By 09:59 I was near the bridge and saw that the signal for the down line was still at red. It was a dead-straight stretch and I left the Trabant on rough ground, kicking the throttle and holding the wheel hard over and burning the snow off the surface to leave me with a reliable take-off pad for use in an emergency. The flares were a foot long, red-paper-wrapped pitch with an iron spike at one end and a friction-ignition cap at the other. The moonlight was good enough to use as background and I staked them out at fifty-foot intervals on both sides of the track but left them unlit because on the wrapping paper their duration was given as fifteen minutes and they could burn out before the train got here if it was late.

I began waiting.

From where I was standing, at the top of the embankment, the night had two components: a disc and a dome, the gigantic disc of the earth’s surface spreading blue-white under the moon and the gigantic dome of the sky, pricked and glittering with stars. Only the bridge made a connection between the two, breaking the skyline a quarter of a mile away with its dark skeletonic girders curving across the snows like the bones of a dead rainbow. In the opposite direction, to the north-east, I thought I could glimpse the windows of the signal-box a mile distant, a yellow point of light that I could see only when I looked slightly away from it, and not always then. That was where the headlights would begin showing along the service road, a little while from now.

Eastwards a small plane was taking-off from the airfield; its navigation lights were still invisible but I could hear the distant snarl of its engine as the power came on. Moments later the red and green motes of light began rising and floating across the stars, turning and drifting towards the south as the engine’s note died, over the minutes, leaving the night soundless. To the south-west, beyond the Litsky Bridge, there was nothing. The whiteness of the land, lit from overhead, had lost all definition: I could only tell where it ended by noting where the stars began. Somewhere in that direction was the train, and Gorodok.

10:10 and from this moment my nerves began tightening: when the ETA is reached you start thinking that a minute late is going to mean an hour late, and the situation seems critically changed.

Gorodok.

Who was Gorodok?

Smith, Jones, Robinson, Brown, nothing in a name, but he was certainly English because a courier can be any nationality providing he’s not in a line, and the Bureau has a strict ruling on the point. Too many operations have come a mucker because of a blown courier line, and apart from all the other considerations it can be deadly when it goes up. Two years ago we crashed a mission in Scandinavia like that and the ruling was established immediately afterwards.

The air was freezing and I had to keep on the move, going down the embankment and along the road and up again fifty yards on to make channels in the snow: if I had to get out of here fast I didn’t want to waste any time doing pratfalls. In one place there was a lump of rock about half-way down and I pulled it out of the frozen earth and threw it farther away and filled in the hole with gravel and looked at my watch again and saw we were going to cut this fine, too fine for comfort, 10.21 and the night quiet with no sound from the south-west, nothing to break that silence out there.

This time I was certain I could see the yellow light of the signal-box, low on the horizon. He had seemed an efficient, steady-handed man, the type who would think of telephoning the airfield while he was waiting for the tram, asking them if they knew there was a plane down across the line not far to the west of them: in which case there would be a helicopter over with a searchlight and as soon as it had made its first run I’d have to get out because they could scan the track for five miles in five minutes and report it clear.

10:24.

Silence across the night.

Whoever he was he knew what he’d got to do because we had a definite rendezvous and he’d be expecting the train to stop and he’d be ready. God knew when the alert had gone through but they must have warned him before he boarded the thing at Tashkent: they couldn’t have got a message to him after that. The network was in a big hurry — he could’ve been simply sent to ground and someone else could have come in his place to take over the films but that hadn’t happened and the obvious answer was that they hadn’t got anyone else to replace him, but I don’t like obvious answers and I would have said that London wanted the films as soon as they could get them and I wished them luck because someone had blown Gorodok and they’d have his description out and he was going to have a bad time getting clear.

Who had blown him?

I stood listening to the night. My hands were now numb and I blew into my gloves but my breath was cold before it reached the skin. The stars had the glitter of broken icicles and the snow was an ocean, stilled and frozen, capping the curve of the planet and reaching to infinity, making it seem absurd to wait here for a thousand tons of metal to come steaming out of the void with the force of a fallen comet: there was a degree of sensory deprivation in this vast silence as I stood here, small as a molecule, between earth and sky.

Of course it didn’t strictly matter who had blown him. What mattered was that the whole of the line was now vulnerable and would become exposed if he was caught and interrogated: it wasn’t certain that the network could alert the rest of them before Gorodok was broken and the KGB went to work on what he’d given them. A courier is a mobile entity and not always at the end of a phone.

10:32.

So there was snow on the line or the points were frozen or there’d been a derailment because we were now running twenty-two minutes late.

Or they’d stopped the train at Alma Ata and taken Gorodok off and he was sitting there now under the bright lights and they were starting with a cosh. They might have to work all night on him but in the end -

Sounds north-east, vehicles, and I turned round with a jerk and listened, cupping my ears. Lights. The sounds were intermittent, a series of low rumbles, and the lights flickered up and down. They were coming from the direction of the signal-box and I watched them. The distance was a mile and over this road they’d keep up a good speed and be here within three minutes.

I turned and looked the other way but there was nothing.

Four and a half miles south-west of the Litsky Bridge there was a tunnel marked on the map and the express would use its whistle on the far side of it, assuming standard procedure; and in this stillness I’d hear it over that distance unless the emergency crews were too close by then. Their headlights were bright now, already throwing shadows over the scrubland and silvering the telephone wires along the track.

I gave it ten seconds and stooped and lit the first flare and then the next, moving back from side to side until there were ten of them going, their short flames reddening the snow. The Trabant was directly below me now and I slithered down the embankment through one of the channels I’d made and got in and started up and gunned into a half turn with the lights off and headed for the bridge.

The flares would burn for fifteen minutes and in that time the crews would be here asking questions and if I told them the plane had come down half-way between here and the signal-box they’d take less than ten minutes to look for it and come back and at that point I’d have to get out and if they’d left one of their vehicles in the way I’d be blocked and it’d be no go.

The light was tricky and I hit something with a front wheel and the Trabant lurched and half-spun and dug into the snow at the side of the road until I banged the shift into first gear and put the power on and burned the snow down to solid ground and took off again with the back end snaking across the surface until we got traction. On the far side of the bridge I slung it in a U-turn and stopped under the first outrigger girder from the south end and got out and stood listening.