Archangel (16 page)

'You had to know that you would be caught. Did they not tell you that you might be held? Do they think we are stupid? They misled you, for a year you have known that. It is a kindness to them to say that they misled you, Holly, you were their plaything. Was it a senior man who briefed you? I don't think so, I think it was a boy. Did your desk officer tell you who would collect the package . . . ?'

Holly alone on the Underground, with an uncollected package. Surrounded by Muscovites, strap-hanging on a fast train that slid to its halts and was away again. Returning to the Rossiya and not daring to look at the men and women who stood and swayed beside him.

it wouldn't even have been an important mission. They may have told you that it was, but it couldn't have been.

Would they have asked you, without training, without experience, to carry an important package? Hardly, Holly

All so fast, so dreamlike and simple, the arrest of Michael Holly. Standing at Reception at the Rossiya, asking if there had been any messages because the Ministry might .have telephoned to give timings for his meeting. One moment standing at Reception and then wafted, as if he were a feather fluttering, to the car on the kerb. Through the swing doors, and he had not registered what was happening to him until he was out into the late afternoon cold and the open doorway at the back of the car was yawning for him. God, he'd been frightened. Terrified. A locked car, a short journey of screaming tyres, a side entrance to the Lubyanka.

Nothing they could do now would be worse than the fear as the high gate fell like a guillotine behind him.

'You owe it to yourself to help us to help you. It is not betrayal, it is you who have been betrayed. You owe them nothing. I think that you know I speak the truth. What do you say, my friend?'

Holly saw Rudakov leaning easily back in his chair, saw the smugness on his face.

'I think, Comrade Captain, I think you should shove yourself right up your arse . . .'

Rudakov laughed, richly and loudly.

'Right up your arse till you choke in your own stink.'

Rudakov still laughing, and the shimmer of cracked ice across his face, and his gaze unwavering.

'Think on it, Holly. Think on it tonight, think on a transfer to Vladimir, think on a flight to London.'

Holly laughed too, and their laughter mingled. There was something of pride in Holly's eyes, and there was an inkling of combat in Rudakov's eyes. But in an instant the laughter was gone from the Political Officer's mouth. 'Be careful for yourself, Holly. Believe me you should be careful. In a few days I will send for you again. In the meantime you consider.'

'Thank you for the coffee, Captain Rudakov.'

Coming from the latrine, the figure hugged the shadow of the building before jogging across open ground to the cover of Hut 5. Wrapped in newspaper were the frozen lumps he had fashioned by stone to the width of the water pipe. From Hut 5 he had thirty yards of snow space to cross. He caught his breath, prepared himself, then ran for the hole. His shape joined the dark heap of earth and he landed without noise in the pit. A searchlight beam curved above him. A dog barked. He heard the voices, miserable and low-pitched, of patrolling warders. He realized with a vicious clarity that he had never considered the possibility of discovery. The light swung away, no sign or sound of the dogs, the voices faded.

He trembled. His fingers groped for the junction of the pipes. It was the work of a few minutes.

Michael Holly was back inside Hut z a clear hour before the trustie slammed shut the hut's door, switched off the lights.

In the morning the water would run, run fast and sweet along a mains pipe until it met with an obstruction and the water would eat away at the mass that blocked it. Chisel it, and then carry that mass in diminishing particles to the taps and basins and sinks and cooking saucepans of the barracks.

The prisoners are quick to notice change.

Behind the listless,, dulled faqade their minds are keen to seek out anything which is eccentric in the camp life. It is impossible to trick these leeches. Better than those who administer the compound, the prisoners know the working of the camp ritual.

Within a day and a night of Holly making his night run to the earth hole, the huts were alive with rumour.

Another morning after and there was no longer scope for rumour. The talk now was certainty.

Of the four corner watch-towers overlooking the compound of Zone 1, one was not manned as the men massed for parade and roll-call.

The work of counting the prisoners and shouting the names was managed by seven warders and guards and not the familiar dozen.

