by Alex Dryden
‘Oleg,’ he said, and held out his hand. She took it briefly. ‘And you are Valentina?’
‘That’s right.’
He looked at her steadily, neither believing nor, as far as she could tell, disbelieving. ‘They really gave you a beating,’ he said finally, looking at her puffed face and split lip.
‘It was just one of them,’ she replied, ‘and it was only three blows.’
‘That OMON guy? The first one who came aboard? What did the others do, stand you up? Those other bastards?’
‘That’s right. On all counts.’
‘You want to get your own back?’
She looked at him, a thin young man who looked more like an adolescent but with all the strength of ten men in his eyes. She didn’t answer him.
She now began to feel deeply uncomfortable in his presence, despite his apparent friendliness. They sat in silence for a minute or two, watching the bank of trees passing endlessly by. Then he looked at her again.
‘You know,’ he said, drawing slowly on a cigarette and taking infinite care with his words, ‘it’s only the completeness of your disguise that gives you away. You’re too good. It was the same when you were in Kyzyl. Too good. But I and the others know.’
‘Know what?’
He smiled more broadly. ‘That you aren’t who you say you are, that’s all.’
She looked at him angrily. ‘Are you working for them too?’ she snapped. ‘Have they asked you to watch me?’
He put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘No, no, you misunderstand me, Valentina.’ He watched her eyes with the burning coals of his own. ‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want you to know. Not just because they beat you up, but because I know I can.’ He paused. ‘As for us, we’re not who we say we are either,’ he finished.
She looked directly back at him. But she didn’t ask any questions.
He leaned in towards her. ‘We’re activists,’ he said. ‘We’re going north to commit a great act.’
He pulled back the flap of his grey jacket and she thought for a moment that he was about to do something crude. But then she saw a glint of metal above the waistband of his trousers, a black plastic handle above it. He was showing her he had a gun. It was an old pistol, a Makarov, by the quick look of it which he allowed her. Then he dropped the flap of his jacket again.
‘You won’t get very far with that,’ she said. ‘Whatever great act you’re planning.’
‘Oh, it’s not just this and the few other weapons we’ve brought with us. We have friends. Up in Norilsk. They can get their hands on the explosives they use in the mines there. That’s where we’re going. And thermite too,’ he added.
Thermite was like a highly explosive paint. Once a surface was coated with it, it would take only a small fire to ignite it into a huge explosion. She felt her discomfort in his presence deepen. Saboteurs. That’s what the Wolf had said. They were looking for saboteurs.
‘They’ll find you and they’ll kill you,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘We’re going to commit this great act for the world,’ he said. And she believed he meant it. ‘It will be on the front page of every newspaper in the world, too.’
‘What are you? The three musketeers?’ She wished to remove herself from his presence, but too much had already been said.
‘There are six of us.’ He smiled. ‘And a few more at the mines in the north.’
He leaned in towards her again. ‘The guys that beat you up? They’re our enemies too. And our enemies’ enemy is our friend. So join us.’
This time it was she who laughed. ‘I’m just a saw operator,’ she said.
‘Like I told you, it’s the completeness of your disguise that gives you away. To me, anyway,’ he added. He looked at her with an amused, almost playful expression on his face. ‘Think about it, Valentina.’ He showed her the old pistol again. ‘You want to return the favour to that OMON bastard? We’ll help you.’
She looked at him, genuinely aghast this time.
‘You mean, do I want to kill him?’ she said, and laughed again, but laughing hurt her mouth too much. It was a short pleasure. She saw he was smiling too, eagerly this time, the calmness gone.
‘You should hide that away,’ she said. ‘They’re looking for you. That’s why they’re on the ship. If the OMON guys see it, you’re in deep shit.’
‘They won’t,’ he said.
‘And I wouldn’t talk to people you don’t know about this,’ she told him. ‘Including me. You must be crazy.’
But looking in his eyes again, she knew his intent was genuine.
‘I know I can trust you,’ he said. ‘And I’ve persuaded the others. Join us. I know you’re lying about what you were doing in Kyzyl and you’re lying about what you’re doing here.’
She turned on him savagely. He put up a hand in passive defence.
‘No, no… Valentina. I’m not interested in telling anyone I saw you there,’ he said, and then added, ‘And I’m not interested in getting anything from you with the knowledge.’ He paused. He seemed to be weighing alternatives. But he was someone who decided things quickly. ‘I’d like to kill that bastard too,’ he said finally. ‘But you can have him first. If you want.’
‘You are crazy,’ she answered.
She wondered now if this was a set-up. The Wolf had told her to keep him informed of anything that suggested sabotage. ‘Use your eyes and ears.’ If she told the Wolf about the boy and his friends, it would be safer for her. If she didn’t, she might pay for it with her life. It was an obvious choice – to report what the boy had said. Then, if it were a set-up, the Wolf would trust her, or trust her more.
But again, just as at the border, some deep misgiving held her back. And she wondered again if she’d lost her edge, her ruthlessness, the single-minded course of action that had kept her alive so long.
‘Maybe a little crazy.’ He grinned.
