The Dark Chronicles (88 page)

And, more simply, I’d fallen for her.

The music on the radio ended, and led into an international news bulletin. I turned it up. I didn’t think there would be anything of any importance in it, but you could never tell. The first item was an interview with a cosmonaut who had been part of the Soyuz 7 mission. No mention was made of the fact that the Americans had put a man on the moon. Perhaps they hadn’t made that public either.

The next item was about a military coup that had just taken place in Somalia, which was talked of in ecstatic terms by the announcer – presumably there had been Soviet support for it. After that, there was a report on the forthcoming talks on arms limitation with the Americans in Helsinki, which had apparently been in dispute for some time. The tone was generally positive, but the suggestion was that the Americans had already ceded to Soviet demands for the talks to take place on their terms; I wondered if the mention of it was deliberate. Well, everything was deliberate with the Soviets when it came to the dissemination of news, but was this a more precise message and, if so, who was its intended audience and what reaction was it intended to spark? The delay in the
militsiya
message suggested it wasn’t directed at us, and it seemed unlikely that such a report would make any difference to the Americans if they truly were planning an attack.

An alternative was that it had been prepared earlier, say yesterday, as part of a wider strategy to present the Americans in a bad light over the talks, and it wasn’t related to the current crisis. But no wonder they were so bloody jittery: they’d lost the big prize in the space race, were in a border dispute with the Chinese and just as they were coming out of long negotiations with the Americans over weapons reduction talks, Nixon had decided to fly some nuclear-armed B-52s directly towards their border. Coupled with a supposed chemical attack on two heavily fortified naval bases, they’d snapped.

The bulletin came to an end. Once again, there had been no mention of a chemical attack, but I guessed they would reveal that only once they had retaliated, if then. There might not be a news service in place after a nuclear war, and there would probably be few people alive to listen to its broadcasts.

I suddenly wanted to forget the lot of it: the U-boat, the mustard gas, the men in the bunker in Moscow. Perhaps if we managed to escape over the border, we could head somewhere else instead, Sarah wearing my jacket in cars in other countries, smiling that soft smile.

I blinked the thought away and locked my wrists on the wheel. As I passed a restaurant by the side of the road, I remembered we hadn’t eaten anything apart from a few stale biscuits at Anton’s flat. I looked across at Sarah and realized that if we were going to get over the border it might be an idea to gather our strength. I pulled over a few miles later at a roadside restaurant with steam coming from the windows, and gently woke her.

We took a table facing the door and a surly, barrel-chested waitress walked over. I picked up the menu and ordered
kotlety
with black bread and coffee. The waitress curtly informed us that the food would take several minutes to prepare and sauntered off.

Sarah stifled a yawn, and I found myself aping her. I’d been driving for five hours without a break. I started going through my plan to cross the border, keeping my voice down to barely a murmur.

‘Is it dark enough?’ Sarah said. It was twilight now, the sky just a greying pink on the horizon.

‘It’ll have to do.’ There was nothing to do now but head full pelt for the target, and hope. We would fill up fast with fuel and get going. I glanced through to the kitchen to see if there was any progress on the meal and saw that sitting on the shelf behind where the waitress was standing was a small transistor radio. And that she was talking to someone in the kitchen, and nodding towards us.

‘I’ll explain the rest in the car,’ I said. ‘We have to get out of here.’

I left a few token coins on the table, and we made for the door. The waitress came running out after us, but we were already at the car.

*

I headed back onto the road, putting my foot down. It had been a stupid, foolish,
stupid
bloody mistake. The
militsiya
would now be told precisely where we were, and they would hand the information over to Yuri and Sasha soon enough. I had just lost our advantage, and had painted a bull’s-eye on our rear ends to boot, all because of my empty belly, which now felt even emptier.

I put my foot down, and a little less than two hours after leaving the restaurant we passed Leningrad, after which I cut around Vyborg and drove to its outskirts. As we approached the
pogranichnaya polosa
, the twelve-mile protected zone around the frontier, I took a detour into a gap in the undergrowth by the side of the road and pulled up. I took Anton’s forgeries out of my jacket and placed them in the glove compartment – they would only help to identify us now. I told Sarah that if we were caught we would claim to be geologists.

