by Alex Dryden
‘There are problems at the depot,’ I said. ‘You may know about them.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ he laughed, and put up his hands. ‘That’s your business.’
‘You may be able to help us.’
‘And why should I trust you?’ he said, smiling still. ‘Because you’re a woman, perhaps? But it’s not just the Russian winters we want to leave. We also want to say goodbye to Russian uniforms.’
‘You seem very confident,’ I said, taken aback by his lack of respect, let alone fear.
‘What do you want? I’ll help you and maybe you’ll help me too. But I don’t expect it. That way, I am always happy.’
‘I’m going into the depot, but I’m going in unannounced. You get me?’
‘Sure.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘I’ll trust you to do what’s right.’
‘You’re not like a Russian.’
‘I haven’t lived in Russia for three years, thank God.’
‘You’ll have a thousand dollars. Meet me in two minutes by the truck.’
‘No hurry. I don’t need to be there for an hour,’ he said, without reacting at all to the offer of what was so much money to him.
‘Two minutes.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said and put his hands up again mockingly.
I went to a filthy toilet at the back of the café and took off my SVR uniform and put on some dirty overalls I had in my backpack. To my surprise and relief, the driver was by the truck when I returned.
‘I’m Anatoly,’ he said, and held out his hand.
I paused, then took it. ‘Good to meet you, Anatoly,’ I said, and he didn’t ask me my name.
‘I can put you in the toolbox in the truck,’ he said. ‘I smuggled three tiger cubs across the Ukrainian border six months ago in there. There’ll just be room.’
We waited, drinking coffee and kvint in the truck’s cab for another forty minutes or so. Finally it was time. Anatoly opened the big doors at the rear of the truck and climbed in and I followed. There was an upright metal box, like a filing cabinet and maybe five feet high, and it didn’t look as if a human being would fit into it. But he cleared out some of the equipment and lashed it to the side of the truck and I stepped inside. I heard him snap the padlock and then the rear doors slammed shut.
Why did I trust him? Finn always said that most of his life was instinct and it had never let him down. I had never had so much faith in my own instincts but maybe I had never trusted anyone, except Nana and now Finn. It was easier than I thought to add one more to the list.
I listened from inside the box and felt the truck rumble along the uneven, potholed road and finally pull up at what I assumed was the checkpoint at the depot. I heard the rear doors open and felt no fear. I was committed and, of course, I had a story- not much of one but something at least- if I was betrayed. But the rear doors clanged shut again. I couldn’t hear any of the exchanges, but I felt the truck move on again and drive in what seemed to be a wide circle, pushing me against the metal side of the box. It finally came to a halt.
There was a long wait. I imagined security guards lining up with guns at the ready for the box to be opened, but maybe Anatoly was waiting for the coast to clear. I was becoming more and more cramped and started to feel a panic rising. What if something happened to him? What if he was taken away? What if the truck was taken to a scrapyard? Fear of everything began to flood into my head.
Then I heard the rear doors finally clang open and a figure walking around inside. I heard the key in the padlock and suddenly the door of the toolbox was open and I was looking past Anatoly at an empty concrete space with a barbed-wire perimeter fence behind it and, beyond that, wasteground at the edge of the town.
‘You’ve got about a minute,’ Anatoly said in an unhurried way.
‘The money’s in there,’ I said, and pointed behind me at the toolbox.
Without checking the money, he walked ahead of me and jumped out of the truck while I swung my legs over the side.
‘I’ll be leaving at five o’clock if you’re coming with me,’ he said.
‘Maybe. What’s your cargo?’
‘Spare parts.’
I looked at him.
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘That’s just what it says on the manifest.’
‘For where?’
‘Ultimately?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m taking this load to Romania.’
‘OK. You’ll be here at five.’
‘They’ll be loading inside that warehouse over there. Wait for me to pull up the truck somewhere in this area.’
‘Is there a room where the drivers go?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Round the back of that office building. It’s a bare room with dirty calendars and dirtier coffee.’ He grinned.
Finn always said that if you want something, the best thing to do was simply to ask for it. He said it worked for him nine times out of ten. I hadn’t really ever believed in his straightforward method, but I was beginning to now.
There were four and half hours until Anatoly left. It was far too long. I took a clipboard from the inside of my overalls and begin to walk, head down, around the depot. There was no uniform working clothing here and I was relieved. I blended in well enough for a long-haired woman under a pair of baggy overalls.
I walked around to the back of the office block and saw the entrance to the driver’s room. On the way, I saw a truck parked with its doors open and up against the open doors of a smaller warehouse. It was a smaller truck than the rest. Its tarpaulins pulled aside for loading, but the metal sides were still up. ‘Reiter’ was engraved on the side and there, finally, was the outsized eagle.
When I entered the room there were three drivers sitting reading newspapers and sipping from polystyrene cups. They all looked up and didn’t return to their newspapers. Their expressions seemed to suggest I’d walked out of one of the pornographic calendars stuck on the walls.
I pulled my SVR identity card out of my pocket and flashed it long enough for them not to remember the name, only the message. Their attitude changed instantly from mild lechery to embarrassment.
