‘Kretov?’ he whispered. ‘Kretov?’ But the only voice he could hear was his own.
Then the gunfire started up again.
*
THE fire was like a red dawn through the trees, and when Suvorin stepped out on to the track he could feel the heat of the burning snow plough, even at a range of a hundred yards. The fuel tank must have exploded and the inferno had melted the winter all around it. The vehicle stood blazing in the centre of its own scorched spring.
The gunfire was continuing sporadically, but that wasn’t Kretov returning fire. That was boxes of ammunition, exploding in the cab. Kretov himself was sitting down, doubled over in the centre of the track, beside the RP46, as dead as his comrades. He looked as though he had been shot while trying to set up the machine gun. He had got as far as mounting it on to the bipod but he hadn’t had time to open the cannister of ammunition.
Suvorin went up to him and touched his arm and Kretov toppled over, his grey eyes open, a look of astonishment on his broad, pink face. Suvorin couldn’t see a wound, not at first, anyway. Perhaps the heroic major of the Spetsnaz had simply died of fright?
Another loud bang from the direction of the fire made him look up, to find himself being watched by Comrade Stalin, in his generalissimo’s uniform and cap.
The GenSec was some way up the track, standing before the fire, his left hand on his hip, his right holding a rifle almost casually across his shoulder. His shadow was long in proportion to his squat torso. It danced and flickered on the churned snow.
Suvorin thought he would choke on his own heart. They looked at one another. Then Stalin started marching towards him. And marching – that was the word for the way he walked: quickly, but without hurrying, swinging his arms up across his barrel chest, left-right, left-right: look lively there, comrade, here I come!
Suvorin fumbled in his pocket for his pistol and realised he had left it in the trees, beside the first two corpses.
Left-right, left-right – the living banner, kicking up the snow –
Suvorin didn’t dare look at him an instant longer. He knew that if he did he would never move.
‘Why is your face so shifty, comrade?’ called the advancing figure. ‘Why can’t you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?’
Suvorin swung the barrel of the RP46, his memory toiling back twenty years, to his compulsory army training, shivering on some godforsaken range on the outskirts of Vitebsk. ‘Cock gun by pulling operating handle to the rear. Pull rear sight base to the rear and lift cover. Lay belt, open side up, on the feed plate so that the leading round contacts the cartridge stop and close cover. Pull trigger and gun will fire …’
He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and the machine gun jumped in his hands, sending a couple of dozen bullets sawing into a birch tree at a range of twenty yards.
When he dared to check the track again Comrade Stalin had disappeared.
IF Suvorin’s memory served him right, the ammunition belt of the RP46 carried 250 rounds, which the gun would dispatch at a rate of, say, 600 rounds per minute. So, given he’d already used a few, he probably had something less than thirty seconds of firepower with which to cover 360 degrees of track and forest, with night coming on and the temperature plunging to a level that would kill him in a couple of hours.
He had to get out of the open, that was for sure. He couldn’t keep on like this, scrambling round and round like a tethered goat in a tiger shoot, trying to see through the gloom of the trees.
He seemed to remember some abandoned wooden huts at the far end of the track. They might provide a bit of cover. He needed to get his back against a wall somewhere, needed time to think.
A wolf howled in the forest.
He disconnected the machine gun from the bipod and hoisted the long barrel up on to his shoulder, the ammunition belt heavy on his arm, his knees almost buckling under the weight, his feet sinking deeper into the snow.
The full-throated howling came again. It was not a wolf at all, he thought. It was a man – a man’s exultant shout: a blood cry.
He started wading up the track, away from the burning snow plough, and he sensed that there was someone walking parallel with him through the trees, keeping an easy pace, laughing at his ponderous attempt at flight. He was being played with, that was all. He would be allowed to get within a few paces of his destination, then he would be shot.
He came out of the neck of the track and into the abandoned settlement and headed for the nearest wooden building. The windows were out, the door had gone, half the roof was missing, it stank. He put down the gun and crawled into the corner, then turned and dragged the weapon after him. He wedged himself against the wall and pointed the barrel at the door, his finger on the trigger.
