by Craig Thomas
During the short afternoon, as they wound slowly, methodically along tracks and lanes, often screened by trees or high hedges and walls, always heading generally eastwards, the sky darkened swiftly and heavy cloud pressed down on them. A wind, too, sprang up; the weather had been deceptive in the morning. When it began to snow, large flakes driven into their faces, pattering against the sides of the APC, he knew he had been given the kind of luck he needed. The weather closed in on them. He worked from the map and the compass as the scenery was blotted out by curtains of rushing snow.
No air traffic.
Eventually, he abandoned the soldiers. They feared him, momentarily, but hatred was already beginning to make them calculate recklessly. They were beginning to be dangerous to him. They climbed out of the APC reluctantly, hauled out the wounded man without tenderness, and stood beneath the trees, sheltered from, the worst of the weather, looking up at him in a murderous little knot effaces. He almost abandoned his plan to lake the uniform of the man nearest him in build — but he knew he had to disguise himself if he was to drive the APC the rest of the way.
The man did, shivering with rage and cold as he stripped to his underwear, then donned Vorontsyev's sweaters and anorak and slacks. He seemed to hate the still-warm clothes, but he was forced by the temperature to put them on quickly. Vorontsyev bundled the uniform into the cab, jumped in shaking with cold, and drove off. He drove until the wind and temperature made it difficult to hold the wheel or use the gears — then he stopped, dressed in the chilly uniform, and swigged from the vodka in the first-aid kit.
Gradually, warmth returned. He had abandoned the men at least three miles from the nearest dwelling. They wouldn't die, but it would be a long time before they could describe what had happened.
He drove on, ten miles still from Khabarovsk, having covered nearly eighteen miles of country tracks and lanes. It was already beginning to grow dark with evening rather than storm.
He picked up the first of the roadblocks in the gleam of the headlights, only yards ahead of him. He had skirted Khabarovsk as best he could, keeping to the east of the town, but eventually, after three hours, he had had to join one of the main roads, which would take him through the outer suburbs to cross the river. He wanted to be south-east of Khabarovsk, and time was running out.
The roadblock was thrown across the approach to the bridge, a red-and-white pole, bollards to close the traffic flow down to a single lane, armed soldiers. He slowed behind the cars ahead of him as the brake lights went on, glaring in the falling sleet. He put out the cigarette, adjusted his uniform to some impression of tidiness, and waited to creep forward, or for them to come to him. He tried to shake off the narcosis of the journey. He had thought about nothing, made no plans beyond getting to the destination he had decided upon — even when he began running it had been there, a means of escape more like a child's dream than a plan. But, it had settled itself, apparently, and he had made no conscious effort to rid himself of it.
As the soldier marched down the little rank of waiting cars, he realised the mistake he had made. The sleet shifted aside for a moment, and he could see an army truck up ahead, in another lane. He had ignored the sign he had passed a hundred yards back redirecting priority traffic — which meant any army vehicle. Quickly, he wound down the window.
The cold flowed in, sleet peppered his face. The soldier looked up at him. He believed, in that moment, that they knew who he was — even though the chances of the soldiers he had abandoned getting to a telephone had been almost zero. They might, might just have to run into another army unit 'What the hell's the matter with you?' the guard asked, his face old and flat under the helmet. 'Can't any of you buggers read?'
'Sorry — ' Vorontsyev murmured, thickening his Muscovite accent, not able to trust himself to assume another way of speaking; he made himself more stupid, uneducated. 'Nearly asleep — been driving this bloody thing for hours.'
'Papers?' The guard held up his hand lazily. He didn't want to listen to anyone else, had his own grouses about being on duty so long his feet had gone numb and his back ached.
Vorontsyev handed over the papers as nonchalantly as he could; sensing a situation developing even as the heavy mittened hand took them, flicked a torch on them. Perhaps it was the click of the officer's boots coming down the line, or the fact that the car ahead of him pulled away, its boot having been slammed down after a perfunctory search.
