Twelve men.

Ridiculous.

They came at the run, disorganised and unprepared, because they might have been mistaken and the officer was evidently panicking and they had had to throw away cigarettes Vorontsyev raised his arm, swung back and then forward, and lobbed the grenade into them. Then the second one. Five of them, not bunched, but the grenades, more like fat tins than pineapples, carried heavy charges and an effective fragmentation radius of twenty-five metres. The first one exploded, and he heard something thud into the logs on the other side. The second explosion. A thin scream, then he was on his feet, all but head and shoulders masked by the logs, and firing at the two men still moving, staggering though they were. He did not miss.

He could hear one of the wounded men behind him, screaming something incoherent and terrible about his guts, and then he pressed against the wall of a house twenty yards away, his head bobbing round the corner of the house, cheek rubbing against the rough board - and the APC, a background to the stunned officer and the NCO, who looked white, was fifty yards from him.

Then the officer screamed rather than shouted some confused orders. It was as if he did not realise that his force had been cut to half, and he no longer had sufficient men to perform the demanded tasks.

Vorontsyev grinned. Death, violent death, and winning, even temporarily, charged him with new energy. It was one he would despise later, if he lived. But not now.

One soldier came at a reckless run, because his officer was screaming behind him, down the earthen alleyway between two of the larger houses in the hamlet. His boots pounded on the packed, dark earth, cracked by frost. Vorontsyev waited until he was level, then fired. There was no thought of silent disposal - noise was a part of it, part of the electricity that now galvanised him. It was as if the man had been shoved in the back - arms thrown out, legs going, then face down in a chicken run. Vorontsyev wanted to laugh, because that, too, was a source of energy, of destructive confidence - ways of dying. One man burying his face in chicken-shit, another pulling his pisser out as he died. It had to be good, that.

He ran up the alleyway, seeing the officer confronting him, the NCO already moving away towards the place where the grenade had exploded. He could see no one else now - a face at a little window, barely glanced as he raced past it, then the stutter of the AK-47 on semi-automatic, forty rounds a minute, quicker than single, aimed shots. Vulgar, untrained destruction.

The officer was sliding down the side of the APC even as the NCO dived into the hard dirt of the street. Both of them were dead. He trained the gun, trigger pressed against the back of the guard, until he was sure they had been hit repeatedly. He was ten yards from them, still in the narrow alleyway. Eight dead, and the driver, who had been climbing back into the seat of the APC, perhaps to move it forward, clutching his leg, still bent as if to mount the side of the carrier, knuckles of the hand gripping the rung above him turning white with the pain, and the effort of hanging on. He was afraid to drop on the wounded leg.

Vorontsyev felt the dangerous energy flag. He had known the mood only once before, in a brief KGB firefight with a hijack team surprised in their warehouse headquarters. He had killed two of them, and received a commendation. It had helped to obtain his transfer to SID. He felt exhausted now, as if slipping into sleep or coma. There was little time left, as if the effects of some drug were wearing off.

He dashed to the APC, and bundled the driver out of the way. The man screamed as he fell on his wounded leg, and Vorontsyev saw the hand red with gouted blood. He hauled himself up and tumbled into the body of the carrier, bruising his ribs against the hard edge of a seat.

Bullets puckered and whined against the side of the APC. But he was safe now, the armour of the vehicle protecting him. As he lifted his head cautiously, he saw a soldier's head peer from behind a wooden wall, and he pumped four rounds, heard the scream as the high-velocity bullets passed through the two walls of the building that met at the corner concealing the soldier and hit their target; then the rifle clicked twice.

He tore the magazine off, and struggled with the one in his pocket, which threatened to snag awkwardly. Then it was dipped in, and he raised his head again.

The street was empty.

He felt desperately tired.

With his back against the armoured side of the APC, he raised his head and shouted into the silence of the street:

'Everyone else is dead! How many more of you are there -four, five ? You won't get close enough to throw a grenade in! Give it up. Let some other bastard take me on!'

He listened. Nothing, for a long time.

'You bastard!' he heard someone shout, away to the left of the APC, 'You killed all our mates, you bloody terrorist!'

He wanted to laugh. They were dying, and prepared to die, for the same fiction that had killed the KGB team in Khabarovsk - the Separatists. And then he hated Ossipov. Not the men out there, but Ossipov.

He tried to think coolly, because the mention of grenades had been deliberate. There would be only a few moments more of cold logic, before thought became muddy, indefinite.

He shouted: 'Give up, you stupid bastards! I'll kill the lot of you unless you do!' Then he raised his head. The right arm, half the frame, of a soldier had appeared, hand raised with a grenade. The soldier moved to get a freer throw, and Vorontsyev fired. The arm disappeared, and the grenade bounced twice, then exploded. He heard a scream.

They would have used grenades anyway. He had made them try on his terms, in the moment of his choosing. He did not know how many he had killed or disabled. Probably two.

'Come out, you stupid bastards!' he repeated. 'Give yourselves up!'

It had to be now, in the next few seconds, while their minds clogged still with the number of the dead, with their own lack of safety in diminishing numbers. Had to be.

From one side of the street, two soldiers appeared. Across from the APC, another. One of them was holding a bloody, torn sleeve. He must have been behind the others when the grenade went off. They ostentatiously dropped their guns. The wounded driver wriggled on the ground.

Vorontsyev stood up, almost swaying with weariness. He motioned with the gun.

'Come on!' he barked. 'Get in! Get in or I'll kill you!' He should have done, but he was beginning to be appalled at the slaughter. It was no longer a gratuitous feeling, but wrenched at his stomach. There seemed a stench in his nostrils. The perspective he had rigidly bound in the toil of action loosened and came free, and he was still eighteen miles from the only airport, and thousands of miles from safety. He waggled the gun down at the young peasant faces. Men on military service, without sophistication or great intelligence. Badly frightened automata, shocked out of their normal machine-like operation, their officer dead.

