Sacrifice

by Graham Masterton

  They were in sight of the border post now; Michael could see the concrete buildings and the barriers across the highway. On either side of the road there were thick stands of firs, the kind of trees in which wolves prowled in Russian fairy-tales. Yakov slowed the car down to fifty, then to forty, then almost to a crawl. The helicopters had been forced by the height of the trees to remain high above them, in the grey morning sky, and for a moment the three of them sped obliviously on towards the frontier, not realizing that the Volga had now stayed far behind.

  Lev said, ‘There it is, the marker,’ and for the first time Michael understood what extraordinary planning and organization had gone into their escape, what careful understanding of the Soviet police and how they would react. A single white splash marked one of the firs on the opposite side of the road. Yakov swung left, across the highway, and plunged the Volga into the trees, along an improvised track which once must have been used by woodcutters. Now Yakov pushed his foot down on the accelerator, and the battered car hurtled through the woods, out of sight of the helicopters, occasionally knocking loudly against tree-trunks, skidding on banks of moss and fir-cones, heading south-east, away from the border, but directly towards the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland.

  They emerged on to open countryside, on to balding grasslands strewn with large grey boulders. There was no sign of the helicopters, no sign of any pursuit. Yakov drove like a madman; all of them were bounced and jostled, and several times Michael hit his head on the roof. Then, as they were about to plunge into another stretch of forest, the helicopters appeared behind them, widely spread out, travelling fast.

  Lev wound down the Volga’s window, and tussled his AKM out from between the front seats. He leaned out as far as he could, and fired a wild burst up at the leading helicopter, which veered away from the Volga but quickly returned as Lev struggled himself back inside again.

  ‘Bistra!’ he yelled at Yakov.

  The next second, a shower of bullets rattled across the grasslands all around them, sending up clods of dirt and chips of rock. One bullet banged through the roof of the car, and buried itself in the headrest of Yakov’s seat, in a blizzard of plastic and foam.

  Then they were back in the woods again, and Yakov veered sharply left so that the helicopters wouldn’t be able to fire blind into the trees and hit them on their original course. None of them spoke: they were all too winded and tense, and none of them wanted to interrupt Yakov’s manic concentration.

  At last, after a bruising, jolting five kilometres, they reached the rocky shore of the Gulf of Finland. Michael could see the surf breaking on the grey granite beach, the distant reaches of the Suomenlahti Finskij Zaliv, with two large yachts bending towards the strong west wind.

  The three Soviet helicopters came roaring up behind them, to overtake them, and then circle around over the sea to attack them from the front.

  ‘Where are they?’ Lev demanded. ‘They promised they’d be here!’

  ‘Who promised?’ Michael wanted to know.

  But Lev didn’t have time to answer. One of the helicopters came clattering overhead, and hovered, and suddenly an amplified voice boomed at them, ‘Americans! You have no chance of escape! Abandon your car! Step out, with your hands above your heads, and you will be spared!’

  Lev tugged out the second AKM and hefted it over to Michael. ‘When I give you the word, step out of the car and let that helicopter have it. No hesitation. Full automatic fire; you know how.’

  John said, ‘This is absurd.’

  ‘Of course it’s absurd!’ Lev roared at him, the veins on his neck swelling up in anger. ‘Now, shut up, and let your friend do what he has to.’

  Michael, dry-mouthed, clicked the AKM’s lever on to automatic. Then before he was ready. Lev had opened the door of the car and rolled out of it, over and over, his gun huddled against his chest.

  ‘Go!’ shouted Rufina; and Michael yanked open his door, and rolled out, too. A sharp rock hit him straight in the kneecap, and he yelled out in pain, but then suddenly he was up on his feet, his hair standing on end in the buffeting downdraught from the helicopter’s rotors, and firing his AKM.

  He was conscious of nothing but the noise of the helicopter and the jumping, chattering gun. He wasn’t even aiming; it was all he could do to hold the AKM steady. But then the helicopter suddenly lurched to the left, staggered drunkenly, and exploded in a hot and silent ball of orange flame. He watched in dread and astonishment as it whirled around and around and around, with a fierce crackling noise, and nose-dived into the sea. Spray rose up like a fountain; then gradually settled.

