Sacrifice

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I presume the West. In this direction, Finland.’

  Lev nodded. ‘But we can’t let you go. Already, you know far too much about us. We’re going to have to kill you.’

  Michael looked at Lev in surprise and explicit concern, but there was something in Lev’s eyes which warned him to hold his tongue.

  Rufina said, ‘If you’re going to kill me, why don’t you kill me now? Why waste benzin, taking me all the way across Russia? Why didn’t you kill me before?’

  Lev sniffed, and unselfconsciously waggled a finger up his nose. ‘The reason for that, my dear, is that some friends of mine in Helsinki would very much like to ask you some questions, before you die. Who knows, if you answer them well, they may even allow you to live.’

  ‘Lev—’ began Michael, but Lev abruptly shook his head. ‘This mistress of yours, Michael, knows exactly why the Soviet Union is abducting British and American scientists and engineers, and why she is being allowed to do so not only without protest from London and Washington, but with their active encouragement. You two are experts in computers; scores of other Western experts are now working against their will for the Soviet Union, chemists, aeronautical engineers, physicists, industrialists. And yet when their families attempt to find out what has happened to them, they are met by their own governments with silence, and excuses. “Perhaps he has run off with a Russian woman, Mrs Whatever-your-name-is.” “Perhaps he has decided to stay and work in the Soviet Union.” And have you noticed? Not a word in the newspapers, and not a word in Parliament or on Capitol Hill. The most complete and utter blackout on news and political criticism that there has ever been, ever; even more severe than it was before World War Two.’

  Lev pointed a finger towards Rufina. ‘This young lady knows the answer to this strange problem. Perhaps not all of the answer. The KGB are not in the habit of telling their operatives more than they need to know. Well, the same with MI5, of course, and the CIA. But she knows enough to put us on the right scent.’

  They were approaching the city of Kalinin now, with the Volga winding darkly on their right. The afternoon was blowy, and the slipstream whistled dolefully around the Volga’s badly-fitting windows.

  Michael said, in a tight voice, ‘Then – after she’s put you on the right scent – you’re going to kill her?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lev.

  ‘No,’ replied Michael, ‘I can’t have it.’

  John woke up, and blinked at Michael through unfocused eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ he wanted to know.

  Lev had turned his back on Michael. There was an awkward pause. But then as a concession. Lev said, ‘We shall see. I shall do my best to keep her alive. But that is all I can promise. These things are out of my hands.’

  John frowned at Michael in concern. Rufina, to Michael’s sudden gratification, squeezed his hand.

  They sped along the Leningradskoje Sosse at over 130 kph, the Volga’s engine rumbling in protest. In Russian, Yakov said, ‘I could really tune this car up, if I had the time, I could make her fly like a bird; but, all I can do now is keep my foot on the floor.’ They flashed past timber trucks, occasional private cars, and vans from the cotton factories at Kalinin.

  Kalinin itself came into view on the far side of the Volga; chimneys and 18th-century rooftops and a jumble of flat, uninspiring concrete blocks. The pale sun sparked from distant windows, like warning messages from strategically-placed heliographs. Lev touched Yakov’s arm, and said, ‘Slow down; there’s a highway patrol post just along here.’ Yakov eased off the gas, but even as he did so, a police patrol car pulled out of a tree-lined side-turning just behind them, and came in clamorous pursuit, with its lights flashing and its siren honking. Michael turned around to look, but Lev snapped, ‘Ignore them.’

  ‘You’re not going to stop?’

  ‘Yakov knows what to do. Just ignore them.’

  They sped over the Volga bridge at Kalinin at over 120 kph, with the highway patrol car close behind. As they reached the other side of the river the highway patrol car came up beside them, and the policeman in the front passenger seat flagged them down with his white-gloved hand.

  Yakov obediently slowed, and began to draw the Volga into the side of the highway, beside a long wire fence and a clump of unkempt pines. The highway patrol car pulled over in front of them, and switched off its siren. Yakov came to a stop; although he left the engine burbling, and he didn’t apply the handbrake.

  ‘What do they want?’ asked John, worriedly.

