‘Agreed,’ Korolev said, doing his best to make it clear that he wasn’t being ordered about here.
Whispered instructions proceeded down the line of men and then, with surprising stealth, a procession of burly gangsters squeezed past him – only the faintest of sounds coming from men not inches away. He counted them as they passed. Ten. Twelve including himself and Slivka.
‘Nervous, copper?’
Thirteen, Korolev remembered, regretting that there wouldn’t be more of Mishka to hide behind when they sent him down the tunnel first.
In a whisper not much louder than a breath, Korolev told them the plan. He looked at his watch.
‘In five minutes, we start to move. Very slowly. Mishka, you go first – if we meet someone on the way, you give him the directions to heaven.’
‘With pleasure, jefe.’
There wasn’t anything more to be said and so they sat there, on their haunches, in the pitch black, listening to the sound of the water dripping from the roof not far away, and Korolev found himself rubbing gently at the trigger guard of the machine gun as he counted off the seconds until it was time for them to make their move. At one stage there came a noise that sounded like the scuttle of small pebbles, but where he couldn’t tell, and he felt his hand clench around the gun before reassuring himself that it had probably been just a rock fall. He listened with a concentration that made his ears hurt, but there was nothing else. Then, shielding the torch’s bulb in his hand so that his bones were outlined in the ghostly red light that shone through his fingers, he checked his watch.
‘Time to move,’ he whispered and the click of the torch’s switch as he slid it off was joined by the noise of safety catches being moved to the appropriate position and rounds being chambered. Despite their painstaking care, the sounds seemed unnaturally loud and he felt the familiar electric surge through his body that always came with the approach of danger. Swallowing to relieve his dry mouth, he followed Mishka down the tunnel, each step as careful as a tightrope walker’s.
Step after careful step and breath after controlled breath they advanced. Then from up ahead came the sound of a companionable laugh – the kind a man might give in response to a familiar joke. Korolev’s entire body froze in mid-step before he allowed it, very slowly, to move forward and come to a more comfortable rest.
Without a word, Mishka moved forward and Korolev followed, sensing rather than hearing Slivka coming behind him. The laugh sounded once again. Deeper this time and more drawn out. Was it a different man? Older perhaps? Korolev kept moving, wondering how far away the men were. Now there was a glimmer of light up ahead, at first only a vague colouring of the darkness but growing stronger as he advanced, and it revealed the Thief’s silhouette, twenty paces ahead of them, moving with the smooth stealth of a cat approaching an unwary bird, a knife in one hand while his other slipped the heavy revolver he was carrying into the back of his belt. Korolev upped his pace – he wanted to be close at hand when the gangster did whatever he was going to do.
They were near enough now to hear the murmur of conversation and other incidental sounds as well – the scrape of a heavy wooden object along stone, the squeal of a nail being levered out of its tight wooden resting place. Now that Korolev was able to make out, even if only faintly, the walls and roof of the passage they were following, he increased his pace – just as Mishka disappeared around a corner up ahead. Korolev, arriving at the same point not more than a handful of heartbeats later, found the Thief holding a black-haired youngster in his arms, Mishka’s free hand guiding the gushing blood from a slit throat onto the dead man’s clothing at the same time as he lowered the body gently to the floor.
They were now in a small chamber lit by a sputtering candle, on two sides of which benches had been carved out of the stone itself. A rifle, shining with newness, leant against the bench on which the sentry had been sitting, or more likely sleeping, until Mishka had brought his life to a close.
‘Help me with this, can you?’ a voice said from beyond the far entrance.
‘Let me finish this first,’ another answered, and Korolev was half-convinced that he could hear the invisible men breathing hard as they set about whatever work was occupying them. Mishka grinned at him, his teeth golden in the candlelight, as he wiped his bloody hand clean on the dead sentry’s arm. Was it Korolev’s imagination or did the wide eyes of the corpse show surprise that he was lying prone on a cold stone floor, his throat a bloody gash?
