Adam Hall - Quiller Balalaika

I could hear Marius now, hauling up from below, his breathing audible, too audible, Christ, we'd only just started.

'You want to rest?'

He thought before he answered, didn't want to say yes because of his pride, so he compromised: 'Maybe for sixty seconds.'

'Don't rush it.' In the wind I heard his pick clinking against the granite. 'And don't drop anything.' Eventually the guards would search the terrain below the massif. They would search everywhere.

There was a lot of noise going on below us now: the klaxon horns still sounding the alarm, the dogs barking, engines starting up, the PA system relaying orders to the guards as the big gates swung open in the far distance and three snow tractors rolled through it with their headlights sweeping across the snow. Beyond the west side of the camp I could see shadows moving and the glint of eyes in the lamplight as the wolf pack watched the confusion for a while and then began loping away.

'Marius?'

'I'm ready.'

I adjusted Alex's lamp on my forehead, where I'd strapped it with a strip of canvas, and hauled up on the pick and searched for the next seam in the granite, the next sound piece of ice, rejecting three or four tricky placements before I was satisfied and drove a piton in and slung the rope, testing it, finding it good, cutting a step in the ice and hauling up.

'When you're ready!' I called to Marius, and felt the rope tighten.

Four hundred feet, as a rough estimate.

'Five minutes' rest.'

Marius didn't answer, was out of breath again, and I secured the line for him. A few feet below me, he was half-covered in snow from the east wind as I was, not looking up at me, hanging with his head down, his brow resting against the rock face, could have been dozing, praying, I couldn't tell and I wasn't worried: he was safe enough on the line.

The camp looked pretty now, a Christmas scene, with the torches lighting the snow as the search continued among the huts. The klaxons were silent at last but the dogs were still baying, freed by their handlers to work the terrain, could have been given the scent already: after the explosion and the resulting blackout the huts would have been ringed with guards called out for the emergency, and a general roll call could have been ordered at once as a precaution.

Dmitri Berinov, Hut nineteen. Missing.

Marius Antanov, alias Nikolai Parek, Hut twelve. Missing.

The rope felt good under my hands, the rope and the pitons and the rock face and the near-darkness. Here we were safe. Here was the difference between freedom and the closing in of the war-trained pit-bulls, their jaws ready to maul if their handlers couldn't call them off in time, the wolf pack circling outside the wire if we'd ever managed to climb it, the first search vehicles arriving just in time to drag us back to the camp still alive, then the orders issued in the morning for the head-shaving and the shackling before we were held down across the vaulting horse in the gym for twelve lashes as a preliminary to being thrown into the solitary confinement cellars still bleeding and with rations of black bread and stale water for two months, three, until the commandant was satisfied that the message was understood by the rest of the prisoners: this is Gulanka, and there is no escape.

You still think I was mad to go for the final chance? Then that's your bloody business.

I looked down at Marius. 'Ready to haul up?'

He got his head lifted and looked at me. 'What? Yes,' got one hand tightened on the rope and handed me the piton he'd pulled out.

In another fifteen minutes we'd climbed another two hundred feet at a rough estimate, the placements easy enough with good deep seams and no dirt or dead moss in them, no loose blocks, little ice and what there was of it sound, the wind remaining at constant force and the snow flurries more of a help as a screen from below than a hindrance here, our lungs getting used to the thin air and Marius holding up as best he could.

Then we met the overhang.

Marius was looking up from below me, wondering why I'd stopped.

The curve of rock jutted six, seven feet from the vertical, hiding the faint light from the sky, and ran east and west without a visible break.

'Oh my God,' I heard Marius say.

I took a minute to rest, to think. 'We get these, sometimes,' I told him.

He was quiet now.

Six, seven feet of granite brooding above my head, cutting us off. I reached up and ran my hand over it, having to lean backwards over the drop.

The surface was bare, seamless.

I heard Marius again. 'So we go sideways?'

'No.'

'We've got to.'

'We can't.'

'For God's sake, why not?'

'Moving sideways across the face is always dangerous. In any case we don't know how far we'd have to go, how far the overhang goes. It could be fifty yards to the east and we might take the west, and find it reaches for five hundred.'

The wind buffeted the rock face now, tearing at his voice.

'But we can't go over it.'

I went on feeling for seams, fissures, even cracks. 'According to professional practice, yes, we can. Even if we tried going sideways it would slow us up, and time's critical. We've got to reach the top of the massif and get away overland before the search vehicles are in the area tomorrow – with the dogs.'

'It's snowing too hard for that.' He was close to me now, Marius, wanting comfort. His breath steamed in the rays of my little lamp.

'This wind could die in the night and by eleven in the morning there could be sunshine.'

Decision, make a decision, my fingertips sliding across the freezing rock, coming away numbed. But there weren't any choices.

'I'm going to go sideways,' Marius said, his throat tight.

'You're not going anywhere,' I told him. The adrenalin was on full stream now and I could think better.

'I can't do anything else,' his voice came.

'Marius, hook your fall-arrest line to your harness. Now.'

'Where?' I'd had him rehearse it fifty times, and he'd forgotten: you've heard of stress.

'To the front.' I didn't want him pitched forward against the rock if he came unstuck. 'I'm going down again,' he said, 'some of the way. Remember the ledge we crossed, where we rested?'

'Marius, I want you to get this. I'm taking you to Moscow. I'm not dropping you off this cliff for them to find your body in the morning and learn exactly where I am. All we've got to do is get to the top of this massif, one foot at a time. Get there, you understand? Keep that in your mind.'

'I knew you'd lost your reason, Berinov. I told you.'

I fished out another piton and drove it in for a foot rest and pulled myself up against the curve of the rock, unhooking my pick and reaching higher with it, scraping with its point, searching for anything I could find.

It took minutes before a narrow seam caught at the pick, but it was there, and I hauled up. 'Move with me, Marius. Keep close.' I got the hammer and drove a piton in, hard, weight-testing it. But the lead line was still taut. 'Marius!'

'I can't!' His tone was lost now, desperate. It was a case of extreme funk, and I understood that. To look up at an overhang at night has put fear into hardened pros unless they're perfectly prepared. We weren't.

But I'd got to take Antanov with me: He was a man with a life to live, and he was Natalya's passport to freedom. He was also the key to Balalaika.

'Marius, think about Moscow. Think about your sister. Think about destroying that bastard Sakkas. All that's going to be possible as soon as we reach the top of the massif. So think about getting there. Think about being there.'

Okay, Alex had nodded, his eyes bright on me in the shadows of the huts. Okay.