Archangel (41 page)

Byrkin ran round the corner wall of the Kitchen. Panting, pointing towards the gulf of the opened gate.

'You hear it, Holly?'

'I hear it.' His arm fell from Morozova. 'Are you ready for it?'

Byrkin grimaced. 'As we'll ever be.'

Holly turned towards the girl, searching her face for weakness. Only the sweet brown eyes, only the mouth firm in defiance. When he broke away, her hand tried to check him, for a moment, and then her grip was broken.

Together, hugging the shadow of the huts, sprinting on the open ground, Holly and Byrkin came to Hut 4. They crawled forward over the frozen mud, beneath the floorboards. Holly smelt the paraffin, saw the bottles, the strips of torn blanket, the unlit torches, the boxes of matches.

And all the time the coming thunder of the tank.

'Left side, behind the turret, right?'

'That's where it is . . . I heard it said once that when they went into Budapest they even had "Petrol" written on the screw cap.'

Level with them was Hut 3, fifty yards away. If the tank came straight through the gates it would bisect the open space between the two huts.

Holly reached out and took a handful of blanket. He felt sick from the smell of paraffin.

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The troops who would follow the tank into the compound were gathered in two squads on either side of the approach to the gates. A little way apart from them was Kypov. Apart because he was not in command. He might wear his helmet, he might carry a pistol in his hand, but would not feel the sweet joy of participation in the first assault. He would be used later, as a
gauleiter
to administer prisoners already broken and defeated. His own men of the MVD guard were a full hundred metres further back with orders not to advance or in any way impede the attack by the regular troops. A bitter pill.

He was astonished to see the Colonel General approaching him.

'You are not in command?' asked Kypov.

'My colleague can manage adequately.'

'A strange decision.'

'Perhaps . . . I haven't much stomach for this fight.'

'None of us can choose our duty,' Kypov shouted above the thunder of the tracks.

Adimov heard the muffled sounds of the tank through the reinforced wall of his SHIzo cell. He lay where they had tossed him, in a sludge of dull pain. The sergeant in the Guard House had exacted the full toll from his ribs, his kidneys, the flesh at the fall of his stomach.

'Old man, next c e l l . . . I told them the tank was coming

. . . I gave them warning . . . '

A faint voice. 'Perhaps it was better if they had not known.'

'They have a better chance to fight it.'

'The harder they fight, the harder they will be smashed.'

'I tried ..

'However long you are in the camps, wherever you are sent, you will be known for what you have done.'

Adimov closed his eyes, and his cell was filled with the crescendo of the tank's advance.

'He's tall, dark-haired. Usually in a group of three or four.

Very straight in the back, that's the give-away. Once the tank's in, nail him.'

The Adjutant crawled away across the roof of the Administration building, leaving the four marksmen to prepare for their work.

When he peered over the low parapet wall he saw the tank charging at the gates, full speed for the engine of 130 horse power.

They lay on their stomachs in the doorway of the Kitchen. A daft place to be, but neither would miss the entrance of the tank into the compound.

'Are you afraid?' Morozova asked.

'Wetting my pants, darling,' said Poshekhonov.

The tank loomed between the open gates. Above the engine howl they heard the noise of splintering wood as it took the right side gate-post in its rush. Poshekhonov reached for the girl, pulled her underneath his body. Shit, she felt good. Everyone who was near the doorway heard Poshekhonov's laughter, and thought a madness had taken him.

Feldstein and Chernayev crouched beside the window, peeping through cracked glass that distorted the armoured hull of the T34.

Feldstein said, 'I want them all killed. I'm ashamed of myself, I want every man in that tank killed.'

Chernayev said, if we beat the tank, then I don't care. If we beat the tank, then I don't care if they drop a bastard bomb on us.'

A dimming grey light as the tank plunged into the compound. A grey-brown shape against the grey-white ground, and speeding towards the grey-black huts. A monster that mesmerized its watchers. Something foul from the time before history.

Holly had the blanket rags in his hand, felt the oil run slippery through his fingers. Byrkin gripped an uncapped bottle of paraffin in one hand, and in the other was an unlit torch made from a ring of cloth wrapped round a short stick. Another man held a crowbar. Another kept safe, in large work-scarred fists, a box of matches.

