He strode to Rupert, unclasped the safety belt, twisted his bloodied body round, and placed the fire extinguisher in Rupert’s left hand.
“Okay. Time to go.”
He looked me directly in the eye. Pulled the hood down low over my face and took my hand. “Trust me.”
“Trust you? Who are you?”
“Max.”
Max, just the name for such a huge man. He grabbed one of the backpacks and slipped it onto my shoulders. It was much heavier than I expected. He slung the other two over his shoulders as if they were filled with duck down.
Gently persuasive, Max led me down the steps, out into the blizzard.
Instinctively, I turned my back against the driving snow, which felt like sand blasting, grain by grain, into the exposed skin of my face.
Max tugged me directly into the line of fire, walking quickly, pulling me along, gently determined.
In the fifteen painful and breathless minutes that followed I kept going. And I kept up. Would I have if my hand hadn’t been clasped in his? I doubt it.
My logical brain kept insisting that in this whiteout it had to be the blind leading the blind, but Max knew exactly where he was going.
I, on the other hand, was helplessly lost. The plane had crashed. Rupert and Ruby were dead. We were the middle of a blizzard. And I was carrying the contents of a cupboard on my back.
In Siberia.
I lengthened my step, slipped, fell, crashed onto the icy ground, and burst into tears of exhaustion.
“I can’t do it.”
“You have to.”
My face felt raw but it was quickly becoming numb. He helped me up and we headed once again into the driving, wind, snow and pain.
At last we reached our target. A two-storey stone building, petrified in ice, backed into a hill.
The eight windows and central door were long gone. Like eye sockets in a skull they led to deep, dark nothing.
Once inside, protected from the wind and driving snow, Max let go of my hand.
He went to the back of this room and squeezed the two backpacks through a broken door that led immediately to an iron spiral staircase.
I looked down into the pitch black hole in horror and winced involuntarily when a scraping sound broke the eerie silence. Light from a match burst open.
Max lit two candles, one for me, one for him.
“Follow me, please. We’ll be safe down here.”
My footsteps echoed in the deepening silence as I clanked my way unsteadily down the spiral staircase.
“Please, be quiet.”
“You said we were safe,” I hissed in frustrated anger.
“Soon.”
Down and round, and down and round we went.
“Nearly there.”
At the bottom of the staircase was the entrance to a mineshaft carved out of the raw rock. Max used his candle to light an old miner’s oil lamp. As my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness I could see that this was where Max had set up camp. A table and chair, a bedroll, a makeshift stove, shelves with basic provisions, tea, tins and a saucepan filled with water.
“Got to think about climate change.” He grinned as he blew out the two candles. “I’ll check if they’ve discovered the plane. When I get back I’ll explain everything.”
“Max. No. You can’t leave me here.”
“Why don’t you unpack the backpacks, put on some warmer clothes and checked how much food we have.” Max raised his eyebrows, smiled a question, turned and left.
*
The blizzard disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. The sun shone down, making shadows from the buildings that gave Max cover. He zipped tight his arctic white, Special Forces clothing and pulled the hood right up. Whoever he could see could see him and that made Max wary. Half a dozen men arrived at the scene. Their heads scanning in every direction, checking for signs of life.
Two hurried inside and immediately rushed out. Another, taller, more upright, strode arrogantly up the six steps of the burnt-out plane, two at a time, pushed past the men and entered.
“Who’s that?” Max, who could sense this was the boss, carefully pulled out a pair of 8x20 pocket binoculars.
Jean-Pierre Durand, who would soon be a target of every Z5 agent across the world, re-emerged at the Pilatus door. A flash of light. Something glinting in the sun.
Max nodded as he watched Lucille’s Rolex being scrutinised for the inscription on the back.
Like a detective who had the proof he wanted, Durand pocketed the watch, waved his gang out of the away and marched towards a cluster of buildings. His gang followed. Max watched them. In his binoculars he could see smoke rising from a broken chimney, windows reflecting rays of light in the sun.
If he hadn’t known better Max, would have welcomed those signs of life. But he did know better, much better. He turned and hurried east, leaving a long shadow behind him.
Another shadow followed.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the dull light of the flickering miner’s lamp I watched Max take out the contents of two backpacks. They were identical, so the third remained unopened. I was now wearing most of the contents of the first. Layer upon layer from hosiery vest, thick thermal long sleeve T-shirt, through to a long-sleeved sweatshirt, all covered with a windproof fleece.
Feeling better, I climbed back into the white ski suit and tied on some Sorel snow boots. Clothes had taken up the top third of the cavernous backpacks. The next third had been food.
Max turned out an astonishing assortment, sachets of instant soup, drinking chocolate and coffee powder alongside mundane packets of sugar, pasta, biscuits and oatmeal. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the tins of pâté — Foie gras no less.
“Want some?” Max had caught my gape with a glint in his eyes.
While Max unpacked the sleeping kit, including sleeping bags and torches, the cooking kit — cutlery, plates and mugs — I scraped the pâté onto a digestive biscuit and its taste jarred with our surroundings.
