by Alex Dryden
She went from person to person across the deck near her like this, group to group, studying who was strong or weak, who was honest or dishonest, who might be a potential help to her in a time of crisis and who to avoid and expect nothing from in such an event. It could be valuable information and was nearly always correct if she was rigorous in the initial study of each face.
Finally her eyes fell on a young man. Sometimes he seemed to be on his own. She’d noticed that earlier in the day. But at other times, he appeared to consort with a group similar to him, and in a quiet, conspiratorial sort of way. They were a group apart from the rest of the work gang.
The young man was in his early twenties, she guessed. Then she stiffened for a moment and she forgot her analytical exercise. The man was looking straight back at her. There was something intense in his stare, almost intimate. It was as if he knew her. And when she caught his eyes, he didn’t look away, but continued his level gaze, and the first thing she noticed about him was that his eyes were fiercely bright, almost flaming.
Anna tried to remember if she’d seen him in the line at the hiring office. But she couldn’t remember having seen him as she remembered some of the others. And yet his face seemed familiar. She studied him, but with a jolt of recognition that she couldn’t place. Now it was this thin recognition she felt which took up her thoughts, not the study of his face.
The young man was part of this group who looked more like students than workers. It was partly the way they dressed, and their boyish conspiracy of friendship, rather than a friendship which naturally evolved and flowed. The young man wore nothing that made any concession to the cold; a flimsy grey jacket with one of the pockets torn right down the side, which he’d worn the night before in the harsh low night-time temperatures. The jacket looked as though it had once been part of a cheap suit, she thought. There was an artfulness about his dress which was the mark of youthful disregard for appearances – while all the time being highly aware of them. Around his neck was a very long red wool scarf, like some Petersburg student, she thought. And under the jacket a thin, striped shirt. His head was up, too high, the arrogance of a youthful confidence which hadn’t been defeated by life’s difficulties. He had a narrow, pale face with cavernous, undernourished cheeks – but again, she noted, his physical appearance like his clothes seemed to have an artfulness about it that was an act. He seemed to be conscious of the type of figure he was performing. A thin, wispy, tangled beard worked its way around his chin like a strangled winter vine. But it was still his eyes which set him apart from the others most of all, his eyes which she had first, and startlingly, noticed about him. They contained the same fierce, burning light they’d done ever since she’d started watching him. There was a fire in them that hadn’t yet been extinguished.
As she stared back at him, both of them unwavering in their looks, she found herself confused between the science of what she had been applying and the act that he seemed to have adopted. He could have been a generic poster boy for any revolution, she thought, the thin, gangly, propagandised student with the patriotic flag in his hands, standing legs apart on the barricades, burning shot flying around him, as his fierce eyes and fiercer beliefs scorched away the capitalist oppressor. He was a figure who might have walked right out of a short story by Dostoyevksy.
There was an intensity now, too, in the way that he looked at her. But it was not the intensity of Ivan, or a man like Ivan. It was not a lusting, lecherous look. It expected nothing. His gaze was a dispassionate assessment of her, just as hers was of him.
When she looked away for a while and then turned back to him again, he was still looking, studying her almost like a specimen in a jar, it seemed, just as she had been studying him. It was as if he were performing the same experiment that she was. And this time as she watched him, she knew she had seen him before – but she also knew it hadn’t been in the line at the hiring office. And this sent a disturbing feeling of uncertainty coursing through her.
Troubled at not being able either to place him in the recent past or to dismiss him altogether from her mind, she fell into a lulled state, leaned back against some lifebelts and fell into an uneasy doze. She wanted now just to put him out of her mind.
Savino, Tunguska, Rudikovka… The small settlements and wooden villages drifted by. As the afternoon fell into its grey decline over the taiga, a hazy, puffy cloud bank descended on the landscape like a dirty pillow and the Rossiya pulled groaning to starboard, dropping its anchor off the bank by the town of Tomonovo. The rattling of the chain from the ship’s hawses stirred her from her torpor.
The ship was expected in the town. More boats with outboards came out to sell vegetables or bread, but the main product on offer seemed to be fish. From time to time the river here still supported sturgeon, despite the unchecked pollution further north.
Anna got to her feet and watched the captain of the Rossiya descend metal steps that had been dropped down the side of the hull and he climbed on to one of these small boats that waited. He shouted back up the steps at nobody in particular that the ship would depart in two hours.
She descended the steps after him, along with a few of the other passengers, and they paid a few kopecks each to be taken ashore.
The ‘town’ was more like a small village and all the more strange for the way it had suddenly loomed out of the dense green forest like a mirage. It seemed to be made up largely of semi-wild dogs. There were mostly Samoyeds from the north, or Siberian huskies, which ran at high speed towards the boats as they beached on the shore. There were also various long-legged wolf-hunting dogs. The Samoyeds whined and growled but didn’t bark, while the hunting dogs bayed furiously and had a dangerous pack mentality about them. There were other dogs – for hunting wolves – tied up on chains and there were two captured wolves and a small bear kept on chains further away. Now and again, one of the old women who had produce for sale on the few rickety tables by the beach threw them a fish head or scrap of bone.
