‘They’re about three hours ahead of us.’ Kretov had a large-scale map spread over the hood of the nearest jeep. ‘This is the road,’ he said. ‘There’s no way out except back the way they went, and the snow will hold them up. Don’t worry. We’ll have them by nightfall.’
‘And how do we reach them? Can we use a helicopter?’
Kretov winked at one of his men. ‘I fear the major from Moscow has not adequately studied our terrain. The taiga is not well supplied with helicopter pads.’
Suvorin tried to stay calm. ‘Then we reach them how?’
‘By snow plough,’ said Kretov, as if it was obvious. ‘Four of us can just fit in the cab. Or three, if you prefer not to wet your fancy footwear.’
Again, and with difficulty, Suvorin controlled his temper. ‘So what’s the plan? We clear a way for them to drive back into town behind us, is that it?’
‘If that proves necessary.’
‘If that proves necessary,’ repeated Suvorin, slowly. Now he was beginning to understand. He gazed into the major’s cold grey eyes, then looked at the two MVD men who had finished unloading the jeep. ‘So what are you people running nowadays? Death squads, is that it? It’s a little bit of South America you’ve got going up here?’
Kretov began folding up the map. ‘We must move out immediately.’
‘I need to speak to Moscow.’
‘We’ve already spoken to Moscow.’
‘I need to speak to Moscow, major, and if you attempt to leave without me, I can assure you that you will spend the next few years building helicopter pads.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘If it comes to a trial of strength between the SVR and the MVD, be aware of this: the SVR will win every time.’ Suvorin turned and bowed to Vavara Safanova. ‘Thank you for your assistance.’ And then, to Korf, who was watching all this, goggle-eyed: ‘Take her home, please. You did well.’
‘I told them,’ said the old woman suddenly. ‘I told them nothing good could come of it.’
‘That may be true,’ said Suvorin. ‘All right, lieutenant, off you go. Now,’ he said to Kretov, ‘where’s that fucking telephone?’
O’BRIAN had insisted on shooting another twenty minutes of footage. By sign language he had persuaded the Russian to pack up his relics and then to unpack them again, holding each object up to the camera and explaining what it was. (‘His book.’ ‘His picture.’ ‘His hair.’ Each was dutifully kissed and arranged on the altar.) Then O’Brian showed him how he wanted him to sit at the table smoking his pipe and to read from Anna Safanova’s journal. (‘Remember Comrade Stalin’s historic words to Gorky: “It is the task of the proletarian state to produce the engineers of human souls …”’)
‘Great,’ said O’Brian, moving around him with the camera. ‘Fantastic. Isn’t this fantastic, Fluke?’
‘No,’ said Kelso, ‘it’s a bloody circus.’
‘Ask him a couple of questions, Fluke.’
‘I shall not.’
‘Go on. Just a couple. Ask him what he thinks of the new Russia.’
‘No.’
‘Two questions and we’re out of here. I promise.’
Kelso hesitated. The Russian stared at him, stroking his moustache with the stem of his pipe. His teeth were yellowish and stumpy. The underside of his moustache was wet with saliva.
‘My colleague would like to know,’ Kelso said, ‘if you have heard of the great changes that have taken place in Russia and what you think of them.’
For a moment, he was silent. Then he turned from Kelso and stared directly into the lens.
‘One feature of the history of the old Russia,’ he began, ‘was the continual beatings she suffered. All beat her for her backwardness. She was beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiters – to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak – therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved.’
He sat back, sucking on his pipe, his eyes half closed. O’Brian was standing directly behind Kelso, holding the camera, and Kelso felt the pressure of his hand on his shoulder, urging him to ask another question.
‘I don’t understand,’ Kelso said. ‘What are you saying? That the new Russia is beaten and enslaved? But surely most people would say the opposite: that however hard life might be, at least they now have freedom?’
A slow smile, directly into the camera. The Russian removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned forwards, jabbing it at Kelso’s chest.
