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Page 384
to get up, lost his balance, and fell back onto the cot. He held his breath, but the Americans snored on.
He came near to weeping at his physical weakness. And, Karmann thought, my mental state. I hadn't realized how near I am to the brink of despair. I am ill and disheartened, he thought, and I have lost any real hope of survival. The Device has already killed Arkady Karmann, Karmann the drunken fool, who decided, when offered the chance to join the crew of the Pravda, that any job was better than no job at all. I was wrong, and because of it, I am dead. The plutonium I ingested aboard the Pravda is my death. But perhaps I might be comforted, having my last words with a countrywoman. Perhaps I can tell her something of what is in my heart, my sorrow and my guilt. I simply cannot speak when I face Morgan and the other Americans. The words will not come out.
God, but it was cold.
His heart labored in his chest, and he tried to take a deep breath. A yearning of almost unbearable intensity suffused him. He tried to remember how it felt to be healthy, to draw air into undamaged lungs, to feel red blood in strong veins and arteries. How I wish that I could go home, home to Russia, to die there, rather than here in this wasteland.
Karmann gathered the sheaf of notes he had made while he had been studying drawings of the systems inside the Device and put them into his briefcase. Bad weather lessened their chances of success, good weather strengthened them. The diving teams should have been on hand two days ago, studying the site. But the crash of the original Starlifter, whose crumpled corpse lay at the end of the steel runway, had frightened the Canadians into delaying one day while the engineers lengthened the runway a pitiful few meters because the ground under the mesh was so swampy. And then the Russians had not arrived in Montreal until another ten hours had passed. Enough of what had gone awry, Karmann thought. If they will follow my instructions, we can defuse the bomb.
He lay back on the cot, trying to rest, until 0230 hours, then

 
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