But Dolgikh was something of a vampire in his own right, except he fed on fear. Yes, and now he saw the opportunity to give his plan an elaborate twist. A little extra something for his own amusement.
He quickly kneeled, used his strong square teeth to strip the cable down to its copper cores, and connected up the firing box. Then, still on one knee, he called out loudly up the trail: ‘Gentlemen!’
The three turned, saw him. Quint and Krakovitch recognised him at once, looked stunned.
‘Now what are we having here?’ he laughed, holding up the box for them to see. ‘See? Someone is forgetting to make the connections — but I have done it for him!’ He put down the box and drew up the plunger.
‘For God’s sake, be careful with that!’ Carl Quint threw up his arms in warning, stumbled out of the ruins.
‘Stay right where you are, Mr Quint,’ Dolgikh shouted. And in Russian: ‘Krakovitch, you and that stupid ox of a foreman come to me. And no tricks, or I blow your English friend and Gulharov to bits!’ He gave the T-shaped handle two savage right-hand twists. The box was now armed; only depress the plunger, and —‘Dolgikh, are you mad?’ Krakovitch called back. ‘I’m here on official business. The Party Leader himself—’
‘— Is a mumbling old fool!’ Dolgikh finished for him. ‘As are you. And you’ll be a dead fool if you don’t do exactly as I say. Do it now, and bring that lumbering engineer with you. Quint, Mr English mind-spy, you stay right there.’ He stood up, took out his gun and the nylon cord. Krakovitch and Volkonsky had put up their hands in the air, were slowly leaving the area of the ruins.
In the next split second Dolgikh sensed that something was wrong. He felt the tug of hot metal at his sleeve before he heard the crack of Sergei Gulharov’s automatic. For when the others had gone forward to the ruins, Gulharov had stepped into a clump of bushes to answer a call of nature. He had seen and heard everything.
‘Put up your gun!’ he now yelled, coming at Dolgikh at a run. ‘The next shot goes in your belly!’
Gulharov had been trained, but not nearly as thoroughly as Theo Dolgikh, and he lacked the agent’s killer instinct. Dolgikh fell to his knees again, straightened his gun arm toward Gulharov, aimed and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Gulharov was nearly on him. He, too, had fired again. His shot went inches wide, but Dolgikh’s was right on target. His snub-nosed bullet blew away half of Gulharov’s head. Gulharov, dead on the instant, jerked to a halt, then took another stumbling step forward and crashed over like a felled tree — directly on to the firing box and its extended plunger!
Dolgikh hurled himself flat, felt a hot wind blow on him as hell opened up just one hundred yards away. Deafening sound blasted his ears, left them ringing with wild peals. He didn’t see the actual explosion, or simultaneous series of explosions, but as the spray of soil and pebbles subsided and the earth stopped shaking he looked up — and then he did see the result. On the far side of the gorge the ruins of Faethor’s castle stood much as before, but on this side they had been reduced to so much rubble.
Craters smoked where the castle’s roots were bedded in the mountain. A landslide of shale and fractured rock was still tumbling from the cliff onto the wide, pitted ledge, burying deep the last traces of whatever secrets had been there. And of Krakovitch, Quint and Volkonsky —Nothing whatsoever. Flesh isn’t nearly as strong as rock.
Dolgikh stood up, brushed himself down, heaved Gulharov’s corpse off the detonating box. He grabbed Gulharov’s legs and dragged his body to the smouldering ruins, then toppled him from the cliff. An ‘accident’, a genuine accident.
On his way back down the track, the KGB man rolled up what was left of the cable; he also collected Gulharov’s gun and the box. Half-way down the ledge where it hugged the cliff he threw all of these things into the dark gurgling ravine. It was finished now, all of it. Before he got back to Moscow he would have thought up an excuse, a reason why Gerenko’s supposed ‘weapon’, whatever it had been, no longer existed. That was a pity.