Looking back directly at him again she knew that what he’d told her was the truth and that he was neither joking nor crazy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THERE WERE TWO Russian military helicopters on the mud bank by the river. The ship was just outside the village of Kostino, under half a day’s journey from Igarka, when she saw them.
From Anna’s viewpoint on board the Rossiya, the soldiers in the helicopters and sitting around them on the wet mud and snow bank seemed to be mostly sapari. In the hierarchy of the Russian conscription system, this meant they were ‘fresh meat’ – conscripts with less than a year of service – and, for the most part, they were abused, underfed and disgruntled teenagers. Like the boys at the border, she thought. But they would enjoy nothing more than to find people even lower down the pecking order than they were, and the Rossiya was full of them.
There were four officers with them that she could see, each of whom evidently had at least two or three years’ service, and then a couple of career officers in charge of the whole group. All told, she estimated there were a little over fifty troops waiting on the bank, roughly twenty-six from each helicopter.
Dmitry the Wolf was on the bridge with the two other OMON officers and he was evidently directing the captain to stop. Kostino hadn’t been on the list of places they were stopping at. The ship curved in a circle until it faced the current and then dropped its anchor. From speakers fixed up on the bridge came the tinny instructions for everyone to get out on deck on pain of arrest. Crew members were lowering various small craft from davits on the port side, nearer the bank. With a crewman in each, they set off to the shore and Anna heard the shouted orders from the bank for the conscripts to get up.
The Wolf descended the steps from the bridge and the other two OMON officers went to stand at either end of the ship, weapons drawn now. It seemed to her that they were preparing for someone on the ship – or more than one – to make a break into the icy river. If so, anyone attempting such an escape would be shot as soon as they hit the water.
The conscripts crossed the narrow stretch
of river from the bank and boarded the ship. They clearly had their orders. Most of them fanned out at once against the guard rails all around the ship, while half a dozen took up vantage points high above the deck, either on the bridge or on a single container in the stern. These troops trained their weapons down on the milling passengers who had slowly emerged from below. When the work crews were all in place, the senior career officer walked up the deck and conferred with the Wolf.
Some of the passengers sat, heads bent, others waited anxiously in twos and threes, smoking nervously. Nobody talked. From the speakers came the new instruction: ‘Men in the bow, women in the stern. Be quick about it.’
She saw a dozen conscripts now leave their posts around the ship’s guard rails and, with the career officer and one of the ‘walruses’ – a conscript with two or three years of service – the conscripts were then ordered to go below. It was a search, Anna saw, as she walked head down to the stern of the vessel with the other women, and she wondered if she’d concealed the Thompson well enough. From the bridge the speakers issued further instructions: ‘Strip down to your underclothes!’
Slowly, the complement of workers began to take off their clothes. Where Anna stood, plump old and middle-aged women and some younger ones like herself began to strip. It’s like the camps, she thought. The officers were acting like the prison guards had. Finally, most of the women stood in bare feet, shivering in the feeble noon sun. There seemed to be no hurry to inspect them. Anna looked up the ship and saw that the men had already stripped, far quicker than the women with her, some of whom still grumbled in rage, seemingly oblivious to the penalty that might be meted out to them for disobedience.
She saw a man in the distance up by the bow light a cigarette and then she looked as it was knocked out of his mouth by the butt of an SPK which connected ruthlessly with the man’s jaw.
It soon became clear that they were to be kept waiting and stripped in the cold until the search below was complete. Anna thought about the hiding place where she’d dismantled and hidden the Thompson Contender. But she guessed she was better at hiding something than these inexperienced youths would be at finding it.
More conscripts were now descending below decks from the bow, while the others trained semi-automatics on the shivering, degraded passengers. It was a deliberately harsh tactic, designed to debilitate and humiliate. Next to Anna, a woman who was in her late fifties, she guessed, began to cough. It was a harsh bronchial sound that seemed to rattle her insides. They waited like this for nearly an hour.
At first, the conscripts came up from below in twos and threes. There was an officer with them and each conscript was carrying an assortment of weapons. They were put in a pile between the bow and stern. From where she stood, Anna saw that there were three or four AK47s and a collection of handguns, a pile of hunting knives and even a whip. But she couldn’t see if the Thompson was among them.
The officer went up to the men’s end of the ship first. She saw that a few men, on command, came out to claim their knives. No one claimed any of the guns. Clearly no one had the required licences for a gun. They were hard to obtain and the guns were almost certainly illegal, even if they were only used for hunting. The officer put the claimed knives to one side and then walked the length of the ship.
‘Anyone with a weapon, legal or illegal, come and identify it now!’
No one among the women moved.
He turned and walked back, now at last ordering the conscripts, who had all returned from below to the deck, to begin searching the clothes that lay in bundles all around the bow and stern of the boat. The teenagers who came up to the women’s end lifted up the women’s clothes with bayonets or knives and sometimes searched them when they felt any weight. They were laughing and poking fun at the semi-naked women, letting their eyes feast on the younger ones and making obscene suggestions.