'Wait. . . ' whispered Byrkin.

The tank hammered towards the gap between Hut 3 and Hut 4.

'Wait

God. . . how long? The tank blotted out the perimeter arc lights, it swerved in the snow, hunting for a target. The main armament barrel heaved and swung. He saw the thrashing motion of the tracks that he must clear when he hurled himself onto the platform. God . .. What did you hold onto? Byrkin was coiled tight beside him.

From underneath Hut 3 came the sharp flash of a lit match. A second, a third.

From underneath Hut 3 came the first firing from the machine-gun.

The whine, endless and onward, of the tracer ricocheting from armour-plate.

The first bottle rose easily in its arc between the base of Hut 3 and the tank. A brilliant vapour of light caught the tank and its turret-number and its radio aerial and its gun-barrel. The second bottle and the third curved from Hut 3. The pitch of the engine sagged. The driver knew he must back away from the fire, so that his gunner could drop the main armament barrel for the dose-quarters contact.

He veered to the right, towards Hut 4, then to the left, aligning the gun-barrel towards the source of annoyance.

Closer to Hut 4 than to Hut 3. Blind to Hut 4, preoccupied only with Hut 3.

A match flashed beside Holly. A torch spluttered, caught, flung off a burning stench. Smoke sank in Holly's lungs.

Byrkin running. Beside him the man with the crowbar.

Holly pulled himself out from the shelter of the hut floorboards. He ran to catch them. Twenty yards to the tank. When does the bloody firing start? When do they start from the roof of the Administration building? The barrel depressing, falling towards the base of Hut 3. Five feet up to the platform above the tracks, and the tank still moving and his hands scrabbling for a grip, and running beside the tank.

Byrkin was on board, standing for a moment at his full height. God . . . and Byrkin held the torch, Byrkin would draw the firing like a moth at a bloody lamp. The man with the crowbar was beside Byrkin now, pushing him down into the lee of the turret. Byrkin on his knees, reaching down for Holly, dragging him upwards, feet kicking past the ravaging tracks. He could hear the men shouting inside the tank, hear the stammer of their radio. A new concert of firing as the rifles on the Administration block joined battle, and then the answering blast from under Hut 3, and then more distantly from under Hut 6.

The man with the crowbar smashed his weapon against the cap of the petrol tank.

Holly held a pick-axe strapped to the turret. He found the driver's vision slit, and began to force the rags into the opening.

'Give me the fire, give me the bottle . . . '

The bottle first. Holding the pick-axe with one hand, pouring the paraffin onto the rags. He dropped the bottle, reached for the fire. A new sound for the crowbar, the sound of a pierced hole in light metal. Holly took the torch, touched the rags, jumped. Byrkin jumped. The man with the crowbar jumped.

The sheet of flame soared at the front of the tank and beneath the gun-barrel. Holly stood transfixed. God .. .

they were screaming. The main armament fired into the lower walls of the side of Hut 3.

Couldn't move . . . and the torch was in his hand and his body was alive with light, and inside the tank they were screaming.

Byrkin snatched the torch from Holly, cudgelled him to the ground, then looped the flame towards the spilling petrol tank.

There was the petrol tank of the T34 to explode, there were five 1100mm armour-piercing shells inside the hull to detonate.

Between the two of them they shoved and dragged Holly away from the bonfire of the tank. He would have stood there, rooted in fascination, if they had not taken him. A shell exploded, there was the whine of shrapnel alive in the air. When they reached the far end of Hut 4 and could shelter behind the brick stilts, then Holly could kneel and watch the devastation that was the work of Byrkin, the former Petty Officer.

The monster had been halted. A heart of light amongst a rippling mirror of melted snow. Another explosion, another shell ignited. Hut 3 was ablaze. Crawling from the fire were the men who had fired the machine-gun, who had thrown the decoy bottles. And when they were moving they could not fire, and when they could not fire then the lone gun under Hut 6 could not stifle the shooting from the roof of the Administration building.

An eye for an eye. The machine-gun men in a searchlight beam.

A tooth for a tooth. The tracer finding them.