  ‘Oh, nothing special,’ said Lev. ‘We were speeding a little. The limit along that stretch is 90 kph. Also, they were probably bored.’

  The highway patrol officers approached the Volga, and one of them indicated with a twirling finger that Yakov should wind down the driver’s window. The other officer walked around the car, peering at it suspiciously, as if he could tell where it had been and who had owned it by the condition of its paintwork.

  ‘Your speed was checked over the past three kilometres, comrade, and it was at all times well over the permitted limit. I want you to produce all of your papers, hand them to me, and then step out of the car.’

  Yakov shook his head. ‘Ya nyi panyimayu,’ he said, in a clumsy pretence at an American accent. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘American?’ asked the highway patrol officer. He peered into the car. Michael could see his clear blue eyes, his wispy blond moustache, his bright red cheeks. He couldn’t be very much older than 25; and Michael prayed in sweaty silence that Lev wouldn’t shoot him.

  ‘We’re all American,’ Michael spoke out. ‘We’re on a tour to Leningrad.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the highway patrol officer. ‘Then, I must be asking you to show me papers from Intourist. I will need your international driver’s licence, your pamyatka avturista, your Motoring Tourist’s Memorandum, and also your passports.’

  ‘Do you think we can make it to Novgorod before dark?’ Lev asked the policeman, in an accent that sounded more like Jose Ferrer playing Toulouse-Lautrec than an East Coast American on a cultural tour of the Soviet Union.

  ‘You have arrangements to stay in Novgorod?’ the policeman asked. His companion had completed his circuit of the car, and now came to join him, with his thumbs tucked into his belt. The first policeman’s hand was still held out for Yakov’s papers.

  Lev said, ‘Do you like Adidas shoes?’ and beckoned the policemen forward.

  The word ‘Adidas’ acted on both men instantly. They stepped forward, smiling, towards the car, and Lev lifted his 8mm T-T automatic and shot them both, very loudly and very accurately, between the eyes. In the space of two seconds, red spots appeared as if by magic in the centre of each of their two pale foreheads, and they fell over backwards on to the road, their legs flopping heavily into the air.

  ‘Go,’ said Lev, slapping Yakov’s shoulder, Yakov crashed the Volga into second, and they howled away from the side of the highway leaving four black snakes of rubber behind them, and two sprawled bodies. Lev fired at the police car as they sped past it, in a wild attempt to hit the petrol tank, but all he succeeded in doing was puncturing the rear bodywork, and smashing one of the side windows.

  ‘Now we’re going to have to go top speed,’ said Lev, happily. Michael was beginning to understand that Lev actually enjoyed this mayhem, and that he had been bored and testy up until now only because the dull-witted Soviet police had believed (as they were supposed to) that the fugitives were heading east. Where was the chase? Where was the gunfire? Lev had lived on his nerves for so long that nothing could excite him but hair-raising danger; nothing could gratify his spirit but killing and burning and ferocious destruction.

  Thirty-five kilometres north-west of Kalinin, close to Mednoje, they came across a road-block. They could see it ahead of them, four highway patrol cars drawn across the road, their headlights glaring; and Lev glanced behind them to confirm that four more cars had appeared out of the woods by the side of the highway to box them in from the rear.

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nbsp; Lev looked steadily at Michael, and said, ‘Are you afraid, my friend? What do you prefer? Years of enforced work for the Soviet Union, or a few moments of high danger?’

  Michael said nothing, although he could feel that his face was drained of blood.

  ‘I ask you this because we could all die,’ said Lev. ‘They have the smell of us now, and of course our chances of escaping from the Soviet Union are almost nil. Well, let’s say five per cent. But I am not a fortune-teller. We may be lucky; we may not.’

  Rufina said, ‘If you stop now, they will kill us all.’

  She said it with such earnestness, and such conviction, that John reached forward and tapped Lev on the shoulder and said, ‘Go on. Let’s take the five per cent.’

  Michael hesitated for a moment, and then said with a dry mouth, ‘All right, let’s go on.’

  ‘By George, Michael!’ said John, suddenly excited.

