Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

  nov? You're not going to play daft buggers? If the whole of Hut z were to sit down . . .

  The prison diet had not entirely stripped away his fat.

  Poshekhonov made a faintly ridiculous sight as he rolled down onto his buttocks.

  And the zek on his right followed him, and the zek on his left.

  First the fraud, then the parasite, then the hooligan.

  And like a line of tin soldiers who will keel over when one is pushed, the zeks of Hut z sat down.

  For a moment only Mamarev was standing, and he looked hard at the Adjutant and saw only indecision, then he too lowered himself to the snow.

  The Adjutant pursed his cold-chapped lips, wet them with his tongue. Behind five ranks of standing prisoners a whole line was sinking, dropping from his sight.

  'Request Major Kypov to come here, and suggest to him that his attendance is immediate.'

  The Adjutant rasped the instruction to an N C O , who turned and ran towards the Administration building.

  It was a familiar place, almost a place that was home.

  As Holly was led inside Yuri Rudakov's office he felt the warmth .worm beneath his clothes. He looked warily at Rudakov while the warder's keys unfastened his manacles.

  He saw on the Political Officer's face the smile of studied friendship.

  'Sit down.'

  'Thank you.'

  'You have suffered no injury during y o u r . . . your expedition?'

  'There is no heating in the SHIzo, my clothes are still wet.'

  'Of course. Put your tunic on the radiator, your socks too.'

  'Thank you.'

  Holly laid his tunic on the hot pipes and the worn socks beside them and the heat tingled his fingers.

  'Your shirt, ypur trousers?'

  'They're all right. Thank you again.'

  'Coffee? Something to eat?'

  'No, thank you.'

  Yuri Rudakov rested his elbows on the desk, balanced his chin against his hands. They could have been friends, they might have been companions. Two educated young men.

  Their smells divided them - Rudakov rich with the talc from his bathroom, Holly ripe with the sweat stains from his flight. Their cheeks separated them - Rudakov close-shaved, Holly raw with a week's stubble.

  'I would not have credited that you could have been so crass, so stupid.' Rudakov said. 'You believed in the possibility of escape, Holly. You believed so strongly in the possibility of running clear that you even sent me a little letter. That showed a touching faith in your ability to leave us.' There seemed a mocking serenity in Rudakov. That was his outward armour. There were two paths he could take.

  There was friendship, there was the fist. His choice was based not on kindness but on expediency. 'You have confessed to murder. You make a confession and at the same time you run away like a truant from a teacher. Did no one ever tell you how many get clear from the Dubrovlag? You know, Holly, down the road is Camp 5 where we keep the foreigners - addicts, currency offenders, drunks, religious maniacs - never has one of them done anything as stupid as to try to break out. For a foreigner it is impossible . . . '

  'What are you going to do?'

  'Why should I do anything, Holly? It is on you that we wait.'

  'No riddles, please. You don't sleep when you're running, nor when you're on a concrete floor.'

  if I do not have your statement then I do not interfere in the case of a man held at Yavas. If I have your statement then I take upon myself a different course of action. That is not a riddle.'

  'You're a pig, Rudakov, a stinking, lousy pig.'

  'You don't have to be theatrical, Michael. If you did not want to meet me you could have stayed in England. If you did not wish to make a statement to me you could have avoided introducing excrement in the water supply of the barracks.' There was a change now in Rudakov, a cut of hard steel. 'He was a young boy who died. He was a conscript. He served his country, he had done no harm to you. You had no right to murder him.'

  'What guarantees do you give me?'

  'You cannot ask for guarantees, you are owed nothing.

  You have to trust me when I say that an innocent man will not die at Yavas because of what you have done. You have no alternative but to trust me.'

  Holly looked down at the floor, saw the blisters on the joints of his toes where the skin had been rubbed away by boots that were sufficient for the slow shuffle of the prisoner, inadequate for the gallop of the escaper. He was no longer certain. He had boasted of his strength, and his strength was found out and false. The life and death of a man at Yavas had rotted it.

  He could have cried out the name of Mikk Laas, he could have cried for an older fighter's forgiveness.

  'You'd better get a sheet of paper,' Holly whispered.

  Vasily Kypov strode across the compound. He glowered at the front lines that stood in dumb hostile insolence. Relief at his coming lit the face of the Adjutant.

  He recognized the signs. Any trained and experienced officer would have recognized the signs of approaching mutiny. You catch mutiny early, he had been told that at some long ago staff officers' course, you catch it early and you belt the balls off it. He saw the widely spaced cordon of guards around the lines of prisoners, and the three small groups of warders who huddled together with only their truncheons to sustain them. Too few men, he decided.

  He reached the Adjutant, but did not concern himself with returning the salute.

  'I want every man out of the barracks,' Kypov hissed. 'And I want the perimeter guard doubled.'

