A grim-faced Eisenhower replied that the over-flights were over but that Khrushchev’s ultimatum was unacceptable to the United States. And at that point Khrushchev stormed out of the conference. Eisenhower went back into the US Embassy trembling with rage.
Eisenhower, de Gaulle and Macmillan held an informal, broken-backed meeting the next day, and the summit was over.
But Khrushchev’s revenge was far from over. Three thousand journalists and broadcasters attended a chaotic press conference the next day when Khrushchev denounced the United States as “piratical,” “thief-like,” and “cowardly.” He followed this diatribe by announcing that the Soviet Union would now solve the Berlin problem by signing a separate treaty with communist East Germany.
22
The long line of cattle-trucks stretched right across the horizon, silhouetted by the setting sun and black against the first scattering of the coming winter’s snow.
In one of the tail-end wagons a man sat hunched up in a corner, his legs drawn up, his head resting on his knees, his dark hair lank and long, his cheeks flushed with fever. There were forty other prisoners in the wagon. Five of them frozen stiff, to be thrown out by the guards the next time they checked the prisoners.
The train had been on its journey for two weeks already and of the 1,650 who had started the journey 60 had already died.
Five days later the prisoners were herded onto the steamer Dzhurma for the voyage across the Sea of Okhotsk. If they were lucky they would complete the voyage before the pack-ice closed in around Wrangel Island. If the transport authorities guessed wrong and the ice closed in, that would mean that there would be no prisoner survivors from that shipment. The Gulag authorities in Moscow and Kolyma considered it a worthwhile risk. Once the pack-ice formed, the steamer would be locked-in until the spring thaw. But Gulag labour camps needed their new replacements if they were to meet their norms. Leaving it late could generally mean pushing through four extra shipments, and even with the chance of a twenty-five per cent loss that was a reasonable return.
The man in the corner was going through the litany that had kept him alive and as near to sanity as he could hope for. Amid the stench of excreta and urine he went again and again through the Lord’s Prayer, half a dozen hymns, Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” the names of the home grounds of every first-class football club that he could remember, the instructions for clearing a blockage on a Bren gun, odd bits of the Bible and Shakespeare, Boyle’s Law on expansion of gases and the names of the girls he had slept with. Sometimes he thought of the password, but he never said it, or even let it linger in his mind. It was best forgotten, but you can’t forget just because you want to.
He could smell the pus from the weals on his back and ribs. They’d offered him a course of antibiotics in return for what he knew about Mark Wheeler and Tony Craddock. The instructors had always said that beating-up and torture never produced useful information and that the beatings and pain only stiffened a prisoner’s resistance. He had smiled when he had heard it and hadn’t believed a word of it. A broken finger or two, a rough hand round your scrotum or even the bath treatment, and you’d be singing like a nightingale. Maybe it applied to ex-Shanghai police instructors but not to ordinary mortals. But the bastards were right. Once you’d got over the shock of being caught it wasn’t the pain that counted but the fact that they were doing it to you that sat in the front of your mind. It was a fight even though you couldn’t move. You could hit back by saying nothing. Screaming maybe but not talking. Name, rank and number stuff taken to ridiculous extremes. Just hate the bastards and shout obscenities in their own language. And it wouldn’t take long before they went too far and you were out. Sailing on white cumulus clouds in a summer sky, the wolves below snapping at your gliding body until you floated past the cliff and out over the sea.
There was a week in the transit camp at Vladivostok before the sea voyage to the horror camp at Kolyma, where tens of thousands laboured in the gold mines. Men, women and children were the victims of disease and a regime of systematic cruelty that rivalled the worst excesses of the Nazi concentration camps. Three million of the stream of hopeless prisoners had died in Kolyma, their graves unmarked because there were no graves. A tractor gouged out a few feet of frozen earth and then shovelled the daily quota of corpses into the pit, skeletal hands, feet and sometimes heads were left projecting when the permafrost set the earth ironhard, chopped off later by a mechanical grader.
John Summers had been put in a separate enclosure with three other special grade prisoners. Two of them had no legs and the third was blind. At night the barbedwire compound was permanently floodlit. Day after day Summers was detailed to collect all the new corpses and deliver them on a flat barrow to the guardroom for registration. The routine was simple. The name and prison number were recorded with the date of death, the duty guard thrust his bayonet into the silent heart of the already dead prisoner and the corpse was stripped and thrown onto the pile of other bodies to await the next mass-burial.
23
Harris was in a hurry but he went into the information room and signed that he had checked the weekly information files laid out on the table. As he headed for the door