“I think the pilot was planning some kind of assignation with the stewardess. Was he planning on me joining in?” I was hoping to open some kind of dialogue with Max. “I’ll heat some soup,” I added hopefully, reaching for the matches.
“Better save those,” Max said lighting a scrap of paper from the miner’s light flame and taking it to the stove.
And while I stirred the soup I learned about Z5, my eyes popping and my brain spinning.
Never before had I heard of an organization that left politics to politicians, security to security forces, policing to police forces, and petty crime to the petty criminal, while it focused instead on megalomaniacs — terrorists, business tycoons and politicians — whose aim was to blackmail the world into dancing to their tune.
How many of these megalomaniacs are there? Lots of guys who want things better for them and to hell with the rest, and a lot more than you think who will pay and kill to achieve it.
And I learned about the Z5 core. “Who pays you?”
“Z5’s a non profit trust, so all the money it makes goes into the running costs. That way we don’t owe anything to anyone, there’s no drain on any taxpayer, and everybody loves us.” He grinned.
So they should, I thought.
“Our operatives are all members of their country’s military or special police forces. Which means Z5 can call on help from any security force for anything, anytime, anywhere. And we find that petty criminals and informers are great whistle-blowers.”
“So why are you here? And where are we, exactly?”
He looked at me. “A gulag. And it’s active.” I frowned.
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago leapt into my mind. I could see my paperback copy, read with horror, covered in notes from my uni days, now standing in my bookshelves squashed between John McCannon’s Red Arctic and Martin Bollinger’s Stalin’s Slave Ships — books that graphically outline the horrors for Stalin’s forced labour empire.
My frown turned into a glower.
“Active? They were all closed down when Stalin died. No one’s here — just look at the place.”
Just when I thought Max might be making sense, he seemed to have lost the plot.
I waved my hands and looked at the staircase we’d crept down.
And screamed.
There, staring at us from near the bottom of the staircase, was a figure dressed like a beggar in a British winter: a faded woolly hat, a torn duffel coat, a thick shapeless cardigan, holed black stockings and worn-out trainers.
“There are thousands here,” she said. She spoke with a very British accent. “I’m so cold.” She sagged at her knees. Max was quickly by her side.
Silver blanket. Soup. Steaming hot. Sipped slowly.
I hugged her icy body. Max riffled the through the second set of clothes, selecting the warmest.
None of us said a word.
Just listened.
Had anyone followed her? She’d clearly followed Max.
“I’ll go and check,” Max read my thoughts.
He took out his pistol, clicked and checked and put it away.
“I could be a while, but don’t worry, I won’t go far.”
“Wait. Have some soup first.”
“No. Got to go.”
“At least take some chocolate.”
I ate some myself, and hugged the shivering stranger as she sipped her soup.
As he moved to go, Max turned to the woman.
“What do we call you?”
“Joy,” she murmured. The incongruity of her name echoed around the room even though she only whispered it.
“And how did you spot me?”
“Your shadow. I followed your shadow.”
Max’s scowl was turned in on himself as he went out.
Joy, soon wearing layers of new, warm clothes, tucked herself inside a sleeping bag and, within moments, was fast asleep. Knocked out by sheer exhaustion — with a little help from me.
I had raided the first aid box, worried about frostbite to her fingers and toes, and her nose. The instructions said ‘immerse the affected areas in warm water’. Joy had refused.
“We must go, must go, must go,” she whispered, like a mantra. So I slipped some sleeping pills I’d discovered into some hot chocolate, laced with extra sugar, as suggested by the frostbite instructions.
My mind darted from one unresolved question to another. What am I doing here? How could I be here? Who could be looking for me?
And as my eyes searched our freezing prison for answers, taking in the candles that I’d lit for light and heat, and the stove that I’d kept going long after the water for Joy’s chocolate had boiled.
Max would be unhappy with the waste, but I pretended that this was for Joy as my mind drifted back to university days and readings of the horrors of Stalin’s terror. Readings of women torn away from Moscow, simply because their husband, or brother, or son had been caught glancing at a foreign pamphlet, and then transported in their city clothes to Gulags, where they slaved and froze, and died — millions of them.
I looked at Joy. There are thousands here, she’d said.
Could Russia’s terrible history still be a frightful reality?
I shook my head.
I was utterly exhausted.
*
Max had let Joy and me sleep until the sun was high in the sky, although we couldn’t tell in our dungeon darkness.
Had he slept? I should have asked but didn’t. I was too occupied eating.
Max had boiled and plated three ‘ready to eat’ breakfasts: Two eggs, two sausages, two rashers of bacon, one tomato, cut in two, all laid on five slices of potato.
Sitting on broken chairs, in a dungeon around a rickety table, Joy and I were enjoying the best breakfast in the world.
Max knew that Joy was more likely to talk on a full stomach.
He was right.
Words that staggered, shocked and dismayed poured out of her.
Joy had been flown here by a glamorous British pilot wearing Armani— Rupert.
Less than a week earlier she’d set out from London with a couple of friends to have a good time in LA. They’d splashed out good money for Virgin Upper Class, confident they’d need spending money for just one night in a high-class hotel.
