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Page 386
membered important information, necessary to make measurements before morning. Divers will be here in an hour, and I must tell them."
"Well, all right," the sailor said doubtfully.
Arkady felt suddenly weak and very tired, almost disembodied. As he looked over at the deck of the icebreaker, for a moment he could see a girl, a young girl waving at him, beckoning him to come to her. It is my sister, he thought, and at first tried to wave back. But it couldn't be Ilena, he thought in confusion, it was not possible. She had died of meningitis at sixteen, when they lived in Leningrad. Am I dreaming?
Karmann squeezed the steel hook at the end of his arm with his good hand, causing sharp pain. Stay alert, Arkady, he thought. You have no time for memories. Stay awake and meet a beautiful Russian woman with whom you have an assignation.
Overhead the clouds were closing in again, darkening the night.
"Get aboard the Zodiac," the sailor said grudgingly. "I'll run you out to the Trudeau."
Marina Suslova felt she had been waiting for hours before she saw the two men get into the Zodiac and leave the jury-rigged jetty. So much depended on whether or not the note she had written piqued his curiosity enough to get him out here at this hour. He would never recognize the nameEkaterina Marchenka was the cover she always used when posing as a journalist. From this distance, it was hard to be sure that Arkady Karmann was the passenger. "Come on, you bastard," she breathed, watching the little boat's progress across the water. "I don't have much time."
Marina stood on the working platform in the deep shadow between a tied-down portable generator and a stack of spares for the RPV. Much of the platform was empty, garishly lit by banks of sodium vapor lights powered from the nearby Trudeau. The circular metal deck was rusted and uneven, showing

 
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