Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

The lightning struck twice again and flickered out and for a moment it was difficult to see. We had both stopped. The Harz range stood fifty or sixty kilometres to the north but the storm had been drifting south-east and the thunder reached us in less than one minute. I looked up and saw that the moon was now ten or twelve degrees of arc from the edge of the cloud-mass.

I said: 'We haven't got long.'

He moved again, counting seven paces and checking. The post was lined up with the fourth pine from the end but I used one of the wire-stanchions as the closer reference because it was thinner and therefore more accurate. He was taking his time and I began thinking it had been a mistake to throw the bloody thing away: his confidence had gone with it, 'Look, we've got about nine minutes' visibility left so for God's sake get off the pot.'

Through his teeth: 'You want me to blow myself up?'

'If it'll get you off the pot.'

Halfway to the eastern wire my weight broke the crusty earth and one shoe slipped on the shoulder of something hard. I said:

'Wait.'

I made sure he stopped, then bent down and felt the thing because I needed to know how good his bearings were. The soil came away under my fingers and I went on clearing it until they could define the shape. It was a curved shoulder and pitch-smooth and the detonator would be three or four inches to the right, in the centre. It would be at least a fourteen-ounce actuator, otherwise the odd crow or some heavy rainfall would trip it, so I finished the job and left the whole thing exposed: it would be a help if I ever came back this way and if I didn't it would help someone else.

'You're not very good,' I said, 'are you?'

It was just possible that he'd deliberately taken me too close but I didn't think so: even in his demoralized condition he must realize that he'd catch some of the blast.

'You shouldn't have done that.' His whisper was reedy with fright.

'You shouldn't have taken me so bloody close.'

There were two more changes of angle before we reached the wire and I took a final sighting with the military depot as a reference. It looked closer than I would have believed: the nerves had come farther than thirty metres. He climbed through the wire, more confidence in his movements now that we were clear of the mines and he could lead me to his friends and borrow a gun. When he'd gone five paces I said sharply:

'What was that?'

He turned his head and I did it and when he was down I looked for his papers. All he had were an identity card and a crossword puzzle and I held my watch-glass at an angle against the name to increase the light-factor. Guhl. Re-check, Guhl. I kicked a hole in the earth and buried the card and put the crossword puzzle into my coat as a flash came. There were three more over a ten-second period and I kept still until they were over. He lay in much the same position as Benedikt but there were no bits of porcelain around, just the scuffed earth.

I had waited until he had taken his last five paces so as to know the direction of the rendezvous. It lay towards the group of pines and I started off. The sound of the preliminary flash was already crackling and the rest of the series followed and sent a ricochet of echoes from the Thuringerwald range to the south-east so that for longer than half a minute the sky and earth reverberated.

The dark came down soon afterwards, sweeping from west to east across the land as the clouds reached and drew beneath the moon. I should have made him push on faster through the mines instead of wet-nursing him: the rendezvous could be a kilometre from here and if I missed it the one fine thread would break. Or I should have let him take me further than those five paces but the trouble was that I couldn't stand his company.

A long flash broke, a chain-discharge that went rippling across the dark mass of the trees and dusted them with grey-green light. I froze and waited, uneasy now because this was a patch of open ground where there was nothing higher than a clod of earth and anyone could pick me off with the other hand behind their back. The thunder arrived within a few seconds: at ground level the air was calm but a high wind-layer was shifting the storm-clouds at increasing speed. Then light flashed once and I wasn't ready for it because it didn't come from the sky. It could have been the nerves:

I was stumbling blind across furrows and the spine was taking some of the shocks. The trunk of the first pine loomed and I began crossing the gap to the next one.

I had overshot quite a bit and had to turn back and to the left before I saw it. There was still ploughed earth underfoot so they must have brought it right to the dead-end of the track.

I got in and said: 'You'd better get away quite fast because I kicked up some noise coming across.' The dash-lamp threw a weird greenish glow on the driver's face. He had his neck screwed round to look at me and I stared back at him. 'What the hell did you have to flash your light for?' I said. 'Did you think I couldn't find you or something?' He didn't move but his eyes switched twelve inches to my left.

She asked from beside me: 'Where is he?'

'Guhl? Crossing tomorrow night. You'll have to meet him.' Her one question had been clipped and authoritative so I said: 'Just tell him to shove off, will you? There's two of them out there looking for the noise I made.'

She told him: 'Wait for the next thunder.'

'Kamerad Oberst.' He faced the front.

'What happened to Guhl?'

Lightning flared and I was looking into bronze eyes, their brilliance heightened by the flash: then it was over but I had seen her face, hard, proud, altered by the storm and my strangeness.

'I was ordered across first.' The thunder shook the night and the engine started up and we were on the move before the echoes died away. 'You want an intelligent report, don't you? You think he knows what the hell's going on? He's a clod, you know that.'

The track gave on to a metalled road within a hundred metres and we stopped bumping around.

'How did you injure yourself?'

She didn't miss much: he hadn't switched the heads on yet and there was no back-glare. She'd taken me all in, just in the one flash.

'The nail-file slipped.' We got into higher gear and now he switched them on so I hunched myself round a bit more to face her. Night-black hair, close-cropped but not masculine, pale lipstick, if any, a lean hard jaw-line, the nose by Michelangelo. 'What do you imagine things are like in Hanover with the Benedikt thing just blown up? I was lucky to get off with a stray one in the hand.' It was the sort of face you'd expect to see at a night-rendezvous in the East German Frontier Zone if you expected to see a woman there at all. 'Anyway,' I-said wearily, 'we've stopped the leak, that's the main thing.'

She kept her hands inside her battered flying-jacket. Perhaps she had a gun but I didn't think so: one sharp word to the Prussian-headed type at the wheel and he'd swing one on me without even swerving. He'd called her Oberst: Colonel. She asked:

'How far had it gone?'

'What?'

'The leak.'

'Christ, don't you know anything? Didn't Neueburg keep you informed?'

She didn't answer but I wasn't worried. You don't set up a contact point thirty kilometres from a frontier without putting radio in. I let the silence go on for a bit and then said: 'I'll tell you how far it had gone. He'd made contact — twice. We got the one in Hanover and he went and did it again: he knew how to try, I'll give him that much.' The scene was lit up around us and I had to shout against the din. 'It was Guhl who was sent in to fix him the second time, at Linsdorf. I thought they were your orders through Hanover. If they weren't yours then whose were they for God's sake?'

She might have answered me, given me a name, a hand-hold, but there was a flash so bright that it looked as if the whole sky had fused: the headlights seemed to go out and the entire landscape went lichen-green and the thunder rolled between the hills with one long-drawn-out bowling-alley clatter. It was appropriate enough: I was on my way to what London called the 'storm-centre' and bloody Parkis was right again.