by Adam Hall
It was the first time I'd taken an uncalculated risk during a mission, and now I knew why the idea had always frightened me: with a calculated risk, when you know most of the data, most of the hazards and the chances of escape, you can keep a modicum of control over the operation. Without that, you're plunging into the labyrinth blind, and may God have mercy on you.
It was something I'd been certain I would never do, however hot a mission was running, however urgent the need, the one thing that as a seasoned professional I would never expose myself to, because of its deadly threat to survival.
The uncalculated risk.
Mea culpa. But stay, be gentle with me, my good friend, grant me your charity, for madness of whatever kind can come upon any man at any time.
Sleep came at last from the shadowed silence of the night, broken only by the distant howling of the wolves across the snow.
18: BONES
'What's your name?'
I stowed my spare mittens in the empty orange crate along with the rest of my stuff. The crate was my locker, nailed to the wall above the bunk.
I looked round. 'Berinov.'
'Berinov.' He said it slowly, giving it a sarcastic twist, as if I'd said it was Napoleon. 'That the only name you got?'
He was a big man with a sloping forehead and eyes buried in puckered flesh, a hare lip distorting his mouth. Other men were gathered in the hut, getting what warmth they could out of the dying stove. It was evening, and a time for rest.
'It's the only name,' I told the big man, 'I'm giving you.'
'And why's that, now?'
There was a hook on the wall by the crate, made from a bent rod, but we never took off our coats until we were ready for bed. They'd taken the one I'd worn here at the check-in yesterday and given me a regulation issue with broad stripes on it; it wasn't lined but it was thick, and kept out most of the cold.
'Whoreson,' the big man said. 'I asked you a question.' Some of the men were turning to watch. They'd seen this before, had been victims of it themselves, probably, the old sweat and the new recruit routine. This was my second day in Gulanka.
'You're in my bunk space,' I told him. 'You can leave.'
'I'm in your what?'
I went to move past him to get nearer the stove, but he stopped me with a push of his hand. 'You telling me what I can do?' Feigning total disbelief, not a terribly good actor. He smelled of sweat and stale beer.
'What's your name?' I asked him.
'None of your fucking business, whoreson.'
'All right, then let's call you Mickey Mouse. You've only got one little problem, Mickey. You're full of shit.' I wanted to put a stop to this before I got bored, and there was only one way to do it.
'Say it again?' Cocking his head as if he really hadn't heard.
'I said you're full of shit.'
His eyes glinted and he pulled back his right elbow with his fist bunched and I looked around the whole of the exposed target area and decided on a sword hand to the right carotid artery because he was leaving plenty of time for it, and as he dropped I drove a finger into the spatulate nerve and got a scream that filled the hut, drove it in again and got another one and stopped right there because I didn't want him to start vomiting, there's always the risk with this strike because of the pain.
'Holy Christ,' someone said from near the stove, his voice hushed. I assumed nobody had put the big man down before.
He was rolling on the boards, hands clutching his jawbone with his eyes squeezed shut.
'Mickey,' I said, 'you're in my way there.' He didn't answer, quite possibly couldn't, so I took a light kick at the median nerve in his arm to wake him up. 'Mickey, you've got three seconds. Crawl if you have to, but get out. One.'
He was moaning now but I knew he could hear.
Some of the dogs were voicing outside, having heard the screams.
'Two.'
I hoped one of the guards didn't come in.
'Three.'
But he'd got the message, was crawling now, his big calloused hands reaching ahead of him and dragging his body after. He could at least have tried to get up, for God's sake, at least put on a show.
I watched to make sure he kept moving, then went over to the stove, where two or three of the men gave me room.
'Christ,' one of them said, 'You know who he is?'
'Of course. Mickey Mouse.'
'Could you teach me that?'
I swung the pick again, brought down stones, working my way along the vein.
'Could I teach you what?'
He was young, not more than twenty, light in his body, hunched, defensive; I'd noticed the way he walked, head down, glancing from side to side as if he expected trouble. 'What you did to Gradov.'
'Who's he?'
'The big guy in the hut.'
'Oh. What's your name, son?'
'Babichev.'
'Christian name.'
'Alex.'
He'd stopped work, was giving me the whole of his attention, and I glanced along the pit at the guard. 'Keep working, Alex,' I said, and swung my pick again and caught the glint of nickel.
'Yeah.' He saw the change in the vein too. 'You've struck,' he said.
'Looks like it. Why do you want me to teach you things like that?'
'I get picked on. You know?' He turned his face to me, his cheeks pinched from the weather, the cold, the misery, his eyes in a permanent flinch. 'There's no women here.'
'You haven't tried protecting yourself?'
He swung his pick. 'You don't understand. I'm not a big guy.'
'But you've got muscle.'
'Oh, sure. Yeah, I've tried hitting, a bit, but they like that, they like me to struggle, you know? They come at me two at a time, see, sometimes more. You don't know what it's like.'
I got the pans from the trolley and we started hammering the iron wedges into the vein. 'All right,' I said, 'I'll give you one or two of the basics. But it's not something you can pick up in five minutes.'