The good time had started on a high. A couple of days on the beach at Santa Barbara highlighted by free nights with some guys. Joy’s eyes sparkled with the memory. One of the guys, who clearly had more money than sense, offered to drive them to Las Vegas where he’d given them a thousand dollars each ‘just to kick things off.”
In the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, Rupert, the pilot, had approached her.
Joy didn’t elaborate on exactly how, but Rupert persuaded her to split from her friends and come with him on a flight in the very same brand new, six seat, Swiss built, single engine plane that I’d chartered from him a little over twenty-four hours ago. Now it was a tangled, burnt-out wreck.
“We had a paying passenger. Jean-Pierre Durand. I hate him.” Joy’s tone was venomous.
She’d been persuaded to act as the stewardess. I thought of Ruby. Rupert told her they’d have a luxury stopover in Anchorage, take Durand to where he wanted to go and work it out from there.
Anchorage was no luxury stopover, the airport hotel — Courtyard something — where the three of them had shared a room and got very little sleep. Rupert turned out to be a rabbit, Durand a veritable snake.
They set off again first light the next morning.
“Why did you agree to carry on?”
“Private plane. Seeing America. It seemed like a good deal. How wrong can you be?”
She found out when they landed on a runway cleared of ice, surrounded by grubby snow and lifeless grey buildings. A god-forsaken hell. Minutes later a giant army land-anywhere transport plane arrived and fifty shocked women were rushed towards a block.
“You don’t want to go there.” Durand had soothed Joy. “Come with me. You don’t need a coat.” Joy had taken that to mean she’d be back on her plane in seconds.
Her eyes glazed as she remembered what had happened next.
Durand gripped her arm and jostled her to another building, lifeless and freezing. Guarded by three thick-necked thugs, their big rounded heads topped with woollen hats, ghost-like, hollow eyes, hands big as boxers’, bare and hard.
She heard Rupert start up the plane and glanced around to see it moving towards the runway.
She screamed, panicked and dropped to the ice like a dead weight, and scratched at Durand.
“Go to hell then.” His eyes cobra-cold. “I’ve had my night.” And the three brutes pulled her to the queue of frightened women.
Joy, her story over, laid her pleading eyes on Max and me.
“I can’t go back. It’s hell down there.”
“What are they doing?” Max’s voice was whisper quiet.
“Fucking. Those fifty women are there to fuck the thousand, sex starved, lice-ridden slaves working shifts with no hope of release, for them sex is the only reward.”
“What are they producing?”
“No idea.”
“No hint?”
Joy smirked at the ridiculousness of the question. “Do animals pillow-talk when they fuck? There’s just been a massive accident, though. I don’t know what happened.”
Max’s face implored Joy to go on, his voice silent with the mood.
“That’s how I slipped out. Swapped my clothes and ran. Nobody looking.”
“They’ll be looking for you now,” The thought brought a sense of urgency into the dungeon-quiet surroundings.
“We’ve got to get out of here! Now. We must go.” Joy was becoming frantic. The chances of discovery, and of Joy and me ending up with the other women suddenly felt horribly likely.
“Can we get out the way you got in?” I turned to Max.
“Possibly. I parachuted in.”
“How the fuck do you parachute out?” asked Joy.
Max looked
straight into my eyes as he answered with a question.
“I brought an Aeros hang glider and a military spec paramotor. Are you up to flying that tandem?”
“What about Joy?”
“You take her with you.”
How did he know I could fly a paramotor? What else did Z5 know about me? He knew all about my mother’s watch with its Rose of Jericho tattoo engraved on the back, which he’d stolen off my wrist.
“I’m not going up in one of them!” Joy adamantly cut off my thoughts. We chased through every alternative.
Max had parachuted in from a cargo plane called Gee Gee. As it had lots of space he’d packed an emergency container, filled with kit of all sorts, that he’d pushed out just before he jumped. Max and his Z5 colleagues were prepared for every eventuality.
Glass half full again, I began thinking I might just have a future. I concentrated on the options.
Plan A. Walking out? The nearest town, Pevek, home to Joy’s grey, grubby, ghastly, local airport, was over a hundred kilometres away.
Plan B. Skiing out? Was Joy up to skiing a hundred kilometres? Certainly not.
Plan C. Snowmobile out? Possible. Max had a snowmobile, and a sledge for fuel. There’d be tracks unless a snowstorm wiped them out, and Pevek was not a place to hide in, especially without Russian visas. But storms were frequent. This was possible. It was promoted from C to A.
Plan D. Paramotoring out. Paramotoring is much the same as parachuting, but because a propeller and motor are strapped to your back, you don’t need to jump out of a plane and can go up as well as down.
“Why don’t we just blow the whistle? Tell the media what’s happening?” Joy was all for getting the army in.
“The mines are probably booby-trapped. A thousand male and fifty female slaves would die.” Max’s answer killed off that suggestion.
“And we’d never find out what they’re doing here, or if they’re doing it elsewhere.” Max again.
Back to plan D. Paramotoring had the great advantage of leaving no tracks. The wing, motor, fuel tank and straps were all white so it would be difficult to spot. But it could only take two, and I’d be pilot. A tinge of mad excitement overwhelmed me.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 3
