Death in Siberia f-4

by Alex Dryden

  Was she a murderer? Had she killed Bachman? That picture didn’t seem to fit either. But he felt a slow realisation that the woman and the documents he carried were inextricably connected, nevertheless.

  They’d been riding the river for four hours at just over half revs in the turbulent water, and Petrov was icy cold, a thin film of frozen river water on the sleeves of his jacket. It was then that on the right-hand bank of the river, in the flat, grey light of the day in which nothing stood out against anything else, that he saw something. The river was broad here, half a mile across, and it was hard to see but he knew what he was looking at wasn’t a thing of nature.

  He pointed at the bank and shouted at Roman, who slowed the throttle slightly while he looked in the direction Petrov was pointing. The struggle against the wind to hold the outboard with its long extension made from a wood pole had kept Roman relatively warm. As the boy looked, he slowly edged the boat at more of an angle towards the shore, careful not to let it turn too far so that the waves chopped by the wind didn’t come broadside against the boat. He looked back at Petrov when he was satisfied with the boat’s new course. He had a questioning look on his face. He could see nothing strange.

  But now Petrov could make out the lines of a jeep, turned on its side on the shingle bank and in the lee of a low cliff. The snow on the cliff was being lifted by the wind in plumes that snaked and spiralled up only to settle in a new location on the rocks above the bank.

  Petrov cut the air with his hand, indicating that Roman should go in closer.

  The boy was careful, not allowing the boat to turn sideways into the waves, and they came up on the shingle ahead of the jeep, passing it with the angle of their course, and where the water was calmer. And by this time, Roman had seen what Petrov had.

  The metal boat crunched on to the shingle and they hauled it with difficulty a foot or so on to the stones, then weighed down the anchor with a boulder higher up the beach. Then they walked back down the shingle until they were standing by the crashed jeep.

  Petrov was suddenly Lieutenant Petrov again. It surprised him how much that life had slid away from his consciousness in the past few days. He looked down into the driver’s seat, the window facing up towards the sky, and saw both seats were empty. Then he pulled back some canvas in the rear that was snapping in the wind and would soon be shredded by it. There was nothing – or rather nobody – inside. He looked up at the cliff from where it must have fallen. The nose of the jeep clearly had been crushed by the fall. It hadn’t been thrown up on to the bank from the river’s flood in the past weeks. Then he saw some footsteps in the scuffed, wind-blown snow. They went in both directions, but Petrov began to walk back, in the direction from which they’d come, until he saw that two sets of indistinct footsteps were visible in patches where the new snow had been blown off the frozen snow beneath. He signalled to Roman who was still inspecting the jeep, perhaps looking for things to salvage. Petrov wished he hadn’t left his pistol in the pack on the boat.

  The two of them ascended the low cliff, Petrov stopping to look at the footsteps from time to time when they appeared; a bigger and a smaller foot, he thought, the smaller one a boy’s – or a woman’s.

  When they reached the top of the cliff, they followed where the occasional appearance of the steps indicated, into the forest, Petrov leading. A hundred yards or so from the cliff top, Petrov stopped. Through the trees he could see another jeep. Slowly this time, as if he were approaching a living crime scene, Petrov advanced under the trees and stepped over a pile of loose branches, until he was standing next to the jeep. Inside it through the closed window, he saw a man, partially tied up as far as he could see. He wore the insignia of the OMON.

  Petrov took a hunting knife from his jacket and indicated to Roman to stand away.

  Then he opened the door. The man was lying half on his side across the two seats. He had his eyes closed and Petrov couldn’t see any suggestion of breathing. Petrov was once more a militsiya lieutenant. He didn’t know it yet, but it was the last time the learned instincts of police work would be pre-eminent.