‘Which of you is the driver of the Reiter vehicle?’ I said.
None of them wanted to reply, to draw attention. Eventually the man closest to me, whom I chose to fix with a stare, stumbled out the information that the driver I wanted was in the toilet.
‘Show me identities,’ I said. I wanted there to be some business for them all to do while I waited.
They each showed me their grubby identity cards and the Pribor pass. And then the sound of a toilet flushing announced the return of the man I was looking for. He appeared through a door at the rear of the room still doing up his flies. I could see he wasn’t cowed like the others, and he stood looking at my SVR card without any reaction at all.
‘Your papers,’ I said.
He hesitated and then, with deliberate slowness, took them from an inside pocket. I looked at them and saw he was German.
‘What do you want?’ he said rudely.
‘Show me your itinerary,’ I demanded, ignoring his manner.
‘That’s confidential,’ he said without moving.
‘I’m a colonel in the SVR,’ I reminded him.
‘And I’m the King of Sweden,’ he said.
I tried to imagine what Finn would have done in the same situation. I tried to conjure up the flip remark, the careless, throwaway line that helped people put their guard down, but I couldn’t be Finn and I couldn’t use the full force of my position. I was hamstrung by not wanting anyone outside this room to know I was in the depot.
‘Yes,’ I said, summoning as much of a threat as I could manage. ‘It’s confidential.’
‘My papers,’ he said.
‘You’ll get them back when I’m ready.’
He took a slight move towards me, just enough to show me some aggression, and I turned around until my back was to him. Then I simultaneously cracked my elbow ba
ck into his nose and kicked my left foot into his groin as his hands went up to his face. I turned back to watch the effect.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t need help to break you in two, but I can call some up and we could really do a good job.’
He was sweating, blood poured from his nose and he could barely walk.
‘Get in that chair.’
I looked at the other three men in the room and they were wide-eyed with shock.
‘Find him some shithouse paper,’ I said. ‘And some water. Clean up that mess on his face.’
‘You bitch,’ the German muttered through his teeth as he sat bent over the table, clutching his balls with one hand and his face with the other.
‘If you want to get back home this year, you’d better listen this time,’ I said.
A look of fear crossed his face.
The other three arrived through the door at the rear carrying toilet paper and several cups of water.
‘Clean up,’ I said.
I took out a piece of paper and a pen and told the German to write out his itinerary. He did so, muttering at me and what he would do to me if he ever caught me in his own country. When he’d finished, I told him to get out separate papers from his pocket with the formal itinerary printed on them and then he began to look genuinely frightened. I could see he hadn’t written the truth.
‘Give me the printed sheet.’ I placed my hand gently on his shoulder and this, I think, frightened him more than anything.
He reached inside his jacket and gave it to me. I studied the route he was to take and gave him back the itinerary.
‘What’s your cargo?’
‘Spares.’
‘Weapons spares?’
‘How should I know?’
I watched him without speaking.
‘You going to let me go now?’ he said.
‘When your papers have been checked,’ I replied.
I told the others to give me their papers too.
‘Don’t leave until I return,’ I said. ‘Or your stay here will be indefinite.’
I took the only truck that wasn’t being loaded or unloaded and got into the cab. I drove it slowly around to the back of the depot, away from the main entrance and where there were fewer people working, and parked it next to the fence.
Using the truck as a blind, I climbed up the side of the cab and took a look around while I was still invisible. Two men in uniform were walking towards the truck talking to each other, but they turned when they were a hundred yards away and entered a building. I climbed the remaining few feet on to the roof of the truck and, visible for only a few seconds, I jumped over the fence.
It was a fifteen-foot drop to the other side and should have been easy, but in my hurry I landed badly. I began to walk fast away from the depot, across some wasteland, the truck shielding me for the first few yards and then, when I was in the open, I dropped down into a garbage dump for cover and came out on the other side into trees and then a road where there were cars and buildings. I walked fast into the centre of the town and stripped off the overalls in an alleyway, replacing them with my SVR uniform.
There was a very old Mercedes parked near the second-best hotel in the town centre, which had the word ‘Taxi’ written badly on a piece of card in the front window. The driver was sitting on the pavement smoking a cigarette. With my colonel’s uniform, it was a straightforward exercise to get him into the car to take me wherever I wanted to go. That’s the advantage of totalitarian societies. Certain people make everyone afraid, unquestioning. Their own system can be turned against them far more easily than in a free country.
We drove to the nearest gas station and I paid to fill the car. Then I told the driver to head for the capital Tiraspol, further into Transdnestr, and to the rendezvous we’d arranged. Bendery and the border would be filled first with troops if the alarm were raised.
As I sat in the front seat, nursing what I feared was a fracture, I wondered whether any of this had been worth it; we had an itinerary of one of Reiter’s trucks. But if the alarm were raised they would change it. I was relying on the German driver’s unwillingness to risk admitting a mistake.
