Northlight

We would do anything rather than see it written down, to avoid the knowledge, as we lie angled across some rubbish dump listening to the sirens, waiting for the headlights, fumbling at last for the capsule and trying to find our mouth, the knowledge that it will later be written down, our failure spelled out letter by letter in that crabby hand, for others to see.

Not everyone, of course. The records are classified. And there's a gentleman's agreement that along those creaking and half-lit corridors our secret shall forever be sacrosanct, that we shall all of us conspire to protect what rags of pride may still be left in the bosom of a failed brother-rat.

Did Thompson get back?

Oh yes. Came in last night.

What sort of condition?

Bit done up.

What happened? He'd only just gone out.

Called off, I believe. They scratched it.

Change of plan?

That's right. Are you coming along for some tea?

And we sit in the Caff for longer than usual, wanting company but not to talk about anything significant, just not wanting to be alone with the creeping nightmare thoughts that one day this could happen to us. Because our pride is pretty well all we've got. None of us do it for the money. Do you know the kind of money we get paid? Then you know what I'm talking about. We do it from vanity, from the arrogant and overweening urge to prove that we can go out there and take anything on and get away with it and bring back the product. So the worst thing that can happen to us is failure.

Northlight: finis.

The train thundered through the night.

Dark had come down an hour ago at three in the afternoon. Black snow clouds, driving in from the north, had thrown shadow across the freight-yards, blotting out the light from the polar cap. Images weren't too clear, but of course we could recognize the van all right and the men ru

'Did you know about this?

He didn't answer.

I still couldn't trust him, at the last. This was a trap and I think he could have known about it, could have made some kind of sordid pact with the KGB to lead me into them and then do what they wanted of him. I'd asked him before: 'Are you taking me into a trap? And soon afterwards he'd asked me: 'What will happen if the KGB are watching the station?'

But there wasn't much time to think about that now. I'd got the objective for the mission with me and my local control had got an escape route set up and the one thing I was not going to do was sit here and shut down Northlight and let them put our sleeper under the thumbscrews and blow our Murmansk network out of the ground so I got the toy from the floor under my legs and made a rough estimate of the weight and the range and the force needed to land it where it would give us a flamescreen and swung it through the open window, but the tip of the lever caught the frame and sent the thing spi

In the twilight the blast was blinding and the shockwave brought debris up from the ground and hurled it across the truck and for a couple of seconds I stayed where I was, sprawled across the clinkers with snow against my face and stones still ringing on the girders of the footbridge and pattering down. I heard Karasov screaming but I couldn't see where he was: he'd been thrown clear of the truck and was somewhere in the snow that had drifted against the bank. Then the first shot came and I got up and began ru

There was a lot of smoke drifting across the ground by now and I went for the freight office and dropped behind it, crawling for a while and finding new cover behind sand-bins alongside the train. It wasn't until I was under the train that I saw what was happening over there: Karasov was ru

You know when a record's playing and a fuse blows and the record-player slows down and stops? That was how Northlight ended, in my mind, as I crouched under the train with blood seeping into my shoe from the gash in my leg and the flash of the explosion still bright on the retinae whenever I blinked, that was how the mission wound down, like a slowing record, the rhythm broken and the music dying to a medley of strange moans before the silence came and I closed my eyes and watched the bright flare of the explosion again until that too died away and left the dark.

After a long time, perhaps a few seconds, I heard a man shouting in the distance of the freight-yards — 'You bloody fool?

I opened my eyes. From this distance I couldn't see clearly what was going on at the bottom of the ramp. I could see one of them tugging at Karasov, pulling him over onto his back, but I couldn't see whether he was dead or not. I didn't need to.

'You bloody fool?

It was a scream of rage, and that was how I knew that Karasov was dead. It was the senior KGB officer yelling at the man whose shot had gone in. They would have had strict orders to take Karasov alive. The man who had shot him had made a mistake, that was all: he'd tried to stop his run by firing at the legs, but after the explosion it wouldn't have been easy to achieve any kind of accuracy.

It had taken me an hour to crawl half the length of the train, because a lot of people were ru

I sat with my eyes closed against the foetid turbulence. The air blew in a freezing gale from the front of the train and the wheels broke it up into gusts and eddies, sending sparks and chips of stone flying, one of them cutting my face and drawing blood, not a good thing because a mark like that can give you away when the hunt's up, it won't matter how good your papers are.

But I didn't think there was going to be any hunt for me now; Karasov had been the shared objective for both missions: the Bureau and the KGB had both wanted him, and wanted him alive. Now he was dead, and it was over. The KGB would show a mild interest in finding the agent who had been operating against them on their own soil and who had flushed Karasov under their own guns, but it would be mainly out of frustration, out of spite. They would feel a bit better if they could put me against a wall or send me to break stones in the penitentiaries for the rest of my life, but that was all: they wouldn't mount a dragnet as they'd done for Karasov.

And even if they did, they'd draw blank. They might find my body, but there'd be no identification that would tell them I was an agent. Because this was the way it was going to be, I knew that now. My body would be found along the railway, churned by that spi

That would be all right. The idea of piecemeal extinction under the busy claw and beak has never troubled me; I would be there to share the celebration of ongoing life as my blood and sinew passed into different creaturehood, sustaining the ecology. The show must go on, so forth. Better that than be shovelled up by a sanitation squad and strapped into a cardboard box and dropped into the ground by an indifferent and very minor civil servant for the worms to feed on. I can't stand those bloody things.