The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  Above her the massive fuselage of the plane shakes and groans in the wind. Covers are going over the plane’s engine cowlings. The way the pilots stay in the cockpit suggests they planned a quick turnaround.

  After the storm dies, the plane will have to be refueled, and she doesn’t see any refueling truck. The pilots will want to carry out a visual check for external damage. The rest of the prisoners will have to be taken off. Counting up, Kat reckons she’ll have less than an hour to get her father out—if he’s even in the camp; if she can find her way to the cell, get in, and get him back here.

  Without warning, the wind drops, and with it the dust screen, so she has a sudden clear view. The jeeps are behind her. The prisoners are to her right, just beyond the aircraft wing, lying facedown on the ground. A guard stands over them with an M16 carbine.

  As Kat begins to walk toward him, the wind whips up again. She keeps going. Grit blows against her face. The baseball cap lifts up from her head and vanishes. Her hand squeezes the butt of the Beretta, finger on the edge of the trigger guard. She fixes her sight on the guard; slight movement in the swirl, his back to her only four, five yards away, but the screeching wind so loud she has to get closer.

  They say that after your first killing, the others come easier, and Kat knows what they mean. With the two at the Kazakh embassy, it was tears she had to stop. With Lancaric, she’d vomited, but that was because of the hand. With the guard looming ahead, whose face she can’t even see, Kat is afraid of what she might have to do and what she might become. But it won’t stop her.

  He turns, startled to see her. Her finger moves inside the trigger guard. He sees the Beretta, but guns are commonplace inside a RingSet base. He’s not hostile.

  She points toward the plane, jabs at the RingSet logo on her overalls, and shows him a piece of paper with the cell number on it.

  His head is scarfed, leaving only a slit for his eyes. He looks beyond her into the storm-filled blackness, shouts something, points to the storm, grabs her wrist, and leads her to the prisoners. He must think she needs to take one of them.

  With her eyes half closed and her face stinging with sand, she sees only prone prisoners.

  The guard takes the scarf off his head, steps behind her, and folds it around her head, tying it to allow her to see. Kat lets him.

  She’s barely noticing. Her eyes, moving along the line of prisoners, have stopped on a man she is convinced is Mike Luxton. She crouches down to be certain. Three days ago, while making her a daisy chain, she’d seen him double knot the same laces. She kicks them. No movement. She walks around to his head. There’s no doubt in her mind. She pulls the scarf down from her mouth.

  “Mike,” she says, loud as she can.

  No answer. Luxton doesn’t move. She’s about to put her lips to his ear when he lunges at her. His fingers curl like a lizard’s tongue around her wrist, pressing her radial artery, doing everything he can to weaken her grip on the Beretta.

  Sandy grit in her mouth, she can’t find her voice. Kat throws herself backward, but those hands and arms, trained hurling bodies from trapeze to trapeze, are too strong. He shifts his weight, knees bent, keeping hold of her, drawing up his legs to get to his feet.

  The guard’s M16’s coming up. The Beretta’s slipping from her hand.

  If Luxton gets it, the guard will shoot. And Luxton will shoot Kat, unless he recognizes her. Blinded by dust, deafened by the wind, working from every sense except sight, Luxton wouldn’t even know the guard is there. He doesn’t seem to know who she is—even that she’s someone trying to help him.

  Kat’s focus is on her other gun, the 21, her left hand bringing it out from her pants and taking off the safety. Kat fires a round into the sky. Luxton doesn’t slacken his grip, but his eyes meet hers under her scarf.

  “It’s Kat,” she shouts, just as the wind lulls again. Dust drops to the ground. Vision clears.

  Confusion flashes onto the guard’s face. He isn’t sure what to do. Kat has the 21 in one hand, held skyward, and now that Luxton’s let go, she’s regained control of the 38.

  Kat stands up, both hands on the Beretta, pointing it at Luxton. “I got him. It’s okay,” she says quickly to the guard. She smiles.

  The guard’s face is dark, blotched with red, his eyes rough and blank; he doesn’t know what she’s saying. Kat smiles confidently, but over his shoulder, shimmering toward them, comes another rolling wave of sand.