'Where's the bloody picture, then?' The guard held out the ID papers. 'And your movement orders — in the cab?'
'Picture fell out,' Vorontsyev mumbled, looking sheepish. 'Sent it to some tart, I expect.'
Nothing, nothing yet 'What's going on here, Boris?' the officer said, and Vorontsyev saw the soldier wince at the use of his first name by the younger officer.
'Nothing much, sir. Silly bugger — sorry, sir — this man pulled up in the civilian queue — and he's lost the picture in his ID card.'
'Has he? You, where's your picture? Have you reported this to your officer?'
'Sir — he said he had more important things to worry about.'
'Mm. From Moscow, are you?'
'Sir.'
'All as thick as cowpats, they are, sir,' Boris offered, obscurely in league with Vorontsyev now that the officer was present.
'It says here you're from Tallinn.'
'Lived in Moscow for years, sir. Mother's from Tallinn — '
'Bloody conscripts for you,' Boris murmured helpfully.
'Why are you driving around on your own. Where's your officer, the rest of the platoon?' the officer snapped, then strolled to the back of the APC. As Vorontsyev leaned out of the cab to answer, Boris winked up at him. The officer glanced into the back of the vehicle.
The blood — there had to be blood A car horn hooted at the delay caused by the APC. Vorontsyev saw the young officer's back straighten, his attention fixed on the offending driver.
'You watch this,' Boris muttered, grinning and showing bad, stained teeth. Vorontsyev could smell the tobacco on his breath. 'All bullshit, he is. Don't worry, mate — he won't keep you long now.'
The driver of the car behind had wound down his window. The officer was half-swallowed by the interior of the car, his words muffled as he remonstrated with the driver, his tone evident. Then he re-emerged from the car, and it pulled meekly over to the side of the road. The officer strode back towards the APC's cab, Vorontsyev's papers in his hand.
'You — why are you alone?' he snapped, his face red with outrage and cold.
'Sir? This is going to the depot for repairs — new gearbox needed, seems like. I was detailed to take it.'
'Then you're not — ?' The officer was confused.
'Not what, sir?'
'Never mind. Oh, get on with it — get moving. Boris, come with me!'
As Vorontsyev would up the window again, Boris winked again, then swaggered off briskly behind the officer, towards the hapless driver who had expressed his impatience.
Vorontsyev felt weak, and grateful that he had been able to sit through the last few minutes. It was an effort to depress the dutch, get the APC into gear, pull forward to the pole. It went up, out of his view, and he was through and on to the bridge across the Amur. He dared not look in the rear-view mirror, nor the side-mirror. He sat as if there was nothing behind, only the rutted slush on the bridge. As he pulled off the other side of the span, he slumped more in his seat, tried to relax, to pretend that his weakness, his quivering arms and legs, was due to tiredness and not fear.
The track lay below him, gleaming icily in the moonlight, the white, snowbound fields spreading away below the steep, in-dined embankment the tracks followed. It was ten o'clock. The storm had lasted until only an hour earlier, and then had been brushed aside by the mounting wind which now swept the last rags of high cloud across the night and howled across the expanse of lower land between the eastern hills and Khabarovsk.
Vorontsyev lay in the shelter of a rock ledge which overlooked the main line be
tween Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. It had been his destination all that day, since the killings in Nikoleyev certainly.
He had abandoned the APC in a steep-sided gully, beneath dark trees. It had ploughed into a snowdrift below, wheels spinning, engine racing. Then it had collapsed on one side, like something dying, and then the engine stopped. Silence.
That had been six miles and three hours before. He had struggled across open country, the snow deepening as he followed the lines of hedges and walls, and passed from clump to clump of thin trees as best he could. He had stayed away from all roads, all traffic. The flask of vodka from the AFC was almost empty.
He was chilled to the bone, even the uniform fatigues hopelessly thin and useless now. His feet, he thought, must be frostbitten, and there was little feeling in his hands. His face, where he had been unable to keep it masked by his hood, he had rubbed periodically, feeling the flesh deadening as he walked or rested, the wind-child removing all feeling.
