'Come on!' Ilya snapped. 'This is it!' He turned Maxim away from the sight of the diminishing helicopter, a black spot winking red.

'What the hell is ?' he asked, in his puzzlement returning to the humour they had shared in the hut.

'The whole bloody shooting-match!' He was looking about him, realising that his voice was raised unnaturally. 'Finland Station !' It came out as a harsh whisper, just audible above the retreating drone of the helicopter.

The HQ seemed to settle, briefly, then another high-pitched whine of rotors, and, away to their right, where their own helicopter had landed in a clearing, the winking of lights.

'Finland Station ?' 'Yes, you silly bugger!' Ilya was shaking his arm as he gripped them. 'That chopper is over the border, in Finland. Why? Ask yourself why! It has to be the answer to the puzzle!'

'Oh my - !' Maxim's face went blank, then came back to the present. 'What do we do ?'

'Where the hell is our pilot ?'

'Canteen?'

'On his back reading a naughty book! Where the hell is the rest room - where are their quarters ?'

The two young men looked around wildly, feeling the puzzle that the HQ presented.

'He went off that way,' Maxim said, pointing to their left.

'He did. A hut down there.'

They began to run, feet slipping minutely with every stride on the packed snow. They seemed to be the only people now running in the whole of the camp.

'What about that bloody soldier ?' Maxim panted.

'If he's as thick as the usual, he'll spend an hour realising he's given the game away!'

They went on running. Heads turned to look at them, but with the incuriosity of routine. They were part of the retreating wave of activity.

'But if he's not- ?'

'Then they know that we know - and up yours!'

'What the hell is over there ?'

'Who knows? Hell! Our people?' Ilya skidded to a halt, mounted the two steps up to the porch, and wrenched the door open. Maxim crowded into the doorway with him, and Ilya felt the prod of his Makarov automatic in his back.

'Careful!' he could not resist saying. 'My virginity.'

Their pilot, the young, assured man who had been so unguarded, it had appeared, during the flight from Murmansk, was lying on his bunk at the far end of the small barrack. He was alone. The room was warm, and a record player beside his bunk was tinnily producing Mozart. He lifted his head from the pillow and his supporting arm, smiled - then saw the two drawn guns.

'On your feet!' Ilya barked, then: 'You do and I'll blow your hand off! You won't fly again.'

The pilot stopped reaching for the automatic in his holster, hung on a peg above the bed with his flying-jacket. He raised his hands, and the recognitions nickered in his face as his thoughts embraced the sequence of half-observed events that had brought them there.

'Yes - we know,' Maxim said. The pilot nodded in acquiescence. 'Get up.'

'Stupid,' the pilot observed.

Ilya, the scheme forming desperately in his mind, as a sequence of ill-linked episodes, a badly-edited film, said; 'One chance! Only one - but it's there. With your assistance.'

The pilot remained seated. 'Assistance ?'

'Don't drawl, and don't delay! On your feet, and get into that flying-jacket. You're going to take us up, and show us the view!' He smiled. Turning to Maxim, he added: 'Ever been to Finland, Maxim ?'

'No. Always wanted to, though.'

'Great. Let's have a little holiday.' He walked over to the pilot, careful to leave Maxim a clear field of fire, and pulled the pilot to his feet. The young man, sensing, perhaps, that an extreme purpose had settled uncomfortably on the room, made little physical protest. Instead, he put on the jacket that Ilya handed down to him, picked up his cigarettes and lighter, and walked slowly to the door, his hands in his pockets.

At the door, a sheepish grin on his face, he said, 'And what do we do now ?'

'We walk directly to the chopper, and we make it go up in the air, and head west, across the border,' Ilya said. 'By the way - what's going on over there ?'

The pilots shrugged. 'Routine patrols. It happens all the time, this far from Moscow.'

'Balls! No one in their right mind flies routine patrols in those beauties. They're MIL-24s, gunships!' 'Clever.'

'Only a well-spent Soviet youth, taking a proper interest in the armed forces of our glorious country, get going.'

They crossed the packed snow in a tight group, Maxim walking alongside the pilot, apparently engaging him in animated conversation, with much laughter, while Ilya, the gun in the pocket of his coat, walked just behind them.

The transport helicopter in which they arrived was in the same condition of constant readiness as the MIL-24s that had taken off minutes before, even though it was not required until the following day when it would take an off-duty platoon for forty-eight hours' leave in Murmansk. It sat on a swept concrete square, white-and-yellow striped, in a tiny clearing just big enough to allow it to take off and land. Camouflage netting, now drawn aside, concealed it from the air, and its temporary hangar was erected around it when the weather required. At that moment the corrugated structure was wheeled back under the trees.

The pilot nodded to the two members of the groundcrew on duty, and they asked no questions when he climbed aboard. Maxim, then Ilya, clambered awkwardly after him up the handholds on the fuselage. Once inside, they settled themselves in metal-framed, canvas-webbed seats behind the pilot.

'Ask no one nothing!' Ilya ordered, taking pleasure, an almost wild delight in what was becoming for him a daring piece of initiative - an escapade. 'Just take off, and follow those taxis!'

'And don't bugger about with the machine, will you?' Maxim added, his tone level, without the slightest humour.

'We may be ignorant laymen, but if this thing doesn't behave as helicopters normally do, then I'll make sure you don't live to regale your colleagues with the tale!'

'All right, Comrades. Just like the flying manual says. Strap yourselves in, please.' He fitted his headset, settled in his seat, was aware of Ilya craning forward over his shoulder to watch him, and began the checks; hurrying them as much as he could.

As he settled to the task, he began to be less aware of his danger. His stomach settled, and the routines with which he was so familiar possessed him.

He set the turrets on the computerised fuel-flow, then the turbines began to wind up. Ilya was aware, comfortingly, of their increasing whirr. Then the chopper jiggled sideways as the tail rotor started. When there was sufficient power to the main rotor, the pilot released the rotor brake, flickered a switch, and hauled over the handle of the clutch which engaged the drive to the main rotor.

Ilya, seeing the ease, the speed of familiarity, assumed that nothing untoward was in the pilot's mind. The pilot, aware of the gun near his right ear, knew that he could have done a dozen things that Ilya would never have noticed until it was too late.

He settled to fly them. He knew the extent of their possible discoveries. He did not - he suddenly perceived - have the nerve.

He ignored the whole problem.

When they came back. It would do, then. Then they would be taken care of.

Through the canopy top, Ilya saw the rotor blades begin to turn as the engaged clutch bit, and he heard their swirling beat. Normal. As they achieved proper speed, they became a shimmering horizontal dish.