  The blow to her shoulder makes her cry out, and she feels the Beretta snatched from her hand. She’s stumbling, arms out to break her fall, to keep her on her feet. Luxton barges past her, shoulder down, head butting the guard in the midriff. His cuffed hands swing together like a baseball bat and hit him in the face. The man’s down on the ground. Luxton snatches the 38 from Kat and positions himself to fire.

  “No!” screams Kat.

  Luxton hesitates, and Kat is there, her hand on his arm. Luxton’s expression flares angrily, but he obeys her.

  “Tie him, then,” says Luxton, keeping the Beretta straight on the guard’s face. Kat undoes the scarf he gave her, brings the guard’s hands behind his back, ties them. Luxton’s on his knees, checking the strength of Kat’s knot.

  Then he lies facedown, arms stretched out, pulling the cuffs as far apart as he can. “Now, the barrel hard against the link,” he says. “Shoot it through.”

  The sound of the gun blast is drowned in the roar of the wind. They can barely see each other. She thinks she hears him cry out, feels his hand on her arm, fumbling down to take her hand, fingers clasping over the Beretta, his lips against her ear. “Keep hold of me, and we walk,” he shouts.

  They move, leaning forward, the wind coming straight at them. If anyone else is around, Kat can’t see them.

  “We’ve got half an hour at best,” yells Luxton.

  “Before the plane goes?” screams back Kat.

  Kat’s only inches away, and she can just about make him out shaking his head. “No. Before we get killed. There’ll be no way out of this place.”

  “But you came before.”

  He speeds up. His grip goes from her left hand to her wrist. “That took six months’ planning. You can’t just walk into a place like this.”

  “What about—”

  “You want to see your father?” yells Luxton.

  A bellow of wind knocks her back. Luxton keeps his balance. He’s holding her upright, and as her head is jerked around by the gale, she feels the rush of a bullet passing within inches of her head. Something behind her is moving with purpose, while everything else is a random swirl.

  She fires twice. She feels the gun buck, sees its spark. She hears the remnants of a man’s cry whisked away by the weather as he’s hit.

  Luxton drops her wrist and runs back. The guard has fallen to his knees, curled like a baby, rocking from side to side, head bent forward like he’s in prayer, jacket red with blood and his hand trembling around his neck, where her bullet has caught him.

  Luxton takes the M16 and shoots the guard in the head.

  Kat goes rigid. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you,” she accuses.

  “You come to a death camp and expect no killing?” Luxton’s down with the corpse, searching through the clothes, transferring papers from the dead man’s pockets to his own.

  Luxton brings her toward him, puts his lips to her ear. “The storm comes in cycles of three or four. We’ve had two lulls. We’ll get two more if we’re lucky. During the next lull, whoever freed him might be able to sound the alarm.”

  Kat nods, but pushes his hands away. “You know where my father is?” she shouts.

  Luxton points the way they were heading, and just then the wind dies. The dust shield drops to the ground, and Kat’s looking into Luxton’s face, his eyes streaked and hard, the same man who four days ago guided her back from Balham and warned her away from all of this.

  Like Kat, he wears a face that has crossed too many bridges too quickly. A few minutes ago, he was in a line of pri
soners slated for execution. Now, all he wants to do is to get Kat to see her father before they both get killed.

  His hand is on her head, the way a cop pushes a suspect into a police car. “Down,” he says. “Down and don’t move.”

  He keeps her face pressed into the ground as a jeep drives past. His calluses scratch the skin on the back of her neck, pushing forcefully, then relaxing and gently staying there until the engine sound dims. She looks up and sees the vastness of the steppe, lit by sunshine exposing them as a searchlight pins a fugitive.

  His hand hesitates, hovers, and moves away. She feels his mouth press into her hair, then leave. They wait until the next surge of sandstorm comes.

  When Kat gets to her feet, something sweeps through her, part warm, part cold, part antidote.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Friday, 7:33 a.m., BST/2:33 p.m., Voz Island

  Balloons of dust roll through the camp again, turning daylight to darkness, fresh air to choking fog, the swell of dust cloud darkening like a bruise, making Kat feel as if she’s being engulfed by the ash from a volcano.