I left the taxi on the outskirts of Tiraspol. I gave the driver fifty dollars and told him there was another fifty in it for him if he went to a hotel in the city, stayed put in his room, and waited for me there for twenty-four hours. I didn’t want him on the road when checkpoints began to go up, if that was what was going to happen. I knew he’d do it for ten dollars, but fifty was more than he made in three weeks.
I then doubled back in the darkness the way we’d come and put the overalls and uniform into my backpack and wore what I had worn when I arrived across the river, ordinary clothes bought in Moldova.
Finn was waiting at the rendezvous in the main square, leaning against an old grey Subaru and I climbed into the car without speaking. We drove fast to the outskirts of the town and beyond, skirting in a wide arc that took us twenty miles to the south of Bendery. We left the car on a dirt track which had a few ramshackle houses scattered along it.
‘We should take the other route out,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ he said.
He didn’t ask me what had happened. He just held me for a few moments and then we walked towards the river.
There were barges plying the Dniester River down to the Black Sea. They stopped for refuelling by a wooden jetty on the bank. They carried grapes and other agricultural produce, scrap metal, plastic- anything that could get a better price in the Ukraine or further afield than here. Finn went and stood behind a wooden building that was boarded up.
I leaned on a fence and looked down at a man smoking on the deck outside the wheelhouse of a barge that looked as if it might make it the sixty or so miles to the Black Sea. He finally noticed me and made a lewd comment. I told him that for a couple of dollars I was his, whatever he liked. He didn’t think for long. I descended a walkway on to the deck and brought my knee into his solar plexus. I could smell the drink on him and he began to retch with the blow to his stomach.
I dragged him into the wheelhouse, tied him up to some pipes, gagged him, took his cap off his filthy head and put it on. Then I started the engine and climbed back up the walkway as Finn appeared. He cast off the two loose hawsers that secured the barge to the quay and pulled in the walkway. I took the wheel and we turned away into the current heading south towards the Black Sea.
It was getting dark and it would be as dark as it had been the night before when we had crossed the river. There was little river traffic at this hour, just the occasional barge pushing its way slowly up against the current in the opposite direction.
Finn took the wheel and we were making good way with the current in our favour. We had to be careful not to overshoot the target and become entangled with the guards who watched the bridge where the borders of Ukraine, Transdnestr and Moldova met.
I saw the pontoons first. They were over to the right-hand side of the river-to starboard, as Finn said–until I told him to talk in left and right. I realised how hard it was going to be to dock a 150-tonne barge against a pontoon with all the power of the current behind it.
Finn headed straight for the upright post at the far end of the pontoon and as we seemed to be about to hit it, he slammed the engine in full reverse and spun the wheel. The barge choked and struggled against the current coming up behind us and then slowly, its engine roaring, the barge hauled its stern towards the pontoon while the bow pressed against the post ahead.
I jumped on to the pontoon at the stern and Finn threw me a rope, which I secured, and then ran to the bow and did the same. The barge edged towards me, I hauled in the line and secured it again as we docked parallel to the pontoon.
Then I climbed back on to the barge and we picked up our packs.
As we stepped off on to the pontoon, we heard shouts from farther up the bank. I heard feet running along the pontoon from the shore and saw at least three men
in uniform. We turned back, climbing on to the barge. Finn pointed into the fast-flowing black water and then we jumped.
The water was very cold, a start-of-summer temperature, and I gasped with shock. My leg hurt again where I’d fallen on it. I heard feet behind me on the wooden deck of the barge, then shouts. Finally there were gunshots ploughing wildly into the water. But we were travelling fast in the current and were soon fifty yards away, holding tight to each other, our packs gone.
Finn shouted at me to strike out for the shore. I saw, perhaps a mile ahead, twin searchlights that seemed to be coming from a bridge and which were shining their beams on to the river’s surface. It was the frontier with the Ukraine, below which was the Black Sea. The bank we were striking out for was Moldovan territory.
‘Don’t let go!’ Finn shouted, and we both struggled with one arm, inch by inch, working half with the current as we tried to cross it.
I felt nothing, no pain from my leg now, no fear, I was completely controlled by adrenalin. And I knew that this loss of all feeling would last me as long as it took to get to safety.
When we were nearly at the shore and the lights on the bridge ahead seemed dangerously close, a broken branch stretched its dead wood out from the bank and we both grabbed it and held on desperately, too exhausted to do anything else. Finally we pulled ourselves along the rotting wood until we touched the muddy bottom of the river. I hauled myself out, freezing in the cool night, and Finn followed. Without talking, we ran straight into the woods that lined the bank, hoping to avoid the patrols from the right where the pontoons were, and from the left where the bridge loomed now, close up and fully lit.
The woods ran all along the Moldovan side of the river and for several hundred yards inland. It was completely dark now. There were shouts from not far off, and dogs barking in the distance, the guards trespassing now on to the Moldovan side.
And then we suddenly came out of the trees and into a field. There was some spring-sown crop that was barely visible above the earth. We ran down the edge of this field and heard the dogs in the wood behind where our pursuers had now come far into Moldovan territory. I saw a vehicle coming down a road a few hundred yards ahead. We ran faster. We were well into Moldova now, but I knew that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to our pursuers. I could still hear the dogs.