KELSO heard the big explosion, gunfire, a long pause, and then the short and heavy clatter of a much bigger weapon opening up. He and O’Brian were on their feet by now, frantically trying to find some way of cutting the rope that bound them to the stove chimney. Each sound from the forest drove them to more desperate efforts. The thin plastic was digging into his wrists, his fingers were slippery with blood.
There was blood on the Russian, too, when he appeared in the doorway. Kelso saw it as he came towards them, unsheathing his knife – smeared across his face, on his forehead and on either cheek, like a hunter who had dipped himself in his kill.
‘Comrades,’ he reported, ‘we are dizzy with success. Three are dead. Only one still lives. Are there more?’
‘More coming.’
‘How many more?’
‘Fifty,’ said Kelso. ‘A hundred.’ He tugged against the rope. ‘Comrade, we must get clear of this place, or they will kill us all. Even you cannot stop so many. They are going to send an army.’
ACCORDING to Suvorin’s watch, about fifteen minutes had elapsed.
The temperature was plunging as the light faded. His body began to vibrate with the cold – a steady, violent shaking he couldn’t stop.
‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Come on and finish the job.’
But nobody came.
Comrade Stalin’s capacity for springing surprises was truly endless.
THE next thing Suvorin heard was a distant click, followed by a whirr.
Click-whirr. Click-whirr.
Now what was he doing?
Suvorin found it hard to move at first. The frost had locked his joints and starched his wet clothes to board. Still, he was on his feet in time to hear the mysterious click-whirr turn suddenly into a cough and then a roar as an engine started.
No, no, not an engine exactly: a motor – an outboard motor –
He was baffled for a moment, but then he realised.
‘Fifteen miles, major. It’s right on the river …’
WELL, the RP46 didn’t get any lighter, nor the snow any easier, and now he had the oncoming darkness to contend with, but he tried. He made a valiant effort.
‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ he chanted as he ran, following the pulse of the revving outboard as it led him through the fifty yards or so of trees that screened the deserted fishing settlement from the river.
He crashed through the last barrier of undergrowth and came out on to the crest of a bank that sloped down steeply to the water’s edge. He stumbled along the ridge, heading upstream. Some pieces of electronic equipment lay spread out in the snow. Grey ice extended for a little distance and the black water rushed beyond his reach – an immensity of it: he couldn’t see the trees on the opposite shore. And already the little boat was heading towards the centre, and turning now, carving a great white sickle of spray in the darkness. He could just make out three crouched figures. One seemed to be trying to struggle to his feet, but another pulled him down.
Suvorin dropped to his knees and unshouldered the machine gun, fumbling to close the cover on the ammunition belt, which promptly jammed. By the time he had it free and ready to fire the boat had rounded the curve of the river – and then he couldn’t see it any more, he could o
nly hear it.
He put down the gun and bent his head.
Beside him, like a space probe landed on some hostile planet, the antenna of a satellite dish pointed low across the Dvina to the dissolving horizon. One set of cables connected the dish to a car battery. Another was linked to a small grey box labelled ‘Transportable Video & Audio Transmission Terminal’. Even as he watched, a row of ten red zeros in a digital display winked at him briefly, faded and died.
He had an overwhelming sense of emptiness, squatting there, as if some malevolent force had erupted from this place and escaped for ever, a comet trailing darkness.
For perhaps half a minute he listened to the sound of the outboard motor and then that too was gone and he was left alone in the utter silence.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE FIGURE SUVORIN had seen trying to rise in the boat was O’Brian – my gear!, he shouted, the tapes! – and the figure who had pulled him down was Kelso – forget the bloody gear, forget the tapes. For a moment the boat rocked dangerously, and the Russian cursed them both, and then O’Brian moaned and sat down quickly and put his head in his hands.
