Holly saw Rudakov leaning easily back in his chair, saw the smugness on his face.
'I think, Comrade Captain, I think you should shove yourself right up your arse…'
Rudakov laughed, richly and loudly.
'Right up your arse till you choke in your own stink.'
Rudakov still laughing, and the shimmer of cracked ice across his face, and his gaze unwavering.
'Think on it, Holly. Think on it tonight, think on a transfer to Vladimir, think on a flight to London.'
Holly laughed too, and their laughter mingled. There was something of pride in Holly's eyes, and there was an inkling of combat in Rudakov's eyes. But in an instant the laughter was gone from the Political Officer's mouth. 'Be careful for yourself, Holly. Believe me you should be careful. In a few days I will send for you again. In the meantime you consider.'
'Thank you for the coffee, Captain Rudakov.'
Coming from the latrine, the figure hugged the shadow of the building before jogging across open ground to the cover of Hut 5. Wrapped in newspaper were the frozen lumps he had fashioned by stone to the width of the water pipe. From Hut 5 he had thirty yards of snow space to cross. He caught his breath, prepared himself, then ran for the hole. His shape joined the dark heap of earth and he landed without noise in the pit. A searchlight beam curved above him. A dog barked. He heard the voices, miserable and low-pitched, of patrolling warders. He realized with a vicious clarity that he had never considered the possibility of discovery. The light swung away, no sign or sound of the dogs, the voices faded.
He trembled. His fingers groped for the junction of the pipes. It was the work of a few minutes.
Michael Holly was back inside Hut z a clear hour before the trustie slammed shut the hut's door, switched off the lights.
In the morning the water would run, run fast and sweet along a mains pipe until it met with an obstruction and the water would eat away at the mass that blocked it. Chisel it, and then carry that mass in diminishing particles to the taps and basins and sinks and cooking saucepans of the barracks.
Chapter 9
The prisoners are quick to notice change.
Behind the listless,, dulled faqade their minds are keen to seek out anything which is eccentric in the camp life. It is impossible to trick these leeches. Better than those who administer the compound, the prisoners know the working of the camp ritual.
Within a day and a night of Holly making his night run to the earth hole, the huts were alive with rumour.
Another morning after and there was no longer scope for rumour. The talk now was certainty.
Of the four corner watch-towers overlooking the compound of Zone 1, one was not manned as the men massed for parade and roll-call.
The work of counting the prisoners and shouting the names was managed by seven warders and guards and not the familiar dozen.
The Captain of KGB was on show in uniform and greatcoat, and held the clipboard for the ticking off of names, and that would normally have been the task of a junior officer of the M V D detachment.
And of those who were, there, some looked sick with a yellow pallor of the face skin, and some leaned on the shoulder of the nearest colleague for support, and some during the day would duck away from their duties and run with a crabbed strut towards the barracks building.
A guard on the ski run between the high wire fence and the high wooden wall collapsed in the view of the prisoners and it was a full ten minutes before he was noticed from a watch-tower and help sent to him. The zeks had heard his soft low call for help, turned their backs and closed their ears.
The prisoners were marched to work. They were hurried across the transit land between the compound and the Factory. They were stampeded over the open space of the road and the railway line, and when they reached the work shops they found that all was normality with the full staff of civilian foremen there to harry them to the daily quota.
And the zeks wondered, wondered how it were possible for only guards and warders to be ill and sick, and for themselves to crawl about their work and existence immune from the microbe.
Late in the morning the word spread through the workshops. From tongue to ear, from the finish shop to the paint shop to the lathe shop the word flowed.
The word was dysentery.
Dysentery. How was it possible that an epidemic of dysentery could afflict only that minority living in the barracks, and avoid touching eight hundred men who ate and slept the short distance away over the high wooden wall and high wire fence?
How was it possible?
Major Vasily Kypov pondered that question as he walked a slow circle of the compound in the company of Captain Yuri Rudakov. When an ambulance passed them, khaki and green camouflage with the red marking on white background, he could remember that it was the third that morning to leave the barracks sleeping-quarters for the Central Hospital of the Dubrovlag.
And there would be an inquiry and findings and an official report that would reach the desk of the Procurator in Saransk, the capital city of the Mordovian ASSR, and then join the paper chain that routed to the Ministry in Moscow. Public Health inspectors had come from Pot'ma and had sealed the kitchens of the barracks. A crate of phthalyl-sulphathiazole tablets had been flown by helicopter from Saransk. And at the hospital there was nausea and fever and diarrhoea of mucus and blood, and it was said that a guard and a warder might die.
They had no answers, the Major and the Captain, as they walked the snow paths, only a growing sense of humiliation that the camp was now in the possession of strangers. On that morning there was no sparring between them, and Kypov could almost feel an ooze of sympathy from the young Rudakov. There had never been disease before at ZhKh 385/3/1, not even amongst the prisoners. The Major led the way back towards the barracks, no longer able to stall the hearing of the initial reports from the experts who had invaded his territory. As they went past the Factory they could hear the drone of the working engines. Half as bad only, if the prisoners had been laid down by the disease – but it wasn't the prisoners, not the scum, the filth of the huts. It was the guards and warders who rolled in drugged discomfort in their segregated wing of the Central Hospital. That was a salted wound.
The team from Public Health in Pot'ma had made the NCO's mess hall in the barracks their working area.
There were charts and diagrams spread out over a ping-pong table encircled by men and women in white coats.
There were stool bottles for paperweights, little bottles with pen markings for identification. This was Vasily Kypov's empire, but none of the interlopers stiffened to attention at his entrance.
The man who came to him was hollow-cheeked. Wire-framed spectacles sat low on a hawk nose. He gazed at the Major as if he were a hostile creature, and when his eyes flickered to the younger officer beyond the Commandant and understood the blue collar tabs of KGB he seemed to look away with a smear of distaste. He gave Kypov and Rudakov the crystal impression that they interrupted his work.
'Major Kypov, the Commandant…? I am Superintendent of Public Health at Pot'ma… '
Kypov nodded.
'You have here an outbreak of dysentery of epidemic proportions. I have worked at Pot'ma for nine years. Yours is the most serious outbreak of this disease that I have found in any of the camps during that time…'
Kypov's head seemed to droop against his chest.
'Dysentery, Major Kypov, does not arrive by accident. It is not obligatory, not even in a place such as you supervise…'
Kypov straightened himself. He spoke with a bluff optimism, half believing the suggestions that he offered. 'Somecook with filthy hands, something like that, could that be it?'
'That most definitely would not be the cause of this outbreak, Major. You have raw sewage coming directly