With a quick shivering laugh: 'Okay, but we've got more than five minutes to spare in this place, right? Rest of our lives.'
By the third day I knew more about Gulanka.
The twelve-foot-high reinforced steel fencing with its inward-curving scimitar frieze was bolted to the rock face of the massif with half-inch-thick iron strips; the rock face itself was sheer, and floodlit by night. The thirty war-trained pit-bull guard dogs could be unleashed within a second by their handlers from quick-action snap cleats, and they understood the command to kill; they were fed the minimum rations to keep them hunting fit and their staple diet was fresh red meat from the goats that were farmed at the side of the camp. The gates under the enormous archway where the trains came in were routinely manned by dogs and sentries, but were impenetrable anyway and fitted with foot-long, one-inch diameter bolts. When a train came through with supplies or prisoners and took away nickel and waste, the guards were trebled and armed with Chinese assault rifles, and every inmate of the camp was confined to quarters until the train had left and the gates were bolted again.
At night the main thousand-watt floodlights were supplied with current from three huge stationary diesels that ran from six in the morning until midnight, when the floods were switched off, to leave marker lights along walkways and around the buildings. A shifting roster of fifty guards was on duty through the clock. Most buildings outside the hutment area were out of bounds, but inmates could walk along the fence if they wanted to and look through it.
Most of the supplies for keeping 700 men alive came in by train from Khatanga, on the river from the estuary opening into the Arctic Ocean, but in the short summers there were a few crops raised in the camp, mostly corn and potatoes.
No prisoners were ever released from Gulanka: they were brought here, without exception, to serve a life sentence. When they died – rarely past middle age – their bodies were sent by train to their relatives, if they could afford the one-million-ruble fee for this service. Mostly they were buried here
outside the wire, with nothing to mark their grave. There were two priests at the camp, one Catholic and one Russian Orthodox, but they were drunk half the time, shacked up with a wood-burning stove and free rations of vodka and magazines from Moscow to read.
The rest, for most of the year, was snow. It was borne in from the coast on gale-force winds, to drift and pile against the fence and between the wooden hutments, sometimes bringing the crews out of the mines to clear emergency gangways through it. In summer the sun was seen on good days, and you could take off your coats and hoods and scarves and mittens, and sometimes even bare your arms to feel the warmth.
In winter, which lasted from September to May, wood smoke hung across the camp in a permanent fog except when the winds cleared it for a day or two. Half the inmates suffered from lung trouble, and emphysema was commonplace, the leading cause of death.
Outside the camp there were only the mountains and the snows, with at night the vast silence concealing and then revealing, as the wind shifted, the voicing of the wolves.
'They feed them meat,' Igor told me. 'It's to keep them near the camp.'
'You mean people escape?'
He cast his milky eye at me, his huge knife stopping its work on the pit prop. Today the snow was too heavy to allow crews to reach the mines, and we'd been detailed to the timber shop. Igor was one of the few ageing inmates I'd seen here, but he wasn't given light duties: he was as gnarled as an oak with a voice coming out of a barrel, and for this I respected him as a survivor.
'Escape? Well, yes, but none too often. Last year there was a character who tried it, croaked a guard one night and put on his uniform next day and went out with a mining crew and buried himself in the snow till evening – you can keep warm that way if you're well wrapped up. Then the same night we heard the wolves howling, a real chorus this time, and a search party went out and found a few scraps of this poor bugger left on the bones.' He worked his knife again. 'There's a big pack out there, twenty or thirty of 'em with a huge dominant male. You think the wire's something to get through? Try getting through the wolves. That's why they feed them, so they're never far away.'
I finished a pole and started on another one. The wood was seasoned, pine-scented, the slivers coming away clean under the knife. The guard was at the other end of the shed near the door, out of earshot if we kept our voices low.
'Have there been any other attempts?'
'To escape?'
'Yes.'
'Some. People get wire fever, in this place. They'll run at the fence sometimes, yelling their heads off. Those are the new ones in, been here only weeks. Could catch up with you – you never know what you'll do, the first weeks, never know yourself till Gulanka gets to you. Them as gets the fever gets put under special guard for a time, because it's after that they try and escape. You interested in escaping? Say no and you'll be lying in your teeth.' He swung his head to check on the guard, then looked back at me. 'What would you say's the easiest way of getting out of this place?'
'The train.'
'Right. It's kind of obvious, ain't it? We had a character try that one. He'd been a rich man, back in the city, in the mob, name was Nyazov, I knew him well, he was in my hut.' The 'city' was Moscow. Everyone talked about the 'city', a shining paradise at the end of the railroad line. 'He bribed the guard who was taking roll call. Tell you something – before they let a train come through those gates we're all confined to quarters and then roll's called, and if only one of us out of six or seven hundred doesn't answer his name – isn't seen to answer his name – the hunt's up, and until he's found they won't open them gates. You know Colonel Kalentsov? The commandant? He's been in charge here for twenty years, and takes pride in the fact that in the last twenty years no one's ever got out of Gulanka.' With a shrug, 'He's not a bad skipper, though, never touches the vodka, never -'
'What happened to the man who tried to get out on the train?'
