The Source Read Free

of experimental missile from Vorkuta and lost it? If so, does it have a warhead?
    How many warheads?
    Alert classifications go up two notches and Moscow comes under fire in some very heated hotline exchanges. Still the Soviets deny all knowledge, however nervously.
    Better, clearer reports are coming in. We now have the thing on satellite, on ground radar, on AWACS. No physical, human sightings as yet but everything else. The spysats say it could be a dense flock of birds—but what sort of birds fly in excess of three hundred mph five miles high across the Arctic Circle? Collision with birds could have taken out the Migs, of course, but … The top-secret high-tech radar sites along the older DEW-line say it’s either a large airplane or … a space-platform fallen out of orbit? Also that it’s impossibly low on metal content—namely, it doesn’t have any! But intelligence won’t admit of any aircraft (not to mention space-stations) two hundred and some feet long and constructed of canvas. AWACS says that the thing is flying in a series of spurts or jets, like some vast aerial octopus. And AWACS is more or less right.
    It is now one hour since the American interceptors scrambled. Flying at close to Mach II, they have crossed
the Hudson Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point about two hundred miles north of Churchill. In so doing they’ve just overtaken the AWACS and left it a few minutes behind. The AWACS has told them that their target is dead ahead, and that he’s come down to 10,000 feet. And now, finally, just like the Migs before them, they spot the intruder.
    That had been the narrative, the scenario that the CIA and MI6 had set for Simonov before showing him the AWACS film; and as the Briefing Officer had spoken those last three words, “spot the intruder,” so the film had started to roll. All very dramatic, and deservedly so …
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    â€œSpot the intruder,” thought Simonov now, the words bitter on his tongue so that he almost spat them out loud. By God, yes! For that was the name of the game, wasn’t it? In security, intelligence, spying: Spot the Intruder. And all sides playing it expertly, some a little better than others. Right here and now he was the intruder: Michael J. Simmons, alias Mikhail Simonov. Except he hadn’t been spotted yet.
    Then, as he re-directed all of his concentration back down onto the scene in the ravine, he sensed or heard something that didn’t belong. From somewhere behind and below him had come the chink of a dislodged pebble, then lesser clatterings as the tumbling stone picked up smaller cousins on its way down the side of the mountain. The last leg of the climb had been along a steep, terraced ridge of rock, more a scramble than a real climb, and there had been plenty of loose scree and stony debris littered about. It could be that in his passing he’d left a pebble precariously balanced on some ledge, and that a strong gust had dislodged it. Simonov fancied that was all there was to it, but—
    What if it was something else? He’d had this feeling recently—a sort of uneasy, half-formed suspicion—that someone, somehow, was aware of him. Someone he’d
rather was not aware of him. He supposed this was a feeling spies learned to live with. Maybe it was just that everything had seemed to be going so smoothly, so that now he’d started to invent difficulties. He hoped that was all it was. But just to be sure …
    Without looking back or changing his position, he unzipped his anorak, reached inside and came out with a blocky, wicked-looking short-barrelled automatic, its stubby silencer already attached. He checked the magazine, and silently eased it up again into the grip. And all of this done one-handed, with practiced ease, without pausing in the filming of the trucks in the ravine. Maybe the last couple of frames would be a bit off-centre. No big deal. Simonov was satisfied with what