'Stechko - get Holokov and Filipov right away - I've got some important paperwork for you,' he said, his smile becoming puzzlement once more. Where was that radio?
Semelovsky was waiting for him, the small Moskvitch saloon pulled into the side of the narrow road leading to Bilyarsk, the bonnet open. Gant could see the faint outline of Semelovsky hunched into the open jaws of the car, as if in the process of being swallowed.
He settled down at the peak of the bank, which bordered the road, and waited. The man went on working, or appearing to work, on the engine of the small car.
Gant spent ten minutes checking that the figure was alone, and that the road was empty. When the man stood up, stretched his back, and cursed in Russian, Gant ducked back out of sight. Semelovsky was small - Gant saw light glint from the two moons of his spectacles. The man looked around him, and up and down the road, then returned his head beneath the bonnet.
Gant heard muffled tinkering, and a tuneless whistle, then slowly got to his feet, and eased himself down the slope of the bank. The man's back was to him, and if he were not Semelovsky, then...
'How long have you been watching me-' the little man asked in Russian, in an irritated voice, without lifting his head from beneath the bonnet. Gant stopped in his tracks, one foot raised from the ground in a half-made step.
'Semelovsky?' he asked as the shock dissipated in his system.
The man emerged from beneath the bonnet, wiping his hands on an oily rag. He studied Gant by the light of the moon, low on the horizon still, nodded to himself as if in satisfaction, and closed the bonnet loudly.
Gant moved closer to him. The man was in his late forties, possibly fifties. The remainder of his frizzy grey hair clung to his ears, but the top of his head was bald.
He was dressed in a drab suit, and wore a raincoat. He was barely more than five feet in height. He looked up at Gant, the light glinting from his spectacles as he studied the American.
'You're late,' he said at last.
'I'm sorry,' Gant snapped back, irritated by the man.
'It's a question of the guards,' Semelovsky explained, as if to a child. 'A little longer, and one of the guard-posts, either at the junction or the other end of the road, would have sent someone to discover where I was. It is almost an hour since I checked through the first guard-post - which is why my car has, to all intents and purposes, broken down.'
Gant nodded, and then said: 'How do I get into Bilyarsk?'
'A good question. In the boot of the car, of course.'
'Won't they search it?'
'Probably not. It was searched at the other end. Thoroughly. The KGB work very mindlessly, most of the time,' he added, as if lecturing on the subject of an inefficient mechanism. 'If the one guard-post is detailed to search all incoming vehicles, and the other all outgoing traffic, then they do not, as a rule, change functions - despite the recent draft of extra guards into the town. Do you know, there were more than a dozen jammed into the guard-post at the highway junction.'
Semelovsky smiled suddenly, brilliantly. 'They must be expecting trouble, of one kind or another!'
He walked round Gant to the rear of the car, and opened the boot. He gestured to the American, sharply, as if accusing himself of having wasted valuable time, and Gant joined him. The boot was empty, and small.
Pocketing the gun he had held all the time in his right hand, Gant climbed into the small space, hunched himself into a foetal position, and nodded. The Russian stood watching him for a moment, and then nodded back. The light disappeared, and Gant was in a confined, cramped darkness. He accepted that Semelovsky would have prepared the boot so that he would not asphyxiate. The darkness held no terrors for him. The boot was not as cramped as his own thoughts had proved, those months in the hospital. He heard the tinny roar of the engine, realised that Semelovsky, with careful attention to detail, was firing on only three cylinders, and then was heaved against the cold metal of the boot-door as the Russian pulled onto the road.
Semelovsky gave little thought to his passenger as he negotiated the remaining miles to the outskirts of Bilyarsk, where the quarters for the technical and scientific staff had been constructed. The road was narrow and deeply rutted by the passage of numerous heavy vehicles, bringing equipment to the project site. Semelovsky thought only of his function within the total operation that was intended to bring Gant and the Mig-31 into successful proximity. He had been recruited into the underground cell by Baranovich, for whom, and for whose sufferings at the hands of the NKVD and later the KGB, he had an almost religious respect. Semelovsky was himself a Jew, but had spent most of his adult life working successfully on various technical and military projects for the regime that despised and harried in large numbers, the people of his race. But, Baranovich was sufficiently his hero to shake him out of the political cowardice of years; like all converts, he was zealous to an extreme.
The second guard-post lay in a gap in the high wire fence that surrounded the whole project area, including the airstrip. The original farming village of Bilyarsk lay outside the wire, a separate, and separated, community of wooden houses, communal agriculture, and poverty. The project-town had been grafted on to it, a hybrid growth surrounded by trees, ordered, secret.
Semelovsky slowed the car as he approached the gates in the wire, and he saw the increased size of the guard, a pattern he already expected from the junction guard-post fourteen miles down the road. Two guards, rather than the usual one, approached the vehicle, and he was almost blinded by the new, powerful searchlight mounted on the back of a truck. The beam of a searchlight mounted on one of the guard-towers, fifty yards away, swung to pick him up, and he was bathed in cold, white light. He wound down the window, and stuck out his head. He recognised the guard.
'Ah, Feodor - I see you have some new toys to play with, eh?' He laughed naturally, smiling inwardly at his own bravado.
'Dr. Semelovsky - where have you been? You were checked through the guard-post more than an hour ago.' The guard was frowning, more, Semelovsky suspected, because an officer he did not recognise watching the little scene, than because he was suspicious, or angry.
Semelovsky held out his hands, and the oily stains were clearly visible in the searchlight's glare.
'Damn car broke down!' he said. 'Much as the latest Five-Year Plan has achieved, it has not solved the problem of the Moskvitch - eh.' He laughed again, inviting the guard to join him. The guard smiled.