  “This will be the last cycle,” says Luxton. “It’ll go on longer. Ten minutes perhaps. When it drops, we’ll be exposed.”

  Luxton pulls on her wrist.

  “Over there. That’s where he was last time.”

  His hand is on a metal door of flaking black paint. Kat can see no more than a few inches ahead of her. She goes to the end of the building and counts them down: F-10687, F-10688, and, her heart locked with fear, F-10689, white stenciled letters, just like in the photograph. She feels down it, searching for the lock. Luxton touches her shoulder and shakes his head. She thinks he’s telling her that it’s unlocked, but only reads his lips, can’t hear a word.

  She pushes, but it’s solid. Shoulder down, Luxton rams the door. Only the top edge gives an inch. The bottom is wedged.

  Luxton’s hand is pulling at the Beretta to shoot out the lock.

  She puts up her hand to stop him and bangs on the door. Something’s happening at the bottom, like a rat scrabbling a way through. She pushes, pushes harder, and she swears she hears a voice. The movement gets more frantic. Luxton’s weight is with hers, and they break the door open, at least partway. Something’s blocking it, but there’s enough room for her to squeeze inside.

  She steps into sudden quiet and blackness. The door is jammed by a pile of dust that has blown in and then been sucked back against it by the wind currents.

  Kat reaches out, feels a wall of rough, concrete cinder blocks. She sweeps her hand in front of her.

  “Hello?” she says hesitantly.

  An unfamiliar sensation creeps over her, a tingling of the senses that has nothing to do with weather or the camp, but with a fear of her own personal emotions. She takes another step forward into silence.

  The door gives more, and Luxton comes in, flashlight in hand, beam sweeping the room, picking up details of newspaper and magazine clippings on the wall.

  The room is bigger than she’d imagined, 20 by 15 at least, a good height to the ceiling, with a bathroom off to one side, strip lighting on the wall, an air-conditioning unit, a writing desk with a separate lamp, a double bed made up with a white sheet, and a bedside table scattered with books. The bathroom is basic, but clean, with a grilled air vent.

  Kat absorbs it all in seconds; not so much a prison cell as a motel room floating in hell.

  Taped up above the desk, neatly arranged, dated pictures chronicle the rise of Tiina Gracheva to the very height of Russian money and power. In the week that Max Grachev was conceived, she stands as a young KGB interpreter with Kat’s father in Red Square. Next to it, a different one of her father and Tiina duck hunting in Smolensk, just the two of them. Then they show Tiina, in uniform, as a senior official in the KGB; later in fashionable suits as a businesswoman; Tiina stepping out of a limousine; at her daughter’s graduation; at a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Yulya outside an oil refinery; with the same daughter at a banquet in a chandeliered hall; only Yulya, nothing of Max or Lara.

  Kat searches without subtlety: desk drawer out; papers on the floor; books’ pages checked, then dropped; hands feeling under the bed; light switches on—no power; hands sweeping the mattress; sheet pulled back, crumpled, and dropped; bedside table drawer out, tipped over, dropped; fingers inside the lamp shade; mattress upended; first pillow out of its case, shaken, dropped.

  Luxton’s hand is on her arm, but she shakes him off.

  “We have to go,” he says.

  Second pillow, half out of its case, her fingers brush the corner of a piece of card, and Kat stops. She pulls it out.

  “Kat,” shouts Luxton. “He’s not here. He was, but he’s gone.”

  Her eyes are now adjusted enough to recognize a familiar photograph, crumpled, pushed from hiding place to hiding place, one edge torn, but everyone’s there—Dad at the back; Suzy by his side; Mom leaning against the cherry tree at the orphanage in Lancaster, holding Kat’s hand; Grandma Polinski behind them, with a blur of pink blossom at the back; the same picture Suzy carried in her big, ugly ring.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “He was here.”

  Luxton has her by the shoulders, propelling her out the door. The dust twists and dances, suspended.

  A single shot cracks above the sound of the storm.

  She senses Luxton behind her, sees the weapon flash at her again, but the shots are going wide. Then her attacker looms in front of her, closer than she expects, and she fires for the legs, which buckle. Two gunshots; not from her. They fall together, her cheek grazing against the rough cloth of his pants and the sand.

