Archangel (42 page)

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 its' 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.'

Kelso hoisted the two cases and O'Brian called out, 'Watch yourself, Fluke.'

'What?'

'Traps. Remember? He's got this whole wood wired.'

Kelso stood, looking at the ground, uncertain, remembering the spurt of snow, the snap of the metal jaws. But it was hopeless to worry about that, he thought, just as there was no way they could avoid passing directly by the door of the cabin. He waited for O'Brian to finish packing up the Inmarsat, and then they started walking together, treading warily. And Kelso could sense the Russian everywhere now: at the window of his squalid hut, in the crawlspace underneath it, behind the stack of cordwood piled against the back wall, in the dank and mossy water barrel and in the darkness of the nearby trees. He could imagine the rifle trained on his back and he was acutely aware of the softness of his own skin, of its babyish vulnerability.

They reached the edge of the clearing and followed the perimeter of the forest. Dense undergrowth. Fallen, rotted logs. Strange white fungoid growths like melted faces. And occasionally, in the distance, crashes, as the wind shifted and brought down falls of frozen snow. It was impossible to see much further than a hand's reach. They couldn't find a path. There was nothing to do but plunge between the trees.

O'Brian went first and had the worst of it, lugging the two heavy cases and the big battery, having to twist his bulky body sideways to edge through the narrow gaps, sometimes left, sometimes right, ducking abruptly, no free hand to
protect his face from the low branches. Kelso tried to follow in his footsteps and after half a dozen paces he was conscious of the forest swinging shut behind them like a solid door.

They stumbled on for a few minutes in the semi-darkness. Kelso wanted to stop and transfer the edit machine to his other hand but he didn't dare lose sight of O'Brian's back and soon he had forgotten about everything except the pain in his right shoulder and the acid in his lungs. Trickles of sweat and melted snow were running into his eyes, blurring his vision, and he was trying to bring his arm up to wipe his forehead on his wet sleeve when O'Brian gave a shout and lurched forwards, and suddenly - it was like passing through a wall -the trees parted and they were in the light again, standing on the ridge of a steep bank that fell away at their feet to a tumbling plain of yellowish-grey water a clear quarter-mile across.

IT was an awesome sight - God's work, truly - like finding a cathedral in the middle of a jungle - and for a while neither man spoke. Then O'Brian set down his cases and the battery and took out his compass. He showed it to Kelso. They were on the northern bank of the Dvina facing almost exactly due south.

Ten yards below them, and a hundred yards to their left, dragged clear of the water and covered in a dark green tarpaulin, was a small boat. It looked as though it had been taken out for the winter, and that would make sense, thought Kelso, because already ice was beginning to extend out into the river - a shelf maybe ten or fifteen yards across that seemed to be widening even as he watched.

On the opposite bank there was a similar strip of whiteness, and then the dark line of the trees began again.
K
elso raised his binoculars and inspected the far shore for signs of habitation but there
was none. It looked utterly for
bidding and gloomy. A wilderness.

He lowered the binoculars. 'Who're you going to call?'

'America. Get them to call the bureau in Moscow.' O'Brian already had the case of the Inmarsat open and was slotting together the plastic dish. He had taken off his gloves. In the extreme cold his hands looked raw. 'When's it gonna be dark?'

Kelso looked at his watch. 'It's nearly five now,' he said. 'An hour perhaps.'

'Okay, let's face it, even if the battery holds on this thing and I get through to the States and they fix us a rescue party

- we're stuck here for the night. Unless we take some pretty dramatic action.

'Meaning?'

'We take his boat.'

'You'd steal his boat?'

'I'd borrow it, sure.' He sat on his haunches, unwrapping the battery, refusing to meet Kelso's eyes. 'Oh, come on, man, don't look at me like that. Where's the harm? He's not going to need it till the spring anyhow - not if the temperature keeps on dropping like this - that river'll be iced over in a day or two. Besides, he shot up our car, didn't he? We'll use his boat - that's fair.'

'And you can work a boat, can you?'

'I can work a boat, I can work a camera, I can make pictures fly through the air - I'm fucking superman. Yeah, I can sail. Let's do it.'

'And what about him? He'll just stand there, will he, w
hile we do it? He'll wave us of
' Kelso glanced back the way they had come. 'You realise he's probably watching us right now?'

'Okay. So you go keep him talking while I get everything ready.'

'Oh, thank you,' said Kelso. 'Thank you very much indeed.'

'Well, at least I've had a fucking idea. What's yours?'

A fair point, Kelso had to concede.

He hesitated, then focused his binoculars on the boat.

So this was how the Russian survived - how he made his occasional forays into the outside world. This was how he acquired the fuel for his lamp, the tobacco for his pipe, the ammunition for his guns, the battery for his transistor radio. What did he use for money? Did he barter what he caught or trapped. Or had the encampment been set up in the 1 950s-with a treasury of some sort - NKVD gold - which they had been eking out ever since?

The boat was concealed in a small depression, protected from the river by a low screen of trees: to anyone drifting by, she would be invisible. She was resting on her keel, propped up to port and starboard by logs - a sturdy-looking vessel, not big, room for four people, at a pinch. A bulge at her stern suggested an outboard motor, and if that was the case, and if O'Brian could make it work, they might reach Archangel in a couple of hours - less, probably, with the current flowing so fast through its narrowing channel.

