Archangel (29 page)

Every man in this hut shouts in his heart for their success.'

Rudakov whispered beside the ear of Feldstein. if they are not s h o t . . . if they are returned here then what has been the value of their courage?'

Feldstein laughed without mirth. 'They have damaged the institution of the camp, they have kicked the authority of the Comrade Commandant, they have battered the dignity of the Comrade Political Officer. I have to tell you that?'

if for this escape there is collective punishment against all the men in the camp, what then is the value of their courage?'

'We have nothing. If you have nothing what then can be taken from you . . . ?'

At first light a convoy of lorries and jeeps arrived at Camp 3.

A hundred cold, cursing men who had been pulled early from their barracks' beds at Yavas. They brought with them their trained tracker dogs and their skis and their rifles. The troops stayed under the tarpaulin covers of their vehicles, the officers gathered in Vasily Kypov's office.

There was a large-scale map unfolded on the Commandant's table. One centimetre to five hundred metres. A full Colonel had come from Yavas and there was the hint that the General himself might follow. Kypov, bruised with embarrassment, prodded his finger at the map and at the camp diagram that he had drawn himself. He explained the detail of the escape. When he had finished he was eased without apology by the Colonel from the central point in front of the map.

'Visibility is no more than a hundred metres, perhaps not even that.'

Kypov asked with caution. 'You have road blocks out?'

'I have road blocks, I have the stations watched. I have men who could be better employed waiting in reserve. I have a bloody army ready.'

in this weather surely they cannot go far?'

'More luck to you if they d o n ' t . . . I have a helicopter if the bastard thing can fly.'

The Colonel strode out into the snow, shouting his first orders. The men fell from the tail-boards of their lorries and the dogs plunged in the drifts. He spoke to Kypov's Adjutant who scurried into the compound to return with two folded blankets. The column skirted the perimeter of the camp and came to the north-west corner watch-tower. The troops stood back, the blankets were thrown onto the snow for the dogs to sniff at. There were faint indentations in the snow surface, something of the start of a trail that headed across the open ground towards the trees. The dogs buried their nostrils in the blankets and patterned the snow with their footprints before they were satisfied. They moved into the trees. Four dogs pulling their handlers after them and a hundred men fanned out in line behind. As they entered the tree line there was the rippling clatter of weapons being armed.

Chernayev and Poshekhonov on the perimeter path, walking before the breakfast bell.

'Did you see him, the bastard Kypov? Did you see his face? Like the world had fallen on him . . . ' Poshekhonov was animated, bubbling. 'Best thing I've seen in five bastard years. Your friend did that for us, Chernayev. I could kiss him, if I ever see him again.'

'Perhaps you will see Holly again, perhaps not.' Chernayev said softly.

The trustie from Internal Order took a place at the end of a rank of five. A long snake column heading through the gates of the compound for the Factory. Byrkin was at the trustie's shoulder.

'They've no chance, have they?'

'Quiet, look to the front.'

Byrkin ignored the instruction. He would not have done that before, a small courage flushed to his cheeks. 'The alarm went too early. They had to have ail of the night...'

'You want the SHIzo for fifteen days?'

'Why did the alarm go?'

'I've warned you.'

'How did the alarm go?'

The trustie hesitated, seemed to look only at his boots in the snow, seemed to take a decision of loyalty, to span a crevasse. 'There was an informer...'

'You . . . ?'

'Mamarev .. .'

Byrkin smacked the fist of his hand against his thigh.

'Thank you . . .'

'I have told you nothing.'

They made wooden dolls in the Factory wing of the Women's zone. Chubby dolls with wide smiles and hollow so that a smaller replica could fit inside the two halves.

This week Irina Morozova painted the faces. Twin pink blobs on the cheeks, coy black eyelashes, a petite ruby mouth. Down the line another woman would paint the yellow of the headscarf, another the red and blue and gold of the traditional peasant dress. The tourists beavering for presents in the hotel stores in Moscow or Leningrad would never know that a doll so full of life came from the work bench of a young girl with a pale face and hollowed eyes.