  Lev screamed, ‘Your first kill! By God, you’ll make a fighter yet! Your first kill!’

  But now the other two helicopters were circling around towards them; and it was obvious that they were not prepared to take the risk of negotiating with them. Michael heard the rapid brrrrp, brrrp, of four-barrelled 12,7 mm machine-guns, and a stream of bullets hosed across the beach, and up the rocky shore, and suddenly blinded him with dust and dirt and flying fragments of granite. He fired back, but knew that he had missed. The helicopters roared overhead, and climbed over the woods to attack them again.

  It was then that ‘they’ appeared; the people for whom Lev had been waiting. They came out of the glare of the sea and the sky, in two twin-engined Bell UH-IN helicopters, advanced versions of the famous Hueys that had served with such success in Viet Nam. They were painted olive drab, without markings, and they came in almost at sea-level, extremely fast. Michael saw smoke blurting from their open cabin doors, machine-guns, but he heard nothing, the morning was too windy. The next thing he knew, however, was that the two Russian helicopters were lurching away, one of them shedding pieces of fuselage, the other already on fire.

  The burning helicopter disappeared behind the trees that lined the shore. There was a distant bang, and a black cloud of oily smoke rolled up into the sky. The second helicopter limped and burped away to the east, rising and falling as if its collective controls had been shot away.

  The two UH-INs waltzed around the beach, looking for a clear place to land, then noisily settled themselves down.

  Michael said to Lev, ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Friends,’ said Lev, as John and Rufina climbed out of the car. ‘That is all you have to know. Come on; we must be quick.’

  Michael took Rufina’s arm, and began to stumble towards the nearer of the two helicopters, which was silhouetted against the sparkling sea; its rotors still slowly turning. Rufina said, ‘Yakov? Is Yakov coming?’

  They turned around. Lev was leaning against the Volga, staring into the driver’s, window. Michael whispered, ‘Oh, no,’ and ran back across the rocky shore towards the car. Lev came forward and intercepted him, grasped his arm.

  ‘Hurry,’ he said.

  ‘But Yakov?’

  ‘He knew what the risks were; just as we all do. He has served us well.’

  Michael twisted himself free from Lev’s grip, and walked slowly towards the car. One 12.7 mm bullet had pierced the car’s windscreen without even smashing it, leaving nothing but a single circular hole. There was a matching hole in Yakov’s shirt, stained with blood that was already black.

  ‘A lucky shot, huh?’ asked Lev.

  Michael said nothing, but turned away. He was beginning to understand that his experiences here in Russia had already aged him, quickly and remarkably. He was beginning to understand why Lev was so cynical. He took Rufina’s hand, not gently, but simply because he had to, and led her down the boulder-jagged shore to the waiting helicopters.

  John said, ‘Michael?’

  But Michael knew that he had outgrown John, outgrown toys, outgrown everything that had ever happened to him before. He made his way down the beach with his head lowered and wouldn’t speak; although he had learned at last what courage really was, and why men and women risk their lives for the countries they live in, and why people cry when anthems are played, as they always should.

  Ninete
en

  Golovanov said, ‘I should like a drink, please, Inge.’

  Inge was standing by the window, her arms folded over her breasts, staring out at the garden. She had changed into a white short-sleeved blouse and a very tight pair of black leather trousers; and with her white-blonde hair braided into two loops, she looked even more Germanic than ever.

  ‘You know what the rule is,’ she said. ‘You may drink when you decide to talk. Otherwise, no drink; no food; nothing.’

  ‘You know I have nothing to say. How can I tell you anything? A marshal in the Soviet Army? I have dedicated my whole life to my country. I could not possibly betray her now.’

  ‘Perhaps this is the time to betray her,’ Inge replied. ‘You have given her all of your very best years; why give her your soul as well?’

  Golovanov made a face. ‘You, what do you know of souls?’

  Inge walked slowly towards him across the white-tiled kitchen floor. Her stiletto heels clicked methodically. ‘My love, I know a great deal about souls. All women do. And wasn’t it your own writer Dostoyevsky who said that once people ceased to believe in their immortal souls, that every living force in the world would dry up, including love?’

