brightened rapidly. With it came the slicing whup, whup, whup, of a helicopter's rotors . 
. .
  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-jacketed 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 . . .
  
  
  2
  
  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 re-programme him 
as a double agent. But then they'd changed their minds, ditched him, tossed his drugged, 
battered body into the outlet basin under the dam. He'd been picked up five miles 
down-river from Perchorsk, floating on his back in calm waters but gradually drifting 
toward falls which must surely have killed him. If that had happened . . . nothing 
remarkable about it: a logger and spare-time prospector, one Mikhail Simonov, falls in a 
river, is exhausted by the cold and drowns. An accident which could happen to anyone; he 
wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last. The West could make up its own mind about the 
truth of it, if they ever found out about it at all.
  But Simmons hadn't drowned; "sympathetic" people had been out looking for him ever 
since his failure to return to the logging camp; they'd found him, cared for him, given 
him into the hands of agents who'd got him out through an escape route tried and true. 
And Jazz himself remembering only the scantiest details of it, brief, blurry snatches 
from the few occasions when he'd been conscious. A lucky man. Indeed, a very lucky man . 
. .
  His days were uncomplicated during that long period of recuperation. Uncomfortable but 
uncomplicated. He would wake up to slowly increasing pain, a pain which seemed to stem 
from his very veins as much as from any identifiable limb or organ. Immobile, his lower 
half encased and (he suspected) in some sort of traction, his left arm splinted and 
swathed and his head similarly wrapped, waking up was like moving from some darkly 
surreal land to an equally weird world of grey shadows and soft external movements.
  Light came in through his bandages, but it was like trying to see through inches of 
snow or a heavily frosted window. His entire face had been very badly bruised, 
apparently, but the doctors had managed to save his eyes. Now he must rest them, and the 
rest of his body, too. Simmons had never been vain; he didn't ask about his face. But he 
did wonder about it. That was only natural.
  His dreams disturbed him most, those dreams he could never quite remember, except that 
they were deeply troubled and full of anxiety and accusation. He would worry about them 
and puzzle over them in the period between waking and the pain starting, but after that 
his only concern would be the pain. At least they'd given him a button he could press to 
let them know he was awake. "Them': the angels of this peculiar hell on earth, his doctor 
and his Debriefing Officer.
  They would come, shadows through the snow of his bandages; the doctor would feel his 
pulse (never more than that) and cluck like a worried hen; the Debriefing Officer would 
say: "Easy now, Mike, easy!" And in would go the needle. It didn't put him out, just took 
away the pain and made it easy to talk. He talked not only because the DO wanted him to 
and because he knew he must, but also out of sheer gratitude. That's how bad the pain 
could get.
  He'd been told this much: that while he was badly banged about he wasn't beyond repair. 
There'd been some surgery and more to come, but the worst of it was over. The pain-killer 
they'd used had been highly addictive and now they had to wean him off it, but his dosage 
was coming down and soon he'd be on pills alone, by which time the pain wouldn't be 
nearly so bad. Meanwhile the DO had to get everything he knew-every last iota of 
information-out of him, and he had to be sure he was getting the truth. The "damned 
Johnnie-Red" might have inserted stuff in there that wasn't real, "don'tcha know." With 
the methods they used these days they could alter a man's memory, his entire perception 
of things, "the damned boundahs!" Jazz hadn't known there were people who still talked 
like that.
  And so, to ensure they were digging out the "gen stuff, they'd started right back at