After nearly another hour more, the process was finished. No more weapons were found on anyone’s person. It had been a cruel two hours in the freezing cold and some of the women around Anna were showing signs of hypothermia and sickness. Finally the officer came up and ordered them to dress and remain on deck.
Now, Anna knew, the real interrogations would begin. The ownership of the guns was to be established. One by one, the men were brought out, bullied, beaten and casually hit in a process which the conscripts were evidently enjoying. At last they had their moment of power, after suffering the same treatment from their more senior conscripts back at whatever base they came from. Despite the treatment, nobody claimed a single weapon. Anna watched as Oleg and his friends received similar treatment. She saw he took the blows and made it worse for himself by refusing to appear subdued.
But as they sorted through the pile of guns, she saw the Thompson wasn’t in it.
Before the sun began its slow fade to the west, a camera was brought and each of the workers for the Igarka mills was made to stand up straight, hat and cap removed, and then photographed. From behind the conscripts milling in front of her, Anna saw that an old-fashioned fingerprinting machine was being set up on a table in the centre of the ship’s deck. Then each of the workers was forced to line up and be printed.
When Anna’s turn came, she began to calculate the time it would take for their prints to be helicoptered out, then examined in Moscow, before finally, the alarm bells were rung. It was lucky that they were using such a crude method. It might take days, or even a week, depending on the sense of urgency. Not for the first time, she thanked the inefficiency of the system, including its security forces.
The pile of weapons, maybe two dozen in total, lay on the deck and the Wolf summoned the captain and his crew. It was now the turn of the ship’s personnel. Anna couldn’t hear the words that were exchanged between them. But it was clear that the Wolf was blaming the captain. It was the captain’s responsibility that there were illegal weapons on board. No one could have brought assault weapons on to the ship in the small bags people carried. There must have been collusion back in Krasnoyarsk. One or more of the crew were responsible, he seemed to be saying, and the whole serious problem was ultimately being laid at the captain’s door.
Anna watched as one of the two other special forces officers handcuffed the captain. An example was to be made. He looked ill, hungover and white. They took him somewhere below.
The Wolf then took three of the crew with him on to the bridge and the ship’s engines were started. Some of the conscripts descended the steps to the launches and headed back for the bank and the waiting helicopters. About thirty stayed onboard. Then a metallic announcement came out across the deck from the bridge through the speakers.
‘This ship is impounded by the Russian state,’ the Wolf intoned. ‘Once we reach Igarka, there will be a full investigation. No one will leave the ship until this has been completed on pain of death.’
The anchor rattled up into the hawses and the Rossiya left for Igarka.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BEHIND ITS SHELTERING island, the town of Igarka was tucked into a bend in the river. The water was over half a mile wide and the bend in the river had caused a deep channel to be cut where vessels with a big draught could anchor close to the shore. But the Rossiya stayed well away from land.
Sawmills and piled logs dominated the shoreline, with the mainly spruce forest pressing in close behind the town. The functional town – no more than a logging operation – stood on the edge of the Arctic Circle and vast rafts of cut timber waited anchored in log pools for the river’s mouth finally to be declared open from ice. The industries of sawmilling and small-ship repairs dominated the shore and these and the power houses that fuelled them were the only buildings visible as the Rossiya dropped its anchor out in the channel in the slower-moving current of the river’s bend, the chain rattling from the ship into the river floor.
From the deck Anna studied the floating wooden wharves that had been rebuilt after the water surge of spring. She judged the distance from the ship to the nearest wharf and k
new it was too far, even if a swimmer weren’t spotted in the water. Otherwise she saw the lingering grey pall of a town that was little more than a huge rubbish dump. Nothing was collected from here that couldn’t be burned and there were piles of non-inflammable waste that lay randomly discarded.
Anna continued to look from the deck as the sun sank behind her. She watched the piles of waiting timber stacked on wooden trestle roads that were built on the shifting muddy slopes of the banks and, higher up the banks, the concrete roads pitted and gouged by the winter ice. She looked carefully across the sparse township but could see no military helicopters or other military presence. There were just the piles of rounded timber and mountains of sawdust, stacks of planking and the spruce forest pressing in behind the small town.
Roadways made of logs led from the town into the forest. Placed on top of the logs were planks, and on top of these were spread moss and sawdust. The streets were built up high, away from the winter frost. The little patches of concrete visible had thin hopes of success in the Arctic temperatures of winter and any pilings that supported them needed to be sunk deeper into the frozen earth than the slaves and underpaid workers who had built Igarka since 1928 were able to achieve. Beneath the raised roadways grew moss and heather appearing for the brief summer growth.
The half-dozen other ships were moored close in at the log wharfs, but it was clear the Rossiya was to remain here, too far from the bank for anyone to make an escape. Even if an escapee weren’t shot, the water was so cold that muscles would seize before the bank could be reached.
She saw that her options were narrowing sharply to nothing. By anchoring out here, the intention of the OMON officers was clear. Nobody was to be allowed ashore and there were no boats that had come out from the town as they had done at previous stops. Like the others on board, she realised she was now a prisoner on a prison ship.