  ‘Yes, he said that.’

  Inge leaned forward and kissed Golovanov on the forehead. A cool kiss like being touched by ice.

  ‘What lovers we could have been,’ she said.

  Golovanov accepted her kiss but didn’t reply. He was handcuffed with his arms behind his back to a heavy beechwood kitchen chair. He knew that he had been taken much further west than Mariental, where his kidnappers had first imprisoned him, but he had no idea where. They had driven him here in a windowless van; and all he had seen of the house in which he was imprisoned was the hallway, and this modern white-tiled kitchen. At the far end of the kitchen, there was a window overlooking a red and white paved yard; and beyond that a wooden fence. On the horizon, there was a row of poplars, swaying in the warm afternoon wind; but they were all that Golovanov could see, and they might have been anywhere, from Minden to Münster.

  Inge said, ‘I don’t want to cause you any pain; but you must talk to me soon, or my friends will insist that I do something more positive.’

  ‘You should shoot me,’ said Golovanov, gruffly.

  ‘Perhaps I should,’ she replied, stroking his shoulders. He flinched his head away from her; she was beginning to irritate and upset him, and he was feeling desperately thirsty. ‘But, if I shoot you, you will not be able to tell me anything, will you? And that is the only reason you are here. To talk to us, to tell us what you know.’

  ‘Don’t play with me, Inge,’ Golovanov told her.

  She smiled. ‘I shall do what I like. Do you remember me telling you about my mother? What a dancer she was; how she could have been the very best. But she was always too aloof; her dance instructors would shout at her to dance an entrechat this way or that way, but she always said no, no, no, my way is the best way. So, she never became a legendary dancer, even though she was far better than Krista Muller or Hedwig Brandt. I am the same. I will never do anything but what I like, and that is why you should talk to me, my dearest Timofey, because I will do to you whatever amuses me, and it will hurt you more than you can even begin to imagine. You were in the war, weren’t you? You saw men hurt. How did you feel about it? Pleased, it wouldn’t surprise me, that it wasn’t you. Well, now it is you; now it’s your turn; and you should be very frightened.’

  Golovanov tried to smile. ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘I can tell you nothing.’

  ‘In my life, nothing is obvious,’ said Inge. She stared at him for a long time, saying nothing, and he found the coldness and paleness of her eyes deeply disconcerting, as if she were an android without emotions and without any kind of conscience at all. He was frightened, there was no question about that. And she was right: it was one thing to watch other men screaming in pain. It was one thing to see your friend’s skull blown apart, or watch him trying to heap his intestines back into his gaping stomach. He had seen all of those things, and turned away. But it was quite different to know that you were going to suffer that agony yourself.

  Inge caressed Golovanov’s cheek, outlined the curves of his ears. Then, with one hand, she began to unbutton her blouse, tugging it loose from the waistband of her black leather trousers. One breast was bared, then the other. Golovanov watched her fixedly, licking his lips from time to time because he was so thirsty.

  ‘Do you think there should be music?’ Inge asked him.

  Golovanov shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do to me, but do it, do it, don’t keep me waiting.’

  She unfastened the cuffs of her blouse, and then took it right off, hanging it on a hook next to the aprons. Golovanov thought that she looked extraordinary; like a woman out of a masochist’s wildest fantasy. Huge milk-white breasts, gleaming black leather trousers, high spiky heels; and an expression on her face that could have frozen a river.

  ‘You have to think, always, of what will frighten people the most,’ she said. ‘I have been thinking about you for a long time.’

  ‘My child, nothing frightens me, not any more.’

  Inge smiled faintly. Then she knelt down and opened one of the kitchen cupboards. Golovanov looked at the swelling curves of her bottom beneath the shining black leather. The white, wide-shouldered triangle of her back. He thought: even if she kills me, I will go to whatever purgatory is reserved for Communists and soldiers with her perfume still in my nostrils: the smell of leather, sex, and Cartier cologne.

