‘What?’ Khuv almost shouted. ‘You’d shoot it out? You’ll ruin his face and the shock might kill him!’
‘I would love to shoot it out,’ Karl answered, ‘but that isn’t my intention.’ He poised the heel of his free hand over the weapon’s butt.
Khuv looked away. This part of it was for such as Karl. Khuv liked to think he stood a little above sheer animal brutality. He looked out over the rim of the ridge, gritted his own teeth in a sort of morbid empathy as he heard Karl’s hammer hand come down with a smack on the butt of the gun. And:
There!’ said Karl with some satisfaction. ‘Done!’ In fact he’d got two teeth, whole, the one with the cylinder and its neighbour. Now he used a grimy finger to hook them out of Simonov’s bloody mouth. ‘All done,’ Karl said again, ‘and I didn’t break the cylinder. See, the cap’s still secure on the top. He was just about to wake up, I think, but that bit of additional pain should keep him under.’
‘Well done,’ said Khuv with a small shudder. ‘Pack some snow in his mouth – but not too much!’ He inclined his head, added, ‘Here they come.’
Dim, artificial light washed up from the gorge like the pulse of a far false dawn. It brightened rapidly. With it came the slicing whup, whup, whup, of a helicopter’s rotors . . .
Jazz Simmons was falling, falling, falling. He’d been on top of a mountain and had somehow fallen off. It was a very high mountain and it was taking him a long time to hit the bottom. Indeed, he’d been falling for so long that the motion now seemed like floating. Floating in air, frog-shaped, free-falling like an expert parachutist waiting for the right moment to open his chute. Except Jazz had no chute. Also, he must have hit his face on something as he fell, for his mouth was full of blood.
Nausea and vomiting woke him up from nightmare to nightmarish reality. He was falling! In the next moment, remembering everything, the thought flashed through his mind:
God! They’ve tossed me into the ravine!
But he wasn’t falling, only floating. At least that part of his dream was real. And now as his brain got in gear and shock receded a little, so he felt the tight grip of his harness and the down-draft of the helicopter’s great fan overhead. He craned his neck and twisted his body, and somehow managed to look up. Way up there a chopper, its spotlights probing the depths of the ravine, but directly overhead . . .
Directly overhead a dead man twirled slowly on a second line, a hook through his belt, his arms and legs loosely dangling. His dead eyes were open and each time he came round they stared into Jazz’s eyes. From the splashes of crimson on his white parka Jazz supposed it was the man he’d shot.
Then-
Shock returned with a vengeance, weightlessness and vertigo and cold, blasting air and noise combining to put him down a second time. The last thing he remembered as he fell into another ravine, the night-black pit of merciful oblivion, was to wonder why his mouth was full of blood and what had happened to his teeth.
Mere moments after he’d passed out the helicopter lowered him to the flat top of the upper dam wall and yellow-jacketed men removed him and his harness complete from his hook. They took Boris Dudko down, too, a heroic son of Mother Russia. After that . . . their handling of Jazz Simmons wasn’t too gentle, but he neither knew nor cared.
Nor did he know that he was about to experience the dream of every intelligence boss in the Western World: he was about to be taken inside the Perchorsk Projekt.
Getting out again would be a different thing entirely . . .
2
Debrief
Though lengthy, the debriefing was the very gentlest affair, nothing nearly so cold and clinical as Simmons had imagined this sort of interrogation would be. Of course, in his case it had to be gentle, for he’d been close to death when his friends had smuggled him out of the USSR. That had been several weeks ago – or so they told him -and it seemed he was a bit of a mess even now.