‘Weapons spares?’
‘How should I know?’
I watched him without speaking.
‘You going to let me go now?’ he said.
‘When your papers have been checked,’ I replied.
I told the others to give me their papers too.
‘Don’t leave until I return,’ I said. ‘Or your stay here will be indefinite.’
I took the only truck that wasn’t being loaded or unloaded and got into the cab. I drove it slowly around to the back of the depot, away from the main entrance and where there were fewer people working, and parked it next to the fence.
Using the truck as a blind, I climbed up the side of the cab and took a look around while I was still invisible. Two men in uniform were walking towards the truck talking to each other, but they turned when they were a hundred yards away and entered a building. I climbed the remaining few feet on to the roof of the truck and, visible for only a few seconds, I jumped over the fence.
It was a fifteen-foot drop to the other side and should have been easy, but in my hurry I landed badly. I began to walk fast away from the depot, across some wasteland, the truck shielding me for the first few yards and then, when I was in the open, I dropped down into a garbage dump for cover and came out on the other side into trees and then a road where there were cars and buildings. I walked fast into the centre of the town and stripped off the overalls in an alleyway, replacing them with my SVR uniform.
There was a very old Mercedes parked near the second-best hotel in the town centre, which had the word ‘Taxi’ written badly on a piece of card in the front window. The driver was sitting on the pavement smoking a cigarette. With my colonel’s uniform, it was a straightforward exercise to get him into the car to take me wherever I wanted to go. That’s the advantage of totalitarian societies. Certain people make everyone afraid, unquestioning. Their own system can be turned against them far more easily than in a free country.
We drove to the nearest gas station and I paid to fill the car. Then I told the driver to head for the capital Tiraspol, further into Transdnestr, and to the rendezvous we’d arranged. Bendery and the border would be filled first with troops if the alarm were raised.
As I sat in the front seat, nursing what I feared was a fracture, I wondered whether any of this had been worth it; we had an itinerary of one of Reiter’s trucks. But if the alarm were raised they would change it. I was relying on the German driver’s unwillingness to risk admitting a mistake.
I left the taxi on the outskirts of Tiraspol. I gave the driver fifty dollars and told him there was another fifty in it for him if he went to a hotel in the city, stayed put in his room, and waited for me there for twenty-four hours. I didn’t want him on the road when checkpoints began to go up, if that was what was going to happen. I knew he’d do it for ten dollars, but fifty was more than he made in three weeks.
I then doubled back in the darkness the way we’d come and put the overalls and uniform into my backpack and wore what I had worn when I arrived across the river, ordinary clothes bought in Moldova.
Finn was waiting at the rendezvous in the main square, leaning against an old grey Subaru and I climbed into the car without speaking. We drove fast to the outskirts of the town and beyond, skirting in a wide arc that took us twenty miles to the south of Bendery. We left the car on a dirt track which had a few ramshackle houses scattered along it.
‘We should take the other route out,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ he said.
He didn’t ask me what had happened. He just held me for a few moments and then we walked towards the river.
There were barges plying the Dniester River down to the Black Sea. They stopped for refuelling by a wooden jetty on the bank. They carried grapes and other agricultural produce, scrap metal, plastic- anything that could get a better price in the Ukraine or further afield than here. Finn went and stood behind a wooden building that was boarded up.
I leaned on a fence and looked down at a man smoking on the deck outside the wheelhouse of a barge that looked as if it might make it the sixty or so miles to the Black Sea. He finally noticed me and made a lewd comment. I told him that for a couple of dollars I was his, whatever he liked. He didn’t think for long. I descended a walkway on to the deck and brought my knee into his solar plexus. I could smell the drink on him and he began to retch with the blow to his stomach.
I dragged him into the wheelhouse, tied him up to some pipes, gagged him, took his cap off his filthy head and put it on. Then I started the engine and climbed back up the walkway as Finn appeared. He cast off the two loose hawsers that secured the barge to the quay and pulled in the walkway. I took the wheel and we turned away into the current heading south towards the Black Sea.
It was getting dark and it would be as dark as it had been the night before when we had crossed the river. There was little river traffic at this hour, just the occasional barge pushing its way slowly up against the current in the opposite direction.
Finn took the wheel and we were making good way with the current in our favour. We had to be careful not to overshoot the target and become entangled with the guards who watched the bridge where the borders of Ukraine, Transdnestr and Moldova met.
I saw the pontoons first. They were over to the right-hand side of the river-to starboard, as Finn said–until I told him to talk in left and right. I realised how hard it was going to be to dock a 150-tonne barge against a pontoon with all the power of the current behind it.
Finn headed straight for the upright post at the far end of the pontoon and as we seemed to be about to hit it, he slammed the engine in full reverse and spun the wheel. The barge choked and struggled against the current coming up behind us and then slowly, its engine roaring, the barge hauled its stern towards the pontoon while the bow pressed against the post ahead.
I jumped on to the pontoon at the stern and Finn threw me a rope, which I secured, and then ran to the bow and did the same. The barge edged towards me, I hauled in the line and secured it again as we docked parallel to the pontoon.
Then I climbed back on to the barge and we picked up our packs.
As we stepped off on to the pontoon, we heard shouts from farther up the bank. I heard feet running along the pontoon from the shore and saw at least three men in uniform. We turned back, climbing on to the barge. Finn pointed into the fast-flowing black water and then we jumped.
The water was very cold, a start-of-summer temperature, and I gasped with shock. My leg hurt again where I’d fallen on it. I heard feet behind me on the wooden deck of the barge, then shouts. Finally there were gunshots ploughing wildly into the water. But we were travelling fast in the current and were soon fifty yards away, holding tight to each other, our packs gone.
Finn shouted at me to strike out for the shore. I saw, perhaps a mile ahead, twin searchlights that seemed to be coming from a bridge and which were shining their beams on to the river’s surface. It was the frontier with the Ukraine, below which was the Black Sea. The bank we were striking out for was Moldovan territory.
‘Don’t let go!’ Finn shouted, and we both struggled with one arm, inch by inch, working half with the current as we tried to cross it.
I felt nothing, no pain from my leg now, no fear, I was completely controlled by adrenalin. And I knew that this loss of all feeling would last me as long as it took to get to safety.
When we were nearly at the shore and the lights on the bridge ahead seemed dangerously close, a broken branch stretched its dead wood out from the bank and we both grabbed it and held on desperately, too exhausted to do anything else. Finally we pulled ourselves along the rotting wood until we touched the muddy bottom of the river. I hauled myself out, freezing in the cool night, and Finn followed. Without talking, we ran straight into the woods that lined the bank, hoping to avoid the patrols from the right where the pontoons were, and from the left where the bridge loomed now, close up and fully lit.
The woods ran all along the Moldovan side of the river and for several hundred yards inland. It was completely dark now. There were shouts from not far off, and dogs barking in the distance, the guards trespassing now on to the Moldovan side.
And then we suddenly came out of the trees and into a field. There was some spring-sown crop that was barely visible above the earth. We ran down the edge of this field and heard the dogs in the wood behind where our
