Eventually we reached the summit. Max hid the snowmobile below the rim, before grabbing his binoculars.
The view was breathtaking. This spot had been chosen with evident care. The care I’d seen Max take with every detail that came his way. It was amazing how far one could see — right down to the Z5 container that we’d left far behind and far below. Without knowing precisely where to look it would be next to impossible to spot. But Max knew exactly where to look and took care to take in everything.
Weaving playfully behind the snowmobile had not only given me renewed hope, I was also as warm as toast.
By comparison Joy felt cold to the marrow. Her only warmth had come from clinging onto Max’s back, shading her face from wind. No heat exchange. The dozen layers of clothing separating her from the heat of Max’s body acted as an insulator, so the only energy she got came from her own chilly body. I helped her off the bike and started to rub her up and down as roughly as I dared.
I looked round for Max and saw him straightening up from the engine. He’d been using it to heat three small pizzas.
Max grabbed one and plonked it, a flask and an empty cup onto the snowmobile seat before taking Joy’s hands and removing her sealskin mittens. He filled her cup with steaming coffee.
Joy clutched it eagerly; both hands still enveloped in her inner gloves, and drew the cup to her blue-cold lips.
“Some pizza will warm you up.”
“You okay?” Max turned to me.
“Better than okay.”
Max smiled his smile and took up his binoculars again.
“If my hunch is right, and we have been compromised, they will reach the container today. If I am wrong and no one comes, we can return tomorrow.”
“So we’re staying here? All day?” Joy was nearly shrieking. “We’ll freeze to death.”
“We’ll build an igloo. Building it will help keep you warm.”
Joy shook her head with immediate horror. I nodded with bounding curiosity.
And so I built my first igloo.
All you need is a saw, a day, and knowledge. This was when I first asked myself what Max didn’t know.
And as she warmed up even Joy got into it, growing confident that when the sun moved on to bring warmth and light and life to other parts, we could survive the freezing hours of moonlit darkness.
The igloo was, of course perfectly camouflaged, and positioned so that no one could see us moving in and out.
Once done there was space inside to cook and eat as well as sit and sleep.
But this was not enough for Max. He quickly, deftly put up two of our three white tents.
“One will be for storage. The other is where I will sleep.”
The sledge’s tarpaulin had covered a veritable bonanza of much-needed stuff.
All of it was offloaded and put inside the igloo or the tent. And then Max threw the white tarpaulin over the snowmobile.
The chances of white on white being spotted were negligible.
The cooking stove was put to use first, heating the igloo, miraculously producing water out of snow and hot food out of packets.
And every twenty minutes or so Max took up his binoculars and stared intently at the container.
“I was right,” he said half an hour or so before sunset.
“Let me see.” Joy was immediately anxious. It was easy to understand why. Max gave her his binoculars. “There are three of them.”
“Recognize anyone?” I asked.
“No. They’re too far away.” As Joy handed back the bins to Max I was saddened at how she’d returned, in an instant, to her deflated, depressed self.
“They will come for us next. I know the way they work.”
I turned to Max, my question mark stamped on my face. No need for words.
“There is a lot of kit in there that could be used against us.” Max was factual and quizzical at the same time, waiting and watching through his binoculars.
“What are they doing?”
“Working out how to get in.” Max was intent. It was as if he was taking part in their decisions. Inside their minds.
“They’ve decided to blow off the door.”
“So they will get in.”
A small flash appeared in the distance, like the sun’s brief reflection on the flat windscreen of an old car. The explosion.
Joy took a sharp inhalation of breath.
“Amateurs,” said Max with disdain, “all three have gone in.”
“What’s amateur about that?” said Joy with a touch of sarcasm.
“It’s booby trapped. None of them are going to be coming out again.”
Max looked at me first and then Joy. A long, enquiring look. “I must get back there.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Someone has to bury the bodies.”
My face must have shown disbelief.
“It is necessary.”
“How long will you be gone?” Joy’s voice shook with fear.
“I’ll start back at first light. Sunrise — about 6.30.”
He then kissed me on the forehead, sending a tiny tingle down my spine, and took Joy’s hands, but no kiss for her.
“Look after each other. See you at breakfast.”
*
By 6.30 the next morning I had cat-washed, tugged on five layers of clothing and was staring out towards the container through my binoculars.
And my heart was racing. I wanted to see Max, check that he was on his way. I was anxious. I just wanted to know Max was okay. But there was no sign. I checked my watch again: 6.32.
I saw the flash of sun reflecting on glass.
I stared harder and yes; I could just make out white moving on white.
I smiled inwardly, relieved and happy and popped back into the Igloo. Joy was awake.
“Is Max on his way?” she asked and I could feel my cheeks redden.
“Yes,” I nodded. “I’ll get breakfast started for the three of us.”
“I’ll help.”
No point in saying don’t, there was no loo in the igloo.
“Bring your binoculars too. He could be difficult to spot.”
“I will.” And we both smiled.