One of the Russian playwrights, Denodovski, had defected at a literary fair in 1962, and in reviewing his debriefing documents I’d come across a curious mention he had made of the border conditions. He had said that on a trip to Karelia years earlier, when he’d been part of a group of geologists, the whole lot of them had been detained for three days by the border guard because they didn’t have documents proving who they were. This, he claimed, was-because the KGB had in fact banned geologists and certain other experts from carrying documents: they were afraid a foreign government might rob them and then use their specialized documents to justify a scientific presence near border areas and infiltrate the Soviet Union. But this meant that there was one valid reason not to have documents near the border.

Well, it wasn’t the best cover in the world – they would probably only need to make a couple of telephone calls to establish from
our descriptions alone that we were fugitives wanted for murder and various crimes against the state. But if we were caught, it would probably all be over anyway.

‘Ready?’ I asked, switching off the ignition.

She nodded, and we began to make our way through the bushes, treading very carefully. There were men with dogs patrolling this area, as well as three security fences, tripwires and watchtowers. But the entire length of this border was secured in this way, so this was as good a spot as any to attempt to cross.

Night had fallen now, but there was still some visibility. The mist had returned, though – swathes of it covered the ground and a foot or so above it – and I found that if I crept on my belly I could move for several yards at a time following bands of it between bushes and trees. I motioned to Sarah to do the same. I picked up a small stick and used it to feel in front of me for trip-wires. After I’d been doing this for fifteen minutes or so, I caught sight of the turret of a watchtower poking out from a large clump of pines to my left: it wasn’t quite a forest, but there was a lot of cover there. I pointed it out to Sarah, and we started making our way towards it, keeping as close to the ground as possible, watching for any sign of men or dogs.

I wanted to make a beeline directly for the watchtower for several reasons. Border control towers often lack heating in order to focus the minds of the guards, but even that doesn’t always work and sentries in watchtowers tend to be less alert than their colleagues on the ground. One of my contingency plans for defection had involved making my way across from Finland, so I knew from studying the towers on the other side of the border that it was possible to avoid several lines of guard positions by crawling directly under the towers, where there were no additional sentries posted besides the men in them. I had no idea whether the Soviets used the same system on this side, because my plan had involved simply walking up to the nearest guard after crossing the frontier and surrendering, then waiting for the local KGB chief to be contacted and my bona fides to be established. We would simply have to hope.

Luckily, the mist was holding, and as we moved deeper into the woods I found I could cover ground a lot faster than before, when I’d had to stop every five seconds to find the next spot of cover. Unfortunately, I could see that Sarah’s stamina was already flagging, and she was stopping not for cover but to catch her breath. I wasn’t faring as well as I’d hoped I would, either. Earlier I had all but forgotten the ache in my hand, but now it came back as a stabbing pain and I found myself feeling disoriented.

I blinked to try to snap myself out of it. This was no time to start hallucinating. Well, at least I no longer had my Nigerian fever slowing me down. It was quite a year I’d had: I’d caught a deadly African disease, been shot at, tricked, exposed as a traitor, tortured by a madman in a dungeon in Sardinia and hunted to within an inch of my life. And now here I was, with the world on borrowed time, crouching by a pine tree in Russia with a woman I barely knew – and just a few miles away from the West again.

It was colder now, perhaps below freezing, and Anton’s clothes didn’t offer much protection. It was getting darker with every passing moment and the temptation to stand up in the ground mist was enormous, but we were safest here, creeping along side by side. Ahead of us, finally, I saw the criss-cross structure of the traditional wooden watchtower, and I tried to block out everything as I made the additional effort to keep as low as possible and move in fluid, unnoticeable movements, elbow over elbow, feeling the grass beneath me respond almost as though I were a snake, or a fish swimming through a current.