Korolev looked at his watch. They were early by two minutes and close enough, it seemed to him, to hear the men next door wheezing away like steam engines. He glanced over at Slivka’s grave expression – a contrast to Mishka’s, who was looking at the two of them with a smile on his face, as if he were sitting in the front row at the cinema. If the situation were different, Korolev would have had the greatest of pleasure in throttling him, but instead he held up two fingers to indicate how long was left. He pointed his weapon at the doorway, and was pleased to see Slivka follow suit. Mishka, winking at Korolev as he did so, pulled his long-barrelled hand cannon from his belt.
And all would no doubt have proceeded in an orderly fashion if there hadn’t come the sound of approaching feet from the tunnel along which Korolev and the others had so painstakingly advanced. Even Mishka lost his jaunty grin when the noise became unmistakable – at least half a dozen men cutting off their retreat. Korolev looked at Mishka, wondering if the approaching footsteps might be friends. Mishka shrugged his shoulders. Could they be Chekists? No, NKVD men would have approached slowly and stealthily. These fellows were bowling along as if they were out for an evening walk and Korolev wouldn’t be surprised if they were carrying weapons not dissimilar to the nice shiny rifle the dead sentry had been cuddling.
Korolev gestured Mishka and Slivka to cover the chamber ahead, extinguishing the guttering candle with a quick pinch of his fingers before turning back to the tunnel and lifting his machine gun so that the butt sat snugly inside his elbow.
‘Militia. Drop your weapons and lift your hands to the ceiling.’ Korolev spoke quietly. There was a moment of silence, a conversation stopped mid-sentence and seven or eight men came to a halt about five metres away. The lead man, carrying a lantern to illuminate the tunnel, smiled as Korolev turned the corner, but the smile slid away now he found himself looking down the barrel of a machine gun. As the silence extended, Korolev thought there might just be a chance the rats would indeed drop their guns, but then one of them began to point what looked like the sawn-off stump of a hunting gun while two of the others unslung their rifles, and Korolev fired the entire magazine in three short bursts – the muzzle’s yellow flash splattering the walls as the recoil bucked the gun in his hands. The lead man’s lantern was still falling as Korolev stepped back round the corner, already dropping the magazine to the floor, and in its light he was able to register the carnage caused by a couple of dozen forty-four calibre bullets fired at close range in an enclosed space.
He ducked back just as the first bullet slammed into the wall beside him, slipping in a new magazine as he did so. The bullet was followed by a blast of shotgun pellets, and ricochets spattered his face and coat like hailstones. He was half-deaf but could still hear Slivka’s gun sounding like an eight-hundred-rounds-per-minute death sentence behind him, and he glanced over to see Mishka’s revolver jerking up like a French can-can dancer’s leg. All good – they were doing some damage to the rats, and that was what mattered.
This time when he went round the corner, he thought it prudent to do so at a low level, and so bent down on one knee. The lantern he’d seen before was now half-covered by a body and not giving out much light, but the muzzle flash from the quick bursts of three or four bullets that he sent in its direction was enough to tell him that at least five of the bandits were down and out of the battle. Bullets were still cracking back towards him, however, showering him with loose chunks of rock. He fired off the last of the magazine and ducked back into relative safety, pursued by another shotgun blast and the screams of a severely wounded man.
A quick glance told him Mishka and Slivka were gone, hopefully to finish off the last of the devils next door. He slid another of the magazines into the machine gun and, in the moments of relative silence between fusillades from either side, listened as well as he could with his ringing ears to what was happening in the passage he was defending. To his surprise he felt warm liquid on his face and a sudden consciousness of pain told him he’d been nicked. He decided it was time to beat a retreat, turning the corner to fire off a farewell gift, but the machine gun only managed to loose off two slugs before it jammed. Korolev was about to swear when he was hit in the shoulder by something very damned solid. It fell to the ground with the unmistakable metallic roll of a grenade and Korolev didn’t hesitate, turning and running towards the next chamber, almost tripping on the body of the sentry that Mishka had done for, but somehow managing to keep his balance as his feet and legs tangled and tumbled him across the room. He dived through the entrance pursued by a blast that sent rock shards and shrapnel to help him on his way.
It took him a moment to gather his senses – he’d landed awkwardly on the useless machine gun, but apart
