the grenade's bouncing ringing in his ears, and Dragosani's hiss of snatched breath, he opened the steel door to the courtyard, stepped through it and pulled it firmly shut behind him.
Out in the night, Ustinov mentally ticked off the seconds as he limped towards the two white-coated attendants at the rear of the ambulance. 'Help!' he croaked. 'I'm cut - badly! It's Dragosani, one of our special operatives. He's gone mad, killed Borowitz, Gerkhov, and a KGB man.'
From behind him, lending his words definition, there came a muffled detonation. The steel door gonged as if someone had struck it with a sledgehammer; it bowed outward a little and broke a hinge, then was sucked back and open to slam against the corridor wall. Smoke, heat and a lick of red flame billowed out, all bearing the heavy stench of high explosives.
'Quick!' Ustinov shouted over the frantic questioning of the attendants and the yelling of security guards as they came clattering over the cobbles. 'You, driver, get us away from here at once, before the whole place goes up!' There was little fear of that happening, but it would guarantee some action. And it would get Ustinov out of harm's way, for the moment anyway. The hell of it was that he couldn't be sure any of them back there were dead. If they were he would have plenty of time to construct his story; if not he was done for. Only time would tell.
He flopped into the back of the ambulance as its engine roared into life, followed by the attendants who at once began to peel off his outer garments. Doors flapping, the vehicle pulled away across the courtyard, passed under a high stone archway and onto a track leading to the perimeter wall.
'Keep going,' Ustinov yelled. 'Get us away!' The driver hunched down over the wheel and put his foot down.
Back in the courtyard the security men and the helicop ter pilot hopped and skittered on the cobbles, coughing in the streamers of acrid smoke from the hanging door. The fire, what little of it there had been, had died in the smoke. And now, out from behind that dense, reeking wall of smoke staggered an ashen nightmare figure: Dra gosani, naked still, black-streaked over grey and gore- spattered flesh, carried a bellowing Gregor Borowitz draped in a fireman's lift across his shoulders.
'What?' the General shouted between coughs and splut ters. 'What? Where's that treacherous dog Ustinov? Did you let him get away? Where's the ambulance? What are you bloody fools doing?'
As the security men lifted Borowitz down from Drago sani's bowed back, one of them breathlessly told him: 'Comrade Ustinov was wounded, sir. He went off in the ambulance.'
'Comrade? Comrade?'' Borowitz howled. 'No comrade, that one! And "wounded", you say? Wounded, you arsehole? / want him dead!'
He turned his wolfs face up to the tower, yelled: 'You there - do you see the ambulance?'
'Yes, Comrade General. It approaches the outer wall.'
'Stop it!' Borowitz screamed, clutching at his shattered shoulder.
'But -'
'Blow it to hell!' the General raged.
The marksman in the tower slid his night-sight binocu lars into a groove in the butt of the Kalashnikov, slapped home a mixed clip of tracers and explosive bullets. Kneeling, he picked up the vehicle again in the crosshairs of the night-sights, aimed at the cab and bonnet. The ambulance was slowing down as it approached one of the archways through the perimeter wall, but the marksman knew it would never get there. Jamming his weapon between his shoulder and the parapet wall, he squeezed the trigger and kept it squeezed. The hosepipe of fire reached out from the tower, fell short of the vehicle by a few yards, then jumped the gap and struck the target.
The front end of the ambulance burst into white fire, exploded and hurled blazing petrol in all directions. Blown off the track, turned on its side, the vehicle ploughed to a halt in torn-up turf. Someone in white crawled away from it on hands and knees as it burned; someone else, wearing an open, flapping shirt and carrying a dark overcoat, cowered back from the flames and limped in the direction of the covered exit.
Unable to see out of the courtyard from where he stood supported by the security men, Borowitz eagerly shouted up to the tower, 'Did you stop it?'
'Yes, sir. Two men at least are alive. One is ambulance crew, and I think the other is - '