11 Northlight by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17 : TOY

The smell wasn’t strong, but it was unmistakable. The truck wasn’t familiar to me - I’d only driven it three miles and in any case there were electric wires and plastic and brass fittings under the dashboard that would add their own subtle odours to the general smell of this particular machine: they weren’t much different from the electric wires and the plastic and the brass terminals that I knew had been put in here more recently, during the night, perhaps when the dog had voiced, sensing something outside. It was the smell of death that I had recognized when I’d climbed behind the wheel. It’s not always the same: it can come from gun oil, geraniums, smoke, new rope and a hundred other things that in the harmlessness of their natural context can go unnoticed. But I was starting the final run out with the objective for the mission and my senses were fine-tuned and alert for any conceivable threat to the organism. It wasn’t the smell of the bomb itself that had warned me. My instinct had triggered cognizance of enormous danger and in the instant I became afraid, and what I had recognized was the smell of my own fear as it sprang from the skin. Metal banged and sent echoes through the hollow shell of the barn and my scalp rose again and the sweat came so fast that it trickled against me under my clothes. The relative warmth of the new day had expanded the corrugated iron sheets of the building where they overlapped, and a bolt had moved, that was all. There was a lot of incoming data and some immediate decisions would have to be made because if that thing had a timing device on it that had started ticking to the movement when I’d got into the truck it could detonate at any next second and I ought to get out now and get out fast. But-Yes, we’ve got to get out before -

Shuddup. But it wasn’t likely they’d done that. They would only have put that kind of mechanism in here if they’d wanted to make sure that Karasov and I would blow ourselves up in the barn before we started off, and that didn’t make any sense - it would be all the same to them if we did it five miles along the road, or fifty. If they’d wanted to keep things quiet they wouldn’t have chosen explosives: they would have used a telescopic lens and waited for us to come out of Volodarskiy’s cave and dropped us quietly into the snow. Or they would simply have tipped off the KGB and run us into a road-block and left it at that. It was probably wired to the ignition. That was a problem because I wanted to use this truck and get us both out of here without wasting any more time: there was a ship waiting for us in Severomorsk and if we missed it

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