Gulharov’s attention had now fastened on something outside the car. He grew still, thoughtful. Quint looked at him: “silent Sergei’, as he and Kyle had privately named him. It wasn’t his fault he spoke no English; in fact he did speak it, but very little, and with many errors. Now he answered Quint’s glance, nodded his short-cropped head, and pointed through the open window of the car at something. ‘Look,’ he softly said. Quint looked.
Silhouetted against a low, distant haze of blue light —the lights of Kolomyya, Quint supposed — black cables snaked between poles over the border check point, with one section of cable descending into the building itself. The power supply. Now Gulharov turned and pointed off to the west, where the cable ran back in the direction of Suet. A hundred yards away, the loop of cable between two of the poles dipped right down under the night horizon. It had been grounded.
‘Excusing,’ said Gulharov. He eased himself out of the car, walked back along the central reservation, and disappeared into darkness. Quint considered going after him, but decided against it. He felt very vulnerable, and outside the car would feel even more so. At least the car’s interior was familiar to him. He tuned himself again to Krakovitch’s raving, coming loud and clear through the night from the border post. Quint couldn’t understand what was being said, but someone was getting a hard time . .
‘An end to all foolishness!’ Krakovitch shouted. ‘Now I will tell you what I am going to do. I shall drive back into Siret to the police station and phone Moscow from there.’
‘Good,’ said the fat official. ‘And providing that Moscow can send the correct documentation for the Englishman, down the telephone wire, then I shall let you through!’
‘Dolt!’ Krakovitch sneered. ‘You, of course, shall come with me to Siret, where you’ll receive your instructions direct from the Kremlin!’
How dearly the other would have loved to tell him that he had already received his instructions from Moscow, but . . . he’d been warned against that. Instead he slowly shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, Comrade, I cannot leave my post. Dereliction of duty is a very serious matter. Nothing you or anyone else could say could force me from my place of duty.’
Krakovitch saw from the official’s red face that he’d pushed him too far. Now he would probably be more stubborn than ever, even to the point of deliberate obstruction.
That was a thought which made Krakovitch frown. For what if all of this trouble had been ‘deliberate obstruction’ right from the start? Was that possible? ‘Then the solution is simple,’ he said. ‘I assume that Siret does have a twenty-four hour police station — with telephones that work?’
His opponent chewed his lip. ‘Of course,’ he finally answered.
‘Then I shall simply telephone ahead to Kolomyya and have a unit of the nearest military force here within the hour. How will it feel, Comrade, to be a Russian, commanded by some Russian army officer to stand aside, while I and my friends are escorted through your stupid little checkpoint? And to know that tomorrow all hell is
going to descend on you, because you will have been the focus of what could well be a serious international incident?’
At which precise moment, out in the field to the west of the road and back a little way towards Siret, Sergei Gulharov stooped and picked up the two uncoupled halves, male and female, of a heavy electrical connection. Taped to the main supply cable was a much thinner telephone wire. Its connection, also broken, was a simple, slender plug-and-socket affair. He connected the telephone cable first, then without pause screwed the heavier couplings together. There came a sputter and crackle of current, a flash of blue sparks, and —The lights came on in the border post. Krakovitch, on the point of leaving to carry out his threat, stopped at the door, turned back and saw the look of confusion on the official’s face. ‘I suppose,’ Krakovitch said, ‘this means your telephone is also working again?’
‘I. . . I suppose so,’ said the other.
Krakovitch came back to the counter. ‘Which means,’ his tone was icy, ‘that from now on we might just start to get somewhere . .