Archangel (30 page)

They lay together, two grey bundles of quilted rags, and the cold burrowed against their bones.

Holly remembered when he had taken Adimov for that first time to the perimeter path and talked of escape. To get through the wire had then been the summit of their aspirations. Bloody daft, bloody idiot thought... To get through the wire was nothing. To get away and clear, that was everything. And they lay on the floor of a farmer's hut a few short kilometres from the camp, soaked and frozen, they were starved close to exhaustion. What had he been thinking of when he had taken Adimov to the perimeter path?

There had been no plan. Only the blazing anxiety to get clear of the camp because he had consigned a man to the condemned cells of Yavas and, if Michael Holly could break out, and leave a pathetic note for Rudakov to read, then he could in some way scrub his conscience clean. Escape was an absolution, a few fleeting hours of the hair shirt and the whip. Holly had thought that escape would purge him of the responsibility for the man who would be shot at Yavas.

Bloody naive. Escape should have been a symphony of electric excitement, it should have been a dream of fresh flowers and spring time. Escape was a body draped in wet clothes, without heat, without food, without hope . . .

Without hope, Holly?

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Lying on the floor of the hut he believed that he knew why men bent the knee and turned the cheek in the camp.

They had managed nothing, nothing that was worthwhile. They had exchanged one prison for another. He almost yearned for the bunk in Hut 2, he almost wished to hear the dragging of the main gate shut behind him. God, Holly, bloody beaten, and not out of the bloody place eighteen hours. Is that all you're worth? Eighteen bloody hours . . . And this was only the beginning, only the first short footstep. Barely out of sight of the camp, barely beyond the range of the lights set above the high wooden fence, a thousand miles to travel.

'We have to have a fire, Holly .. .'

A fire meant smoke, and smoke meant a trail, and a trail meant capture.

'No.'

'We have to warm ourselves. We have to dry our clothes.'

if you want a fire then you walk back along the track to Barashevo. All the way to Barashevo and the fire in Hut 2.

That's where the bloody fire is.'

Holly listened to his own words, heard their spite. He was not willing to mitigate it.

'Why did you come out?'

They would have to walk through the night. They must be alert for the blocks and cordons. Out beyond the short snow horizon an army would be mobilized. They had to sleep through the day's hours, they had to rest. God, he wished that he had come alone. Adimov had said that they no longer needed each other. But they were bound together, bound by a chain of dependence.

'Because to stay there is to be defeated. To accept their rule is to be beaten.'

'That's shit.'

'No one has shown you another colour, Adimov, you only know the colour of the Dubrovlag. If you stay there you make it easy for them.'

There was a laugh from Adimov that veered to hysteria.

'The camps are a part of us, a part of Russia. Can we beat that? Adimov and Holly can run away from Camp 3, and that helps to beat the camps. That's shit, Holly.'

'We have to do it for ourselves . . . '

He remembered the hut of the Commandant that had burned. He remembered the reinforcement platoon that had come to replace the guards taken to the hospital beds. He remembered the wail of the siren at his back. We have to do it for ourselves. And each hour of the day, each day of the year a million men rotted in the camps, and a million men had not found the way to win . . . Christ, what an arrogance, Holly. What a conceit. A million men do not fight, and yet to Holly the answer of combat is crystal clear.

if they take you back . . . ?'

it will still have been worth it.'

'We split at Gorki. I go to Moscow.'

'When we get to Gorki I decide where I go.'

'We have to have a fire.'

'No.'

Adimov sighed, slumped back again to the floor. 'You'll kill us without a fire.'

'No.'

For a long time Yuri Rudakov had sat in his office pondering the letter. The single sheet of paper was locked away now, secure in the inner drawer of his safe. He had shouted at his Orderly that he wanted to be left alone.

The dilemma tore at the peace of his mind.

Outside his window was the howl of a helicopter landing.

Impossible to think with the battering noise of the engine piercing the window of his room. He must go home, back to Elena. His head shook slowly, imperceptibly.

