This was the part that Dolgikh was going to enjoy:
bringing them to their conclusion, and letting them know that he was their executioner.
Most of the time the four moved in clear light, free of shadows: Krakovitch and his man, the British esper, and the big construction boss. But where the cliff overhung, there they merged with brown and green shade and black darkness. Dolgikh squinted into the sky. The sun was well past its zenith, sinking slowly beyond the looming mass of the Carpathians. In just two more hours it would be twilight, the Carpathian twilight, when the sun would abruptly slip down behind the peaks and ridges. And that was when the ‘accident’ would happen.
He trained his binoculars on them again. The huge Russian foreman carried a haversack with its strap across one shoulder. A T-shaped metal handle protruded: the firing box for gelignite charges. Dolgikh nodded to himself. Earlier in the day he’d watched them lay charges in and around the old ruins; now they were going to blow the place and whatever it contained — a fabulous weapon, according to that twisted dwarf Ivan Gerenko — to hell! So they thought, but that was what Dolgikh was here to prevent.
He put his binoculars away, waited impatiently until they were safely off the ledge and into the woods of the overgrown slope beyond, then quickly moved in pursuit —for the last time. The cat and mouse game was over and it was time for the kill. They were out of sight in the-trees now, with perhaps a mile to go to the ruins, and so Dolgikh must make haste.
He checked his blunt, blued-steel, standard issue Malatukov automatic, shoved home the clip of snub-nosed rounds and reholstered the heavy weapon under his arm. Then he stepped out from cover. Directly opposite his position, across the narrow gorge, the new road came to an abrupt end. This was the point at which someone had decided it wouldn’t be cost effective to proceed further. Rubble from the blasted cliff filled the depression, forming a dam for the mountain stream. A small lake lay smooth as a mirror behind it. Beneath the dam the water had forced a route, erupting in a torrent where the much reduced stream continued its course down towards the plain.
Dolgikh scrambled down to the jumbled debris which formed the bridge of the dam and nimbly made his way across and up on to the road. A minute more and he’d left the tarmac behind for the narrow, treacherous surface of the scree-littered ledge. And without further pause he followed in the tracks of his quarry. As he went, he thought back on the events of the day.
This morning he’d followed them when they first came up here. Finding their car parked on the road, he’d hidden his Fiat in a dense clump of bushes and tracked them on foot along this very ledge. Then, at the apex of the gorge where the two sides almost came together, they’d entered crumbling old ruins and searched through them. Dolgikh had observed, keeping well back. For maybe two hours they’d busied themselves digging in the ruins. By the time they were ready to leave they all seemed much subdued. Dolgikh didn’t know what they’d found, or failed to find, but in any case he’d been told that it was probably dangerous and warned to steer clear.
Seeing them about to leave, he’d quickly hurried back to his car, waited for them to show up. And in passing, so as to be on the safe side, he’d fitted their vehicle with a magnetic bug. They’d driven back into Kolomyya then, with Dolgikh close behind but keeping just out of sight. He’d almost caught up with them where they stopped, half-way back along the new road, to talk with a party of gypsies in their encampment. But in a few minutes they’d been on their way again, and still they hadn’t seen him.
Kolomyya was a railhead and meeting point for four tracks, from Khust, Ivano-Frankovsk, Chernovtsy and Gorodenka; every other building seemed to be a warehouse or storage depot. It wasn’t hard to find one’s way about; the industrial and commercial sides of the town were distinctly separate. The four men Dolgikh followed had driven to the town’s main telephone exchange, parked outside and gone in.