The sound of the engine filled the night like the buzz of a rusting chainsaw, and we were speeding along the tarmac and into the dark skies above.
There was no moon, and I sat back inside the Cessna whilst the pilot took us into the air, flying low over the frozen landscape. No moon, only the distant glow of thousands of stars, duplicated below in the ice in a ghostly reflection.
It took me six days to heal enough for me to be willing to do it. Six long days--and not nearly enough time for the bones to heal or the cuts to fade, but it was enough, and throughout those six days, Seago and Abramovich paced and worried, and Eldershott was invisible, hiding somewhere inside that place in the ice, the place that wasn’t officially there.
On the seventh day I was ready.
Over that period there had been two more angel killings, the one in Rome and the other in Haifa, a port city in the south of Israel. There were only ever a few angels in America but, had one been assassinated, the Americans would have had to get involved, and the threat of a nuclear war would have become almost inevitable. But it was hard to find angels in America, thankfully.
Six long days: Seago smoked too many cigarettes; Abramovich drank too many cups of tea. I waited. Six days didn’t seem like a long time if I thought of what waited at the end of them.
I tried not to, practiced killing in an empty room instead.
Meanwhile, nothing had been seen of Eldershott, and no word had come through any of the networks as to the purpose of the research facility. There was a big cloud of silence over that installation in the ice, a chasm where none should have been.
I was going to fall into that chasm. A part of me chafed at being inactive. I could grow bored very quickly trying to kill the air. The mission was entering its last, and most dangerous, stage, and I was ready to go, I was ready to finish it.
There was no word from any of the Archangels; they had kept silent about the killings as if trying to deny they had ever happened. The situation was getting tense, and the pressure was affecting Seago, who spent hours communicating on the radio with London every night, receiving information, giving none back, dead ash collecting at his feet like a grey Whitehall carpet. All London knew was that the mission was still active--the Bureau may have been compromised and Seago wasn’t about to let them compromise the mission, what was left of it.
What was left of it was me.
We flew blind, on instruments and a certain amount of hope. It was a hundred and fifty miles to the target, but getting too close would be suicide and I would have to hike the last twenty-five alone.
This is what Abramovich had gathered: the facility employed a large number of ex-Nazi scientists, most of them brought back after the war but some--so Abramovich said in a voice as devoid of emotion as a hastily-erected tombstone--were apparently brought later by ODESSA, the Nazi network that saw so many wanted men slip away from the Allies and disappear, after the war.
“ODESSA,” he had said. Were their agents the ones who had attacked me, the ones attempting to stop anyone on Eldershott’s trail? We didn’t know. Had the Nazis infiltrated the Fourth Directorate of the KGB? The Kremlin? Or were the old scientists being used by someone else for purposes we didn’t know and couldn’t understand?
We didn’t know. All Seago and Abramovich knew, joining forces reluctantly, was that they couldn’t trust anyone else, not in Moscow, and not in London either.
It left them no-one but me. There was no-one else to send, not here, not now. It came down, simply, to me finishing the mission.
Which suited me fine. I always work alone.
The pilot shouted through the roar of the engine and signalled down with his thumb. I acknowledged it, released the seatbelt and forced the door open.
Wind blasted into the small aeroplane, bringing with it frost and the promise of worse to come. The temperature plummeted. I held onto the frame and pushed myself against the wind until it came at me like a fist and punched me loose, away from the plane and into the black and white Siberian night.
I fell, and as I did, the parachute opened and I breathed a sigh because I don’t like parachuting. I do it only when I really have to; they’re too easy to sabotage and I should know--I removed two senior members of the Romanian Securitate that way once.
It’s not a nice way to go.
I dropped heavily onto solid ice and rolled with difficulty, my body flaming in pain once again. It would stop me if it could, but I wasn’t going to let it. Instead, I collected the parachute and hid it under a pile of snow. Then I began to walk.
I was still about twenty-five miles from the target, and I had to get there fast. I unfolded the telescopic skis and attached them to my boots and then I took out the goggles Seago had given me, starlight vision, and I attached them and turned them on and twilight suddenly grew over the horizon.
It is a strange sensation, skiing in complete silence through a landscape that has nothing of the human in it. The goggles gave everything a pale aura and bathed the icy world with pale shadows. It was hypnotic, gliding on ice with nothing but the stars for company, and it made me think again of the dream I’d had, of that pale, sterile world of ice in which a giant being spoke to me in riddles....
Perhaps I had been going on for too long. I didn’t know. I began seeing new shapes in the artificial shadows, vast and sharp like the outlines of wings, and grey chasms like Sophie’s eyes, at once human and alien. There were white lights glowing behind the shadows, like milky pale eyes, watching me from their hiding places: ice and snow, the frozen siblings.
My speed escalated, and I felt as if I were being pushed by a giant hand across the fields of ice, gathering momentum.
It was strange and exhilarating, that silent race in the starlight, and I flew ahead, flying as if I, too, had wings, as if I, too, were--for just one tiny moment--an angel.
Then, like a fist coming out of the sky, the ice exploded around me and I was thrown, hard, landing awkwardly in a pile of hard snow.
Numbly, I stared up at the sky. I didn’t know what had happened. Something had thrown me, but as to what it had been I could see no sign. All was quiet, and peaceful, and cold. Somewhere high above, movement like the passing of giant wings....
I didn’t know what had happened, but it had saved my life. I sensed rather than saw the movement in the distance. Coming closer.
They were too far away yet, and too well-trained, to betray themselves by sound. White shadows moving against white snow...and had I continued skiing, my trajectory would have delivered me straight into their laps.
Which was something I was quite eager to avoid.
Instead, I stood up, removed the skis and folded them away, and circled cautiously round them, giving the approaching party a wide berth. I saw them from a distance, crouching behind a boulder, the goggles--somehow still on my head, still working--showing them to me in starlight.
There was nothing distinct about them, just a group of soldiers wrapped up heavily, with guns slung over their shoulders. They didn’t look tense, and I left them to it and walked on until, suddenly, I crested a small hill and found myself staring at the frozen monstrosity that was the research facility, and I thought, This is going to be a hell of a lot more difficult than I thought.