Was the innocence of a zek a question that should absorb him? Had innocence ever played a part in determining punishment?

He was in a pit, a dark and stinking hole. His hands could not reach the rim of the sides. If the letter were suppressed a man who was innocent would die. If he admitted to the letter then the bright career of Captain Yuri Rudakov was a mess of broken china on the floor. This was how Holly had repaid him. The bastard should have been grateful. Bastard, Holly .. .

He walked out of the office and to his jeep. They were loading a searchlight through the open doorway of the helicopter. They would fly through the night. There would be no refuge from the dogs and searchers and helicopters.

They would have him back. And when he was returned, with his wrists manacled, then the letter written by Michael Holly would be snug in the safe. He surged away in his jeep and drove recklessly over the ice-covered road to his bungalow.

Inside the living-room of his home he opened his soul to Elena. Never before had he felt such desperation and uncertainty. He stood with his back to the log fire, and she sat pretty and blonde and clean in her chair. He talked of the letter and of a man in the condemned cell at Yavas. He talked of the prize that had been so nearly gained should Michael Holly have broken in interrogation. He talked of the disgrace of failure that would shower on him.

'You must not interfere with the man at Yavas,' Elena said quietly, and her cheeks were smooth and rosy from the fire's heat.

'Then an innocent man dies.'

She laughed shrilly. 'And he would be the first?'

Rudakov knelt beside her chair, and his arms were around her neck, and his head was hard against her breast, and through the thin wool of her jersey she felt the panting of his breathing. Neither looked up, nor broke away from each other, as the helicopter shuddered away over the roof of their bungalow to resume its search.

There were nail holes in the tin walls of the hut, and through them Adimov could see that the light outside was failing.

Holly was in deep sleep, his mouth at peace and his forehead unlined. He lay on his side and his body was curled tight, knees against his chest. Adimov stayed very still for a full minute watching the pull and give of Holly's breathing.

When he was satisfied he crawled across the floor of the hut to the doorway and eased his shoulder against it to open it a few centimetres.

The snow had stopped. There was a misted haze over the smoothed white ground. Away to his left were the dim outlines of the telegraph poles beside the railway.

Even from the cab of a train a driver would only have a scant impression of the smoke, it would merge in the coming darkness. Better if there had been a hole in the roof through which the smoke could escape because then he could have prepared his fire inside the hut. No hole, and therefore he must make his fire in the doorway. He worked in a scrabbling haste. He pushed what dry hay he could find into a small central heap, and his groping hands found lengths of old planking. He took his matches from his pocket and silently praised himself for having remembered to wrap them in plastic. Five matches only. He lit the first, nestled it against the hay, watched it spark, felt the heave of the wind, watched it splutter, watched it die. Adimov swore. He lit the second and it was a poor match which flamed for a moment and then was gone before he had hidden it in the hay. The third match was alive now and Adimov gazed at the brightness of its flame and tucked it into the hole he had fashioned, and slid strands of hay across it, and cupped his hands to protect the flicker of light from the wind, and blew softly with his mouth.

He built his fire, and when it had caught he stood up and, above the short flames, he held his sheet high so that the smoke bounced against it and was directed through the doorway. He felt the heat against his legs and when the first of the wood embers were alight he nudged his boot against the fire and pushed the centre of the burning further into the doorway, and added more wood. Only a portion of the smoke now peeled back into the hut. Adimov dropped again to the ground and dragged at his boots that were wet solid and difficult to bend from his feet, and he stripped off his socks, and placed the boots close to the fire and his socks over them.

The smoke climbed, the flames tickled, the heat breathed over him. Behind Adimov, Holly slept on.

Adimov lay on the ground and the warmth of the small flames was like a narcotic. If his boots were dried then, perhaps, he could manage to walk again through the night.

He leaned forward to take his feet in his hands and rubbed them and chafed the white skin. The smoke from the wood played at his nostrils, the odour was sapping and softening.