‘That is very good. But, unfortunately, freedom alone is not enough, by far. If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone.’
O’Brian whispered, ‘What’s he saying? Does it make sense?’
‘It makes a kind of sense. But it’s odd.’
O’Brian persuaded Kelso to ask a couple more questions, each of which drew similar, stilted replies, and then, when Kelso refused to translate any more, he insisted on taking the Russian outside for a final shot.
Kelso watched them for a minute through the narrow, dirty window: O’Brian making a mark in the snow and then walking towards the cabin, returning, pointing to the line, trying to make the Russian understand what he wanted him to do. It was almost as if he had been expecting them, Kelso thought. ‘You are the ones,’ he had said. ‘You are truly the ones …’
‘This is the book of which it is spoken …’
He had been educated, obviously – indoctrinated, perhaps, a better word. He could read. He seemed to have been brought up with a sense of destiny: a messianic certainty that one day strangers would appear in the forest, bearing a book, and that they, whoever they were – even if they were a couple of imperialists – they would be the ones …
The Russian was apparently in a great good humour, bringing his index finger up close to his eye and wiggling it at the camera, grinning, stooping and making a snowball, tossing it playfully at O’Brian’s back.
Homo Sovieticus, thought Kelso. Soviet man.
He tried to remember something, a passage in Volkogonov’s biography, quoting Sverdlov, who had been exiled with Stalin to Siberia in 1914. Stalin wouldn’t associate with the other Bolsheviks, that was what had struck Sverdlov. Here he was: unknown, almost forty, had never done a day’s work in his life, had no skills, no profession, yet he would simply go off on his own to hunt or fish, and ‘gave the impression that he was waiting for something to happen’.
Hunting. Fishing. Waiting.
Kelso turned from the window and quickly slipped the notebook back into the satchel, stuffed the satchel into his jacket. He checked the window again, then stepped over to the table and began leafing through Stalin’s Collected Works.
It took him a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for: a pair of dog-eared pages in different volumes, both passages heavily underlined with black pencil. And it was as he thought: the Russian’s first answer was a direct quotation from a Stalin speech – to the All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry, February 4 1931, to be exact – while the second was lifted from an address to three thousand Stakhanovites, November 17 1935.
The son was speaking the words of the Father.
He heard the sound of Stalin’s boots on the wooden steps and hastily replaced the books.
SUVORIN followed one of the MVD men out of the hangar and across the runway towards a single-storey block next to the control tower. The wind tore through his coat. Snow leaked through the tops of his shoes. By the time they reached the office he was freezing. A young corporal looked up as they came in, without interest. Suvorin was beginning to feel thoroughly sick of this tin pot, backwoods town, this Archangel. He slammed the door.
‘Salute, man, damn you, when an officer comes into the room!’
The corporal leapt up so quickly he knocke
d over his chair.
‘Get me a line to Moscow. Now. Then wait outside. Both of you wait outside.’
Suvorin didn’t start to dial until they had gone. He picked up the chair and righted it and sat down heavily. The corporal had been reading a German pornographic magazine. A stockinged foot poked out glossily from beneath a pile of flight logs. He could hear the number ringing faintly. There was heavy static on the line.
‘Sergo? It’s Suvorin. Give me the chief.’
A moment later, Arsenyev came through. ‘Feliks, listen.’ His tone was strained. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you. You’ve heard the news?’
‘I’ve heard the news.’
‘Unbelievable! You’ve talked to the others? You must move quickly.’
‘Yes, I’ve talked to them, and I mean to say, what is this, colonel?’ Suvorin had to put his finger into his other ear and shout into the receiver. ‘What’s going on? I’ve landed in the middle of nowhere and I’m looking out of the window here at three cut-throats loading a snow plough with enough firepower to take out a battalion of NATO –’
‘Feliks,’ said Arsenyev, ‘it’s out of our hands.’
‘So what is this? Now we are supposed to take our orders from the MVD?’