  'Most of the men who are in reserve are at Visitors'

  Reception .. .'

  'Get them here.'

  'Who is to supervise the visits? There is the searching of visitors . . . '

  'Fuck the visits, fuck the visitors. I want them out.'

  The zeks in the front rank had heard. The Adjutant watched the bitter hardening of their faces. Visits were the cornerstone of their lives. Visits were precious.

  is that wise, Commandant?'

  'I will say what is wise.'

  In a camp of Strict Regime such asZhKh 385/3/1, prisoners are entitled by law to two brief and one prolonged visit each year. A brief visit may last up to a maximum of four hours, a prolonged visit may be extended to three days with prisoner and relative sleeping together in small rooms set aside in a secure section of the Administration block. Before and after both brief and prolonged visits, the men and women and children who have travelled to the camp to see their loved ones are subjected to a vigorous and painstaking body-search.

  Weakened by their winter journey, depressed by the surroundings, the relatives on this Tuesday morning sat in the wooden hut beyond the outer door of the Administration building and waited to be strip-searched. The hut was full, the search cubicles already occupied, when Kypov's order found its destination.

  The daughter, aged twelve, of a fifteen-year man was in one cubicle, her skirt up around her waist, her knickers at her ankles, feeling the fingers of a wardress pry her open in the hut for contraband.

  A farmer from a collective outside Kazah, and past seventy years and the father of an army deserter, was in the second cubicle, with his trousers on the floor and his body bent forward to expose his anus.

  The mother of a thief, who had travelled eight hundred kilometres and made five connections, tipped the contents of her plastic handbag onto the search table.

  The son of an Adventist with four years to serve looked at the crumbled wreckage of a cake first torn apart and then passed for inspection.

  These people, and those crowding the benches at the side of the hut, were informed of the order given by the Camp Commandant. They wailed in plaintive union, and the guards linked arms and jostled them out through the door, back into the cold and the snow. Prisoners' scum. The women shouted the loudest. They screamed at the smooth dark surface of the high wooden fence, they shouted at the young men in their high watch-towers.

  Holly heard the screaming. Cocked his head for
a moment, then ignored the noise of disturbance.

  'As a teenager I occasionally went with my father to meetings of the OUN - that is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. I don't remember that I was ever particularly interested in what I heard there. I thought it was pretty sterile.'

  'You will have been on their files from that time, Michael, the files of the Intelligence people.'

  'I suppose so. When I left school I went to Technical College. I was studying to be an engineer . . . '

  Yuri Rudakov was hunched over his desk, writing in a fast scrawl. It was not easy for him to mask his exhilaration.

  Holly was waffling, Holly was telling it his own way, in his own time. Rudakov would not interrupt, just write until his arm ached.

  Kypov heard the screaming.

  The zeks in their lines heard the screaming.

  The guards who circled the prisoners heard the screaming, and they looked into the burning eyes of many hundreds of men and saw a hatred, and among the conscripts none had seen that loathing so co-ordinated before.

  The detachment doubled into the compound.

  A dozen more armed men. Kypov's army was augmented to twenty-five guards from the M V D force, fifteen warders with truncheons, four dog handlers. And he had wire fences behind him, and the watch-towers with their mounted machine-guns. He would use the detachment as a wedge to break up the mass of prisoners. He would break the will of one rank, then the second, then the third.

  Hut 3 formed the forward line.

  'Front rank, form into fives . .. Move! Move, you bastards!

  Kypov might have yelled at a mountain. The front rank stayed solid. Not even the trusties moved, not even the

  'stoolies'. The trusties and 'stoolies' had visits.

  'Put a dog in, break them up.'

  The sergeant handler was positioned behind the lines of prisoners. He faced the sitting backs of the men of Hut 2.

  His dog was king, master of the pack. A black and tawny German shepherd, huge within its long and rough-haired coat, weighing 3 5 kilos. He slipped the leash at the collar.

  The dog was trained to attack the zeks, taught from the time it had been a puppy. The dog ran forward, low and devastating in its assault. The white teeth buried themselves into Poshekhonov's shoulder.

  It was the moment that the dam burst. For two, three brief seconds, the sergeant handler saw his dog worrying at the shoulder of a small, fat prisoner who scrabbled to get clear of the animal's jaws. Then dog and prisoner were engulfed. The zeks from either side, the zeks who stood to the front, threw themselves upon his dog. Once the sergeant handler thought he heard a yelp of pain. He saw the pounding movement of the zeks. And as suddenly as they had moved, they parted, and as the stillness fell upon the zeks the sergeant handler reached for the holster flap at his waist.

  His dog had a strip of padded tunic material clamped in its jaws. His dog was lying on its side, strangely twisted. His dog had been killed by the zeks.

  Around the prisoners from the cordon of guards was the noise of bullets sliding into the breeches of rifles.