The Captain of KGB was on show in uniform and greatcoat, and held the clipboard for the ticking off of names, and that would normally have been the task of a junior officer of the M V D detachment.

And of those who were, there, some looked sick with a yellow pallor of the face skin, and some leaned on the shoulder of the nearest colleague for support, and some during the day would duck away from their duties and run with a crabbed strut towards the barracks building.

A guard on the ski run between the high wire fence and the high wooden wall collapsed in the view of the prisoners and it was a full ten minutes before he was noticed from a watch-tower and help sent to him. The zeks had heard his soft low call for help, turned their backs and closed their ears.

The prisoners were marched to work. They were hurried across the transit land between the compound and the Factory. They were stampeded over the open space of the road and the railway line, and when they reached the work shops they found that all was normality with the full staff of civilian foremen there to harry them to the daily quota.

And the
zeks
wondered, wondered how it were possible for only guards and warders to be ill and sick, and for themselves to crawl about their work and existence immune from the microbe.

Late in the morning the word spread through the workshops. From tongue to ear, from the finish shop to the paint shop to the lathe shop the word flowed.

The word was dysentery.

Dysentery. How was it possible that an epidemic of dysentery could afflict only that minority living in the barracks, and avoid touching eight hundred men who ate and slept the short distance away over the high wooden wall and high wire fence?

How was it possible?

Major Vasily Kypov pondered that question as he walked a slow circle of the compound in the company of Captain Yuri Rudakov. When an ambulance passed them, khaki and green camouflage with the red marking on white background, he could remember that it was the third that morning to leave the barracks sleeping-quarters for the Central Hospital of the
Dubrovlag.

And there would be an inquiry and findings and an official report that would reach the desk of the Procurator in Saransk, the capital city of the Mordovian ASSR, and then join the paper chain that routed to the Ministry in Moscow. Public Health inspectors had come from Pot'ma and had sealed the kitchens of the barracks. A crate of phthalyl-sulphathiazole tablets had been flown by helicopter from Saransk. And at the hospital there was nausea and fever and diarrhoea of mucus and blood, and it was said that a guard and a warder might die.

They had no answers, the Major and the Captain, as they walked the snow paths, only a growing sense of humiliation that the camp was now in the possession of strangers. On that morning there was no sparring between them, and Kypov could almost feel an ooze of sympathy from the young Rudakov. There had never been disease before at ZhKh 385/3/1, not even amongst the prisoners. The Major led the way back towards the barracks, no longer able to stall the hearing of the initial reports from the experts who had invaded his territory. As they went past the Factory they could hear the drone of the working engines. Half as bad only, if the prisoners had been laid down by the disease - but it wasn't the prisoners, not the scum, the filth of the huts. It was the guards and warders who rolled in drugged discomfort in their segregated wing of the Central Hospital. That was a salted wound.

The team from Public Health in Pot'ma had made the NCO's mess hall in the barracks their working area.

There were charts and diagrams spread out over a ping-pong table encircled by men and women in white coats.

There were stool bottles for paperweights, little bottles with pen markings for identification. This was Vasily Kypov's empire, but none of the interlopers stiffened to attention at his entrance.

The man who came to him was hollow-cheeked. Wire-framed spectacles sat low on a hawk nose. He gazed at the Major as if he were a hostile creature, and when his eyes flickered to the younger officer beyond the Commandant and understood the blue collar tabs of KGB he seemed to look away with a smear of distaste. He gave Kypov and Rudakov the crystal impression that they interrupted his work.

'Major Kypov, the Commandant. .. ? I am Superintendent of Public Health at Pot'ma . . . '

Kypov nodded.

'You have here an outbreak of dysentery of epidemic proportions. I have worked at Pot'ma for nine years. Yours is the most serious outbreak of this disease that I have found in any of the camps during that time . . .'

Kypov's head seemed to droop against his chest.

'Dysentery, Major Kypov, does not arrive by accident. It is not obligatory, not even in a place such as you supervise . . .'

