UNDERGROUND

182

In the cosmically vast corridor, the two figures seemed so tiny that I wanted to reach out, grab them and put them in my pocket. Sharp eyesight allowed them to look after them for a long time, until they were swallowed up by an alarming haze. He gave them everything he could - weapons, knowledge, his own experience and something else that they did not know about - like that couple thirty years ago. And still it was very little. But alas, their time had come, and there was nothing he could do about it. Perhaps he would have come up with something more reliable if he knew that the pendulum of fortune had begun to swing in the opposite direction, but he was only a man.

At the moment when Pustovalov was saying goodbye to Dasha and Viktor, seventy-three floors above in a spacious room, the former investigator of the military prosecutor's office of the Baltic garrison, Krutilov, who was acting deputy head of the security service for operational work in U-4, got up from his chair. He went up