Irina Morozova's fingers were quick. She was a pianist, though she had not seen a piano for twenty-seven months.

She was of minor concert standard and had not known an audience's applause since her arrest. She could meet the daily norm. She could satisfy her supervisor.

The thunder of the rotor-blades distracted her. A huge beast with black and dun-coloured camouflage stripes on its hull hovered beside the window of the Factory above the perimeter fence. The roof staggered under the force of the downblast. She saw the crew man at the opened door, the microphone at his mouth as he talked the pilot to the ground.

She had heard the siren in the night, but she had not spoken of it to any of the other women in their small dormitory hut. She was the 'intellectual', and that was a dreaded label in a criminal compound. The prostitutes and thieves of the dormitory were vicious towards any that claimed a superiority over them. She might have won a protector, but she had kicked her boot at the cow's finger grope and earned herself three nights in the SHIzo. And she had no friends because the bitches were fast to sneer at an Article 58 'intellectual'.

'Why is the helicopter here?'

There were times when she could not help herself, when she could not survive the isolation wall around her.

'The Commandant didn't tell me.' The woman who painted the headscarves cackled in laughter.

'I heard the siren, there were lorries arriving early this morning, now a helicopter . . . '

'Go and ask the Commandant, darling, she'll tell you, a clever bitch like you.'

Article 5 8 - a typed letter to the United Nations Commission of Human Rights in Switzerland. She had been an idiot to have believed that the letter would ever reach its destination. A complaint on the persecution of the Tartar minority, and she not even a Tartar. A four-year sentence - an exemplary penalty the judge had described it. The dissemination of Anti-Soviet propaganda, the spreading of lies about her country. Her letter had travelled no further than Lubyanka.

'Has there been an escape?'

'Well, it's not Brezhnev come to kiss us goodnight . . .

'Course there's been a fucking escape. Out of Zone x. One of the 'barons' and an Englishman as well. Wish the bas--

tards had managed it in here . . . Not- that you'd be interested, would you, darling?'

'An Englishman . . . ?'

'Some bastard spy . . . good looking stud. We'd have hidden him well enough.' She laughed again and her breath whistled in the gap where two upper teeth were missing.

Morozova's fingers trembled on the narrow stem of the brush. The helicopter's engine was a diminishing whine, slipping below the fence. She dipped her brush in the paint pot. She took again in her hand the wooden shell of the doll.

She remembered a man who had stood tall amongst those around him while the women waited for the column to pass between the Factory and Zone i. She had seen a name that was strange in its lettering. The man had stared at her. Of all the women it was she at whom he had stared.

There was another memory, a memory of a shout through the wall of a SHIzo cell. A different accent, an accent that was as strange as the lettering of a name.

'Don't please them with your tears,' the man had shouted through the bricks of the cell wall. She had not cried since.

The Englishman was running, the man who had called to her through the cell wall, the man who had picked her from a crowd as she had watched the zeks go by.

God keep you safe.

God. Something from her childhood that the Elementary School and the Pioneer Corps and the Academy of Music had never painted over. A shadow that stayed with her.

She could not recall the letters on his tunic. She did not know his name. She only knew that a helicopter had come to join the men who hunted him.

The senior official of the Ministry of the Interior picked his nose as he waited in the ante-room outside the office of the Procurator. He wondered how long he must wait before he was permitted to enter the sanctum and display the latest of the telex messages to have come from Saransk concerning events at ZhKh 385/3/1.

He was adept at his work, this senior official. When he had been ushered into the Procurator's presence and sat humbly on the edge of his chair, he was ready with his denunciation.

'You will remember, Procurator, that this is not the first incident involving Camp 3 at Barashevo this year. Within the last month we have had the fire, as yet unexplained, that burned down the Commandant's office. We have had the dysentery epidemic that claimed the life of a guard and hospitalized seventeen others. Now we have an escape. I should draw your attention, Procurator, to the identity of one of those who is missing. Michael Holly, an Englishman serving a fifteen-year sentence for espionage against the State. He was a Red Stripe prisoner and yet he was able to acquire wire-cutters and cut through two wire fences, and scale a wall, right underneath a watch-tower. Already I have had Lubyanka on the telephone, they describe this man as a prisoner of maximum importance. I think you will agree, Procurator, that the matter is a disgrace . . .'