The second guard joined him, and said: 'Turn on the engine, please.' Semelovsky did not recognise this guard, looked at Feodor for a time, then shrugged and did as he was ordered. He revved loudly, and the missing cylinder could be plainly detected. The guard motioned him to release the bonnet-catch, and lifted the bonnet, his head disappearing. Semelovsky spared a momentary glance at the officer, who appeared to be persuaded of the normality of the situation. He was smoking, and appeared bored.
Leaning out of the window, he called: 'Any idea what it is?'
The second guard slammed down the bonnet suddenly, as if caught at some forbidden prank, and replied gruffly: 'That engine's filthy. You're a scientist - you should take more care.' Then he seemed to realise that his mask of deference had slipped. Semelovsky, surprised by his unguarded tone, realised that the man had to be KGB or GRU, whatever his uniform said.
He nodded in reply.
'They keep us too busy...'he began.
The second guard turned away, and shook his head in the direction of the officer lounging against the wall of the guard-hut The officer waved a hand nonchalantly, and the gates swung apart The guard Feodor waved Semelovsky through.
He eased the car into gear, and pulled forward. He passed through the gates, and they closed behind him.
At that point, and at that point only, a wave of fear swept over him. The incident was more fraught in retrospect than it had been as he experienced it. He had smuggled Gant into the complex, and his job was done.
He steered the car through the straight streets of the living quarters. Each dacha-like dwelling, wooden and one-storied, was identical, set back from the road behind a strip of lawn. It was, he thought, more of a camp than a town. Not a camp like the ones Baranovich knew from personal experience, on what they called the Gulag Archipelago, but it was a camp, nevertheless. It did not have walls like Mavrino, where Baranovich had spent years of his creative adult life - but there were electric fences, and guard-towers, and the KGB.
He turned the wheel of the car, and drove it up the slightly-sloping drive and into the opened garage of a house half-way down Tupolev Avenue. It was near the middle of the fenced-in township, identical to almost every other street, except those which contained the shops, the bars, and the cinema and dance-hall.
Semelovsky glimpsed, the watcher in the black car parked across the street from the house. He was suddenly afraid again. It did not matter that Baranovich had told him, and that he knew himself perfectly well, that they would not arrest them until after the weapons trials - otherwise, who would complete the arming of the plane, the rest of the work...? It was only by recalling Baranovich's face, and by hearing his voice, that he was able to calm himself. Then the bumper of the car bounced gently away from the car-tyre at the end of the garage, and he tugged on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As if forgetting Gant, locked in the boot, he sat for some moments, breathing regularly and deeply. He had seen too much, too quickly.
Then he opened the door, took the key from the ignition, and closed the garage door before he opened the boot.
'And you have learned nothing from either of them, Dmitri - still nothing?' The silkiness that had earlier invested it was gone from Kontarsky's voice. Instead, it was querulous, impatient. He was pacing his office, while Priabin sat in a chair before his desk, maintaining a ceaseless patrol. It was ten past seven. Priabin had left the cellar-room in Dzerzhinsky Street only minutes earlier, after Riassin, the man who seemed most likely to break of the two they had collected from the Mira Prospekt flats that morning, had slipped again into unconsciousness. Priabin tasted the ashes of an unsuccessful interrogation. There had been no time for the more refined, slower processes he preferred - this had been a brutal softening-up and the massive misuse of pentathol on both men. Yet, they had learned nothing. Priabin was of the opinion that there was nothing to learn, other than the fact that the two men knew Pavel Upenskoy, and that one of them, Glazunov, worked with him, as driver's mate on his delivery truck.
Glazunov had been instructed to remain at home that day, despite the fact that Upenskoy was leaving for a delivery to Kuybyshev, a long trip but, so he claimed under drugs, he had not been told why.
However, Kontarsky was in no mood to believe that Priabin had tried as hard as he could, pushed as hard as he dare, without killing Glazunov and the other man - he was prepared to believe only that his aide had failed. Kontarsky, it was obvious, still believed that the two men possessed the information.
Priabin's eyes followed Kontarsky as he paced the carpet. He, like his chief, had a sense that there was a mounting urgency about the circumstances of the second man in the truck. The problem was the inability to understand what these agents of British and American intelligence could hope to gain by smuggling one man into Bilyarsk ... for that must be where the impostor was heading. What could he do, that one man, that could not be done by Baranovich, the brilliant original mind, or Semelovsky, or even Kreshin - all of whom would be working on the actual aircraft during the night? A stranger would not be able to get anywhere near the Mig. And to consider that he had come merely to spy, to photograph, was ridiculous, Priabin concluded once more.
He realised that Kontarsky had halted in front of him. He looked up into the colonel's strained face. The man was already hours late in departing for Bilyarsk, since he wanted to go with positive information concerning the man travelling in the same direction in Upenskoy's truck. A KGB helicopter had been waiting for him on the outskirts of the city since early afternoon.
'Very well,' Kontarsky said, appearing to have come to some decision. Tick up the phone, Dmitri. Get in touch with the tail-car, and have Upenskoy and the other man pulled in - at once!'
'Sir.'
Priabin picked up the telephone. A simple instruction would be relayed via radio to the KGB office in Kazan, whence it would be passed on to the tail-car. 'Tell them to request what help they need from the guard-post at the Bilyarsk junction,' Kontarsky added.
'How many men in that car?'
Three.' Priabin replied. Then he said: The last position of the truck showed it to have passed the junction to Bilyarsk - it didn't slow down, and it didn't stop...' He held the phone loosely in his hand.
Kontarsky whirled round, and snapped: 'Then they must stop it now - I want to know if that second man is still aboard!'