A few unshaven men in the extreme stages of inebriation slumped against walls or sat on the rocks by the beach. They were offering mangy sable pelts for sale, in exchange for vodka. The women in these lonely impoverished places were the ones who, as ever, worked, while the men hardly cared any more as long as they had vodka.
There were just two streets in the village. They were both made of earth and the two dozen or so wooden houses that lined them were sunk into the mud at crazy angles, as if the town itself and not just most of its inhabitants were drunk. Anything built here without proper foundations sank into the earth when the frost melted in the summer. She paused on the beach and looked at what was for sale at the tables. There were some root vegetables, more mangy-looking fur pelts, a pair of live sables and two sturgeon, one of the fish over six feet in length.
Anna walked off into the main street without any plan other than to stretch her legs on dry land. A few children in filthy clothes played around a hole in the ground full of stagnant water with a thin coating of ice. A man reeled down the street unsteadily towards her, his eyes glassy, and holding out a hand for alms. But it was a gesture without any hope, let alone expectation.
When she’d reached the edge of the village, a distance of a hundred yards or so, she saw the forest pressing in close, as if intent on pushing the houses and the entire village with all its decayed humanity back into the river from where it had come.
She turned and, as she did so, immediately the hackles on her neck rose. She saw Ivan. He was skulking in the shade of a wood store on the far side of the street. And then, looking to the left of him, she saw that he wasn’t alone.
He was talking closely with a tall man, fit and healthy-looking, not like the men on the ship or in the village. He wore smart polished black leather boots. Slung loosely over the second man’s shoulders she saw what seemed to be an American military jacket. Her first thought was that he’d got it on the black market from one of the American military bases in Kyrgizstan, which supplied their endless war a
cross the border in Afghanistan. But his boots seemed to be too good to come from the black market. The two men were about twenty-five or thirty yards away from her, and behind her, as she walked up the mud street of the village. She knew at once that Ivan, or more likely both of them, had been following her, watching to see where she would go.
Now, as she watched Ivan talking with the man, she saw the second man turn and look in her direction. Then he looked away, back towards Ivan, and she saw Ivan make an obscene gesture and both he and the man began to laugh in her direction, Ivan with his big, crude laugh, while other man made a pinched, mirthless bark that was as close to laughter as, most likely, he ever got.
Anna crossed the street, dipped behind a house, unhurried, affecting not to care about their presence. She walked around behind the few other houses on this side of the street until she was well out of their sight. She was walking across rough ground now, half wild ground bush, half village, but all the time keeping away from the street. She expected them to follow her, but she needed to know.
Her mind was not calm, but it was focused now on danger. She knew that Ivan was never going to leave her alone. She wondered if he had shown the second man the picture he had taken of her on the phone. Ivan, she realised, was becoming an unacceptable danger to her. The photograph – even in her current state of disguise – could jeopardise everything about her alias. They had her pictures in every security service establishment in Russia and, even disguised as she was, a sharp eye might just – might easily – make the connection. Her life was now in danger. She would have to move on to a new, aggressive footing.
She was very well known to the highly secret foreign intelligence services at their headquarters in Balashiha to the east of Moscow. She’d once been one of the SVR’s best officers in Department ‘S’, the so-called patriotiy, and their youngest female colonel until her defection. And the foreign intelligence service to which she’d belonged had placed her on their most wanted list for the past five years. She’d even gleaned from Burt Miller, via one of his informants in Russia, that recruits to the SVR were being encouraged to use photographs of her for target practice at the Balashiha headquarters.
Not for the first time in the past few hours she considered the existence of her photograph on Ivan’s mobile phone. Maybe – and the inevitable thought came to her without reluctance or even pause – she would now have to kill Ivan, destroy him and his mobile phone along with him.
But when she came out from behind the few houses, she saw that the two men hadn’t followed her but had remained in the same place. They knew she would have to come back eventually in their direction. She was just ten yards away from them now.
The second man was staring at her as she came out in front of the house and on to the street. The house was a tilting wooden structure like the others, with a wood porch on which an old man was gutting fish.
It was as if the two men watching her had judged her movements in advance. Ivan was smoking a cigarette and he smiled unpleasantly at her. Both of them were staring directly at her.
The second man possessed a pronounced asymmetry between the two sides of his face; a man who lived in great tension, she thought; a man who was capable of great imbalances in his character. The two halves of his face were alternately concave and convex, retracted and dilated. Such an imbalance, she judged, would lead to the man’s inner tensions creating in him a great propensity for violence. His skin was very taut over his forehead, and his eyes were very different from each other. The left eye curved in its socket, and the eyebrow above it was lowered over it, protecting it from external influences. His right eye, on the other hand, was piercing, and set on a horizontal line. The left side of his face was angular and tense; the right more dilated. His flaring nostrils were like a bull’s, sensing everything around him. An instigator of actions – and, more than likely, violent ones. And his tight, straight lips suggested that he would never admit to whatever life it was he led.