Igor's milky eye was on me again. 'I'll tell you. Like I say, he bribed the guard so he wasn't down as missing. Then he got a civvy coat from somewhere and walked down to the gates with a whole bunch of official-looking papers in his hand. All the rolls had reported every man present in his hut so they let the train come in. Well this character Nyazov was going up and down handing out these papers – I saw one of them afterwards, they was just copies of a new daily routine order he'd filched from the orderly room.' He kicked his pine shavings together and dumped them into the bin. 'Then the train got up steam and started rolling, and you know what this character did? He knew it'd be stupid to just climb on board, so he waited till he thought no one was looking and made a dive underneath. Idea was, I reckon, to hang on to the struts and find space enough to wedge himself in for the ride.'
He'd stopped work again for a minute, and the guard gave him a shout. 'Get a move on, then!'
'Fuck yourself,' Igor said under his breath, and struck down again with the huge blade to make a perfect slice. 'But he came unstuck, poor old Nyazov, couldn't hang on for more than a couple o' minutes, lost his grip. They heard him scream, one o' the guards told me afterwards, when he went down under the wheels. They brought the two halves of his body back into camp, shoved 'em in a box and took 'em out there to the graveyard. Next morning at general roll call we got all the details from the commandant, told us to take it as a warning of what happens when people try and escape. Of course he'd been out of his bloody mind, Nyazov, because it was November and even if he'd managed to hang on under that train for more than a few miles he'd have been found some fine day stiff as a bloody icicle, still there. Those trains go seventy mile an hour, so what d'you think the wind-chill factor is when the temperature's fifty below for a start? Out of his bloody mind.' The big blade bit, sliced and came away, leaving a perfect taper. 'You want to know the only way to get out of Gulanka? It's easy, and there's some who's done it. Get yourself a bit of rope and sling it over a beam and kick the box away.'
'Okay, this is a sword hand. Palm flat, fingers tight together, thumb in line with the first finger, not tucked in, or you'll diminish the muscle tension.'
He watched me, Alex, his eyes intent in the dim light. We were in the wash house, the last to leave. Smell of soap, urine, tobacco smoke, the night smell, the morning smell.
'You right-handed?'
'Yeah.'
'Okay, the strike's like this and the usual target's the neck. It's to stun, if you hit the carotid artery right. That's here. You'll only kill if you use terrific force at that point – the sword hand's not normally used for killing. You cold?'
'Bit.'
He was always cold; most of it was fear. 'Swing your arms, but keep watching. This is the hammer fist. You can use it for a downward block or target the head with it, or the elbow or the groin or the knee, depending on the situation. The trouble with the sword hand and the hammer fist is that you need to pull back first to get the momentum, and that takes a lot of time, at least two seconds, and if your opponent's quick he'll get in first. But don't underestimate them as weapons – they can do significant damage.'
A wind was rising from the north, from the Arctic, coming over the top of the massif and curving down across the camp, rustling paper, rattling the doors. Another blizzard, Igor had told us, last night had been nothing.
'Getting warmer?'
'Bit.'
'Keep swinging. This is the half-fist, and it doesn't look like much but it's used mainly for killing. It's effective because the knuckles make a blade and you can drive the strike from the hip without having to waste time pulling back first – you're in there before your opponent knows it. Stop swinging a minute and try it. No, fingers tight, really tight, lots of tension at the instant when you go in, thumb tucked against the first fingertip – no, tight, that's it. You can practise the hand set whenever you get the chance, last thing at night in bed's a good time. Train the muscles – they're not used to it.'
'The hand set?'
'The shape you form with it. This is the hand set for the half-fist we'
re forming now. Okay, but tighter than that, tighter. Right, now this is the killing area, the best target for the half-fist, takes two seconds to kill once you're good enough. But if you mean to kill, don't pull the strike, go for it. And try and make sure you've got witnesses who can say it was in self-defence.'
'That would kill Gradov?' His young eyes were awed.
The man with the hare lip. 'Once your muscles are up to strength, yes. But that's going to take you a few months, a whole lot of secret training.'
On a slow breath: 'Gradov.'
'Anyone. But look, you don't have to kill people to make them understand you're not just a pushover. Cool them down with a strike or two and leave them to think about it.'
Snowflakes were mottling the black window pane, and the wind began keening under the door.
'Will you show me -'
'Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. But you can start practising right away, in bed. Get those muscles into condition, that's half the battle.' I put an arm round him. 'How long have you been taking this kind of thing, Alex?'
'This kind of – oh. Two years. Ever since I got here.'
'Well look, I know it's tough to say, but give it another two months, maybe three. The most dangerous thing you can do is to start hitting back before you've got the strength and the moves down right – they'll stop you in your tracks and things'll be even worse for you. Now come on, before we freeze to death in here.'
Later, after midnight when the main floodlights were switched off, I left the hut and made my way between the snow-banks, taking my time, taking an hour, more, watching for the sentries as they sheltered under the eaves, finding detours to avoid them and to avoid the marker lights as the new snow whirled past my face on the strengthening wind. Then I reached the target building.