There were many thoughts in Adimov's mind . . . of a wife bedded down with cancer . . . of a woman outside a bank and crossing a road . . . of a tobacco store abandoned in a prison h u t . . . of punishment cells and loss of privilege . ..

of the smile that would break on the pained cheeks of a woman in sickness. He would walk through the night for that smile. And across the hut, Holly's regular breathing comforted Adimov. His hand settled on another plank, dusty and dry in its rottenness, and he twisted to drop it into the heart of the fire, and his head sagged to the crook of his arm.

Holly already sleeping, and Adimov now asleep, and the fire bright and the smoke crawling towards the clouds from the doorway of a farm hut.

Like a kestrel that alternately hovers and then surges forward at speed, the helicopter ranged over the map co-ordinates that had been issued to its crew. The side-doors behind the fliers had been removed and on each flank of the helicopter sat a machine-gunner with a mounted armament, protected from the cold by electrically heated flying suits.

They flew low, the altitude needle bouncing on either side of the zoo-metre marker on the dial, and the cloud was a ceiling just above them that the pilot avoided. It was hard for them to see any great distance ahead or sideways because the further they looked then the more obscure was the greying mist of evening and darkness. The men in the helicopter placed little trust in the searchlight with which they were now equipped. Any search for fugitives was enough of a pin in a stack operation, but to rely on a narrow cone of light when daylight vision had failed was to hope for the miraculous.

Beneath them was the snow carpet, a vanishing expanse which played tricks on the eyes. The railway line was their marker-guide, and they had used its dark river slash as a reference to be married to the map that was folded under a plastic cover on the thigh of the second pilot.

The pilot of the helicopter was not required to make his own decisions on areas of search. The earphones in his flying cap carried the instructions that he must follow. He was aware of a growing frustration in the staccato commands that he was given by the Signals Officer who controlled him from Barashevo.

He was very young, the pilot, fifty days past his twenty-second birthday. He had been born six years after the death of Joseph Stalin but he knew little of the camps that were Stalin's legacy, except that it was necessary to find a suitable place for the minority scum who were parasites on the State.

He barely thought of the two men hiding somewhere beneath him. He sought only to find them, before darkness negated his efforts.

The helicopter hovered. The second pilot pointed to the map with a fur-gloved finger, indicated their position. The pilot acknowledged, switched the button for his mouth transmitter.

'Area C . .. east of the track. Nothing. Over .. .'

There was the stamp of static in his earphones, then the distortion of a mechanical voice.

'Hold your position for further instructions . . . '

The helicopter yawed, the wind tossed through the thunder of the rotor-blades. There were occasional snow flurries across the perspex, and the wipers smeared the pilots' vision ahead. The second pilot did not speak because he knew that the young man beside him was waiting, concentrating, for the new instructions. But he tugged at his arm, and when he had achieved attention he pointed ahead to the blurred horizon where mist and snow were mingled.

Something there. Something trickling upwards from the vague outline that might be a snow-sheltered hut.

The pilot nodded.

'Command . . . I have smoke, approximately two kilometres, ahead. I think there is a hut there . . . '

'Give your position.' A keener note to the voice in his ears.

'Over the railway track, eight kilometres north from Barashevo.'

'Wait.'

Didn't the buggers know the light was half gone?

'For your information, we have no record of an occupied dwelling close to the line and approximately ten kilometres north from Barashevo. Investigate.'

The engine roared forward, a great camouflaged bird of prey racing from the darkness of the cloud ceiling.

He was dreaming.

The same repetitious dream that led to the same tunnel, the same crevice. Always the setting was the ground-floor flat, her clothes on the bedroom floor, her sink in the kitchen filled with unwashed saucepans, her wanting to take in a film when he had arranged to go to Hampton Wick. Piffling excuses for a row. And when he tidied her clothes, and washed her saucepans, and cancelled his arrangements, then she would scream at him. His only weapon against her scream was morose quiet, and that was the catalyst that raised her voice. The dream always ended with her in full cry.