It was probably wired to the ignition.

That was a problem because I wanted to use this truck and get us both out of here without wasting any more time: there was a ship waiting for us in Severomorsk and if we missed it there might not be any other way for Fane to get us out before the KGB finally picked us up in their dragnet for Karasov.

Correction: they hadn't simply tipped off the KGB and run us into a road-block and left it at that because they hadn't wanted to.

They wanted us dead, out of it, finis. They didn't want the KGB to put us under the light and drain the information out of us.

Why not?

What did we know?

The metal roof strained again and my left eyelid began flickering. There were a lot of things to be worked out but I didn't know which ones could wait and which ones had such a direct bearing on this immediate point in time that it could make the difference between driving the truck out of here or going through the roof with it.

Something had gone wrong. The Rinker cell had so many people in the field that they could afford to watch the traffic coming in on the main road from Murmansk and as soon as they knew I'd left the train they'd done that, they'd watched for me. Or they'd picked me up since then and thrown a distant-surveillance net round the periphery of my travel patterns and kept me in sight with field glasses.

But they couldn't know about this morning's rendezvous in the freight-yards. I would have to get Karasov there and get his papers and drive north if I could. We had to get out of Kandalaksha. They were too close.

Pale light came through the open end of the barn, costing me too much visual purple in the retinae: the cab of the truck was almost dark. I didn't know that if I could see better in here I wouldn't actually see an extra wire creeping below the dashboard or the glint of a terminal.

Tune for decision-making. I didn't think they'd put a clock on the thing or a rocker mechanism or a remote-control receiver or a heat sensor because it wouldn't matter when it blew up and a rocker would detonate at the first corner and a remote control would mean they were still in the immediate environment and waiting to transmit and I knew they weren't in the immediate environment because they couldn't afford to be: otherwise they would have simply come here hi the night and finished off the lot of us including Volodarskiy and the dog. A heat sensor would delay detonation until the engine had warmed up but that involved a time element again and it wasn't of any interest to them.

I believed they would have done it the simplest way and linked it with the ignition switch.

But when I moved I moved slowly.

It could be anything: C3, C4, Cyclonite, TNT, picric acid, gelignite, dynamite, Tetryl, Amatol, any one of a dozen sensitive chemicals. In this region they wouldn't have found the more sophisticated materials and they'd probably used something out of any army ordnance store but I couldn't count on that.

I got down from the cab and stood on the earth floor and let the sweat trickle down my flanks and waited until my scalp loosened again before I moved to the front of the truck and stood still again, looking at the bonnet lever. When they rig a bang in the electrical circuitry of the vehicle they don't like you to disconnect a battery lead and today they might have placed auxiliary contacts on the bonnet levers or the hinges so it was a little while before I decided that they wouldn't have made things more complicated for themselves than they needed to.

They too were working their mission within the hostile and all-powerful environment of the KGB and all they had wanted to do was to wipe Karasov out and do it by stealth, setting it up and moving away and leaving it to the device itself to finish the business. They could do that by wiring the ignition switch and there would be no real need to provide backup circuits or contacts so I moved the bonnet lever and waited again until the nerves came down from screaming pitch and I got my breathing rhythm back to normal. Then I went round the front of the truck and pulled the other lever and lifted the bonnet.

Filthy engine. Everything was covered with an antique film of dried mud and oil stains and husks of grain, and I got the torch out of the tool compartment and used it, looking for any disturbance in the grime. Something bright flashed under the beam of the torch and I spun away and hit the snow outside as the whole barn blew apart and a roaring filled the sky and I lay there with my body against the snow and the nerves came off their high and the barn came back into one piece again and the roaring stopped and I thought Jesus Christ if I can't do better than this…

The snow cold under me, my face against it, my breath melting its crystals as the lungs went on pumping in the aftermath of unholy terror, pick yourself up, yes, get on with things.

When I was ready I got up and went back to the truck and found the wrench and disconnected the battery and stood for a minute with my eyes shut, just taking a break, it wasn't over yet because the thing could have its own battery but we might have come a little further away from blowing Northlight across the Kola River..

'What's wrong?'

I jerked round and looked at him.

Volodarskiy.

No dog. I think if he'd brought his dog I'd have killed it.

'Someone was here in the night.'

He watched me, noting, quite obviously, quite obviously noting, damn his eyes, the sweat on my face.

'How do you know?'

'They put a bomb on board this thing.'

'How do you know?' he asked again.

'In the same way in which you would have known, Volodarskiy, if you had come here first,' using my most polished academic syntax and my best Muscovite-intellectual accent, except for the last bit, 'and it would have scared the shit out of you too.'

His black eyes glittered with amusement. 'Conceivably. Where is the bomb?'

'I haven't found it yet.'

He looked at the filthy engine. 'Are you an expert?'

'I'm finding out. If your barn is still standing an hour from now you'll know I'm an expert.'

'Perhaps I can help.'

'Yes. You can go back and look after Karasov.'

'I would rather stay here,' he said softly, 'and fiddle with the toy you think they've sent you.'

'I know you would. You can't keep away, Volodarskiy, can you?'

'From what?" 'The brink.'

His eyes glittered again. 'That is a way of putting it, I suppose.'

'You're like me.'

'I think so, yes.'

'But if I get it wrong, and this thing goes up, I want you to look after Karasov. I want you to contact my local control and tell him what's happened and ask him how he's going to get the objective out. Until he can do something I want you to keep that man with you and see that no one gets to him. He's the objective, Volodarskiy. The objective.'

His eyes moved around the barn while he thought about this, then he looked down and shrugged. 'I will do what you say, my friend; I know how important your mission is. But do what you can to find that little toy of yours and make it safe. I have no wish to keep that craven wretch in my house for longer than I have to. He's not fit company for my dog.'

'He's burnt out,' I said, 'that's all.'

'And so am I. But there is heat there yet.' He came to stand close to me. 'I was fifteen years in the labour camps, but that was not so bad. When I came home they told me that my wife had been arrested for circulating subversive material — she was a poet, and she wrote of freedom.' His breath clouded on the cold air and his eyes never left my face. 'She refused to give away her friends, her collaborators, and so they beat her, and she died. The KGB men who killed her had received promotion and been transferred. But I have found one of them, and when I find the other, I have some work to do. So has my dog.' He turned away. 'He is hungry, and so am I.'