He thought of the crosses in the cemetery, the dates, the

obliterated faces.

It did not look as though many people had ever left this place.

It was worth a try.

'All right,' he said, reluctantly, 'let's do it.'

'That's my boy.'

When he stepped back into the trees, he left O'Brian
a
i
ming the antenna across the river, and he had not gone far when he heard behind him the blissful, rising note of the Inmarsat locking on to the satellite.

THE snow plough was coming on fast now, thirty, forty miles an hour, rushing down the track, throwing up a great white bow wave of freezing surf that went smashing into the trees on either side. Kretov was driving. His men were jammed together next to him, nursing their guns. Suvorin was hanging on to the metal moorings of the jump seat at the back of the cab, the barrel of the RP46 poking into his thigh, feeling sick from the vibration and the diesel fumes. He marvelled at the complexities that had overwhelmed his life in so short a time, and pondered nervously the wisdom of the old Russian proverb: 'We are born in a clear field and die in a dark forest.

He had plenty of time for his thoughts because none of the other three had addressed a word to him since they left the airfield. They passed chewing gum to one another and TU144 cigarettes and talked quietly so he couldn't hear what they were saying above the racket of the engine. An intimate trio, he thought: clearly a partnership with some history. Where had they been last? Grozny, maybe, taking Moscow's peace to the Chechen rebels? ('The terrorist gunmen all died at the scene...') In which case this would be a holiday for them. A picnic in the woods. And who was giving them their orders? Guess. .

Arsenyev's joke.

It was hot in the cab. The single windscreen wiper batted away the pawprints of snow with a soporific beat.

He tried to shift his leg away from the machine gun.

Serafima had been on at him for months to get out of the
service and make some money - her father knew a man on the board of a big privatised energy consortium and, well, let's just say, my dear Feliks, that - how should we put this?

- a number of favours are owed. So what would that be worth, papa, exactly? Ten times his official salary and a tenth of the work? To hell with Yasenevo. Perhaps it was time.

A heavy male voice started grunting from the radio. Suvorin leaned forwards. He couldn't make out exactly what was being said. It sounded like co-ordinates. Kretov was holding the microphone in one hand, steering with the other, craning his neck to study the map on the knee of the man sitting next to him, watching the road. 'Sure, sure. No problem.' He hung up.

Suvorin said, 'What was that?'

Ah,' said Kretov, in mock-surprise, 'you're still here? You got it, Aleksey?' This was to the man with the map, and then, to Suvorin, 'That was the listening post at Onega. They just intercepted a satellite transmission.'

'Fifteen miles, major. It's right on the river.'

'You see?' said Kretov, grinning at Suvorin in the mirror. 'What did I tell you? Home by nightfall.'

KELSO
CAME OUT of the trees and walked towards the wooden cabin. The surface of the snow had frozen to a thin crust and the wind had picked up slightly, sending little twisters of powder dancing across the clearing. Rising from the iron chimney the thin brown coil of smoke jerked and snagged in the breeze.

'When one approaches Him, do so openly. 'That was the advice of the maidservant, Valechka. 'He hates it when people creep up on Him. Ifa door has to be knocked upon, knock upon it loudly...'

Kelso tried his best to make his rubber boots thump on the wooden steps, and he hammered on the door with his gloved fist. There was no reply.

Now what?

He knocked again, waited, then raised the latch and pushed open the door, and immediately, the now-familiar smell - cold, close, anim4 with an underlay of stale pipe tobacco - rose to overwhelm him.

The cabin was empty. The rifle was gone. It looked as though the Russian had been working at his table: papers were laid out, and a couple of stubby pencils.

Kelso stood just inside the doorway, eyeing the papers, trying to decide what to do. He checked over his shoulder. There was no sign of movement in the clearing. The Russian was probably down at the river's edge, spying on O'Brian. This was their only tactical advantage, he thought: the fact that there were two of them and only one of him and he couldn't watch them both at once. Hesitantly, he stepped

over to the table.

He only meant to look for a minute, and. probably that was all he did - just long enough to run his fingers through it all:
A pair of passports - red, stiff-backed, six inches by four, lion-crested, marked 'PASS' and 'NORGE', issued in Bergen, 1968 - a young couple, identical-looking: long hair, blond, hippyish, the girl quite pretty in a washed-out kind of way; he didn't register their names; entered the USSR via Leningrad, June 1969 -Identity papers - old-style, Soviet Union, three different
men: the first, a youngish, jug-eared fellow in spectacles, a student by the look of him; the second, old, in his sixties, weathered, self-reliant, a sailor perhaps; the third, bug-eyed, unkempt, a gypsy or a drifter; the names a blur -And, finally, a stack of sheets, which, as he fanned them
out, he saw were six sets of documents, of five or six pages each, pinned together and written in pencil or ink, in various hands - this one neat, that one hesitant, another a wild and desperate scrawl - but always, at the top of the first sheet, in neat Cyrillic capitals, the same word: 'Confession'

Kelso could feel the freezing draught from the open door shifting the hairs on the back of his scalp.

He replaced the pages carefully and backed away from them, his hands raised slightly as if to ward them off, and at the doorway he turned and stumbled out on to the steps. He ( sat down on the weathered planking and when he raised the binoculars and scanned the rim of the clearing he found that. he was shaking.