As the feet of the watchtower came into view, I felt something on my back. I turned, thinking someone had touched me, before I realized it was rain. My spirits sagged. Rain was good in one sense, in that it worsened the border guards’ visibility. But in another sense it was terrible, because it released the body’s natural scents, and dogs might pick up on those. But I couldn’t see or hear any dogs around here. Perhaps they were taking it easy on a Monday on this part of the border. Perhaps this wouldn’t be quite as difficult as we had…

The bark came suddenly, and made my shirt vibrate on my back.

I froze, and heard a rustle next to me as Sarah froze too.

It came again, and this time I located it – it was about twenty yards away, to our right. Two barks from two different dogs. They worked in pairs.

Do not panic. Now is not the time to panic.

Elbow over elbow. Move away, to cover. I could no longer see Sarah, but hoped she was doing the same.

There was a shout from somewhere above. The sentry in the tower wanted to know what was happening, talking either to the dogs or to a colleague on the ground.

‘He’s heard something!’ It was his colleague replying, and he was close, perhaps twenty or thirty feet away.

Shit.

The rain was coming down in sheets now, and it was starting to hurt as it hit my spine and my calves. It was loud, as well, but that was good, because any senses it overrode for those hunting us helped. Elbow over elbow, elbow over elbow – just a few more yards to go. I couldn’t see where the dogs’ handler was, but border guards wore green uniforms precisely so they wouldn’t be seen.

Finally, I made it under the watchtower. I was dry, at least, and hopefully that would mean my scent didn’t get any stronger. But I had no real cover: no bushes, no trees; nothing but the wooden stilts holding up the tower. I squinted out into the darkness but couldn’t see any sign of Sarah in the low mist. I grabbed hold of one of the stilts to lessen my own visibility, pressing myself into it, every muscle tensed. I clamped my eyes shut: children do it and think they cannot be seen, and we laugh at them. But I didn’t dare open them, partly because the surface of my eyes might reflect light and give me away, partly through fear.

‘Which way, boy?’

It was just one of the dogs that had picked up the scent, then. The voice was harder to locate now, but that was because the sound
of the rain was drowning him out, rather than the distance. They might be even closer now – not yet close enough to see through the mist and rain, but close enough to smell or hear me.

There was a faint padding noise behind me, and I opened my eyes a fraction and saw the outline of Sarah’s head emerging through the darkness. She had made it under, too. I reached out a hand and caught hold of her, and then pulled her in to the stilt. She was shaking very gently, and I covered her with my arms and pressed against her, urging her to control her fear, and thus her movements.

There was another vibration in the ground, and the front of my skull tingled as I realized it was the dog coming across the grass. It was heading straight for us. Gooseflesh formed on my arms and neck, as I waited for the animal to pounce on us. And then the vibrations stopped. It must be able to see us now, surely? I could hear it panting over the sound of our own breathing.

I stayed as still as I could, breathing through my mouth. Dogs see in monochrome and find it hard to focus over distance, so I hoped it saw four fuzzy grey wooden stilts holding up the tower through a screen of mist and rain. As a result of their vision, dogs mainly react to sources of movement, after which they investigate sound and scent. But in this case I thought the dog had been alerted by scent, the smell of our bodies brought out by the rain and exacerbated by our physical exertions over the last few hours. Now it was waiting to see if any of the stilts moved.

Judging by its reactions so far, this was a guard dog rather than a tracker. If so, it would be relying on air scent rather than following ground scent over a distance. That was an advantage, because air scent disperses more quickly. Now that we were under the tower and out of the rain, our scent would be harder to locate again. On the other hand, this type of dog would also have been trained to attack once it found its quarry.

It took a few steps closer to the tower, and barked again.

‘Where are you, boy?’

I tried not to take too much hope from the question. It suggested the handler couldn’t see through the rain either, and he would have much better eyesight than his dog. But it wasn’t necessarily sight that would give us away. I could feel Sarah’s heart hammering through her chest, as she could no doubt feel mine. The dog would be able to hear our heartbeats once it was within five feet of us.