Every minute or so I’d look up to how he was doing.
Joy staggered out, wearing just a couple of layers and dashed away from the igloo for her pee.
“God I hate this,” she said. “It’s freezing.”
“Minus 30,” I called back.
Moments later she crunched back into the igloo. That was something you do hear, dry snow crunching with every footstep. I was hoping to hear Max’s skidoo, but the next sound was the same as I’d heard a few minutes earlier. Joy crunching the dry snow.
She was dressed for an expedition, complete with ski goggles, woolly hat covered by her ski jacket hood.
“See it?”
“What?”
“Helicopter.” Joy’s tone was resigned.
I scanned Max’s route for any sign of him, while Joy hunted the skies to put sound and sight together.
“Fuckers.”
I followed her goggled stare and could make out a helicopter moving fast.
I lunged to the ground, fixed my elbows as supports, brought my bins to my eyes, steadied and stared. Concentrating on keeping Max in sight.
Instead I saw Joy on the skis, my skis, screaming down the hill as fluently as an Olympic champion, straight as a die.
I watched in disbelief, what was she doing?
What? Why? Joy. And then, once she was well clear of our hideaway, Joy started to weave as if on a downhill slalom, snow spraying into the air like a dust cloud. And just as visible. And I saw the helicopter dive towards her. And I wailed out of panic and despair.
Joy had thrown herself to the lions to save Max and me.
*
The lion’s den was a former gulag — a death camp closed in 1953.
The prisoners still living when it was closed were the only ones to leave alive. All the others had be
en worked to death.
Stalin had needed uranium. He couldn’t afford workers. He could afford slaves, on a one-way ticket and very little food. These slaves had to come from somewhere. Who better than anyone who disagreed with him. Zecs — political prisoners.
And now, fifty or so years, later the same need applied, with some ‘subtle’ variations.
Thousands of workers were needed.
The promise of money wasn’t a problem, persuading them to come was the ‘subtle’ difference here. A return ticket was never required; the planes that brought the workers went back empty. Every ticket turned out to be one way and there was nowhere to spend the promised money.
The problem was secrecy. In these enlightened times workers who disagreed with their government could protest, march, and strike. Anything but keep their grievances to themselves. So other incentives were needed to persuade the hard done-by to emigrate quietly to an unknown promised land.
For men the answer turned out to be easy. Exaggerated promises of abundant sex.
The women were mostly kidnapped.
And so, the thousands of workers in the days of the gulag had been replaced by thousands of workers in the days before ‘enlightened change’.
Both were needed to mine for uranium. No ‘subtle’ difference here. Stalin wanted uranium because it would power the world. So did those running the League of Enlightenment. They wanted energy.
Eternal energy with no conditions attached.
Joy knew just what to expect as she was marched down long underground corridors by the dreaded guards, past teams of workers who stopped to stare.
Everyone there fitted into a pecking order.
Some shuddered as they pictured themselves in the place of the wretch being dragged to hell.
Others felt immune to such horrors — because they were too used to being abused, too ingratiating to be brought to book.
But most were too tired to think and too ill to care.
A few knew that tonight would be their turn for a taste of urgent, hurried sex, provided they behaved. Would it be with her? The thought obsessed them, forced them to work, to be obedient, to inform on others in the sex queue. Anything for more.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Manhattan, where I live, or lived, or think I lived - right now I am so confused - I work hard and play hard. Rollerblading when the city is dry, running when it’s wet.
At work I’m a do-everything: a presenter, a director, who lugs around a camera in a backpack half the day, editing my local news stuff during the other half. It seems another world.
At play — I swim three days a week, practice yoga the other three and party into the small hours on the seventh.
And sometimes I feel utterly exhausted.
But I have never, never felt as exhausted as I do now.
The helicopter had gone with Joy and her skis inside. Max had returned to the igloo, and packed my backpack.
“You need to get back to the West.”
“I want to stay here with you!” I blushed.
Max took a deep breath, looked at me hard and put his arm around my shoulder. “How about us leaving Siberia together? And working out what next from there?”
Difficult to find fault with that, so I nodded and smiled and snivelled.
I threw my arms around him, and my hands tried to tear the fleece from his shoulders before his hands unzipped it, and then mine. And for what seemed an infinity then, but as I look back was no more than a moment in time, we were lost inside each other.
I don’t remember, or maybe I just don’t want to, the journey to Pevek, but I do recall sitting, hidden from view, in the corner of a cream-coloured dining room in one of the barren airport buildings.
It was one or two hours past midnight. And I had nearly thawed after our tortuous, freezing snowmobile trek. The only light came from an empty, but nevertheless inviting, Coca Cola fridge. Inside my shrinking belly was the mulch of some slices of sausage, weak cabbage soup and a couple of pieces of raw fish.
The glass of vodka made it all taste like a dinner prepared for those sitting on the wrong side of the gates of heaven.
Would they ever get in?
Would I ever get away?