‘They’re not MVD,’ said Arsenyev quietly. ‘They’re Special Forces in MVD uniforms.’
‘Spetsnaz?’ Suvorin put his hand to his head. Spetsnaz. Commandos. Alpha Brigade. Killers. ‘Who decided to turn them loose?’
As if he didn’t know.
Arsenyev said, ‘Guess.’
‘And was His Excellency drunk as usual? Or was this a rare interlude of sobriety?’
‘Have a care, major!’ Arsenyev’s voice was sharp.
The snow plough’s heavy diesel cracked into life. The revving engine shook the double glass, briefly obliterating Arsenyev’s voice. Big yellow headlights turned and flashed through the snow then began moving ponderously across the runway towards Suvorin.
‘So what are my orders exactly?’
‘To proceed as you think fit, using all force necessary.’
‘All force necessary to achieve what?’
‘Whatever you think fit.’
‘Which is what?’
‘That’s for you to decide. I’m relying on you, major. I’m allowing you complete operational freedom –’
Oh but he was a wily one, wasn’t he? The wiliest. A real survivor. Suvorin lost his temper.
‘So how many are we supposed to kill then, colonel? One man is it? Two? Three?’
Arsenyev was shocked. He was profoundly disturbed. If the tape of the call was ever played back – which it would be, the following day – his expression would be obvious for all to hear. ‘Nobody said anything about killing, major! Has anyone there said such a thing? Have I?’
‘No, you haven’t,’ said Suvorin, finding within himself a depth of sarcasm and bitterness he didn’t know he possessed, ‘so obviously whatever happens is my responsibility alone. I haven’t been guided by my superior officers in any way. And neither, I am sure, has the exemplary Major Kretov!’
Arsenyev started to say something but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the engine being revved again. The snow plough was nearly up against the window now. Its blade rose and fell like a guillotine. Suvorin could see Kretov in the driver’s seat, passing his finger across his throat. The horn sounded. Suvorin waved at him irritably and turned his back.
‘Say again, colonel.’
But the line was dead and all attempts to reconnect it failed. And that was the sound that Suvorin afterwards could never quite get out of his ears, as he sat squashed in the jumpseat of the snow plough, bouncing into the forest: the cold, implacable buzz of a number unobtainable.
Chapter Twenty-eight
THE SNOW HAD eased and it was much colder – it must have been minus three or four. Kelso pulled up his hood and set off as fast as he could towards the edge of the clearing. Ahead of him through the trees his paper trail of yellow markers blossomed every fifty yards in the snowy undergrowth like winter flowers.
Getting out of the cabin had not been easy. When he had told the Russian they needed to go back to their car – ‘only to collect some more equipment, comrade,’ he had added, quickly – he had received a look of such glinting suspicion he had almost quailed. But somehow he held the other man’s gaze and eventually, after a final, searching glance, he was given a brief nod of permission. And even then O’Brian had lingered – ‘you know, we could do with one more shot from over here …’ – until Kelso had grabbed him hard by the elbow and steered him towards the door. The Russian watched them go, puffing on his pipe.
Kelso could hear O’Brian, breathing hard, stumbling after him, but he didn’t stop to let him catch up until they were out of sight of the hut.
O’Brian said, ‘You got the notebook?’
Kelso patted the front of his jacket. ‘In here.’
‘Oh, nice work,’ said O’Brian. He performed a little victory shuffle in the snow. ‘Jesus, this is a story, isn’t it? This is a hell of a story.’
‘A hell of a story,’ repeated Kelso, but all he wanted was to get away. He resumed his walk, but more urgently now, his legs aching with the effort of pushing through the snow.
They came out on to the track and there was the Toyota, a hundred yards away, wrapped in a wet, white layer more than an inch deep, thicker towards the rear where the wind was blowing from, and as they came closer they could see that the surface was beginning to crystalise to ice. It was still tilting forwards, its back tyres almost clear of the snow, and it took them a while to locate all the damage. The Russian had fired three bullets into the car. One had blown off the lock on the back door. Another had opened up the driver’s side. A third had gone through the hood into the engine, presumably to silence the alarm.
