Archangel (35 page)

'I will say what is wise.'

In a camp of Strict Regime such asZhKh 385/3/1, prisoners are entitled by law to two brief and one prolonged visit each year. A brief visit may last up to a maximum of four hours, a prolonged visit may be extended to three days with prisoner and relative sleeping together in small rooms set aside in a secure section of the Administration block. Before and after both brief and prolonged visits, the men and women and children who have travelled to the camp to see their loved ones are subjected to a vigorous and painstaking body-search.

Weakened by their winter journey, depressed by the surroundings, the relatives on this Tuesday morning sat in the wooden hut beyond the outer door of the Administration building and waited to be strip-searched. The hut was full, the search cubicles already occupied, when Kypov's order found its destination.

The daughter, aged twelve, of a fifteen-year man was in one cubicle, her skirt up around her waist, her knickers at her ankles, feeling the fingers of a wardress pry her open in the hut for contraband.

A farmer from a collective outside Kazah, and past seventy years and the father of an army deserter, was in the second cubicle, with his trousers on the floor and his body bent forward to expose his anus.

The mother of a thief, who had travelled eight hundred kilometres and made five connections, tipped the contents of her plastic handbag onto the search table.

The son of an Adventist with four years to serve looked at the crumbled wreckage of a cake first torn apart and then passed for inspection.

These people, and those crowding the benches at the side of the hut, were informed of the order given by the Camp Commandant. They wailed in plaintive union, and the guards linked arms and jostled them out through the door, back into the cold and the snow. Prisoners' scum. The women shouted the loudest. They screamed at the smooth dark surface of the high wooden fence, they shouted at the young men in their high watch-towers.

Holly heard the screaming. Cocked his head for a moment, then ignored the noise of disturbance.

'As a teenager I occasionally went with my father to meetings of the OUN - that is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. I don't remember that I was ever particularly interested in what I heard there. I thought it was pretty sterile.'

'You will have been on their files from that time, Michael, the files of the Intelligence people.'

'I suppose so. When I left school I went to Technical College. I was studying to be an engineer . . . '

Yuri Rudakov was hunched over his desk, writing in a fast scrawl. It was not easy for him to mask his exhilaration.

Holly was waffling, Holly was telling it his own way, in his own time. Rudakov would not interrupt, just write until his arm ached.

Kypov heard the screaming.

The
zeks
in their lines heard the screaming.

The guards who circled the prisoners heard the screaming, and they looked into the burning eyes of many hundreds of men and saw a hatred, and among the conscripts none had seen that loathing so co-ordinated before.

The detachment doubled into the compound.

A dozen more armed men. Kypov's army was augmented to twenty-five guards from the M V D force, fifteen warders with truncheons, four dog handlers. And he had wire fences behind him, and the watch-towers with their mounted machine-guns. He would use the detachment as a wedge to break up the mass of prisoners. He would break the will of one rank, then the second, then the third.

Hut 3 formed the forward line.

'Front rank, form into fives . .. Move! Move, you bastards!

Kypov might have yelled at a mountain. The front rank stayed solid. Not even the trusties moved, not even the

'stoolies'. The trusties and 'stoolies' had visits.

'Put a dog in, break them up.'

The sergeant handler was positioned behind the lines of prisoners. He faced the sitting backs of the men of Hut 2.

His dog was king, master of the pack. A black and tawny German shepherd, huge within its long and rough-haired coat, weighing 3 5 kilos. He slipped the leash at the collar.

The dog was trained to attack the zeks, taught from the time it had been a puppy. The dog ran forward, low and devastating in its assault. The white teeth buried themselves into Poshekhonov's shoulder.

It was the moment that the dam burst. For two, three brief seconds, the sergeant handler saw his dog worrying at the shoulder of a small, fat prisoner who scrabbled to get clear of the animal's jaws. Then dog and prisoner were engulfed. The zeks from either side, the zeks who stood to the front, threw themselves upon his dog. Once the sergeant handler thought he heard a yelp of pain. He saw the pounding movement of the zeks. And as suddenly as they had moved, they parted, and as the stillness fell upon the zeks the sergeant handler reached for the holster flap at his waist.