'Who is the Commandant at Camp 3 ?'

'Major Vasily Kypov, formerly paratroop.'

'How is my diary next week?'

'You are in Moscow - routine.'

'Make the travel arrangements.'

The train had spurred them on, driven them forward with fresh hope.

When they had heard its approach, slow in the dawn light, they had been staggering along the path of chip-stones and snow-covered sleepers. They had plunged together into the snow at the side of the line and tried to arrange their sheets across their backs. It was an old steam engine, pulling a crocodile line of goods wagons and belching black smoke, forcing the snow from the line with an angled fender. The train lumbered past them, scattering soot over their bodies.

Holly had seen the value of the train. He had seen the way it had scoured the track of surplus snow, tossed it on one side, and spilled down a debris of coke and dirt. The dogs would have a hard time of it, a hard time following the scent now that the train had passed. Desperately tired, he had dragged Adimov up from the snow, on down the track. It was a chance that must be taken. Adimov had cursed him, and Holly's grip on his tunic had tightened. They had gone on together, two grey shadows on the embankment of the track.

They had walked another hour after dawn and then they had seen the farm hut a few yards from the line.

While Adimov wrenched at the door, Holly smoothed their snowprints flat.

A windowless hut, with a floor-covering of wet hay. A palace to two fugitives.

They sank to the rough floor.

They eyed each other.

One thing to be friends when the momentum of escape drove them forward. Another matter when they were alone, isolated inside four tin walls. Almost a shyness between them. Holly knew why. Adimov had the food and Adimov had never shared his food with any
zek
in the camp.

'We have to eat, Adimov,' Holly said.

The bastard wants me sleeping, Holly thought. On my back and cold and out, and then he'll stuff the bloody food down his throat.

'We're going to share the food, Adimov. Crumb for crumb we're going to share it.'

'I don't need you . . . not now.'

'Get the food out.'

Both men on their knees now and the brightness of anger in their faces. Bitter, locked eyes.

'I gave you the cutters, you took me through the wire -

that's where it ended.'

it ends when I say. Get the food and share it.'

On their knees because they had walked all night and neither had the sinew to stand. Ready to fight over half a loaf of hard black bread, and a cube of cheese, and a pinched paper filled with sugar.

Adimov reached between the buttons of his tunic.

'You want the food, you get the food ..

Holly remembered the blade, steel sharp against the blanket of a bunk in Hut i. He lurched forward, swung his weight against Adimov. Had to go fast. Find the wrist, hold it. One blow, one harsh stroke. The glaze was in Adimov's eyes. Beaten, destroyed by one punch. Holly reached inside Adimov's tunic, took the handle of the knife and the plastic bag of food. He crawled to the door, pushed it a few inches open and threw the knife as far as his strength allowed. The snow still fell, the hiding-place would be covered, lost until the spring thaw.

The cheese could wait, and the sugar too. They would be needed on the second day and the third. He would break into the bread alone. He tore off a quarter of half a loaf and then divided that quarter. He crawled across the floor of the hut towards Adimov and the man shrank away from him until he was against the wall and could go no further. Holly put an arm around Adimov's shoulder.

'Together we have a chance, alone we are beaten. Eat, Adimov.'

When the old zek had closed the door Yuri Rudakov tore open the gummed-down envelope. He read the words, written in a strong decisive hand, with a growing astonishment.

Captain Rudakov,

You have a man accused of the poisoning of the barracks water supply. He is not guilty of that offence. 'I alone was responsible. On the question of my escape 'I want you to know that Adimov was not the instigator of the attempt. Again I take full responsibility. With this knowledge I hope you will take the appropriate actions.

Sincerely,

Michael Holly.

Chapter
17