  He untied the feet which were bound together expertly as far as he could tell. He was able to reach across and grasp the rope which tied the man’s hands behind his back. As he did so, Petrov saw the ignition key was switched to On. But the motor had died. He checked the key to see if he was right and he had been. The jeep must have run out of fuel with the engine running. Then he cut the rope around the man’s hands – another expert knot, which he used in arrests if he didn’t have cuffs with him – and saw a flicker in the man’s eyelids. Petrov touched the skin of the man’s face and it was icy. The fuel – and the jeep’s heat – must have ceased several hours earlier.

  He put an arm round the man’s neck and slowly pulled him upright, using the shoulders as far as possible, on to the driver’s seat. A groan came from blue lips. The face was drained of blood. Hands all but frozen. A body that lingered somewhere between life and death. Petrov began to rub the man’s hands, but the man groaned in agony and Petrov saw that one hand was smashed.

  From behind him, he felt a tap on the shoulder. Roman had approached and had a metal flask in his hand. Roman unscrewed the cap and gave it to him. Petrov poured some of the liquid around the man’s blue lips and watched most of it dribble down his chin, but some stayed in his mouth. Not quite dead yet, he thought, but soon. Roman came through on the passenger side of the jeep and took one of the man’s arms between his two and joined Petrov in trying to get some circulation going. Neither of them spoke. But Petrov could see that Roman’s face was shadowed by fear; the fear of being found with a dead or dying OMON officer, perhaps.

  After half an hour, Petrov felt a faint breath on his cheek as he leaned across the man. It came and went, not proper breaths. He saw the side of his face was slashed by a sharp object, a blade perhaps, no, the butt of a gun, he guessed. The blood had congealed. And then he felt a whisper, rather than heard it.

  Petrov leaned in further, his ear next to the man’s mouth. There was a long wait before the strength for even a whisper returned, but Petrov heard the word this time.

  ‘The woman…’ the man rasped and fell silent again.

  Petrov looked at the man’s eyes, but they were still closed. The breath very faint, coming at dangerously slow intervals. But he saw the blue lips twitch and a flicker in the eyelids. He put his ear to the man’s mouth again.

  ‘SVR colonel…’ he heard. ‘The woman…’ again. Then the word, almost inaudible, ‘Traitor.’

  The intervals between breathing became longer and finally stopped altogether. The man was dead.

  On the way back to the boat, Roman asked Petrov what the man had said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

  Roman stopped by the crashed jeep on the beach. They heard a helicopter somewhere over the forest to the east.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Petrov said. ‘We don’t want to be associated with this.’

  Roman dragged himself away from the potential booty of the jeep and they pushed the boat out into the river, the engine starting immaculately again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW when it was exactly that she crossed the Arctic Circle, but it was some time between the forest track where she’d left Dmitry and Dudinka, the port of Norilsk, where she was heading. The place where she was now on the river had little more than an hour of darkness in twenty-four and soon there would be nothing but white nights. But instead of the clear blue skies from the day before, there were wide, low clouds that seemed to stretch and curve around the world.

  The constant light meant that the helicopters didn’t cease their patrols, eyes in the sky looking for her over a terrain of river and forest. She’d watched them fly low down the river, checking small craft, or over the forest trying to find tracks in the remaining snow, or a lone figure walking. She wondered if they’d found Dmitry the Wolf yet. Most likely. She’d left him and the jeep on the only forest track north.
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  She’d also seen one or two patrol boats stopping any traffic on the river. But an ice floe attracted no attention.

  She’d stayed low in the hole she’d dug with the chainsaw and she was dusted with snow and ice from the wind that was coming from the north. It was only the dark pupils of her eyes that were not white.

  By four o’clock in the cloudy, lit-up morning, she’d reached a point a few miles south of Dudinka. She could see in the far distance the bare, concrete, four-storey workers’ quarters of the city and the high derricks of its big river port that exported the nickel and palladium, the copper and platinum from the Gulag city of Norilsk, an hour’s drive to the east. Now was the time to find somewhere to come ashore, before she approached the city. Closer in, there would be roadblocks.

