"Sh-h-h." Then he said, "Now!"
Fortunately Aleksandr did not try to be gallant. He went first, presumably holding Irina by the hand. Irina was in the middle, with Dugan — gingerly holding a fingernail-sized expanse at the tip of her scarf — following. Dugan felt Irina step sidewise and released his hold just in time. If she had reached up with her left hand she would have touched him in the face. (Then, he knew, he would have had to knock her unconscious with a short jab to the throat, fleeing to the woods with an unconscious Irina and a distraught Aleksandr left behind; Dugan pitied the lovers and did not wish to hurt them.)
Irina slipped sidewise through two vertical pillars which felt, as Dugan followed, like uprights of six-centimeter iron pipe.
Dugan's eyes at last caught the indirect glow of a very dim light inside a doorway. Below him, twenty feet downward and thirty or forty feet away, he saw three entrances to corridors. The entrances were twice the size of household doors. The lights within them were set far back in the interior. These must be tunnels, he thought, and the nearer one the guardhouse.
A chain rattled as Aleksandr padlocked the little door through which they had come. For two or three seconds he saw the two of them silhouetted against the dim faraway little lights. Aleksandr stood erect and proud; his uniform collar fitted well; well-brushed curly hair showed between cap and forehead. Irma's hairdo was Russian-style with a bun at the back; Dugan could not be sure, but he suspected her of being amazingly pretty.
They moved away, hand in hand and Dugan voicelessly said farewell: "Goodbye, poor lovers. For your own sakes, I hope you never see me."
At the tunnel level, Irina hastened away.
Dugan took the opportunity to move away from the gate, to the top of a flight of steps.
As Aleksandr, returning, passed him, Dugan melted into a small tree. Aleksandr passed within inches and went back to the main gate. He stood there, silent until a sentry called. Then he began bellowing back.
Dugan ruefully made a package of his tricky little gadgets — all except for a tiny camera which would not have been noticed on him even if he were stripped naked, and a single pliofilm-sealed wafer of cyanide — and hid them just under the roots of the tree. The items were inside Atomsk with him and he could find them again, if he lived through the night.