I waited hidden from view, wondering idly with the confidence of a naïve westerner who had never seen the inside of a police cell, how Max was talking his way round my lack of a passport.
Pevek Airport sheltering from the worst winds of the Arctic by Chaunskaya Bay was built for Stalin’s cronies who flew in from Moscow to manage the slave labour of the 1930s. The political prisoners and other dogs’ bodies had taken six months to get here in slave ships packed in tighter than cattle.
Some of them must have built this dismal place.
All of them knew they’d never return home.
What had happened to them?
I tried to think but my mind was fuzzy, my memories melting like ice cream on a summer’s day.
The runway at Pevek’s airport runs almost north south. It’s nearly one and a half miles long. More than enough for a jet that will whisk me back to America, proving all this was a dream.
Provided Max came too.
I tugged up my sleeve to look at my watch, Mum’s Rose of Jericho watch.
It wasn’t there. This wasn’t a dream.
Tears welled up as my head dropped onto my folded arms resting on the cheap, plastic-topped table.
“Time to go.” Max gently shook me awake, brought me to my feet, zipped up my ski suit and draped an old army coat around my shoulders. He took my head in his hands and brought my face close to his. And I found my eyes drawn to his, into the very centre of his soul.
Moments later we hurried down the dimly lit corridors.
We stopped at the two-door exit. After going through the first, we waited in a cold and empty space until it slammed shut.
In this cold and empty space, Max stopped and whispered.
“Once I’ve got through,” he nodded towards the exit door, “count to thirty — slowly. Walk outside and you’ll see a UAZ jeep. Slip into the back seat and crouch low.”
I tensed with uncomprehending horror.
“No one knows I’m here?”
“Stay hidden in the jeep, no matter what, no matter how long. Until you’re told, in English, it’s safe to leave.”
“That will be you?”
“Me, the pilot — an English speaker for sure.”
Before I could respond. Max walked out through the door, without a backward glance.
I counted to thirty and scurried into the cold.
I heard noises nearby as I scrambled into the back seat of the jeep I heard the front doors squeak open. I heard a man and Max getting in the front. I heard the engine start.
I juddered with every bump as we sped away.
I heard the roar of a jet aircraft landing. I heard the man and Max get out of the jeep.
I felt my heart thumping and my muscles cramping as the cold set in.
I heard my back door open.
“Lucille — it is safe now.”
It wasn’t Max.
Five minutes later we took off without him.
My heart sank.
*
“Welcome back Miss Schobinger.”
‘Do you know where I’ve been, what I’ve been through?’ I felt like shouting at the greeter as I almost fell down the steps of the Gulfstream V that had just landed at Teterboro Airport.
The greeter and the co-pilot now helped me down the steps of the jet, steadying me as I reached the tarmac.
America. New York. Home.
I shook my head to shake my brain into believing it. And mumbled. “Thank you.” And slipped into the front passenger seat of the waiting Jaguar FX.
Sitting in the back, in the accustomed way that sets apart those who are regularly chauffeured, was the stylish woman in her fifties I’d seen on the screen in the container. Dame Marion looked up from a file of papers.
“You’ve come through i
t very well.”
It seems I’d passed muster.
“Ted, drop me off at the Park Central first and then escort Lucille to her door.”
“Yes, ma’am,”
And so, Ted Hollen, who introduced himself as Z5’s New York bureau chief, steered the Jaguar onto Charles Lindbergh Drive.
“I thought Max was coming too?” Ted was looking in the rear-view mirror, aiming his question at Dame Marion.
My heart leapt. Part furious that Max had not come with me but mostly hungry for any information about him. Anything at all.
“Max is in too deep.”
I winced; knowing I was well out of my depth, and forced my eyes to take in my surroundings, take me back to my reality.
Ted had chosen the George Washington Bridge. And there, as if determined to extend an extraordinary welcome to the American side of me, the giant Stars and Stripes fluttered lazily beneath the upper arch of the New Jersey tower.
It must be President’s Day.
And for the first time since we landed I felt at home. I felt free.
Soon I’d be in my own clothes.
Soak in a long bath.
Have a long and lazy talk to Father.
My mind glitched again. What would I say to him?
And how to explain to Bernard? He must be worried sick. Would I ever see him again? Did I ever want to? He had to know about Max and me.
“Ted could I borrow your cell? I need to phone my boyfriend.”
Ted glanced round and down. His eyes pointing at the cell that was right beside me. Identical to the one I’d left on the Pilatus turbo prop.
“It’s got a new sim card, your number, all your contacts.”
“Welcome to Z5.” Dame Marion didn’t look up from her files.
It’s amazing what you accept if you really want something and I almost didn’t register how much I wanted my cell back, my old life back.
This cell was a mirror image of my old one. Even the recent calls. And there was Bernard’s number, overwhelmingly reassuringly familiar.
I clicked it and clicked call.
Bernard’s phone didn’t even ring.
Didn’t even respond.
The call just dropped.
That was odd.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 9
