'Yes, sergeant, all quiet… ' A chilled, unhappy voice from above.
'Fucking awful night.'
'Yes, sergeant.'
'All right for you in your shelter.'
'Yes, sergeant.'
'Fucking awful night to be o u t… and the dog, silly bitch, doesn't notice it. Have you been throwing food down?'
'Perhaps, perhaps a bit of sandwich, sergeant.'
'You eat your food in the barracks, you don't take bloody sandwiches on duty. Right?'
'Right, sergeant. I'm sorry, sergeant.'
'Don't let me catch you again… come on, you stupid bitch, you're fed enough without having to dig the snow for a crust… '
The dog growled, a soft rumble in her throat.
'I'm sorry, sergeant.'
Then the hiss of the skis and the oath for the dog to follow, and the stamp of the feet above them. Holly and Adimov held each other for comfort. Holly grinned, Adimov bit his lip to suffocate a laugh of relief.
The high wooden fence was dark with creosote. The top was two feet above Holly's head when he stood. He reached up with his hands, felt the rough-cut wood through his gloves. It was the last mountain to be climbed. He stood a long time, waiting for the strength to return.
The words had passed him by. Chernayev cared nothing for the lecture of Elena Rudakov. He had sat for near to an hour rigid in his seat. He had listened only for the hammer of gunfire, the agony scream of the perimeter siren. The letter burned in his pocket, the letter he had been charged by Michael Holly to hand to Captain Yuri Rudakov on the following afternoon. And Holly was running… Holly who had no words for the thief once he had returned to the hut from the SHIzo block. Happy enough to talk with Chernayev before he went to the SHIzo, glad enough then to hint of revolution. But the SHIzo had changed him… How many times had Chernayev tried to talk with him since he had come back? Half-a-dozen times, a dozen times? And nothing given in return, nothing until the last. When the letter had been passed, that had been the Holly he knew.
The man who was going to the wire, the man who could crack a grin, the man who was going to run and who asked a friend to give a letter to the Captain of KGB. Shit, that was style. Chernayev had been seventeen years in the Dubrovlag and had never known of a man succeed in running loose from the camps.
There was no applause when she finished her speech.
The senior man from Internal Order shouted for them to come to their feet and they stood in silence and watched the departure of the Political Officer and his woman. He was smart in his uniform greatcoat, she was velvet in the warmth of her fur. And she wore her scent, the bitch, because her scent would save her nose from the smell of the men that gaped at her. Chernayev flopped again to his chair and waited for a film to be shown – and for the gunfire, and for the sirens.
Run with the wind, Holly. They'll hunt you as they would a rat in a chicken coop. And in winter… Run hard. An old thief was allowed to cry. There was no shame in crying for a young man who ran at the wire.
'What's the film called?' Chernayev asked.
'The title is irrelevant. The important thing is that it lasts two hours,' replied Poshekhonov comfortably.
He had needed Adimov to push him up. Without Adimov he could not have found the muscle necessary to scale the high wooden fence. When Holly jumped, Adimov grasped his shins and forced them up so Holly could swing his leg and straddle the summit of the fence. For a moment Holly was silhouetted on the top of the fence, and he ducked his body down and tried to lie along its length. He pulled at Adimov's wrist. Adimov was strong. The man who was at the front of the food queue in the Kitchen, who had not spent fifteen days in the SHIzo block on half-rations. He could climb for himself. They were together on the fence. A deafening noise they seemed to have made. Holly saw the ski tracks and the footprints of the dog. He held the top of the fence in a steel grip of his hurt fingers, he swung the other leg, he hung from his fingers.
He fell and his body crumpled on the snow and the blood flushed to his head and his ears screamed with the noise of his landing. He thought of a guard who stood a few feet above him, he thought of a balaclava and a forage cap with ear muffs… Adimov fell beside him.
They crouched low. Each for the other they spread out the sheet-tangle to cover their backs. The camouflage of the white winter fox.
The guard shifted on his platform, his feet beat on the planked flooring. Over the fence and the high wire and the low wire came the drift of voices, the spill from the Kitchen, those who were leaving before the start of the film. Incredible, to hear those voices from beyond the fences.
It was as though Holly had performed his task. Adimov's fist rested on Holly's elbow, ready to propel him towards the darkness of the tree-line. Holly had said he would take Adimov out, Holly had been good to his word. Like a team that could work in tandem, the leadership was exchanged without question. Adimov pointed to the snow surface, made a smoothing motion with his hand.
Forty metres to the treeline.
Adimov went first, awkward, charging.
Holly watched him go. His legs shook. He lost Adimov in the haze of trees.
Holly's turn. But he must go backwards, his back to the trees. He must be bent so that he could push the snow again into the holes that their feet had left. Forty yards to cover while his glance wavered between the snow pits and the back of the guard in the watch-tower. Don't turn, you bastard, don't turn. He remembered Feldstein's question: if you had known that this place waited for you would you have done what you d i d? '… and a miserable answer he had given. Of course he hadn't known of ZhKh 385/3/1, of course he hadn't known of two wire fences and a high wooden fence and a guard above him with a machine-gun and clear fire field…
Did Alan Millet know? Holly wanted to shout the question, found it rising in him. Did the man who gave him sandwiches and beer in a pub near the Thames and a package to take to Moscow, did he know? When he was out
… when… he'd find Alan Millet.
Adimov clutched him, twisted him towards the abyss of the woods. No gun had been cocked. No siren button had been depressed.
At first they went in caution, doubled beneath the lower branches of the firs and larches and wild birch. Sometimes where the trees were set thickest there was little snow, but when they came to places of more open planting they would fall up to their waists into drifts. They blundered in the blackness with an arm raised to protect their faces from the whiplash of loose young branches. When the lights over the perimeter of the camp could no longer be seen, they went faster. They cared less for noise now. The pace increasing, the exhaustion surging. And through all the hours of darkness they must never stop, never break the rhythm of distancing themselves from the fences.
'We're going north?'
'As I said we would, Holly.'
'How far, like this?'
'Till we reach the railway that runs north from Barashevo.'
'We will go along the line?'
'The line is safer than the roads.'
'I thought… I thought there would be a greater excitement…'
Adimov leading, not looking back, the snow falling from the branches that he disturbed onto Holly's face and body.
'Excitement at what?'
'At getting out. Stupid, I thought I'd be singing.'
'Stupid, Holly… it's not a bloody Pioneer ramble…
You want to know what chance you have of getting out, right out, over the frontier? None. You've done all this just to be brought back, and when you're back it will be worse
… And for me, what is there?'
'There is your wife, Adimov…'
'My wife who is dying. To see her, should that make me excited?'