  Luxton has his weapon leveled at the guard’s head. Kat’s face is inches from the guard’s. He’s short, stubby, not much taller than Kat. His eyes shiver, fingers splayed, head shaking side to side, no pride to play with.

  Kat shows him the family photograph, her finger jabbing onto the face of her father.

  “Where,” says Luxton, then switches to Russian: “Gde on?” he shouts, pulling the guard up. He points through the dust cloud, and Luxton says, “Come on, then.”

  By now they’re familiar with the cycles of the storm. In its last seconds, the weather becomes harsher. They have a few minutes, each moment getting darker and darker, the dust more abrasive.

  They reach a row of whitewashed concrete cells, no windows, no doors, just iron bars, through which she sees a man, naked but for a couple of tiny threadbare rags that barely cover a quarter of his emaciated body. His feet are fettered, and his arms are wrenched up and tied to a metal ring in the wall above him.

  From Luxton’s flashlight, Kat sees a trickle of urine run out from under him, then as the beam hits the wall behind, she spots another man, but from the stench reaching her, he must be dead, and the patch that she first thinks is a massive bruise on his back is in fact a blackness of crawling maggots.

  A rat with its baby in its mouth darts from the shadows and bolts between the bars to another cell. Hand on her mouth to control a retch: The rat was feeding on the human body, left to rot with her father in the cell.

  “Keys,” yells Luxton at the guard, who, still at gunpoint, fumbles in his pocket. Luxton snatches them from him, opens the door, and lets Kat go in.

  As she steps forward, Kat sees a human shape, then its frailty, and as she recognizes her father, she also sees herself in his face.

  Luxton takes John Polinski’s body weight as Kat unties the rope holding up his hands. Her father’s eyes are shut tight with pain. He feebly grasps the hanging ropes to hold the weight of his arms, the pain in his shoulder joints too excruciating for him to move them.

  Slowly, slowly the stick-thin arms come down, and the crusted eyes open slightly.

  Her father is in front of her, his face ash pale, lined and worn. Skin hangs over his cheekbones, and his shoulders jut out like tent stakes.

  “It’s me, Kat,” she manages, sounding so stupidly formal.

  The w
ay his eyes, still sharp, dance around, she can tell he recognizes her, examining his daughter and the situation. There’s no surprise, no great joy. It’s as if, although he sees it’s Kat, his mind is not used to dealing with happiness. His gaze moves directly to her face, testing himself, until he loses his courage and, shifting from love to furtiveness, he looks somewhere behind him.

  John Polinski shakes. He’s sitting on the earth floor now. His trembling hand touches his own face.

  He holds out thin, shaking arms toward his daughter. Kat sinks to the ground to be with him, the drum of her pulse beating in her ears, as she touches first his fingers, then gently takes his hand, scared of the sores on it, but looks into his face and sees his eyes filled like never before at the sight of his daughter.

  Kat cups her hand around his bony shoulder. Luxton’s hands are around the other one.

  Outside, there’s only the guard, lying facedown, hands tied behind him. Visibility is still at a few feet. If anyone else is close, Kat can’t see them, and they can’t see her.

  They carry her father out, then lower him to the ground next to the guard.

  Luxton has the pistol on the guard. “Change him,” he says, undoing the man’s bound wrists one-handed.

  She lifts the guard’s torso, then his feet, while Luxton unzips his jumpsuit, pulls it off, and holds it out.

  “Are you able to put this on?” he says.

  Polinski nods. Luxton reties the guard, and they get her father to his feet and awkwardly pull the jumpsuit onto him. It’s way too big, but it does the job.

  “We’ll carry you,” Luxton yells at Polinski. He and Kat make a seat for him with their hands, and they set off in the direction of the airplane.

  Kat’s lungs are bursting; her lips chapped, hands crying with pain to take the weight of her father, feet clumsy on the shifting ground, hair blown into her face.

  Without warning, Luxton stops. Visibility is so bad that a few steps farther, and they would have run into the underbelly of the plane. They lower John Polinski to his feet.