His dog had a strip of padded tunic material clamped in its jaws. His dog was lying on its side, strangely twisted. His dog had been killed by the zeks.

Around the prisoners from the cordon of guards was the noise of bullets sliding into the breeches of rifles.

'Over their heads... Fire!' Kypov shouted.

'This firm I was working for, Letterworth Engineering and Manufacturing Company had several contracts from the Soviet Union. Sovlmport wasn't the biggest of our clients but it was a healthy one, one that we kept sweet with. Well, it was a turbine order that we were chasing, worth two million sterling to us. We're not a big firm and that was good money. Along tripped Afghanistan, then we had the Olympic fracas. Our contract was in the pipeline but stuck there.

Mark Letterworth wanted it unstuck but he wasn't the man to have the time on his hands to be sitting around Moscow.

He asked me to go. Seemed obvious really. I speak the language, I'd worked on the specifications . . . '

The sound of gunfire crashed through the room.

Instinctively Holly fell to the floor from his chair.

After the first volley another was fired, then a third.

Rudakov was on his knees clawing open the lower drawer of his desk, finding the strapping of the shoulder holster that carried the small Makharov pistol, threading it over his chest and back. He crawled across the floor to the doorway.

He yelled for an Orderly. He was greeted with silence, an empty corridor, deserted offices. His place was in the compound and he had no escort to take Michael Holly back to the SHIzo block. He swore, he caught at Holly's arm as the Englishman was pulling on his socks and boots and tunic.

He delayed long enough for the tunic to be over Holly's shoulders, not for his boots to be tied. He propelled Holly out of the office, down the corridor, out into the compound.

He gasped at the sight in front of him.

In a great flattened antheap the prisoners of Camp 3, Zone I, knelt and lay prone. In the snow beside the long boots of the guards was the twinkle of discharged cartridge cases. He barely noticed as Holly drifted from him into the fallen mess of men and was lost to his sight. He hurried to Kypov.

'They won't go to work, we've fired over their heads.'

Rudakov did not hesitate, knew no caution with his advice. 'Better to calm them than confront them. Withdraw the troops and the dogs - the "stoolies" will give us the names. Once you've fired over their heads you can only fire into them, and that's a blood bath, that's the end of us all.'

'You're yellow, Rudakov, you're a bastard coward.'

Rudakov yelled back, 'I'm not a coward, I'm not stupid.

Your way we lose, my way we win.'

'It's running away.'

'Call me a coward again, and I'll break you . . . '

Rudakov, a bright young officer with a future on the KGB

ladder did not know of the beating of Feldstein. Nor did he know of the sit-down in the snow, by Chernayev first and then by all the men of Hut 2. Nor did he know of the killing of the sergeant handler's dog. Rudakov's sure confidence won the day over the wavering uncertainty of his Commandant.

As they backed out through the compound's gates inside a porcupine of rifles, Rudakov said, 'Within two hours we'll be back . . . when they're cold and hungry.'

The compound was a new place. A new place because the great gates had closed behind the withdrawal of the Commandant and the guards and the warders. Never before in any man's time in the Zone had the forces of the regime scuttled to safety behind those gates.

Who now were the prisoners?

Only the guards in the watch-towers were visible to the men on the inside, and they were distant dolls high above their ladders and half-hidden by the sides of their platforms.

It was unbelievable to the zeks, it was rich wine to these long stretch men on Strict Regime. It had never happened before.

How were they to respond?

As the gates slipped shut behind the retreat of Kypov and his force, the zeks had risen from their stomachs and their knees.

They swept the snow from their tunics and trousers and felt the excitement that comes only from unscheduled success. Kypov had fled from his own camp. So unbelievable, so extraordinary that the delight was merged with fast suspicion. From where would the hammer blow come?

Without a leader the zeks were pulled as if by a magnet towards the very centre of the compound. They gathered between the living huts and close to the north wall of the Kitchen. There seemed a certain security there, and for many the sight of the wire and the watch-towers was blocked off by the buildings.