And now she was closer to them, she saw that the American-looking military jacket the second man wore slung over his shoulder was, in fact, a Russian military jacket. It had a Russian military badge sewn at the top of the right arm.
But it was the badge that made her catch her breath. The badge was an embroidered wolf’s head. The white outlines of the creature were embossed on to a black background. The wolf was snarling. Anna recognised it at once as the badge of the OMON special forces.
She paused, too close to them to walk away and pretend she hadn’t seen them. The badge, like the MVD insignia she’d seen outside the apartment block, was a red warning light, but it represented something far more dangerous than the MVD. The wolf demonstrated the man was in some section of the OMON, the dreaded paramilitary force attached to Russia’s security services. The men who were recruited into this force were greatly feared, trained to the highest degree in physical combat. They were reared through their training like fighting dogs. Many of them had been formed into special brigades in the brutal war in Chechnya in order to commit the numerous, inhumane atrocities there. They were killers, torturers, rapists, who cared neither for the sex nor age of their victims in pursuit of absolute control and humiliation.
Anna nodded at them curtly and walked on with an apparent calm, avoiding their stares. But inside her head her mind was racing. What was an OMON special forces officer doing here, in an insignificant village with a few houses, two hundred miles north of Krasnoyarsk?
Maybe there were twenty thousand like him in the whole of Russia, but not much more than that. So why was he here? She sensed her pulse quickening. Perhaps it was a coincidence, she told herself, and no more than that. It must be another coincidence. Her entry into the country had been seamless.
But she felt herself sweating under the work overalls and the quilt jacket. She pulled her hat down lower, from some obscure instinct for anonymity. She knew she was in danger of starting to imagine things now; alone in the presence of people. The looks in the faces of others, even the villagers here, began to insinuate themselves into her consciousness. Were they looking at her too? Were they seeing through her, into her? Into Valentina Asayev, or into someone else, the person she really was? Did they know? She shivered, though not from the cold. She had to bring herself back to the present, to focus on the real, not the imagined. She shook herself out of her thoughts and began to think of what she had to do.
By the time the captain and the few passengers who’d disembarked had all re-boarded the Rossiya, the darkness of the short night was approaching. She saw that the captain was lit up on the bridge, silhouetted against the window. And she could see he was lit up in other ways, too – drunk, it looked like, even from this distance. She could see that he was holding a bottle in his hand that didn’t seem to have a label. The second mate was at the wheel, receiving the captain’s orders. Then she heard the loud clanking of the chain coming up from the floor of the river and locking back into the hawses like the metal trap of a prison gate.
And at the last minute, coming across the silver moonlit water in an aluminium launch that glinted in the moon’s mysterious light, she saw the man with the wolf badge emblazoned on his shoulder. He was standing up in the boat, alone apart from the boatman. She didn’t know what had become of Ivan. He must have boarded via another boat, before the Wolf.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANNA DECIDED TO stay on deck after the Rossiya left its mooring and had departed from Tomonovo. From the guard rail she watched the last of the sun’s livid orange hangover fade into a dull grey-pink beyond the Urals to the West.
She stayed in the lee of some davits built to hold non-existent lifeboats. She remained there for several hours as the temperature dropped to near freezing. She was motionless, sprung for some action as yet unknown. Her training, repressed since the line at the hiring office, was bursting to be released. It was as if she were waiting to be attacked.
The first time she looked at her watch she saw it was now after one o’clock in the morning, but s
till she remained. It was icy up on the ship’s superstructure and a cold wind was coming down the river from the north. But still she waited motionless.
Most of the women had turned in for the night, but there was a group of four or five men playing cards and drinking on the cold deck. They had a small wood burner flaring beside them. She envied its warmth. Once the sky had receded into a purple blackness and there emerged a million stars, Anna sought a place away from the guard rails, out of sight of inquisitive eyes. She sat or coiled herself in the cold darkness, her back against a bulkhead, her feet placed apart, ready to spring in the face of an attacker. From here nobody could approach her from the rear and she could see if anyone was coming towards her.
And now, after hours in the darkness, there was a figure, just as she’d expected. It was coming up the steps from below, up the staircase that led down to the women’s area. From the height and bulk of the figure she knew it was Ivan, even if she hadn’t expected him. She realised she’d been expecting he would come for her either here or in the hold, maybe both. Clearly he had gone to the hold first and, not finding her there, had come back up to the deck.
The broad silhouette of the foreman stopped at the top of the staircase, his big head turning around as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Eventually he must either have seen her dark shadow by the bulkhead, or gone there because he couldn’t penetrate the shadows and had deduced her presence by a process of elimination. He walked towards her with a swaying gait that could either be the macho slope of a predator or simply caused by drink.
‘It’s cold out here,’ he said, when he’d approached and was standing over her, six feet four inches of male threat and ugly stench.
‘Yes it is cold,’ she replied. She got to her feet. ‘I was about to go below and get some sleep.’