Clumsily, he unscrewed the stopper on the flask, and poured the last of the vodka into him, burning his throat. He felt it like a dribble of molten metal, thin and scalding, tracing its way to his stomach. Then, as if a light going out, its effect dissipated and was gone. He shivered. If the train did not come soon, then he would be asleep and dying as he crouched there.
He kept himself wakeful, at least fitfully so, by concentrating his feelings on two objects — Ossipov and his own wife. It generated a mental life, to swing now between what had become opposite poles of experience. He did not consider that he might have falsified either or both of them. They became devil and angel to him, and the dynamism of his responses kept his mind alive, and his body less insistent to succumb to the cold.
Khabarovsk was a minefield for him; he had known that from the beginning. He had to get to Vladivostok, and to the KGB Resident there. He had to communicate with Moscow, because what he knew about Ossipov, and the fact of his escape, thus far, meant that whatever was going on — and it was the invasion of Finland — would be moved forward. As would the coup, if that was intended, as it had to be, to coincide with the invasion.
He began to despair — not of his escape, but of its being a trigger. They had no idea, in Moscow, just as he had no idea, who was involved, which of the High Command, if not all, and which of the Politburo and the Central Committee and the Secretariat. They were no nearer arrests, or prevention, than before he arrived in Khabarovsk.
How could they get Ossipov or one of his senior officers into a KGB office, and make him talk? Impossible.
He made himself not think about the larger perspective. His survival depended on the importance of what he had discovered, not its limitations. He had to live, to get to Vladivostok, and perhaps then to Moscow. What he knew was priceless.
He thought of his wife. He would have to call her, when he got to Vladivostok. He would have to tell here he was safe.
The deep bellow of the train hooter reached him through thoughts becoming foggy. He roused himself. It was hatred that was required, not love. In thinking of his wife, he had been betrayed almost to sleep. He tried to stand, staggered against the rock, and began to pummel frantically at the weary, numb legs. He beat his fists against them, and that action seemed clumsy and ineffectual. He almost wailed with anguish, at the thought of failing to get on the train.
He hobbled out of shelter, into the force of the wind which pushed him backwards. He raised his hands as if to ward off physical blows, and forced himself to place one stiff leg before the other, bending his body as if approaching an assailant.
The hooter of the train roared again, its noise loud even above the wind. A couple of miles further up the track, the line branched south and entered the Khakhtsir Mountains. The train would be slower there, but it would have been impossible for him to have reached them.
He scrabbled down the slope, his feet numb brakes which seemed unable to stop him. He jolted his elbow, then he was brought up jarringly short by the packed, snow-covered gravel lining the track. The cutting was very narrow. He heard the train labouring, and looked down the track. Great gouts of steam billowed against the black sky. He pressed back against the wall of the cutting, the one tiny outcrop of rock that lifted above the level of the country, and which had given him shelter. He began to run, to force his legs to move, as if he were being pursued by the train.
He was out of the cutting, struggling up the embankment, a couple of hundred yards ahead of the train. Its noise now drowned the wind. He lowered himself down the embankment until his head was below the level of the tracks. The huge engine crashed past him, pistons churning as it laboured up the slope. He stood up. It was unlikely that anyone on the train would see him, not from the high windows of the carriages. He began to run alongside the train. He forced his legs to move, trundling forward in a hideously slow jog, stumbling more than once and almost losing his footing. The carriages slid past him, accelerating away from him because of the labours of the huge locomotive. Patterns, squares of light gleamed over him, slid on, gleamed, slid on — each one marking the passage of a window. Too quick. He wondered how many windows to a carriage.
Then, suddenly, he was laughing. He lifted his head, and remembered the childhood hobby that had brought this train to mind. If he had dreamed, then, staring at the picture books, that he would one day run for his life alongside the great trans-Siberian Express, trying to board it…
It was a fulfilment. He drove on, counting now the moments it took for each carriage to pass, and looking back to check down the remaining length of the train. The guard's van, last carriage. Observation platform, or hand rails. He had to board this train.
