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done,” said Khuv with a small shudder. “Pack some snow in his mouth—but not too much!” He inclined his head, added, “Here they come.”
    Dim, artificial light washed up from the gorge like the pulse of a far false dawn. It brightened rapidly. With it came the slicing whup, whup, whup, of a helicopter’s rotors …
    Â 
    Jazz Simmons was falling, falling, falling. He’d been on top of a mountain and had somehow fallen off. It was a very high mountain and it was taking him a long time to hit the bottom. Indeed, he’d been falling for so long that the motion now seemed like floating. Floating in air, frog-shaped, free-falling like an expert parachutist waiting for the right moment to open his chute. Except Jazz had no chute. Also, he must have hit his face on something as he fell, for his mouth was full of blood.
    Nausea and vomiting woke him up from nightmare to nightmarish reality. He was falling! In the next moment, remembering everything, the thought flashed through his mind:
    God! They’ve tossed me into the ravine!
    But he wasn’t falling, only floating. At least that part of his dream was real. And now as his brain got in gear and shock receded a little, so he felt the tight grip of his
harness and the down-draft of the helicopter’s great fan overhead. He craned his neck and twisted his body, and somehow managed to look up. Way up there a chopper, its spotlights probing the depths of the ravine, but directly overhead …
    Directly overhead a dead man twirled slowly on a second line, a hook through his belt, his arms and legs loosely dangling. His dead eyes were open and each time he came round they stared into Jazz’s eyes. From the splashes of crimson on his white parka Jazz supposed it was the man he’d shot.
    Then—
    Shock returned with a vengeance, weightlessness and vertigo and cold, blasting air and noise combining to put him down a second time. The last thing he remembered as he fell into another ravine, the night black pit of merciful oblivion, was to wonder why his mouth was full of blood and what had happened to his teeth.
    Mere moments after he’d passed out the helicopter lowered him to the flat top of the upper dam wall and yellow-jacketted men removed him and his harness complete from his hook. They took Boris Dudko down, too, a heroic son of Mother Russia. After that … their handling of Jazz Simmons wasn’t too gentle, but he neither knew nor cared.
    Nor did he know that he was about to experience the dream of every intelligence boss in the western world: he was about to be taken inside the Perchorsk Projekt.
    Getting out again would be a different thing entirely …

Chapter Two
    Debrief
    THOUGH LENGTHY, THE DEBRIEFING WAS THE VERY GENTLEST affair, nothing nearly so cold and clinical as Simmons had imagined this sort of interrogation would be. Of course, in his case it had to be gentle, for he’d been close to death when his friends had smuggled him out of the USSR. That had been several weeks ago—or so they told him—and it seemed he was a bit of a mess even now.
    Gentle, yes, but on occasion irritating, too. Especially the way his Debriefing Officer had insisted on calling him “Mike,” when he must surely have known that Simmons had only ever answered to Michael or Jazz—and in Russia, of course, to Mikhail. But that was a very small grievance compared to his freedom and the fact that he was still alive.
    Of his time as a prisoner he’d remembered very little, virtually nothing. Security suspected he’d been brainwashed, told to forget, but in any case they hadn’t wasted too much time on that side of it; the important thing had been his work, what he’d achieved. Perhaps at one time the Reds had intended to keep him, maybe even try to reprogramme him as a double agent. But then they’d changed their minds, ditched him, tossed his drugged, battered body into the outlet