Kelso couldn’t make out anyone on the shore as they roared away from it. All he could see was the sky pulsing red above the tips of the darkening firs where something big was burning fiercely, and then very quickly a bend in the river obliterated even that and he was conscious only of speed – of the racket of the outboard motor and the rushing current hurtling them downstream through the forest.
He was thinking with great clarity now, everything else in his life irrelevant, everything narrowed to this one single point: survival. And it seemed to him that all that counted was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this spot. He didn’t know how many men were left alive behind them, but the best he reckoned they could hope for was that a search party wouldn’t set out till the morning. The worst scenario was that the blond-headed man had radioed for help and Archangel would already be sealed.
There was no food or water in the boat, just a couple of oars, a boathook, the Russian’s suitcase, his rifle, and a small tank that smelled as though it was leaking cheap fuel. In the darkness he had to hold his watch up very close to his eyes. It was just after half-past six. He leaned over and said to O’Brian, ‘What time did you say the Moscow train left Archangel?’
O’Brian lifted his head long enough from his despair to mutter, ‘Ten past eight.’
Kelso twisted round and shouted above the engine and the wind, ‘Comrade, could we get to Archangel?’ There was no reply. He tapped his watch. ‘Could we get to the centre of Archangel in an hour?’
The Russian didn’t seem to have heard. His hand was on the tiller and he was staring straight ahead. With his collar turned up and his cap pulled down, it was impossible to make out his expression. Kelso tried shouting again and then gave up. It was a new kind of horror, he thought, to realise that they probably owed their lives to him – that he was now their ally – and that their futures were at the mercy of his unfathomable mind.
THEY were heading roughly north-west and the cold was being hammered into them from all sides – a Siberian wind at their backs, the freezing water beneath their feet, the rushing air on their faces. O’Brian remained monosyllabic, inconsolable. There was a light in the prow, and Kelso found himself concentrating on that – on the shifting yellow path and the roiling water, black and viscous as it began to solidify.
After half an hour the snow resumed, the flakes huge and luminous in the dark, like falling ash. Occasionally something knocked against the hull and Kelso spotted lumps of ice drifting in the current. It was as if winter was clutching at them, determined not to let them go, and Kelso wondered if fear was the reason for the Russian’s silence. Killers could be frightened, like anyone else, perhaps more than anyone else. Stalin lived half his life in a state of terror – scared of aeroplanes, scared of visiting the front, never eating food unless it had been tasted for poison, changing his guards, his routes, his beds – when you had murdered so many, you knew how easily death could come. And it could come for them here very easily, he thought. They would run into an ice barrier, the water would freeze behind them, they would be trapped; the ice-crust would be too thin to risk crawling across, and here they would die, covered for decency under a shroud of snow.
He wondered what people would make of it. Margaret – what would she say when she learned her ex-husband’s body had been found in a forest nearly a thousand miles from Moscow. And his boys? He cared what they would think: he wouldn’t miss much, but he would miss his sons. Perhaps he should try to scrawl them a heroic final note, like Captain Scott in Antarctica: ‘These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale –’
He thought that perhaps he didn’t fear dying as much as he had expected he would, which surprised him as he had little physical courage and no religious faith. But a man would have to be a rare fool – wouldn’t he? – to spend a lifetime studying history without acquiring at least some sense of perspective on his own mortality. Perhaps that was why he’d done it – devoted so many years to writing about the dead. He’d never thought of it that way.
He tried to imagine his obituaries: ‘never quite fulfilled his early promise … never published the major work of scholarship of which he was once judged capable … the bizarre circumstances of his premature death may never be fully explained …’ The memorialising articles would all be the same and he would know every one of their grudging, timeserving authors.
The Russian opened the throttle wider and Kelso could hear him, muttering to himself.
*
ANOTHER half hour passed.
Kelso had his eyes closed and it was O’Brian who saw the lights first. He nudged Kelso and pointed, and after a second or two, Kelso saw them as well – high gantry lights on the chimneys and cranes of the big wood pulp factory on the headland outside the city. Presently more lights began to appear in the darkness on either bank and the night sky ahead became fractionally paler. Perhaps they would make it after all?