Eight hundred men and each offering his opinion or listening to that of another, and interrupting, and shouting and whispering. But there was still the sight of the steel-clad stack of the Factory chimney. Only a narrow smoke column drifted from the chimney-top. No work in the Factory. The civilian foreman would be beside the lathes and saws and varnish pots. One h o u r . . . perhaps a few hours, and then the Commandant would seek to lead them back to the Factory.

Most men felt their freedom as a passing pleasure.

A shimmer of a whisper sped amongst the prisoners.

Fingers pointed towards the north-west corner of the compound. A guard was climbing the ladder to a watch-tower and he held the rungs with one hand, and in the other was the dark outline of a machin-gun, and his body was wrapped in belt ammunition. They watched him climb.

Then the pointing fingers changed direction as the flock of birds will turn to another course. The fingers pointed to the south-west corner watch-tower, and another guard was climbing and another machine-gun was carried to a vantage platform. And the fingers swung again and the direction was south-east. And swung again, and to the north-east.

It had been a titbit of freedom. The happiness died under the barrels of the newly-placed machine-guns. A man in freedom must own a certain privacy. What privacy could there be under the sights of eight machine-guns? Now the prisoners watched the gates. The gates were massive and shut and held their secret. Behind the gates the force that Kypov had mustered would be collecting, absorbing its orders. The whisper had gone. Voices raised now in argument, in confusion.

Men from Hut i talking with men from Hut 3 and men from Hut 5. The thief with the drug addict. The speculator with the rapist. The killer with the homosexual. The first tide of fear, fear that hissed over a shingle beach.

Fear recalled the pain at Anatoly Feldstein's bruised groin, fear carried once more the dull ache to Poshekho-

nov's savaged shoulder, reminded Byrkin of the thunder of falling bombs above a water-line cabin. Feldstein, Poshekhonov, Byrkin, and Chernayev . . . all together, and a crush of men around them. Men pressing against them, men listening and waiting and hoping . ..

Feldstein who had been strong on his bunk, brave in the snow when the boots and truncheons flew, now small and frightened and hurt and cold.

'What will they do?'

Poshekhonov who had sat down only after others had made the gesture and who still felt the teeth marks in his skin and the chill from the rip of his tunic.

'They'll give us one chance, then they'll fire.'

Chernayev who had taken the action he would never have considered before on any day of the seventeen years that he had laboured in the camps.

'They will subdue us. We'll all be for the courts at Yavas.'

Byrkin who had only followed, who had never initiated.

'They have the names, they have the faces. There'll be ten years "Special" Regime at best, fifteen years at Vladimir or Chistopol at worst.'

Feldstein said, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Just an individual protest. . . '

Poshekhonov said, it's no longer one silly bastard's hunger strike. It's collective bloody mutiny. They stamp out mutiny, they make an example of it. Down the line, in the camp at Lesnoy, there was a mutiny in '77, they shot two boys for that, neither more than twenty years old.'

Chernayev said, 'They'll kill us, or they'll let us rot.'

'We're wrecked .. .' said Feldstein.

'We can't find an end to what was started,' said Poshekhonov.

'Holly started it, Holly is the beginning,' said Chernayev.

'Holly fought them from the first bloody day he was here.

We have drifted this far, if we drift further we might as well run at the wire,' said Byrkin.

Each man's opinion now must count. This is not the ; outside world. In the small camp the minority cannot dictate to the majority. The decision must be collective.

Chernayev could see Holly. Over the close pack of heads he saw that Holly stood apart from the mass, leaning against the door frame of Hut z. He had isolated himself from the debate, he was no part of the crowd that had come together in the heart of the compound. A calmness seemed to bandage his face. He leaned with his hands in his trouser pockets.

A group of men is a herd. It follows a leader. It gives ground to the loudest, to the most certain. Those with faint hearts stand back, though they have the opportunity to speak they will not take advantage of that opportunity.

Those in the crowd who spoke with certainty were those who believed in the retaliation of Kypov that would fall on their heads, all of their heads.