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Hale wished for hot coffee, but didn't dare ask for it directly after a hard question; he had learned about Cassagnac's precious amomon thistle from the Kurds, and he was sure that Theodora did not want him telling this Rabkrin agent anything at all about the amomon.
"First I went to the train crossing at the border. Let me tell it in order. Guy Burgess was there, with Philby."
"Ah! I was there too, but hidden in the undercarriage of the baggage car." Mammalian topped up their glasses with the clear liquor and clouded it with splashes of water.
The railway line that crossed the border by Kizilçakçak had been the only train crossing along the entire eastern Soviet border; the rails had been laid for the old Russian five-foot gauge, and the nineteenth-century locomotive that traversed it twice a week ran from Kars to a station only three miles into the Soviet territory, after which it retraced the route in reverse, with the locomotive pushing from behind.
The train had come chuffing up from the west on that chilly spring Wednesday morning, white smoke billowing up out of its Victorian smokestack and trailing away over the three cars it pulled, and it screeched to a steaming halt on the Turkish side of the iron bridge that marked the frontier-the tall barbed-wire fence stretched away to north and south on either side, strung down the center of a broad strip of dirt that was kept plowed to show the footprints of anyone who might cross.
Khaki-clad Turk askers stood with rifles beside the weathered sign that announced KARS-SOVIYET SINIRI, the border between the Soviet Union and the Kars district of Turkey, and four Russian soldiers in green uniforms marched across the bridge from a black Czech Tatra sedan parked on the eastern side; two of the Russians were clearly officers, with blue bands around the visors of their caps and gold epaulettes on their shoulders, while the other two were plain pogranichniki, border guards carrying rifles with bayonets. The Russians and the Turks saluted one another, and the Turk soldiers handed over a sheaf that presumably was the train crew's passports and any bills of lading.
Hale was standing beside Philby and the stocky, red-faced Burgess in the shadow of a guard shack a hundred feet away from the tracks on the western side, and all three watched the two pogranichniki walk around the train cars, poking their bayonet blades into the spaces under the carriages.
"I h-hope your Armenians are s-s-stoical about a blade or two up their arses," said Philby softly to Hale. They were dressed in anonymous khaki for this dawn outing, and they were being careful not to be heard speaking English. "Though some m-might like it, I sup-s-suppose. Do you f-fancy any of those pogranichniki, G-Guy?"
Hale was making a modest show of glancing covertly at the train, and he wished the other two Englishmen had not come along to observe. Philby had insisted on driving them all out here in an embassy-pool jeep, and he was the Head of Station.
"Pooh!" said Burgess, pouting his full lips toward the Russian soldiers. "Slavs have shovel faces. Slav probably means shovel in some Balkan language."
"Be quiet," whispered Hale.
Burgess turned from Philby to give Hale a pop-eyed stare. Perceiving that Hale was annoyed, he went on in a mock-reasonable tone. "It's true. Look-you or I, if we were starving and saw a potato growing in the dirt, we'd dig it out and cook it." His breath was sharp with vodka, though the sun was hardly above the eastern hills. "But Slavic facial features are clearly evolved for diving right into the dirt to eat the potato, dirt and all, not bothering with the hands: the teeth slant out, there's no chin to get in the way, the cheekbones make fenders, and the eyes slant back and up, and the ears are set back to keep the dirt out."
Philby was laughing softly.
The Russian soldiers a hundred feet away had stepped back from the train cars, and on the locomotive's black flank the long connecting rods rose and shifted forward as the steel driving wheels began to roll and the train surged ahead, onto the bridge.
"Intermission," said Philby as the train picked up speed and the first of the cars rattled up the metal bridge. "Half an hour from now it will return, backward. We can check then for blood on the brake riggings and the axle-boxes."
Which there will of course not be, Hale thought, unless by coincidence someone really did sneak across this morning-and who would want to sneak into the Soviet Union?
"No," he said, nodding toward a watchtower that stood only a hundred yards away on the Soviet side of the border. "If they see a party hanging about to look at the undercarriage, they'll know we sent someone across. We leave now." He began trudging back toward Philby's jeep, and was relieved to hear the other two following him.
"What were the names of your Armenians?" called Burgess from behind him.
Hale stepped up on the jeep's running board and looked back at Philby and Burgess. "Laurel-ian and Hardy-ian," he said.
"Oh, see, he's a c-c-close-mouthed b-b-boy, Guy," said Philby, puffing up to the left side, where the Ford jeep's steering wheel was. "Don't even t-try to draw him out with your sut-suttee-subtleties."
Hale sat down cross-legged on a coil of rope in the bed of the vehicle, and as Burgess grunted and hoisted his portly frame up into the passenger seat, Hale noticed for the first time a steel ring welded onto the dashboard on that side, right next to the brass plate that showed the gear-shifting positions. And when Philby had started the jeep and clanked it abruptly into reverse, Hale grabbed at the rope coil and found himself gripping an oblong steel ring knotted to one end of the line; glancing down, he saw that the oblong ring could be opened at a spring-loaded gate-it was a carabiner, a snap-link. He was sure that the rope was meant to be secured to the ring on the dashboard, to drag something; but why not simply moor the line to the hitch on the back bumper?
As Philby rocked the jeep around in the yard behind the guard shack and shifted into first gear, Hale groped among the rope coils under him to find the other end. And when he found it he recognized the release-pin housing of a weather balloon launcher.
The rope wasn't for dragging something-it was for towing an airborne balloon.
SIS business, he thought-but when he glanced up he caught Philby's gaze in the rear-view mirror, and Philby's eyes were narrowed with obvious displeasure.
Hale shrugged and dropped the end of the rope. "Weather balloon?" he said, loudly over the roar of the four-cylinder engine.
"Fuck me wept!" exclaimed Burgess, thrashing around in the passenger seat to goggle back at him.
"I'm doing," said Philby clearly, as if to prevent any further outburst from the drunken Burgess, "a top-poppographical s-s-survey, of the border r-regions out here. Operation Spyglass, we sussur-surveillance wallahs are c-calling it. And in order to m-measure atmospheric presh-pressure, and t-temperature, and relative you-you-humidity, we attach a radiosonde t-transmitter to in-sin-instruments on a wet-wet-weather b-balloon, moored to a mobile receiving station: namely th-this jeep." He cuffed sweat from his forehead as he steered the jeep along the dirt road back toward Kars. "Ultra-sensitive operation-k-keep it under your h-hat."
"Fine," said Hale easily, squinting out at the green hills. "Better you lot than me."
But as he kept a distracted expression on his face, he was remembering the balloon he had glimpsed over the incongruous Arab boat on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin three years ago, in the oily warm rain-the balloon that had been engulfed, a moment later, by the sentient tornado. Like bait swallowed by a fish?-a lightning rod struck by lightning?
Philby had been in Berlin, then. Had he been monitoring that briefly glimpsed balloon, from a safe position on the western side of the gate?