  She listened and heard the chop of a helicopter’s blades receding somewhere over to the left, the west. Maybe it was going towards the oil and gas fields of Vankor. Perhaps they thought she’d try to make a break for it there. Reach the fields to the west where she could lose herself among construction workers and oil gangs. But if they thought she would make a break, they didn’t know her determination now to complete what she had come to do.

  After the sound of the helicopter faded, she listened until there’d been a silence broken only by the river’s flow and which lasted for several minutes.

  She unlashed the pole she’d made back in the forest and which looked, she’d hoped, like a small tree trapped by the ice of the floe. Then she came out of the hole a little way and looked around. A white ice figure in an ice floe.

  The banks were still an empty wilderness, now made up of a forest of the small larch trees that were the only ones to grow this far north. But soon there would be the little wooden houses that preceded the outskirts of the city; the fishermen’s huts, or the weekend dachas by the river. It was time to head for the shore before she reached them.

  She dug the pole behind her back and wedged the end of it against the floe for leverage. Then she dipped its rough-sawn blade into the river and with great effort began to haul herself and the floe against the current of the river. Coming out of it was far harder than it had been to get into the current; twice the pressure of the floe’s weight against the paddle in the water nearly forced her from the hole and into the river. But slowly, sluggishly, the large floe began to nudge away from the faster current in the centre of the river and began to inch diagonally towards the larch bank where the current lessened. It became easier the further she was from the main current, but she was becoming more exhausted by the second, the pressure of the pole in her back agonising.

  There was hardly any foreshore, just trees. As the floe crossed into shallower water where the current was hardly moving, at last it became easier to manoeuvre the huge block of ice. And then it touched the floor of the river a few yards from the trees. The floe rocked on its own weight and Anna stepped into the icy water and was swiftly on the bank. Freezing now from the snow and ice, soaking wet from wading through the river’s edge, she felt her pulse as soon as she was on dry land and found it was dangerously low.

  She felt as if she were made of ice; the wind and the proximity of the floe around her body had reduced her temperature to a dangerously low level. She knew she would have to risk making a fire before she could go on. But there was no darkness to hide the smoke and, from the patrols she’d seen from the river, she guessed there was now a full-scale manhunt out for her.

  But she walked into the covering of the larch trees anyway, snapped some twigs and dug a small hole in the hard ground with a jagged stone. Then she lit the smaller, dry twigs and nurtured a feeble flame until it took hold and she began to stack on larger bits of any dryer wood that she could find. It would take half an hour, maybe, for her to warm up to a safe temperature and to dry her clothes a little but, unless she did, it wouldn’t matter whether they caught up with her or not.

  When she was warmer and relatively dry, she doused the fire with snow and swept some stones over the pit and then she scattered branches randomly on the floor of the forest to hide all traces. There’d been no helicopters for half an hour and she’d been lucky with that. But the smoke might have been seen by anyone on the ground. They might be pin-pointing any sign of smoke in the city’s environs. But her other problem now was hunger.

  She set off through the larch forest, skirting to the south of the city of Dudinka, taking care to stay clear of roads or, if she had to cross, to make sure there was no one in either direction who might spot her. There would be a dacha somewhere in the environs of the city, in the forest itself, and one which was hopefully empty until the weekend or longer. If she kept to the trees and stayed away from roads and tracks, eventually she would find a track that led to a dacha.

  It was afternoon by the time she saw it. She was warmer from the hard walking through trackless forest. She had now skirted round the south of Dudinka and was east of the port, heading in the direction of Norilsk nearly seventy miles inland from the river. It was here that she came to a well-used track that was too neat for a logging road. She stayed deep in the forest but followed its course, fifty to a hundred yards away from it in case of traffic, until she saw the house. It was simply made of rough-sawn logs, criss-crossing each other at the corners, with a pitched tin roof over the top.