‘That crazy sonofabitch,’ said O’Brian, staring at the ugly holes. ‘This is a forty-thousand-dollar vehicle –’
He squeezed behind the steering wheel, put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. Not even a click.
‘No wonder he didn’t mind if we came back to the car,’ said Kelso, quietly. ‘He knew we weren’t going anywhere.’
O’Brian had started looking worried again. He struggled out of the front seat and sank deep into the drift. He waded round to the back, lifted the rear door and blew out a long sigh of relief, his breath condensing in the cold air.
‘Well, it doesn’t look as though he’s damaged the Inmarsat, thank Christ. That’s something.’ He glanced around, frowning.
Kelso said, ‘Now what?’
O’Brian muttered, ‘Trees.’
‘Trees?’
‘Yeah. The satellite’s not straight above our heads, remember? She’s over the equator. This far north, that means you need to keep the dish at a real low angle to send a signal. Trees, if they’re close up – they, ah, well, they kind of get in the way.’ He turned to Kelso, and Kelso could have murdered him then: killed him just for the nervous, sheepish grin on his big, handsome, stupid face. ‘We’re gonna need a space, Fluke. Sorry.’
A space?
Yeah. A space. They would have to return to the clearing.
O’BRIAN insisted they took the rest of the equipment back with them. That, after all, was what Kelso had told the Russian they were going to do, and they didn’t want to make him suspicious, did they? Besides, no way was O’Brian going to leave over a hundred-grand’s-worth of electronic gear sitting in a shot-up Toyota in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t going to let it out of his sight.
And so they struggled back along the track, O’Brian in the lead carrying the Inmarsat and the heavier of the big cases, with the Toyota’s battery, wrapped in a black plastic sheet, jammed under his arm. Kelso had the camera case and the lap-top editing machine and he did his best to keep up, but it was heavy going. His arms ached. The snow sucked at him. Soon, O’Brian had turned into the forest and was out of sight, while Kelso had to keep stopping to transfer the damned
bloody swine of an edit case from one hand to the other. He sweated and cursed. On his way back through the trees he stumbled over a hidden root and dropped to his knees.
By the time he reached the clearing, O’Brian already had the satellite dish connected to the battery and was trying to twist it into the right direction. The trajectory of the antenna pointed directly at the snowy tops of some big firs, about fifty yards away, and he was hunched over it, his jaw working with anxiety, holding the compass in one hand, pressing switches with the other. The snow had almost stopped and there was a faint blueness to the freezing air. Behind him, framed against the shadows of the trees, was the grey wooden cabin – utterly still, deserted apparently, apart from the thread of smoke rising from its narrow iron chimney.
Kelso let the cases drop and leaned forwards, his hands on his knees, trying to recover his breath.
‘Anything?’ he said.
‘Nope.’
Kelso groaned.
A bloody circus –
‘If that thing doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘we’re here for the duration, you realise that? We’ll be stuck here till next April with nothing to do except listen to extracts from Stalin’s Complete Works.’
It was such an appalling prospect, he actually found himself laughing, and for the second time that day, O’Brian joined in.
‘Oh man,’ he said, ‘the things we do for glory.’
But he didn’t laugh for long, and the machine stayed silent.
AND it was in this silence, about thirty seconds later, that Kelso thought he heard again the faint sound of rushing water.
He held up his hand.
‘What?’ said O’Brian.
‘The river.’ He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky, straining to hear. ‘The river, I think –’
It was hard to separate it from the noise of the wind in the trees. But it was more sustained than wind, and deeper, and it seemed to be coming from somewhere on the other side of the cabin.
‘Let’s go for it,’ said O’Brian. He snatched the pair of crocodile clips off the battery terminals and began rapidly rolling up the cable. ‘Makes sense, if you think of it. Must be how he gets about. A boat.’