  Yakov twisted the Volga’s wheel, and flung the car straight off the highway into the woods. The suspension banged and crashed on the ground, and all that Michael could see through the windscreen was a jumble of trees, branches, fragments of late-afternoon sunlight, fractions of sky. The trees whipped at their car as if they wanted to catch them, and punish them, but Yakov drove like an angel, drove like a bird, so that the car slithered and roared between the trees, flew across gullies, bounced over rocks. Michael had all the breath knocked out of him, and his hand bruised against the old-fashioned curved metal door-handle, but Rufina was clinging to him tightly, and for a moment that was all he cared about.

  John said, ‘Christ!’ and that was the first time that Michael had ever heard him take the Lord’s name in vain.

  Yakov steered the Volga along the precipitous edge of a long gully, which overhung a tributary of the Tverca river. Michael peered down into the shadows; he could just about make out the white splashes of foam, seventy feet below. At times, the Volga’s tyres exploded against clods of earth, sending them tumbling down into the depths; but Yakov never once lost his control; never once lost his skill; and the next thing Michael knew they were hurtling down through a long dark avenue of pines, branches whistling and sizzling against the windows, their suspension walloping against protruding roots.

  They slithered through a dank muddy valley, then roared up the other side with smoke pouring out of the Volga’s exhaust. At the very top of the hill, the back tyres lost their grip, and the heavy car hesitated, whinnied, and began to slide backwards.

  Yakov screamed something in Russian which Lev didn’t even have to translate. He rammed the car into first gear, gunned the engine until it was screaming as loudly as he was, then popped out the clutch so that the Volga bounded forward as if it had been hit up the backside by a steam-engine. The car stalled, and Yakov had to restart it, but he had got it over the hilltop; and Lev silently crossed himself and said, ‘Mother of God.’

  Now they curved westwards, back towards the highway. They made slow progress through a boggy field of long grass and pink swamp-mallow flowers; spattering their windows with black mud; but then they drove faster across a dry diagonal slope of grass, which ascended gradually towards the main Leningrad highway. Soon, through the trees, they could see trucks and cars running parallel to them, with their parking lights already glowing. They had avoided the roadblock completely; and Lev said, as he lit up a papirosi, ‘They will still be searching those woods at Christmas.’

  Yakov jammed his foot down, even though they were now driving across a slithery field of graded pebbles. The Volga hurtled towards the highway at nearly 110 kph, ran up the side of the concrete pavement, and catapulted on to the road with a jarring screech and a shower of sparks. Yakov almost lost control of the car as it skidded across the highway, but he managed to wrestle it around just as their offside tyres scrabbled against the median strip. Then they were roaring north-eastwards again, towards Leningrad, 120 kph without lights, under a sky that was still quite pale and bright, but which strangely gave very little illumination to the land which lay beneath it.

  ‘They will catch us, you know,’ said Rufina, with unusually passive certainty.

  ‘They haven’t caught us yet,’ Lev retorted. ‘And as far as I’m concerned, that’s all that matters.’

  Yakov’s energy appeared to be limitless. Sustained by cigarettes and vodka, he drove them at top speed into the dusk, and into the night, saying nothing, keeping his eyes fixed somewhere up ahead on to a road which only he could discern. Michael was exhausted; his eyes felt as if they had been rubbed with fine-grain sand; but for hours he couldn’t sleep. John occasionally nodded off, yelped, and then opened his eyes again. Rufina remained sitting between them, close, warm, fearful. They stopped a few times to pee by the side of the road, and those were the only times they heard the hush of rural Russia, the singing of summer crickets, the wind blowing through the grass.

  It was a mad adventure. Michael was certain that they were doomed; that they would never be able to pass through Leningrad; and even if they did, that they would never be able to escape across the Finnish border.

  He never knew which route they took. Yakov drove without consulting any of his passengers, not even Lev. Somewhere, in the small hours of the morning, they must have stopped for benzin, because Michael remembered lights and people talking in low voices, and the sharp smell of low-grade petrol. He opened his eyes once and saw a sign which said Pelusna, but he had no idea where that was, and so he went back to sleep again.