He was sheltered from the bitter wind by the bulk of the express. He ran on, his speed, untiring now, nowhere matching that of the labouring train, but making the difference of speed more acceptable, less deadly.
The last carriage still took him by surprise. The corner of an eye, and moonlight and a snowbound field — he swore he could see them behind the train — and then he leaned into the train, grabbing for the handrails at the side of the guard's van. His arms seemed wrenched from their sockets, and his strides leaped out until they were great lunar bounds, then one foot on the step, then the other.
He was clinging to the side of the Trans-Siberian Express, like someone in a film, and he wanted to laugh because he was certain that somewhere down there on the track his child-self had watched it all, laughing with glee, and clapping hands and wanting to imitate the man he had become.
He stepped up on to the narrow observation platform. It was only then that he understood that a steam engine would no longer be used on the Trans-Siberian, and that the last carriage would not be the guard's van, but an observation coach. He wasn't on the Trans-Siberian at all. He laughed, loudly and almost hysterically. He had saved his life only because of a fantasy. It wasn't real. This was just a local train. Even the timetable he had scrupulously dredged out of the past was out of date, and no longer applied. Which was why the train had been late. It was the wrong train.
He sobered, realising how near to some kind of frozen death he must have been during the last hour.
He gripped the handle of the door, almost wrenching the Makarov free of the shoulder holster. He had abandoned the AK-47 in his rush for the train. Which train? He opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him with a bang.
The guard was a little man, perhaps nearly sixty, with grey hair plastered across a bald dome. He was sitting with his uniform jacket unbuttoned, the tiny room fuggy and heady with the heating. A mug of tea was raised to his lips. When he saw Vorontsyev, and the gun, his eyes widened helplessly, and the mug quivered in his grip. Some of the dark tea slopped on to the grimy wooden table.
'Where is this train going?' Vorontsyev asked. It seemed the most important question at that moment, to satisfy the strange sense of disappointment he felt, as if awakening reluctantly from a pleasant dream. He shook his head as if to clear it.
The guard's mouth moved for
a time without sound, then: 'Nightsleeper to Nakhodka.'
'Vladivostok?' He moved threateningly closer, the gun levelled at the little man's face. 'Does it go to Vladivostok?'
Somehow, it had to go there. The little man nodded, carefully putting down the mug as if aware that he might drop it. Vorontsyev sighed, and almost slumped against the wall in his relief. He felt the train speeding up, having reached the top of the incline. 'When?' he asked, more gently; tiredly. 'When do we arrive?'
'Four in the morning.' The little man could cope with that kind of enquiry.
'Good.' Vorontsyev sat down in a hard chair, on the other side of the unvarnished wooden table from the guard. He reached into his pocket, and took out his wallet. Flipping it open, he passed it to the guard. Vorontsyev could already feel the skin on his face pricking with returning feeling, and the numb feet hurting as if thrust into a fire.
The guard looked up from his inspection of the ID card. For him, all was satisfactorily explained. A KGB officer had boarded his train. It was not permitted to ask why, or to question the peculiar method of boarding. Or the army uniform. His face was smoothed to indicate attentiveness, and efficiency. He said, 'What can I do, Major?'
'Is there a KGB man on the train?'
'Yes, Major. One of the stewards. Levin. Shall I fetch him?'
'In a moment.' His feet and hands were burning now. He put down the gun. 'Has this train been searched in Khabarovsk?' he asked.
'Yes, Major. From end to end. It is why we are late.'
Vorontsyev did not bother to observe the additional luck that had come to him. He said, 'Who carried out the search?'
The little man shrugged, as if indicating Vorontsyev, then when he saw him shake his head, he said, 'Then they must have been army, Major. There were some in uniform.'
'They were — looking for me,' Vorontsyev said. 'Are there any on the train — any late passengers?'