Kypov straightened himself. He spoke with a bluff optimism, half believing the suggestions that he offered. 'Somecook with filthy hands, something like that, could that be it?'

'That most definitely would not be the cause of this outbreak, Major. You have raw sewage coming directly into the water system of the barracks building. Untreated sewage flowed directly through the waterpipes . . . '

'Impossible.'

'Not impossible, but proved. We have taken scrapings from several feet behind the taps, there is no area of doubt.

You have a very serious situation on your hands. We believe there has been an act of sabotage . . . '

impossible . . . ' But the denunciation of Major Kypov was hesitant, unsure.

'How could it be sabotage?' Rudakov said quietly. Filth in the kitchens was within the province of the camp's Commandant. Sabotage was KGB, sabotage was his own.

'From your own charts of the water-main route and that of the sewage pipes from both inside and outside the compound that lead to the general cesspit... they are not even close to each other. Raw sewage was introduced to the water-main. Major Kypov, I assume that the diet of your prisoners differs considerably from that of the camp officials.'

'Correct.'

'We have managed only a preliminary examination of the specimen from the pipes, but I am confident that a more thorough testing will show that the sewage is the product of he prisoners' faeces.'

The Captain of KGB closed his eyes. In front of his face he palms of his hands rubbed slowly together. A man who winces at the implications of his knowledge.

Rudakov ignored his Commandant, he stretched out his hand to the Superintendent of Public Health and led him to he door. Before they went out into the compound he had Jdraped a guard corporal's weatherproof anorak over the

;ivilian's shoulders.

They walked to a place behind Hut 3 and Hut 4, and stopped beside a dug pit and a heap of earth. Rudakov shouted at the two zeks who worked in the hole and when they were slow to respond he dragged them each up from the ground heaving at their collars. The Superintendent of Public Health took the place of the zeks, looked hard at the pipes between his shoes that were half covered in mud water.

He took a knife with a fine sliver of a blade from his pocket and first scraped at the rim of the screw top over the junction, then dropped his findings into a plastic sachet bag. Afterwards he took another bag and unscrewed the top of the junction pipe and scraped again. When he had finished he looked up and shrugged, then blew into his hands to warm them.

i said it was an act of sabotage - there is your evidence.'

The prisoners marched with their snow-shuffling tread back into the compound. Midday and lunch. Eight hundred men. Blank-faced, yet devouring the sight of the Captain of KGB and a civilian with a white coat peeping beneath a military anorak. Like the rustle of wind in an autumn tree the word echoed from those who could see to those who were at the back and denied sight. Rudakov scanned the faces, saw the dumb and sullen eyes of those who stared back. There was one amongst this mass who fought against him, one who had taken Yuri Rudakov as the target of his attack. Any battle against the life of the camp was a personal fight with the Captain of KGB. He bit his lip. He pulled his cigarettes from his pocket. One of them amongst that mess of filth had tossed the glove into the path of the Captain of KGB. And they seemed so barren of initiative, so deserted of spirit, and yet there was one . . . He had thought Michael Holly important. Michael Holly was a luxury, an irrelevance compared to the sabotage of the water-mains pipe.

Where to begin?

The eyes of the zeks bored into Yuri Rudakov's back as he walked away towards the Administration block. He abandoned the Superintendent of Public Health to find his own way back to the barracks.

There had been a fire in the Commandant's office. Begin there.

There had been an attempt to poison the guard troops and warders living in the barracks, follow with that. He had the beginning, he had no end. He felt the eyes trace his footsteps. Fear winnowed his gut. The regime of the camp had never been challenged before. If the worm was not stopped then it would eat out the core of submission around which the camp existed.

In the months that he had been at ZhKh 385/3/1 he had never known that fear that slid with him into his office.

He had the beginning, he had no end.

On her knees, beside her pail, a rough brush in her hand, Irina Morozova scrubbed the floor of the corridor that led to the ground floor wards of the hospital. At least once a week a detachment of the Zone's prisoners were taken to the hospital for the skivvy work. The water was cold, her hands blued, her nails cracked, but it was welcome work.