  They drove through Leningrad at dawn. Quietly, and slowly, using all the back streets, approaching Litenyiy Prospekt along Saltikova-Schedrina ulitsa, and then, once they had crossed the broad grey expanse of the Neva with the sharp gilded spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral shining at them from the west, driving at less than 30 kph up Lyesnoy Prospekt. Lev laconically jerked a thumb behind them as they passed under a railroad bridge. ‘That’s the line to Finland. It leads straight into the Finland Station.’

  Michael said, ‘Why haven’t they caught us yet? They must have a description by now.’

  Lev shook a last cigarette out his paper packet of papirosi. ‘My guess is that they don’t want to catch us. They want to watch us, see which way we go, what we’re up to. Maybe they think we’re going to lead them to somebody bigger.’

  John rubbed his stubbly chin. ‘Perhaps that was why they kidnapped me in the first place; to flush you people out.’

  Lev laughed, abruptly. ‘We can never be “flushed out”, as you put it. This is because we are not an organization in the conventional sense. So, yes, they may catch some of us, and kill us, but they will never be able to flush us out. How can you flush out something which is inside your own soul, just as we are deep inside the soul of every country in which we work?’

  They were less than an hour from the Finnish border, driving at almost 110 kph, when they saw the first helicopter. It came from the east, probably from the helicopter base at Vsevolosk, travelling low and fast. It overtook them, and then circled around to the north-west, as if it were waiting for them. Soon after, another helicopter appeared, from the same direction, and then a third, from the south-east, from Leningrad. The three helicopters formed a triangle between them, and then followed the Volga-22 along the highway, keeping four or five hundred metres distant, but obviously tracking, and watching.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Michael, tightly.

  ‘We keep going,’ said Lev. ‘I was right, you see, they left us alone after we managed to avoid that road-block, because they wanted to see where we were going. They probably had a succession of unmarked cars following us all the way through Leningrad, and all the way out here. Except that here, of course, we are going far too illegally fast for anybody to be able to follow us without arousing our suspicions.’

  ‘They could hardly arouse our suspicions any less with those three helicopters,’ John remarked.

  ‘Ah, you miss the point, Mr Bishop,’ Lev explained. ‘They are not concerned about us knowing that they are there; they ar
e simply concerned that if we do, we might retaliate, in the same way we have done from the beginning. That is why they are keeping well out of our way. Somebody is going to have to explain this affair to the KGB, and when they do, they would obviously prefer not to have to account for more dead bodies and burned-out police cars than they can possibly help.’

  ‘They will stop us, though,’ said Rufina, emphatically.

  ‘They will try,’ said Lev.

  They drove through Vyborg, and the helicopters clattered after them, still keeping their distance. Then they turned west along the windswept road that runs north of the ragged inlet called Vyborgski Zaliv, on the last stretch of their journey before they reached the border with Finland. Michael, in spite of his anxiety, in spite of his tension, kept nodding off, and dreaming that he was hurtling through strange black woods, and whispering in unfamiliar streets to hooded strangers.

  ‘You see,’ said Lev, in some other existence, ‘any event that takes place in the Soviet Union always generates for some unfortunate official a strangling snake-pit of red tape. That is why so much of Soviet life takes place “under the counter”. Policemen, highway patrolmen, clerks of court, they will do anything to avoid paperwork.’

  Michael woke up. Rufina had touched his hand. Lev said, ‘We have only a few minutes now, before.we reach the border.’

  Michael squinted up at the sky. The three helicopters were still there, closer now, so that Michael could see their pilots, the white of their bone-dome helmets.

  Rufina said, ‘We will never be able to get across the border. There are too many guards.’

  ‘Frightened?’ smiled Lev. ‘You can always disembark here, if you want to, and tell your masters that you were unwillingly kidnapped. Which of course you were.’

  Rufina glanced away. For whatever reason – whether she genuinely wanted to escape from the Soviet Union, or whether she considered it her duty to stay with the fugitives for as long as possible, so that she could discover more about Lamprey – she stayed silent. Michael looked at her, but her expression gave nothing away. High cheekbones, eyes as impenetrable as ink.