His face was frozen. It was hard to speak.
He said, ‘Got the Archangel map?’
O’Brian turned stiffly. He looked like a white marble statue coming to life and as he moved small slabs of frozen snow cracked and slid off his jacket into the bottom of the boat. He dragged the city plan out of his inside pocket and Kelso shifted forwards off the thin plank that served as a seat, fell on to his hands and knees, and crawled awkwardly to the prow. He held the map to the light. The Dvina bulged as it came into the city, and a pair of islands split it into three channels. They needed to keep to the northern one.
It was a quarter to eight.
He moved back to the stern and managed to shout, ‘Comrade!’ He made a chopping motion with his hand to starboard. The Russian gave no sign of having understood but a minute later, as the dark mass of the island emerged out of the snow, he steered to the north of it and soon afterwards Kelso made out a rusty buoy and beyond that a line of lights in the sky.
He cupped his hand to O’Brian’s ear. ‘The bridge,’ he said. O’Brian pulled down his hood and squinted at him. ‘The bridge,’ repeated Kelso. ‘The one we came over this morning.’
He pointed and very quickly they were passing beneath it – a double-bridge, half-rail, half-road: heavy ironwork dangling stalactites of ice, a strong smell of sewage and chemicals, the drumming of vehicles overhead – and when he looked back he could see the headlights of traffic moving slowly through the snow.
The familiar shape of the Harbour Master’s building appeared ahead of them on the starboard side, with a jetty stretching out and boats moored to it. They hit an invisible sheet of thick ice and Kelso and O’Brian were bounced forwards. The engine cut out. The Russian restarted it and reversed, then found a channel which must have been cut by a bigger boat earlier in the evening. There was still ice but it was thinner and it splintered as their prow sliced into it. Kelso looked back at the Russian. He was standing now, pe
ering intently at the dark corridor, his hand on the tiller, taking them in. They came alongside the jetty and he put the outboard into reverse again, slowing them, stopping. He cut the motor and leapt nimbly on to the wooden planking, holding a length of rope.
O’BRIAN was out of the boat first, with Kelso after him. They stamped and brushed the snow off themselves and tried to stretch some life back into their frozen limbs. O’Brian started to say something about finding a hotel, maybe, calling the office, but Kelso cut him off.
‘No hotel. Are you listening to me? No office. And no bloody story. We’re getting out of here.’
They had thirteen minutes to catch the train.
‘And him?’
O’Brian nodded to the Russian who was standing quietly, holding his suitcase, watching them. He looked oddly forlorn – vulnerable, even, now that he was out of his home territory. He was obviously expecting to come with them.
‘Christ almighty,’ muttered Kelso. He had the map open. He didn’t know what to do. ‘Let’s just go.’ He set off along the jetty towards the shore. O’Brian hurried after him.
‘You still got the notebook?’
Kelso patted the front of his jacket.
‘D’you think he’s got a gun?’ said O’Brian. He glanced back. ‘Shit. He’s following us.’
The Russian was trotting about a dozen paces behind them, wary and fearful, like a stray dog. It looked as though he had left his rifle behind in the boat. So what would he be armed with, wondered Kelso? His knife? He pushed his stiff legs forwards as hard as he could.
‘But we can’t just leave him –’
‘Oh yes we bloody can,’ said Kelso. He realised O’Brian didn’t know about the Norwegian couple, or any of the others. ‘I’ll explain later. Just believe me – we don’t want him anywhere near us.’
They almost ran off the jetty and came into the big bus park in front of the Harbour Master’s building – a bleak expanse of snow, a few sorrowful orange sodium lights catching the whirling flakes, nobody else about. Kelso struck north, slithering on the ice, holding on to the map. The station was at least a mile away and they were never going to make it in time, not on foot. He looked around. A ubiquitous, boxy, sand-coloured Lada, spattered with mud and grit, was emerging slowly from the street to their right, and Kelso ran towards it, flapping his arms.