after him. I’ll be a moment.”

The young soldier went back inside with her. As he helped Siggi on with her parka, she asked him: “Where did you stop?”

“About half-way here,” he told her, “just to warm up, as I said. And also …”

“Also?”

“Just outside of town, but very briefly. To let some travellers over the crossing.”

Travellers! The word riveted her. “Gypsies?”

He nodded. “They’re late this year—or early. It’s hard to tell with the travelling folk. They just come and go.” Then, looking worried, he asked her: “Madame, am I in trouble?”

Siggi only half-heard him. After a moment’s silence, she gave herself a mental shake and answered, “Eh, trouble? No, I shouldn’t think so.” And controlling an urge to laugh hysterically, she went outside to Tzonov and the snowcat…

Standing some two miles to the north of Little Kozhva, a steep-sided knoll of volcanic rock—the plug of a once-mighty caldera—grew up above the forest some hundreds of feet high. The snowcat had skirted its thinly wooded base on the approach to the logging camp. Now, as Siggi and Tzonov headed north for Perchorsk, she asked him: “How much power does this thing have? Enough to climb that knoll?”

“If I climb gradually, along the contours, and make a complete circuit, yes. Did you want to?”

“The view from up there must be quite marvelous.”

“Very well,” he grunted, however grudgingly. “It will cost us half an hour, but…”

“Are you still worrying about Nathan? But I’m sure that by now they’ll have found his hiding-place in the complex, or discovered him half-frozen, trying to climb out of the ravine.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he answered.

By then the clouds were breaking up and wan beams of sunlight were finding their way from the south. They weren’t much, but they cheered Tzonov up a little …

At the top of the knoll, while Tzonov went off behind a rocky outcrop to relieve himself, Siggi found binoculars in the snowcat’s panniers and swept the forested country to the south-west. This was why she’d wanted to come up here: to see if she could catch a glimpse of—

—The travelling folk!

And there they were, the real thing, just as they had been for a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years and more. Romany: pariahs and outcasts, suppressed, persecuted, chased from country to country for all that time. A race apart, yes, yet close and closer to their origins than any other race in the whole world; a party of Gypsies, their half-dozen painted caravans jolting and jingling far beyond the range of audibility, but clear as bells in Siggi’s mind as she tried to bring them into focus.

No, she couldn’t; they were too far away, three or maybe four miles; running from the winter, heading south. Except … something the young Corporal had said had stuck in Siggi’s memory. Being mobile, and with their knowledge of the seasons, why on earth were they still here? They were a secretive, even esoteric people, true enough, and wherever possible would keep clear of the world’s more heavily populated regions; but even so, by now they should be seven hundred miles further south. Down on the shore of the Caspian, in Astrakhan or Baku. Or perhaps the Black Sea, Moldavia … Romania? Yet here they were, and only now fleeing the rigours of winter.

Siggi looked around, her eyes tracing Tzonov’s tracks in the snow. He was nowhere in sight. And again she picked out the thin line of caravans on the fringe of a distant forest. Unlike Tzonov, her talent didn’t require eye to eye contact; she could cast her mind like an arrow, if she had a target.

Good
luck!
she sent
. Run far and fast, Nathan, and never come back.
She didn’t for a moment believe he would answer, or even that he could. But…

… A tendril of numbers touched her consciousness, and at once fastened to her thoughts! Siggi’s skin prickled as if she stood close to a giant dynamo. And in her mind:

Goodbye, Siggi. I won’t forget you
. Nathan’s voice, and his unique warmth. But so powerful! And Turkur Tzonov was receptive to strong telepathic signals.

Nathan heard that, too; his carrier probe at once disintegrated; the mental ether was clear again. And just in time, for Tzonov’s voice came ringing:

“What do you see? Anything interesting?” The tone of his voice signaled nothing special.

Siggi sighed her relief and called back, “Smoke from the villages and camps. A flight of birds, geese I think. And some furtive creature in the woods. A dog, perhaps, or a wolf. It’s all very cold out there, but it’s all very peaceful, too.”

“Do you think so?” He went to the snowcat and started it up. “Well, my mind is full of vague premonitions. So enough of these sidetracks, let’s get back to Perchorsk.”

All the way back Siggi was sad, for now she must keep her mind caged behind bars of her own making. And thinking of Nathan (however much she tried not to think of him), she wondered if he was sad, too …

When they arrived back at Perchorsk, Tzonov’s “vague premonitions” quickly assumed tangible form. At the crest of the pass his Platoon Commander was sitting in the half-track’s driving seat with the engine already ticking over, waiting patiently for the snowcat’s return.

Staff-Sergeant Bruno Krasin was dark-skinned, wiry, long-limbed. Thirtyish, square-jawed and hard-eyed, the blood of his Cossack forefathers still ran strong in him. The son of an old hard-line communist and KGB officer, Krasin was one of Tzonov’s most trusted men; indeed, he was the man who would one day lead Tzonov’s expeditionary force through the Perchorsk Gate into an alien world. On the way down to the complex he told Tzonov what had transpired in his absence.

“First, our search teams have worked their way through the Projekt scrupulously. They’ve scoured it just as you ordered, and the visitor isn’t here. We’ve discovered nothing of his whereabouts. Second: it had been snowing in the pass, but not too heavily. So anyone on the run must leave tracks in the fresh snow. You would think so. Yet there was nothing. It’s as if he simply disappeared.”

And again Tzonov remembered who was Nathan’s father. But Siggi had sworn he didn’t have his father’s powers. And Nathan had seemed cowed and even despondent in captivity. “I take it your men are still out searching?”

