the second cubicle, with his trousers on the floor and his body bent forward to expose his anus.
The mother of a thief, who had travelled eight hundred kilometres and made five connections, tipped the contents of her plastic handbag onto the search table.
The son of an Adventist with four years to serve looked at the crumbled wreckage of a cake first torn apart and then passed for inspection.
These people, and those crowding the benches at the side of the hut, were informed of the order given by the Camp Commandant. They wailed in plaintive union, and the guards linked arms and jostled them out through the door, back into the cold and the snow. Prisoners' scum. The women shouted the loudest. They screamed at the smooth dark surface of the high wooden fence, they shouted at the young men in their high watch-towers.
Holly heard the screaming. Cocked his head for a moment, then ignored the noise of disturbance.
'As a teenager I occasionally went with my father to meetings of the OUN – that is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. I don't remember that I was ever particularly interested in what I heard there. I thought it was pretty sterile.'
'You will have been on their files from that time, Michael, the files of the Intelligence people.'
'I suppose so. When I left school I went to Technical College. I was studying to be an engineer… '
Yuri Rudakov was hunched over his desk, writing in a fast scrawl. It was not easy for him to mask his exhilaration.
Holly was waffling, Holly was telling it his own way, in his own time. Rudakov would not interrupt, just write until his arm ached.
Kypov heard the screaming.
The zeks in their lines heard the screaming.
The guards who circled the prisoners heard the screaming, and they looked into the burning eyes of many hundreds of men and saw a hatred, and among the conscripts none had seen that loathing so co-ordinated before.
The detachment doubled into the compound.
A dozen more armed men. Kypov's army was augmented to twenty-five guards from the M V D force, fifteen warders with truncheons, four dog handlers. And he had wire fences behind him, and the watch-towers with their mounted machine-guns. He would use the detachment as a wedge to break up the mass of prisoners. He would break the will of one rank, then the second, then the third.
Hut 3 formed the forward line.
'Front rank, form into fives… Move! Move, you bastards!
Kypov might have yelled at a mountain. The front rank stayed solid. Not even the trusties moved, not even the
'stoolies'. The trusties and 'stoolies' had visits.
'Put a dog in, break them up.'
The sergeant handler was positioned behind the lines of prisoners. He faced the sitting backs of the men of Hut 2.
His dog was king, master of the pack. A black and tawny German shepherd, huge within its long and rough- haired coat, weighing 3 5 kilos. He slipped the leash at the collar.
The dog was trained to attack the zeks, taught from the time it had been a puppy. The dog ran forward, low and devastating in its assault. The white teeth buried themselves into Poshekhonov's shoulder.
It was the moment that the dam burst. For two, three brief seconds, the sergeant handler saw his dog worrying at the shoulder of a small, fat prisoner who scrabbled to get clear of the animal's jaws. Then dog and prisoner were engulfed. The zeks from either side, the zeks who stood to the front, threw themselves upon his dog. Once the sergeant handler thought he heard a yelp of pain. He saw the pounding movement of the zeks. And as suddenly as they had moved, they parted, and as the stillness fell upon the zeks the sergeant handler reached for the holster flap at his waist.
His dog had a strip of padded tunic material clamped in its jaws. His dog was lying on its side, strangely twisted. His dog had been killed by the zeks.
Around the prisoners from the cordon of guards was the noise of bullets sliding into the breeches of rifles.
'Over their heads… Fire!' Kypov shouted.
'This firm I was working for, Letterworth Engineering and Manufacturing Company had several contracts from the Soviet Union. Sovlmport wasn't the biggest of our clients but it was a healthy one, one that we kept sweet with. Well, it was a turbine order that we were chasing, worth two million sterling to us. We're not a big firm and that was good money. Along tripped Afghanistan, then we had the Olympic fracas. Our contract was in the pipeline but stuck there.
Mark Letterworth wanted it unstuck but he wasn't the man to have the time on his hands to be sitting around Moscow.
He asked me to go. Seemed obvious really. I speak the language, I'd worked on the specifications… '
The sound of gunfire crashed through the room.
Instinctively Holly fell to the floor from his chair.
After the first volley another was fired, then a third.
Rudakov was on his knees clawing open the lower drawer of his desk, finding the strapping of the shoulder holster that carried the small Makharov pistol, threading it over his chest and back. He crawled across the floor to the doorway.
He yelled for an Orderly. He was greeted with silence, an empty corridor, deserted offices. His place was in the compound and he had no escort to take Michael Holly back to the SHIzo block. He swore, he caught at Holly's arm as the Englishman was pulling on his socks and boots and tunic.
He delayed long enough for the tunic to be over Holly's shoulders, not for his boots to be tied. He propelled Holly out of the office, down the corridor, out into the compound.
He gasped at the sight in front of him.
In a great flattened antheap the prisoners of Camp 3, Zone I, knelt and lay prone. In the snow beside the long boots of the guards was the twinkle of discharged cartridge cases. He barely noticed as Holly drifted from him into the fallen mess of men and was lost to his sight. He hurried to Kypov.
'They won't go to work, we've fired over their heads.'
Rudakov did not hesitate, knew no caution with his advice. 'Better to calm them than confront them. Withdraw the troops and the dogs – the 'stoolies' will give us the names. Once you've fired over their heads you can only fire into them, and that's a blood bath, that's the end of us all.'
'You're yellow, Rudakov, you're a bastard coward.'
Rudakov yelled back, 'I'm not a coward, I'm not stupid.
Your way we lose, my way we win.'
'It's running away.'
'Call me a coward again, and I'll break you… '
Rudakov, a bright young officer with a future on the KGB ladder did not know of the beating of Feldstein. Nor did he know of the sit-down in the snow, by Chernayev first and then by all the men of Hut 2. Nor did he know of the killing of the sergeant handler's dog. Rudakov's sure confidence won the day over the wavering uncertainty of his Commandant.
As they backed out through the compound's gates inside a porcupine of rifles, Rudakov said, 'Within two hours we'll be back… when they're cold and hungry.'
Chapter 20
The compound was a new place. A new place because the great gates had closed behind the withdrawal of the Commandant and the guards and the warders. Never before in any man's time in the Zone had the forces of the regime scuttled to safety behind those gates.
Who now were the prisoners?