Death, where is thy sting? The sting is the tracer that tosses a man in the air, that hurtles another sideways, that breaks a gun into the useless metal of scrap.

'We have their tank, they have our throats,' Holly said.

The flames from Hut 3 and from the T34 tank served to darken the compound beyond the orbit of the fires. The searchlight had moved on, seeking a new prey. Together Holly and Byrkin scurried across the snow to the men who had tried to carry away the machine-gun. Blood on the snow. There was the bent shape, black and worthless, of the gun. One of the men lay still, the life frozen from him.

Another writhed in a death dance. Another moved haphaz-ardly in the dumb shock of a gunshot wound.

They started the long, crawling journey back towards the Kitchen.

The Colonel General now stood beside his Major. Dark-faced, harsh with anger.

'The t a n k . . . ? '

'It's out''

A snapped instruction. 'Mortar them.'

'A particular target?'

'Random.'

'And the marksmen?'

'Everything.'

'There may be seven hundred men in the Kitchen.'

'Then they'd better be on the floor.'

'And the infantry?'

'I'm not losing more men.'

'You'll destroy the camp.'

'Before I lose one more man I will destroy the camp.'

The mortar shells popped in the tube, sighed in the air, whistled as they fell, thundered on impact.

The machine-guns traversed the ink-black space beneath the huts and ravaged through the windows. The tracers were one in four, red heat as they careered into bedding. The straw in the mattresses caught in the first flickers of fire.

The marksmen's bullets pecked sporadically at the windows of the Kitchen.

The flames licked up from the living huts and were fanned by a light wind.

The machine-gun under Hut
6
had fired occasionally since the full weight of the attack was directed on its position after the silencing of its partner. When the heat of that hut, burning too, became unendurable, the hiding-place was abandoned. The gun crew tried the long, long run for the open doorway of the Store shed. They were less than twenty metres from it when the searchlight found them. One man fell. Another stumbled, staggered inside the doorway. One man carried the machine-gun inside the safety of the cement-block structure. Another joined him. With their fingers they tore away a metal ventilation strip, gave themselves an aiming tunnel at the main camp gates. Their brief burst of firing, ill-directed and inaccurate, was sufficient to harden the Colonel General's resolve.

Systematically, steadily, the fabric of ZhKh 385/3/1 was razed to the ground by mortar shells, machine-gun bullets and fire. The low cloud over the compound was burned a golden orange.

Holly had reached the Kitchen.

In the murky light he could see only those
zeks
who were gathered at his end of the hall. The far end was a blackness of explosions, moaning, crying.

'We have more than twenty men hit here. We have nothing with which to treat them,' said Morozova.

'They're massacring us, Holly, we've nothing to protect ourselves,' said Poshekhonov.

'You are responsible for these people, Holly. They look to you. How much more will you ask of them?' said Feldstein.

if you tell them to fight on, they will struggle with their teeth, with their fingers. You have their lives in your hands,'

said Chernayev.

'We have to go on, Holly. They're going to shoot us anyway. Better while we are standing, better while we are free. After the tank there is no mercy. If we surrender now, it is to die in handcuffs,' said Byrkin.

'Do you trust me?'

'You have taken us this far,' said Poshekhonov.

The girl was watching him. She had blood on her hands.

A mortar shell burst close to the west wall of the Kitchen, and glass crashed and wood shrieked. A man screamed. The bullets pattered on the brickwork. He would lead them to hell, would he care if they returned? Slowly, carefully, Holly unbuttoned his tunic. It was cold in the Kitchen, bitter sub-zero cold. He shivered, then pulled off his shirt. He still wore the two vests that he had put on to crawl through the wire. The second vest was cleanest, whitest. He stripped off the under vest from his skin. The girl still watched him. He heard the sharp burst of firing from the Store. She looked at him with compassion, with the pity of a mother. He let the vest slip to the floor, and then began to put on again his top vest, his shirt, his tunic.

'Trust me . . . '

He stepped out of the doorway, waving his vest high above his head.

The searchlight caught him.

Far away there was a shouted order.

The snow crunched under his boots as he headed between the blazing huts and the burning tank towards the main gate.