Stephen Leather - The birthday girl

'Terrific,' Freeman said. Down below, one of the snowmobiles appeared from behind the rocky outcrop and headed across the snow-blanketed hillside. 'So what do we do?'

Tim pulled the lever again and the burners roared as the balloon lifted. He looked at the thermistor. The needle was hovering around the one hundred degree mark, and according to the altimeter they were two thousand feet above the ground.

'There's a map down there by that tank,' he said to Mersiha.

'Can you pass it to me?'

Mersiha knelt down and handed the folded chart to him.

Tim opened it over the instrument pack and took off his sunglasses. He studied the chart and suddenly jabbed at it with his forefinger. 'I've got it,' he said, excitedly. 'I know what we can do.' Jenny drove slowly down the track, grateful for the Jeep's four-wheel drive. Several times she'd almost skidded into die trees, and in a less rugged vehicle she wouldn't have made it down the steep hillside. The forest was dense and the trail was so winding and tortuous that she could never see more than a few dozen yards ahead. She alternated between accelerator and brake, taking care not to skid as she slid the Ingram underneath the seat. If the trail opened up on to a main road, it made sense to keep the weapon hidden from view. She took off her fur cap and threw it on to the back seat, shaking her long blonde hair free so that it cascaded down her shoulders.

The trail she was driving down wasn't shown on the map, but the position of the balloon's launch site was shown with a black cross, and a series of dotted lines marked its projected course to the east. Several roads intersected with the balloon's course, and a number of possible landing sites were marked on the map, all within ten miles or so of the take-off point. She couldn't see the balloon through the pines, but the map and the compass would allow her to keep track of it once she reached a road. She considered using the transceiver to call Kiseleva and check on his progress, but decided against it. She doubted that he'd be able to control the snowmobile with one hand, and she didn't want to be blamed for him running off the mountain. The way Kiseleva was operating, he wouldn't be on Utsyev's team for much longer. He'd been making a lot of mistakes recently, and Bzuchar wasn't a man who tolerated fuck-ups. She hoped that when Bzuchar decided that enough was enough, he'd let her be the one to pull the trigger. Bzuchar owed her one for the way she'd dealt with Lennie Nelson.

Tim compared the chart with the terrain below and nodded to himself. 'Another four miles, okay?' he said. The snowmobiles were far off to the left, skirting an area of dense pines.

'Are you sure about this?' Freeman queried.

'We don't have any other choice,' Tim said. 'If the three of us stay in the balloon we'll end up in the trees. If I drop you two off, I might just be able to make it. They won't be able to cross the ridge in the snowmobiles, so I'll be okay.'

'But you said you'd crash in the forest,' Mersiha said, the concern obvious in her voice.

Tim shook his head. He pulled on the lever and gently sent the balloon up another hundred feet or so. 'With three of us in the basket, that's true. But with the reduced load, I'll probably make it on my own.'

'Probably?' Mersiha repeated.

Tim smiled and scratched his beard. 'I'll be okay,' he said.

'Probably. You said probably.'

'And they'll see us go down,' Freeman said. 'If they see us leave the basket, we're dead.'

Tim tapped the chart. 'Yeah, but if I can get us to this snowfield here, we'll be hidden by that.' He pointed to a rocky outcrop in the distance.

Freeman looked at the chart, then at the terrain slowly passing below. The sound of the snowmobiles faded for a second and then restarted as the machines rounded the trees and headed up a gently sloping hill. They were maybe five miles away. How fast had Tim said the snowmobiles could travel? Sixty miles an hour?

They could be directly under the balloon within five minutes.

'We won't make it,' he whispered.

Tim pulled the burner lever again, keeping the flame burning for a full fifteen seconds. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching snowmobiles. 'We'll be okay, if I can just get us to the other side of those trees there.'

Freeman looked where Tim was pointing. A swath of snow-covered pines cut through the snowfield like a huge wedge. The trees were growing together so closely that it was hard to see the ground between them. There was no way the snowmobiles would be able to get through. They'd have to go around, and that would entail a detour of at least ten miles.

Freeman frowned. Tim's plan depended on them getting the trees between the balloon and the snowmobiles, but wind was taking them away to the right of the woods. Down below, the snowmobiles were racing across the virgin snow at full speed.

Tim pulled on the lever again, a short burst to maintain their altitude. He leant over his instruments, and then checked his chart. 'I thought you couldn't steer balloons,' Freeman said.

'You said they blow with the wind.' Tim didn't answer. He was staring off into the distance. Freeman gripped his shoulder.

'Tim, come on, man. How are we going to get to the other side of the trees?'

'I'm looking for a current that will take us in the right direction.

But I think we're going to have to go lower if we're going to make it.'

'Lower?' Freeman repeated. The balloon was about 2500 feet above the ground, so they had plenty of altitude to play with, but he was reluctant to go any closer to the men with submachine pistols.

'It's the only way we're going to get behind those trees,' Tim said. 'The higher we go, the more we drift to the right.'

'Why's that?' Mersiha asked.

'It's just the way it is,' Tim replied. 'In the northern hemisphere the wind veers to the right with altitude – it's something to do with the turning of the earth. "Right with height" is a balloonist's saying. So if we want to go more to the left, we're gonna have to descend.'

'How low?' Freeman asked.

'No way to tell,' Tim replied, keeping a close watch on his altimeter. 'It's never the same. We just have to go down and have

a look-see. There's another problem, though. The lower we go, the slower we go.'

'Is that another balloonist's saying?' Mersiha said, smiling.

Freeman could see that she was trying to ease the tension.

Tim grinned back. 'No, kid, that's just a fact. The faster winds are higher up, so we'll slow down as we descend.' He tapped the variometer. It was already showing a descent rate of two hundred feet per minute. The thermistor was showing the temperature of the air at the crown of the balloon at just below one hundred degrees.

'How do we go down?' Mersiha asked.

'Simple. We just go easy on the burners. We have to use them to maintain our height: the air in the envelope cools pretty quickly, especially in these temperatures. Cut back on the heat and we'll fall pretty quickly.'

'Is that how you land these things?' Freeman asked.

'That's part of it, but we have a parachute deflation system to let the air out of the top of the balloon. It's a circle of fabric which I can pull into the balloon using this rip-line.' He ran his fingers down a dark blue line which ran out of the neck of the balloon and was tied to the side of the basket. 'Pull it and air floods out; let go and the parachute reseals. That's how we get the balloon down in normal wind conditions. But if we really want to deflate the envelope, say if we were trying to land in high winds, then there's a Velcro rip which runs around the parachute.' He showed them another line. 'Pulling this rip-line effectively creates a huge hole in the top of the balloon. But we don't use that for normal descents – it's a way of quickly deflating the balloon on the ground.'