'Get hi!' he barked. 'One of you drive!'

They seemed to hold a silent debate, and then one of them climbed into the driving-seat.

Tick him up!' he shouted, pointing at the wounded figure on the ground. They did so, bundling him gently into the back of the APC, the double doors opened. One of them examined the wound, and took out a field dressing, binding the calf that had been torn by a bullet. 'Get moving!' Vorontsyev called, sitting down next to the driver hi the officer's accustomed seat, turning so that he could watch the two men and the driver, and the wounded man supported in one of the seats.

'Where?' the driver asked, his hands gripping the wheel to still fear.

'Turn round - back the way you came. I'll give directions.'

The APC's engine roared, and then they turned on the dirt of the street, picking up speed as if to leave the carnage behind. Vorontsyev felt the weariness leave him, feeding instead on the shocked, stunned faces of the men he had captured, lifting himself up from the level of their self-abnegation. Now they did not even hate him. They were feeling nothing.

The APC left the village behind. Still no one had come out of any of the houses as they bumped over the rise and the village dropped out of sight. Within a quarter of a mile, Vorontsyev barked, 'Right here!' They turned off the road, down a narrow dirt track. The driver appeared puzzled. The rifle prodded against his arm, which quivered as at the touch of an electrode, and he changed down. The surface of the track was pitted with craters, in some of which icy pools remained.

Vorontsyev watched the sky, and the road ahead. It would be some time before the men became dangerous again with renewed hatred; and by that time he would have dumped them, and the driver. He would not kill them. He would simply leave them, in the middle of nowhere, on foot.

During the short afternoon, as they wound slowly, methodically along tracks and lanes, often screened by trees or high hedges and walls, always heading generally eastwards, the sky darkened swiftly and heavy cloud pressed down on them. A wind, too, sprang up; the weather had been deceptive in the morning. When it began to snow, large flakes driven into their faces, pattering against the sides of the APC, he knew he had been given the kind of luck he needed. The weather closed in on them. He worked from the map and the compass as the scenery was blotted out by curtains of rushing snow.

No air traffic.

Eventually, he abandoned the soldiers. They feared him, momentarily, but hatred was already beginning to make them calculate recklessly. They were beginning to be dangerous to him. They climbed out of the APC reluctantly, hauled out the wounded man without tenderness, and stood beneath the trees, sheltered from, the worst of the weather, looking up at him in a murderous little knot effaces. He almost abandoned his plan to lake the uniform of the man nearest him in build - but he knew he had to disguise himself if he was to drive the APC the rest of the way.

The man did, shivering with rage and cold as he stripped to his underwear, then donned Vorontsyev's sweaters and anorak and slacks. He seemed to hate the still-warm clothes, but he was forced by the temperature to put them on quickly. Vorontsyev bundled the uniform into the cab, jumped in shaking with cold, and drove off. He drove until the wind and temperature made it difficult to hold the wheel or use the gears - then he stopped, dressed in the chilly uniform, and swigged from the vodka in the first-aid kit.

Gradually, warmth returned. He had abandoned the men at least three miles from the nearest dwelling. They wouldn't die, but it would be a long time before they could describe what had happened.

He drove on, ten miles still from Khabarovsk, having covered nearly eighteen miles of country tracks and lanes. It was already beginning to grow dark with evening rather than storm.

He picked up the first of the roadblocks in the gleam of the headlights, only yards ahead of him. He had skirted Khabarovsk as best he could, keeping to the east of the town, but eventually, after three hours, he had had to join one of the main roads, which would take him through the outer suburbs to cross the river. He wanted to be south-east of Khabarovsk, and time was running out.

The roadblock was thrown across the approach to the bridge, a red-and-white pole, bollards to close the traffic flow down to a single lane, armed soldiers. He slowed behind the cars ahead of him as the brake lights went on, glaring in the falling sleet. He put out the cigarette, adjusted his uniform to some impression of tidiness, and waited to creep forward, or for them to come to him. He tried to shake off the narcosis of the journey. He had thought about nothing, made no plans beyond getting to the destination he had decided upon - even when he began running it had been there, a means of escape more like a child's dream than a plan. But, it had settled itself, apparently, and he had made no conscious effort to rid himself of it.

As the soldier marched down the little rank of waiting cars, he realised the mistake he had made. The sleet shifted aside for a moment, and he could see an army truck up ahead, in another lane. He had ignored the sign he had passed a hundred yards back redirecting priority traffic - which meant any army vehicle. Quickly, he wound down the window.

The cold flowed in, sleet peppered his face. The soldier looked up at him. He believed, in that moment, that they knew who he was - even though the chances of the soldiers he had abandoned getting to a telephone had been almost zero. They might, might just have to run into another army unit 'What the hell's the matter with you ?' the guard asked, his face old and flat under the helmet. 'Can't any of you buggers read?'

'Sorry - ' Vorontsyev murmured, thickening his Muscovite accent, not able to trust himself to assume another way of speaking; he made himself more stupid, uneducated. 'Nearly asleep - been driving this bloody thing for hours.'

'Papers ?' The guard held up his hand lazily. He didn't want to listen to anyone else, had his own grouses about being on duty so long his feet had gone numb and his back ached.

Vorontsyev handed over the papers as nonchalantly as he could; sensing a situation developing even as the heavy mittened hand took them, flicked a torch on them. Perhaps it was the click of the officer's boots coming down the line, or the fact that the car ahead of him pulled away, its boot having been slammed down after a perfunctory search.

'Where's the bloody picture, then ?' The guard held out the ID papers. 'And your movement orders - in the cab ?'