Krasin nodded. “I’ve sent out search parties into all of the neighbouring villages and camps. Also, and despite that we cleared the trucks heading for Beresovo, I’ve sent a motorcyclist after them to double-check. But in my opinion it’s all a waste of time. Something that had to be done, but a waste all the same. I think he had help.”

Tzonov shook his head. “From here, Perchorsk? Impossible! Who?”

“The British?”

“Oh? How, when they’ve been kept little short of prisoners themselves? Our agents in the embassies have reported increased esper activity in London, but not around here. And anyway, what could they do?”

Krasin had worked frequently with Soviet E-Branch, providing the muscle behind some of Tzonov’s more covert schemes. He vastly admired his talented master, but knew that while Tzonov was a mindspy, he would never make an agent on the ground; that is to say, an espionage agent in the old sense of the word. His talent got in the way; he relied on it too heavily; he couldn’t see the wood for the trees. The British have known about this place since its early days,” he answered. “From space, this has to be the most photographed place in the world. They know every track and trail from here north to Vorkuta and south to Sverdlovsk. If they could get a message, or a map, to the visitor …”

“He can’t even read!” Tzonov exploded.

“But he can see! He’s not unintelligent.”

“You told me there are no tracks.” Tzonov’s frustrations were mounting.

Siggi cut in: “He’s Szgany, from Sunside. He knows how to cover his tracks. He has avoided the Wamphyri! In the wild, it will be like hunting the Invisible Man.”

“The British!” Tzonov growled. “This morning I sent a man to wake them up, but I didn’t tell them he’d escaped. What, so that they could look for ways to assist him on his way? Anyway, they weren’t fit for much of anything. Probably still feeling the effects of the drug … though by now it should have voided itself.” He frowned, shrugged, continued. “Apparently they were like zombies! And they didn’t appear to know anything. I left a message for them: I have been ‘called away’, but I shall be at their disposal upon my return.”

“But they
are
talented,” Krasin insisted. “And you yourself have frequently stated that their organization is second to none. Also, they have seen the visitor, spoken to him. And if they haven’t helped him in some way, then why were they so eager to leave?”

“What?”

“They’re out of here.” The other wasn’t cowed. “They came on the invitation of Gustav Turchin, and they invoked his name to get out. They saw Projekt Direktor Vanadze right after you left, and he arranged air transport to Moscow. By then the jet-copter had returned, and of course I had personally supervised the unloading of the machine. No —” he held up a hand, “— the British didn’t see it.”

“Vanadze let them go?” Tzonov couldn’t believe it.

“How could he prevent it? He asked them to wait until your return, but they would have none of that. They threatened to speak to Gustav Turchin himself, which turned the trick most admirably. The Premier is like a puppet; his policies tie him inextricably to Western economics; his political survival is entirely dependent upon the USA, United Germany, and the UK. He would have ordered the immediate release of the British, and in the process would have given everyone else hell!”

“They simply flew out of here?” It was getting worse.

The other could only shrug. “Yes. There was a British Airways Hawk from Moscow to London at 11:45. About now … it will be seeking a window into Heathrow. But even if you’d been here, what could you have done? They were guests, not prisoners.”

They were three-quarters of the way to the bottom of the ravine. Two hundred feet below them, the manmade lake of pent water was a sullen, leaden grey. Tiny flyspeck figures in winter white uniforms moved antlike where they searched icy scree slopes. As the half-track slewed onto the ramp to the staging area in front of the Projekt’s massive security doors, Tzonov calmed down a little. “You’re absolutely sure they didn’t see the machine?”

“I am positive, sir.”

Tzonov took a deep breath. “Then we must brazen it out.”

Siggi frowned. “Brazen what out?” In closing her mind to him so completely, she had also denied herself access to Tzonov’s thoughts.

“The whole thing is a mess,” Tzonov snapped. “And we will be the ones who take the blame—unless we turn events to our own advantage. For example: the British espers have gone home in a hurry. Why? Because they’ve been up to no good here. That will be our story, anyway. So, what have they been up to? Well, we think they may have helped our alien visitor to escape, perhaps by acting upon him like a catalyst until he developed his father’s powers. And damn it all —” he slapped the flat of his hand against the half-track’s steel door, “— that mightn’t be so very far from the truth!”

The doors opened and they drove through. And as the half-track’s uproar faded into silence and they dismounted, Tzonov continued to paint his picture of deceit. Ushering Krasin and Siggi to one side, and talking in a lowered tone now, he said: “How then are we to react? But how
would
we act, if our story were entirely true? We would be outraged, furious! What? Having shown the British every courtesy, they repay us with this … this
treachery
? Then, as soon as my back is turned, they laugh like hyenas and flee to safety! Perchorsk’s staff will back us up; they have seen nothing extraordinary in my treatment of Trask and Goodly. Also, they wouldn’t dare go against me.”

“But we did drug those two,” Siggi reminded. “Maybe that was a mistake.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I had to get them out of the way. I hoped to move my arsenal, hide it away. Also, we were bringing our visitor in through the Gate; I planned to interrogate him … oh, a good many things! And all without their interference.
Huh!
Anyway, it’s their word against ours. They have no proof. If they dare to bring charges, it will only be as an excuse for fleeing from us when in fact they’re running from their own treachery. Of course they are, for their mission is accomplished. They’ve unleashed an alien creature upon us with powers we don’t understand. Ah, but our response … will be to issue a warrant on this Nathan’s life. To all intelligence agents in the field: terminate on sight, and as the Americans are wont to say, ‘with extreme prejudice!’“