  'Over their heads... Fire!' Kypov shouted.

  'This firm I was working for, Letterworth Engineering and Manufacturing Company had several contracts from the Soviet Union. Sovlmport wasn't the biggest of our clients but it was a healthy one, one that we kept sweet with. Well, it was a turbine order that we were chasing, worth two million sterling to us. We're not a big firm and that was good money. Along tripped Afghanistan, then we had the Olympic fracas. Our contract was in the pipeline but stuck there.

  Mark Letterworth wanted it unstuck but he wasn't the man to have the time on his hands to be sitting around Moscow.

  He asked me to go. Seemed obvious really. I speak the language, I'd worked on the specifications . . . '

  The sound of gunfire crashed through the room.

  Instinctively Holly fell to the floor from his chair.

  After the first volley another was fired, then a third.

  Rudakov was on his knees clawing open the lower drawer of his desk, finding the strapping of the shoulder holster that carried the small Makharov pistol, threading it over his chest and back. He crawled across the floor to the doorway.

  He yelled for an Orderly. He was greeted with silence, an empty corridor, deserted offices. His place was in the compound and he had no escort to take Michael Holly back to the SHIzo block. He swore, he caught at Holly's arm as the Englishman was pulling on his socks and boots and tunic.

  He delayed long enough for the tunic to be over Holly's shoulders, not for his boots to be tied. He propelled Holly out of the office, down the corridor, out into the compound.

  He gasped at the sight in front of him.

  In a great flattened antheap the prisoners of Camp 3, Zone I, knelt and lay prone. In the snow beside the long boots of the guards was the twinkle of discharged cartridge cases. He barely noticed as Holly drifted from him into the fallen mess of men and was lost to his sight. He hurried to Kypov.

  'They won't go to work, we've fired over their heads.'

  Rudakov did not hesitate, knew no caution with his advice. 'Better to calm them than confront them. Withdraw the troops and the dogs - the "stoolies" will give us the names. Once you've fired over their heads you can only fire into them, and that's a blood bath, that's the end of us all.'

  'You're yellow, Rudakov, you're a bastard coward.'

  Rudakov yelled back, 'I'm not a coward, I'm not stupid.

  Your way we lose, my way we win.'

  'It's running away.'

  'Call me a coward again, and I'll break you . . . '

  Rudakov, a bright young officer with a future on the KGB

  ladder did not know of the beating of Feldstein. Nor did he know of the sit-down in the snow, by Chernayev first and then by all the men of Hut 2. Nor did he know of the killing of the sergeant handler's dog. Rudakov's sure confidence won the day over the wavering uncertainty of his Commandant.

  As they backed out through the compound's gates inside a porcupine of rifles, Rudakov said, 'Within two hours we'll be back . . . when they're cold and hungry.'

  Chapter 20

  The compound was a new place. A new place because the great gates had closed behind the withdrawal of the Commandant and the guards and the warders. Never before in any man's time in the Zone had the forces of the regime scuttled to safety behind those gates.

  Who now were the prisoners?

  Only the guards in the watch-towers were visible to the men on the inside, and they were distant dolls high above their ladders and half-hidden by the sides of their platforms.

  It was unbelievable to the zeks, it was rich wine to these long stretch men on Strict Regime. It had never happened before.

  How were they to respond?

  As the gates slipped shut behind the retreat of Kypov and his force, the zeks had risen from their stomachs and their knees.

  They swept the snow from their tunics and trousers and felt the excitement that comes only from unscheduled success. Kypov had fled from his own camp. So unbelievable, so extraordinary that the delight was merged with fast suspicion. From where would the hammer blow come?

  Without a leader the zeks were pulled as if by a magnet towards the very centre of the compound. They gathered between the living huts and close to the north wall of the Kitchen. There seemed a certain security there, and for many the sight of the wire and the watch-towers was blocked off by the buildings.

  Eight hundred men and each offering his opinion or listening to that of another, and interrupting, and shouting and whispering. But there was still the sight of the steel-clad stack of the Factory chimney. Only a narrow smoke column drifted from the chimney-top. No work in the Factory. The civilian foreman would be beside the lathes and saws and varnish pots. One h o u r . . . perhaps a few hours, and then the Commandant would seek to lead them back to the Factory.

  Most men felt their freedom as a passing pleasure.

  A shimmer of a whisper sped amongst
the prisoners.

  Fingers pointed towards the north-west corner of the compound. A guard was climbing the ladder to a watch-tower and he held the rungs with one hand, and in the other was the dark outline of a machin-gun, and his body was wrapped in belt ammunition. They watched him climb.

  Then the pointing fingers changed direction as the flock of birds will turn to another course. The fingers pointed to the south-west corner watch-tower, and another guard was climbing and another machine-gun was carried to a vantage platform. And the fingers swung again and the direction was south-east. And swung again, and to the north-east.