  Out of the cupboard, Inge produced the motor section of a Moulinex blender. Then she searched through one of the drawers, and produced other pieces, an orange plastic collar, a cast-iron screw, and fitted them together.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Joked Golovanov. ‘Blend me into tomato juice? Perhaps if you gave me a glass of vodka first, I could be a Bloody Mary.’

  Inge finished assembling the blender, and plugged it in. She didn’t smile. ‘I’m surprised that you can laugh,’ she said. She held up the Moulinex and Golovanov saw that she had put together the pieces which made it into a meat-grinder. He stared at her and she stared back. The air between them almost crackled.

  ‘Not my hands,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of your hands,’ she said.

  ‘You had better kill me,’ he told her.

  She shook her head. ‘I have to have some answers to my questions first.’

  Golovanov swallowed dryly. ‘You know that this kind of torture is in direct contravention of the United Nations Declaration of 1975.’

  ‘Is that what they tell you whenever you visit Lubianka?’

  Golovanov said nothing. Inge stepped forward, until she was standing right over him, and their knees were touching. Black leather against uniform khaki. He closed his eyes.

  While his eyes were closed, she leaned over him and pressed her breasts with her hands against his face. Her stiffened nipples were pushed against his eyelids, against his cheeks, and brushed his lips. Then she leaned forward even more heavily, and almost suffocated him in the soft perfumed depths of her cleavage. He felt her hand unbuttoning his trousers; he felt her fingers prize his penis free, and stroke it over and over and over, until it hardened.

  ‘Now,’ she whispered, drawing back, ‘all you have to do is tell me why the Soviet Army is still on full alert; and what you plan to do.’

  ‘You know that I can tell you nothing,’ Golovanov repeated, without opening his eyes.

  ‘But, Timofey, my darling, you must.…’

  Abruptly, he opened his eyes. Inge was gripping his erect penis in one hand, and the Moulinex meat-grinder in the other. As he stared at her, she switched on the grinder, and held it up so that he could see the spiral screw turning around and around inside it, and the rotating blades which would shred anything which was caught in the grinder into raw, chopped-up meat.

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ he told her, in a
tight voice.

  Inge shook her head, and brought the meat-grinder closer to the crimson crest of Golovanov’s erection. ‘Timofey, you should know me by now. Have I ever deceived you, even once?’

  The Moulinex was whirring loudly; so loudly that Golovanov could hardly think what to do. If I tell her about Operation Byliny, that will be treachery, treason, and the utter betrayal of everything for which my father suffered and died, as well as my whole career in the Army, My father endured, even when his hands were smashed, why shouldn’t I? Yet the thought of being emasculated, the thought of having his manhood ground off – that was more than he could bear. To die as a man was one thing; to die as a neutered eunuch was something else altogether. He had seen men in battle, with their sexual organs torn away, bleeding to death; there had been such a terrible indignity about their fate; such a hideous hopelessness.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ Golovanov heard himself repeating. Sweat was sliding down the back of his shirt, and he knew that he was shaking, like a man in a fever.

  Inge held the grinder even closer. He could feel the draught of its electric motor against his bare skin. ‘Perhaps I should give you a count of five,’ she told him. ‘Five more seconds of manhood; then, castration. Do you think that would be a good idea?’

  ‘Inge!’ he shouted at her.

  She shook her head again, and lowered the meat-grinder so close to Golovanov’s penis that the head of it disappeared inside the white plastic funnel. It had shrunk now, as if he had been swimming in a cold sea. The cold sea was his own terror, and his own confusion: and it was a sea in which even stronger and more determined men than he had often drowned.

  ‘Five,’ Inge counted.

  ‘Inge!’ Golovanov shouted again. I can tell you nothing! I know nothing! I am a marshal in the Soviet Army! I am forbidden to tell you anything at all!’

  ‘Four,’ said Inge. ‘You are small now, you see, Timofey. You will be ground up in one good turn of the screw. What do you think it will be like, to watch it wriggle out of the other end, as hamburger meat? Do you think that will be frightening? And exciting, too! Why do you think I took off my blouse? There will be plenty of blood, I want to feel it on my bare skin!’