  She went around it in a circle. There might be animals, a guard dog, perhaps, if it were permanently occupied. But she saw no vehicles around it. It was a place not just where she could find food but where she could spend the night, recuperate, sleep, before going on. Finally, sure there was no living presence nearby, she approached a door at the rear of the dacha. There was a small window that looked out into the forest next to the door and she looked through the dirty glass to the interior; an old sofa, a wood burner, a carpet worn to its colourless threads, some books, an icon on the far wall. That was all she could see. She tested the door but it was locked on the inside as she’d expected, and padlocked on the outside.

  Next to the door and window was an outside privy and then a shed. The shed too was locked, but easier to break into than the house. She was soon inside. She found a few tools, some seeds ready to plant in the coming month – a task for the coming weekend, perhaps – and some old burlap sacks containing potatoes and other root vegetables. On the shelves around the shed, she felt in the gloom for the trays that would contain the remains of the winter vegetables. There was something for her to eat at least, and there might be more in the dacha, tins most likely. She gathered an armful of the vegetables together from the trays and the sacks. She would eat them later, once she’d broken in.

  Then she found a crowbar, lying on the earth floor and, taking care to look in every direction again as she exited from the shed, she made her way to the rear door of the dacha and broke open the padlock easily. It wasn’t hard to snap the primitive lock on the inside by levering the crowbar against the door and the jamb.

  She realised now that she was trembling, from the cold maybe, but also from some unfamiliar feeling; aloneness, loss, home, Russia. She felt some premonition, but she didn’t know what – the end perhaps. She shook herself out of this and entered the dacha.

  The house had a musty air – the confinement of winter, the stillness of dust and the lack of living things for long periods of time. It seemed there’d been no one here for a while. That was good. She saw there were just two rooms. The kitchen was part of the living room which had windows at the front and back from where she could get a view of anyone approaching in either direction. The bedroom, through an old thin wood door, just had a single window that looked out to the front. That would be from where the danger would come, if it came.

  In the living room, she took the Thompson Contender from its sleeve in the back of her jacket and, unwrapping its waterproofing, laid it on a low wood table. Then she began to take it to pieces, dismantling every part and laying them out carefully. She meticulously oiled each part from a tin she found on a shelf in the kitchen, before putting the gun back to
gether again. She counted out the ammunition she had. She would have liked to have had more of the powerful rifle rounds. Maybe there were some here, in the dacha. It was a place for hunting.

  Then she rolled up her sleeves and peeled the vegetables, filled a pot with water and boiled them on a propane stove. She found some tins in a cupboard and filled her pack with them, saving one to eat with the vegetables. Then she ate hungrily, too fast, and felt a pain in the pit of her stomach which went away and then returned. She knew, too, that she was on the edge of exhaustion. She didn’t make it to the bed, but lay on the sofa, the loaded gun on the worn and splintered wood floor beside her. Then she slept.

  It was not lights that woke her. There was no need for lights in the near twenty-four hour daylight she was in now. But there was a noise and it was that noise which broke through the thin skein of her sleep and brought her out of it into an immediate wakefulness. When she’d been sprung from semi-consciousness – though what the noise was she had as yet no idea – she rolled immediately on to the floor beside the sofa, away from the window, concealed, and had the gun in her hand pointing towards the dacha’s front door.

  She lay breathing deeply on the wood floor and listened. Then she calmed her nerves, shattered from broken sleep, and her breathing quietened. It was the noise of a vehicle, she was certain of that now. When the engine was switched off, she heard the voices that had also perhaps woken her from the shallow sleep; two men, it sounded like.

  She crawled around the sofa and into the bedroom. The voices were coming from directly behind the front door now, out of sight to the left of the window in the bedroom, but they’d been right outside – feet away – when she’d been lying on the floor of the living room. She took the risk of looking up, over the sill of the bedroom window, to the left, and saw an army jeep, with two uniformed conscripts standing a little way from it and looking at the front door. Then they looked in at the window of the living room where she’d been sleeping.